To Kiss or To Kill

by Jean Lorrah

  Some Simes believed that it was not a good system—Jonmair had heard the Householders’ claims that it was economic and ecological folly to use a Gen only once. Out West whole territories were collapsing because, despite Gens being bred to Gens on vast Genfarms, there were not enough to go around. But that couldn’t happen here in Gulf Territory, with its healthy climate and wealth of resources.

  But then, she would not live to see if it did.

  Jonmair stared at her naked arms. They would always be so. She would never have the convenient, efficient tentacles that graced Sime wrists, never have Sime senses, speed, strength, or balance.

  Who would want to live as a Gen? She would not fight her fate. When she was chosen, she would go with her head high, proud to provide life to a Sime in Need.

  Nevertheless, when the lock of her cell door turned, her stomach gave a lurch of fear. See? she told herself. That is what it means to be Gen. But she forced the fear away. If this is my time, I will not be dragged kicking and screaming. I will go with outer dignity, no matter what Simes may be able to read in my nager.

  “All right—come on now,” the penkeeper told her. “Got customers lookin’ fer somethin’ special today.”

  He hooked a lightweight chain to the collar around her neck, but Jonmair did not resist.

  At least she would not die like the pitiful Pen Gens. Jonmair was a Choice Kill, a self-aware Gen who would provide an extra thrill to whoever chose her. Her price would be high, far beyond the tax assessment that permitted each citizen to claim an ordinary Pen Gen each month. She would go to someone with wealth and prestige.

  Two other female Gens were brought out and herded toward the display chamber. One of them was a Wild Gen, an illegal rarity. The Choice Kills were not permitted to talk to one another, so Jonmair had not been able to find out even if the Wild Gen knew enough Simelan to tell them her story.

  Jonmair’s parents had always prevented her from staring at Householding Gens. She had never had a good look at a mature Gen before. This one was not old—not as old as Jonmair’s mother, she was sure—but she appeared to be older than Jonmair. She had the fabled Gen physique, rounded flesh on arms, legs, hips. Her breasts—obvious, like those of a pregnant Sime woman, although she was not pregnant—seemed almost obscene. If I lived, would I develop into something like that? Jonmair wondered.

  Partially healed whip cuts showed that the Wild Gen had fought her captors, perhaps tried to escape. Now, though, she was pale and empty-eyed, plodding in the direction she was prodded without protest or even care.

  The other Gen was young, like Jonmair, but she had succumbed to her Genness. Tears streaked her face, and she snuffled loudly as she stumbled through the corridor to the display room. She shied away from Old Chance, the penkeeper, and toward the other Gens. Jonmair whispered, “You’re going to be killed no matter what—so act like a human being!”

  Chance shoved his whip between them. “Shut up!” he said to Jonmair, threatening to hit her but not doing so when she looked calmly back at him and did not answer. The frightened Gen scrambled away from both Jonmair and Chance. As they entered the display room she cowered as far from the customers as her chain allowed.

  Jonmair stood tall. While the keeper prodded the other Gens into place, she mounted the platform and looked at the two customers.

  Both were Sime, of course. They were male, one old, one young. Only female Choice Kills had been brought out. Were these jaded Simes who bought their Kills a month early, used them as sexual playthings, and then killed them at the end of the month? Her stomach clenched again—she had been counting on a quick, clean death.

  At least one of these Simes, the younger one, was in hard Need of selyn. He would have no interest in a woman until after he had killed. And the older man did not even look at the Gens as they entered—his attention was all on the younger Sime.

  So was Jonmair’s—she had seen him somewhere before, and yet she did not know his name.

  “Dad, this scheme won’t work!” the younger man said wretchedly.

  “We won’t know until we’ve tried, will we?” his father replied. “Baird, nothing else has helped. I won’t let you give up. I want you to be happy—and I want grandchildren.”

  “It’s an old wive’s tale!” Baird protested. When he turned away from his father, it brought him to face the three female Gens. Incidentally, the move placed him under the skylight, where the light emphasized his strong features.

  Something stirred in Jonmair’s breast, choking her heart for a moment with the sheer beauty of the man in contrast to the pain he was feeling. Now she knew him: he was the man who had saved her little sister the day before Jonmair’s life changed forever. The one who had stolen her mother’s Gen.

  So it was exactly three months. Not only was he in Need again, a state every Sime suffered every month, but an emotional weight lay on his shoulders that Jonmair could not fathom, but recognized—she could not for the life of her have said how.

  Baird was taller than his father, but his clothes hung a bit too loose, and she could see in his corded forearms that he lacked some of the flesh even a Sime should carry. She remembered the haunted look in his eyes that day in Norlea’s square. Whatever had troubled him then had worsened in the past three months. Both Need and stress caused Simes to virtually stop eating. Living on selyn alone was possible for a considerable time—but it was not a healthy option.

  What Jonmair saw in Baird’s eyes now was the dull overcast of chronic pain. Emotional pain, she guessed, for other than weight loss he showed no sign of physical illness.

  “I can’t do this,” he protested to his father again.

  “You won’t be able to help yourself. Old Chance has heard the same wisdom I have, Son—we’re both sure this will work for you. Now...pick one of the Gens.”

  Stiffly, Baird studied the three females. Jonmair could see that even on the ragged edge of Need, he was only looking, not using the Sime senses that would tell him so much more. Gray eyes moved from the Wild Gen to the cringing frightened girl, and then came to rest on Jonmair.

  “Zlin them!” Baird’s father said in annoyance.

  Both Jonmair and the frightened girl had grown up among Simes—both should have been equally accustomed to Sime tentacles. It was only the tiny moist laterals that Baird allowed to slip out of their sheaths on either side of his wrists—the delicate sensing organs that allowed Simes to read a Sime’s or a Gen’s field of life energy, and any emotions carried in that nager.

  In the same order as his gaze had moved over them, Baird extended those vulnerable organs toward the Wild Gen, then the crying girl, who cringed as if they had touched her. But when they turned toward Jonmair, she...felt something.

  No, she couldn’t feel anything except her own emotions. She was Gen, blind to the shifting ambient nager. She would never have the senses that Simes relied on to know the world.

  Yet...it was as if she sensed his Need, his frustration, his despair—and her heart went out to him.

  Baird gasped, and withdrew his laterals.

  But his father had been zlinning, too. “That one!” he said to the keeper, pointing to Jonmair.

  “Good choice,” agreed Old Chance.

  “No,” Baird whispered, but there was no conviction in his protest.

  “Yes,” said his father, smiling in satisfaction. “It’ll set you up, Son.” Then to the keeper, “You understand the agreement?”

  “Yes, Tuib Axton!” the penkeeper replied confidently. “If it don’t work, you pay only for the Kill.”

  As father and son left, Old Chance came over to Jonmair. A strange sense of unreality settled over her. This, then, is the day that I die. At least I feel Baird Axton will do something worthy with the life I give him.

  Attendants led the other Choice Kills out of the display room. Chance looked Jonmair up and down, not zlinning, and nodded. “Listen, Gen—you got a chance don’t come t’most. You do right by me, and by that young man, an’ you kin stay ali
ve fer months, mebbe years. You understand me?”

  Jonmair didn’t, but the only way she dared respond was, “Yes, Tuib Chance.” What could he mean, stay alive? Baird Axton was going to kill her, and that would be the end of it.

  Chance took Jonmair’s chain and led her from the display room through a different door, into an area of the pen she had never been in before. “You ever seen a Kill?” he asked.

  “Yes, Tuib Chance.” She dared not elaborate, explain that she had seen this very man kill before.

  “Good, good—’cause yer gonna watch Tuib Baird take his Kill today. An’ yer not gonna get all upset and scream and cry and ruin it all—you understand?”

  He gave a tug on the chain that almost pulled her over, but Jonmair managed once more to gasp, “Yes, Tuib Chance.”

  But she didn’t understand, not at all.

  The section of the pen Chance took her into now was completely different from the utilitarian holding cells. Instead of plain painted wood, the walls were white plaster with stenciled green borders. Soft green curtains hung at the window at the end of the corridor. He steered her into a bathroom tiled in green and white, with big white fluffy towels hanging on a lacquered wooden rack.

  Chance unclipped the chain from Jonmair’s collar. “Git in there and shower,” he told her. “Wash yer hair—I want you smellin’ real good when thet boy is post—understand?”

  Suddenly Jonmair did. It was not her life that Baird Axton was to take today. It was her virginity.

  No! something inside her protested. I don’t want to live on for a few weeks or months, offering perverted pleasure to men who get some kind of kick out of sex with Gens!

  Chance, of course, zlinned her change of mood. He leaned close to her, saying, “Listen, Gen—you give me no trouble so far, so I been treatin’ you good. You don’t cooperate today, don’t expect to be handed over fer a nice clean Kill. You spoil this, an’ I’ll sell you straight into Shandy’s place. You know what goes on there?”

  Cowardice was indeed inevitable in a Gen. Much as she wished to defy him, Jonmair felt a bolt of fear strike through her at the idea of Shandy’s place. She didn’t know the whole of what went on there...but she did know it was frequented by the most jaded of Simes. They never took simple Kills, but tortured Gens into quivering objects of pain and terror, making death a welcome release.

  Whatever she might have to do with Baird Axton, it would not involve torture. Nevertheless, she swallowed down bitter shame as she responded, “Yes, Tuib Chance. If you please, Tuib...what am I supposed to do?”

  “Good girl,” Chance told her, as if she were a skittish horse. “I’ll tell ya—but scrub down first.”

  It was the first hot shower Jonmair had had since being taken from her home. When she closed her eyes, the feel of the water, the smell of the soap, brought back unwelcome memories of the life she had once known, the future she had once thought was hers.

  My parents didn’t trust me not to try to join the perverts in the Householdings, Jonmair thought sadly. And for the thousandth time she wondered, had someone informed her that she had begun to produce selyn...would she have run for Householding Carre and pled for sanctuary?

  Maybe I would have run for the border, came the thought that had cycled through her mind ever since her parents had handed her over to Old Chance. But she knew the futility of that idea. Here in Norlea, the nearest boundary with Gen Territory was the Mizipi River—how could she possibly have gotten across?

  Ever since the founding of Householding Carre, Gens who found out that they had established selyn production had made the coward’s choice of trying to reach the Householding, even if it meant a life of perversion. Little wonder her parents had not risked such shame to their family.

  Still...they could have told me it had happened. Maybe it wouldn’t have seemed so bad, coming from Mama or Dad. At least they would have acknowledged that I was still their daughter, that I was still...human.

  The shower spray hid her tears at the thought, but Old Chance would not let her linger once the soap was washed away. As he prepared her for her destiny, he told her a story she had never expected to hear: Baird Axton, that outward example of the perfection of Sime manhood, had almost become a Householding pervert himself!

  Baird, it seemed, had fallen very ill as a boy. In last-ditch desperation, his father had taken him to Carre, for the one thing that made people tolerate the Householders was their healing ability...although some people feared their powers might be due to the forbidden magic of the Ancients.

  The channels had indeed healed Baird, but at the cost of instilling their propaganda. The boy had told his father that he wanted to live without killing. Tuib Axton was too smart to make an issue of it with a child—but when Baird went into changeover, the process of becoming a Sime, his father refused to take him to the Householding or call one of their perverted channels to his home. When the boy’s tentacles broke free and he was presented with a Gen, he did what a Sime was supposed to: he killed it, draining it of life force so that he could be strong and graceful and free.

  But instead of being proud to be Sime, Baird was ashamed of having killed. Once he had changed over, he was an adult under the law, and his father could not prevent him from going to Householding Carre the next month, to get his supply of selyn from a channel instead of killing a Gen.

  “He learnt,” Old Chance chuckled as he roughly toweled Jonmair’s thick burgundy-colored hair, “oh, yeah—he learnt what them perverts do. He had selyn to live for another month, but he had no spark, no vigor. Ya gotta kill to feel really alive.”

  That was what Jonmair’s parents always said. If nature had not intended Simes to kill Gens, then Gens would not have that inborn fear that attracted the Sime in Need and capped off the Kill in a way that put the Sime in perfect health and spirits for another month.

  Baird Axton, torn between his belief that the Householders were right and the demands of his Sime nature for the Kill, tried to find in Householding methods the satisfaction the channels told him would come if he persevered. Every month he went to Carre for what the channels called “transfer,” and returned home replete with selyn, but lacking in life.

  As Simes put it, Baird did not experience post-syndrome, the heady sense of health and well-being that a Sime was supposed to get from a Kill. And without post-syndrome...he had no sex drive.

  The Axtons ran one of the finest entertainment establishments in Norlea, called, in fact, The Post. People came to dine, to dance, to gamble, and to sample the variety of delights a Sime could experience at the monthly peak of good feeling. While his experiments with channel’s transfer continued, not only was Baird Axton’s presence a blight on the customers’ enjoyment, but the day came when his experiment in Householding perversion ended in a public scandal.

  Jonmair did not have to listen to Old Chance’s version of what had happened three months ago: she had been there when the son and heir of one of Norlea’s most prominent families disgraced himself in the public square.

  * * * *

  “WHAT IF SHE KNOWS?” BAIRD AXTON ASKED HIS FATHER. “She seemed to recognize me. If that girl is from Norlea, she’ll know who I am and what I did.”

  “Girl?” said Treavor Axton. “It’s not a girl—it’s a Gen. Stop that shenned Householding thinking! Baird, you’ll never be normal till you stop thinking of Gens as people.”

  “Then why do you want me to have sex with one?” Baird demanded.

  “It’s the only way I know!” his father admitted wretchedly. “Son—you’re my only heir since your sister died fighting the Freebanders.” Baird zlinned his father’s sorrow, exacerbated by the fact that Elendra had died with Gulf’s army, far away, and they had not been able to bury her in the family mausoleum. To make matters worse, she had been dead for over two months, her grave somewhere in the foothills of the Western Mountains, before they had received the news.

  It had come just after Baird’s changeover, and made him even more determined to live
without the Kill, as his sister had reported many soldiers were learning to do. In the letters she sent to her father, she said they had to do it to conserve selyn...but in her letters to her little brother she had encouraged him in his intention to live nonjunct.

  I am learning to know Gens, little Bear, she had written in her last letter, not knowing her pet name for him was no longer appropriate since he had already reached their father’s height. The leaders of this combined army are both Sime and Gen—and the Gens are as human as you or me. You already knew that, Baird, but I could not let myself know it until I fought side by side with them against the Raiders. You’ve made the right decision, and now I’ve made it, too. I’ve talked to the channels. I will not kill again.

  She hadn’t...because as it turned out, Elendra died in battle less than a week after she wrote that last letter, leaving Baird the only surviving Axton of his generation.

  “You will carry on the family business,” his father was saying, “and you must carry on the family as well. This,” he shrugged, gesturing at the trappings of the Choice Pen about them, “is private, and will be forgotten. The Gen you picked will go to someone else as a Choice Kill, and I’ll see to it Old Chance keeps his mouth shut. Heh! I could report that Wild Gen he showed us, and set him up for shedoni.”

  Deep into Need, Baird barely controlled a shudder at the mention of the worst of all punishments under Sime law: to be caged as a public spectacle for all to zlin, while dying of attrition—the denial of selyn, of life itself.

  But no one would report Old Chance. He was too useful and, Baird suspected, knew too many equally damning things about all his customers for them ever to risk his being questioned by the authorities.

  If this insane scheme actually worked, there would be no scandal concerning Baird Axton bedding a Gen. Nothing to add to the scandal he himself had caused.

  The shameful scene in Norlea’s square was as vivid in Baird’s mind as if it were happening today. Even three months later and deep into Need, he felt guilt at what he had done that day—not only taking a Kill in a public street, but stealing that Kill from another citizen....