Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Frikatim’s snorkel waved proudly. He sat full up on his tail. Tmafekitch and even Rilla crowded close to stroke the back of the squealing baby. It was such a cute little-she! Rilla put a finger between the teeny flukes of its tail, and the baby flipped it in pleasure. Rilla stroked it again while the Master watched, inscrutable, and all of a sudden Rilla was crying at the little-she, at being with Tmafekitch again, at the beauty and excitement of a new life on Genji.

  “Hello, Jane,” Daddy said.

  Rilla tightened her grasp on his hand.

  Mommy looked calm, which was more than she had looked the last time Rilla had visited her. She sat in a small room on the ship, a room even smaller than Rilla’s partitioned cubby in the field dome. Two walls of the room were painted to look like a place Rilla had never seen. The sky was the wrong color, a sort of garish blue, and the plants were too tall and thin, and very strange-looking. Rilla shrank closer to Daddy.

  He said, “I’ve brought her.”

  Mommy didn’t even look at Rilla. But Rilla knew she saw her. Mommy hurt, that was why she didn’t look at Rilla, and seeing Mommy again, remembering how Mommy had combed her hair and read her stories, Rilla hurt, too. So much she thought she couldn’t stand it.

  But all Mommy said was, “I’ve been reading the original exploration teams’ journals, Bruce.”

  “Oh? Why is that? I thought you read only things set on Earth.”

  Mommy didn’t say why. “I read Toshio Tatsuhiko, Yukiko Arama, Emile Esperanza, Nicole Washington—even Aaron Kammer. The presnug Aaron Kammer. The human.”

  Daddy’s mouth turned down.

  “And you know what?” Mommy said. “They all reflect the same concern. They all cared so much about not causing ecological and cultural imbalance on Genji and Chujo. Were so fucking concerned about human contamination. And all the time we humans were completely, totally irrelevant. Don’t you think that’s funny?”

  Daddy said, “I’m not sure it’s true.”

  “Yes, you are. You know it. All the ecological balances, all the cultural disasters, were caused by the Murasakians themselves. Not by us. And now they’re being corrected by the Murasakians themselves, and not all our science or religion or so-called ‘art’ or anything else has made the slightest difference to the whole weird process. Isn’t that true?”

  Daddy was silent.

  “How does it feel to be completely irrelevant, Bruce? How do you stand it?”

  Daddy glanced down at Rilla. “That’s enough, Jane. Please don’t start again . . .”

  “And do you know why we’re irrelevant on Genji and Chujo? Because it’s not our system, Bruce. We can’t even eat the food, breathe most of the air—we don’t belong here. Even our science doesn’t belong here. Science observes things in order to effect beneficial change, Bruce. You knew that once. There is nothing we can ever change here. Nothing.”

  Daddy said, his voice thick, “Not again, Jane. I brought Rilla here to say good-bye. Just that.”

  “Just that. ‘Just that.’ A First Conciliator you bought and paid for decides who gets custody of my daughter and you—”

  “That’s not true, Jane! Not even a word of it!”

  Rilla saw a place to say something. Holding on to Daddy’s hand very tight, she said, “I wanted to stay on Genji, Mommy. I wanted to. I told Mr. Dane that.”

  Mommy didn’t say anything. Suddenly she hugged Rilla so tight Rilla couldn’t breathe. “Mommy! You’re hurting me!”

  Abruptly, Mommy let her go. Then she was pushing them out of the cabin, closing the door. “Go! Go! Take her!” Daddy picked up Rilla, who was too old to be picked up, and ran down the ship corridor. He didn’t stop until he got to the shuttle bay, where he set her down, knelt, and brought his face close to hers. “Rilla—are you sure? There won’t be another ship from Earth for at least three years standard, you know. Are you sure?”

  Rilla said, “I’m sure.”

  “And I . . . I know I’m not the best father for you, I get so caught up in my work. . .”

  Rilla hated it when he got like this. It was so much better when he just did the work, letting her do what she wanted to. She was all right, she had Tmafekitch and the other Ihrdizu . . . . When Daddy got like this, she almost despised him. That feeling frightened her. So she said coldly, “Don’t start again, Daddy. Please.”

  After that, Daddy got quiet. Rilla felt herself grow quieter, too. But it wasn’t until they were in the shuttle, returning to Genji, that she spoke again.

  “Daddy—I didn’t tell Mommy that Mr. Dane isn’t going to stay on Genji. I was going to, because I thought she might want to know who else was going to make the trip with her, but then I didn’t. Was that right?”

  Daddy brushed his face with his hand. “That was right, Rilla.”

  “Daddy—are we unimportant to Genji, like Mommy said?”

  Daddy sucked in his cheeks. “Yes.”

  “Then . . . then why are you staying? I mean, I know why I’m staying, because I was born here”—Rita Byrne and Seigi Minoru and Cade Anson and me—“but why are you? If you’re completely unimportant to Genji?”

  Bruce Johnson looked out the shuttle window. The great ship was in low orbit; beneath them Genji’s clouds swirled thickly, covering and uncovering an expanse of bleak sea, multicolored land.

  “Because Genji is important to me.”

  Suzy Tatsumi laid the bunch of flowers on Edward Philby’s grave, telling herself it was a ridiculous and sentimental thing to do. Certainly Philby would have thought so. The body, cremated, was not really buried under the rough stone marker, and the tide would come up in a few hours and carry away the flowers anyway. But they were “new flowers,” the first the Chujoans had engineered, and Tatsumi wanted them to be there.

  Jordan Dane waited in the flyer. She knew he still had much to do before both of them boarded the shuttle tomorrow for the ship, but he showed no sign of impatience. He was, she thought, always and forever, a patient man.

  “All done?”

  “In my grandmother’s house in Kyoto,” Tatsumi said as the flyer lifted, “was a painting on rice paper. It was very old, and she was very proud of it. The painting showed a mountain beside a sea. It was done in the old style: very spare, quick, light brush strokes. In the foreground were plum blossoms. I would stare at the painting for hours when I was a child. What I remember—although it is difficult to know if memory is accurate—is that the mountain and the sea and the trees filled me with peace. They seemed completely calm, caught forever in a moment of perfect balance.”

  “I see,” Dane said.

  “I think you do,” Tatsumi said, in her pretty voice. “Jordan, where will you go when we reach Earth?”

  “I have eleven years to think about it,” he said. He did not look at her. “I have never seen Japan.”

  “You would very much like Kyoto. At least, the Kyoto I remember. Of course, Japan may be very different now.”

  “Do you expect it will be?”

  “Not in its essence. That does not change. And of course there are excellent facilities for the writing of your book.”

  “I would very much like Japan if you were there,” Dane said.

  “It is very different from a habitat. Or from Genji.”

  “I would hope so,” Jordan said.

  The flyer skimmed over a cliff and then over the sea. Below them drifted a mass of the new plankton the Masters were breeding, dull red. It was fast-growing, of high nourishment to several breeds of Genji sea life, genetically malleable. Bruce Johnson had exulted in the new plankton.

  Suzy said neutrally, “I am twenty years your senior, Jordan.”

  “I don’t think I should want to come to Kyoto if you were not.”

  “It is not usual for a young man to value a . . . a formal balance over, let us say, sexual youth. Or riotous adventure.”

  Dane looked again at the drifting mass of plankton, which had not existed two months ago. At the bioloon floating in the air in the far dis
tance above Nighland. At the manic report Bruce Johnson had turned in correlating QED fuzzy-logic deductions about the bioengineered spaceship, the Masters’ cities on Chujo, the genetic alteration of plankton and land fauna, the sudden vocabulary acquisition of the Ihrdizu, and his wife’s refusal to set foot on Genji. The report also covered the origin of carpet whales, which Johnson maintained had been created by the Chupchups. Three Japanese researchers had filed angry and derisive counterreports, calling Johnson’s speculations “irresponsible science-mongering,” a term completely opaque to Dane. Maybe it was the translator. Johnson had counterattacked. Resource allocations for Malachiel Holden’s carpet-whale studies were affected by the politics of this and six other scientific feuds dumped on the First Conciliator, with Holden’s resources being cut by a third. Or increased by a third—the outcome was not yet clear. Holden and Byrne were screaming anyway, just in case. Three Quantists had declared the Chujoan return to be a “Return,” capital R, and had set about building more Carnot temples. Two of the time artists had moved into a Carnot temple to hold what they called a “court of time”: Dane had failed to find out exactly what this involved. The ship from Earth was bringing a mixed scientific and missionary team. The ship was called the Light of Allah, and most of the people aboard, after eleven years together, seemed to be engaged in blood feuds with each other.

  “Riotous adventure,” Dane repeated, and laughed, and reached for Suzy’s hand.

  After a moment she laughed, too.

  The new First Conciliator stood ready to greet the first team of scientists off the shuttle. It was actually the shuttle belonging to the old ship still in orbit; apparently, the shuttle on the Light of Allah had been damaged in some unspecified accident in transit. The First Conciliator found it hard to picture this: surely not even a space-bored crew would have reason to try to make use of a shuttle while traveling at an acceleration slightly greater than one g? What could they do with it? These questions had not thus far been answered.

  The shuttle touched down on the plain not far from the sub-Genji point. The main base on Chujo had, of course, been shifted to here after the startling events of eight months ago. And now that the new First Conciliator had been chosen, Dune Tiger Station would replace Okuma Base as the center of joint decisions for the humans in the Murasaki System.

  If you could call what Miyuki made “decisions.” The shuttle air lock opened, and the first ten embarkees, in full suits, stepped onto the soil of Chujo. Miyuki moved forward, greeting first Captain Salah Mahjoub, then each member of the scientific team. Before greeting the last man in line, she braced herself.

  Even through his faceplate the resemblance was startling. The old pictures she had seen . . . just the same. The light, sandy hair, so out of place among the dark-complexioned team. The slightly crooked nose, gray eyes, too-small chin.

  She said in English, “You are welcome to the Murasaki System, Mr. Kevin Kammer-Washington.”

  His eyes burned with his special interest in this place: the boulder-strewn valley with its deep crevasses, the self-managing fields, the ruins of the Chupchup city on the horizon.

  “Thank you, First Conciliator,” he said. “I am very eager to become a part of Chujo.”

  1993

  STALKING BEANS

  Nancy Kress has authored six novels, including a fantasy called The Prince of Morning Bells (her first) and, most recently, the science fictional Brain Rose. She has also written numerous short stories, winning the 1985 Nebula Award for “Out of All Them Bright Stars.” and the 1991 Nebula Award for her novella "Beggars in Spain."

  It has always seemed unfair that in the original tale of Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack—thief and betrayer—got away scot-free. So Kress’s version, with an older, bitter “Jack,” is a more satisfying story on several levels.

  SOMETIMES I TRY TO MAKE MY WIFE ANGRY. I CLUMP in from the dairy in boots fouled by cow dung; I let the hearth fire die; I spill greasy mutton on the fresh cloth Annie insists on laying each night as if we were still gentry and not the peasants we have become. I wipe my nose with the back of my hand, in imitation of our neighbors. I get drunk at the alehouse. I stay away all night.

  It’s like fighting a pillow. All give, and feathers everywhere. Annie’s pretty face flutters into wispy dismay, followed by wispy forgiveness. “Oh, Jack, I understand!” she cries and falls on my neck, her curls—that but for me would be bound in a fashionable coif—filling my mouth. “I know how hard our fall in the world is for you!” Never a word about how hard it is for her. Never a word of anger. Never the accusation, You are to blame. Always, she invites me to sink into her understanding, to lie muffled in it as in the soft beds we once owned, to be soundlessly absorbed. Sometimes it takes every fiber of my muscles not to hit her.

  Only when, drunk, I traded our best cow to a dwarf for a sack of beans did Annie show a flash of the anger she should feel by right. “You . . . did . . . what?” she said, very deliberately. Her pale eyes sparkled and her thin, tense body relaxed for one glorious moment into anger. I took a step toward her and Annie, misunderstanding, cried, “Keep away from me!” She looked wildly around, and her eye fell on the shelf with our one remaining book, bound in red leather and edged with gold. She seized it and threw it at me. She missed. It fell into the fire, and the dry pages blazed with energy.

  But she couldn’t make it last. A second later her shoulders drooped and she stared at the fire with stricken eyes. “Oh, Jack—I’m sorry! The book was worth more than the cow!” Then she was on my neck, sobbing. “Oh, Jack, I understand, I do, I know your pride has been so badly injured by all this, I want to be a good wife to you and understand . . .” Her hair settled into my mouth, over my nose.

  Desperate, I said, “I cast away the beans in the forest, and vomited over them!”

  “Oh, Jack, I understand! It’s not your fault! You couldn’t help what happened!” What kind of man can never help what happens to him?

  I can’t bring myself to touch her body, even by chance. When one of us rolls toward the center of the sagging mattress, I jerk away, as if touched by rot. In the darkest part of the night, when the fire has gone out, I hear her sobbing, muffled by the thin pillow that is the best, thanks to my stupidity, we can now afford. I get out of bed and stumble, torchless, into the woods. There is no moon, no stars. The trees loom around me like unseen giants, breathing in the blackness. It doesn’t matter. My feet don’t fail me. I know exactly where I’m going.

  She is taller than I am by perhaps a foot, and outweighs me by thirty pounds. Her shoes are held together with gummy string, not because she doesn’t have better—the closet is filled with gold slippers, fine calfskin boots, red-heeled shoes with silver bows—but because this pair is comfortable, and damn how they look. There is a food stain on her robe, which is knotted loosely around her waist. Her thick blond hair is a snarl. She yawns in my face.

  “Damn, Jack, I didn’t expect you tonight.”

  “Is he here?”

  She makes a mocking face and laughs. “No. And now that you’re here, you may as well come in as not. What did you do, tumble down the beanstalk? You look like a dirty urchin.” She gazes at me, amused. I always amuse her. Her amusement wakes her a little more, and then her gaze sharpens. She slides one hand inside her robe. “Since he’s not here. . .” She reaches for me.

  It’s always like this. She is greedy in bed, frank, and direct. I am an instrument of her pleasure, as she is of mine, and beyond that she asks nothing. Her huge breasts move beneath my hands, and she moans in that open pleasure that never loses its edge of mockery. I ease into her and, to prolong the moment, say, “What would you do if I never climbed the beanstalk again?” She says promptly, “Hire another wretched dwarf to stalk another drunken bull.” She laughs. “Do you think you’re irreplaceable, Jack?”

  “No,” I say, smiling, and thrust into her hard enough to please us both. She laughs again, her attention completely on her own sensations. Afterwards, she’ll fall asleep, not kno
wing or caring when I leave. I’ll wrestle open the enormous bolted door, bang it shut, clump across the terrace to the clouds. It won’t matter how much noise I make; she never wakes.

  The morning air this high up is cool and delicious. The bean leaves rustle against my face. A bird wheels by, its wings outstretched in a lazy glide, its black eyes bright with successful hunting, free of the pull of the earth.

  Annie is crying in the bedroom of our cottage. I’m not supposed to know this, since she thinks I’m still at market with this week’s eggs and honey. I poke at the fire, adding up weeks in my head. They make the right sum. Annie must have her monthly flow again, our hopes for a child once more bleeding out between her legs.

  I creep quietly out of the cottage to the dairy and sit heavily on a churning cask. I should go to her. I should take her in my arms and reassure her, tell her that maybe next month. . .But I can’t go to her like this. The edge of my own disappointment is too sharp; it would cut us both. I sit on the churning cask until the two remaining cows low plaintively outside their byre. Inside the cottage Annie has lit the candles. She flies around the dingy room, smiling brightly. “Stew tonight, Jack! Your favorite!” She starts to sing, her voice straining on the high notes, her eyes shining determinedly, her thin shoulders rigid as glass.

  The tax collector stands in my dairy, cleaning his fingernails with a jeweled dagger. I recognize the dagger. It once belonged to my father. Lord Randall must have given it to this bloated cock’scomb for a gift, in return for his useful services. The tax collector looks around my cottage.

  “Where is that book you used to have on that wooden shelf, Jack?”

  Once he would never have dared address me so. Once he would have said “Master John.” Once. “Gone,” I say shortly. “One less thing for you to tax.”

  He laughs. “You’ve still luxury enough here, compared to your neighbors. The land tax has gone up again, Jack. You owe three gold pieces instead of two. Such is the burden of the yeomanry.”