Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “You just spoke to Rachel? In her quarters?”

  “Just a few minutes ago.”

  Rachel’s quarters were much farther from mine than were Lemke’s. I stared at him stupidly. In the light spilling from the open lab door, sweat gleamed on his bony face like thick ointment.

  I pushed past him and began to run, covering the short distance from the lab to the edge of the compound, then along the path to the river. I couldn’t find the place where Rachel and I had left the path and crashed through the squat forest. I thought I had passed it when I heard Ta-Nin wail, and immediately afterwards a piercing shriek of agony. Human.

  Even with moonlight, I couldn’t find the dell. Thrashing through the plants, gritty leaves whipping against my face until they filled my mouth, I couldn’t find the dell. Then the human shrieking rose again and the ground gave way under my feet and I was sliding down the rock-strewn side of the depression where Ta-Nin lay. Sharp pain stabbed through my right elbow.

  The third grub had just emerged from between her spread legs. It crawled blind in the thick night, open mouth swaying at the sky. I heard what I had been too nauseous to hear the first time: its thin wailing, nearly lost under Ta-Nin’s cry of pain and that other, agonized shrieking.

  The thing crept towards its mother’s flesh. Ta-Nin, visibly gathering all her strength, raised Rachel’s vial and splashed the last of the clear liquid over its mouth. The offspring wailed again, swayed, and turned away from her. It thrashed a moment, then changed direction and sank its mouth onto what had been Justin Harbatu’s face.

  He still moved. With my left hand I grabbed the grub’s other end and pulled. The suckers did not loosen. I tore at the thing with both hands; it flailed horribly but did not let go. My own voice sounded in my ears as I pulled and pulled and the thing stretched until finally it tore. The other two still fed on Harbatu, one on belly and one on thigh. The one fastened on his belly crawled beside a pointed rock, sticky with blood and hair from Harbatu’s skull.

  By the time I fell backward with half of Ta-Nin’s child slimy in my hands, only she and the other two offspring still moved.

  People came crashing through the forest. Lemke, others. There was shouting, unintelligible yelling. Pain coursed through my arm. Above her two living children, Ta-Nin watched me from exhausted, unfathomable eyes.

  “He was looking for Rachel,” Jameson said. His face was as gray as Harbatu’s had once been from K-gas. We sat in Security the next morning, me sprawled across my chair, Jameson sitting in his as if bound to it. We did not look at each other.

  “He had called me first, and I told him I didn’t know where she was. Then he called Lemke. All the calls show in the Link. Lemke says he told Harbatu that he didn’t know where Rachel was either. Lemke called Rachel after that, to ask about the research. By then she was home. She says she went to your quarters—witnesses saw her. She wanted to make sure you were at the lab with Ta-Nin, without actually going to the lab herself.”

  Jameson stared at a blank wall. His whole office was blank, the cubicle of a man giving nothing away. I said carefully, “Who opened the lab building door from the outside?”

  “Harbatu. It’s on visual. He used Rachel’s code; she must have given it to him, on his previous visit to Kelvin.”

  “Does she say so?”

  “She says she can’t remember.”

  The lock codes were in simple sequence. By seniority. I didn’t mention this; neither did Jameson. He moved doggedly on, his voice a straight hard road.

  “Harbatu was still looking for Rachel. He closed the door, went to the lab, must have found Ta-Nin. You were asleep. She must have led him out and to the woods, since only she would know where that same dell was. Rachel must also have given her father the generic code to unlock the door from the inside. It’s a simple one.”

  Sprawled in my chair, I gazed at the gray ceiling.

  “Ta-Nin just picked the rock from the ring of them surrounding the birth place; you can see the shallow imprint in the ground where the pointed end had once been driven in. She says . . .” Jameson stopped, looked away. I waited.

  “She says Harbatu was going to hurt Rachel and make her go away. The researchers who speak Sha have been at her for hours, all the time she was pulling out her fur to make those damn safehouses. She tells one of them one thing, another one another thing. But that stays constant: Harbatu was going to hurt Rachel and make her go away. And then the Sha would go on dying forever.”

  I thought of an alien mind catching at the misshapen particles which drifted through the membrane of language. Seeing the jagged shards, the broken edges, but not knowing how they had once fitted together—if they ever had. Did Ta-Nin know that Harbatu was Rachel’s father? What would it have meant if she had? How had she twisted whatever she thought she was being told over the last weeks by the researchers who talked to her?

  Or perhaps no twisting had been necessary.

  Jameson said, “The Corps wouldn’t even have to be called in, except for—alien customs have Corps protection, especially for a low-sentient endangered species. If it weren’t for the accident about which vial you took from Rachel’s office, if you hadn’t got the one that didn’t just turn the grubs away from the mother but also actually attracted them to . . . to . . .” He didn’t finish.

  “Accident,” I say, for the sound of it.

  “Yes. That’s what Kleinstadt says. He would be the one to start anything legal, if he thought there was a reason.”

  I said nothing.

  After a while, Jameson repeated, “Accident. Rachel says—” He stopped, heaved himself to his feet, and looked away from me. I would never hear what Rachel had said. When Jameson moved to the Link, it was with the overly careful fumblings of a man carrying something large, and heavy, and too costly to let out of his sight for even an instant, ever again.

  That was my last conversation on Kelvin. Jameson had witnessed what I had to say to the Link, in case it should, sometime, be wanted. By someone.

  I thought of what I did not say to the Link. I did not say: On six percent of the worlds we touch, we destroy something biological. I did not say: sometimes the biological destruction flows the other way. I did not say: Cassie once had thick black hair.

  Afterwards, Jameson himself drove me to the port. Neither of us mentioned Rachel again. Under Jameson’s hands the shuttle throttle shimmied lightly side to side, and I was careful to not notice.

  When the SOMERSET II leaves tomorrow, I leave with her. It’s the ship Harbatu would have taken, but if Jameson thought of that, neither of us named it, among the other things unnamed. “Harbatu made this call, Rachel made that call, Lemke that other call.” None of it important, none of it real. What was real was all conjecture, moving on the wave front ahead of the replicable.

  Rachel’s voice, saying: “We can synthesize chemicals to alter nearly any biological given.”

  Lemke’s voice, not quite saying: “If it hadn’t been for Rachel, Harbatu wouldn’t be here at all.”

  Ta-Nin, coming to me just before I closed my quarters, to put into my good hand a stick woven with yellowed leaves. Her two offspring were not with her. I lay the stick on the floor and did not touch it again, nor did I ask anyone what it meant. Thank-you note, murder threat, curse for infanticide, request to stand godfather.

  My last days on Kelvin, Rachel never tried to see me.

  Waiting for the SOMERSET II, lying in my small stifling room at the spaceport, I see Rachel’s face. The room is dark, but even if I turn on the too-harsh utilitarian light, I still see her face. Harbatu’s should be there, too, covered with spittle and stacked side by side with hers the way they were in Kleinstadt’s chambers, but I don’t see it. Only hers. One is enough.

  I’m leaving Kelvin not because I think Rachel instructed Ta-Nin to kill her father, but because I think she did not.

  This may not be what Jameson thinks. If he is protecting her, he may think she used Ta-Nin that way. I am not sure what Jameson think
s. Unlike Harbatu, I will not lay claim to another’s self-destruction.

  Lemke talked to Harbatu that night; Lemke had had more time after the trial to talk to Ta-Nin; Lemke spoke the language. He had been suckled on it. The words of need turned rage were his native tongue.

  Since Rachel’s resignation, he has become the head of biological research on Kelvin. Today he announced to Corps DataLinks, hungry for news of Justin Harbatu’s spectacular death, that the scientific compound on Kelvin has just had a major breakthrough. He says the Sha biochemistry is the victim of a slow virus. He says they are close to isolating it. He says the Corps cannot interrupt this vital work now, even though research results on slow viruses are so hard to replicate by another scientific team. By the time you’re sure you’ve infected the subject, its life support circumstances have so often changed.

  On the Sector worlds, Lemke will—at least for a time—be The Man Who Saved The Sha. Just as Justin Harbatu will be The Artist Who Died Witnessing Their Agony. The second holovid of Harbatu’s last concert plays to the entire Sector next week, a breathlessly anticipated performance of a great visionary assuming a guilt no one else could, as yet, bear to assume.

  Including Rachel. What I saw burning in her eyes when she spat at her father was not guilt, and not murder. Not even hatred. It was something else.

  The last thing Cassie ever said to me, just before I aimed the teragauss sterilizer at her head, was We won’t ever escape each other, Jake. No matter what I put you through. Never. Sometimes I think I was never alive until you were here.

  The SOMERSET II plans space runs for over a year. Quick orbits, lots of loading and unloading, docking machinery and life-support systems under constant use. And there are other ships. I can stay in space as long as I choose.

  There are no cannibals in the void.

  GLASS

  The author’s most recent story for IAsfm was “Cannibals” (May 1987). Her next novel is An Alien Light, coming in early 1988 from Arbor House.

  Four people stood on the wide shallow steps in front of the library. One of them would be dead before dark.

  As always, I couldn’t tell which one. The moment came and went too fast, enveloping them in the familiar thickened air shot through with faint blue lines like living veins. Last summer, student-slumming through Europe with Janet, I stood frozen before the exquisite striped glass for sale all around the Piazza San Marco. Janet, puzzled and exasperated, had to pull me away: “What is it, Cath? For God’s sake, if you want the vase, buy it—don’t worship it!” Janet, who had landed at Kennedy customs with exuberantly fake cameos, four rosaries guaranteed blessed by the Pope, and seven dolls in different versions of native provincial dress, all made of shiny red satin.

  She loped out of the library and down the steps, long skinny legs scissoring in counterpoint to her long skinny flying hair, calling to me from ten yards away. “Cath! You’re on time, you’re always on time, it’s so incredibly boring!” She laughed, a laugh that would be straight from the belly if she had one, a laugh unchanged since we were both six years old. Then she came close enough, and her face changed. “What is it, what’s wrong?”

  She had rushed right past the four on the steps, noticing them only as obstacles, shapes to not bump into. I tried to not notice them either, but it was impossible. It always is. An overweight woman, a small child, an old man leaning on a cane, a young man holding a book. Still, I refused details. I have learned that much, at least.

  I managed to say, “Nothing is wrong. You’re late.”

  “And you’re not.” She laughed again and her head tilted back, towards the blue October sky. That made her blink and shake her head. I thought yet again how exaggerated Janet’s gestures always were, how open. She leaned towards me and rolled her eyes. “Wait till you see him!”

  I felt myself smiling, horribly, my face cracking open and gaping. I heard myself say, “Where are your glasses?”

  “Broken again. Not to worry, roomie, I’ve got the fastest squint in the East. Wait—is that him over there, talking to whoever?”

  The two men still stood on the steps. The woman and child had moved towards the street; another woman called “Sue!” and hurried up to them. The two women embraced. The child, a girl with skimpy brown hair, stared at them from round eyes in a chinless face that would never be pretty. Like all toddlers, she had the look of knowing things she couldn’t possibly know. I looked away, which made her transfer her ancient gaze to me.

  “That is him,” Janet said. “Hey, Jack! Yo!”

  The young man raised his hand, then went back to talking to the old man. Janet whispered to me in her tough-guy imitation, “Check ’im out, Milecki.” Then she noticed the little girl and began making faces at her. The child slithered to the safety of the back of her mother’s legs, burying her face in the hollow between green polyester thighs.

  The retreat did not deter Janet. Nothing deters Janet. She dropped to her knees, jeans scraping briefly against the leaf-covered sidewalk, and sang, “I seeeeeeeee you!” Twisting her head, she peered up at me. “Look at him talking to Dr. Jarlson. Physics Chair. Jack gets straight A’s, every fucking test. Told you he was a brain, didn’t I? And he’s generous with it. Tim says if it weren’t for Jack, he’d still think quasars were Japanese TV tubes. And all you have to do is just loosen up a little.”

  The child peeked around her mother’s left knee, scowling. There was a tiny white scar, barely visible, on her chin. My little brother Roddy had exactly the same scar, from falling forward as he climbed into the school bus and hitting his chin on the top step. He couldn’t catch himself; he had zipped his arms inside his jacket while pretending to be an earthworm.

  “I seeeeeee you,” Janet crooned. The child scowled harder, then stopped as sunlight flashed off Janet’s ring. The mother glanced towards us, smiled. Blonde hair held by a green plastic barrette, no make-up, tired eyes, windbreaker with a shiny zipper. I watched helplessly, the mute panic starting to roll over me in waves.

  “I seeeeee you. Can I ask what her name is?”

  “Jennifer Ann. Jennie.”

  “See the pretty, Jennifer Ann?” Janet held out her hand. The engagement ring was glass, not diamond, a “stand-in” until Tim could afford the real thing. I suspected that Janet preferred the stand-in; she laughed the one time I accused her of this. As she moved the ring towards the little girl, her hand moved into shadow and the glass returned to dullness. Jennifer switched her gaze to Janet’s face.

  On the library steps, at the edge of my vision, the young man shook hands with Dr. Jarlson, turned, and started towards us. And then it happened, the thing I hate worse than the death itself, the thing I can sometimes avoid but not now, not this time, not when I wanted to. Everyone froze because the moment froze, deepened, turned lush with preternatural brightness. I felt it detach itself from the normal blur of ordinary, sequential moments and become something else, a separate reality that would adhere to me in sharp and unfading detail the rest of my life. The ordinary metastasized to violation. Like cancer:

  Dr. Jarlson, leaning on his cane, blue silk ascot and frayed cuffs, the lines in his face soft and eroded as sand gullies. The overweight mother’s bitten nails, more ragged on the left hand than on the right; the tiny mole just above the collar of her windbreaker; a bluish bruise beside it: a hickey. The faint round corneal orbits of her friend’s contact lenses.

  Jennifer scowling again at Janet, the stitching loose on her soiled pink Winnie-the-Pooh parka, sunlight lending gloss to the wispy hair. And Jack standing on the library steps, too tall and too thin in a brown cable-knit sweater with the lumpy seams of hand-knitting, his uplifted arm frozen forever in greeting to Janet.

  Then she stood up and brushed the leaves from the knees of her jeans.

  “Jack, this is Cath Milecki. Cath, Jack Naven.”

  “Hi,” Jack said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “From me,” Janet said. “All good, all true. She’s wonderful, she’s unique, ask any
body.”

  He smiled. “Rein it in, Janet. You’re embarrassing your friend.”

  “Me? Embarrass anybody?”

  “Well, look at her. Unless, Cath, you always go around with that stunned expression.”

  “She’s stunned by you,” Janet said. “What did I tell you?” She began a clumsy clog step on the sidewalk, humming “Love Is In The Air.”

  “Well, since you two obviously want to go somewhere to discuss all my shining virtues. . .”

  Jack shook his head, smiling at me, an invitation to share his amusement at Janet’s outrageousness. I could see his amusement. I could see his affection, his slight embarrassment, his physical reaction to me. I could see all of him.

  He said, “Really, Janet . . . what do you say, Cath? Should we go have a cup of coffee and dig all the dirt on good old Janet?”

  “No.”

  They both stared at me. I had heard my own tone. Jack looked as if I had slapped him; Janet gaped in astonishment. I curled the fingers of my left hand into my right and dug in until I could feel blood. An old trick. It let me speak.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t feel well. I’m sorry. I better go back to the dorm.”

  “Yes. Sure,” Jack said awkwardly. The muscles around his mouth tightened. Janet grabbed an arm and pulled at me.

  “Time out for a girlish huddle. Jack, you stay right there and don’t move an inch. Think about black holes or something. Cath, in my office. On the double.”

  She tugged me towards the library steps. Jack gazed down the street, his uncertain anger still uncertain, not yet hardened enough to let him stalk away. I thought he must feel like a perfect fool.

  “What are you doing?” Janet hissed. “Here’s this completely wonderful man asking to meet you, obviously bowled over by your gorgeous self when he does, and you cut him off at the knees. What’s with you, Cath? Do you want to spend every last night studying alone in the dorm? Every last one?”

  She glared down at me from her five-inch advantage, needing even for five inches to squint a little. My left palm was slippery with blood.