Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Mr. Philby,” she said formally. “It is Dr. Tatsumi.”

  She wasn’t sure what she expected. Slowly, slowly Philby rose, nodded, and led the way into the dome.

  Tatsumi removed her helmet. (Was it completely safe? He looked crazed. But she stood between him and the air lock, and it was painfully obvious by how much she was the stronger.) She bowed slightly.

  “I have come to see you, after all this time, to ask you once again about something. Alas, it is a painful topic: that last day on the beach, at the Ihrdizu fishing association, when Robert Carnot and Aaron Kammer died.”

  “In time, everything must happen,” Philby said.

  She nodded politely. “So say many Oriental philosophers.”

  “And you think I am merely echoing them. But I mean something much subtler, something derived from physics,” Philby said. She remembered that he had debated philosophy for—literally—years with Robert Carnot, through ship-to-ship link. She heard, too, what she had missed in his first, five-word utterance: the cancer had invaded his throat.

  “What is it that you do mean?” she said, still polite.

  “For everything there is an equal and opposite reaction. That is basic physics. It is also cosmic design. For everything, if one waits and witnesses with enough patience, there is a corrective swing in events. Like a pendulum.”

  “Even manslaughter,” Tatsumi said, using the curious Western term. She could think of no other. For what had happened on the beach, “murder” was not the right word.

  A faint gleam shone in Philby’s sunken eyes. “Yes. You understand.”

  “Not completely,” Tatsumi said honestly. “You are waiting to witness events that will correct your . . . your moral guilt?”

  “I bear no moral guilt,” Philby said hoarsely. “I wait to see the swing of the pendulum, for aesthetic satisfaction, I am an artist.”

  Time artists. “But,” Tatsumi could not help saying, although it was no part of what she had come to say, “an artist does not just wait. An artist participates in the process.”

  “We participate,” Philby said. “Ask any court if the witnesses are not participants in a trial.”

  “But that is justice, not art.”

  “Ah,” said Philby, “but the wisdom of our art is that we do not recognize the distinction. We know that only art creates true justice.”

  Tatsumi gave it up. Subtlety interested her; self-serving rationalization did not. “Mr. Philby, will you look at some pictures I have brought?”

  “An artist witnesses whatever part of the design is entrusted to him.”

  She opened the packet she carried, hard copy from the QED. “These are carpet whales. They are all—all, Mr. Philby—gathering at a point in the strait between Southland and Nighland. The point is as close to the sub-Chujo node as possible, the actual node being inland. This picture here shows one himatid that has rolled over to expose its ventral side. The formation in the air above is an illusion of exudates, gases and water, reflected and refracted by thousands of minute bits of shiny metal, which it must have taken the whale millennia to collect and embed at precise locations between its teeth and stomata.”

  Philby did not seem surprised to hear this.

  “What does the illusory formation look like to you, Mr. Philby?”

  He said promptly, “It’s Aaron Kammer.”

  “Mr. Philby, you told me . . .” No. Wrong. “Mr. Philby, have you ever seen anything like this before?”

  “On the beach. After he died.”

  “After?”

  “I walked between the whale skins. What was left of the whale skins. And I saw him, just like that, red and green ribbons of light.” To her shock, Tatsumi saw that there were tears in his sunken eyes. Tears of gladness. What strange ideas of absolution had been touched in his mind by all this?

  She said, “Just like this you saw him. After he was dead.”

  “I told you so at the time, Tatsumi-san.”

  “Yes. You did.” How cold she had been to him, how furious, how judgmental. How young. “You said something else, as well. You told me what Kammer’s final words were before the . . . the massacre started.”

  “Yes. He said, ‘They’re the ones. They’re the ones, and you’re killing them!’ ”

  She had remembered right. She let out her breath. “Thank you, Mr. Philby.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Do you need anything? Pain blockers?”

  “You have brought me everything a time artist needs.”

  He was too sick to debate with, even if debating had been her style. Too sick, too old, too peculiarly shamed. Tatsumi had not known Westerners were capable of such deep, all-accepting shame. Certainly she had not known Philby was. She had been wrong. Or perhaps over the course of twenty years he had changed, grain by grain, like those flabby plants that petrify into unbreakable stone.

  As she climbed back into her flyer, she thought of two things, turning them over and over like the smooth white stones in her grandmother’s miniature sand garden in Kyoto. The first was what Aaron Kammer had said to her, Suzy Tatsumi, about the Chupchups on Chujo: “Learned much myself on Chujo about understanding and standing between. Masters and slaves. Everybody’s right, everybody’s wrong.” She had not known what he meant. Now, seeing Philby, who had been so wrong and had worked it around in his mind to a process of right that united justice and art—a process she had just contributed to with her prosecutorial questions—she was not so sure. Right and wrong looked more complex to her now. And mastery—of anything—seemed much dimmer.

  The other thought was that it had been years since she had remembered her grandmother’s sand garden in Japan, on Earth, her birth-home.

  “I tell you, she’s gone!” Jane Johnson screamed. “She’s gone, looking for that damn iguana!”

  Bruce Johnson stopped short. The Ihrdizu had never in the least reminded him of iguanas—where did Jane, even in her hysteria, get that? And it wasn’t like her to be so ethnocentric, so utterly imperial about the aliens . . .

  She was a scientist. Even if the science was only botany.

  “Calm down,” he said. “She’s probably playing in the Carnot temple, or sulking somewhere . . . She knows how much air is in her tanks and what her physical capacity is. You underestimate her, Jane. She’ll be all right.”

  “Which only means you don’t want to bother to go looking for her! Well, I’m going!” She yanked on her suit, crying.

  Bruce suppressed his irritation. He didn’t know what was happening to Jane. She had always been high-strung, but now . . .

  “High emotion means an increased chance of accidents, Jane. Look, if you have to go out, just calm down first. Rilla’s all right, she’s a Genjian . . .”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “I said, she’s a Genjian.”

  Jane sobered immediately. Coldly, methodically, she pulled on and sealed her suit, ran through the safety checks. She did not look at him or speak to him until she actually had her hand on the air-lock recycle. Then she said, in a voice he had never heard from her before, “She’s a Canadian child.”

  The QED chimed, not softly, which meant a transmission of crucial, although not life-threatening, importance. Bruce turned his head toward the QED. When he turned it back, Jane was gone.

  Unnecessary. Rilla would be fine. She would be back in an hour. Unnecessary, and therefore wasteful.

  “Transmission from Chujo,” the QED said. A Japanese head appeared, someone Bruce didn’t recognize.

  “This is Dr. Kenzo Ohkubo,” the man said in English; Bruce recognized the slightly mechanical undertones of the QED translator. Dr. Ohkubo was speaking Japanese. “I am at temporary base near the sub-Genji point, twenty-five degrees twenty-eight minutes south, where the largest of the snug mats is growing. I wish to play for my esteemed colleagues on Genji, in which I include all scientists in reach of the information network, the recording of an interview I have just had with a Chujo Master.”
/>
  Bruce whistled. He wasn’t sure what impressed him more: that the Japanese, who tended to be formal and a little proprietary about scientific information, were sharing the interview, or that they had finally gotten one with a Chupchup at all. After twenty-eight years!

  “We did not obtain this information by our efforts,” Dr. Ohkubo said. “It was freely given. The Chujoan walked from his camp near the snug vats to our dome. When I advanced to greet him, he spoke as follows.”

  The camera angle shifted; it was not a particularly good picture. The image of the Chujoan wavered, steadied; no one at the temporary camp, hopeless of any real contact, had prepared for this abrupt appearance. Bruce stared, fascinated, at the noseless humanoid face with the huge gold-brown eyes, slitted mouth, and flaring, scalloped ears. How good would the translation be? For two and a half decades the Japanese had been dropping transmitters into Chujoan encampments and farm centers. This electronic eavesdropping had yielded only a meager vocabulary and the knowledge that Chupchups would not shine at cocktail parties. The QED translation program would not have much to go on.

  But speak it did, forty-five seconds of trills, twitters, and growls. Bruce had the eerie impression that the Chujoan had slowed down its speech, making an effort to be more intelligible. When the statement was over, a callused, blue-fingernailed hand extended toward the camera, offering a smooth blue box about half a meter square. A human hand moved into camera range and grasped the box. Then the Chupchup simply turned and loped off.

  Dr. Ohkubo reappeared. “We have run this speech through the best language programs we have. Many of the Chujoan words were new to the computer. This is the closest approximation we can make, going first to Japanese and then to English. Please bear in your mind that it may not be correct.”

  The voice of the translator began: “It *is/will be* *time/an animal hunted/a problem solved.* Snug travels to Genji. *Error/hunting-mistake-which-leaves-an-animal-unkilled* is *solved/hunted/built/completed.* Cities are empty because Chupchups not *inside/needful of/tied down for the kill* the cities. We eat the *beings* of Genji. The *beings* of Genji eat us. It *is/will be* * time/an animal hunted/a problem solved.*”

  Dr. Ohkubo returned and said something brief in Japanese. Bruce, watching, wondered what he could have said for the translator to produce the idiomatic, resigned English translation: “There you have it.”

  Jesus Christ, Bruce thought. Jesus H. Christ.

  Then he remembered that he was a scientist and should take the flyer posthaste to either Okuma Base or—better—where the carpet whales were gathering as close as possible to the sub-Chujo node.

  Only then did he remember that Jane had the flyer, looking for Rilla.

  “Poetry,” Dane said. “It could be poetry. The last line repeating the first . . .”

  “The only clear points,” said Don Serranian, one of the physicists, “is that the snug is supposed to travel to Genji, and that something is supposed to be settled. But there’s no way that snug could cross space!”

  “Are you sure?” Miyuki Kaneko said. Her voice held an underlying tremor that made Tatsumi watch her closely. “There has been for generations now speculation about bioengineered spaceships.”

  Everyone spoke at once then. Dane tried to follow the arguments behind the positions taken by highly trained minds, none of whom agreed with each other.

  “The same word carries connotations of ‘time,’ of ‘an animal hunted,’ and of ‘a problem solved.’ Is that threefold meaning a construct of our translator, or does it imply a fatalistic belief system in which time is measured by what events are resolved in a given span?”

  “The Chupchups seem to be saying that they abandoned the cities by their own choice, because they no longer needed them. Not because the race had degenerated to a pre-city level. Which, I’d like to remind everyone, is what I maintained all along.”

  “What are the implications of ‘We eat the beings of Genji’ ? The translation of ‘eat’ is firm, but the translation of ‘beings’ is tentative, level-three uncertainty—are they talking about the Ihrdizu? Are the Chujoans possibly cannibalistic? Or could they have been once?”

  “The next sentence is ‘The beings of Genji eat us.’ That seems to imply a metaphorical interpretation rather than a literal one. Perhaps the entire message is metaphor!”

  “If the Japanese would bring that blue ‘book’ to Genji where the rest of us could have a crack at it—”

  “Ihrdizu folk sayings like the groveling ‘May I never rise to Chujo’ seem to me to imply an exalted state for Chujo. If it represents a kind of perfected being-hood, a Nirvana—”

  “Ihrdizu ecological disasters—”

  “—carpet whales—’ ”

  They were not getting anywhere, Dane saw. They never did get anywhere. Individual researches illuminated this small fact of the Murasaki biosphere, or that small fact, or a tentative connection between this and that. But they never got anywhere creating a coherent overall picture. Not in thirty years. Did that mean that humans couldn’t grasp a big picture so alien? Or that there was no coherence to be grasped?

  Dane didn’t believe the latter.

  Why not? Because he just didn’t. The universe was not that fractured. Or human comprehension that limited.

  “We do not really understand anything happening here,” Tatsumi said in her pretty voice, and he looked at her, startled to hear his own thoughts articulated so clearly.

  Tatsumi smiled at him. No one else even heard her: they were all too loud with desperate speculation.

  Why desperate? Dane wondered. But then he knew: contradictory elements in their adopted world made hash of the limited understanding they had already struggled so hard to achieve. The lack of understanding made them feel excluded. Genji and Chujo, by its sudden eruption of events so clear to their own species and so weird to the humans, were shutting the humans out. They felt exiled.

  And he, Dane, did not? No. Why not?

  Tatsumi said to him, in a voice barely above a whisper, “You, Jordan-san, already felt like an exile.”

  Rilla stopped walking to check her tanks. Not quite halfway used. She could walk a little ways yet. But not far. She would have to find Tmafekitch soon. Or—

  She was farther away from the field dome than she had ever been, except in the flyer. The village was far behind. Around her were no birth pools, no Carnot temple, no food ponds. Only low yellow plants and marshy ground and low hillocks and the path, hard and firm, that generations of Ihrdizu had worn for trade. There were no people. Rilla didn’t like to admit how much she wanted to see a snorkel waving above the vegetation. Anybody’s snorkel, it didn’t even have to be Tmafekitch’s.

  How could Tmafekitch leave without saying goodbye! How could she!

  Rilla walked on a little farther. Above, Chujo was full face, the color of the sand that she and Tmafekitch used to build domes with. Chujo was streaked at one edge with white clouds. It was ugly. Tmafekitch wasn’t there.

  Her tanks suddenly chimed, very loud. They were half empty.

  Rilla sat down on a rock beside the path and started to cry. She had to go back. She wasn’t going to see Tmafekitch after all. She had to go back or she would die. She couldn’t even, in fact, afford the time and energy to sit here and cry.

  Life was awful. Nobody had ever told her life was going to be this awful.

  Rilla got heavily to her feet, and Tmafekitch came trotting around a hillock.

  “Tmafekitch! You’re here!”

  Tmafekitch stopped dead and clicked her feet in astonishment. Her snorkel waved in loops. She said to Rilla in their personal language, “Why are you here? Where do you go?”

  “I came to find you! You left before I came back!”

  “It was time for my mating journey,” Tmafekitch said, still clicking and looping. “Are you going on a mating journey now?”

  “Of course not!” Rilla said. This was not the meeting she had envisioned. A new thought occurred to her. “Tmafekitch—why
are you traveling back toward your village?”

  “I cannot go on my mating journey.”

  “Cannot?” Rilla said. She had never heard of such a thing. “Why not?”

  “Because it is ****.”

  Rilla had never heard the word. Something odd in Tmafekitch’s snorkel loops made her think suddenly that Tmafekitch had never said the word, either. But that didn’t make any sense. Rilla wished she had the translator with her after all.

  “Tmafekitch, what does that word mean? The one you just said?”

  Tmafekitch came close to Rilla’s rock. She sat down on her tail, then got up again, which meant she was thinking hard. Her snorkel looped wildly. A flock of silverbirds flew overhead, and only one of her upper eyes tracked it, so distracted was she. Finally she sat down again on her tail and put her face very close to Rilla’s, as talkers often did when they came to the exciting parts in a story they were talking.

  “It means time. And an animal killed after long hunting. And . . . a problem solved.”

  “What?” Rilla said. “What?”

  Tmafekitch took her face away. The silverbirds suddenly started to screech, and Rilla looked up. A flyer approached. Mommy or Daddy. Or both. Probably furious.

  “Oh, uneaten turds,” she said. “Tmafekitch, are you really coming back to your village?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about your mating journey?”

  “I cannot go. It’s ****.”

  There it was again. Rilla had never heard of anything interrupting a mating journey once it was started. “What about your heat flush?”

  “Gone.”

  Rilla had never heard of that, either. “Will it come back?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “When?”

  “After.”

  The flyer landed. Through the window Rilla could see Mommy, gesturing at her furiously. Nothing was going right. Except, of course, that Tmafekitch was coming back to the village. Even if that made no sense.

  “Tmafekitch—how come you never told me this word before, if it’s so important it can stop your mating journey?”

  Tmafekitch seemed to think deeply. Her snorkel ceased all motion. A long moment went by, in which Mommy climbed out of the flyer and stalked toward Rilla.