But he did not die.
Anchises had begun to have suspicions. He did not speak of them, lest others think him mad. He drew his callowhale pictures and thought hard while he drew them. This is what Anchises drew when he made a picture of a callowhale:
As far as beginner naturalist’s drawings go, it was not bad. It was basically accurate. Anchises always drew the top half of a whale the same way, the way he had seen them all his life. But he had no idea what the bottom half of a callowhale looked like. He had never been allowed to go diving with his mother or his father, no matter how hard he had wished it. And besides, even divers didn’t really know what a callowhale looked like. They were too big to see all at once. It would be like trying to guess what South America looked like when you have only seen one cafe in Buenos Aires. But Anchises guessed anyway. He tried many times to make one that seemed right to him, but none of them really did. They looked like a blimp wearing a hula skirt, or a pinto bean with noodles growing out of it. They looked silly to him, and stupid. But callowhales were not silly or stupid. He knew that. He knew it, though he had no reason to know anything about them. Even the people who did know something about the vast, beautiful animals that lived in the wonderful scarlet sea couldn’t seem to agree on anything about them, though Anchises felt quite certain they were animals, and not “great bloody meatloafs,” as Mr Preakness called them, nor “overgrown Brussels sprouts,” as Miss Bao insisted.
Finally, Anchises decided to try something new. He laid out a piece of fresh, new paper, the best sheet he could find, with only a few bits of cacao-seed flecking the fibre. He sharpened his pencil with his knife and made sure he had a good breakfast and a glass of orange juice by his side (which was not really orange juice, but a tangy, thready, tingly juice from a plant whose fruit is orange, but whose exterior is the size of a doctor’s satchel and covered in lilac fur) in case he got thirsty. He sat at his desk, which faced the beach and the foamy Qadesh, and said, very clearly, to the surf: “I wish that I can’t ever draw what a callowhale really looks like, and always make a real hash job of it.”
Anchises put his pencil to his paper, and this is what he drew:
After that, Anchises put his pencil and paper away under the floorboards and only took out his bottom-half-of-a-callowhale picture to look at when everyone else had gone to bed. He never asked his mother or his father whether his drawing looked right to them. He didn’t have to.
And day after day, when his chores were done and he had read all the passages required for the next day’s lessons, Anchises went down to the shore near his house. He no longer collected whelk shells which were not really whelk shells, nor driftwood which was not really driftwood. He did not try to sing along with the striped seals which were not really seals. He only watched the callowhales. In his mind, he kept drawing them, over and over, their endless arms beneath the red water wrapping him up like love.
The boy whose wishes couldn’t come true was a good child with a good heart in his good chest. Even after he discovered how to wish for the opposite of what he wanted, he did not abuse the privilege. If you play too hard with a toy, it will break. Anchises had never broken any of his toys, even when he was so small he thought his stuffed velvet turtle was a real turtle. He spent his wishes carefully, like a miser spends his coins.
He wished that his parents should have terrible draws when they dove for callowmilk—and his voice trembled when he said it, for even though he knew it would come out well, it hurt him to wish bad fortune on his family. When he overheard his father weeping in the night because he had wanted seven children for as long as he could remember—being one of seven himself, whose mother and grandmother had also had six siblings—Anchises looked out to the fiery autumn waves and wished that his mother would never have any more children ever, that he should always be an only child and never have three brothers and three sisters, which was too many, anyone would admit. And he wished—finally, guiltily—that all the children in school would hate him and call him names and beat him, that they would shun the sight of him and never ask him along with them when they went fishing after school. He shook all night afterward, terrified that the spell would work, but also terrified that it would not; sick with the conviction that, this time of all times, he had gone too far, wished for something too precious, too impossible, too princely for the magic to manage.
And the amphorae of Anchises’s house swelled with callowmilk.
And the mother of Anchises swelled with twins.
And the children of Anchises’s acquaintance clapped him on the shoulder; and laughed at his shy jokes; and called him Doctor Callow, because he knew even more about callowhales than the teacher did; and boy howdy did the Doctor catch more trout (which are not really trout, but skinny, skittish, scaly fish with wine-coloured fins and three bulging eyes, one of which is a false lantern-eye that lights up at night to seduce krill-which-is-not-really-krill into the creatures’ wide mouths) than anybody else!
Doctor Callow found himself, suddenly, a happy child. And thus happified, he grew to the age of eight in the Land of Milk and Desire, no longer wishing for the opposite of his own desire, for he had all he could ever imagine wanting.
The Famine Queen of Phobos
(Oxblood Films, 1938, dir. Severin Unck)
(ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL: RECORD 4, SIDE 2, COMMENCE 0:09)
SC3 EXT. LOCATION #6 MARS/PHOBOS—KALLISTI SQUARE, DAY 49. AFTERNOON [5 APRIL, 1936]
[EXT. The Kallisti Square Depot on Phobos, the larger of Mars’s two moons. The camera careens unsteadily; a throng of furious men and women stampede across the square, slamming bats and batons into the windows of the public distribution centre, the customs house, the cafes and warehouses. They are looking for food—they chant for food, they scream for food, they sob for it. But the distribution centre has nothing. The cafes have nothing. They closed weeks ago, and the warehouses contain little but shipping labels from the last deliveries of bread and callowmilk. The people of Phobos would loot the whole city, if there was anything to loot.
Phobos is a tiny world, with poor soil and few features to lure tourists or investors. It is an industrial settlement, a halfway house between the mines of the asteroid belt and the markets of Earth. Almost all food must come from somewhere else: from Mars itself, from Earth, from the fertile Inner System. Nearby Deimos can offer little help—greener, softer, but her population still hovers precariously over stability; unable, quite, to touch down. Two months ago, the organized workers, led by Arkady Liu and Ellory Lyford, went on strike, demanding all the things workers need and management withholds: wages, shortened contracts, more doctors, more food, more protection. The response was simple: all food shipments to Phobos ceased. A year from now, very few offworlders will not know the name Arkady Liu.
SEVERIN UNCK runs with Liu’s mob, searching for a place to stand and speak. She ducks through the doorway of a Prithvi Deep Sea Holdings processing facility and crouches into the shadows. She breathes heavily, a flush riding in her cheeks. She has not eaten in two days. She has had one cup of water in the last twenty-four hours. She is hiding—her equipment is worth something, even her clothes. She came to shoot something else entirely: a year of holidays, each on a different moon. An ice-cream cone of a project, contracted with Oxblood to pay for the Jupiter project she is already writing in her head.