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SCIENCE FICTION
Vol. 20 Nos. 10 & 11 (Whole Numbers 250 & 251) October/November 1996
wea e ee a)
72 Swimmers Beneath the Skin
Next Issue on Sale October 15, 1996
lan R. MacLeod
208 The City of God ___—CS:CMGarirnerr Dcozoois & Michael Swanwick
NOVELETTES
10 The Flowers of Aulit Prison 50 Try and Kill It 106 The Wind Over the World 136 Generation Zero 156 Bicycle Repairman 186 Flying Lessons
POETRY
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71 Basic Criteria 134 Day Omega 155 Anguish
Nancy Kress Gene Wolfe Steven Utley Michael Cassutt Bruce Sterling Kelly Link
James Tiptree, Jr. W. Gregory Stewart W. Gregory Stewart
David Lunde
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DEPARTMENTS
4 Reflections: The Realm of Prester John _____————S—s«RRoobeert Silverberg Z2ISIOn: Books: vat ele ea weil ean ihe Soi Pa DEP Filippo 288 The SF Conventional Calendar ____——CCSCSCSCSSC#Erwirn'S.. Strauss
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by Robert Silverberg
THE REALM OF PRESTER JOHN
his month’s essay can be con-
strued either as a public ser-
vice announcement or as crass
self-promotion. More likely it’s a bit of both, but so be it. Modesty and reticence were not the most widely acclaimed virtues of my late beloved predecessor in this editori- al space, the esteemed Dr. Asimov, and perhaps I'll be providing a wel- come touch of Isaac-nostalgia for you if I blow my own horn a little here.
Anyway:
My book The Realm of Prester John is being reissued by the Ohio University Press, after having been unavailable for the past twenty-odd years. Ohio U. is doing it in a hard- cover edition and also as a trade paperback. This is good news for Silverberg collectors and for fanta- sy writers who would like to doa little fundamental research into medieval esoterica that might just lead them toward some valuable material for their next trilogy. It is also, of course, good news for me, because The Realm of Prester John is a book of which I’m inordinately proud and its status as a highly- sought-after-and-virtually-impossi- ble-to-find collector’s item was not the status I would have preferred for it to attain when I wrote it with so much travail long ago.
4
It isn’t a novel. It’s non-fiction: a scholarly work, if you will. I wrote it in 1970, when I still had some delusions of scholarship, and it was published two years later in an extremely handsome edition by Doubleday, complete with two-tone endpaper maps and many quaint and curious illustrations, and it went out of print with astonishing swiftness. Since then, hardly a year goes by without my getting inquiries about where copies may be obtained. Well, now you know. Your neighborhood science fiction bookstore will be able to order one for you, or, for all I know, may have a couple in stock; or else you can query the Ohio University Press yourself—the address is Scott Quadrangle, Athens, Ohio 45701.
And just who was Prester John, and why should any lover of sci- ence fiction or fantasy care to know anything about him?
He’s a fascinating mythical fig- ure, is who. And the story behind the myth is an even more fascinat- ing adventure in romantic me- dieval geography.
The Prester John legend first surfaced in Europe late in the twelfth century. A widely circulat- ed and much discussed letter from him had appeared—no one knows
its source—in which a mighty king of India who styled himself “Prester John,” John the Priest, sent his best wishes to the Byzan- tine Emperor Manuel Comnenus.
“If indeed you wish to know wherein consists our great power,” this great Indian monarch said, “then believe without doubting that I, Prester John, who reign supreme, exceed in riches, virtue, and power all creatures who dwell under heaven. Seventy-two kings pay tribute to me. I am a devout Christian and everywhere protect the Christians of our empire, nour- ishing them with alms. We have made a vow to visit the sepulcher of our Lord with a great army, as befits the glory of our Majesty, to wage war against and chastise the enemies of the cross of Christ, and to exalt his sacred name.”
Prester John’s letter declared that his magnificence dominated the world from the “Three Indias” onward as far as “the valley of de- serted Babylon close by the Tower of Babel.” It spoke of the elephants, dromedaries, and camels of his ter- ritories. It told of such miracles in his kingdom as a sandy sea without water that abounded with fish, and a waterless river of stones, and a place where all ailments could be cured. “Honey flows in our land, and milk everywhere abounds. .. . In it are found emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolites, onyxes, beryls, sardonyxes, and - many other precious stones. .. .”
The puissant potentate asserted that he was served at his table by no less than seven kings, sixty-two
Reflections: The Realm of Prester John
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October/November 1996
dukes, three hundred and sixty- five counts. Twelve archbishops dined daily on his right hand, and twenty bishops on his left. “If you can count the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea, you will be able to judge thereby the vastness of our realm and our power.” And when he rode forth to war, said Prester John, his troops were “pre- ceded by thirteen huge and lofty crosses made of gold and orna- mented with precious stones, in- stead of banners, and each of these is followed by ten thousand mount- ed soldiers and one hundred thou- sand infantrymen....”
Pretty impressive—especially to a Europe troubled by the power of the hostile Moslems to the east. A Christian king of immense might, ready to ride out of India and finish the job begun by the first Cru- saders in 1095, of driving the Sara- cens from the Holy Land? All Eu- rope was agog. The Christian hold on the Near East was precarious in the extreme, and dangerous new leaders had arisen among the Turks and the Arabs. It was not hard to imagine a Moslem resur- gence that not only would sweep the Crusaders into the sea but would see the armies of Mo- hammed marching onward into Europe itself. To have a mighty Christian ally like Prester John emerge on the far side of the Moslem empire was joyous news indeed.
Of course, the legions of Prester John never did materialize; and in time the Crusaders lost their grip on the Holy Land and even mighty
6
Byzantium fell eventually to the Turkish Sultan. But the grip of fantasy on the human mind is eter- nally powerful. All through the Middle Ages, hope continued to glimmer that one day Prester John and his troops would ride out of the east and set all things to rights.
Who, though, was Prester John, and where, exactly, was his king- dom?
Well, nowhere, exactly, since his letter was in all probability the clever fabrication of some imagina- tive European monk, who very likely was familiar with that mag- nificent ninth or tenth century col- lection of fables that we call The Thousand and One Nights and who seems to have borrowed liberally from such tales as that of Sindbad the Sailor. But no one knew that then; and so, for hundreds of years, the legend of Prester John re- mained ever bright. Perhaps he lived in India, perhaps he lived in the almost unknown wastelands that we now call Mongolia, perhaps he lived somewhere else entirely. But that he lived somewhere and would eventually come to save the Christian world from the menace of the Turks (or, later, the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan) was an idea that nobody challenged.
And so the quest for the realm of Prester John became one of the great romantic enterprises of the Middle Ages, a geographical ad- venture akin to the search for El Dorado, for King Solomon’s Mines, for the Fountain of Youth, for the Holy Grail, for the Seven Cities of Cibola, for the Amazons’ land, for
Robert Silverberg
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the lost city of Atlantis. Men would look throughout the whole length of Asia for his glittering kingdom, and then, not finding anything that corresponded to the legends of magnificence they had so often heard about, they would search for the land of Prester John in Africa; and ultimately they would per- suade themselves that they had actually found it there, in Ethiopia, where an authentically Christian monarch did indeed reign in some- thing that might be called great splendor.
At least two writers of adventure fiction have dealt—in rather oblique ways—with the Prester John saga. One was the British novelist John Buchan, best known for the suspense novel The Thirty- Nine Steps, source of Alfred Hitch-
Reflections: The Realm of Prester John
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cock’s celebrated movie. Buchan’s novel Prester John, first published in 1910, was once almost as fa- mous. It does not, however, grapple very directly with the legend. Buchan picks up the story at its very end—the discovery by six- teenth-century Portuguese explor- ers of a Christian kingdom in Ethiopia—and suggests that the memory of that kingdom’s grandeur had inspired the Zulus of early twentieth-century South Africa to establish a cult of black liberation aimed at overthrowing the rule of the white settlers. What follows is a lively novel somewhat in the vein of H. Rider Haggard, with no elements of the fantastic whatever and, despite its title, no significant connection to the Prester John mythos.
October/November 1996
Closer to the mark—but skewed by its author’s attempt to make the legend his own—is the pair of Prester John novellas by Norvell W. Page published in 1939 in John W. Campbell’s famous fantasy magazine Unknown. In these— “Flame Winds” and “Sons of the Bear-God”—Page showed that he was familiar with the original tales, but depicted his Prester John as an invincible first-century Roman gladiator whose sword- wielding adventures throughout the Orient had inspired the later stories of a great Christian king in Asia. An interesting twist, but once again of only the most tan- gential relevance.
I became fascinated with the sto- ry in the mid-1960s, chased it to its various sources, and in time pro- duced what is, in fact, the basic text about the myth’s many per- mutations over a seven-century pe- riod. Anything anyone might ever have thought about Prester John is there; and quite a story it is, if I do say so myself, and I guess I do.
ARE YOU
I dipped into my own book once when writing a fantasy novel called To the Land of the Living, which is mainly about the Sumer- ian hero Gilgamesh but in which Prester John makes an appear- ance. (The Prester John part of the story appeared in this magazine under the title of “Gilgamesh in the Outback” and won me a Hugo in 1987.) But surely there’s meat enough in the Prester John saga to supply some fantasy writer with sufficient material for a trilogy and a half, at the very least. Heck, it’s a trilogy I might even want to write myself, once I get finished with projects already on hand, if no one else gets to it first.
At any rate, the legend of Prester John is a wondrous story of human inventiveness and gullibility. I had a grand time writing about it a quarter of a century ago. And now, thanks to Ohio University Press, the book is a collector’s item no longer, but is readily available to you all. I just thought you might want to know. @
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October/November 1996
y sister lies sweetly on the bed across the room from mine. She lies
on her back, fingers lightly curled, her legs stretched straight as
elindel trees. Her pert little nose, much prettier than my own, pokes
delicately into the air. Her skin glows like a fresh flower. But not with health. She is, of course, dead.
I slip out of my bed and stand swaying a moment, with morning dizzi- ness. A Terran healer once told me my blood pressure was too low, which is the sort of nonsensical thing Terrans will sometimes say—like an- nouncing the air is too moist. The air is what it is, and so am I.
What I am is a murderer.
I kneel in front of my sister’s glass coffin. My mouth has that awful morning taste, even though last night I drank nothing stronger than wa- ter. Almost I yawn, but at the last moment I turn it into a narrow-lipped ringing in my ears that somehow leaves my mouth tasting worse than ever. But at least I haven’t disrespected Ano. She was my only sibling and closest friend, until I replaced her with illusion.
“Two more years, Ano,” I say, “less forty-two days. Then you will be free. And so will I.”
Ano, of course, says nothing. There is no need. She knows as well as I the time until her burial, when she can be released from the chemicals and glass that bind her dead body and can rejoin our ancestors. Others I have known whose relatives were under atonement bondage said the bodies complained and recriminated, especially in dreams, making the house a misery. Ano is more considerate. Her corpse never troubles me at all. I do that to myself.
I finish the morning prayers, leap up, and stagger dizzily to the piss closet. I may not have drunk pel last night, but my bladder is nonetheless bursting.
At noon a messenger rides into my yard on a Terran bicycle. The bicy- cle is an attractive design, sloping, with interesting curves. Adapted for our market, undoubtedly. The messenger is less attractive, a surly boy probably in his first year of government service. When I smile at him, he looks away. He would rather be someplace else. Well, if he doesn’t per- form his messenger duties with more courteous cheer, he will be.
“Letter for Uli Pek Bengarin.”
“I am Uli Pek Bengarin.”
Scowling, he hands me the letter and pedals away. I don’t take the scowl personally. The boy does not, of course, know what I am, any more than my neighbors do. That would defeat the whole point. I am supposed to pass as fully real, until I can earn the right to resume being so.
The letter is shaped into a utilitarian circle, very business-like, with a generic government seal. It could have come from the Tax Section, or Community Relief, or Processions and Rituals. But of course it hasn’t;
12 Nancy Kress
Asimov's
none of those sections would write to me until I am real again. The sealed letter is from Reality and Atonement. It’s a summons; they have a job for me. And about time. I have been home nearly six weeks since the last job, shaping my flowerbeds and polishing dishes and trying to paint a sky- scape of last month’s synchrony, when all six moons were visible at once. I paint badly. It is time for another job. . [pack my shoulder sack, kiss the glass of my sister’s coffin, and lock the house. Then I wheel my bicycle—not, alas, as interestingly curved as the messenger’s—out ofits shed and pedal down the dusty road toward the city.
Frablit Pek Brimmidin is nervous. This interests me; Pek Brimmidin is usually a calm, controlled man, the sort who never replaces reality with illusion. He’s given me my previous jobs with no fuss. But now he actually can’t sit still; he fidgets back and forth across his small office, which is cluttered with papers, stone sculptures in an exaggerated style I don’t like at all, and plates of half-eaten food. I don’t comment on either the food or the pacing. I am fond of Pek Brimmidin, quite apart from my gratitude to him, which is profound. He was the official in R&A who vot- ed to give me a chance to become real again. The other two judges voted for perpetual death, no chance of atonement. I’m not supposed to know this much detail about my own case, but I do. Pek Brimmidin is middle- aged, a stocky man whose neck fur has just begun to yellow. His eyes are gray, and kind.
“Pek Bengarin,” he says, finally, and then stops.
“I stand ready to serve,” I say softly, so as not to make him even more nervous. But something is growing heavy in my stomach. This does not look good.
“Pek Bengarin.” Another pause. “You are an informer.”
“I stand ready to serve our shared reality,” I repeat, despite my aston- ishment. Of course I’m an informer. I’ve been an informer for two years and eighty-two days. I killed my sister, and I will be an informer until my atonement is over, I can be fully real again, and Ano can be released from death to join our ancestors. Pek Brimmidin knows this. He’s assigned me every one of my previous informing jobs, from the first easy one in cur- rency counterfeiting right through the last one, in baby stealing. I’m a very good informer, as Pek Brimmidin also knows. What’s wrong with the man?
Suddenly Pek Brimmidin straightens. But he doesn’t look me in the eye. “You are an informer, and the Section for Reality and Atonement has an informing job for you. In Aulit Prison.”
So that’s it. I go still. Aulit Prison holds criminals. Not just those who have tried to get away with stealing or cheating or child-snatching, which
The Flowers of Aulit Prison 13
October/November 1996
are, after all, normal. Aulit Prison holds those who are unreal, who have succumbed to the illusion that they are not part of shared common reali- ty and so may do violence to the most concrete reality of others: their physical bodies. Maimers. Rapists. Murderers.
Like me.
I feel my left hand tremble, and I strive to control it and to not show how hurt I am. I thought Pek Brimmidin thought better of me. There is of course no such thing as partial atonement—one is either real or one is . not—but a part of my mind nonetheless thought that Pek Brimmidin had recognized two years and eighty-two days of effort in regaining my reali- ty. Ihave worked so hard.
He must see some of this on my face because he says quickly, “I am sor- ry to assign this job to you, Pek. I wish I had a better one. But you’ve been requested specifically by Rafkit Sarloe.” Requested by the capital; my spirits lift slightly. “They’ve added a note to the request. I am authorized to tell you the informant job carries additional compensation. If you suc- ceed, your debt will be considered immediately paid, and you can be re- stored at once to reality.”
Restored at once to reality. I would again be a full member of World, without shame. Entitled to live in the real world of shared humanity, and to hold my head up with pride. And Ano could be buried, the artificial chemicals washed from her body, so that it could return to World and her sweet spirit could join our ancestors. Ano, too, would be restored to reali- ty.
“Tll do it,” I tell Pek Brimmidin. And then, formally, “I stand ready to serve our shared reality.”
“One more thing, before you agree, Pek Bengarin.” Pek Brimmidin is fidgeting again. “The suspect is a Terran.”
I have never before informed on a Terran. Aulit Prison, of course, holds those aliens who have been judged unreal: Terrans, Fallers, the weird lit- tle Huhuhubs. The problem is that even after thirty years of ships com- ing to World, there is still considerable debate about whether any aliens are real at all. Clearly their bodies exist; after all, here they are. But their thinking is so disordered they might almost qualify as all being un- able to recognize shared social reality, and so just as unreal as those poor empty children who never attain reason and must be destroyed.
Usually we on World just leave the aliens alone, except of course for ~ trading with them. The Terrans in particular offer interesting objects, such as bicycles, and ask in return worthless items, mostly perfectly ob- vious information. But do any of the aliens have souls, capable of recog- nizing and honoring a shared reality with the souls of others? At the uni- versities, the argument goes on. Also in market squares and pel shops, which is where I hear it. Personally, I think aliens may well be real. I try not to be a bigot.
14 Nancy Kress
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I say to Pek Brimmidin, “I am willing to inform on a Terran.”
He wiggles his hand in pleasure. “Good, good. You will enter Aulit Prison a Capmonth before the suspect is brought there. You will use your primary cover, please.”
I nod, although Pek Brimmidin knows this is not easy for me. My pri- mary cover is the truth: I killed my sister Ano Pek Bengarin two years and eighty-two days ago and was judged unreal enough for perpetual death, never able to join my ancestors. The only untrue part of the cover is that I escaped and have been hiding from the Section police ever since.
“You have just been captured,” Pek Brimmidin continues, “and as- signed to the first part of your death in Aulit. The Section records will show this.”
Again I nod, not looking at him. The first part of my death in Aulit, the second, when the time came, in the kind of chemical bondage that holds Ano. And never ever to be freed—ever. What if it were true? I should go mad. Many do.
“The suspect is named ‘Carryl Walters.’ He is a Terran healer. He mur- dered a World child, in an experiment to discover how real people’s brains function. His sentence is perpetual death. But the Section believes that Carryl Walters was working with a group of World people in these experiments. That somewhere on World there is a group that’s so lost its hold on reality that it would murder children to investigate science.”
For a moment the room wavers, including the exaggerated swooping curves of Pek Brimmidin’s ugly sculptures. But then I get hold of myself. I am an informer, and a good one. I can do this. I am redeeming myself, and releasing Ano. I am an informer.
“Tll find out who this group is,” I say. “And what they’re doing, and where they are.”
Pek Brimmidin smiles at me. “Good.” His trust is a dose of shared real- ity: two people acknowledging their common perceptions together, with- out lies or violence. I need this dose. It is probably the last one I will have for a long time.
How do people manage in perpetual death, fed on only solitary illusion?
Aulit Prison must be full of the mad.
Traveling to Aulit takes two days of hard riding. Somewhere my bicy- cle loses a bolt and I wheel it to the next village. The woman who runs the bicycle shop is competent but mean, the sort who gazes at shared re- ality mostly to pick out the ugly parts.
“At least it’s not a Terran bicycle.”
“At least,” I say, but she is incapable of recognizing sarcasm.
“Sneaky soulless criminals, taking us over bit by bit. We should never have allowed them in. And the government is supposed to protect us from unreal slime, ha, what a joke. Your bolt is a nonstandard size.”
16 Nancy Kress
Asimov's
“Ts it?” I say.
“Yes. Costs you extra.”
I nod. Behind the open rear door of the shop, two little girls play in a thick stand of moonweed.
“We should kill all the aliens,” the repairer says. “No shame in de- stroying them before they corrupt us.”
“Kurummmn,” I say. Informers are not supposed to make themselves conspicuous with political debate. Above the two children’s heads, the - moonweed bends gracefully in the wind. One of the little girls has long brown neck fur, very pretty. The other does not.
“There, that bolt will hold fine. Where you from?”
“Rafkit Sarloe.” Informers never name their villages.
She gives an exaggerated shudder. “I would never visit the capital. Too many aliens. They destroy our participation in shared reality without a moment’s thought! Three and eight, please.”
I want to say No one but you can destroy your own participation in shared reality, but I don’t. Silently I pay her the money.
She glares at me, at the world. “You don’t believe me about the Ter- rans. But I know what I know!”
I ride away, through the flowered countryside. In the sky, only Cap is visible, rising on the horizon opposite the sun. Cap glows with a clear white smoothness, like Ano’s skin.
The Terrans, I am told, have only one moon. Shared reality on their world is, perhaps, skimpier than ours: less curved, less rich, less warm.
Are they ever jealous?
Aulit prison sits on a flat plain inland from the South Coast. I know that other islands on World have their own prisons, just as they have their own governments, but only Aulit is used for the alien unreal, as well as our own. A special agreement among the governments of World makes this possible. The alien governments protest, but of course it does them no good. The unreal is the unreal, and far too painful and dangerous to have running around loose. Besides, the alien governments are far away on other stars.
Aulit is huge and ugly, a straight-lined monolith of dull red stone, with no curves anywhere. An official from R&A meets me and turns me over to two prison guards. We enter through a barred gate, my bicycle chained to the guards’, and I to my bicycle. I am led across a wide dusty yard to- ward a stone wall. The guards of course don’t speak to me; I am unreal.
My cell is square, twice my length on a side. There is a bed, a piss pot, a table, and a single chair. The door is without a window, and all the oth- er doors in the row of cells are closed.
“When will the prisoners be allowed to be all together?” I ask, but of course the guard doesn’t answer me. I am not real.
The Flowers of Aulit Prison 17
October/November 1996
I sit in my chair and wait. Without a clock, it’s difficult to judge time, but I think a few hours pass totally without event. Then a gong sounds and my door slides up into the ceiling. Ropes and pulleys, controlled from above, inaccessible from inside the cell.
The corridor fills with illusionary people. Men and women, some with yellowed neck fur and sunken eyes, walking with the shuffle of old age. Some young, striding along with that dangerous mixture of anger and desperation. And the aliens.
I have seen aliens before, but not so many together. Fallers, about our size but very dark, as if burned crisp by their distant star. They wear their neck fur very long and dye it strange bright colors, although not in prison. Terrans, who don’t even have neck fur but instead fur on their heads, which they sometimes cut into fanciful curves—rather pretty. Ter- rans are a little intimidating because of their size. They move slowly. Ano, who had one year at the university before I killed her, once told me that the Terrans’ world makes them feel lighter than ours does. I don’t understand this, but Ano was very intelligent and so it’s probably true. She also explained that Fallers, Terrans, and World people are somehow related far back in time, but this is harder to believe. Perhaps Ano was mistaken.
Nobody ever thinks Huhuhubs could be related to us. Tiny, scuttling, ugly, dangerous, they walk on all fours. They’re covered with warts. They smell bad. I was glad to see only a few of them, sticking close together, in the corridor at Aulit.
We all move toward a large room filled with rough tables and chairs and, in the corner, a trough for the Huhuhubs. The food is already on the tables. Cereal, flatbread, elindel fruit—very basic, but nutritious. What surprises me most is the total absence of guards. Apparently prisoners are allowed to do whatever they wish to the food, the room, or each other, without interference. Well, why not? We aren’t real.
I need protection, quickly.
I choose a group of two women and three men. They sit at a table with their backs to the wall, and others have left a respectful distance around them. From the way they group themselves, the oldest woman is the leader. I plant myself in front of her and look directly into her face. A long scar ridges her left cheek to disappear into grizzled neck fur.
“I am Uli Pek Bengarin,” I say, my voice even but too low to be heard beyond this group. “In Aulit for the murder of my sister. I can be useful to you.”
She doesn’t speak, and her flat dark eyes don’t waver, but I have her attention. Other prisoners watch furtively.
“I know an informer among the guards. He knows I know. He brings things into Aulit for me, in return for not sharing his name.”
Still her eyes don’t waver. But I see she believes me; the sheer outrage
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of my statement has convinced her. A guard who had already forfeited re- ality by informing—by violating shared reality—might easily turn it to less pernicious material advantage. Once reality is torn, the rents grow. For the same reason, she easily believes that I might violate my supposed agreement with the guard.
“What sort of things?” she says, carelessly. Her voice is raspy and thick, like some hairy root.
“Letters. Candy. Pel.” Intoxicants are forbidden in prison; they pro- mote shared conviviality, to which the unreal have no right.
“Weapons?”
“Perhaps,” I say.
“And why shouldn’t I beat this guard’s name out of you and set up my own arrangement with him?”
“He will not. He is my cousin.” This is the trickiest part of the cover provided to me by R&A Section; it requires that my would-be protector believe in a person who has kept enough sense of reality to honor family ties but will nonetheless violate a larger shared reality. I told Pek Brim- midin that I doubted that such a twisted state of mind would be very sta- ble, and so a seasoned prisoner would not believe in it. But Pek Brim- midin was right and I was wrong. The woman nods.
“All right. Sit down.”
She does not ask what I wish in return for the favors of my supposed cousin. She knows. I sit beside her, and from now on I am physically safe in Aulit Prison from all but her.
Next, I must somehow befriend a Terran.
This proves harder than I expect. The Terrans keep to themselves, and so do we. They are just as violent toward their own as all the mad doomed souls in Aulit; the place is every horror whispered by children trying to shock each other. Within a tenday, I see two World men hold down and rape a woman. No one interferes. I see a Terran gang beat a Faller. I see a World woman knife another woman, who bleeds to death on the stone floor. This is the only time guards appear, heavily armored. A priest is with them. He wheels in a coffin of chemicals and immediate- ly immerses the body so that it cannot decay to release the prisoner from her sentence of perpetual death.
At night, isolated in my cell, I dream that Frablit Pek Brimmidin ap- pears and rescinds my provisional reality. The knifed, doomed corpse be- comes Ano; her attacker becomes me. I wake from the dream moaning and weeping. The tears are not grief but terror. My life, and Ano’s, hang from the splintery branch of a criminal alien I have not yet even met.
I know who he is, though. I skulk as close as I dare to the Terran groups, listening. I don’t speak their language, of course, but Pek Brim- midin taught me to recognize the cadences of “Carryl Walters” in several
20 Nancy Kress
Asimov's
of their dialects. Carryl Walters is an old Terran, with gray head fur cut in boring straight lines, wrinkled brownish skin, and sunken eyes. But his ten fingers—how do they keep the extra ones from tangling them up?—are long and quick.
It takes me only a day to realize that Carryl Walters’s own people leave him alone, surrounding him with the same nonviolent respect that my protector gets. It takes me much longer to figure out why. Carryl Walters is not dangerous, neither a protector nor a punisher. I don’t think he has any private shared realities with the guards. I don’t understand until the World woman is knifed.
It happens in the courtyard, on a cool day in which I am gazing hun- grily at the one patch of bright sky overhead. The knifed woman screams. The murderer pulls the knife from her belly and blood shoots out. In sec- onds the ground is drenched. The woman doubles over. Everyone looks the other way except me. And Carry] Walters runs over with his old-man stagger and kneels over the body, trying uselessly to save the life of a woman already dead anyway.
Of course. He is a healer. The Terrans don’t bother him because they know that, next time, it might be they who have need of him.
I feel stupid for not realizing this right away. I am supposed to be good at informing. Now I'll have to make it up by immediate action. The prob- lem, of course, is that no one will attack me while I’m under Afa Pek Fakar’s protection, and provoking Pek Fakar herself is far too dangerous.
I can see only one way to do this.
I wait a few days. Outside in the courtyard, I sit quietly against the prison wall and breathe shallowly. After a few minutes I leap up. The dizziness takes me; I worsen it by holding my breath. Then I ram as hard as I can into the rough stone wall and slide down it. Pain tears through my arm and forehead. One of Pek Fakar’s men shouts something.
Pek Fakar is there in a minute. I hear her—hear all of them—through a curtain of dizziness and pain.
“—just ran into the wall, I saw it—”
“told me she gets these dizzy attacks—”
“—head broken in—”
I gasp, through sudden real nausea, “The healer. The Terran—”
“The Terran?” Pek Fakar’s voice, hard with sudden suspicion. But I
gasp out more words, “... disease... a Terran told me... since childhood ... without help I...” My vomit, unplanned but useful, spews over her boots.
“Get the Terran,” Pek Fakar rasps to somebody. “And a towel!” Then Carry] Walters bends over me. I clutch his arm, try to smile, and pass out.
When I come to, I am lying inside, on the floor of the eating hall, the
The Flowers of Aulit Prison 21
October/November 1996
Terran cross-legged beside me. A few World people hover near the far wall, scowling. Carryl Walters says, “How many fingers you see?”
“Four. Aren’t you supposed to have five?”
He unbends the fifth from behind his palm and says, “You fine.”
“No, ’'m not,” I say. He speaks childishly, and with an odd accent, but he’s understandable. “I have a disease. Another Terran healer told me so.”
“Who?”
“Her name was Anna Pek Rakov.”
“What disease?”
“T don’t remember. Something in the head. I get spells.”
“What spells? You fall, flop on floor?”
“No. Yes. Sometimes. Sometimes it takes me differently.” I look direct- ly into his eyes. Strange eyes, smaller than mine, and that improbable blue. “Pek Rakov told me I could die during a spell, without help.”
He does not react to the lie. Or maybe he does, and I don’t know how to read it. I have never informed on a Terran before. Instead he says some- thing grossly obscene, even for Aulit Prison: “Why you unreal? What you do?”
I move my gaze from his. “I murdered my sister.” If he asks for details, I will cry. My head aches too hard.
He says, “I sorry.”
Is he sorry that he asked, or that I killed Ano? Pek Rakov was not like this; she had some manners. I say, “The other Terran healer said I should be watched carefully by someone who knows what to do if I get a spell. Do you know what to do, Pek Walters?”
“Yes.”
“Will you watch me?”
“Yes.” He is, in fact, watching me closely now. I touch my head; there is a cloth tied around it where I bashed myself. The headache is worse. My hand comes away sticky with blood.
I say, “In return for what?”
“What you give Pek Fakar for protection?”
He is smarter than I thought. “Nothing I can also share with you.” She would punish me hard.
“Then I watch you, you give me information about World.”
I nod; this is what Terrans usually request. And where information is given, it can also be extracted. “I will explain your presence to Pek Fakar,” I say, before the pain in my head swamps me without warning, and everything in the dining hall blurs and sears together.
Pek Fakar doesn’t like it. But I have just given her a gun, smuggled in by my “cousin.” I leave notes for the prison administration in my cell, un- der my bed. While the prisoners are in the courtyard—which we are every day, no matter what the weather—the notes are replaced by what-
22 Nancy Kress
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ever I ask for. Pek Fakar had demanded a “weapon”; neither of us ex- pected a Terran gun. She is the only person in the prison to have such a thing. It is to me a stark reminder that no one would care if all we unreal killed each other off completely. There is no one else to shoot; we never see anyone not already in perpetual death.
“Without Pek Walters, I might have another spell and die,” I say to the scowling Pek Fakar. “He knows a special Terran method of flexing the brain to bring me out of a spell.”
“He can teach this special method to me.”
“So far, no World person has been able to learn it. Their brains are dif- ferent from ours.”
She glares at me. But no one, even those lost to reality, can deny that alien brains are weird. And my injuries are certainly real: bloody head cloth, left eye closed from swelling, skin scraped raw the length of my left cheek, bruised arm. She strokes the Terran gun, a boringly straight-lined cylinder of dull metal. “All right. You may keep the Terran near you—if he agrees. Why should he?”
I smile at her slowly. Pek Fakar never shows a response to flattery; to do so would be to show weakness. But she understands. Or thinks she does. I have threatened the Terran with her power, and the whole prison now knows that her power extends among the aliens as well as her own people. She goes on glaring, but she is not displeased. In her hand, the
gun gleams. And so begin my conversations with a Terran.
Talking with Carryl Pek Walters is embarrassing and frustrating. He sits beside me in the eating hall or the courtyard and publicly scratches his head. When he is cheerful, he makes shrill horrible whistling noises between his teeth. He mentions topics that belong only among kin: the state of his skin (which has odd brown lumps on it) and his lungs (clogged with fluid, apparently). He does not know enough to begin conversations with ritual comments on flowers. It is like talking to a child, but a child who suddenly begins discussing bicycle engineering or university law.
“You think individual means very little, group means everything,” he says.
We are sitting in the courtyard, against a stone wall, a little apart from the other prisoners. Some watch us furtively, some openly. I am angry. I am often angry with Pek Walters. This is not going as I'd planned.
“How can you say that? The individual is very important on World! We care for each other so that no individual is left out of our common reality, except by his own acts!”
“Exactly,” Pek Walters says. He has just learned this word from me. “You care for others so no one left alone. Alone is bad. Act alone is bad. Only together is real.”
24 Nancy Kress
Asimov's
“Of course,” I say. Could he be stupid after all? “Reality is always shared. Is a star really there if only one eye can perceive its light?”
He smiles and says something in his own language, which makes no sense to me. He repeats it in real words. “When tree falls in forest, is sound if no person hears?”
“But—do you mean to say that on your star, people believe they...” What? I can’t find the words.
He says, “People believe they always real, alone or together. Real even _ when other people say they dead. Real even when they do something very bad. Even when they murder.”
“But they’re not real! How could they be? They’ve violated shared real- ity! If I don’t acknowledge you, the reality of your soul, if I send you to your ancestors without your consent, that is proof that I don’t understand reality and so am not seeing it! Only the unreal could do that!”
“Baby not see shared reality. Is baby unreal?”
“Of course. Until the age when children attain reason, they are unreal.”
“Then when I kill baby, is all right, because I not kill real person?”
“Of course it’s not all right! When one kills a baby, one kills its chance to become real, before it could even join its ancestors! And also all the chances of the babies to which it might become ancestor. No one would kill a baby on World, not even these dead souls in Aulit! Are you saying that on Terra, people would kill babies?”
He looks at something I cannot see. “Yes.”
My chance has arrived, although not in a form I relish. Still, I have a job to do. I say, “I have heard that Terrans will kill people for science. Even babies. To find out the kinds of things that Anna Pek Rakov knew about my brain. Is that true?”
“Yes and no.”
“How can it be yes and no? Are children ever used for science experi- ments?”
“Yes.”
“What kinds of experiments?”
“You should ask, what kind children? Dying children. Children not born yet. Children born . .. wrong. With no brain, or broken brain.”
I struggle with all this. Dying children . . . he must mean not children who are really dead, but those in the transition to join their ancestors. Well, that would not be so bad, provided the bodies were then allowed to decay properly and release the souls. Children without brains or with broken brains . . . not bad, either. Such poor unreal things would be de- stroyed anyway. But children not born yet .. . in or out of the mother’s womb? I push this away, to discuss another time. I am on a different path.
“And you never use living, real children for science?”
He gives me a look I cannot read. So much of Terran expression is still
The Flowers of Aulit Prison 25
October/November 1996
strange. “Yes. We use. In some experiments. Experiments who not hurt children.”
“Like what?” I say. We are staring directly at each other now. Sudden- ly I wonder if this old Terran suspects that I am an informer seeking in- formation, and that is why he accepted my skimpy story about having spells. That would not necessarily be bad. There are ways to bargain with the unreal once everyone admits that bargaining is what is taking place. But I’m not sure whether Pek Walters knows that.
He says, “Experiments who study how brain work. Such as, how mem- ory work. Including shared memory.”
“Memory? Memory doesn’t ‘work.’ It just is.”
“No. Memory work. By memory-building pro-teenz.” He uses a Terran word, then adds, “Tiny little pieces of food,” which makes no sense. What does food have to do with memory? You don’t eat memories, or obtain them from food. But I am further down the path, and I use his words to go further still.
“Does memory in World people work with the same... ‘pro-teenz’ as Terran memory?”
“Yes and no. Some same or almost same. Some different.” He is watch- ing me very closely.
“How do you know that memory works the same or different in World people? Have Terrans done brain experiments on World?”
“Yes.”
“With World children?”
“Yes.”
I watch a group of Huhuhubs across the courtyard. The smelly little aliens are clustered together in some kind of ritual or game. “And have you, personally, participated in these science experiments on children, Pek Walters?”
He doesn’t answer me. Instead he smiles, and if I didn’t know better, I'd swear the smile was sad. He says, “Pek Bengarin, why you kill your sister?”
The unexpectedness of it—now, so close to almost learning something useful—outrages me. Not even Pek Fakar had asked me that. I stare at him angrily. He says, “I know, I not should ask. Wrong for ask. But I tell you much, and answer is important—”
“But the question is obscene. You should not ask. World people are not so cruel to each other.”
“Even people damned in Aulit Prison?” he says, and even though I don’t know one of the words he uses, I see that yes, he recognizes that I am an informer. And that I have been seeking information. All right, so much the better. But I need time to set my questions on a different path.
To gain time, I repeat my previous point. “World people are not so cruel.”
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“Then you—”
The air suddenly sizzles, smelling of burning. People shout. I look up. Aka Pek Fakar stands in the middle of the courtyard with the Terran gun, firing it at the Huhuhubs. One by one they drop as the beam of light hits them and makes a sizzling hole. The aliens pass into the second stage of their perpetual death.
I stand and tug on Pek Walters’s arm. “Come on. We must clear the area immediately or the guards will release poison gas.”
“Why?”
“So they can get the bodies into bondage chemicals, of course!” Does this alien think the prison officials would let the unreal get even a little bit decayed? I thought that after our several conversations, Pek Walters understood more than that.
He rises slowly, haltingly, to his feet. Pek Fakar, laughing, strolls to- ward the door, the gun still in her hand.
Pek Walters says, “World people not cruel?”
Behind us, the bodies of the Huhuhubs lie sprawled across each other, smoking.
The next time we are herded from our cells into the dining hall and then the courtyard, the Huhuhub corpses are of course gone. Pek Walters has developed a cough. He walks more slowly, and once, on the way to our usual spot against the far wall, he puts a hand on my arm to steady himself.
“Are you sick, Pek?”
“Exactly,” he says.
“But you are a healer. Make the cough disappear.”
He smiles, and sinks gratefully against the wall. “ ‘Healer, heal own self.’”
“What?”
“Nothing. So you are informer, Pek Bengarin, and you hope I tell you something about science experiments on children on World.”
I take a deep breath. Pek Fakar passes us, carrying her gun. Two of her own people now stay close beside her at all times, in case another prisoner tries to take the gun away from her. I cannot believe anyone would try, but maybe I’m wrong. There’s no telling what the unreal will do. Pek Walters watches her pass, and his smile is gone. Yesterday Pek Fakar shot another person, this time not even an alien. There is a note under my bed requesting more guns.
I say, “You say I am an informer. I do not say it.”
“Exactly,” Pek Walters says. He has another coughing spell, then clos- es his eyes wearily. “I have not an-tee-by-otics.”
Another Terran word. Carefully I repeat it. “‘An-tee-by-otics’?”
“Pro-teenz for heal.”
28 Nancy Kress
Asimov's
Again that word for very small bits of food. I make use of it. “Tell me about the pro-teenz in the science experiments.”
“T tell you everything about experiments. But only if you answer ques- tions first.”
He will ask about my sister. For no reason other than rudeness and cruelty. I feel my face turn to stone.
He says, “Tell me why steal baby not so bad for make person unreal al-
ways.”
I blink. Isn’t this obvious? “To steal a baby doesn’t damage the baby’s reality. It just grows up somewhere else, with some other people. But all real people of World share the same reality, and anyway after the transi- tion, the child will rejoin its blood ancestors. Baby stealing is wrong, of course, but it isn’t a really serious crime.”
“And make false coins?”
“The same. False, true—coins are still shared.”
He coughs again, this time much harder. I wait. Finally he says, “So when I steal your bicycle, I not violate shared reality too much, because bicycle still somewhere with people of World.”
“Of course.”
“But when I steal bicycle, I violate shared reality a little?”
“Yes.” After a minute I add, “Because the bicycle is, after all, mine. You ... made my reality shift a little without sharing the decision with me.” I peer at him; how can all this not be obvious to such an intelligent man?
He says, “You are too trusting for be informer, Pek Bengarin.”
I feel my throat swell with indignation. I am a very good informer. Haven't I just bound this Terran to me with a private shared reality in or- der to create an exchange of information? I am about to demand his share of the bargain when he says abruptly, “So why you kill your sister?”
Two of Pek Fakar’s people swagger past. They carry the new guns. Across the courtyard a Faller turns slowly to look at them, and even I can read fear on that alien face.
I say, as evenly as I can manage, “I fell prey to an illusion. I thought that Ano was copulating with my lover. She was younger, more intelli- gent, prettier. I am not very pretty, as you can see. I didn’t share the real- ity with her, or him, and my illusion grew. Finally it exploded in my head, andI... did it.” I am breathing hard, and Pek Fakar’s people look blurry.
“You remember clear Ano’s murder?”
I turn to him in astonishment. “How could I forget it?”
“You cannot. You cannot because of memory-building pro-teenz. Mem- ory is strong in your brain. Memory-building pro-teenz are strong in your brain. Scientific research on World children for discover what is structure of pro-teenz, where is pro-teenz, how pro-teenz work. But we discover dif- ferent thing instead.”
“What different thing?” I say, but Pek Walters only shakes his head
The Flowers of Aulit Prison 29
October/November 1996
and begins coughing again. I wonder if the coughing spell is an excuse to violate our bargain. He is, after all, unreal.
Pek Fakar’s people have gone inside the prison. The Faller slumps against the far wall. They have not shot him. For this moment, at least, he is not entering the second stage of his perpetual death.
But beside me, Pek Walters coughs blood.
He is dying. I am sure of it, although of course no World healer comes to him. He is dead anyway. Also, his fellow Terrans keep away, looking fearful, which makes me wonder if his disease is catching. This leaves only me. I walk him to his cell, and then wonder why I can’t just stay when the door closes. No one will check. Or, if they do, will care. And this may be my last chance to gain the needed information, before either Pek Walters is coffined or Pek Fakar orders me away from him because he is too weak to watch over my supposed blood sickness.
His body has become very hot. During the long night he tosses on his bunk, muttering in his own language, and sometimes those strange alien eyes roll in their sockets. But other times he is clearer, and he looks at me as if he recognizes who I am. Those times, I question him. But the lu- cid times and unlucid ones blur together. His mind is no longer his own.
“Pek Walters. Where are the memory experiments being conducted? In what place?”
“Memory ... memories...” More in his own language. It has the ca- dences of poetry.
“Pek Walters. In what place are the memory experiments being done?”
“At Rafkit Sarloe,” he says, which makes no sense. Rafkit Sarloe is the government center, where no one lives. It is not large. People flow in every day, running the Sections, and out to their villages again at night. There is no square measure of Rafkit Sarloe that is not constantly shared physical reality.
He coughs, more bloody spume, and his eyes roll in his head. I make him sip some water. “Pek Walters. In what place are the memory experi- ments being done?”
“At Rafkit Sarloe. In the Cloud. At Aulit Prison.”
It goes on and on like that. And in the early morning, Pek Walters dies.
There is one moment of greater clarity, somewhere near the end. He looks at me, out of his old, ravaged face gone gaunt with his transition. The disturbing look is back in his eyes, sad and kind, not a look for the unreal to wear. It is too much sharing. He says, so low I must bend over him to hear, “Sick brain talks to itself. You not kill your sister.”
“Hush, don’t try to talk...”
“Find . . . Brifjis. Maldon Pek Brifjis, in Rafkit Haddon. Find .. .” He relapses again into fever.
A few moments after he dies, the armored guards enter the cell, wheel-
30 Nancy Kress
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October/November 1996
ing the coffin full of bondage chemicals. With them is the priest. I want to say, Wait, he is a good man, he doesn’t deserve perpetual death—but of course I do not. I am astonished at myself for even thinking it. A guard edges me into the corridor and the door closes.
That same day, I am sent away from Aulit Prison.
“Tell me again. Everything,” Pek Brimmidin says.
Pek Brimmidin is just the same: stocky, yellowing, slightly stooped. His cluttered office is just the same. Food dishes, papers, overelaborated sculptures. I stare hungrily at the ugly things. I hadn’t realized how much I'd longed, in prison, for the natural sight of curves. I keep my eyes on the sculptures, partly to hold back my question until the proper time to ask it.
“Pek Walters said he would tell me everything about the experiments that are, yes, going on with World children. In the name of science. But all he had time to tell me was that the experiments involve ‘memory- building pro-teenz,’ which are tiny pieces of food from which the brain constructs memory. He also said the experiments were going on in Rafk- it Sarloe and Aulit Prison.”
“And that is all, Pek Bengarin?”
“That is all.”
Pek Brimmidin nods curtly. He is trying to appear dangerous, to scare out of me any piece of information I might have forgotten. But Frablit Pek Brimmidin can’t appear dangerous to me. I have seen the real thing.
Pek Brimmidin has not changed. But I have.
I ask my question. “I have brought to you all the information I could ob- tain before the Terran died. Is it sufficient to release me and Ano?”
He runs a hand through his neck fur. “I’m sorry I can’t answer that, Pek. I will need to consult my superiors. But I promise to send you word as soon as I can.”
“Thank you,” I say, and lower my eyes. You are too trusting for be in- former, Pek Bengarin.
Why didn’t I tell Frablit Pek Brimmidin the rest of it, about “Maldon Pek Brifjis” and “Rafkit Haddon” and not really killing my sister? Be- cause it is most likely nonsense, the ravings of a fevered brain. Because this “Maldon Pek Brifjis” might be an innocent World man, who does not deserve trouble brought to him by an unreal alien. Because Pek Walters’s words were personal, addressed to me alone, on his deathbed. Because I do not want to discuss Ano with Pek Brimmidin’s superiors one more useless painful time.
Because, despite myself, I trust Carryl Pek Walters.
“You may go,” Pek Brimmidin says, and I ride my bicycle along the
dusty road home. kKk*
32 Nancy Kress
Asimov's
I make a bargain with Ano’s corpse, still lying in curled-finger grace on the bed across from mine. Her beautiful brown hair floats in the chemi- cals of the coffin. I used to covet that hair desperately, when we were very young. Once I even cut it all off while she slept. But other times I would weave it for her, or braid it with flowers. She was so pretty. At one point, when she was still a child, she wore eight bid rings, one on each finger. Two of the bids were in negotiation between the boys’ fathers and ours. Although older, I have never had a single bid.
Did I murder her?
My bargain with her corpse is this: If the Reality & Atonement Section releases me and Ano because of my work in Aulit Prison, I will seek no further. Ano will be free to join our ancestors; I will be fully real. It will no longer matter whether or not I killed my sister, because both of us will again be sharing in the same reality as if I had not. But if Reality & Atonement holds me unreal still longer, after all I have given them, I will try to find this “Maldon Pek Brifjis.”
I say none of this aloud. The guards at Aulit Prison knew immediately when Pek Walters died, inside a closed and windowless room. They could be watching me here, now. World has no devices to do this, but how did Pek Walters know so much about a World man working with a Terran science experiment? Somewhere there are World people and Terrans in partnership. Terrans, as everyone knows, have all sorts of listening de- vices we do not.
I kiss Ano’s coffin. I don’t say it aloud, but I hope desperately that Re- ality & Atonement releases us. I want to return to shared reality, to the daily warmth and sweetness of belonging, now and forever, to the living and dead of World. I do not want to be an informer anymore.
Not for anyone, even myself.
The message comes three days later. The afternoon is warm and I sit outside on my stone bench, watching my neighbor’s milkbeasts eye her sturdily fenced flowerbeds. She has new flowers that I don’t recognize, with blooms that are entrancing but somehow foreign—could they be Terran? It doesn’t seem likely. During my time in Aulit Prison, more people seem to have made up their minds that the Terrans are unreal. I have heard more mutterings, more anger against those who buy from alien traders.
Frablit Pek Brimmidin himself brings the letter from Reality & Atone- ment, laboring up the road on his ancient bicycle. He has removed his uniform, so as not to embarrass me in front of my neighbors. I watch him ride up, his neck fur damp with unaccustomed exertion, his gray eyes abashed, and I know already what the sealed message must say. Pek Brimmidin is too kind for his job. That is why he is only a low-level mes- senger boy all the time, not just today.
The Flowers of Aulit Prison 33
October/November 1996
These are things I never saw before.
You are too trusting for be informer, Pek Bengarin.
“Thank you, Pek Brimmidin,” I say. “Would you like a glass of water? Or pel?”
“No, thank you, Pek,” he says. He does not meet my eyes. He waves to my other neighbor, fetching water from the village well, and fumbles meaninglessly with the handle of his bicycle. “I can’t stay.”
“Then ride safely,” I say, and go back in my house. I stand beside Ano and break the seal on the government letter. After I read it, I gaze at her a long time. So beautiful, so sweet-natured. So loved.
Then I start to clean. I scrub every inch of my house, for hours and hours, climbing on a ladder to wash the ceiling, sloshing thick soapsuds in the cracks, scrubbing every surface of every object and carrying the more intricately shaped outside into the sun to dry. Despite my most in- tense scrutiny, I find nothing that I can imagine being a listening device. Nothing that looks alien, nothing unreal.
But I no longer know what is real.
Only Bata is up; the other moons have not risen. The sky is clear and starry, the air cool. I wheel my bicycle inside and try to remember every- thing I need.
Whatever kind of glass Ano’s coffin is made of, it is very tough. I have to swing my garden shovel three times, each time with all my strength, before I can break it. On the third blow the glass cracks, then falls leisurely apart into large pieces that bounce slightly when they hit the floor. Chemicals cascade off the bed, a waterfall of clear liquid that smells only slightly acrid.
In my high boots I wade close to the bed and throw containers of water over Ano to wash off chemical residue. The containers are waiting in a neat row by the wall, everything from my largest wash basin to the kitchen bowls. Ano smiles sweetly.
I reach onto the soggy bed and lift her clear.
In the kitchen, I lay her body—limp, soft-limbed—on the floor and strip off her chemical-soaked clothing. I dry her, move her to the waiting blanket, take a last look, and wrap her tightly. The bundle of her and the shovel balances across the handles of my bicycle. I pull off my boots and ~ open the door.
The night smells of my neighbor’s foreign flowers. Ano seems weight- less. I feel as if I can ride for hours. And I do.
I bury her, weighted with stones, in marshy ground well off a deserted road. The wet dirt will speed the decay, and it is easy to cover the grave with reeds and toglif branches. When I’ve finished, I bury my clothes and dress in clean ones in my pack. Another few hours of riding and I can find an inn to sleep in. Or a field, if need be.
34 Nancy Kress
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October/November 1996
The morning dawns pearly, with three moons in the sky. Everywhere I ride are flowers, first wild and then cultivated. Although exhausted, I sing softly to the curving blooms, to the sky, to the pale moonlit road. Ano is real, and free.
Go sweetly, sweet sister, to our waiting ancestors.
Two days later I reach Rafkit Haddon.
It is an old city, sloping down the side of a mountain to the sea. The homes of the rich either stand on the shore or perch on the mountain, looking in both cases like rounded great white birds. In between lie a jumble of houses, market squares, government buildings, inns, pel shops, slums, and parks, the latter with magnificent old trees and shabby old shrines. The manufacturing shops and warehouses lie to the north, with the docks.
I have experience in finding people. I start with Rituals & Processions. The clerk behind the counter, a pre-initiate of the priesthood, is young and eager to help. “Yes?”
“T am Ajma Pek Goranalit, attached to the household of Menanlin. I have been sent to inquire about the ritual activity of a citizen, Maldon Pek Brifjis. Can you help me?”
“Of course,” she beams. An inquiry about ritual activity is never writ- ten; discretion is necessary when a great house is considering honoring a citizen by allowing him to honor their ancestors. A person so chosen gains great prestige—and considerable material wealth. I picked the name “Menanlin” after an hour’s judicious listening in a crowded pel shop. The family is old, numerous, and discreet.
“Let me see,” she says, browsing among her public records. “Brifjis . . . Brifjis . . . it’s acommon name, of course... which citizen, Pek?”
“Maldon.”
“Oh, yes... here. He paid for two musical tributes to his ancestors last year, made a donation to the Rafkit Haddon Priest House... Oh! And he was chosen to honor the ancestors of the house of Choulalait!”
She sounds awe-struck. I nod. “We know about that, of course. But is there anything else?”
“No, I don’t think so... wait. He paid for a charity tribute for the an- cestors of his clu merchant, Lam Pek Flanoe, a poor man. Quite a lavish tribute, too. Music, and three priests.”
“Kind,” I said.
“Very! Three priests!” Her young eyes shine. “Isn’t it wonderful ae many truly kind people share reality?”
“Yes,” Tsay. “It.is.”
I find the clu merchant by the simple method of asking for him in sev- eral market squares. Sales of all fuels are of course slow in the summer; the young relatives left in charge of the clu stalls are happy to chat with
36 Nancy Kress
Asimov's
strangers. Lam Pek Flanoe lives in a run-down neighborhood just behind the great houses by the sea. The neighborhood is home to servants and merchants who provide for the rich. Four more glasses of pel in three more pel shops, and I know that Maldon Pek Brifjis is currently a guest in the home of a rich widow. I know the widow’s address. I know that Pek Brifjis is a healer.
A healer.
Sick brain talks to itself. You not kill your sister.
I am dizzy from four glasses of pel. Enough. I find an inn, the kind where no one asks questions, and sleep without the shared reality of dreams.
It takes me a day, disguised as a street cleaner, to decide which of the men coming and going from the rich widow’s house is Pek Brifjis. Then I spend three days following him, in various guises. He goes a lot of places and talks to a lot of people, but none of them seem unusual for a rich healer with a personal pleasure in collecting antique water carafes. On the fourth day I look for a good opportunity to approach him, but this turns out to be unnecessary.
“Pek,” a man says to me as I loiter, dressed as a vendor of sweet flat- breads, outside the baths on Elindel Street. I have stolen the sweets be- fore dawn from the open kitchen of a bake shop. I know at once that the man approaching me is a bodyguard, and that he is very good. It’s in the way he walks, looks at me, places his hand on my arm. He is also very handsome, but that thought barely registers. Handsome men are never for such as me. They are for Ano.
Were for Ano.
“Come with me, please,” the bodyguard says, and I don’t argue. He leads me to the back of the baths, through a private entrance, to a small room apparently used for private grooming of some sort. The only furni- ture is two small stone tables. He checks me, expertly but gently, for weapons, looking even in my mouth. Satisfied, he indicates where I am to stand, and opens a second door.
Maldon Pek Brifjis enters, wrapped in a bathing robe of rich imported cloth. He is younger than Carry] Walters, a vigorous man in a vigorous prime. His eyes are striking, a deep purple with long gold lines radiating from their centers. He says immediately, “Why have you been following me for three days?”
“Someone told me to,” I say. I have nothing to lose by an honest shared reality, although I still don’t fully believe I have anything to gain.
“Who? You may say anything in front of my guard.”
“Carryl Pek Walters.”
The purple eyes deepen even more. “Pek Walters is dead.”
“Yes,” I say. “Perpetually. I was with him when he entered the second stage of death.”
The Flowers of Aulit Prison 37
October/November 1996
“And where was that?” He is testing me.
“In Aulit Prison. His last words instructed me to find you. To... ask you something.”
“What do you wish to ask me?”
“Not what I thought I would ask,” I say, and realize that I have made the decision to tell him everything. Until I saw him up close, I wasn’t completely sure what I would do. I can no longer share reality with World, not even if I went to Frablit Pek Brimmidin with exactly the knowledge he wants about the scientific experiments on children. That would not atone for releasing Ano before the Section agreed. And Pek Brimmidin is only a messenger, anyway. No, less than a messenger: a tool, like a garden shovel, or a bicycle. He does not share the reality of his users. He only thinks he does.
As I had thought I did.
I say, “I want to know if I killed my sister. Pek Walters said I did not. He said ‘sick brain talks to itself, and that I had not killed Ano. And to ask you. Did I kill my sister?”
Pek Brifjis sits down on one of the stone tables. “I don’t know,” he says, and I see his neck fur quiver. “Perhaps you did. Perhaps you did not.”
“How can I discover which?”
“You cannot.”
“Ever?”
“Ever.” And then, “I am sorry.”
Dizziness takes me. The “low blood pressure.” The next thing I know, I lie on the floor of the small room, with Pek Brifjis’s fingers on my elbow pulse. I struggle to sit up.
“No, wait,” he says. “Wait a moment. Have you eaten today?”
“Yes.”
“Well, wait a moment anyway. I need to think.”
He does, the purple eyes turning inward, his fingers absently pressing the inside of my elbow. Finally he says, “You are an informer. That’s why you were released from Aulit Prison after Pek Walters died. You inform for the government.”
I don’t answer. It no longer matters.
“But you have left informing. Because of what Pek Walters told you. Be- cause he told you that the skits-oh-free-nia experiments might have . no. It can’t be.”
He too has used a word I don’t know. It sounds Terran. Again I strug- gle to sit up, to leave. There is no Bore, for me here. This healer can tell me nothing.
He pushes me back down on the floor and says swiftly, “When did your sister die?” His eyes have changed once again; the long golden flecks are brighter, radiating from the center like glowing spokes. “Please, Pek, this is immensely important. To both of us.”
38 Nancy Kress
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October/November 1996
“Two years ago, and 152 days.”
“Where? In what city?”
“Village. Our village. Gofkit Ilo.”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes. Tell me everything you remember of her death. Everything.”
This time I push him aside and sit up. Blood rushes from my head, but anger overcomes the dizziness. “I will tell you nothing. Who do you people think you are, ancestors? To tell me I killed Ano, then tell me I didn’t, then say you don’t know—to destroy the hope of atonement I had as an informer, then to tell me there is no other hope—no, there might be hope—no, there’s not—how can you live with yourself? How can you twist people’s brains away from shared reality and offer nothing to re- place it!” 1am screaming. The bodyguard glances at the door. I don’t care; I go on screaming.
“You are doing experiments on children, wrecking their reality as you have wrecked mine! You are a murderer—” But I don’t get to scream all that. Maybe I don’t get to scream any of it. For a needle slides into my el- bow, at the inner pulse where Maldon Brifjis has been holding it, and the room slides away as easily as Ano into her grave.
A bed, soft and silky, beneath me. Rich wall hangings. The roem is very warm. A scented breeze whispers across my bare stomach. Bare? I sit up and discover I am dressed in the gauzy skirt, skimpy bandeau, and flirting veil of a prostitute.
At my first movement, Pek Brifjis crosses from the fireplace to my bed.
“Pek. This room does not allow sound to escape. Do not resume scream- ing. Do you understand?”
I nod. His bodyguard stands across the room. I pull the flirting veil from my face.
“I am sorry about that,” Pek Brifjis says. “It was necessary to dress you in a way that accounts for a bodyguard carrying a drugged woman into a private home without raising questions.”
A private home. I guess that this is the rich widow’s house by the sea. A room that does not allow sound to escape. A needle unlike ours: sharp and sure. Brain experiments. “Skits-oh-free-nia.”
I say, “You work with the Terrans.”
“No,” he says. “I do not.”
“But Pek Walters . . .” It doesn’t matter. “What are you going to do with me?”
He says, “I am going to offer you a trade.”
“What sort of trade?” “Information in return for your freedom.”
And he says he does not work with Terrans. I say, “What use is free- dom to me?” although of course I don’t expect him to understand that. I can never be free.
40 Nancy Kress
Asimov's
“Not that kind of freedom,” he says. “I won’t just let you go from this room. I will let you rejoin your ancestors, and Ano.”
I gape at him.
“Yes, Pek. I will kill you and bury you myself, where your body can de- cay.”
“You would violate shared reality like that? For me?”
His purple eyes deepen again. For a moment, something in those eyes looks almost like Pek Walters’s blue ones. “Please understand. I think there is a strong chance you did not kill Ano. Your village was one where . .. subjects were used for experimentation. I think that is the true shared reality here.”
I say nothing. A little of his assurance disappears. “Or so I believe. Will you agree to the trade?”
“Perhaps,” I say. Will he actually do what he promises? I can’t be sure. But there is no other way for me. I cannot hide from the government all the years until I die. I am too young. And when they find me, they will send me back to Aulit, and when I die there they will put me in a coffin of preservative chemicals...
I would never see Ano again.
The healer watches me closely. Again I see the Pek Walters look in his eyes: sadness and pity.
“Perhaps I will agree to the trade,” I say, and wait for him to speak again about the night Ano died. But instead he says, “I want to show you something.”
He nods at the bodyguard who leaves the room, returning a few mo- ments later. By the hand he leads a child, a little girl, clean and well- dressed. One look makes my neck fur bristle. The girl’s eyes are flat and unseeing. She mutters to herself. I offer a quick appeal for protection to my ancestors. The girl is unreal, without the capacity to perceive shared reality, even though she is well over the age of reason. She is not human. She should have been destroyed.
“This is Ori,” Pek Brifjis says. The girl suddenly laughs, a wild de- mented laugh, and peers at something only she can see.
“Why is it here?” I listen to the harshness in my own voice.
“Ori was born real. She was made this way by the scientific brain ex- periments of the government.”
“Of the government! That is a lie!”
“Is it? Do you still, Pek, have such trust in your government?”
“No, but...” To make me continue to earn Ano’s freedom, even after I had met their terms. . . to lie to Pek Brimmidin . . . those offenses against shared reality are one thing. The destruction of a real person’s physical body, as I had done with Ano’s (had I?) is another, far far worse. To de- stroy a mind, the instrument of perceiving shared reality . . . Pek Brifjis lies.
The Flowers of Aulit Prison 4]
October/November 1996
He says, “Pek, tell me about the night Ano died.”
“Tell me about this... thing!”
“All right.” He sits down in a chair beside my luxurious bed. The thing wanders around the room, muttering. It seems unable to stay still.
“She was born Ori Malfisit, in a small village in the far north—
“What village?” I need desperately to see if he falters on details.
He does not. “Gofkit Ramloe. Of real parents, simple people, an old and established family. At six years old, Ori was playing in the forest with some other children when she disappeared. The other children said they heard something thrashing toward the marshes. The family decided she had been carried off by a wild kilfreit—there are still some left, you know, that far north—and held a procession in honor of Ori’s joining their ancestors.
“But that’s not what happened to Ori. She was stolen by two men, unreal prisoners promised atonement and restoration to full reality, just as you were. Ori was carried off to Rafkit Sarloe, with eight other children from all over World. There they were given to the Terrans, who were told that they were orphans who could be used for experiments. The experi- ments were ones that would not hurt or damage the children in any way.”
I look at Ori, now tearing a table scarf into shreds and muttering. Her empty eyes turn to mine, and I have to look away.
“This part is difficult,” Pek Brifjis says. “Listen hard, Pek. The Terrans truly did not hurt the children. They put ee-lek-trodes on their heads . you don’t know what that means. They found ways to see which parts of their brains worked the same as Terran brains and which did not. They used a number of tests and machines and drugs. None of it hurt the chil- dren, who lived at the Terran scientific compound and were cared for by World childwatchers. At first the children missed their parents, but they were young, and after a while they were happy.”
I glance again at Ori. The unreal, not sharing in common reality, are isolated and therefore dangerous. A person with no world in common with others will violate those others as easily as cutting flowers. Under such conditions, pleasure is possible, but not happiness.
Pek Brifjis runs his hand through his neck fur. “The Terrans worked with World healers, of course, teaching them. It was the usual trade, only this time we received the information and they the physical reality: chil- dren and watchers. There was no other way World could permit Terrans to handle our children. Our healers were there every moment.”
He looks at me. I say, “Yes,” just because something must be said.
“Do you know, Pek, what it is like to realize you have lived your whole life according to beliefs that are not true?”
“No!” I say, so loudly that Ori looks up with her mad, unreal gaze. She smiles. I don’t know why I spoke so loud. What Pek Brifjis said has noth- ing to do with me. Nothing at all.
42 Nancy Kress
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HASSIS
October/November 1996
“Well, Pek Walters knew. He realized that the experiments he partici- pated in, harmless to the subjects and in aid of biological understanding of species differences, were being used for something else. The roots of skits-oh-free-nia, misfiring brain sir-kits—” He is off on a long explana- tion that means nothing to me. Too many Terran words, too much strangeness. Pek Brifjis is no longer talking to me. He is talking to him- self, in some sort of pain I don’t understand.
Suddenly the purple eyes snap back to mine. “What all that means, Pek, is that a few of the healers—our own healers, from World—found out how to manipulate the Terran science. They took it and used it to put into minds memories that did not happen.”
“Not possible!”
“It is possible. The brain is made very excited, with Terran devices, while the false memory is recited over and over. Then different parts of the brain are made to... to recirculate memories and emotions over and over. Like water recirculated through mill races. The water gets all scrambled together. .. . No. Think of it this way: different parts of the brain send signals to each other. The signals are forced to loop together, and every loop makes the unreal memories stronger. It is apparently in common use on Terra, although tightly controlled.”
Sick brain talks to itself.
“But—”
“There are no objections possible, Pek. It is real. It happened. It hap- pened to Ori. The World scientists made her brain remember things that had not happened. Small things, at first. That worked. When they tried larger memories, something went wrong. It left her like this. They were still learning; that was five years ago. They got better, much better. Good enough to experiment on adult subjects who could then be returned to shared reality.”
“One can’t plant memories like flowers, or uproot them like weeds!”
“These people could. And did.”
“But—why?”
“Because the World healers who did this—and they were only a few— saw a different reality.”
“T don’t—”
“They saw the Terrans able to do everything. Make better machines than we can, from windmills to bicycles. Fly to the stars. Cure disease. Control nature. Many World people are afraid of Terrans, Pek. And of Fallers and Huhuhubs. Because their reality is superior to ours.”
“There is only one common reality,” I said. “The Terrans just know more about it than we do!”
“Perhaps. But Terran knowledge makes people uneasy. And afraid. And jealous.”
Jealous. Ano saying to me in the kitchen, with Bata and Cap bright at
ae Nancy Kress
Asimov's
the window, “I will too go out tonight to see him! You can't stop me! Youre just jealous, a jealous ugly shriveled thing that not even your lover wants, so you don’t wish me to have any—” And the red flood swamping my brain, the kitchen knife, the blood—
“Pek?” the healer says. “Pek?”
“l'm ...all right. The jealous healers, they hurt their own people, World people, for revenge on the Terrans—that makes no sense!”
“The healers acted with great sorrow. They knew what they were do- ing to people. But they needed to perfect the technique of inducing con- trolled skits-oh-free-nia . . . they needed to do it. To make people angry at Terrans. Angry enough to forget the attractive trade goods and rise up against the aliens. To cause war. The healers are mistaken, Pek. We have not had a war on World in a thousand years; our people cannot un- derstand how hard the Terrans would strike back. But you must under- stand: the outlaw scientists thought they were doing the right thing. They thought they were creating anger in order to save World.
“And another thing—with the help of the government, they were careful not to make any World man or woman permanently unreal. The adults manipulated into murder were all offered atonement as inform- ers. The children are all cared for. The mistakes, like Ori, will be al- lowed to decay someday, to return to her ancestors. I will see to that myself.”
Ori tears the last of the scarf into pieces, smiling horribly, her flat eyes empty. What unreal memories fill her head?
I say bitterly, “Doing the right thing . . . letting me believe I killed my sister!”
“When you rejoin your ancestors, you will find it isn’t so. And the means of rejoining them was made available to you: the completion of your informing atonement.”
But now that atonement never will be completed. I stole Ano and buried her without Section consent. Maldon Brifjis, of course, does not know this.
Through my pain and anger I blurt, “And what of you, Pek Brifjis? You work with these criminal healers, aiding them in emptying children like Ori of reality—”
“IT don’t work with them. I thought you were smarter, Pek. I work against them. And so did Carryl Walters, which is why he died in Aulit Prison.”
“Against them?”
“Many of us do. Carryl Walters among them. He was an informer. And my friend.”
Neither of us says anything. Pek Brifjis stares into the fire. I stare at Ori, who has begun to grimace horribly. She squats on an intricately wo- ven curved rug that looks very old. A reek suddenly fills the room. Ori
The Flowers of Aulit Prison 45
October/November 1996
does not share with the rest of us the reality of piss closets. She throws back her head and laughs, a horrible sound like splintering metal.
“Take her away,” Pek Brifjis says wearily to the guard, who looks un- happy. “I'll clean up here.” To me he adds, “We can’t allow any servants in here with you.”
The guard leads away the grimacing child. Pek Brifjis kneels and scrubs at the rug with chimney rags dipped in water from my carafe. I re- member that he collects antique water carafes. What a long way that must seem from scrubbing shit, from Ori, from Carryl Walters coughing out his lungs in Aulit Prison, among aliens.
“Pek Brifjis—did I kill my sister?”
He looks up. There is shit on his hands. “There is no way to be ab- solutely sure. It is possible you were one of the experiment subjects from your village. You would have been drugged in your house, to awake with your sister murdered and your mind altered.”
I say, more quietly than I have said anything else in this room, “You will really kill me, let me decay, and enable me to rejoin my ancestors?”
Pek Brifjis stands and wipes the shit from his hands. “I will.”
“But what will you do if I refuse? If instead I ask to return home?”
“If you do that, the government will arrest you and once more promise you atonement—if you inform on those of us working to oppose them.”
“Not if I go first to whatever part of the government is truly working to end the experiments. Surely you aren’t saying the entire government is doing this... thing.”
“Of course not. But do you know for certain which Sections, and which officials in those Sections, wish for war with the Terrans, and which do not? We can’t be sure. How can you?”
Frablit Pek Brimmidin is innocent, I think. But the thought is useless. Pek Brimmidin is innocent, but powerless.
It tears my soul to think that the two might be the same thing.
Pek Brifjis rubs at the damp carpet with the toe of his boot. He puts the rags in a lidded jar and washes his hands at the washstand. A faint stench still hangs in the air. He comes to stand beside my bed.
“Is that what you want, Uli Pek Bengarin? That I let you leave this house, not knowing what you will do, whom you will inform on? That I endanger everything we have done in order to convince you of its truth?”
“Or you can kill me and let me rejoin my ancestors. Which is what you think I will choose, isn’t it? That choice would let you keep faith with the reality you have decided is true, and still keep yourself secret from the criminals. Killing me would be easiest for you. But only if I consent to my murder. Otherwise, you will violate even the reality you have decided to perceive.”
He stares down at me, a muscular man with beautiful ‘purple eyes. A healer who would kill. A patriot defying his government to prevent a vio-
46 Nancy Kress
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lent war. A sinner who does all he can to minimize his sin and keep it from denying him the chance to rejoin his own ancestors. A believer in shared reality who is trying to bend the reality without breaking the be- lief.
I keep quiet. The silence stretches on. Finally it is Pek Brifjis that breaks it. “I wish Carryl Walters had never sent you to me.”
“But he did. And I choose to return to my village. Will you let me go, or keep me prisoner here, or murder me without my consent?”
“Damn you,” he says, and I recognize the word as one Carry! Walters used, about the unreal souls in Aulit Prison.
“Exactly,” I say. “What will you do, Pek? Which of your supposed mul- tiple realities will you choose now?”
It is a hot night, and I cannot sleep.
I lie in my tent on the wide empty plain and listen to the night noises. Rude laughter from the pel tent, where a group of miners drinks far too late at night for men who must bore into hard rock at dawn. Snoring from the tent to my right. Muffled lovemaking from a tent farther down the row, I’m not sure whose. The woman giggles, high and sweet.
I have been a miner for half a year now. After I left the northern vil- lage of Gofkit Ramloe, Ori’s village, I just kept heading north. Here on the equator, where World harvests its tin and diamonds and pel berries and salt, life is both simpler and less organized. Papers are not neces- sary. Many of the miners are young, evading their government service for one reason or another. Reasons that must seem valid to them. Here gov- ernment sections rule weakly, compared to the rule of the mining and farming companies. There are no messengers on Terran bicycles. There is no Terran science. There are no Terrans.
There are shrines, of course, and rituals and processions, and tributes to one’s ancestors. But these things actually receive less attention than in the cities, because they are more taken for granted. Do you pay atten- tion to air?
The woman giggles again, and this time I recognize the sound. Awi Pek Crafmal, the young runaway from another island. She is a pretty thing, and a hard worker. Sometimes she reminds me of Ano.
I asked a great many questions in Gofkit Ramloe. Ori Malfisit, Pek Brifjis said her name was. An old and established family. But I asked and asked, and no such family had ever lived in Gofkit Ramloe. Wherev- er Ori came from, and however she had been made into that unreal and empty vessel shitting on a rich carpet, she had not started her poor little life in Gofkit Ramloe.
Did Maldon Brifjis know I would discover that, when he released me from the rich widow’s house overlooking the sea? He must have. Or maybe, despite knowing I was an informer, he didn’t understand that I
The Flowers of Aulit Prison 47
October/November 1996
would actually go to Gofkit Ramloe and check. You can’t understand everything.
Sometimes, in the darkest part of the night, I wish I had taken Pek Brifjis’s offer to return me to my ancestors.
I work on the rock piles of the mine during the day, among miners who lift sledges and shatter solid stone. They talk, and curse, and revile the Terrans, although few miners have as much as seen one. After work the miners sit in camp and drink pel, lifting huge mugs with dirty hands, and laugh at obscene jokes. They all share the same reality, and it binds them together, in simple and happy strength.
I have strength, too. I have the strength to swing my sledge with the other women, many of whom have the same rough plain looks as I, and who are happy to accept me as one of them. I had the strength to shatter Ano’s coffin, and to bury her even when I thought the price to me was perpetual death. I had the strength to follow Carryl Walters’s words about the brain experiments and seek Maldon Brifjis. I had the strength to twist Pek Brifjis’s divided mind to make him let me go.
But do I have the strength to go where all of that leads me? Do I have the strength to look at Frablit Brimmidin’s reality, and Carryl Walters’s reality, and Ano’s, and Maldon Brifjis’s, and Ori’s—and try to find the places that match and the places that don’t? Do I have the strength to live on, never knowing if I killed my sister, or if I did not? Do I have the strength to doubt everything, and live with doubt, and sort through the millions of separate realities on World, searching for the true pieces of each—assuming that I can even recognize them?
Should anyone have to live like that? In uncertainty, in doubt, in lone- liness. Alone in one’s mind, in an isolated and unshared reality.
I would like to return to the days when Ano was alive. Or even to the days when I was an informer. To the days when I shared in World’s real- ity, and knew it to be solid beneath me, like the ground itself. To the days when I knew what to think, and so did not have to.
To the days before I became—unwillingly—as terrifyingly real as I am now. @
48 Nancy Kress
—
SN
<
ee eR a
. cae
aS
THIS NEAT SHEET
What things could be found on this page! Think of what you might read here, on this neat sheet. oo You might pick it up and read what you have wanted all your life — Anything could be here. An equation — THE equation which would unlock time. A plan, 1, 2, 3, subhead a, b, c — A plan to put the world in order. | _ A check — Yes, one could write a good check just on this paper, lots of money, for you. (Notice | said “one”; one might be very rich!) A love letter . . . Desiring you, telling you how you are loved. (Are you?) A confession, a thriller . . . crime, treason, perversion. Anything could be here?
See
Gis Se
Why not?
—James Tiptree, Jr.
From Neat Sheets: The Poetry of James Tiptree, Jr. Forthcoming from Tachyon Publications, San Francisco, CA
Es s 4 =
Geese
October/November 1996
is name was Tom, Tom Hunter. He had gone to bed early the night
before and risen at three, having enjoyed six and a half hours sleep,
which was about as much as he ever got. His bow and his quiver of
broadheads had been in the van already, along with his hunting knife and most of his other stuff. He had put on coffee that perked while he fooled around with the rest, mostly looking for the silver flask Bet had given him on his birthday four years ago, so he could fill it with rock-and- rye. At about the same time the coffee perked, he woke up for real and re- membered that he'd filled it the night before and put it in a hip pocket of his hunting pants.
He'd washed his face again (no shave today), put on the pants, and filled his thermos with fresh hot coffee—light cream, no sugar.
Now here he was, and the sun not up. He got out of the van, shutting the driver’s-side door as quietly as he could, switched on his flashlight and got his stuff from in back, shutting that door quietly, too, and making sure the van was locked.
The night wasn’t even getting gray, the stars obscured by an overcast and the moon already down. Padding along in crepe-soled boots, he jogged down the little path and turned onto the game trail nobody else knew about. It was possible—not likely, but possible—that his light would spook the deer, though he’d taped over most of the lens and was careful to aim the beam low. Noise would spook them sure, so he moved as quietly as he could, which was not quietly enough to satisfy him.
The tree looked different at night. Alive, somehow. It was a live tree, of course, with green leaves and even little winged seeds early that sum- mer. He had always known it was alive, but it had looked no more alive when he had built his blind on the big limb than the plastic trees that would appear in Wal-Mart in another week or two. It was different now, a placid thing that stood in the night like a huge horse and let him touch it and even climb it using the spikes he had driven into its rough hide in June, not because it liked or was afraid of him, but because it didn’t care.
He thought about Rusty then, whether he ought to have taken Rusty hunting, was Rusty too young or what? He had decided no, not this year, not this Saturday which would be today when the sun came up to make a new day. Rusty was too young, would whine at being awakened so ear- ly and wake up Bet, who would insist on oatmeal. And it would be seven o'clock before they got into the woods, maybe eight, and the best part of the day wasted.
But he had been wrong, and knew it as he eased into the blind, grip- ping the familiar handholds. He could have, should have, carried Rusty out to the van and let him sleep a little more on the drive out. Waked him before they got to the woods so he could get dressed, and brought him to the tree so he could feel this, feel it standing here in night waiting for a rider who might not come this year or the next. Who might not come at
52 Gene Wolfe
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all but who was worth waiting for in rain and wind and snow, because waiting for the rider (who was certainly not himself, no, never Tom Hunter) was the only worthwhile thing anybody could do. And if Rusty could just once be made to feel that, Rusty would be all right forever, good
_and decent at the core even if he gave them trouble sometimes or got in trouble with the law, even.
So he should have brought Rusty, and perhaps next year it would be too late. Bow season was only a week, but there would be rifle season af-
‘ter. They could do it next Saturday, maybe.
He stood and took his bow out of the bow case as quietly as he could, then pulled out a broadhead quietly too, nocked it and drew the bow just to satisfy himself (as he had so often before) that there was room enough up here, letting the bowstring go straight again without letting fly. The broadhead’s razor-sharp blades gleamed dully in the night, and he real- ized with a little start that the night was not quite so black as it had been. Soon—very soon, now—the sun would peep above the horizon and bow season would begin officially.
There was talk of having a black-powder season, too, a week for black- powder hunters after regular deer season. It meant he would have to get a black-powder gun, a good one, just as he’d gotten the Ruger Redhawk for handgun season. Learn to load and shoot it before next year, to be safe. If there was overtime this winter, maybe he could, a long Kentucky rifle to get the highest possible velocity out of the feeble propellant. He’d—
A thump. Not exactly loud but not soft either, not near and not far— middle distance and very, very impressive. Impressive enough to spook every deer in the county.
He gnawed his lip as he tried to think what had made it so impressive, why he’d known at once that it was an important and a significant thump—that something big had happened not very far away. Without training in logic or any other science, he was of an analytical turn of mind, getting to the roots of things when he could, and when he couldn’t returning to them again and again to paw at the earth and sniff (he smiled to himself) like Dad’s coonhound. This one wasn’t too hard for him though, not nearly. Not rooted too deep for him at all.
It had been because he’d felt the thump as well as hearing it. It had shaken the ground, if only a little, and the ground had shaken the tree, which might even have acted as an amplifier or a sounding board, like the back of the fiddle he’d built from a kit about the time he met Bet but never learned to play. The old fiddle collecting dust in the basement, not a very good fiddle really though something might be made of it now, stripped and refinished after some sanding and regluing. He was a whole lot more patient these days, a better worker.
A craftsman.
Try and Kill It 53
October/November 1996
A supervisor had called him a craftsman back in July, and Dean and Juan had kidded him about it; but he had felt at the time that it was the greatest compliment he could ever get or would ever get, and if he died after that it would not really matter—would matter to Bet and Rusty, no doubt, but not to him.
It had worn off a little since. He had come to realize in his analytical way that it didn’t really matter much whether the supervisor thought he was a craftsman, or what the supervisor said. What mattered was whether he was; and he had worked more carefully than ever after that, taking no more time than was needed to do the job, but always taking the time to do the job right, fixing any little thing he came across so nobody would have to come back and do it later, and leaving each machine clean and tight, running as much like new as he could make it.
Dad. ... He hadn’t thought of his father much in probably a year, but here he was again. Dad had bought a used pickup and said later that if only the guy who'd sold it had told him what the little scraps of wire in the box under the seat were for it would have saved him a hundred dol- lars. But he didn’t like the kind of fixes you did with little scraps of wire. — There was magic in the first drop of oil, and magic in a good, clean oily rag. Out past that it was what you knew and how much you were willing to think, making your mind go like the parts, not just replacing stuff and walking away.
But what had the thump been? What could it have been? Trucks hit- ting out on the highway?
Trucks hitting out on the highway couldn’t possibly have shaken the earth in which this tree stood on a wooded hillside three valleys away; but maybe he had been wrong about that.
An explosion at the plant; but this had been closer, he felt sure. He tried to think whether there was another plant closer, or whether it could have been a truck blowing up; and decided it had not been an explosion at all. More like a tree falling, but that wasn’t quite it either.
Now he could see the ground below, and the place where the game trail turned, the place where he would take his shot—twenty-two yards, he had measured it in July. An easy shot for a compound bow as powerful as his, a bow that could send an arrow straight and true a hundred yards easy.
The little wind that had brushed his cheek once or twice in the dark | could be seen playing all around now, shaking leaves and stirring the few dead leaves that had already dropped, leaves red and yellow or brown, sometimes with green patches on them, alive in death.
Like Mom. Dad had been old and tired and dead, that was all, dressed up in his coffin in a fashion that would have embarrassed him if he had been alive; but some part of Mom had still been alive, had not given up until they had closed the lid and screwed it down, so that he had half ex- pected to hear her rapping on it when they lowered her into the grave. Al-
54 Gene Wolfe
Asimov's
though she was dead, of course, and only some small part of her that death had not yet claimed still living in his mind, a green patch that wor- ried about him and Bet and Rusty, and planned to bake more pies, to teach Bet stuff she already knew or did not want to learn, make another quilt with Dora Skinner, because a real cold winter might come someday when he and Bet would be grateful for a nice—
Something was moving away down the slope, down where the little creek barely trickled along the valley. Something bigger than a deer but just about as quiet. Another hunter, probably. Not driving deer toward a partner, because anybody trying to drive deer would make more noise. Just prowling through the woods with his bow, pretty quiet, hoping to get a shot.
It was too bad he wasn’t driving, whoever he was, because if he had been the deer might have run up here along the game trail. Probably would, in fact. And then he himself might have gotten a shot if he was quick enough.
No does, he told himself again. No doe season this year, and he wouldn't want to be caught with one—didn’t want to bag a doe anyhow. No little spike bucks, either. There were plenty of those every year; but they weren't anything but meat, and Bet could buy meat at the meat counter. Let the little spike bucks grow up a few more years. Six points for him. Eight or ten if he was lucky, but he’d settle for six. A braggin’ buck.
He grinned to himself, grinned to the little breeze and the silent wood.
That other hunter was coming nearer now, and he might very well be driving deer even if he didn’t mean to. A deer heard better than a man, better even than most dogs. The lone hunter (Tom Hunter pictured a big man, middle-aged, moving quietly) was hunting upwind, which was the way to do it; deer had better noses than lots of dogs, too.
A terrified deer was on the game trail, small hoofs trapdrumming the hard, dry soil. Tom drew his bow, but it made the turn too fast for him to have shot even if he had wanted to, coming straight at his tree for a mo- ment and flashing past—a small doe, scared out of her wits.
He got close to her, Tom thought. Got real close, probably kicked her up. Might have creased her with an arrow then. That would account for it.
He himself had put an arrow completely through a deer two years be- fore, and watched it run away. It had run for more than a quarter mile, and it had taken him nearly two hours to find it, following the blood trail. If the lone hunter climbing the hill was following a similar trail, he would see him soon.
He listened for more, then for anything. This early in the morning, with the sun just rising, the birds ought to be making a fuss, but they were not. Had migration begun already? Even if it had, there should be plenty left.
Try and Kill It 55
October/November 1996
It was the explosion, no doubt. It had scared—
Just then a jay started talking some distance down the hillside, the loud, hoarse danger-cries that warned all good birds of the presence of a cat or a man. Here he comes, Tom thought.
And then, that does it—that wraps up the morning. I’m not going to get a damn thing. Not even going to get a shot.
He had gotten up at three for this, left the house without breakfast. He returned the arrow to his quiver, put down his bow, and poured himself a cup of coffee, adding a few drops of rock-and-rye.
He sipped, then swallowed greedily, admitting to himself that it tasted great.
He would go home and eat, maybe take a nap. Bet would kid him, but it wouldn’t matter because he’d kid himself worse. And before sundown he’d be back in the blind again, and maybe he’d at least get a shot. For a moment he regretted not shooting at the terrified little doe, but he pushed the thought aside. He could have, and he had chosen not to, so no more complaining about not getting a shot.
Maybe he should just go back to the van. He could sleep in the van for a couple of hours, then come back here. That way Rusty could make all the noise he wanted; this was Rusty’s day off, too, after all.
He drank again, wiped his mouth on his right sleeve, and considered removing the wrist guard from his left. A wrist guard was there to keep the bowstring from slapping your wrist and to keep your sleeve from foul- ing the string. If he wasn’t going to shoot his bow, why wear it? Although it was just possible that he’d get a shot at something he wanted on the way back to the van.
Or he could stay right here, hang in. The sandwiches he’d carried had been intended as his lunch. Was he going to tote them back to the van af- ter carrying them out here? What would he think of himself—of the way he’d acted—when hunting season was over?
The stainless-steel cup that doubled as the thermos bottle’s cap was nearly empty. As he swallowed the last drop, there was a sudden rattle as a deer broke just out of sight. Before he could grab his bow, it had flashed past, a little spike buck.
He picked up his bow and nocked the arrow again.
A minute passed, or an indeterminate time that seemed to him a minute or more; the playful wind carried the faintest possible odor of laundry day, a chemical smell from some factory miles away.
Then it sounded as if a riot were in progress just out of sight, the rock- eting roar of a pheasant practically lost among clattering hooves and breaking twigs as an entire herd flushed from a thicket. He drew his bow as the lead doe rounded the turn and made for his tree, mouth open and tongue lolling, covering a good twelve feet with every jump, a big doe sleek and fat with autumn going full out and still picking up speed. Be-
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hind her the ruck of the herd, bounding fawns and leaping does, perhaps eight in all, perhaps ten or twelve.
Last of all the buck covering their retreat, muscled like a wrestler and crowned more regally than any king, thick of neck and large of eye, frightened yet still in command of himself if not of his panicky harem. For an instant he halted at the bend, head high, to stare up at the tree- limb blind and the point of the arrow aimed at his heart. His tail twitched; he plunged ahead and was gone.
“God damn!” Tom said under his breath. “God damn, oh, God dammit!” It was inadequate, but what would be adequate? The bow had turned to concrete in his hand, its string sticking to his fingers as though they had been dipped in glue. Buck fever, he told himself. I got buck fever again.
After how many years? He tried to count back to his first hunt with Dad. Sixteen. No, eighteen.
Buck fever.
Yet it had not been. He’d seen buck fever, had experienced it himself. Your hands shook with eagerness, and as often as not you shot too soon. Or you gawked openmouthed instead of raising your gun, or knocked it over when you grabbed for it. His hands had been as steady as ever in his life; he had seen the buck and sighted, had known what to do. Something had stopped him.
Had Dad’s ghost returned? Said spare this one, son, and for the rest of your life you'll know he’s out there?
No. Tom pushed the thought aside. Only women saw ghosts. Ghosts! Women and nuts. Flakes, and he was no flake, was a rock-solid sober family man and a good bow-hunter. Something in his own mind had stopped him, and not for any silly, sentimental reason. What had it been?
When he rooted it out and held it up, he had to laugh. He had not shot because he might need the arrow—because something awful was com- ing. But the other hunter was merely a man like himself, and might eas- ily be a man he knew, a man in a hunting cap and a camo shirt, walking along with his bow in his hand and his quiver on his back like anybody else.
Down beyond the bend there was a flash of brown, rich and reddish among the grays and blacks of trunks, the green of leaves. Not a camo shirt. Some kind of a brown shirt, maybe an Army surplus wool shirt, but it hadn’t quite seemed like the Army color. A man—
There it was, just passing in back of a bush then gone in the shadows, red-brown with a gray streak and bigger than a pony, bigger than any man, as big as a bull almost but not a bull or a cow or anything like that.
A bear.
Not a black bear, and not even the kind of a black bear they called a cinnamon. A grizzly, a bear like people went a thousand miles to hunt. A grizzly bear for sure, even if there weren’t any grizzlies in this part of the
Try and Kill It 57
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October/November 1996
country and hadn’t been since the people here wore three-cornered hats and fought Indians.
They said there weren't, anyhow.
There were coyotes now, and they said there weren't any of those either. Coyotes were supposed to be Western animals like grizzlies, animals you saw on the prairie in Texas, and out in the desert. But there was a dead coyote on the road a while back about a half mile from the house.
There it was again!
He pulled the arrow to his ear, then relaxed. Too risky, even if it wasn’t too far. He’d only spook it, and this was the chance of a lifetime. Wait. Take your time. Even with a good shot, a big bear will need a lot of killing, and I mean to try and kill it, not just scare it away, and I sure wouldn’t want to have it go off into the woods and take two or three months to die.
He put down his bow and wiped his sweating palms on his thighs. Where was it?
The woods were quiet. Even the jay had stopped talking. The jay had been a ways down the slope, probably it was still there, and the bear had gone far enough uphill that the jay wasn’t worried, not that a bear would be much danger to a bird anyhow. The jay probably didn’t know—it was a big animal, so it was scary. It would eat a bird if it could catch one, that was for sure.
The level sunshine streaked the woods with golden bars that seemed to him to obstruct his vision, illuminating a young sumac as though with a spotlight, leaving a clump of bayberries darker than they had been by night. If the bear was moving he couldn’t hear it. It couldn’t be snuffling; he would have heard that. No question about it.
There! Behind the fallen log.
Once more he drew his bow. The wind pushed aside a leafy branch, and a gleaming shaft from the sun struck the place on the other side of the log before his own shaft could. A few twigs and dead leaves lay there.
Nothing else.
The laundry smell had grown stronger. Air pollution! Even way out here, there was air pollution. He snorted, allowed the bowstring to straighten again, and wiped his nose on his sleeve.
And the bear rose on its hind legs at the sound, as bears will, and held up both paws.
No buck fever now. Back went the arrow to his ear. His release was clean and crisp, sending the long aluminum-shafted broadhead flying from his sixty-pound compound bow nearly as fast as a bullet.
Yet the bear tried to dodge. He saw it in slow motion, like movie blood flying off the teeth of a chain saw, the silver arrow streaking, the bear (almost as short-faced as a man, and not like a black bear very much) try- ing to writhe away before the arrow got it, the long orange hair on its
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chest crossed on a slant by a gray streak that was probably from an old scar, a crease from somebody’s big-game rifle.
Quick as the bear was, it wasn’t quick enough. The arrow hit it a little bit to one side of the breastbone, and buried the big steel head and half the shaft.
He had nocked another before the bear fell, and he let it fly, not so sure of his aim this time. Somewhere among the bushes and fallen branches _ the bear moaned, a deep, suffering noise that sounded practically human.
That first one got him good, and if you ask me the other one did, too.
A grizzly! His grizzly!
It seemed incredible. It was incredible. How many men in the whole damned country had taken a grizzly with bow and arrow? A hundred? Maybe. Maybe no more than a couple of dozen.
A couple dozen, and he was one of them. God had somehow, for some unknowable reason of His own, chosen to bless him beyond and above most other men, and he finally saw the level sunbeams for what they re- ally were, God’s fingers, and he thanked God for it, mentally at first, then muttering the words and half ashamed.
Was the bear still there? He peered and squinted, but could not be cer- tain. A cloud passed before the sun and God’s fingers were withdrawn, leaving the woods nearly as dark as they had been when he climbed into the blind. It was vitally important that he know; even a wounded buck could be dangerous.
Patiently he waited, twice thinking that he heard something big mov- ing through the brush, each time assuring himself that it was just the wind, just his imagination. Either the bear was there (as it almost cer- tainly was), or it wasn’t.
If it was, everything was fine; he had his bear. If it wasn’t, he’d have to track it and finish it off, if it still required finishing. He knew himself to be as good a tracker as anybody who hunted these woods, and knew too that he possessed a dogged persistence so great that his coworkers at the plant sometimes thought he was a little crazy, shimming and leveling, ad- justing anew and trying again, working through break and then through lunch because doing it—getting it right—meant more to him than conver- sation or food. The bear would be found, if the bear was findable.
But the bear was probably dead already, lying no more than eight or ten feet from the point where he had shot it.
He took out another arrow just in case.
By degrees that seemed more than painfully slow, the sunlight re- turned, a little higher than it had been. He leaned from the blind, squint- ing. The bear probably wasn’t—no, positively wasn’t—where it had fall- en. He could see the place now, see it as clearly as if he stood there, and there was no big animal there, so it had crawled away; with his arrow in it, it wouldn’t crawl very far, not even if the second one missed.
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And if it had, where was it? Could it have buried itself completely in the dirt? In dirt that was full of roots? That was possible, maybe, but it didn’t seem likely, and he couldn’t see either arrow.
The wounded bear might be anyplace—might even be waiting for him at the base of the tree.
He climbed down cautiously, stopping twice to look below him. If the bear was there, he couldn’t see or hear it.
When he reached the ground, he got out his bow and nocked a third ar- row. Bears could charge very fast. A well-placed arrow might stop a charg- ing bear. But it might not, and a badly placed one certainly wouldn't. His first shot had been right on target though, and the bear had been losing blood for a good ten minutes. How dangerous could it be?
With his third arrow still nocked, he strode down the game trail, then through the underbrush until he reached the point at which the bear had risen on its hind legs.
There was blood, dark already, clotted and reeking. Here—he put down his bow and knelt to examine the ground—the bear had crawled off, still bleeding but not bleeding nearly as much as he’d have liked, pulling itself along with its front claws and leaving six deep gouges in the litter of twigs and leaves.
That way.
He hesitated. He was honor bound to track down and dispatch a wounded animal, and doubly bound to dispatch one as dangerous as a grizzly. His honor did not demand that he start tracking right away, though, or even walk fast once he’d started.
There was a gleam—a dull, metallic wink—some ten or twelve yards away, probably brass from somebody’s deer rifle. Cautiously he made his way over to it and picked it up. It was half an arrow, cleanly snapped in two: the blood-smeared head and a foot and a half of equally smeared hol- low aluminum shaft. No bear, no animal of any kind, should have been able to pull that barbed broadhead out.
Looking around he found the other end tangled in a bush.
This was the second arrow, of course, not the first. It had made a shal- low wound most likely, and had stopped with the head sticking out, hav- ing cut through a lot of fur, flesh, fat, and hide. Thrashing around, the bear had broken the shaft, and with the shaft broken both halves of the arrow had come out. That was what had to have happened.
He sat down on a fallen log. The bear was dying—that was absolutely sure. Very likely, the bear was dead already, and no more than a hun- dred steps away. However bad the second shot had been, the first one had been in the black. It had hit the bear’s chest pretty near center, and gone in deep. As long as its sharp blades were in the wound, every move- ment, every breath, would do more damage. He’d have another cup of cof- fee, drinking it slowly and enjoying it, then track the bear, find its body,
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and skin it. No way in the world could he drag an animal that big back to the van to take over to Lakeside Sporting Goods, where they did taxi- dermy; but he could skin it and he would, and carry back the pelt and head. What had he done with the thermos? He stood up and looked around before remembering that it was still back in the blind, and re- turned the arrow to his quiver.
He had almost reached the tree again when he glanced up at his blind with the half-formed idea of checking its effectiveness from the ground (as he had so many times while building it) and saw the wide reddish face glaring down at him.
Sheer terror gripped him, and he ran. When he stopped at last, it was only because the stand of saplings through which he had tried to flee was too thick, almost, for him to move. He fell to his knees gasping, his own hoarse breath too loud for him to hear anything else. Insects looped and dove before his face, intent on entering his mouth, nostrils, and eyes.
As the minutes crept past, his self-possession returned. Wounded ani- mals frequently turned on their attackers. It had never happened to him before, but he had read about such things in hunting and fishing maga- zines, and heard stories from other hunters. The wounded bear had sup- posed that he was still in the blind from which his arrows had come; and recovering a little from the initial shock of its wound, had climbed the tree in search of him. That was all.
He shuddered, every muscle shaking as if with cold.
He could have—should have—shot it there, standing solidly on the ground and putting two or three more arrows into it before it could get down. There had been two arrows left in his quiver—three, counting the one he had returned to it.
Thinking of his quiver, he groped for it. It was gone. Had he torn it away, dropped it in order to run faster? He could not remember, could re- member only running, running and running, down the wooded slope and through a clearing. Maybe through more than one. Leaping over some- thing that might have been a tree-trunk or the trickling creek.
He got to his feet, his heart still pounding. Could bears hunt by scent? It seemed probable, and if they could it was possible that this bear was still on his trail, still after him. He tried to push aside the terrible mem- ory of its eyes. It would have had to climb down from the blind first, and that had given him a lead.
A bear hunting by scent would move a great deal slower than a charg- ing bear, too. He had seen coonhounds hunt by scent at a dead run, the coon-smell so strong and good they didn’t even have to put their noses to the ground; but he had not seen it a lot, and though a bear might have a good nose, it probably wasn’t as good as a coonhound’s.
Closer every minute, though. It would be getting closer every minute, and not baying like a hound either, but hunting silently, maybe snuffling
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now and then, so he’d better move, get moving soon, get away from it and find a road or something, and he could hitch a ride back home and get his deer rifle, get a neighbor to run him back out to the van.
Struggling, half walking and half climbing, he freed himself from the saplings and looked around, took a few steps, stopped, and turned, real- izing at length that he could not be sure of the direction from which he had entered it.
Walking or trotting—running, he felt sure, was no longer possible for him—at random might bring him nearer the bear. He found his bandan- na and mopped his sweating face. It was fall according to the calendar, and the night had been crisp; but the sun was up now, and the day start- ing to get hot.
He stood still to listen and heard only birdsong. The bear had silenced the birds when it had driven the deer up the slope—silenced every bird around there except for the squawking jay. Birds were singing now, singing in every direction as well as he could judge, so the bear was prob- ably nowhere near.
The best thing would be to circle around. Come up to the van from the other side. He reached into his pocket and found the keys. Once in the van he would be safe, and he could drive home for his deer rifle.
The woods should have been familiar. He had hunted these woods every season for almost twenty years, taken a dozen deer and scores of rabbits and squirrels out of them. He knew them, as he had often told Dean and Juan, like the palm of his hand; but this was a new place, or a place that he was looking at in a new way.
He had not brought a compass, and none was needed. It was early morning still, and at this time of year the sun rose almost due east; he found it without difficulty. North was left, south, right, west behind him; but where was the van?
Cautiously he set out. It was true, of course, still true, that he might be walking toward the bear. True, but not likely. Away from it or at right angles to it were the way to bet, so he would bet like that, and soon—very soon, he hoped—he was bound to see something he recognized, some- thing that would give him his—mentally, he canceled the word bearings. Something that would tell him which way the van was.
His blind had been well up a hill, so he avoided them, threading blind, dry little valleys, and once discovering a stagnant pool shrunk almost to a mud flat by the heat of the summer that was only just over. He thought he remembered seeing it once (much fuller then, with a loon’s nest at the edge) when he was out hunting with Dad; but he could not be sure, and he couldn’t remember where it had been anyway.
Deer flies found him. He got out his repellent and sprayed, but it seemed to do little good.
The sun was too high to direct him now, and he blazed his trail, cutting
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six inch strips of bark from likely trees with his hunting knife and letting them hang, and breaking the limbs of bushes to point the way he was go- ing—not doing these things so much in the hope that anyone would fol- low the signs and find him, but to keep himself from circling. Knowing that lost men instinctively turned left, he turned right whenever a choice presented itself, and tried to walk toward distant hilltops or large trees when he could see them.
Toward noon the sun vanished and he heard the rumble of distant thunder. A cool front was on the way, clearly, with a storm for a roadie. He found shelter under a rocky outcrop, took off his boots and stockings, and waited out the rain.
How many times had he read that smart hunters were never without a compass? That it was always wise to carry emergency rations of some sort? Bet’s little silver flask still held rock-and-rye. He sipped the sweet, potent liquor in the hope that it would assuage his hunger; but he was no drinker and soon recapped the flask, feeling slightly ill.
Thunder banged and rattled, rain pelted the dry woods, then slacked and faded to a shower as the thunder rolled away among the hills. Weari- ly he put on his stockings and boots again, rose, and set out, blazing his trail as before and soon encountering blazes that he himself had made only hours ago.
The sun was close to the western horizon when he came upon the road. It was not much of a road, only two streaks of muddy dirt, but among its rutted wanderings he imagined houses and farms, food and rest and tele- phones, and felt that he’d never beheld anything half so beautiful, not even Bet when chance had thrown them together at a high-school bas- ketball game. Not even Bet, because she was there, too; and she was more beautiful now in the ruts of the dirt road, because she was his as he was hers, and she had given him Rusty.
Rusty ought to have a dog, a birddog, maybe, that they could train to- gether. A birddog and a four-ten.
The road ran northwest and southeast, and there was no way to tell which direction might be better. Either one, he told himself, would be a great deal better than the way he had been going, better than wandering in search of landmarks that somehow weren’t ever there.
Following his rule, he turned right. The shadows were long when he came upon the broken pine and stopped. He had seen it before, surely. Had noticed it several times that summer when he was going out to work on his blind. It had not marked the end of the road; the road went on for nearly a half mile more, past the firebreak the rangers had cut three years before. Yet it had been near the end.
His feet were blistered, and he was pretty sure that the blister on the side of the left one had broken, but he went on at a good clip just the same. Another half mile—more like a quarter mile now—and he'd reach
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the van. He could drive home, get something to eat and a good night’s sleep. Come back Sunday morning to find his bear and skin it.
Two saplings up ahead . . . he stopped to look, then hurried forward. They had been bent and partially broken at several points, interlaced to form a knot that wasn’t quite a braid. His first thought was that he had failed to notice them that morning, his second that it had been too dark to notice much of anything, his third that it had been done recently; the saplings’ leaves were still green for the most part, and there was no sign that either had begun to grow into its tortured new shape.
His fourth was that it had taken enormous strength to do it. He had stopped to feel the bent and twisted trunks when something buzzed past him like an oversized hornet, and he felt that a red-hot poker had been rammed into his right arm. Whirling, he saw the bear, already nocking another arrow.
It missed as he dove into the undergrowth. Not long ago he had thought himself almost too tired to walk. Now he ran again, but not blindly as he had run before with abject terror grinding down his mind. There was a bend here, a pronounced one where the road skirted a hill. He cut across it and found the road again, sprinted down it—falling twice—and reached the van as the bear’s third arrow scarred its steel side.
It’s bigger than I am. (It was the first coherent thought since he had begun to run again.) And it’s stronger, a lot stronger. But I’m faster and maybe I’m smarter.
His arm, limp and drenched with his blood, would not respond when he told it to get the keys from his pocket. He seized the edge of the pocket with his left hand and ripped it open with an effort he would in ordinary circumstances have found flatly impossible.
It was hard to open the door left-handed and maddeningly awkward to jam the key into the ignition switch and start the engine, but he did both, and with his almost-useless right arm managed to knock the shift lever from PARK into DRIVE. He jammed his foot down on the accelerator as he spun the steering wheel one-handed.
Like an angry bull, the van smashed through the roadside brush to turn and charge the dark figure of the bear. There was a shuddering im- pact. Momentarily the van skewed sidewise. He fought the wheel and raced down the road, covering a mile or more before he dared to slow a little and pull out the headlight switch.
Only one headlight came on.
Suddenly (much too suddenly for him) there was gravel ahead, then as- phalt and speeding cars. He should perhaps have slowed and waited for a break in traffic. He did not, charging the highway as he had the bear. Horns blared, and this time the crash was deafening and the world a kaleidoscope of tumbling objects that flashed past too quickly to be seen, though not too fast to strike blows that numbed instead of hurting.
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When he crawled from the wreckage, the bear was upon him, a bear it- self wrecked, its head and one arm dangling, drenched in its own nau- seous blood. He ran, and knew not where he ran, heard the scream of brakes and the sickening impact behind him.
It was after midnight when he got home. Bet helped him out of Dean’s car and into the house, ignoring his protests. “Oh my God,” she said; and again, “Oh my God.” And then, because he had been careful to limp, “Can you climb the stairs?”
And when he had insisted he would be fine on the couch, and eaten two pieces of cold chicken and drunk a glass of milk, and told her a careful mixture of truth and lies, he was able to get her to go up to bed, and opened the drapes.
He waited after that, sitting silent in the dark room, staring out the picture window at the dark street outside and thinking until he had heard the water turned off in the upstairs bathroom and the shutting of their bedroom door. A dozen bruises complained when he stood up, but his right arm, which had begun to throb, throbbed no worse.
“Daddy?”
Rusty was at the top of the stairs in his pajamas, his hair tousled.
“Was it really a bear, Daddy?”
For a second or two he debated, telling himself with perfect truth that Rusty was only a little kid. “Come on down, sport. We don’t want to wake up Mom.”
Rusty came down with alacrity.
“There really was a bear,” his father told him. “But I’m not so sure it was a regular bear.” Bending stiffly, he picked up the blue plastic bag the hospital had given him, feeling the paw stir inside.
“Mamma believed you about the car wreck.”
He nodded, mostly to himself. “But not about the bear.”
Rusty shook his head.
“IT didn’t tell her everything, either. Just a little bit. I tried to get her to believe it.”
“Did you kill the bear, Dad?”
“No.” He started for the family room, limping but trying not to. “There were a couple of times when I thought I had, but I didn’t. You know my big arrows?”
“Sure.”
“I shot it good with two of those, and I figured it was dead. It should've been.” He handed Rusty the blue bag and fished his keys from his left pants pocket with his left hand. “It broke one of those arrows and threw the halves away. The kind of thing a man might do, mad because he’d got hurt.”
“Was it big?”
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He considered. “Yeah. Real big. Four or five hundred pounds, I guess. I took five arrows this morning, sport.”
“Sure.”
“There’s no use carrying more than you need, and the bow license only lets you take one deer. If I missed a couple of shots, Id still have three. So after it got my bow, I was thinking it only had three, and it shot three at me. One got my arm.”
He pointed to the sling, and Rusty nodded, eyes wide. “But there’s one more, the one I shot into it that it didn’t break. I don’t think it can use it now.” He opened his gun cabinet. “The rifle would be better,” he told Rusty, “but I can’t on account of my arm.”
The Redhawk was in its holster, and the holster on his gun belt, hang- ing from a hook. “You’re going to have to help me get this thing on. Grab the other end.”
Rusty did, and his father stepped into the belt, wrapping the buckle end around him, then turning until the tongue reached the buckle. “You know how these work. Think you can fasten it for me?”
Rusty thrust the tongue into the buckle and pulled back on it. “Tighter,” his father said.
When it was fastened to his satisfaction, he drew the Redhawk and pushed the cylinder catch. “Six,” he told Rusty. “Six forty-four magnums, I hope that'll do it.”
“Sure, Dad.”
“T hit it with the van.” He snapped the cylinder back into the frame and reholstered the gun. “That was the second time I thought I’d got it. It dented in the right side of the van some and busted a headlight, but it wasn't hurt so bad that it couldn’t grab onto something and ride along with me. I’m pretty sure that’s what it must have done, because when that car hit me it was right there. It can move pretty fast, if you ask me, but not that fast.”
“Is that when you got hurt, Daddy? When the car hit you?”
“Uh huh. That and the arrow. The arrow first. But it got hurt, too. It went for me, and I was so scared I ran right out onto the highway without looking. You mustn’t ever do that, Rusty.”
“All right.”
“T guess it didn’t look, either. Anyway, a big truck hit it, an eighteen wheeler. It messed it up pretty bad. Smashed the head flat. You ever see a cat or a squirrel that’s been run over and flattened out like that?”
“Sure.”
“That’s what it looked like, and I thought it was dead. ’'d wanted the head, but the head was a mess, and I hadn’t killed it anyhow. What did you do with that bag I gave you?”
“On the chair.” Rusty turned to get it. “It’s gone.”
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“Yeah, I thought I heard it slide off a minute ago. You look in the liv- ing room, I'll look in the kitchen.”
After half a minute Rusty joined him there, holding up the blue hospi- tal bag in triumph. “Is it a snake? I can feel it moving around.”
His father shook his head. “It’s one paw. I don’t even know which one.” He paused, considering. “The left front. I know it was a front paw, any- how. I cut it off. Somebody that had a car phone stopped and said he’d called for an ambulance. Think you can untie that?”
Rusty studied the knot in the top of the bag dubiously. “Tl try.”
“It’s pretty tight. I got a nurse to tie it for me, but then I held the end in my teeth and tightened it up as much as I could. Where was it when you found it?”
“Over in front of the door. I don’t think it could get it open.”
“After it tore through the bag, maybe. The man with the phone went over to see about the lady in the other car. She was hurt worse than I was, and while we were waiting for the ambulance I cut it off. I wanted something to show you and your Mom.”
Rusty’s small fingers were picking at the knot. “You didn’t, did you? Maybe she would’ve believed you.”
“It had been wearing a sort of a belt over one shoulder. It was gray, and when I’d seen it before I thought it was a scar. I took it, but it was all messed up and I threw it away. Then I cut off that paw. It was real quiet till we got to the hospital. That was when I found out it was still alive and started to figure things out. They gave me that bag to put it in, and sewed up my arm and took care of some other stuff.”
“T got it.” Rusty looked into the bag. “It smells like Clorox.”
“Dump it out on the floor,” his father told him, and when Rusty hesi- tated, reached into the bag and took out the paw.
“Three toes.” Rusty regarded the massively clawed digits with awe. “Don’t bears got four like a dog?”
“Maybe it lost one in a trap.” His father tossed the paw onto the floor between them. “Watch it.”
For a minute or more it lay motionless.
“It was wiggling before,” Rusty said.
“It’s scared. You hit it or drop it or anything, and it keeps quiet a while. I think it’s hoping you'll figure it’s dead.”
“Can it hear us?” Rusty whispered.
“T don’t think so.”
As he spoke, one thick claw scrabbled the tiles and found a hold in the grout. The paw inched forward.
“It'll go a lot faster in a minute. It’s waiting to see if we saw it move.”
Rusty knelt beside the paw.
“Don’t touch it.”
The paw inched forward again, this time with all three claws scrab-
Try and Kill It 69
October/November 1996
bling for purchase. “It’s got my bow and that last arrow,” his father said. “I figure it must have broken the first one, then it got the idea of using them.”
As he spoke, the paw raised itself, running on the tips of its claws like a crippled spider.
They followed it to the living room, where he picked it up and returned it to the bag. “Tie this for me, will you, sport?”
“Sure. It’s trying to get back to the bear, isn’t it, Daddy? Only the bear’s dead.”
“T don’t know. I thought it was dead when I shot it, and then when I ran over it.” He sighed. “I was wrong both times, so this time I’m not go- ing to count on anything. It can only fix itself so much, though. There’s limits to everything.”
Rusty nodded, his fingers busy with the bag.
“We can fix ourselves too. My arm'll heal, and I'll be able to go back to work. But if you cut me up enough like that, if you did it over and over, Td die.”
“You said the head was all mashed up.”
“Yeah. That’s going to take it a long time, this time, I think. That gave me time to get to the hospital and call Dean to come and get me there— all the things I did. It may not even start trying to put itself back to- gether until the traffic on the highway lets up. That would be after one o'clock, I guess.”
“Only the paw knows where it is?” Rusty put the blue bag down hur- riedly. “It keeps trying to go there?”
His father nodded. “That’s what I think, and it must know where the paw is, too. It'll come and try and get it back, and I think try and kill me like it did before. If it isn’t till daylight, it won’t get very far. Somebody'll see it and call the police. But if it does it at night, it might get all the way here. You go up to bed now.”
Rusty gulped. “Daddy... ?
“I wasn’t going to tell you anything, and maybe I shouldn’t have. But maybe something like this will happen again after I’m gone, and itll be good if somebody knows. Don’t you forget.”
“Are you going to shoot it?” Rusty ventured. His father nodded. “That'll stop it a while, I figure. A forty-four mag- num does a whole lot of damage, and I’ve got six, and twelve more in the belt loops. I'll cut it up then, and burn the pieces in the barbecue out back.
If you hear shooting, don’t let Mom come downstairs. Tell her I said.”
Rusty nodded solemnly.
“Or call nine-one-one or anything. Now go to bed.”
“Daddy—
“Go to bed, Rusty.” Rusty’s father pointed sternly with his good arm. “Go up to your room and get in bed. Go to sleep. I’ve got to make coffee.”
70 | Gene Wolfe
Asimov's
When the coffee was on, he turned out the lights and sat down on the couch again. lt might be better to meet it outside, he told himself; but it might be worse, too. After a while he would get up and go out and walk around the house. It would keep him awake, anyway.
They'd want a kennel for Rusty’s birddog, and he could decide where to put it.
Thinking about birddogs and kennels, and how kennels might be built, he stared out the picture window, waiting in his blind for a shambling figure that had not yet appeared. @
Holl CRITERIA
Terraforming ain't complete— now let me make this clear— until a planet’s capable
of something like a beer,
Illustration by Anthony Bari
and something like a burger
to serve up good and hot—
without these things then “Terraform’ is NOT what you have got!
?
—W. Gregory Stewart
Some of today’s most disturbing headlines are taken a terrifying extra step in lan R. MacLeod’s .. .
SWIMMERS BENEATH Tht onl
lan R. MacLeod |
Illustration by Ron Chironna
ZA YY Yy
]
October/November 1996
PP here would you choose?” Ruth says. “There was always some- where every decade last century, a place to be. It was Paris in the twenties. Haight Ashbury in the sixties. . . .”
Me, Ruth, and Tom Moss are out on a day’s ride from the cease- fire zone with our new-issue green UN passes. Up into the misty morning hills in the old Mercedes with Press spray-painted on the sides and the roof.
“Think.” Ruth smiles beside me in the back, frail and new here. “Maybe London in the Seventies with Thatcher and punk rock. New York in the eighties—cocaine and Porsches. Berlin in the thirties. . .”
“Berlin!” Tom snorts and wipes his nose down the sleeve of his combat jacket as the road worsens.
“Berlin .. .” Ruth looks out through the muddy glass. “... Berlin in the twenties... .” There’s late snow on the hillsides. A burnt-out farmhouse with grey, empty windows standing against the grey and empty sky. Ruth isn’t running, but still her eyes are unfocused—far beyond. She’s seeing Unter den Linden. Chris Isherwood, Sally Bowles, and the pompous brown-suited marching men. “And maybe Berlin again in the nineties, or even Bejing... .”
“What about the rest of the decades? Who wanted to be anywhere in the forties?”
“There was always New York, Tom. The greatest brains in the world were there. All the clever Jews who got out. And Stravinsky, and Rach- maninov. Fermi and Einstein... .”
Cigarettes are passed. Ruth declines. Her eyes are still full of Berlin, Paris, New York, and Sarajevo as the car greys with smoke. No one says anything. Me and Tom don’t know for sure whether those people were where Ruth says they were, but we’re educated men of letters, and Ruth’s just a jockey to ride the gridnet. We have our pride. And Ruth’s also Ruth. She was posted by VARTEL just two days ago to cover this empty civil war, but we’ve already worked that one out.
The Merc rumbles on along the rubble of what was once a main holli- day route. People used to ski in the mountains up there to the east; you can still see the broken gantries of the lifts. Tom breaks the brow of the hill and curses. We crane out through the windows. A Datsun truck lies upturned across the road beside a ruined filling station. There’s a red | flag, some guys with Kalashnikovs, another in a jeep with a machine gun.
I say, “Worth a shoot?”
Ruth shakes her head.
“Tom? You’ve got the papers?”
“Yeah. They can’t want anything.”
“Nah.”
“Anyway, fuck the little gits.”
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“What’s the flag?” “It’s red. That’s the Communists. You know—Marx. Lenin. Jane Fon- dai. 2
Tom swings the door open and climbs out. He raises a hand, waves our new bits of UN green and walks over to them. Offers the obligatory ciga- rettes. They're just kids. Back at home, they'd be riding the gridnet.
It takes longer than usual as Tom shrugs, points along the road. Words -and signs exchanged. Full of interest, the window down, Ruth watches. I'd get out to help Tom, but he speaks the language and I know that too many foreigners only make these kids nervous. The trees ahead shift and sparkle. A peeling billboard above the petrol station says, in English, The Real Thing. Finally, the kids nod, and Tom walks back toward the car.
“You can tell it’s okay from the way he’s walking,” I say to Ruth. “Look. He hasn’t shat himself.”
She guffaws, scratching her ribs beneath her new flak jacket.
Tom gets back in the driver’s side. He plays it cool, starts up the en- gine, says nothing.
“Are we rolling or what?”
“We're rolling. Straight on through.”
“What about a shoot,” I ask. “Ruth?”
Ruth shrugs and smiles. She waves to the kids as they roll back the oil- drums to let us past. They nudge each other and wave back. “There'll be better shoots than this when the sun really comes through. What’s ahead, Tom?”
“Glad you asked me that. There’s a tank snarl-up two villages down. Heard something else too. About a donor camp... .”
I nod sagely. It’s an old rumor, but one that the UN still drags out as an argument for sending in more troops. No one believes it (who, here, needs atrocities?) but still, it could change everything if it were true. It’s the kind of story that might drag this forgotten conflict back onto the main icons, and us with it.
“It’s like this,” Tom says. “One of the kids has a brother who has a friend who went missing in the big push against the Nationalists last au- tumn.”
“Oh yeah. ..?” I say. “And his friend had a girlfriend who has a sister. . .”
Tom smiles patiently. “Just the friend’s brother. He was captured and taken to what he says was a donor camp and he managed to get back. He’s there.” He nods down the road. Through the trees, a turn in the val- ley shows the roofs of a town rising sunlit over a bluff, guarded by the brownstone walls of a castle.
“So. What’s the plan?”
“We go in there. Find this chappie’s brother . . . then home to the Holi- day Inn before it gets dark. A hot bath, a cold drink . . .”
“... far too ambitious .. .”
Swimmers Beneath the Skin 75
October/November 1996
“Yeah. Forget the bath.”
The Merc rumbles on toward some new scrap of news that may or may not be, carrying our odd little alliance: Tom, with the WP beneath the dri- ver’s seat that he uses to dictate the copy that will curl out as warm newsprint on someone’s breakfast table. And me; mostly magazine free- lance, peripatetic man-on-the-spot and occasional minder for the jockeys like Ruth that VARTEL sends over.
The town ahead had been worth two stars in the local Michelin Guide. Nestled in a valley bordering forests and foothills, it was once a strategic crossroads and stopping-off point for the jingling pack-wagons and pil- grims heading toward the main mountain passes. Then, lace-making, half-timbered houses, a minor romantic poet, tourism, sleepy anonymity. Then, as all the old agonies spread out and the highways were mined, the harbors blockaded, and the airports captured, the town regained some of its old strategic importance.
We drive in past a half-built industrial estate where smoke stains lick up from the roofs and windows, and birds are singing. Like most of the area outside the cease-fire zone that we cover, this town remains virtual- ly deserted. No one here believes that the uneasy truce between the Communists and the Nationalists will last, and anyway the Christian guns to the south are much too close. The people who used to run the cafés and the bookshops and drive trams and change cash at the banks are now living in the refugee camps over the border, or with relatives in the over-crowded lowland cities to the north, or dead.
We rumble over the bridge leading into the old town with the broken span that the UN sappers rebuilt after one of their own smart bombs drowned during the big bash-up last autumn. The river tumbles and flashes in the gorge below, running full and cold and deep as it always runs at this time of year. Looking out through the golden mid-morning haze at the old streets and houses on the far bank rising toward the cas- tle, I briefly imagine that I can see smoke from the chimneys, washing on the lines, cars in the parking lots, people in the cafés, kids in the parks. It’s definitely worth a shoot here, but as I turn to remind Ruth I see that she’s already staring, unblinking, through the open window. Definitely running. Taking it all in.
The rule with jockeys is that you leave the technical stuff to them, but many are as ignorant about newsgathering as they are secretive about their craft, and I’m always trying to point them in approximately the right direction and second-guess when they’re running. With some of them, it’s obvious; on shoot they look and move like zombies. But with others—and, despite her mainly non-news background, Ruth’s one of the best I’ve seen yet—you’d hardly know it was happening. She’s a good worker, is Ruth; the unedited stuff we screen-previewed yesterday evening back at the Holiday Inn was more than enough to convince me of that.
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“Tom? You know the way to reach this guy?”
“A breeze. No problem.”
Off the bridge, and through a square where an old Russian T54 sits rusting, thrust half-way into a building. There’s the drone of flies, a bad smell.
“You really are sure?”
In my experience, the journalists and outsiders who die are the ones who get lost. As long as you’re well-fed and fit, your chances are still good if you get hit by shrapnel or caught in a sniper’s alley. For a start, you won't have to spend more than a few hours in the local hospital before a Sikorsky lifts you out. Fatalities for our kind don’t come when we're sim- ply somewhere bad; they come when we've failed to realize just how bad somewhere actually is.
Tom swings the car out of the square and up a narrow street. Tires squeal over cobbles. He smiles and glances back. I watch the smile care- fully, gauging it for confidence, fear, irony. This is, I suspect, another of Tom’s wind-ups, and I wonder as I have wondered before why we have to keep playing these games with each other. As though we want more risk than the situation is already giving us.
A smaller square. An old fountainhead. A flock of starlings picking over the scattered carcass of a dog. Ruth’s still got her window down for a shoot and it looks like she’s still running. Fresh ivy already drapes the fire-gutted buildings, lavender and heather grows happily from the up- turned municipal concrete pots. There’s sweetness and decay here. If this scene was ever actually broadcast, VARTEL would probably edit the smell out in deference to the delicate senses of its subscribers. But that would be a shame.
“Shit.”
Three rifle shots spark and ping off the cobbles just ahead. But Tom gets the message and stops the Merc on a farthing. From the doorway of a building that looks as wrecked as all the others, an old woman emerges, chewing her gums and hugging herself, to watch the show. It could be a good sign. The engine ticks. We wait.
“You do know where you are, Tom?”
“Yeah. Stop worrying. ...”
A figure, holding a rifle, now stands ahead of us in the road. He raises his hand to the breech. He shifts his stance.
“Then why the blazing fuck don’t you get out and talk to him? You know they don’t like coming to the—”
“Tl go.”
It’s Ruth.
“You don’t even speak the—”
But the door’s open, and she’s gone.
“She hasn’t even got the papers,” I say.
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October/November 1996
Tom shrugs. “She'll be okay.”
After all, this isn’t the first stunt Ruth’s pulled since she arrived down the UN-protected corridor in the back of a Jupiter. She steps gracefully over fallen clumps of power line and fiber optic. And walks right up to the man. He grins.
Ruth and the man talk. She beckons him back to the car. As she turns, I realize from her slow-moving stare that she’s been running all the time, yet still somehow managing to walk, talk, and breathe, to smile that Ruth-smile. To the stubbled guerilla who limps beside her, it all probably just adds to her lovely other-worldliness. She’s a thin dark-haired an- gel—Audrey Hepburn in a flak jacket—and it’s a fine, fine, shoot. Walk- ing right up to a gun-toting guerilla in the middle of a silent, ruined town. The adrenaline rush, the stubble and the sweat-sheen on his face. The smell.
“He speaks English,” Ruth says, leaning down toward the car, blinking herself off. “He says he'll show us the way up to the castle. That is where you want to go, isn’t it, Tom?”
Tom sighs and nods.
The car door swings open, and the man climbs in so he’s wedged be- tween me and Ruth in the back with his gun sticking up between his knees. He gazes at the curve of Ruth’s uptilted throat and the tiny crin- kled scars at the corners of her eyes as she raises the pipette from her eyekit. As the car jerks over a fallen lamppost the saline brims over her lids. Gleaming, it traces the curve of her cheek. Ruth dabs and sniffs.
“Right here,” the communist militiaman says, pointing. “You go there between the buildings.”
Brownstone walls loom. The castle has stood up remarkably well to history. Napoleon and the Ottomans and Frederick the Great and Stalin and Hitler all somehow passed this valley by, whilst the Christians’ big artillery never penetrated far enough to raze the town last autumn and the UN strikes were aimed solely at breaking supply lines to the front. Here, for once, by downing the bridge, they actually achieved that pur- pose.
Tom stops the car. We climb out. The militiaman walks up to some of his colleagues who've emerged from the old ticket booth by the portcullis. Tom goes over to join them. Beside us, there’s an information sign dis- playing the prices of admittance to the castle in four languages. The rock beside it is melted and cratered with laserfire.
We're beckoned. We follow.
Inside the main walls, generators thwack and there’s an old SAM V missile system pointing up at the sky amid the mud and the tents, com- ically exposed and marked with what looks like Hebrew lettering. That’s a new one on me, but I daren’t dawdle too close, and pictures are proba- bly out of the question. Ruth’s blinking, moving, acting normally. They
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obviously haven't twigged to what she is, and there’s no sense in push- ing it.
“You want know about Nazi camp?”
We nod.
Into a tower. Up a stone spiral staircase. High along a battlement above the cliffs, clinging to the handrail in the wind with a hawk soaring below and the countryside spread far and wide to the mountains. Un- tended, the roads, houses and fields are already barely discernable. Everything is fresh, green, and new.
Through a door, a man sits sweating, smoking, drinking as he watches an old VCR from an armchair. The smell in the room comes from him and from the bucket in the corner. He’s got a crooked, nervous smile, big hol- lows for cheeks, an even bigger hole where his left eye should be.
Amazingly, the door shuts again and we're left alone with him. Tom acts as translator and I sit back on a bench in the corner and let things take their course. I’ve been in situations like this before, where out of nowhere you seem to stumble on a big story. It usually ends up as just another set-up.
“He says that he wasn’t wounded before his capture last February. .. .” Tom begins. “He says he half-expected to be shot anyway, but he was taken with the rest of his unit to. . . I think he means the site of an old cinema complex just outside the capital. That’s what? Just forty kils from here. ...”
“Don’t tell me,” I feel compelled to mutter. “The bastards forced him to watch the entire Police Academy series.”
“He was there two months. . .. He wasn’t badly fed. . . . He says the food was better than he gets here... .. No buggerings or beatings. . . .”
The man points to his empty eye socket.
“They took that out first.”
With difficulty, the man stands up. Turning his back to us, he lifts the filthy hem of his T-shirt, on which the just-legible wording commemo- rates the Madonna tour that came here—what?—<an it really be only eight years ago? There’s a neat surgeon’s scar on his back slightly to the side of his spine, where his left kidney would have been.
“They took that out a week or so later. . . .”
He turns to face us and points to his belly. Another scar. Shaped like a happy face smile, it’s just below his navel.
“They took that out next. He thinks about half his lower intestine . . .”
The man lifts the T-shirt further over his bony chest. Another scar.
“Then his right lung. . . .”
I glance at Ruth. She shakes her head—meaning, I assume, poor light, not good for a shoot. But then she takes him by the arm and walks him gently over to where the late morning sunlight pours through the ar- rowslit window. She holds the T-shirt, unsticks it, and lifts it off his body.
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October/November 1996
She says, “Turn off the VCR.”
Tom does so. Aching silence fills the room. Ruth’s staring at the man. Close up, her hands on his sides. Unblinking.
“Ask him .. .” Her voice, so as not to upset the sound balance, is a whis- per. “. . . how he got out.”
I notice there’s another scar at his throat that he hasn’t mentioned, or perhaps doesn’t even know about. The line of healed new flesh is neat and amazingly white.
“He says he pretended to stay under after one of the ops. The surgical and post-op facilities are on a different part of the site, so he knocked out the guy who was wheeling him. Put on his whites and the mask... . And walked out.”
“You believe that?”
“He says the Nationalists are selling spare body parts worldwide... . It’s a big operation. . . . Gets them the money they need to keep busting the sanctions and get arms... .”
“That bit adds up, doesn’t it? They must be getting their funding from somewhere.”
“Ask him what happens if they want a vital organ.”
“He says they kill you.”
He’s trembling, noticeably weaker now than when we first came in. Gently, Ruth turns him, revolving his ravaged body against the daylight. She lifts his arms and you can almost hear the leathery flesh creak. De- spite the ugliness of the moment, there’s something about the way she holds him. ...
“He says they kill you eventually, anyway. They need to get rid of the evidence.”
Ruth blinks herself off, takes a shuddering breath, and helps him back on with his T-shirt. Then, as Tom and I just stand and watch in awkward silence, she half-carries him back to his chair.
“The poor guy... .”
I tell her, “The scars could be anything, Ruth. I mean, the Communists aren't pussies. They could have done it themselves. . . .”
“Ask him if he’ll come back with us to the UNHCR hospital.”
The man shakes his head. Tom has to lean forward to catch the words.
“He says he doesn’t trust doctors.”
Ruth turns the VCR back on for him. Voices fill the room. She lifts the rug back over his legs. “We can’t just . . .” she says, looking up at Tom and me, although I can tell from her eyes that she knows the answer.
I touch her shoulder. “We'd better go.”
Ruth squeezes his hand goodbye and we all shuffle out of the stinking room. Me and Tom, we've learned to live with far worse and still keep our breakfast. You’re not proud of it, but know you have to. You become like the soldiers. You become like the victims.
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And this, after all, and even with so little evidence, could still be big. Murdering doctors. Death camps—a ghost from the past century—white coated demon-angel doctors. But why us? A word to Tom from some teenage militia roadblock guard, and we come here in the Mere and they let us straight in. Surely Communist High Command would want to wheel him out at a press conference, show the world just how evil the Na- tionalists whom they always call Fascists really are? But then, there’s a civil war on here and nothing ever goes to plan. So, let’s say, just for the purposes of argument, that no one here’s made the connection, that the guys in this castle are so wrapped up in their own propaganda that they routinely believe in every atrocity, and hardly think it worth mentioning when some escaped prisoner who's had half his vital organs surgically removed turns up? Or, looking at it another way, perhaps Communist High Command have planned on letting the news trickle out to us. That doesn’t necessarily have to mean it’s a set-up. After all, who believes any- thing that’s said at press conferences any longer? So perhaps they really do want this story to break this way; as our big discovery. Perhaps some- one even knew about Ruth being over and thought that going VR on the story would be a nice final touch. Otherwise, part of me still keeps mut- tering, it’s all too thin, just too much of a coincidence. I mean, maybe if we could go back now, somehow persuade this guy to come with us....
Out of the castle, back into the Merc, we drive down and out of town.
“You got that, Ruth?”
“I think so.” Her voice is faint and she’s staring out of the window, al- most looking as though she’s running although I can tell that she isn’t.
Tom produces one of his big roll-ups. Lights it, inhales like a drain, passes it back. We drive out of town, through the fog. I offer the spliff to Ruth. The air-conditioning’s out, and she buzzes down her window for air and shakes her head.
“Sorry. Is it the smoke? I mean, your eyes...”
“No. It’s just .. . I used to do dope. But it’s too much now, you know. ... It just makes me shake.”
Across the bridge, then back up into the hills. The midday sun. Through the leaves on the trees. A glimpse of a waterfall. A squirrel darts. Across the road ahead. The view back down the valley is wonder- ful. There’s the medieval town. The far tower of that castle on the cliffs where our one-eyed-man waits like Rapunzel. The shimmer of the forest. The mountains clear in the distance.
“Time for a finishing frame,” I suggest to Ruth. “Up there. And we could do lunch.”
We pull in at an old tourist viewpoint.
“Want to eat first? Ruth... ?”
“We'll do the shoot. Try over there.”
“Here?” I stand in the clear sunlight, check the backdrop.
Swimmers Beneath the Skin 8]
October/November 1996
“There. ... Nearly. ... No, I’m getting that litter bin.”
“Here?” Now, I’m right next to the cliff edge. “Two steps back, right?”
Faintly, Ruth smiles. “Say something.”
“One, two...”
Four meters from me, she tilts her head slightly to check for lightflare, windboom, twitch, shake. “That’s fine.” Then pauses. “Are you getting that?”
“What?”
“Listen.”
Carried on the wind, the faint crick-crack of small arms fire.
“That a problem?” I ask.
“No.”
I know, in fact, that shoot-wise, it’s great.
“You know what to say?”
I nod.
“Okay.” She stills herself and seems to stop breathing. “Go.”
“Here, this morning, in the town at my back—’” I turn, point “—we were shown something that, even to those of us who imagine we are used to the senseless horrors of this seemingly unending war, has left us shocked. .. .”
And so on. They'll edit in whatever Ruth’s managed to capture of the guy’s scars as they see fit, or they might save unnecessary jumping if they go for a longer segment and just do it all chronologically. The jour- ney. The castle. Here. Of course, it’s unconfirmed, unattributed, and in my report I keep using words like rumor and alleged. Ruth’s face is fixed and absorbed as IJ talk, a study in poise and unblinking concentration. She needs to keep steady, to focus, to slow and maintain her heart-rate and breathing. I’ve grown used to this with the various jockeys I’ve mind- ed, but there’s still the feeling at the back of my brain that I’m wasting my time. The gridnet was never meant for hard news. The people who fork out money for the suit and the ports and the descrambler cards are more interested in exploring the bumps and crevices of the latest VAR- TEL starlet, fighting the evil gizgons over Ursa Minor, or being Louis XIV in Versailles. But still, and as a handy weapon to use against the state monitors and the moral watch committees, VARTEL and its com- petitors run news menus. They even occasionally risk sending one of their jockeys out to a troublespot. ...
“You might have heard some rifle fire coming from that way—’ I say, concluding “—we’re really not sure as yet what that’s about. But we'll take a look. It could auger badly for the cease-fire. . . . Cut.”
“Okay?” Ruth asks, her face and body relaxing although she still looks tense.
“T should never had said auger... .”
We sit down by the car on an old picnic bench, and eat. There’s crack-
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ers and butter in the trunk, beer and frankfurters, a can of cream to squirt over a can of peaches. After what we’ve seen, we're all shamefully _hungry—even Ruth. And I find, of course, that I’m also looking at her. The curve of her jaw, the dark down at the nape of her neck as she leans forward, the crook in her arm where the silver wire and the vein show close to the surface.
“In the nineteen hundreds, I might choose India,” she says, batting at a fly. The trees whisper. The guns in the distance go crik-crac. “Be a mem- sahib up in a bungalow in the hills. Or maybe even Paris again, with Proust and Ravel, Nijinsky, Debussy. . . .”
“Proust was an asthmatic,” Tom says, his mouth half-full of bread. “He spent years alone in bed, writing in a cork-lined room.”
“Yes, it was a sad time,” Ruth says. “Even Proust, the century’s great- est novelist, was already looking back. And it was the twilight of the British and the Russian Empires, and there was an arms race in Europe, and the Great War lay ahead. Like now, really, I suppose. More the end than the start of everything. .. .”
Afterward, Tom sits down in the car with the doors open and the Brahms Double Concerto blaring to drown out the gunfire while he works on his WP. He keeps cursing because he can’t transmit; there’s some problem with the sat footprint—but Ruth and I, with our work al- ready done, clamber up a huge ancient boulder at the edge of the picnic site, following the grooves and scuff-marks made by ancient glacier-ice and thousands of kids’ sneakers.
At the top, we’re suddenly high, and the treetops bow in the air around us. She sits down crossed-legged like a fairy on a toadstool and folds her hands, closing her eyes and breathing in long and deep through her elfin nose. I squat and wait in my own clumsy fashion, envying the suppleness of her limbs, the ten years she has on me.
“There.” She opens her eyes, exhales, looks around at the horizon, and points. “See the mountain to the east with the dark gap. . . ? We went through the pass there. I mean, me and my Mum, my Dad, in the late nineties. Took the tunnel from England, drove on down and way across France, Germany, and in those days the borders weren’t even there. Stopped at these little hotels on the way.” She smiles. “I remember. . . .”
She shakes her head. The wind lifts her hair and bows the treetops be- low us.
“... That’s what people in the gridnet think when they see all this, isn’t it?” she says. “How nice it once was.”
I nod. I, too, can remember melon vendors on a Mediterranean beach. And the taste of sangria, and the rows of fat bodies carelessly browning. And the white old fort above the town, that, quite by chance and in a dif- ferent century, I watched being strafed widescreen and in quad by a free- lance Moslem MIG. But, even before that, none of it had seemed real.
Swimmers Beneath the Skin 83
October/November 1996
“You've done news before. . . ?”
“Ireland,” she says. “A couple of years ago.”
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
She looks at me with her almond eyes. It’s a stupid question; of course it bothers her. “I’m not afraid,” she says eventually, raising her shoulders as she breathes deep, lifting her chin to the sun. “Even just now, what we saw. But I want people to know.”
I have to smile. Even if Ruth wasn’t wired to the gridnet, there’d be something a little extraordinary about her. But still, I ask the question I always ask.
“What about you, Ruth? Why did you have it done?”
She looks at me, thinking. There never is a straight answer; like the money, which is good without being anything like real compensation; or the fame, which, for the anonymous jockeys whose skin and eyes and ears and limbs the gridnet subscribers enter, is an illusion cooked up by the VR companies. And the technology is far from perfect; the soft-silver wires that grow beneath the skin and flex and change impedance with temperature, pressure, movement; the ear and eye implants; the neces- sary power supplies, data storage and download circuits, all of it adds up to a huge bodily invasion. A jockey once said to me that it was like having a cage of barbed wire inside you. But we were huddled together in muddy jungle rain at the time, waiting for a truck that was already three hours late, and the blood was still trickling out from a cheese-wired rent in his thigh when he said it. Most of the jockeys I’ve met are heavy on endor- phins and keep themselves ferociously fit. Even the off-line periods of rest and re-tuning are scarcely their own. And then there are the cancer scares, and the dreadful images you see of what’s become of those famous early efforts now that they’re getting old. ...
“My dad,” Ruth says, “he did multi-media stuff in his spare time from the Corporation.” She smiles at the memory, and looks back up again at the sun. “He used to have all these screens and midis and sequences puls- ing in a shed in the garden. Cables everywhere. Blues and whites and seabirds keening like an arctic cave. He always said the time would come when we'd all have total control over our environment... .” She catches my smile. “I know that from here that sounds like a joke... .”
I shift my cramped legs on the boulder, and gaze at Ruth.
“Then, I wanted to be a dancer. I mean, that was what I always want- ed. And I was always good, you know? Won all the local prizes. I thought I'd be the new Fonteyn. It didn’t work out that way, of course. I got older. I grew. And I didn’t grow in quite the right ways. I suppose I could have made it in the back rows, but the market was dying out anyway. People don’t listen to real music, they don’t want to risk going out at night to see real people dance. .. .”
“So you chose the gridnet?”
84 lan R. MacLeod
Asimov's
“Someone suggested it. Even then, just a few years back, it was more difficult. Of course, my brother used to have this cheap CASIO suit at home, and I'd had a few goes in it, but I was never really bothered. I was never convinced. I was surprised when all the other jockeys I met said the same thing. Surprised and encouraged. But then you must know that. We’re an odd breed... .”
“Do you enjoy it?” —
“Some of it. White rapid shooting. I loved that. Once, I went toboggan- ing up in the mountains. Jesus, it was fast and lovely and I was scared— and all of that came through. It was in the icon top ten for a while. Even now, they sometimes still run it... .”
Ruth rubs her arms as though she’s trying to get at some itch below the surface and looks away. In the distance, small-arms fire still crackles.
“But it’s a job,” she says, “isn’t it? All those dreams, and you still end up doing a particular something. Everything narrows down. I wanted to know about the world. And I suppose I liked the idea of experiencing it for someone else. For thousands of other people I'll never know... .”
Looking down, I see that Tom’s finished with the WP and is waiting. We slide down off the boulder to join him. He still hasn’t made the sat link, but there'll be plenty of time for that when we get back to the big hardware on the roof at the Holiday Inn. He starts up the Merc. The trees and the hills and the burnt-out houses slip by. The guns are louder now. Not just crik-crac but boom-boom. And I realize that, despite what I'd said through Ruth to the gridnet, I hadn’t seriously imagined that we would actually have to go anywhere near them to get back to the hotel.
Tom stops the car on the crest of a hill. The regional capital is visible through the greenly shimmering afternoon. The river. The bypass. The big, empty, shell-holed supermarket. Ruth’s window is down. The guns are still crackling.
“I thought you said the snarl-up was three villages east?”
“I did. They must have moved.”
“But this is...” What? The cease-fire zone? Since when did we start be- lieving?
“Just keep driving.”
“Hey i:<'s%
The thunder of a jet. We look out and up, expecting something high, one of the UN recon drones. But the sound is closing, and a black dart is racing loud and low and fast down the valley. Tom and I, we jump out of the car and tumble down the verge. We peer over the nettles as a dart- shaped shadow leaps over the trees and fields and the roofless houses. I look for Ruth beside me, but she’s still back up the slope, standing right by. the roadside where there’s a clear view of the jet. And the shadow is tilting, turning up the side of the valley, following the road toward the open-doored Merc in what, even with the fractional delay between pilot
Swimmers Beneath the Skin 85
October/November 1996
and computer, computer and satellite, satellite and plane, would be a bone-crushing maneuver if the pilot were actually in there. And the en- gine tone is changing. Everything is happening fast and in slow motion.
There’s no doubt now that the jet has seen the car. And Ruth’s just standing there by it. Watching. Running. Panning.
The sound breaks in incredible thunder over us, and the jet goes by with burners glowing, fins raising stripes of vapor as it banks at an in- credible angle back along the valley. All radar-slewing angles and su- perblack paint. No markers, and we were just being buzzed.
Ruth’s face is flushed.
“Did you see that!”
Tom and I clamber back up to join her.
“Did you feel it?”
My feet are soaked, and my hands and the back of one leg are on fire from the nettles. Ruth does a vista shoot to front-and-back the stored im- age of the jet, then she blinks and re-focuses, and I say a few words shaky to head-frame, although I know they'll probably be edited out. The guns ahead are less frequent now, but even allowing for the way the sound car- ries in these valleys when the clouds close in, those still firing are closer than ever. And now we can also hear the unmistakable rumble of cater- pillar tracks on tarmac....
We clamber back into the Merc. Tom drives on down the road. The su- perblack jet’s still rumbling, circling, passing between the hills, and the guns ahead are still firing. Crik-crac boom-boom. Insects are droning. There’s a smell of grass and woodland and diesel oil. We pass the red flag and the upturned Datsun that marked the Communist checkpoint this morning, but there’s no one there now and the grey clouds are thicken- ing, closing in for rain.
We reach the town just as the first drops fall, chasing the dust down the Merc’s windows and drumming fingers on the roof. Nationalist tanks and APCs are squatting in the main squares, and I can see illegal or pre- sanctions American and Chinese exports, all of them with that black- white-red logo—one of those things that looks almost exactly like a swastika without actually being one—for which they really must have to buy, when you think about it, one hell of a lot of paint. Huddled in their raincloaks or sheltered in broken shop windows, the UN soldiers look on as Nationalist Jeeps and Subarus grow! and hiss along the gleaming streets. So much, then, for the cease-fire zone, but without a new man- date there’s not much else these guys can do. There’s a glimpse of figures clustered over what might be a body down a narrow street, but most of the firing is up in the air. It’s hard, anyway, to believe that the National- ists will have caught many of the Communist militiamen they’ve always alleged are hiding under the thin cover of the UN umbrella. They'll most- ly have run for the hills at the first whiff of trouble.
86 lan R. MacLeod
Asimov's
Our route takes us past the old soccer stadium where the team, when there was a team, once had a good run in the European Championship; when there was a European Championship. There’s a line of old tourist coaches parked outside, at least a dozen, down on their tires. In English, French, German, their fading paintwork still promises Air-Conditioning, Personal TV Screens, Reclining Seats, a Toilet.
Ruth keeps her window up—it’s striped with condensation, but she’s running anyway. Grey and white, the scene already looks unreal, like an old James Whale film. The sky is rumbling like a leaden door, but when I look up, expecting flashes of light to be playing over the hills, I see that it’s the superblack jet, still zooming, buzzing, circling the town.
A small crowd of locals have gathered outside the fence that surrounds the Holiday Inn. Faces push, arms wave, but there isn’t much sense of hope. We also have to stand out in the rain as the Merc is belatedly searched. A Nationalist captain calls us over, looks at our papers, ticks us off some list. There is, he informs us with a look almost of sorrow, a to- tal ban on all newsgathering and communication until the town has been