Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  When she died, the alien virus died with her. The doctor handed me the suicide note. “She didn’t want to take the chance of transmitting it to you. Even though there was no chance. She knew that, but . . .” He didn’t finish.

  I took the note. With my other hand I took from him my teragauss field sterilizer. Positioned at Cassie’s head, it had created for a brief moment such an intense magnetic field that the atoms of her brain had let go, collapsing into slimy jelly punctured by fragments of clean bone. The instrument, its fist-sized case made of a duraplas immune to magnetism, felt cool and hard under my fingers. A strand of Cassie’s black hair curved down from the handle, the shining tail of a comet already lost against the sun.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said.

  “Yes,” I said. The teragauss sterilizer had gone back in my tool case. I had gone into space, working freighters until after two years I came to Kelvin, whose tiny Basic Humanitarian colony thought it needed a life support engineer.

  The shuttle skimmed over the thirteen klicks between the scientific compound and the one human “city” on Kelvin. Rachel chatted composedly with the rest of the over-dressed scientists, half of them watching her slyly for signs of drama; that was the half who had seen the holovid of Rage. I couldn’t stand to look at them, so I held Rachel’s hand and stared at the ground below.

  There was nothing much to see except limp, shoulder-high trees mottled with the all-pervasive nonfungs, sliced by the freight road connecting the compound to the city. Whatever engineer had laid the road had known what he was doing. It was a good job, serviceable even after three generations of use. I watched it all the time I tried to figure out yet again why Justin Harbatu had chosen to perform on Kelvin.

  It made no sense. Harbatu was an actor. Actors of his stature did not make unenhanced holovids, nor the public appearances at which they were filmed. Actors of his stature made either enhanced holovids or direct-interface brainies—both of which were of course illegal among Basic Humanitarians. Even the equipment for the simplest enhanced holovid—the audience brain-wave scanners, the feed-backs for scent and light and sub-audios—were illegal. What Harbatu was allowed to do on Kelvin was, essentially, to stand on a stage and talk, with pre-set music and pheromones behind him. That was it. Anything else was to rape the Basic Humanitarian skull, on the inside of which was engraved “The human mind supreme, untainted.”

  So why had he come?

  There was Rachel, of course. But he had seen Rachel a few months ago, on the first loop of this tour, right after I met her. She hadn’t been interested in seeing him then; she wasn’t now.

  “Someone should tell him,” she had said, “that the mark of the minor artist is always strain.”

  “You tell him.”

  “He wouldn’t believe me. He calls it something else.” Rachel licked her fingers; we had been eating something sticky, something forgotten. She looked up at me and smiled. “He calls it passion.”

  I smiled, remembering; Rachel leaned towards my ear and whispered, “What could possibly be funny on this stupid shuttle?”

  I shook my head and pointed at the Auditorium below.

  It stood on a slight rise at the far end of the city. Someone had told me that it was the first non-essential building the original settlers had put up. I could believe it. The Basic Humanitarians had rejected a century of space-colony alloys and construction techniques in order to build a Terran Greek temple out of crumbly gray stone, complete with four columns and a frieze. Blue nonfungs mottled the columns and cancered over the stone, eating slowly clear down to the structural supports. Silhouetted against the filthy sky that diluted the light from three moons into watery urine, the Auditorium looked like an outhouse. I had never heard anywhere of original settlers who were not humorless romantics, but this was the far end of a bell-shaped curve. All by itself, the Auditorium went far towards explaining Andrew Lemke.

  He was inside, prowling among the off-worlders who had come in on Harbatu’s ship. Crew, colonists, and scientists milled in artificial camaraderie.

  “Christ,” Rachel said, “there’s Kleinstadt. The Governor. A black hole if there ever was one.”

  “He’s coming this way. Shall I dent his Schwarzchild radius for you?”

  “Behave yourself, Jake. He can throw us both off-planet.”

  I thought it was an odd thing for her to say; the scientific research on Kelvin was funded completely by the Corps, and the colonists could only interfere if the compound threatened their colonizing. Kleinstadt bore down on us, picking up Lemke on the way.

  “Rachel, my dear,” Kleinstadt boomed. “You must be so proud of being queen of a Justin Harbatu live performance.”

  “We’ve all waited so long to see this,” Lemke purred.

  Rachel’s smile was iron. Kleinstadt prided himself on being more cosmopolitan than most Basic Humanitarians; it made him feel daring. Once he had even been off-planet. Years ago he had tried to marry a technician from the compound; she had declined. With his gray tunic he wore an orange necklace.

  From across the room I saw someone I could actually have talked with: Jameson, the Security chief at the compound. He stood in rumpled, outdated dress robes, looking as if he wished he were somewhere else. But then he caught sight of Rachel, and I saw the hungry expression on his face a bare moment before it vanished. That was something I hadn’t known.

  “What is this new work Justin is going to perform?” Kleinstadt asked genially. I would have bet my hydrogen torch that Harbatu was unaware of having become “Justin.”

  “Here I am set to introduce him and he won’t tell me even the title until the last second. All he will say is that it was created since his ship stopped here on the first leg of his tour. But surely he would have told you!”

  “Afraid not,” Rachel said. “Shall we sit down?”

  Just before we took our seats, I whispered to her, “We don’t have to stay.”

  She didn’t even answer me.

  There was a long wait before the lights dimmed and Kleinstadt strode on stage. He looked pale. I saw him glance out over the audience, as if he were looking for someone—Rachel?—and for a disbelieving moment I thought he would announce that Harbatu would perform scenes from Rage. But he did not.

  Kleinstadt cleared his throat. “We are privileged to present to you tonight the galactic premiere of a new . . . a new concert, created in the months since we were . . . privileged to have Justin Harbatu last visit Kelvin. I say ‘privileged’ advisedly, and with two meanings.” He was sweating. “Privileged first because this work is the first Justin Harbatu has created to honor Basic Humanitarian principles: ‘The human mind supreme, untainted.’ Privileged second because this work is the first . . . the first human celebration of our cousins in life, the Sha.”

  All over the room, bodies drew rigid. Kleinstadt fumbled on.

  “There exists on Kelvin that understanding, that brotherhood, great enough to let us appreciate our sentient brothers across the gulf that must exist between any two peoples alien to each other. That brotherhood is made the more precious, the more poignant, by the tragedy befalling our fellow sufferers in the universe—”

  Like the politician he was, Kleinstadt had regained his sonorous tones. The colonists sat like stone. They had given their lives to what they thought it meant to be human; an honored outsider was now going to impose on them what it meant to be Sha. I saw two of the technicians from the compound exchange amused glances. Beside me, Rachel’s thigh felt like stone.

  “—fellow sufferers who face, as humanity once faced, the issue of their own self-destruction. Having triumphed over such a burden, having thrown it off, we can perhaps reach out to help our sentient brothers within the Humanitarian protection of our science. We can certainly reach out with our fellowship, and our tears. And so it is with incalculable gratitude that I welcome to Kelvin the one artist capable of that reaching out, as no other performer of our time could do. Justin Harbatu, performing his new concert: Cannibal
s.”

  Harbatu walked out onto the stage.

  Behind him, the opaquing dissolved and three Sha musicians began to play their weird, repetitive music on instruments of wood and bone. I had heard the music before—when all three moons were down I had heard it all one endless night—but I had never heard it in the presence of Kelvin’s colonists. Nor of Justin Harbatu. Light came up behind him—there may have been scent too, I couldn’t tell—and in the irregular spaces between the notes of Sha music Harbatu began to speak.

  None of his holovid classics had captured the sheer personal presence of the man. It was more than the presence of the actor, more than the huge bulk and the famous eyes: glowing, startling green. Rumor said the eyes were alien implants; official counter-rumor said that was not possible. After thirty seconds, it didn’t matter. After Kleinstadt, Harbatu looked real, alive, and through him came alive the Sha.

  His words were not poetry, although that antiquated art gasped once again on Kelvin. His words were just that: words, the only possible words to give us the Sha and their lives, before: the soft yielding stalks of the forest, the village, the hearth. The air thick and cradling as blankets. The grubs in their safehouses, soft damp mounds of fur and plants in a ring around the hearth. A young maturant clinging to coarse fur. The children. The words to bridge how that felt to humans, felt to Sha.

  Only I wasn’t feeling the words, I was feeling the Sha, and I was watching Harbatu hold his body still with some terrible control that he could not make extend to his eyes, and that was the measure of its terribleness.

  He spoke of when it changed.

  Against the thin tattered music, Harbatu’s phrases rose and fell. He described what I had seen that afternoon, and I knew I had not seen it at all. Cannibals. I had seen the ugliness, the obscenity, and had wanted to slam it into extinction. What I had not seen was the woman, the children. What it meant to her as centuries of evolution failed and her own grubs closed their suckers on her living flesh.

  Picture after picture pinned behind my eyes.

  The musicians played, not understanding the human words, and finally I could not take my eyes from them. Their dark, circular eyes did not watch Harbatu, did not watch anything at all. Lost.

  Then, abruptly, after so long in stillness, Harbatu’s body shifted, a graceless jutting of pelvis, a wrench of shoulders. The lights changed, the music changed—I don’t know how. It wasn’t Sha music. I couldn’t feel where it was coming from. The light opaqued the Sha musicians and did something else, something that hit like a blow. Harbatu’s voice followed it harshly. The audience, amputated too quickly from the first movement, jerked. A woman in front of me whimpered.

  Harbatu threw the words at us, in syncopated phrases contemptuous of the vulnerability he himself had created. The contempt was worse than any direct accusation: I was guilty without knowing of what, and I fell into the guilt as into a gravity well, the smash looming up at me from below. No one moved. There was no escape. Harbatu built it slowly. The child crawling from between the legs, and the vomit rising like despair, and the dark eyes watching as the mouths closed—

  Harbatu was saying that the Sha cannibalism had come to Kelvin with the human settlers.

  The woman in front of me gasped. A man half-rose in his seat and then sank back. Harbatu fixed his gaze on us out of that dangerous light and no one else moved—except Rachel.

  It took me a moment to realize she was gone. Only that could have pulled me from the auditorium. I stumbled after her. Outside, I saw that my arms still flailed weakly. What was I fighting off?

  Harbatu’s voice.

  I breathed deep. It hurt, as if the moonlight were acid being drawn into my lungs. As my head cleared it began to pound. Thought struggled through the pounding: Harbatu used illegal subliminals.

  Rachel had strode to the bottom of the hill and stood leaning against the stone base of a statue of a colonist, it’s silly commemorative posturing mottled with the same blue nonfungs as the building. Her left hand gripped the stone hard enough to turn the knuckles white. She turned to face me.

  “He had no right.”

  “Rachel, it didn’t—it didn’t happen that way. Did it?”

  She hesitated, and in the space of that hesitation she seemed to physically flicker.

  “No,” Rachel said. “It didn’t happen that way.”

  “Tell me.”

  She didn’t answer. I gripped her by the shoulders. “Tell me.”

  “The absence of the enzyme showed up before the original human team. That’s to a .05 confidence level. The only doubt is because . . .” she shook her head to clear it, “because the equations have to allow for the Sha’s having so little sense of time that it’s hard to be sure about what they give us, and because there was the usual time lapse in learning the language. But that’s not the point about the drivel he was wallowing in!”

  I didn’t see how that could not be the point. Rachel’s eyes were enormous and curiously filmed—what kind of subliminals had Harbatu used? Pheromones, subaudios—the whole arsenal, somehow, of mind-benders just short of direct interface. I didn’t see how else he could have sucked me into that much emotion. I writhed at the memory of sitting in that Auditorium.

  Rachel was watching me closely. She slipped free from my grasp and closed her fingers on my arm, and I could feel grit from the statue between her palm and my skin.

  “It’s not the point. It’s not. Don’t you see what he did? This accusation against humans is no worse than the rest of it. He exploits it—all of it. That bleeding compassion for the tragedy of the Sha—what does he know of the tragedy of the Sha? He spent two weeks here once, and never learned enough Sha to give a ritual greeting. He feeds on it, swells himself with this ‘horror’ that never touched him personally, and then spews it back to us sodden with easy compassion.”

  I saw the musicians’ eyes.

  Rachel said, “He has no right to that suffering, not even artistically. It is not his. He hasn’t earned it.”

  She turned her face away from me. Moonlight slid over her hair. I wanted to walk away, escape this, think straight somewhere else. This was not Rachel.

  “Rachel, artists have always—”

  “No. This is different. None of us have a right to this, the death of a whole race. It’s obscene, Jake. Do you think he really did that to all those people without feedback equipment? It’s there, somehow, somewhere, miniaturized—I don’t know. How long since any of us have seen state-of-the-art equipment in this backwater? He may even have used illegal pheromones. You saw that audience, paralyzed—he wants that for the holovid. Reaction shots.” Her face twisted into ugly ridges. “ ‘Look, look, world—see what Justin Harbatu can do to an audience even when they’re Basic Humanitarians!’ God—the cameras spent more time filming them than him, and in holo it will look . . . he manipulated our responses until they were as artificial as his emotion. He fed off us, as much as off the Sha!”

  I had forgotten the cameras. What had my face shown?

  Rachel raced on, the ridges on her face contorting into snaking lines. “His engineers will put together a performance that will break your heart. Then it will go out over the entire sector, billed as the first performance from a Basic Humanitarian colony, and two dozen worlds will file genocide protests with the Corps. They’ll shut us down. They’ll have to, from political pressure, no matter how the figures compare with the biological risk humans bring to any world we touch. Do you know what that risk is, Jake? Do you?”

  I couldn’t speak. Her intensity hammered behind my forehead; her eyes bored into me.

  “Six percent. In six percent of the worlds we touch, we destroy something biological. Something major. Here we have a chance to save something, and he will stop us. He’ll stop us because his transcendent art is worth more than just truth. Truth doesn’t hold up to impassioned holovids, especially when they’re created by my father.”’

  She said the two words softly, white hot. I stepped back.

>   “But not this time, Jake. Not like when . . . not this time. He’s not going to destroy the Sha, or the work I’ve done here, either. Let him feed off somebody else’s pain.”

  She had not let go of my arm. Her face leaned into mine and her breath scorched me. It smelled stale, as if she had been sleeping a long time. It was that, more than all the rest of it, that brought the panic rising along my spine and made me reach for the crudest thing I could have said.

  “I never saw the resemblance between you two before.”

  Rachel’s eyeo widened. She dropped my arm. For a moment her face broke up, went to pieces. Then it was her own again, controlled and smooth, and she strode away from me around the statue, towards the parked shuttle. I did not follow her. No look she wore now would wipe the image of that other face: relentless, fierce, passionate beyond all reason.

  Not Harbatu’s, although that was what Rachel thought I meant.

  She left the moonlit path and the darkness devoured her.

  The next day, the water purification system malfunctioned; nearly simultaneously, everyone in the compound developed diarrhea. The malfunction was easy to find, harder to repair with the limited electronic and mechanical parts inventory. My immediate predecessor, like Andrew Lemke a colonist wanting to be something else, either had not known what he was doing, or had come to not care. The maintenance assistant I inherited from him was shitting his guts out. Overload on the sewage refiltering strained most of the generations-old life support system in one way or another, and I worked twenty-hour days for a week, much of it at the antiquated water purification plant by the river. Bioengineered filter bacteria would have solved the problem in a day.

  I did not see Rachel. But information filtered through, floating to me in semi-broken particles, osmosis through the clean barrier of work.

  Harbatu and his technical team were editing Cannibals, sequestered in the visitors’ hotel. Kleinstadt had introduced a colony law banning concerts not previously viewed by a member of the Basic Humanitarian Council. Lemke had said outright that Harbatu had used illegal pheromones.