Kevin Martens Wong
Issue 1: RISE, July 2023
It is night. Lest one forget, it is almost always night when it arrives, everywhere in the multiverse, everywhere else but on one, quickly tilting side of the Earth; but also only somewhat dark, very rarely stormy. (How hard it is, remember, for things to land safely in a storm, and in a space without moonlight, or starshine, or even the barest glimmering of the day yet to come.)
Who do you have to be, for it to come to you?
You have to be exactly that: you have to be a star. A sun. A wavering, flickering moon. A point of light. A heartbeat, dancing on the lines between here and there. A galaxy; an unidentified object; a shimmering, radiant neutron star. A constellation.
You have to be everything. You have to be everyone.
And because of that, you could be anyone.
••
Suppose it is you, then. How does it come to you?
And first – before anything – is it it? Could it be him? Could it be them? Did it always have to be her, no matter how much she filled our own engines with courage and strength, with serenity, with the wings of Pegasus herself, carrying the galaxy home?
Suppose it could be him, then. Why not? In the collective unconsciousness of an omniverse filled with the detritus of an octillion souls, blessed and damned, wicked and divine, dead and alive – why couldn’t it be a him? Why couldn’t you be a her, or a him, or a them, or an it?
And why couldn’t you just be?
And that is the question. That is the answer, sought for eons in the night sky.
That is how he comes to you.
••
This is how your great journey begins. For all your sins, and those of your mother, and those of your father, and their mothers and fathers, and the empires that came before, and the night skies that fell before them, and the worlds beyond that called to you, night after night, light after light burning away in the void.
This is how he comes to you, late at night, almost always night, almost always bright nonetheless, with light after light shining away in the void.
The Earth. You know it by another name, of course; the name after your own heart, after the beautiful, rolling expanses of your own islands and seas, your own mountains, your own maps and charts and towns and cities. In one universe, not so distant from ours, her name is Kharad; in another, Kobel of the Twelve; in another, Eden. In another, Shamsara. In another, Terra-3. In all the worlds, the name means the same thing; and in another set of all the worlds, it means home.
Where do you have to be, on this vast, rolling globe, for him to find you? Maybe sequestered in a pod in the rings, purple or blue or yellow or radiant orange, last survivor of the nineteenth apocalypse of the fifth and final city to fall, waiting to be awoken; maybe in the old forest, perched on the edge of a clearing, seventh child on the way. Maybe atop of a blistering mountain, death finally dealt to the last machine god of the order of fire; maybe in the Library at the end of the frigid cold of the vast ecumenopolis of the South, your crutches laid across your lap as you search, increasingly in vain, for the spell-code that will give your ruined, battered, abused body life once more.
Maybe you could be anywhere. And so maybe this is where you are: on another island city, at the furthest end of the world at the dawn of the 42nd, or 84th, or 168th century of your time, waiting for history to begin, and for civilisation to end. Maybe history has already begun; maybe civilisation is already falling, and maybe, in you heart of hearts, you already know this. You studied the equations, the remaining data-stones that the Library allows restricted access to, the Thirty Fourth Revised Edition of the Amended Seldon Plan, the legends left behind by the Seer Pit and the Oracles of the Garden and the Fifteenth Column; and beyond that, you studied the songs you sing to yourself, quietly and secretly, as the fires of the machine god begin to flicker back to grey, tumultuous life in the streets and in the souls of angry, careless men, and the ways you take to get home, every day, as things soar: crime, and injustice, and the price of bread and noodles and sweet potato and tapioca, and the cost of fear, and the cost of being who you are, in a time of uncertainty, and emptiness, and devouring, consuming solitude, and the knowledge that are terrified that you, in the end, deserve absolutely nothing at all.
Undo the ribbons that hold back the storms, and unleash the dogs in heaven that will rouse the asteroids to their faithful shower. The preacher, she calls for it in the street outside your house, and you know that the people will lie down and weep, silently and mercilessly to themselves, in their houses and their cars and all the places they have the sex and the tenderness they always wanted to have, but were too afraid of themselves to admit. Nothing is coming. No one is coming. Someone claims the dead are rising, imbued by a new, revived, fascist-evangelical Cult of the Thermodynamic, and someone else claims the volcanoes around the Ring of Flame, too, have awoken too early. The seas are boiling, and the dream is become drama, and demiurge, and Deluge.
You are too young to remember the Deluge; everyone on your Earth is too young. But you know of it because you have found out how to read the data-stones in a new way, a very, very old way; from the restricted access log-counter in the Library, you know others have found out how to do this too, a few, here and there, maybe in the rings, maybe in the old forest, maybe in the Gated Domes of the North. You know it will come again. But remember, always remember, the cost of fear is far too high; and the terror that grips you every day, as the police claim they know nothing, and the old women in the park claim they do not know who to turn to, the Secretary for Light and Wind claims on the national Vox that enacted deviance was proscribed against by the First Republic, no matter how much it is allowed to thrive in the mind, and fester in the heart, and so goes against the bedrock of the very foundation of the nation, and of this good, orange Earth. And, she says, in full force, against the wind, and stone, and bedrock of your own soul, no matter how far away she is on the Vox, that it is people like you who are tearing this country apart, people like you who are refuse to let the Fourth Thermodynamic War be done, people like you who lie down and weep, silently and mercilessly to themselves, in their houses and parks and all the places they have the sex and tenderness they always wanted to have, because they know that there is something wrong with them. This is the 42nd, or the 84th, or the 168th century! This is Dominion, and this is our strange, broken, new world. This is how it will have to be. This is what it has come to.
And on your tiny balcony, one, blustery, lightless, starless night, as the clouds race its breadth, and the Senior Secretary for Justice and the Peace calls for a special session to discuss people like you, and you can hear someone almost like you being beaten up in the alley beneath you, wordlessly and delicately, as one of the Senior Secretary for Justice and the Peace’s ancestors might have dismantled, with care and strange, twisted love, an Oracle of the Garden – something in your inner world gives way, at last. Is it a dam? A executable that finally cannot self-perpetuate a gaping, ragged hole? A caldera of the Ring of Flame, incandescent and spewing with rage? People like you, says the Secretary for Light and Wind’s voice in your mind, and all of the people who came before her, the people who took the island of your ancestors, and the islands to the East, and the great, vast continent to the West, and broke it, dismantled it, gave it their version of hope and love and progress and sweet, sweet fear – it is people like you who do not understand themselves. Whose own thought-process and mind- schema are inconstitutable in visual form. Whose song-drive and heart whispers whisper evil, and pestilence, and war, and death.
Something in your inner world gives way. People like me, you whisper, delicately, wordlessly in your inner world, quietly and mercilessly. People like me. The abuse goes on in the alley below you, and on the Vox, and across the city, and the islands to the East, and the continent to the West, and the entire world. The plague of abuse. People like me are a plague. Something is giving way. A mind, finally freed of Stasis and become Dynamic? An Oracle’s words, breaking through? A storm from the other side, says the Secretary for Light and Wind. A failure of the imagination’s barriers. A dream caught in the web of the Empty Beyond.
Something in your inner world gives way, and there it is: something in the outer world, given way, a way to find you at last.
In a flash, it is there, delicate and wordless, quiet, and filled with the limitless mercy of all those who have gone before. Sent by the elders, your mind says to you; sent by great-grandma. The gaping, ragged hole is there; the caldera of the Ring of Flame is alive; and yet, this has given way, the speed of light has given way, skipping, warping, slipping and jumping.
And he is there. He has come.
He is there in the air above the balcony, and you are filled with the voices of a people across the multiverse, another nation, another time. You hear their stories; you hear the ship’s words in an octillion tongues and times, spilling out into you through the gaping, ragged hole. You know this has happened so many times before, throughout history in your universe and in all the ones adjacent to it.
Not for you, says the Secretary for Light and Wind in your mind. Not for me, you repeat; but it is impossible for that to not be the case.
Let us go, says the ship to you; and you know in many, many other countries, many other cultures, many other worlds, the same thing is ready to be said in an octillion different ways, in the heart-language and the words refuse to bow in the face of the void to anyone but the stars themselves.
Join our Federation of Planets.
You, now, my leaf on the wind; how I want to watch you soar.
And for a moment, in your mind’s eye, your great-grandmother smiles down on you, from the Worlds Far, Far Beyond.
So say we all.
I am not a goddamn leaf on the wind, you whisper feebly. I am…I am…
One of the crutches scrapes against the grill of the balcony and starts to slide into a fall; you catch it, but then you yelp in spite of yourself. What a sound, from a person like me.
And she is there, in a flash, like lightspeed, the Secretary of Light and Wind in your mind’s eye, and the Senior Secretary of Justice and the Peace, and the other boy, the lover, the monster who turned around and destroyed you, incinerated you, set you aflame, as you turned away from the blistering mountain and the last machine god of the order of the fire, and the men in the street, and those who took your island, and your world.
You are who you say you are, says the ship.
The caldera erupts, bubbling over. The stars fall. The tears shudder their way out of you, one by one, until all that you can hear is yourself and the ship’s gentle, humming song.
I am broken, you say. I am afraid.
You are who you say you are, repeats the ship.
I am not a pilot, you say. Lava, hot and wet, and searing. I am not a warrior. I am not a scholar. I am not anyone. I am a person like me.
Facts are facts, says the ship.
Then why are you still fucking here? you scream. Go away. Go to someone else who can save us. Go to someone who it makes sense to go to. Go to someone who isn’t like me.
The ship doesn’t move, no matter how long you weep, silently and mercilessly.
After a while, you tremble, and collapse. The crutches have both slid to the floor; you don’t care about getting them dirty or infected anymore.
I have to be everything. I have to be everyone.
Exactly, says the ship. And so I am here.
I am not everything, you say. I am not everyone.
But you are, says the ship. You are everyone.
I am no one, you whisper. No one at all.
As is everyone, says the ship; and again, within it, you see your great- grandmother. The last person in your family to know how to speak the true language of the island, the Star-language. The only person in your life who recognised you, a person like you, and who still loved you for it no matter what.
You could be anyone.
I could be anyone.
••
Who do you have to be, for it to come to you?
This is the first step, the first time you learn how to fly, and soar, and skip, and jump. The first time you glimpse the magnificent, terrifying beauty of void-space and the Worlds Between, and the first time you learn how to dance with the universe on its own terms. You will crash; you and the ship will be lost, sometimes, a lonely voyager, islanded in a sea of stars, caught in time and space across far-reaching dimensions.
And you will find your way, as so many like you have across the multiverse, so that you can be a story to someone else. You will challenge all that humanity, in your space and time, has ever accomplished; a discovery, an endeavour, a new hope moving ever forward unto dawn. With the ship, you will bring an end to the Thermodynamic Era, to the war of old men, and the stone skies within. A reconstitution of the data-stones, and a healing of the last Oracles in the Garden. A place for articulated deviants, and a new home for the Star-language. So say we all, little leaf on the wind; and what a mighty and magnificent storm you will bring to the edge of tomorrow, and the island city at the crossroads of yesterday, today and forever.
But first, you had to be a person like you. Whoever you are, wherever you are, in whatever space and time you are: you had to be a person like you. A star. A sun. A foundation. A vessel of daring, dauntless hope. An enterprise. A little gay brown boy, on the edge of the galaxy; a lonely, terrified creole girl, waiting to come home. Broken, abused, battered and empty; and still ready to be everything that you could be for the universes beyond.
You have to be everything. You have to be everyone.
And because of that, you could be anyone.
Kevin Martens Wong is the last Merlionsman and first Dreamtiger of the Republic of Singapore: a gay, non-binary Kristang / Portuguese-Eurasian Singaporean speculative fiction writer, independent scholar and teacher, and the leader of the Kristang / Portuguese-Eurasian community in the Lion City. Specialising in intangible cultural heritage revitalisation, indigenous archeoastronomy and accessible non-Western psychology, he is the developer of the the Kristang theory of the human psyche known as the Osura Pesuasang, the editor-in-chief of Kadamundu: The Spice Road Review, and Kabesa or director of Kodrah Kristang, the grassroots movement to revive the critically endangered Kristang language. A 2023 Poesiaeuropa Fellow under the High Patronage of the European Parliament and the 2017 winner of both the Lee Hsien Loong Award for Outstanding All-Round Achievement and President’s Volunteer and Philanthropy Award (Individual Youth, his first novel, Altered Straits, was longlisted for the 2015 Epigram Books Fiction Prize, and he has published three anthologies of poetry in Kristang and English: Relwe di Reinyang, Glow-Glow Dancer and Songs of a Young Startiger. He currently runs his own coaching and consulting initiative, Merlionsman, and writes new plays, poetry and prose in Kristang and English at Tigri sa Chang / The Tiger’s Land.