Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  He looked at Ta-Nin. She turned clumsily in a circle and began to edge out of the room.

  “Rachel is still confined to the city, of course. She told me the arrangements she made for you. To function as a Sha male.” He grinned.

  I shifted my weight against the table. Lemke said hastily, “There’s a couch in Rachel’s office. I know she thinks Ta-Nin will be willing to birth here in the lab, but I don’t. I think once labor starts she’ll revert to taboo and go on out to the forest alone. So the building will be locked. When the birth starts, she’ll start walking in circles, over and over, and she’ll probably wail to get out of the building. Her noise will wake you and you can take the vial of enzyme—it’s here in this case, the only one on this shelf so you can’t mistake it—and follow her. Buzz me first. And take a remote tracker so we can find you.”

  “All right,” I said, to say something.

  “Pour a third of the enzyme over each offspring as it emerges—Sha never have more than three. If Ta-Nin vomits on her own, don’t worry. The enzyme doesn’t have to be very concentrated to turn the offspring away. And she may not even try. In fact, she might not understand what we’re trying to do here at all, despite what Rachel says. They’re not very bright, you know. Despite Harbatu’s sentimental grand-standing. They’re just barely sentient.”

  “Then why do you want Rachel’s credit for saving them?”

  Lemke looked at me as if I were a dead fish. I shoved the table forward and left.

  Outside, Ta-Nin handed me two more stones.

  That night it rained. Even though I knew the gravity was .97 Terran, the rain seemed to fall slowly: great cold drops struggling through living smog, to reluctantly splatter on the spongy earth and be swallowed. There were no puddles on Kelvin.

  The sparse gray fur on Ta-Nin’s head and back matted, smelling worse than before. She lumbered slowly beside me, and it seemed that her belly had distended even more since that afternoon. I had found her squatting outside the power Till, outside the water purification plant, outside my quarters after a solitary dinner ordered in. Did she need to eat? I figured that if she did, she would.

  At nearly midnight we set off for the lab, through the filthy rain.

  As I had hoped, everyone had gone. I led Ta-Nin to Rachel’s office, not letting her see me lock the building door behind us. She curled up under the table I had shoved at Lemke, which seemed odd—if Sha birth was supposed to be out in the open, wouldn’t she try for as much open as the large room permitted? I didn’t worry about it. Lemke’s anxious insistence that I buzz him when labor started was so much crap; I didn’t believe for a minute that the lab wasn’t fully monitored by more than the Link.

  Rachel’s office, however, probably wasn’t. She would have known, and wouldn’t have stood for it. I offered Ta-Nin a blanket, which she ignored. I left it on the floor beside her, went into Rachel’s office, and stretched out on the couch.

  An hour later I woke up, disoriented. Beyond the office door the lab was pitch black, although I knew I had not turned off the lows. I groped for the switch, flooded the place with light, and scooted to Ta-Nin’s table.

  She blinked up at me. I said, stupidly, “Are you all right?”

  She blinked again and turned away. The rotting-sweetness smell rose from her like smoke. I made my way back to the darkened office and lay down.

  A few minutes later I heard her drag heavily from under the table and across the floor. All the lights went off.

  I grinned at Lemke and his monitors.

  Hours later I bolted awake, listening. Noise. Around me the darkness pressed like dreams. But there was no walking in circles, no wailing. I heard the noise again: the scrape of a table leg across the floor. Ta-Nin must be shifting clumsily in her sleep.

  I wondered what Justin Harbatu could create from Sha dreams.

  Kleinstadt’s judicial chambers were more B.H. romanticism: synthetics molded to look like heavy dark wood, over-sized Link terminal with styling popular a generation ago, all needlessly bright memory chips visible behind permaplas. Schlock, but technically good quality schlock. Kelvinites jammed the seats, but they too gave me an unexpected feeling of quality, of a peculiar sort. Unexpectedly quiet, expectedly grim, they sat with a perverse dignity. If the Corps shut down the scientific compound, it would make little difference to them. If the Corps evacuated Kelvin, they would lose everything. Faced with this threat, however second-hand, to their homes, they sat stiffly and did not look at Harbatu, who on many worlds would already be dead. “The human mind supreme, untainted.”

  Or maybe they just wanted to look good for the camera.

  “Mr. Harbatu,” Governor Kleinstadt said, his jowly face stripped of all geniality, “your turn. Face the DataLink terminal, please. Statement.”

  “I came to Kelvin with an artistic purpose,” Harbatu began quietly, “and found a humanitarian one. I am an artist. An artist’s job is to make humanity look at itself, to show us things we sometimes might not want to see. An artist . . .”

  The Governor let him go on being artistic for several minutes more. Harbatu had not chosen to dress as I thought he would. I thought he would wear the gaudy trappings of one of the sophisticated worlds Kelvin colonists would never see, underlining his position as an outsider from somewhere less parochial, more passionate about beauty and truth and wide-angle justice. A phoenix in the void. But instead he wore a plain gray tunic. He had pitched his famous voice a little higher than at his concert, however; the Link is usually set for the middle vocal ranges. He was a pro, all right. When had I become immune to him?

  The moment I saw Rachel sitting beside Kleinstadt.

  She didn’t avoid my eyes. Steady, unflinching, she looked at me and nodded. The nod said there would be no self-tortured apologies for the laser saw, no passionate justifications for Jameson, no desperate appeals wrenching my guts into water. She trusted me to understand that she had been protecting her work, and if I did not, tough re-entry. Tough, and clean.

  I nodded back.

  Finally Harbatu began to actually recount what had happened the night the holovid disappeared.

  “And you heard nothing?” the governor said.

  “Nothing identifiable.”

  “DataLink?”

  The colony Link coded and cross-checked the testimony. “No questions,” it said.

  “Anyone else want to ask Mr. Harbatu anything?” the governor said. Evidently Kelvin had purchased the very loose Reform Legal Package.

  “I do. But later,” Jameson said. His face was as blank as Rachel’s, but not as clean. He did not look at her.

  “Well, I do now,” the governor said. The air in the room, Kelvin-thick, jerked taut. “What made you think, Mr. Harbatu, that the Corps researchers had anything to do with starting the Sha illness?”

  Harbatu’s gaze traveled the room. I saw that he had expected this, just as he must have expected the colonists’ hostility. Love of home planet versus reverence for life, all set among the B.H. simpletons who claimed exclusive right to such reverence. It would make a great vid.

  “Is this relevant, governor, to the theft of my property?”

  “If it’s not, the Link will ignore it. I want to know.”

  “If you’re asking, governor, whether I have hard statistical data, replicable and publishable—no, I do not. That is the function of the scientist, not the artist. The artist moves on the wave front ahead of the replicable. He must do that, if he is to have any value at all.” Harbatu leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair with both hands. In my mind’s eye I saw Lemke, gripping the edge of a lab table. “To struggle to name what hasn’t yet been named. To show us all the possibilities, for good and for ill—don’t you see? Don’t any of you see?”

  He looked at us, pleading in the alien green eyes, and I suddenly saw the one thing I did not want to see: he was sincere. Not playing for the holovid. He believed what he was saying, and he believed it because it was, at least in some sense, true.

&n
bsp; “Art shows us to ourselves, and until we look, we don’t know what we are. Not fully. We don’t see our own greatness, or our own guilt. The artist—from Genesis on—has taken on that burden of human guilt nobody else can yet bear to assume, in order to make it assumable. Socrates, Christ, Sakharov, Pollidena—the performing artist has held a mirror to our guilt. Art itself—”

  But he had gone too far. The governor’s face mottled. “The ‘burden of guilt’ in this case, Mr. Harbatu, is being charged not to you but to your daughter!”

  Harbatu shifted his gaze to Rachel. I think it was the first time he had looked at her. His eyes filled, horribly, with tears. They did not fall, merely shimmered in a green film. The governor’s face lost its high color, looked uncertain. Finally he looked away. No one moved. No one, it seemed could—except Rachel.

  She met that terrible nakedness for a long time before her gaze dropped. Only that. But I had seen, and recognized, and something in my chest that I had not known was still there, that I had thought long since smashed, stirred and clawed.

  “That’s all,” the governor said, finally. “You’re done, Mr. Harbatu. Security Chief Jameson, please. Face the DataLink, Mr. Jameson.” Rachel never raised her eyes again. Jameson testified, in a dry voice spare with words. I did. Lemke did, and Jameson’s agent, and Harbatu’s holovid engineer. The colony Link asked a few questions.

  “All right,” the governor said wearily. “DataLink, connection to SectorLink 710. Request amicus curiae brief from Code 654-3210A, British-American-SpaceBeta tradition, Reform Legal Package copyright Juno Corporation. Hear ye, hear ye. Court in recess.”

  We sat and waited. To call the Corps Link decision an amicus curiae brief was a judicial euphemism; Rachel was not a colonist but a Corps citizen, and the Reform Legal Package was accredited. The governor laboriously hand-wrote his legal opinion. Three and a half light years away, the SectorLink retrieved the testimony from megalight, coded it mathematically, cross-checked in the indicated tradition: thousands of precedents, millions of facts, dozens of events as recent as an hour ago from as distant as the edge of the spiral arm. The governor wrote with his left hand, the thumb criss-crossed with thick, whitened scar tissue. The Link said, “CorpsLink amicus curiae brief received.”

  “Just a minute, just a minute.” Kleinstadt scratched some more, read it over, handed his paper to the court clerk. The clerk held the two papers, one in each hand. When he swallowed, long tendons in his neck surfaced like ropy fish.

  “Hear ye, hear ye. Basic Humanitarian judicial opinion is that the accused, Dr. Rachel Susan Harbatu, is not guilty of theft.”

  It had not been in doubt. No one moved.

  “Amicus curiae CorpsLink judicial opinion is that the accused, Dr. Rachel Susan Harbatu, is not guilty of theft, due to lack of substantial evidence.”

  “A match,” someone said just behind me. His voice curdled with disappointment. It was Lemke.

  Harbatu rose. He walked over to Rachel and said, with infinite gentleness, “You did it.”

  She stood. He said in that same gentle voice, “I filed a Priority-A Alien Protection Violation with the Corps. Yesterday.”

  Everyone heard; faces clenched in anger. But still Rachel said nothing. “Rachel. You had no right to take that chance with these beings’ lives. No matter how statistically small a chance. The Corps should have been notified a decade ago. You had no right to feed your career on their extinction.”

  She spat in his face. Harbatu stood there a long moment after she had turned to walk away and I saw both their faces clearly, stacked one beside the other. Rachel kept on walking, and people sank back out of her way as if mowed down with a scythe.

  Harbatu said clearly, his daughter’s spittle still running down his face, “There is another print of the holovid.”

  She did not even look back over her shoulder.

  I didn’t remember walking outside the building. Lemke’s hand closed on my shoulder, the fingers like sharp wire. “An Alien Protection Violation. He’ll shut us down. All for . . .” His bony jaw quivered and I saw that he could not finish speaking; all I thought was how ridiculous he looked.

  “I have to get back, Lemke. To Ta-Nin.”

  “Why bother? We’ll never finish the work now. Not before the Corps acts on that. . . that . . .”

  His fingernails felt too much like Rachel’s, the night of the performance. I shook him off. “And if it hadn’t been for Rachel, Harbatu wouldn’t be here at all. Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

  Lemke’s eyes glittered, and then his face went blank, as completely empty as if somewhere in his mind circuits had switched off. I thought that if the Corps shut down the research compound, the scientists would leave—but not Lemke. Physically and emotionally unfit for anywhere but the colony he hated, he would remain on Kelvin until he died.

  “Everyone on the research team is of course concerned about Dr. Harbatu,” Lemke said with such tinny pomposity that I nearly brayed. Lemke’s face stayed deadly blank.

  I didn’t take the shuttle from the City back to the compound. I should have, because of Ta-Nin, but I thought of the whispered speculation, heads averted from me: Who had taken the holovid? For whom Jameson . . . and I walked the ten klicks, on the road laid down by the original engineer. Strange plants I hadn’t seen before, that must not grow near the compound, edged the hard duraperm. One was reddish-brown, thick and wavy, almost like human hair. Twice a vehicle passed overhead, and once on the road itself. Each time, I stepped off the road and deep into the alien forest, crouching down among the flaccid shoulder-high plants until they met over my head, the thick blue-mottled leaves closing over me like water.

  Ta-Nin waited outside my quarters. When she handed me two more stones, I could see their imprint pressed into the fat of her palm.

  By the time I took her to the lab, it was again silent and dark. Had there been even one light, I think I would have turned us both back. Maybe not; shambling heavy beside me, Ta-Nin smelled even worse than last night, but this time I knew what the smell was. It was fear. I didn’t know what she had thought during the hours we had all been gone to the City, nor who had been with her in the hours since. Rachel? Lemke? No one? She seemed different, somehow: something in the dark alien eyes. She might have thought we had all abandoned her. She might have thought anything.

  I went into Rachel’s office only to take the stoppered vial from its rack, and did not look at the couch.

  Ta-Nin crawled under her table and lay down. I turned off all the lights and sat under the switch, the small of my back resting against the wall. The last thing I thought was I won’t sleep, before I did. Machinery chugged in and out of my dreams, the kind of machinery that has not existed for three hundred years: pistons thumping with hot steam, fans pumping coolant, gears turning with teeth sharp enough to bite bone.

  Then I was awake, in the darkness, knowing somehow that Ta-Nin was gone.

  “Ta-Nin!”

  She was nowhere in the lab, nor in Rachel’s office. I thought of all the places she could be in the unlocked portions of the rest of the building, all the dark crannies large enough for a panicked alien about to give birth to children who would eat her. In Animal Control, I scanned the pens; none of the jelkin seemed to be gone, but I couldn’t be sure. Racing through the corridors, turning on lights as I ran, I called out again and again. No answer. When the first grub turned on her, would she scream? Would that be too late?

  “Taaaaaaa-Niiiiiin!”

  She had asked for my help; why would she go away without it? Lemke had said she would revert to ritual, go to the open woods. He had also said that Sha were stupid, barely sentient, whereas Rachel thought otherwise . . .

  I moved down the corridor to the building’s outside door.

  The door, which I had left carefully locked, stood wide open. I punched up the record of the last opening. It was half an hour ago. From the inside.

  Ta-Nin is an unusually intelligent alien.

  Things shifted
in my mind, great subterranean re-alignments like tectonic plates. A Sha who could learn to punch in an E-code . . . how much harder would it be to learn to use a laser saw? To use it clumsily, ineptly, the tuning already set and locked in, just enough to burn a hole in a synthetic flooring. For a synthetic sister, who was going to save your life.

  Stumbling over my own feet, I ran back to the lab. The stoppered flask, which I had left beside me under the light switch, was gone.

  Outside, it had rained again. The spongy ground held no footprints, but I thought I knew where Ta-Nin would go. The shallow dell where she had seen one taboo broken lay to the north. But if she went there, why without me, after all those mute appeals for my help? And if she went there without a host . . .

  I started to run, but stopped a little way from the building and turned to re-trace my steps. This time I punched up the building lock record for the last six hours. Five minutes before the last unlocking the door had been opened from the outside, and then closed. A generic code opened the door from the inside; from the outside, the codes were individualized. This was the only one I would recognize; I had used it myself. It was Rachel’s.

  Undoubtedly a visual monitor covered this door, but only Security would have access to that record. Rachel would know that. Had she come to check on Ta-Nin, closed the door behind her, opened it, and left with Ta-Nin five minutes later? But Ta-Nin would not accept Rachel’s help with her birthing. Only a sister’s mate would be acceptable as midwife. We think.

  I stood in the filthy air, thick as damp smoke, staring at the lock record. When someone moved up behind me, I didn’t hear movement before voice, and I jerked as if I’d been shot.

  “Razowski. What are you doing?” Lemke.

  He stopped two meters from me and I thought, crazily in the midst of all the other craziness, out of arm’s reach.

  “Ta-Nin is gone. With Rachel, I think.”

  “Rachel? No, she can’t be. At least not with Rachel. I just spoke with her on the Link. I called to see if there was anything I could do. About Harbatu’s protest to the Corps. About the research.”