io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “The Raspberry Manifesto of Professor Warana” by Adam-Troy Castro. Enjoy!
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“The Raspberry Manifesto of Professor Warana”
By Adam-Troy Castro
Something has happened. It is amazing. It is unheard-of and inconceivable. It is many, many, many things, gathering a plethora of adjectives that indicate its ability to cause astonishment and confusion among those who behold it. It is a mountain-sized edifice of awe. Whether it is horrific, tragic, or a leap forward has yet to be decided.
Nevertheless, it has happened.
The renowned artist Dejuik has been transformed into an orange.
Yes. The fruit.
We all know Dejuik, of course. We have all seen his acclaimed sculpture, Everything, a simple block that achieved artistic immortality by, Dejuik said, implying the rest of the universe where such a thing could come to be. Some scoffers said, “It’s the same block of granite you started with! You didn’t sculpt it in the slightest!” To which Dejuik replied that this was the very point, and that if anybody didn’t get it this was their own problem. Later, after ten years of meditation, Dejuik took a similar granite block, chipped off one corner, and called this sculpture Almost Everything. It made the scoffers scream, but they’re all dead from self-immolation now, so nobody cares about them. That it later turned out Dejuik could produce figures as well-defined as anything from Michelangelo is merely a source of confusion. Those were specifics, and Dejuik had trumped all specifics by first doing everything.
“Look,” Dejuik says, at some point after being turned into an orange, “the universe is perfection, right? How, then, to measure and comment upon the arrogance of the human animal, to say that one could improve on perfection with art? By definition, the act of describing perfection is the act of diminishing it, by putting it in a little box. It is arrogance. The most I could do was comment on that arrogance by saying, here is my granite block. Here is my creation, an iota of the greater creation. Here I am, an infinitesimal speck, beheld by other infinitesimal specks. That is my commentary.”
And, arrives one inevitable response, what of those who think it pretentious rot?
“That,” Dejuik said, “is additional commentary. What do you think?”
We think we need additional discussion of you becoming an orange.
To be sure, Dejuik was never a conventional person. They were more than one person, at a point in humanity’s evolution where a person can decide to be multiple persons, and it is not unheard of to be entire teeming masses. We all know Irishiti, a city of millions where everybody is part of the same group mind, subsisting on sunlight and intimately connected, in what for any other population would be their most intimate places, by vines. This seemed to be a good idea, back when everybody decided that it would be the model of their civilization. They’re another story entirely.
Dejuik was far from that many. There were only five of them, one of each recognized gender, forever collaborating on the great projects that transformed the landscape of the world where they lived, that included measures like sculpting mountain ranges. Most people who lived on their world loved at least one of Dejuik, and many hated at least one other. The purple one was generally agreed to be the most unpleasant.
This happens. Many artists benefit from having several faces. They always have.
Now Dejuik is an orange. Becoming one sounds like the kind of thing the five of them would have done just to provoke a reaction, but the orange is capable of communication and is adamant that the transformation was against their will. Some evil person—a mad scientist if you will—captured them and did this thing that has never been done, that no sane person would have considered doing. Dejuik is adamant that they protested. Dejuik even fought. At one point before the procedure Dejuik escaped captivity and hid out in a nearby wetlands, trudging knee-deep in mud while the native predators, things best described as mouths with feet, attempted to eat them. It was a genuine, bloody survival drama. Some people think that two of Dejuik were in fact eaten and that the loss of forty percent of their gestalt was the trauma that resigned their remaining bodies to their fate.
In any event, Dejuik seems pretty happy about itself now.
“I am an orange,” it says.
Yes, we can see that.
“I am not identical to the fruit that was,” Dejuik elaborates. “That was a mindless fruit of an extinct tree. It could not communicate and it had nothing to communicate. It would be dull to be such a thing. It was only an orange.”
As are you.
“Yes, well. To be explicit about this, I am the only representative of the life form extant at this point in history, and I therefore define the characteristics of oranges just by existing. These are things I have in common with the historical orange: I am spherical; I am small enough to be cradled in a human palm; I can be peeled and devoured (though I appreciate it if you would refrain); I can be squeezed for juice (though again I would appreciate it if you refrain); and I am sure that I am genetically an orange because the chief thing I know about myself is that it would take microscopic examination to determine anything that separates myself from the oranges of yore. But as you can plainly see, I have lost none of my cognitive or rhetorical abilities and can still discuss the philosophical ramifications of my condition as well as the greatest savants of my age. All of that must be coming from somewhere. Do I have a brain? No. I’m an orange. Do I have a mind and a soul? Clearly. Ask me something and I’ll answer it.”
Fine. What is the meaning of life?
“Now you’re just being a smart-ass.”
There have been many conferences with this orange. Five turnings ago it was delivered to the Institute of Deep Questions, where it now occupies a countertop in the lab of a learned personage called Professor Clarikos Warana, responsible for the queries in the interview already excerpted. We use the word occupies because all the words that normally apply to a human body at rest no longer apply. It is an orange and therefore does not sit. It is an orange and therefore does not stand. It does not run, or jump, or dance. It does not make love or scratch its chin thoughtfully. It is an orange.
Professor Clarikos Warana is by contrast Professor Clarikos Warana, typical of any human individual in that he is the culmination of many life decisions that took a useless wailing infant and over many years of care and discipline transformed him into the adult he is now. He is completely, totally himself. He remembers being a sleeping fetus in the womb. He remembers being his mother yanking him from the home womb. He remembers the difficult twenty minutes of his education, the neuroses and sum knowledge being injected into his brain from a library of possible life characteristics chosen for him from a database. He remembers the dismay he felt as an unformed babe reacting to the sudden appearance of Imperial Chinese History, amphibian biology, and the Joy of French Cooking blossoming in his unformed gray matter like fungal infections. He remembers his first philosophies, which were like these courses of study that had been chosen for him. He remembers consciously deciding to be asocial and eccentric. He remembers his one and only orgasm, purchased from a street stall in pill form, when he was fifteen. He was always learned. But he was never any good at being a human being, something he decided to underline and italicize by having his head sculpted into the shape of an ancient terrestrial salamander. He is, by acclimation, the only scholar equipped to solve the problem that is what has happened to Dejuik.
Caring for the orange has been difficult. A couple of times, before a circular wire cradle was built to hold it, it was accidentally nudged, and so it rolled. It came unnervingly close to the edge of the counter before somebody yelled, launched herself across the room and reached for Dejuik just as it toppled over the edge. No one knows whether Dejuik would have survived a hard landing on the floor—which is, for reasons that must have made sense to someone when the lab was designed, patterned in alternating white and black squares, the white ones heated to above the boiling point of water, the black ones cooled to the temperature of liquid oxygen. Researchers work there but working side by side is difficult and most people have their feet modified. It is likely that collision with the floor would have killed the orange that was Dejuik, one or way or another, hence the cradle, which holds the orange in place for the many, many question-and-answer sessions it needed to endure once it was brought here.
An orange, for people who don’t know, is, as Dejuik alluded, a citrus fruit that was once extant on the home world, up to a mass extinction that took place midway through the period then measured as its twenty-first century, though in fact it had been around for a lot longer than that. People ate them, or drank juice derived from them, in part because they tasted good and in part because ingestion prevented some nasty ailments that you did not want to get, especially if all you had to do to avoid them was eat an orange. There was an uptick in the occurrence of such diseases when oranges went away, and this was a tragedy of the home world and thus something we don’t need to worry ourselves with. One interesting item of arcana about oranges is that they inspired the word orange, for a color that oranges were reputed to be. It is complicated. It seems to have nothing to do with why Dejuik was made into an orange.
Dejuik tells Clarikos, “You must begin with the creator.”
I’m not sure we have time to go back that far.
“I don’t mean the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent spirit who breathed life into the universe. We no longer live in the days when Their Existence was a matter for clergy and philosophers. This is the modern era. We have made contact with that eternal being and have sent diplomats. We know that They created the heavens and the Earth, a massive project that did, by implication, include oranges. No, I talk about the human creator who took a linked artist colony of five people living as one and made what you see before you now, a sentient creature who might be considered an orange or might be something that only approximates an orange. Let us just say, ‘orange,’ okay? That fellow was a madman, who carefully explained to the Dejuik who sat naked and shivering in the transformation chamber that he had always wanted to turn what he called a gaggle of pretentious snots into an orange. That is as much detail as he ever went into. I have described him, but of course that might be of limited utility, since a fellow who could turn people into oranges can surely change the general shape of his face. He could be anybody. Or a persimmon. A guy who would turn people into oranges might well want to turn himself into a persimmon. But if you find him and ask him, he might well be willing to go into greater specificity about his motives.”
Didn’t he tell you anything?
A long, thoughtful pause. “He talked about playing with his childhood dog.”
What’s a dog?
“Another species left over from the home world, a semi-sapient quadruped of limited reasoning but immense emotional intelligence. It has proven unable to survive on most of the worlds in our galactic diaspora, but some places still have them, and some worlds like the one that raised the man who turned me into an orange have engineered creatures like them. I am given to understand that even on the home planet dogs were such a diverse species, separated into so many strains, that the very word dog told you practically nothing. In any event, he remembered his dog with somewhat pathetic fondness. He said it was always his best friend. He said it considered itself a human, he elaborated that this was a premise with which he agreed, and that it led to much personal cogitation over how much basic humans could be transformed and still consider themselves members of the baseline species. We were to be a demonstration of the principle.”
So are you human?
“At least as much as I’m an orange.”
But you say you’re an orange.
“I say I define an orange. I choose to also define a human being who has become an orange. I contain multitudes. Also Vitamin C. Lots of that. Lots and lots of that.”
That the orange speaks at all is of course one of the many mysteries involved in its transformation. It has no mouth, and it must communicate, which it does in the sweet, musical voice of one of its past five selves, Caralytha, a woman with black eyes and raven hair and a graceful way of moving, none of which is remotely true of the orange it has become. The orange has demonstrated that it can utilize any one of the five voices it used as the individuals who made up Dejuik, from the wizened old man Octhav to Glon, the looming giant too large to fit through the front door of the house that was their official shared residence. It simply prefers to speak as Caralytha. She had the best voice. The orange still does.
Clarikos Warana stands on one hot square and one cold square, straddling the two states and embracing the dichotomy, while admitting to himself that he wanted to know what orange juice tasted like. He shifts his stance to achieve temperature equanimity and wonders also whether it really matters how this transformed being justifies its own existence. He can barely justify his own. He doesn’t have a life. This is something frequently said of the learned, by uneducated plebians who think that only the stupid fully enjoy life’s pleasures; among them, having ever injected a book into one’s veins and feeling the full text spring into being on the medium of one’s gray matter is inconsistent with life authenticity. But he really doesn’t have a life. He is dedicated to his work and, following the transformation of his head into a salamander’s, has had himself altered so that food, breath, sleep, and the need to rest do not provide distractions; neither does sitting, which is how come he had his knees fused in a standing position. What he has instead is a permanent position behind the counter, observing oddities like this artists’ collective turned into an orange. Later, he will provide his commentary to anyone who’s interested. It’s a dull existence, but he has also had himself altered to remove his need to ever be interested. This is why it can be said that he does not have a life: Life is distracting. He nevertheless finds the orange fascinating. He says, How did it work?
“How did what work?”
The transformation.
“On a molecular level. It was a big room with a door on one side and a conveyer belt on the other. We were shoved in one side and collected on the other. It was not an unpleasant process, even if we hated the music. He said that we would all become an orange now. We screamed, certain that it would be unimaginable agony, but it was really quite pleasant. First, we were drawn together by an attraction we could not resist. Then our bodies started to merge, and then our limbs were absorbed, and by then the sensations involved a wholly incalculable joy that none of us had ever felt as humans. It was like taking a bath in a topical euphoric; every inch of us exulted in what has happening. It occurred to us that these were the most pleasurable sensations we had ever known. One of the last things we thought before it occurred to us that we were an orange now was that we were lucky to have fallen into the hands of a mad scientist who was that considerate. And then we were an orange. And I decided I liked it.”
That’s the part I’ve been asked to investigate. Why is it so good to be an orange?
“Look, as an evolved orange with the kind of enhanced senses only a super-evolved orange can have, I don’t possess the vocabulary to label what this feels like. But it’s great. Being an orange connects me to the sensory universe in a way that being human beings never did. I know joys I can’t describe to you, pleasures that you could not comprehend with any kind of map. Right now I feel like an orgasm gone supernova, and I must, must tell you that it shows no sign of diminishing. I know you’ve offered to search for a cure, and I appreciate the gesture, but this is the truth of my existence: Once you’ve gone orange, you never go, uh, whatever word rhymes with orange. I’m still looking for a way to encapsulate that ethos within the limitation of the rhyme scheme. I want to sell the idea to the rest of the human race. We should all be oranges. I don’t think any of us have ever known such joy.”
And if we did find a cure? If we ever managed to turn you back to the people you were?
“We would go to any lengths to become an orange again. It’s our destiny. It should be your destiny. Being an orange is great.”
And there, Dejuik stops talking, never to utter another word. It has not died. It is destined to live forever, wholly self-contained, surviving off any light source that can be construed as sunshine. Once in a great while telepaths are brought in to confirm that it is still thinking. It is, though its thoughts are a bit monotonous. They all translate to “I’m an orange, yay! I’m still an orange one second later, yay!” In this way it demonstrates the truism that a genuine happy ending—and what has happened to Dejuik is nothing if not a happy ending—is dull for anybody else who does not share in it. In a purely narrative universe, Dejuik would have sworn vengeance, arranged the construction of an exoskeleton which would provide it protection and locomotion, and plunge into the public spheres in which humanity hustles and bustles to track down its tormenter, the maniac who took away its humanity, ultimately ending in a showdown on the edge of some bottomless pit where the orange could defeat the madman in pitched battle, but Dejuik doesn’t want that, having already achieved closure, and found its true self. Happily Ever After is, if nothing else, a journey. For Dejuik it is also destination, and after much in the way of philosophical discussion, the authorities have concluded that there is no need to improve on perfection.
The identity of the man who created Dejuik is destined to be an unsolved mystery. The narrator has special knowledge but still does not know everything. What can be revealed is that he spends a year traveling to various luxury resorts, some on the shores of saltwater seas and others which, by the whim of various worlds that engineered them, sit along seas of urine, bile, blood, and hydrochloric acid. He does not like swimming. At night, he lies in his lounge and watches people who have been dissolved to raw flesh stagger back to land and, before going off to the buffets or night clubs, stop in regeneration booths to have their flesh restored to the condition it was before a swim in the burning seas. It strikes him as a weird thing to do on a vacation. He thinks of the orange, and he wonders if it was a kind thing to do to Dejuik. Moral doubt appears for the duration of an eyeblink. Of course it was, he thinks. The point of the experiment was not turning a person into a silly thing, but changing the entire definition of happiness for that person into being that silly thing. This technology might yet change the human condition, if he could manage to overcome his moral qualms. He could make people exult, forever, in being clods of dirt, or puffs of vapor, or invertebrate worms, or turds like those dropped by his one-time best friend, that long-deceased dog. That dog was just a dog, after all, with all the limitations possessed by dogs, and yet it adored being a dog; it was built to deeply appreciate its own dogginess, and if there was anything that so steered the future mad scientist into doing what he has done, it was that lesson, that education by example, that being other things was better than being a human being, by nature deeply regretful at having been made that, and being forced to live with what all human beings had, a chasm of dissatisfaction. He now has the means to fix that, really, could he only figure out what he wants to be, out of all the other options. He just knows that he doesn’t want to be an orange.
And Clarikos Warana. In the wake of his interviews with Dejuik the Orange, he is unaccountably at the beach, too. This is at a resort near the lab where the famed citrus fruit sits silent in its cradle, revealing nothing of its innermost thoughts; and Warana, by nature and physical condition not an outdoorsy kind of person, has nevertheless had the whim to do what he has almost never done: persuade a grad student to put him on a magnetic dolly and haul him to the water’s edge, to the very spot where his frozen legs will welcome ripples at high tide. He too feels a deep disappointment in that once again, in his life of great academic achievement, he has confirmed that learning something is not understanding something, and that understanding something is not appreciating something. He wants to weep, of course, but he is not capable of doing that any more than he is capable of doing anything else. He rages, silently. Those who recognize him think that the great man must be thinking deep and significant thoughts. Mostly, he is thinking about how he’s been cheated of a life. He aches, he really does, for the joy of being as self-contained as Dejuik, of determining what shape would make him happy, and what he would do if awarded contentment, a condition that strikes him as unlikely to fit as a bad suit tailored to fit a creature whose specific measurements were as alien to him as, as, and here the metaphor fails him completely.
Raspberries, he thinks. Yes, raspberries might be it.
About the Author
Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). The audio collection My Wife Hates Time Travel And Other Stories (Skyboat Media) features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” In 2022 he came out with two collections, his The Author’s Wife Vs. The Giant Robot and his thirtieth book, A Touch of Strange. Adam was an Author Guest of Honor at 2023’s World Fantasy Convention. Adam lives in Florida with a pair of chaotic paladin cats.
Please visit Lightspeed Magazine to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the October 2026 issue, which also features short fiction by John Wiswell, Susan Palwick, Arden Powell, Kehkashan Khalid, Rob Cameron, Marissa Lingen, Martin Cahill, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.
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