Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Had it been any other scientist, he might have been listened to.

  Rachel had visited her father the day after his performance. A short visit, osmosis murmured. Behind closed doors, osmosis murmured. No shouting, osmosis murmured. Rachel left with a face as blank and cold as when she went in.

  I bent closer over my valves and pipes and circuit boards.

  When I looked up, Ta-Nin stood watching me. I glanced sharply over my shoulder—I had left the door open. Hadn’t Rachel said something about lone Sha being unwilling to enter human buildings without their sisters? But here she was, bare huge feet splayed over the damp floor, blinking at me. I had seen no Sha since the concert.

  “Hello,” I said. Stupidly.

  She answered with a burst of gibberish like rocks scraping together. I nodded, smiled, and pointed towards the door.

  Ta-Nin scraped some more. I walked over and took her firmly by the elbow, steering her towards the door. To my surprise, she broke free—I had not thought her that strong—and planted herself firmly. Staring up from the level of my waist, she rubbed her flabby belly. I smelled the stale mildew of her skin, and looked down into the dark circular eyes.

  “I don’t have any food.”

  She tilted her head, looked at me stupidly, and went on rubbing her belly. I tried to pantomime “no food,” shaking my head and pointing to my mouth and cupping empty hands and feeling a total idiot. She went on rubbing the drooping rolls of fat beneath her flat chest. Then I got it.

  “You’re pregnant.”

  She tilted her head some more, and something moved in those dark eyes.

  I dropped her elbow. Uncertain, she put a hand on my arm. It felt gritty, and I thought confusedly of the nonfungs on Rachel’s palm, the blue grit from the decaying statue.

  That Ta-Nin was here without her sisters could mean only that she had no sisters left. She had seen Rachel and me run to save a sisterless Sha, and somewhere in her dim alien mind she had lowered a barrier, or dissolved it, or shifted it. It was all right to ask me to help her survive her birthing. She did not want to die.

  I pushed her hand away and snarled, “Rachel—ask Rachel!”

  She tilted her head far enough to ruin her balance, tottered, righted herself. The thing moved behind her eyes. Around us, the stench of untreated Kelvin water festered on thick air.

  “Rachel helped, remember? I’m the one who shit upwards. Ask Rachel.”

  “She can’t,” Rachel said from the doorway. She wore her biochemist’s smock over pale clothing. Against the dimness outside she was hard-edged white.

  “She can’t ask me because I’m female but haven’t ever been pregnant. But she can ask you. A male.”

  Her voice was cool, rational, invulnerable. All that I had loved in her. I looked away and said, “Then why not ask a Sha male?”

  “She probably has. She’s probably asked males by whom her sisters became pregnant, which are the only ones she can—we think. But you know the ratio, Jake—only 5% of the Sha are male. They spend most of their lives screwing.”

  “What a life,” I said, and heard my own callous strain. But Rachel, the old Rachel, only smiled.

  “You’re the first human male a Sha has asked to help her, at least as far as I know. She saw you at that other birth. Most Sha aren’t able to combine abstract transfer of an experience with breaking a taboo. But Ta-Nin is an unusually intelligent alien.”

  The unusually intelligent alien was still rubbing her belly, tilting her head, staring with complete incomprehension.

  Rachel said quietly, “Please help her, Jake. You won’t have to touch Ta-Nin or the offspring. You can use the synthesized enzyrtie. You just pour it over an offspring’s mouth and the maternal flesh will repel it.”

  “Will she permit that?”

  “I don’t know. She says yes, but I think she may just expect you to carry away the offspring. The enzyme is more reliable.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You’ll need to stay near Ta-Nin when her time comes, in a few weeks. Or rather, she’ll stay near you. She can sleep—”

  “Not in my quarters.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that. In my lab. She’s been there enough to enter it more or less willingly. And there’s that couch in my office, for you. I’ll be in and out. I’d like to see the actual birth, although I won’t distress Ta-Nin by letting her see me. By remote, I think.”

  That couch in my office. I’ll be in and out. With another woman, I would have seen this as at least partly devious invitation to gloss over the night of her father’s performance. But Rachel met my gaze steadily, without layers. If she wanted to talk about that night, she would say so. Not everything she did was driven by devious emotional need. She was not Cassie.

  I said, “What about a host?”

  “There are always jelkin in the animal lab, alive and just-dead. You can bring one in when Ta-Nin starts labor. Jelkin were traditional hosts for the Sha, before. The offspring will seize it greedily.”

  But that picture was too close to the day of the picnic. I said sharply, “Tell her to stop that!”

  Rachel made a gesture, and Ta-Nin finally stopped fondling her flaccid belly. If Rachel wondered at my sharpness, the wonder did not show on her face. She had never remarked on my squeamishness, never asked why a life-support engineer could not tolerate smashed bodies. She began to talk to Ta-Nin, presumably explaining the plans for her birthing. Ta-Nin suddenly dropped to the floor and began rubbing her forehead against my left knee. I leaped backwards.

  “Christ! Make her stop that!”

  Rachel laughed. She shot more gibberish at Ta-Nin, who rose and looked from me to her. Rachel took the Sha’s arm and firmly guided her to the door. It seemed to me for a second that as Rachel maneuvered the Sha, I could actually see purposefulness shimmer around her, a kind of steady, undistorted field. Maybe Ta-Nin felt it, too. Maybe it would calm her. If she rubbed my knee again, I would probably kick her, and knowing that bothered me. I didn’t like the Sha, but I liked even less resembling Andrew Lemke.

  “Jake. Would you like to have dinner together tonight?” Rachel’s voice from the doorway was level.

  I hesitated, and then hesitation—or something—turned my voice sharp.

  “No, thanks. Not tonight.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right.” Her tone did not change.

  I bent over my pipes and valves, oddly reassured.

  That night my Link buzzed, long after midnight. Someone had broken into Justin Harbatu’s rooms at the visitors’ hotel and stolen the holofilm of Cannibals.

  Security called me not because the door lock had been tampered with, which would not have been my concern, but because it hadn’t. Door and window E-monitors recorded nothing. Instead, the thief had simply come up through the floor with a tunable laser saw set to infra-red to avoid triggering the E-monitors with X-ray backscatter. The ragged hole in the floor, a few meters from Harbatu’s bed, was matched by pitted burns on the ceiling; the laser saw had been ineptly wielded. All the laser saws in the compound were supposed to be under my jurisdiction.

  Justin Harbatu sat on the bed, holding his head in both hands. The windows were flung open and a strong breeze blew through. Jameson stood in the middle of the room, looking as if something inside him had died.

  “How could anyone get hold of a tunable laser, Razowski? Don’t you keep them locked up? Or is this one off one of the ships at the port?”

  “No, it’s not off a ship. Yes, I keep the compound saws locked up. One is missing. I checked when you called.”

  “Missing from where?”

  “My quarters. My personal tool case.”

  Our eyes met. Jameson was looking at me with a hatred I did not understand.

  “The tool case has an E-lock?”

  “Of course.”

  “Who had the code?”

  “To the tool case, nobody. To my quarters, just Security and Rachel Harbatu.”

>   Harbatu raised his head. His skin was gray. Even so, even not looking directly at him, I was hit again by his peculiar personal force, radiating from the strange green eyes. It filled the room like heat.

  “My daughter? To your quarters?”

  I looked at him then; his tone was an insult. Jameson said, “Could Dr. Harbatu have somehow gotten or deduced the code to your tool case?”

  I thought then of Rachel’s teasing voice, the two of us lying naked in my room: “When were you born, Jake? By how much am I robbing the nursery?” But I hadn’t used my birth date for the tool case code; only amateurs did that. I had used the date of my fifth birthday, when my mother had given me my first tool kit. Miniature welder, calculator, saw, struts, pliers, scribe: miniature love. I had told Rachel about that birthday. It had, like so much else, come welling up after two years of silence, two years of celibacy.

  God, the things I had told her.

  “Razowski,” Jameson repeated with that same inexplicable anger, “could Dr. Harbatu have gotten access to your tool case?”

  “Yes.”

  Harbatu’s eyes bored into me. I said, “A laser saw is not completely silent, not on that synthetic. It would sizzle. Didn’t you hear anything? Didn’t the staff below hear anything? Christ, isn’t there any security around here?”

  Jameson snapped, “The visitors’ hotel isn’t exactly an E-max prison. Watch your tone, Razowski. The room below is a kitchen and nobody’s in it at night. Mr. Harbatu was knocked out. A K-gas, we think, either in his room or shot through the floor after the first cut from the laser. He thinks he remembers hearing something. That stuff fuddles you.”

  That’s why the windows were open, why Harbatu looked gray. A K-gas.

  “Anyone in Animal Control would have K-gas,” I said. “That’s what it’s for.”

  “A lot of people could have it,” Jameson said; the stress on the second word sliced the air. I wanted to smash something, with an intensity that frightened me.

  With heavy formality Jameson said, “Mr. Harbatu, I have to ask you if you want to file charges for the theft. Colony laws apply in the compound if anyone chooses to file a complaint that evokes them; otherwise, only Corps regulations apply. Do you wish to file charges?”

  “Of course I do!”

  “Are you sure? Was that the only copy of the holovid?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be another print. I jerked my gaze to Harbatu. He sat up straighter on the edge of the bed, his face clearer as the last of the K-gas wore off. He hesitated just a fraction, and in that hesitation I read not paternal affection but a lightning calculation.

  “It doesn’t matter if there is another print or not. If no, an irreplaceable work of art is lost. If yes, and I let that sway me, an irreplaceable principle of justice is lost. There’s already been enough disregarding of justice on Kelvin. Justice is what Cannibals is all about. It’s not an abstract to me, Mr. Jameson.”

  I said, “And neither is free publicity.”

  He didn’t even glance at me. His gaze was locked on Jameson, whom I saw struggling to find some impact of his own to match Harbatu’s, to keep himself from disappearing into that intense personal field.

  “Then you file charges.”

  Harbatu stood, dwarfing us both. He burned—with impatience, with outrage, with pain, with exploitation—I could no longer tell.

  “Yes. Arrest both him and my daughter.”

  Jameson looked like a man choking on rivets. “I won’t arrest Razowski, Harbatu, and neither would the colony police. He doesn’t know it, but he’s covered. There was a security agent watching his quarters all night. He never left. And Dr. Harbatu is covered as well, at least as far as having committed the theft herself. Any evidence the colony wants to bring against her would only be circumstantial, based on motive but not opportunity. She was . . . was with me all night.”

  He didn’t look at me; neither did Harbatu. Harbatu said something, but I didn’t hear it. I was already out the door, leaving them both there behind me.

  The strange thing was that after the first shock, I didn’t really blame her.

  I locked the door to my quarters, sat on the bed, and spread the contents of the tool case around me in a circle of yellow lamplight. Monocrystal steel scribe. Pliers: needle, bent nose, stubby, griplock, diagonal. Quantum spectrometer. Omnimeter. Hydrogen torch. And the teragauss field sterilizer, fist-sized, shaped like a stoppered jar. In the lamplight it shone softly. I unpacked everything.

  The tool case lock showed that it had been opened at 15:06:24, not long after Rachel had followed Ta-Nin from the water purification plant. She had asked me to dinner first. I had refused, and only after that she had moved onto Jameson, a second cat’s paw. She had not begged me, or cajoled, or cried. She had—by whatever lies—gotten Jameson to set a watch on my quarters, removing me from complicity in her fight to save her work on Kelvin. It was a clean, tough, and purposeful fight, and in a curious way, impersonal. I did not blame her.

  Once, I had insisted on fucking Rachel in her lab, in the middle of the working day. She had smiled that ironic, mocking smile, and I knew nothing I could do would hurt her. We had screwed like animals. It was the only time I ever told her I loved her, and she had laughed and kissed me lightly, without answering.

  I packed the tool case and reprogrammed the lock with a different code. I chose the date of Cassie’s death on Janos. Harbatu would not say if there were another print of the holovid; my guess is that there was not. They liked that extra edge of intensity, Harbatu and Cassie. One print of the masterpiece. One cat’s paw.

  I wondered if the Sha, in the sane generations before their enzymatic genocide, had provided not one but two hosts for the hungry, sucker-edged mouths as they emerged.

  Ta-Nin squatted beside the path outside my Quonset, watching as I re-set the lock. I had not seen her in days. She waddled up to me, smelling subtly different: a heavy, sweet-sick smell, like rotting flowers. Wordlessly, she handed me two stones.

  I took them—what else? They were gray, irregular, featureless except for having been rubbed free of every trace of blue nonfung. Ta-Nin’s dark alien eyes peered into mine. I shrugged ignorance; Ta-Nin went on peering. Finally I put the stones in my pocket and walked on towards the greenhouses. Ta-Nin followed, squatting just outside the doorway, a blurry image through the translucent synglass.

  Was she going to begin labor—here? Now? From what Rachel had told me, it should not be for another week yet. Could the Sha time birth more accurately than humans? With Rachel arrested, was I still supposed to midwife for this blobby, doomed alien?

  I went to work checking machinery that didn’t need checking. No one came near me; Rachel’s trial, with swift colony justice, was set for tomorrow. Time had been requested on the Corps sector Link. Had anyone told Ta-Nin? Would she have understood if they had?

  Half an hour later, I opened the door. Ta-Nin was still there, rolls of gray fat over huge flat feet. Directly in front of the doorway were two more stones.

  I slammed the door shut and led her to Rachel’s lab.

  When we entered the building, it fell silent. Technicians and scientists alike avoided my eyes. Ta-Nin at first hung back, then crowded close to me, smelling foul. I hunted up Lemke.

  “Razowski—I’ve been looking all over for you!”

  He couldn’t have looked very hard; I was on-call with the Link. I grunted something. Lemke looked at me, then away, blinking rapidly.

  “Has Ta-Nin been with you all morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  Curiosity showed in his face for a moment, followed again by that rapid blinking. He looked over my left shoulder and moved around the edge of a lab table. The corner jutted sharp between us.

  “This is all ridiculous, you know. Rachel’s arrest. They’re just making a show for Harbatu’s sake, and he’s got his crew filming it. All of it.”

  I said nothing. Suddenly Lemke looked at me directly, still blinking.

  “
The colonists are afraid, you know. They’re afraid that if Harbatu’s holovid gets out and the Corps forces us to leave, then it’s possible the whole planet might be quarantined. To colonists as well as research.”

  I reached for the stones in my pocket.

  “Of course she’s innocent,” Lemke rushed on, “but if they find her guilty of the theft and that’s the only print—I have to be at the trial, of course. I’m the only one who could explain what her work here consists of. The only one. I’m the only one who could carry on with it if she can’t, if she—”

  “If she what?”

  “If she, well . . . if she can’t.” And he smiled.

  The smile was involuntary: a sudden stretching of thin lips over sharp teeth. I saw Lemke’s horror that the smile had happened at all. He fumbled to grip the jutting corner of the table. I threw the four stones down in front of him and said, “What are these?”

  Lemke looked, not seeing them.

  “I asked you what they are. She brought them to me, Ta-Nin, two at a time. These two first, then these two. What are they?”

  Finally he seemed to see the stones. “When?”

  “This morning. She was waiting outside my quarters. Then she put the other two outside the door at the greenhouse.”

  Lemke picked up the stones and fingered them. Professional blandness settled over him like smog. “We’ve only seen this a few times. The Sha are secretive, you know, and if we get too close, they lie. But see how all the nonfung has been ground off? These are ritual stones, a formal request for help to a sister’s mate from a woman about to give birth, when her own sisters can’t help. We think.”

  He frowned, a grotesque wrinkling of bony chin.

  “She probably didn’t know what other category to put you in.” Suddenly his eyes gleamed with malicious pleasure. “This might mean she considers Rachel to be some sort of sister. A Corps research head . . . but maybe not. They’re not very inventive, you know. At any rate, the stones mean that the Sha’s very close to birth. Tonight maybe, or tomorrow night.”