Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Come, do not die on the starside,” Tmafekitch said, which meant that Rilla was not supposed to be so negative. “I have something to tell you.”

  “What?” Rilla said sulkily. “Look at that she over there—the new one—why is she watching us so hard?”

  “She has never seen a human until she came here.” So that was why Daddy had been so eager to talk to the new female. She came from a village where no scientists had been. She must have had a very long mating journey. Mommy and Daddy’s field camp, after all, wasn’t on Farland. It was only an hour’s fly from Okuma Base, where there were plenty of humans.

  “I go,” Tmafekitch said, and walked away, flipping her tail. Tmafekitch was angry; Rilla realized it was because she hadn’t asked what the something was that Tmafekitch had offered to tell her—what Mommy would call “a serious breach of manners.”

  “I am low,” she said hastily to Tmafekitch’s retreating back. “Cut off my tail. May I never rise to Chujo.” Tmafekitch turned around and nodded, accepting the apology. She never held a grudge. Unlike me, thought Rilla, who was currently holding several grudges against several people. But not against Tmafekitch. Never against Tmafekitch.

  “I have something to tell you,” Tmafekitch said, just as if the little anger hadn’t happened.

  “Oh, what?”

  “Last dark I had a heat flush. The first.”

  Rilla stared at the Ihrdizu. A heat flush! “But that means you won’t be a little-she any more! You’ll be a grown-up! And you’ll go off on a mating journey!”

  “Yes. So,” Tmafekitch said.

  “And leave me here!”

  “You will soon go off on your own mating journey,” Tmafekitch said, but Rilla heard in her clicks and words and grunts and pitch—the grunts that she and Tmafekitch had invented together!—that Tmafekitch was sad about the parting, too. Well, so what! Sadness didn’t help! Tmafekitch would go off to find some male, and it would have to be pretty far off because look how far the new she had had to come to find anybody to mate with, and then Rilla would never see Tmafekitch again. Never. And in less than a year Mommy and Daddy would take her back to Earth that they were so Chujo about, and Rilla would have nothing left. Nothing. Nothing.

  She turned and left Tmafekitch standing there without even a good-bye courtesy, running away from the village, away from the dome, her strong Genji-bred legs standing against the gravity better than her parents ever could, not even the bulky suit much slowing her flight under the thick, gray sky.

  “Let me see it again,” Bruce Johnson said.

  His wife Jane hit Replay, and the QED in the corner of the small dome, half research station and half home, started the incredible sequence of data again.

  The QED—Quantum-Effect Device—was on receiving mode, which meant that at the moment it was doing no thinking of its own but merely acting as a terminal to receive data from the main computer at Okuma Base, atop Mount Korabachi. The QED in the field dome was capable of thinking, very smart thinking, due to fuzzy programs that could make reasonable deductions from incomplete evidence. Bruce Johnson, xenobiologist, had thought often over the last ten years that this was a good thing because on Genji all you got was incomplete knowledge. This didn’t bother him. A huge ex-Texan who found it hard to sit still, either physically or mentally, he was pleased rather than not that Murasaki System still held so many facts that refused to fit together. It made for interesting theories. And now, looking at the data coming in on receiver mode, here was room for one more.

  The carpet whales, those huge sluggish maybe-sentient himatids that spent their unguessably long lives in the polar waters of Genji’s starside, were all swimming toward moonside.

  All of them.

  They were doing it very, very slowly, at even less than the two knots that were characteristic of their budding journeys. Measurement of their speed and direction came from Malachiel Holden, the half-crazy hermit researcher who fanatically studied the carpet whales from a research outpost on Farland. Well, not “hermit” any more, not since he had married Rita Byrne, the Genji-born girl young enough to be his daughter. That had fascinated and appalled Jane, who had taken to giving worried glances at Rilla and then doubled her insistence that Bruce and she and Rilla secure places on the ship arriving from and returning to Earth next year. Bruce didn’t much care that Rita Byrne had married Malachiel Holden. People didn’t interest him as much as Ihrdizu or himatids.

  Except for Jane and Rilla, of course.

  “Look at that,” he said to Jane. “All of those damn carpet whales. All moving toward moonside, where they never go.”

  “Holden has done a beautiful job of tracking their movements. He must spend every minute of every day either at sea or running QED projections.”

  “Not practical,” Bruce said. “But he’s good, all right. Cautious, though. This is all data and images—he’s not even offering a tentative hypothesis.”

  “Just an expense request,” Jane said dryly. The allocation of resources to carpet-whale study had always been a sore point among the researchers of the Ihrdizu; the Ihrdizu at least cooperated with being researched. In their own eccentric way. “He wants a station set up at the probable point of convergence of all the whales. As soon as he can figure out what it is.”

  “Well, of course,” Bruce said. Jane glanced at her husband. Abruptly she moved into his line of sight, not directly between him and the screen but clearly in his peripheral vision.

  “Bruce—we’re leaving in less than a year, right? We are leaving?”

  “Will you look at that,” he said softly. “Just look at that.”

  At Okuma Base, Jordan Dane, First Conciliator, stared at another set of data, this set from the moon.

  “Are they sure of this?” he asked his scientific liaison, Suzy Tatsumi, a middle-aged woman of soft-spoken tact and penetrating intelligence.

  “Yes, First Conciliator. They are sure.”

  He glanced at her, half smiling. How did she get so many delicate shades of meaning into six words? Verification (“The data is reliable”), rebuke (“They would not send it if they were not sure”), loyalty (“They on Chujo are my countrymen, after all, should you be questioning them to me?”), and conciliation (“I know it is just a Western reflex, to question data integrity, to question even superior researchers”). How did Tatsumi-san do it? She should be First Conciliator.

  Which was a damn silly title anyway. It sounded as if he were followed by a whole line of other conciliators—second, third—like a tiered judiciary system. But there was only Dane, at thirty-five standard years one of the youngest adults on Genji, chosen by the seven different human groups in the Murasaki System to coordinate forums at which their differences could be conciliated. Six of those groups maintained clusters of headquarter domes at Okuma Base, where most days you could breathe most of the air: three domes for the Japanese expedition that had seniority on Genji. Three domes for the American scientists that had arrived twenty-five years ago. Four domes for the British-led multinational expedition five years after that. And three smaller domes belonging to smaller groups.

  Among the domes, power packs hummed softly. Okuma Base had also, for the last six years, been the nexus of the information-sharing network Dane had set up. The QED in the British dome acted as a clearinghouse, not because the British equipment was particularly distinguished but because the Japanese and the Southwest American teams both found it easier to deal with the British than with each other.

  That was also probably the reason Jordan Dane had been elected First Conciliator. It was a vital job, he had come to see, even though it carried no actual power whatsoever and he could not order anyone to do anything. But the post was nonetheless necessary. First, because the seven groups were so diverse—three English-speaking scientific expeditions; the large group of Japanese scientists; the pathetic remnants of the proselytizing Carnot missionaries, mostly wiped out by plague; one even weirder religious group called the Mission of Fruitful Life whose stat
ed aim was to fill the entire galaxy with humans, however long it took; and one Spacer group who denied being colonists—there weren’t enough human-usable resources on Genji to self-support colonists—but didn’t seem to be anything else. They were artists, they said, but they neither wrote nor painted nor performed. They described themselves as “time artists,” and from what Dane could see, they sat and contemplated time at someone’s incredible expense.

  The second reason a First Conciliator was needed was the twenty-year-old massacre of Robert Carnot, human, and Aaron Kammer, God-knows-what, by Ihrdizu fisherfolk, who had in turn been massacring whales. The incident had left anger, confusion, and myths. The anger belonged to the Japanese, who had seen the two Anglo factions as disrupting Genji culture to gain power and glory. The confusion belonged to Edward Philby, the self-appointed first First Conciliator, who had witnessed (caused?) the massacre and who had never been the same afterward. The myths belonged to the Ihrdizu. All sorts of myths, none of them particularly influential but all of them tenacious: that the temples Robert Carnot left behind were blessed by angels from the sky. That the humans could disappear into the sea and become carpet whales. That Aaron Kammer was not really dead but had been glimpsed in Farland.

  This last, oddly, was what had driven that superrationalist Edward Philby around the bend.

  The odd thing, though, was that Philby had not left Genji. Twenty years later and he was still here, sitting with the time artists, contemplating whatever it was that time artists contemplated.

  Tatsumi never spoke of him. Jordan Dane never asked her why, sensing that she would not answer, that there were things moving below the surface of her mind about Philby. He could sense things like that. It was why he had lasted as First Conciliator. And Suzy Tatsumi was naturally reticent, formal. He liked that in her; it was restful. Perhaps it was also why she had lasted as liaison to diverse sets of scientists.

  He said to her now, “Who is still here who remembers that first time the snug mats formed on Chujo? Who was an eyewitness to the bioloons?” He was careful not to say the “so-called bioloons,” as the non-Japanese scientists did. In nearly thirty years, no one had ever seen bioloons form again.

  Tatsumi said, “Most of them returned on the second Japanese ship. But there is here a woman, Miyuki Kaneko, who witnessed it all.”

  “Here? On Genji?”

  “No. On Chujo.”

  Dane nodded. He stared a moment longer at the transmitter screen, which showed a valley floor on bleak Chujo writhing as if alive. Which it was, with the bioengineered microorganisms that, together, made a mysterious sort of cloth that had already done so many things on Murasaki’s worlds: Cure. Transform. Kill.

  “I think we should call a general forum,” Dane said. “Representatives from each group, two from those with teams on both Genji and Chujo. Transmitter linkup only for those who absolutely can’t spare the personnel from either the snug watch or the carpet-whale watch. Everyone else welcome, to the dome’s capacity. Call it a priority-two meeting: information sharing with possible vote on significant action.”

  Tatsumi nodded. She didn’t look surprised. “For when shall I call the meeting, First Conciliator?”

  Dane stared at the snug writhing over the floor of Chujo. The screen switched to data on the nomadic Chupchups, traveling toward the spot, even as the carpet whales traveled toward . . . something or other.

  “For now,” he said. “Better yet, for yesterday.”

  Jane Johnson stood at the edge of the plateau that held the Johnson field dome and the Ihrdizu village, and bitterly watched the water below rising up the plateau wall.

  Water on Genji was always doing some damn thing: rising in tides, falling in tides, whipping into vicious sea storms, stagnating in birth pools until the smell was enough to drive you crazy, even, according to the best research theory, wiping out entire ecosystems on a systematic basis, like endless punishments of an entire race for some sin no one remembered.

  She had been so enthusiastic about ecosystem research during her first year on Genji. Everything had seemed so exciting, after the confinement of the ship. She was a botanist; there had been so many new plants. New people. New possibilities. Genji had struck her as ugly, but next to the rest of it, that had hardly mattered.

  How did you account for a ten-year mistake?

  It had started with her pregnancy, an astonishment that had resulted from a batch of defective pregnancy blockers among the supplies. Well, with that many pharmaceuticals aboard that long, there were bound to be some defects. The surprising thing had been her fight against an abortion. She had wanted the baby fiercely, unthinkingly, and eventually Bruce had given up arguing. It wasn’t as if she had been the first: Rita Byrne was already fifteen years old and thriving. On Chujo, little Seigi Minoru was almost two.

  She didn’t know how it had been for those mothers, but for Jane, Rilla’s birth had changed everything. With her baby in her arms Jane had come to look at Genji as the hell it really was. Thick, heavy planet, dragging on her body, on her legs, on her very arms as she held her baby. Thick, soupy gray air, pressing down on them wherever they went, not even safe to breathe. Ultraviolet radiation to sear an infant’s unprotected skin, swooping pseudobirds strong enough in their perverse gravity to carry away an Ihrdizu child. Or a human one.

  Rilla changed everything. Under the huge dome at Okuma Base while Bruce went into the field to work, or in the research camps he insisted she bring Rilla to when the little girl was older, Rilla was a constant presence in Jane’s heart, pressing on her, weighing on her. Rilla deserved better. Rilla deserved a planet where she could run outside unfettered in the sunlight, dive into clear blue water, play with little girls instead of the little-she’s of the friendly Ihrdizu, who no matter how friendly could never really be friends. That was the first lesson of xenobiology: The alien is not human. Not your own behaviors, not your own motivations, not your own kind.

  No woman should ever have a baby off-planet.

  The tide below the plateau had almost peaked. Jane looked at the swirling water beneath her. Then she closed her eyes and arched her back slightly, not easy to do in her bulky suit. But she wasn’t in her suit. She stood on the edge of a red cliff at Amilcar, and below her the Mediterranean crashed, blue as the sky. Her back was arched against the wind, which blew her hair back from her face and brought to her the scent of wild jasmine. She sniffed deeply, eyes closed, only opening them because she was so hungry for the exquisite sight of the dusty leaves of olive trees lacy against the bright, clear sky.

  “I’m not going!” Rilla cried, aghast. “How can you make me go?”

  Her father looked at her, not especially patiently. Behind them, Mommy was doing something to the QED, and Rilla knew why, too: so that Mommy wouldn’t have to look at Rilla while Daddy told her she had to go with them to the conference at Okuma Base. If Mommy had said she had to go, Rilla could always have run to Daddy; Daddy liked her to be such friends with Tmafekitch. But Daddy was the one telling her. There was no escape.

  “I won’t go! I’ll. . .I’ll run away with Tmafekitch on her mating journey!”

  Mommy turned around sharply, her face white. But Daddy only said, in a tone he probably thought was soothing, “Now, Rilla, you know you can’t do that. How could you get food, or air tanks? And besides, Tmafekitch wouldn’t take you. She has an important job to do, finding a mate so she can establish a homestead and not be a little-she anymore. She can’t fit you into that job.”

  This was true. Rilla had already asked Tmafekitch. And Tmafekitch, waving her snorkel and clicking her feet in a way that meant she was embarrassed, had said no. The flush was all over her skin, that hateful sex flush that meant I soon Rilla would never see her friend again.

  “But by the time we get back from Okuma Base, Tmafekitch might be already gone!”

  “She might not,” Daddy said. But he didn’t look at her when he said it.

  Rilla burst into tears, stamped both her feet, and fled be
hind her partition.

  Jane frowned. “When did she start doing that?”

  “Doing what?” Bruce said. He still squatted on the floor, bringing himself down to Rilla’s height. His love for his daughter, he often thought, should not be such a painful thing.

  “Stamping both her feet like that to show she’s angry. In that Ihrdizu pattern.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She never smiles,” Jane said.

  “Smiles are rude in Ihrdizu. You know that. The tongue is a sex organ.”

  “She’s not Ihrdizu!”

  Bruce rose. “Lay off, Jane, will you?”

  “She’s not Ihrdizu.”

  Within an hour the three of them were in the flyer, bound for Okuma Base.

  Dane looked around the crowded room. Nobody looked back; they were all watching the monitor showing carpet whales migrating on Genji, snug mats growing on Chujo, or both.

  The scientists sat in rows on inflatable benches, reasonably orderly even under stress. Hauro Maguto represented the Japanese scientists on Genji, Miyuki Kaneko those on Chujo. Miyuki had answered eager questions almost the moment her shuttle had landed, but she hadn’t been able to add much. The data coming in on transmission was fresher than her last firsthand information from Chujo. She claimed, Dane remembered, to be an eyewitness to the bioloons these snug mats had supposedly become twenty-eight years ago. Her face, as she stared at the visuals from the Chujo upland valleys, showed nothing.

  Six designated representatives from the three other scientific expeditions also occupied inflatable benches, talking quietly among themselves. Other people crowded in the back, among them, Dane saw, the Johnsons. He had received three requests for berth space aboard the Light of Allah, due to arrive and depart Genji in eight months, from Jane Johnson. None had been cotransmitted with her husband. A bad sign. The child, Rilla, was not at the meeting; Jane had probably left her to play with the only other child on Genji, six-year-old Cade Anson.

  Between the inflatable benches and the standing scientists sat two members of the Quantists: two of the nineteen that existed, including Cade Anson. Dane couldn’t remember their names. They were muttering something. Prayers?