Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  It takes me only a day to realize that Carryl Walters’s own people leave him alone, surrounding him with the same nonviolent respect that my protector gets. It takes me much longer to figure out why. Carryl Walters is not dangerous, neither a protector nor a punisher. I don’t think he has any private shared realities with the guards. I don’t understand until the World woman is knifed.

  It happens in the courtyard, on a cool day in which I am gazing hungrily at the one patch of bright sky overhead. The knifed woman screams. The murderer pulls the knife from her belly and blood shoots out. In seconds the ground is drenched. The woman doubles over. Everyone looks the other way except me. And Carryl Walters runs over with his old-man stagger and kneels over the body, trying uselessly to save the life of a woman already dead anyway.

  Of course. He is a healer. The Terrans don’t bother him because they know that, next time, it might be they who have need of him.

  I feel stupid for not realizing this right away. I am supposed to be good at informing. Now I’ll have to make it up by immediate action. The problem, of course, is that no one will attack me while I’m under Afa Pek Fakar’s protection, and provoking Pek Fakar herself is far too dangerous.

  I can see only one way to do this.

  I wait a few days. Outside in the courtyard, I sit quietly against the prison wall and breathe shallowly. After a few minutes I leap up. The dizziness takes me; I worsen it by holding my breath. Then I ram as hard as I can into the rough stone wall and slide down it. Pain tears through my arm and forehead. One of Pek Fakar’s men shouts something.

  Pek Fakar is there in a minute. I hear her—hear all of them—through a curtain of dizziness and pain.

  “—just ran into the wall, I saw it—”

  “—told me she gets these dizzy attacks—”

  “—head broken in—”

  I gasp, through sudden real nausea, “The healer. The Terran—”

  “The Terran?” Pek Fakar’s voice, hard with sudden suspicion. But I gasp out more words, “. . . disease . . . a Terran told me . . . since childhood . . . without help I . . .” My vomit, unplanned but useful, spews over her boots.

  “Get the Terran,” Pek Fakar rasps to somebody. “And a towel!” Then Carryl Walters bends over me. I clutch his arm, try to smile, and pass out.

  When I come to, I am lying inside, on the floor of the eating hall, the Terran cross-legged beside me. A few World people hover near the far wall, scowling. Carryl Walters says, “How many fingers you see?”

  “Four. Aren’t you supposed to have five?”

  He unbends the fifth from behind his palm and says, “You fine.”

  “No, I’m not,” I say. He speaks childishly, and with an odd accent, but he’s understandable. “I have a disease. Another Terran healer told me so.”

  “Who?”

  “Her name was Anna Pek Rakov.”

  “What disease?”

  “I don’t remember. Something in the head. I get spells.”

  “What spells? You fall, flop on floor?”

  “No. Yes. Sometimes. Sometimes it takes me differently.” I look directly into his eyes. Strange eyes, smaller than mine, and that improbable blue. “Pek Rakov told me I could die during a spell, without help.”

  He does not react to the lie. Or maybe he does, and I don’t know how to read it. I have never informed on a Terran before. Instead he says something grossly obscene, even for Aulit Prison: “Why you unreal? What you do?”

  I move my gaze from his. “I murdered my sister.” If he asks for details, I will cry. My head aches too hard.

  He says, “I sorry.”

  Is he sorry that he asked, or that I killed Ano? Pek Rakov was not like this; she had some manners. I say, “The other Terran healer said I should be watched carefully by someone who knows what to do if I get a spell. Do you know what to do, Pek Walters?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you watch me?”

  “Yes.” He is, in fact, watching me closely now. I touch my head; there is a cloth tied around it where I bashed myself. The headache is worse. My hand comes away sticky with blood.

  I say, “In return for what?”

  “What you give Pek Fakar for protection?”

  He is smarter than I thought. “Nothing I can also share with you.” She would punish me hard.

  “Then I watch you, you give me information about World.”

  I nod; this is what Terrans usually request. And where information is given, it can also be extracted. “I will explain your presence to Pek Fakar,” I say, before the pain in my head swamps me without warning, and everything in the dining hall blurs and sears together.

  Pek Fakar doesn’t like it. But I have just given her a gun, smuggled in by my “cousin.” I leave notes for the prison administration in my cell, under my bed. While the prisoners are in the courtyard—which we are every day, no matter what the weather—the notes are replaced by whatever I ask for. Pek Fakar had demanded a “weapon”; neither of us expected a Terran gun. She is the only person in the prison to have such a thing. It is to me a stark reminder that no one would care if all we unreal killed each other off completely. There is no one else to shoot; we never see anyone not already in perpetual death.

  “Without Pek Walters, I might have another spell and die,” I say to the scowling Pek Fakar. “He knows a special Terran method of flexing the brain to bring me out of a spell.”

  “He can teach this special method to me.”

  “So far, no World person has been able to learn it. Their brains are different from ours.”

  She glares at me. But no one, even those lost to reality, can deny that alien brains are weird. And my injuries are certainly real: bloody head cloth, left eye closed from swelling, skin scraped raw the length of my left cheek, bruised arm. She strokes the Terran gun, a boringly straight-lined cylinder of dull metal. “All right. You may keep the Terran near you—if he agrees. Why should he?”

  I smile at her slowly. Pek Fakar never shows a response to flattery; to do so would be to show weakness. But she understands. Or thinks she does. I have threatened the Terran with her power, and the whole prison now knows that her power extends among the aliens as well as her own people. She goes on glaring, but she is not displeased. In her hand, the gun gleams.

  And so begin my conversations with a Terran.

  Talking with Carryl Pek Walters is embarrassing and frustrating. He sits beside me in the eating hall or the courtyard and publicly scratches his head. When he is cheerful, he makes shrill horrible whistling noises between his teeth. He mentions topics that belong only among kin: the state of his skin (which has odd brown lumps on it) and his lungs (clogged with fluid, apparently). He does not know enough to begin conversations with ritual comments on flowers. It is like talking to a child, but a child who suddenly begins discussing bicycle engineering or university law.

  “You think individual means very little, group means everything,” he says.

  We are sitting in the courtyard, against a stone wall, a little apart from the other prisoners. Some watch us furtively, some openly. I am angry. I am often angry with Pek Walters. This is not going as I’d planned.

  “How can you say that? The individual is very important on World! We care for each other so that no individual is left out of our common reality, except by his own acts!”

  “Exactly,” Pek Walters says. He has just learned this word from me. “You care for others so no one left alone. Alone is bad. Act alone is bad. Only together is real.”

  “Of course,” I say. Could he be stupid after all? “Reality is always shared. Is a star really there if only one eye can perceive its light?”

  He smiles and says something in his own language, which makes no sense to me. He repeats it in real words. “When tree falls in forest, is sound if no person hears?”

  “But—do you mean to say that on your star, people believe they . . .” What? I can’t find the words.

  He says, “People believe they always real, a
lone or together. Real even when other people say they dead. Real even when they do something very bad. Even when they murder.”

  “But they’re not real! How could they be? They’ve violated shared reality! If I don’t acknowledge you, the reality of your soul, if I send you to your ancestors without your consent, that is proof that I don’t understand reality and so am not seeing it! Only the unreal could do that!”

  “Baby not see shared reality. Is baby unreal?”

  “Of course. Until the age when children attain reason, they are unreal.”

  “Then when I kill baby, is all right, because I not kill real person?”

  “Of course it’s not all right! When one kills a baby, one kills its chance to become real, before it could even join its ancestors! And also all the chances of the babies to which it might become ancestor. No one would kill a baby on World, not even these dead souls in Aulit! Are you saying that on Terra people would kill babies?”

  He looks at something I cannot see. “Yes. My chance has arrived, although not in a form I relish. Still, I have a job to do. I say, “I have heard that Terrans will kill people for science. Even babies. To find out the kinds of things that Anna Pek Rakov knew about my brain. Is that true?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “How can it be yes and no? Are children ever used for science experiments?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kinds of experiments?”

  “You should ask, what kind children? Dying children. Children not born yet. Children born . . . wrong. With no brain, or broken brain.” I struggle with all this. Dying children . . . he must mean not children who are really dead, but those in the transition to join their ancestors. Well, that would not be so bad, provided the bodies were then allowed to decay properly and release the souls. Children without brains or with broken brains . . . not bad, either. Such poor unreal things would be destroyed anyway. But children not born yet . . . in or out of the mother’s womb? I push this away, to discuss another time. I am on a different path.

  “And you never use living, real children for science?”

  He gives me a look I cannot read. So much of Terran expression is still strange. “Yes. We use. In some experiments. Experiments who not hurt children.”

  “Like what?” I say. We are staring directly at each other now. Suddenly I wonder if this old Terran suspects that I am an informer seeking information, and that is why he accepted my skimpy story about having spells. That would not necessarily be bad. There are ways to bargain with the unreal once everyone admits that bargaining is what is taking place. But I’m not sure whether Pek Walters knows that.

  He says, “Experiments who study how brain work. Such as, how memory work. Including shared memory.”

  “Memory? Memory doesn’t ‘work.’ It just is.”

  “No. Memory work. By memory-building pro-teenz.” He uses a Terran word, then adds, “Tiny little pieces of food,” which makes no sense. What does food have to do with memory? You don’t eat memories, or obtain them from food. But I am further down the path, and I use his words to go further still.

  “Does memory in World people work with the same . . . ‘pro-teenz’ as Terran memory?”

  “Yes and no. Some same or almost same. Some different.” He is watching me very closely.

  “How do you know that memory works the same or different in World people? Have Terrans done brain experiments on World?”

  “Yes.”

  “With World children?”

  “Yes.”

  I watch a group of Huhuhubs across the courtyard. The smelly little aliens are clustered together in some kind of ritual or game. “And have you, personally, participated in these science experiments on children, Pek Walters?”

  He doesn’t answer me. Instead he smiles, and if I didn’t know better, I’d swear the smile was sad. He says, “Pek Bengarin, why you kill your sister?”

  The unexpectedness of it—now, so close to almost learning something useful—outrages me. Not even Pek Fakar had asked me that. I stare at him angrily. He says, “I know, I not should ask. Wrong for ask. But I tell you much, and answer is important—”

  “But the question is obscene. You should not ask. World people are not so cruel to each other.”

  “Even people damned in Aulit Prison?” he says, and even though I don’t know one of the words he uses, I see that yes, he recognizes that I am an informer. And that I have been seeking information. All right, so much the better. But I need time to set my questions on a different path.

  To gain time, I repeat my previous point. “World people are not so cruel.”

  “Then you—”

  The air suddenly sizzles, smelling of burning. People shout. I look up. Afa Pek Fakar stands in the middle of the courtyard with the Terran gun, firing it at the Huhuhubs. One by one they drop as the beam of light hits them and makes a sizzling hole. The aliens pass into the second stage of their perpetual death.

  I stand and tug on Pek Walters’s arm. “Come on. We must clear the area immediately or the guards will release poison gas.”

  “Why?”

  “So they can get the bodies into bondage chemicals, of course!” Does this alien think the prison officials would let the unreal get even a little bit decayed? I thought that after our several conversations, Pek Walters understood more than that.

  He rises slowly, haltingly, to his feet. Pek Fakar, laughing, strolls toward the door, the gun still in her hand.

  Pek Walters says, “World people not cruel?”

  Behind us, the bodies of the Huhuhubs lie sprawled across each other, smoking.

  The next time we are herded from our cells into the dining hall and then the courtyard, the Huhuhub corpses are of course gone. Pek Walters has developed a cough. He walks more slowly, and once, on the way to our usual spot against the far wall, he puts a hand on my arm to steady himself.

  “Are you sick, Pek?”

  “Exactly,” he says.

  “But you are a healer. Make the cough disappear.”

  He smiles, and sinks gratefully against the wall. “ ‘Healer, heal own self’.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. So you are informer, Pek Bengarin, and you hope I tell you something about science experiments on children on World.” I take a deep breath. Pek Fakar passes us, carrying her gun. Two of her own people now stay close beside her at all times, in case another prisoner tries to take the gun away from her. I cannot believe anyone would try, but maybe I’m wrong. There’s no telling what the unreal will do. Pek Walters watches her pass, and his smile is gone. Yesterday Pek Fakar shot another person, this time not even an alien. There is a note under my bed requesting more guns.

  I say, “You say I am an informer. I do not say it.”

  “Exactly,” Pek Walters says. He has another coughing spell, then closes his eyes wearily. “I have not an-tee-by-otics.”

  Another Terran word. Carefully I repeat it. “ ‘An-tee-by-otics?”

  “Pro-teenz for heal.”

  Again that word for very small bits of food. I make use of it. “Tell me about the pro-teenz in the science experiments.”

  “I tell you everything about experiments. But only if you answer questions first.”

  He will ask about my sister. For no reason other than rudeness and cruelty. I feel my face turn to stone.

  He says, “Tell me why steal baby not so bad for make person unreal always.”

  I blink. Isn’t this obvious? “To steal a baby doesn’t damage the baby’s reality. It just grows up somewhere else, with some other people. But all real people of World share the same reality, and anyway after the transition, the child will rejoin its blood ancestors. Baby stealing is wrong, of course, but it isn’t a really serious crime.”

  “And make false coins?”

  “The same. False, true—coins are still shared.”

  He coughs again, this time much harder. I wait. Finally he says, “So when I steal your bicycle, I not violate shared reality too much, becaus
e bicycle still somewhere with people of World.”

  “Of course.”

  “But when I steal bicycle, I violate shared reality a little?”

  “Yes.” After a minute I add, “Because the bicycle is, after all, mine. You. . . made my reality shift a little without sharing the decision with me.” I peer at him; how can all this not be obvious to such an intelligent man?

  He says, “You are too trusting for be informer, Pek Bengarin.”

  I feel my throat swell with indignation. I am a very good informer. Haven’t I just bound this Terran to me with a private shared reality in order to create an exchange of information? I am about to demand his share of the bargain when he says abruptly, “So why you kill your sister?”

  Two of Pek Fakar’s people swagger past. They carry the new guns. Across the courtyard a Faller turns slowly to look at them, and even I can read fear on that alien face.

  I say, as evenly as I can manage, “I fell prey to an illusion. I thought that Ano was copulating with my lover. She was younger, more intelligent, prettier. I am not very pretty, as you can see. I didn’t share the reality with her, or him, and my illusion grew. Finally it exploded in my head, and I . . . did it.” I am breathing hard, and Pek Fakars people look blurry.

  “You remember clear Ano’s murder?”

  I turn to him in astonishment. “How could I forget it?”

  “You cannot. You cannot because of memory-building pro-teenz. Memory is strong in your brain. Memory-building pro-teenz are strong in your brain. Scientific research on World children for discover what is structure of pro-teenz, where is pro-teenz, how pro-teenz work. But we discover different thing instead.”

  “What different thing?” I say, but Pek Walters only shakes his head and begins coughing again. I wonder if the coughing spell is an excuse to violate our bargain. He is, after all, unreal.