We humans in this city, we excrete houses. Our city and others like it are giant stromatolite fields. We synthesize solid minerals the way arthropods synthesize shellstuff, only our digestion systems are on the outside. Many of the materials would be poisonous, you see, allowed into our own bodies. So, we build external alimentary tracts for ourselves.
Stone cutters for teeth. Concrete blenders for guts. Components for these parts are, in turn, excreted from simpler organs that are also external.
Through metabolic chains not known in other species, we generate temperatures high enough to melt metal, or excrete solvents that turn rockstuffs temporarily into fluids. Our molds define the boundaries of their shape. Then we combine them into structures more than 800 meters tall.
We often excrete communally. Flocks of us move to the location and stay for a year or more. We raise up our external limbs, like cranes; disposable shells, like scaffolds. In these places we then deposit our sediments, layers over layers of them – mineral, metal, and even organic stuffs like wooden fiber.
Our use of wood deserves special mention. Among our range of detachable limbs, some are sharpened or serrated to extract matter from species as cladistically remote as trees. While it would seem like a parasitic relationship, some has argued it is symbiotic: As trees give up building blocks for our houses, we in return plant more trees.
When trees evolved the ability to become good houses, they also found a seed-spreading mechanism more ingenious than when they were only making us fruits.
You plain-dwellers have it the same way with your cereals.
We help when a house needs to position and rearrange its parts, like insects during their metamorphosis. A house has in its DNA (which we store alongside our own) instructions for level planes and precise angles, an instinct for engineering mediated by squiggly ink upon cellulose. Or the recent mutation of that form: Programmable pathways among arrays of semi-conductors.
And cities keep swelling, with us dwellers as their means. They consume us, metabolize us, excrete us. Over their life spans they grow outwards, upwards, downwards, resist entropy, extract order from their surroundings.
Our cities bid their dwellers bring them nourishment and replace their parts. At their pleasure we patrol and maintain them, rejuvenate and rearrange them, and often they must close down sections of themselves so our workers can dig down to its underlaying structures, or stay on the surface to tear apart unwanted matter (for example older houses or pieces of asphalt that have become too worn).
This might seem like obsession, some might wonder why there’s never an end to these high fences and noisy drillings and holes right in the middle of the road, with notice of “work in progress”, but cities are continually a work in progress and must be. If left alone, they will decline, just like us carbon-based forms of life. Rot will take them, and they decompose, reunite with the less differentialized matter around them, and it will happen faster than we perhaps imagine.
I don’t think our cities, like horrors from our collected fictions, will wake up and fight or consume us.
Their inner lives must be of a different nature than ours.
In any case, we are more useful to them consuming, digesting, excreting matter on their behalf, than we would be reprocessed into more simple forms of matter ourselves.
What I do sometimes question is how we must look to the diminishing populations outside our cities’ bounds? Can you and your diminutive houses perceive our conscious thought as something, anything, like your own? Can you assume that we, like you, possess the same amount of ambition, the same adoration of justice and beauty, the bliss and despair that encircle humankind? Perhaps you look at us with sympathy. But do you see us as alive?
You don’t even live in towers. What purpose, to your eyes, to our excretion of brick upon brick upon brick?
What purpose to our time and our routines?
What will you think when you come to see us, take refuge in one of our hotels, go out only for the sake of leisure?
What will you think when you see us eat stone, wash it down with solvents?
When you see us sit on molded cylinders and defecate cement?
When we copulate in the streets, but do not mean anything by it; we’re just striving to recall that we have bodies?
I don’t have anything against being seen. Ground dwellers are welcome in our cities.
I don’t mind when passers-trough linger as you drive our streets, look out from our high-rise hotels, take your time, and observe our routines; our rigid speech, or social taboos, and begin to deduce what our cities has made us into. I worry not for changes that you might bring.
Take my urban body to your laboratories if it will amuse you: Steal it away from its city and take it completely apart. That change is easily undone.
Induct into my brain whatever judgment of our world that you and your peers would conceive: The thing I regard as my self will stay around.
Not even for that block in my city, the one where I was born and which even in my exile I embody, I worry.
The only thing I do not accept, is to be seen when we gather at night. When we convene in private gardens, under darkened domes, to Dance.
Our Dance: Hid from all windows with their curtains drawn; from surveillance cameras; from pollsters, mapping us like streets. When we Dance, we move stiffly, like shellfish on stilts. We chant. The city cannot hear us, now; nor would it want to.
Our Dance is private, for participants only. They are ritual, they relieve us of the immaterial.
At Dance we excrete meaning, not stone; personalities, not practicalities. We ooze of longing, we stink of art.
At Dance we are allowed to hunger, at Dance we are allowed to lust.
If this were to be seen, the meaning of it would change. Not into nothing, I could have born it better if the meaning was merely lost, but to have it change? To have it transmuted into nothing but performance?
Into a thing to please the eye. (Or displease, as it were, but in a pleasant way.)
It would be made to express something different from our pressing, pressing need.
For this reason, I and certain others at regular times dislodge ourselves from the group. We rinse our bodies and clothe them. We comb our hair. We meet with passers-through, and also visitors, like yourself: We come to you as official guides.
We have plenty of sights for your enjoyment, plenty of horrors for your stimulation, plenty of customs for you to try and turn us away from.
As long as you take our directions, you can engage us. You can debate us. You can pour all that you fear and resent over our fabric-clad, mud-free bodies — or in reverse, admire us, want to join us (you could, you know, it only takes a change of address). As long as you take our directions, we make patient friends, or in a few cases: more than adequate lovers.
We can perform the physical acts of love just fine, you know. We can perform almost whatever is required, if we never have to perform our selves.
As long as you take our directions, you can try and work your changes into our system. A touch of reform now and then doesn’t hurt. We rather welcome it. It’s as if you leave us with a piece of yourself, and we will care for it, be respectful of your effort, the way a bivalve encapsulates a speck of dust:
We will see your good work embellished. Beatified. We promise you are going to love the things we can turn it into, should you come back to our city another day; you might even ask for their return, which we would grant.
No lasting harm can be done, not to our houses, not to ourselves, when only passers-through agree to our directions.
For this reason, we consider it worth the prize when we separate from the urban mass; I consider it worth it. To bend away, just for a little time, from the course that serves the growth and continuance of houses, to talk and move and function in this empty place, unable to build, unable to repair.
And when the time comes and you must leave, don’t worry too much, we know how to reattach. Our houses have plenty of rooms, lit, stocked, and furnished, ready for occupation.
Even now, as you reach the country road, I move out into the city streets. As you, maybe, pull your vehicle over by the side of the road, and step out to look behind — would you do that? You are allowed, you know, we are not the Greco-Roman underworld — and see us silhouetted from a distance, our curves and angles rising from the plains, as shadows against the misty morning sky, yes, even as you watch, I will be searching. Prepared to move in at any time.
I am in fact now looking at an elderly building, not far from my old block. Ten stories tall, squeezed in between what must be its overbearing younger siblings; the façade with its old-fashioned decor, inviting, dark, it seems a friendly house. It whispers: Two rooms, 30 luxurious square meters, previous tenant just moved to a distant burrow. It whispers: Welcome. It whispers: Please, will you fill this gap. I let myself in the gate.
I call for the elevator. I ride to the seventh floor. And there it waits, my new home, emotions so brittle: An apartment, so to speak, apart … it tugs at me before I can even grab the keys. Envelops me as I emerge from the hall. I will stay at home for hours now, I think.
Maybe days, to rest; to rest before I reintegrate with my kind.
In this city, we have a saying.
Take care of your humans, and your humans will take care of you.
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