Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  I slip out of my bed and stand swaying a moment, with morning dizziness. A Terran healer once told me my blood pressure was too low, which is the sort of nonsensical thing Terrans will sometimes say—like announcing the air is too moist. The air is what it is, and so am I.

  What I am is a murderer.

  I kneel in front of my sister’s glass coffin. My mouth has that awful morning taste, even though last night I drank nothing stronger than water. Almost I yawn, but at the last moment I turn it into a narrowlipped ringing in my ears that somehow leaves my mouth tasting worse than ever. But at least I haven’t disrespected Ano. She was my only sibling and closest friend, until I replaced her with illusion.

  “Two more years, Ano,” I say, “less forty-two days. Then you will be free. And so will I.”

  Ano, of course, says nothing. There is no need. She knows as well as I the time until her burial, when she can be released from the chemicals and glass that bind her dead body and can rejoin our ancestors. Others I have known whose relatives were under atonement bondage said the bodies complained and recriminated, especially in dreams, making the house a misery. Ano is more considerate. Her corpse never troubles me at all. I do that to myself.

  I finish the morning prayers, leap up, and stagger dizzily to the piss closet. I may not have drunk pel last night, but my bladder is nonetheless bursting.

  At noon a messenger rides into my yard on a Terran bicycle. The bicycle is an attractive design, sloping, with interesting curves. Adapted for our market, undoubtedly. The messenger is less attractive, a surly boy probably in his first year of government service. When I smile at him, he looks away. He would rather be someplace else. Well, if he doesn’t perform his messenger duties with more courteous cheer, he will be.

  “Letter for Uli Pek Bengarin.”

  “I am Uli Pek Bengarin.”

  Scowling, he hands me the letter and pedals away. I don’t take the scowl personally. The boy does not, of course, know what I am, any more than my neighbors do. That would defeat the whole point. I am supposed to pass as fully real, until I can earn the right to resume being so.

  The letter is shaped into a utilitarian circle, very business-like, with a generic government seal. It could have come from the Tax Section, or Community Relief, or Processions and Rituals. But of course it hasn’t; none of those sections would write to me until I am real again. The sealed letter is from Reality and Atonement. It’s a summons; they have a job for me.

  And about time. I have been home nearly six weeks since the last job, shaping my flowerbeds and polishing dishes and trying to paint a skyscape of last month’s synchrony, when all six moons were visible at once. I paint badly. It is time for another job.

  I pack my shoulder sack, kiss the glass of my sister’s coffin, and lock the house. Then I wheel my bicycle—not, alas, as interestingly curved as the messenger’s—out of its shed and pedal down the dusty road toward the city.

  Frablit Pek Brimmidin is nervous. This interests me; Pek Brimmidin is usually a calm, controlled man, the sort who never replaces reality with illusion. He’s given me my previous jobs with no fuss. But now he actually can’t sit still; he fidgets back and forth across his small office, which is cluttered with papers, stone sculptures in an exaggerated style I don’t like at all, and plates of half-eaten food. I don’t comment on either the food or the pacing. I am fond of Pek Brimmidin, quite apart from my gratitude to him, which is profound. He was the official in R&A who voted to give me a chance to become real again. The other two judges voted for perpetual death, no chance of atonement. I’m not supposed to know this much detail about my own case, but I do. Pek Brimmidin is middle-aged, a stocky man whose neck fur has just begun to yellow. His eyes are gray, and kind.

  “Pek Bengarin,” he says, finally, and then stops.

  “I stand ready to serve,” I say softly, so as not to make him even more nervous. But something is growing heavy in my stomach. This does not look good.

  “Pek Bengarin,” Another pause. “You are an informer.”

  “I stand ready to serve our shared reality.” I repeat, despite my astonishment. Of course I’m an informer. I’ve been an informer for two years and eighty-two days. I killed my sister, and I will be an informer until my atonement is over, I can be fully real again, and Ano can be released from death to join our ancestors. Pek Brimmidin knows this. He’s assigned me every one of my previous informing jobs, from the first easy one in currency counterfeiting right through the last one, in baby stealing. I’m a very good informer, as Pek Brimmidin also knows. What’s wrong with the man?

  Suddenly Pek Brimmidin straightens. But he doesn’t look me in the eye. “You are an informer, and the Section for Reality and Atonement has an informing job for you. In Aulit Prison.”

  So that’s it. I go still. Aulit Prison holds criminals. Not just those who have tried to get away with stealing or cheating or child-snatching, which are, after all, normal. Aulit Prison holds those who are unreal, who have succumbed to the illusion that they are not part of shared common reality and so may do violence to the most concrete reality of others: their physical bodies. Maimers. Rapists. Murderers.

  Like me.

  I feel my left hand tremble, and I strive to control it and to not show how hurt I am. I thought Pek Brimmidin thought better of me. There is of course no such thing as partial atonement—one is either real or one is not—but a part of my mind nonetheless thought that Pek Brimmidin had recognized two years and eighty-two days of effort in regaining my reality. I have worked so hard.

  He must see some of this on my face because he says quickly, “I am sorry to assign this job to you, Pek. I wish I had a better one. But you’ve been requested specifically by Rafkit Sarloe.” Requested by the capital; my spirits lift slightly. “They’ve added a note to the request. I am authorized to tell you the informant job carries additional compensation. If you succeed, your debt will be considered immediately paid, and you can be restored at once to reality.”

  Restored at once to reality. I would again be a full member of World, without shame. Entitled to live in the real world of shared humanity, and to hold my head up with pride. And Ano could be buried, the artificial chemicals washed from her body, so that it could return to World and her sweet spirit could join our ancestors. Ano, too, would be restored to reality.

  “I’ll do it,” I tell Pek Brimmidin. And then, formally, “I stand ready to serve our shared reality.”

  “One more thing, before you agree, Pek Bengarin.” Pek Brimmidin is fidgeting again. “The suspect is a Terran.”

  I have never before informed on a Terran. Aulit Prison, of course, holds those aliens who have been judged unreal: Terrans, Fallers, the weird little Huhuhubs. The problem is that even after thirty years of ships coming to World, there is still considerable debate about whether any aliens are real at all. Clearly their bodies exist; after all, here they are. But their thinking is so disordered they might almost qualify as all being unable to recognize shared social reality, and so just as unreal as those poor empty children who never attain reason and must be destroyed.

  Usually we on World just leave the aliens alone, except of course for trading with them. The Terrans in particular offer interesting objects, such as bicycles, and ask in return worthless items, mostly perfectly obvious information. But do any of the aliens have souls, capable of recognizing and honoring a shared reality with the souls of others? At the universities, the argument goes on. Also in market squares and pel shops, which is where I hear it. Personally, I think aliens may well be real. I try not to be a bigot.

  I say to Pek Brimmidin, “I am willing to inform on a Terran.”

  He wiggles his hand in pleasure. “Good, good. You will enter Aulit Prison a Capmonth before the suspect is brought there. You will use your primary cover, please.”

  I nod, although Pek Brimmidin knows this is not easy for me. My primary cover is the truth: I killed my sister Ano Pek Bengarin two years and eighty-two days ago and was judged unreal eno
ugh for perpetual death, never able to join my ancestors. The only untrue part of the cover is that I escaped and have been hiding from the Section police ever since.

  “You have just been captured,” Pek Brimmidin continues, “and assigned to the first part of your death in Aulit. The Section records will show this.”

  Again I nod, not looking at him. The first part of my death in Aulit, the second, when the time came, in the kind of chemical bondage that holds Ano. And never ever to be freed—ever. What if it were true? I should go mad. Many do.

  “The suspect is named ‘Carryl Walters’. He is a Terran healer. He murdered a World child, in an experiment to discover how real peoples brains function. His sentence is perpetual death. But the Section believes that Carryl Walters was working with a group of World people in these experiments. That somewhere on World there is a group that’s so lost its hold on reality that it would murder children to investigate science.

  For a moment the room wavers, including the exaggerated swooping curves of Pek Brimmidin’s ugly sculptures. But then I get hold of myself. I am an informer, and a good one. I can do this. I am redeeming myself, and releasing Ano. I am an informer.

  “I’ll find out who this group is,” I say. “And what they’re doing, and where they are.”

  Pek Brimmidin smiles at me. “Good.” His trust is a dose of shared reality: two people acknowledging their common perceptions together, without lies or violence. I need this dose. It is probably the last one I will have for a long time.

  How do people manage in perpetual death, fed on only solitary illusion?

  Aulit Prison must be full of the mad.

  Traveling to Aulit takes two days of hard riding. Somewhere my bicycle loses a bolt and I wheel it to the next village. The woman who runs the bicycle shop is competent but mean, the sort who gazes at shared reality mostly to pick out the ugly parts.

  “At least it’s not a Terran bicycle.”

  “At least,” I say, but she is incapable of recognizing sarcasm.

  “Sneaky soulless criminals, taking us over bit by bit. We should never have allowed them in. And the government is supposed to protect us from unreal slime, ha, what a joke. Your bolt is a nonstandard size.”

  “Is it?” I say.

  “Yes. Costs you extra.”

  I nod. Behind the open rear door of the shop, two little girls play in a thick stand of moonweed.

  “We should kill all the aliens,” the repairer says. “No shame in destroying them before they corrupt us.”

  “Eurummmn,” I say. Informers are not supposed to make themselves conspicuous with political debate. Above the two children’s heads, the moonweed bends gracefully in the wind. One of the little girls has long brown neck fur, very pretty. The other does not.

  “There, that bolt will hold fine. Where you from?”

  “Rafkit Sarloe.” Informers never name their villages.

  She gives an exaggerated shudder. “I would never visit the capital. Too many aliens. They destroy our participation in shared reality without a moments thought! Three and eight, please.”

  I want to say No one but you can destroy your own participation in shared reality, but I don’t. Silently I pay her the money.

  She glares at me, at the world. “You don’t believe me about the Terrans. But I know what I know!”

  I ride away, through the flowered countryside. In the sky, only Cap is visible, rising on the horizon opposite the sun. Cap glows with a clear white smoothness, like Ano’s skin.

  The Terrans, I am told, have only one moon. Shared reality on their world is, perhaps, skimpier than ours: less curved, less rich, less warm.

  Are they ever jealous?

  Aulit Prison sits on a flat plain inland from the South Coast. I know that other islands on World have their own prisons, just as they have their own governments, but only Aulit is used for the alien unreal, as well as our own. A special agreement among the governments of World makes this possible. The alien governments protest, but of course it does them no good. The unreal is the unreal, and far too painful and dangerous to have running around loose. Besides, the alien governments are far away on other stars.

  Aulit is huge and ugly, a straight-lined monolith of dull red stone, with no curves anywhere. An official from R&A meets me and turns me over to two prison guards. We enter through a barred gate, my bicycle chained to the guards’, and I to my bicycle. I am led across a wide dusty yard toward a stone wall. The guards of course don’t speak to me; I am unreal.

  My cell is square, twice my length on a side. There is a bed, a piss pot, a table, and a single chair. The door is without a window, and all the other doors in the row of cells are closed.

  “When will the prisoners be allowed to be all together?” I ask, but of course the guard doesn’t answer me. I am not real.

  I sit in my chair and wait. Without a clock, it’s difficult to judge time, but I think a few hours pass totally without event. Then a gong sounds and my door slides up into the ceiling. Ropes and pulleys, controlled from above, inaccessible from inside the cell.

  The corridor fills with illusionary people. Men and women, some with yellowed neck fur and sunken eyes, walking with the shuffle of old age. Some young, striding along with that dangerous mixture of anger and desperation. And the aliens.

  I have seen aliens before, but not so many together. Fallers, about our size but very dark, as if burned crisp by their distant star. They wear their neck fur very long and dye it strange bright colors, although not in prison. Terrans, who don’t even have neck fur but instead fur on their heads, which they sometimes cut into fanciful curves—rather pretty. Terrans are a little intimidating because of their size. They move slowly. Ano, who had one year at the university before I killed her, once told me that the Terrans’ world makes them feel lighter than ours does. I don’t understand this, but Ano was very intelligent and so it’s probably true. She also explained that Fallers, Terrans, and World people are somehow related far back in time, but this is harder to believe. Perhaps Ano was mistaken.

  Nobody ever thinks Huhuhubs could be related to us. Tiny, scuttling, ugly, dangerous, they walk on all fours. They’re covered with warts. They smell bad. I was glad to see only a few of them, sticking close together, in the corridor at Aulit.

  We all move toward a large room filled with rough tables and chairs and, in the corner, a trough for the Huhuhubs. The food is already on the tables. Cereal, flatbread, elindel fruit—very basic, but nutritious. What surprises me most is the total absence of guards.

  Apparently prisoners are allowed to do whatever they wish to the food, the room, or each other, without interference. Well, why not? We aren’t real.

  I need protection, quickly.

  I choose a group of two women and three men. They sit at a table with their backs to the wall, and others have left a respectful distance around them. From the way they group themselves, the oldest woman is the leader. I plant myself in front of her and look directly into her face. A long scar ridges her left cheek to disappear into grizzled neck fur.

  “I am Uli Pek Bengarin,” I say, my voice even but too low to be heard beyond this group. “In Aulit for the murder of my sister. I can be useful to you.”

  She doesn’t speak, and her flat dark eyes don’t waver, but I have her attention. Other prisoners watch furtively.

  “I know an informer among the guards. He knows I know. He brings things into Aulit for me, in return for not sharing his name.”

  Still her eyes don’t waver. But I see she believes me; the sheer outrage of my statement has convinced her. A guard who had already forfeited reality by informing—by violating shared reality—might easily turn it to less pernicious material advantage. Once reality is torn, the rents grow. For the same reason, she easily believes that I might violate my supposed agreement with the guard.

  “What sort of things?” she says, carelessly. Her voice is raspy and thick, like some hairy root.

  “Letters. Candy. Pel.” Intoxicants are fo
rbidden in prison; they promote shared conviviality, to which the unreal have no right.

  “Weapons?”

  “Perhaps,” I say.

  “And why shouldn’t I beat this guard’s name out of you and set up my own arrangement with him?”

  “He will not. He is my cousin.” This is the trickiest part of the cover provided to me by R&A Section; it requires that my would-be protector believe in a person who has kept enough sense of reality to honor family ties but will nonetheless violate a larger shared reality. I told Pek Brimmidin that I doubted that such a twisted state of mind would be very stable, and so a seasoned prisoner would not believe in it. But Pek Brimmidin was right and I was wrong. The woman nods.

  “All right. Sit down.”

  She does not ask what I wish in return for the favors of my supposed cousin. She knows. I sit beside her, and from now on I am physically safe in Aulit Prison from all but her.

  Next, I must somehow befriend a Terran.

  This proves harder than I expect. The Terrans keep to themselves, and so do we. They are just as violent toward their own as all the mad doomed souls in Aulit; the place is every horror whispered by children trying to shock each other. Within a tenday, I see two World men hold down and rape a woman. No one interferes. I see a Terran gang beat a Faller. I see a World woman knife another woman, who bleeds to death on the stone floor. This is the only time guards appear, heavily armored. A priest is with them. He wheels in a coffin of chemicals and immediately immerses the body so that it cannot decay to release the prisoner from her sentence of perpetual death.

  At night, isolated in my cell, I dream that Frablit Pek Brimmidin appears and rescinds my provisional reality. The knifed, doomed corpse becomes Ano; her attacker becomes me. I wake from the dream moaning and weeping. The tears are not grief but terror. My life, and Ano’s, hang from the splintery branch of a criminal alien I have not yet even met.

  I know who he is, though. I skulk as close as I dare to the Terran groups, listening. I don’t speak their language, of course, but Pek Brimmidin taught me to recognize the cadences of “Carryl Walters” in several of their dialects. Carryl Walters is an old Terran, with gray head fur cut in boring straight lines, wrinkled brownish skin, and sunken eyes. But his ten fingers—how do they keep the extra ones from tangling them up?—are long and quick.