Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Post-op in the nursery,” Julu said, “so the doctors can start on others as soon as they get the parts.”

  “Yes,” Claree said, and pinched the baby so it woke up and cried, and she had an excuse to shrug at Julu and wander off, jiggling and crooning.

  Parts. Parts of what? They were performing some medical procedure on Brak, on all the kids in turn, that would aid the peace effort. What would do that? It must be something temporary, reversible, non-painful. Recording devices? Trackers? Those didn’t make sense. “They worship their children. Lucky for us.” Ransom? But the Servants didn’t need money, and how would ransoming children bring peace?

  Another thought came to her: Were all the children Treemon? Could some of them be Ignati? The people of the two countries didn’t, she thought she remembered, look much different from each other . . . or did they?

  Still lulling the baby, who was dozing off again, she strolled into the nursery. The nurse, pleasant and middle-aged, overweight in her too-tight Servant’s uniform, smiled at Claree. She was changing a child’s soiled diapers. Claree walked casually around the windowless room, studying the seven children, some asleep and some having a snack and some playing with a pile of brightly colored toys.

  Two were blond, with blue eyes.

  One was a sort of dirty blond, with brown eyes and light brown skin.

  Two had black hair in different stages of curliness, medium skin, and changeable eyes, greenish-brownish-gray.

  Two were brownish sort of redheads with darker skin and lighter eyes.

  All their features looked the same to her, the too-small noses and too-big eyes and pudgy rounded chins of little kids. If these children were two distinct racial groups, Claree couldn’t see it. Moreover, she remembered reading that Treemon, which made a religion of tolerance, was comprised of all ethnic groups, as long as the individuals adhered to the Treemon ideals of biological integrity, vegetarianism, personal responsibility, freedom, and all the rest of their admirable creed.

  “Mistress,” Claree said to the nurse—it was impossible to address the woman by her first name, which was Ada. Claree was not that far from the Novitiate crèche herself. “Mistress, what do Ignati children look like?”

  The woman looked startled. Despite her age, she was only a private first class, which suggested that she was probably not too bright or curious. The Servants had places for such people, of course.

  “Why, Ignati are taller than Treemon, of course, but otherwise pretty much the same . . . aren’t they? I think I was told so.”

  “The Ignati are a matriarchy,” Claree said, not because it was relevant but because she wanted to keep the woman talking.

  “Why, yes. They don’t have sexual equality, like the Treemon. The women rule, the men are warriors. Their families are . . . I can’t remember the word. But children belong to a family of their mother and her brothers and sisters, not the child’s father. They might not even know who he is. They’re sexually free, I’m told.” She said this with neither approval nor disapproval.

  “They’re fierce fighters,” Claree said.

  “Oh, yes. They train all their lives for it. Not much literacy, but fierce fighters. Otherwise Treemon would have won the war long ago. Treemon has the more deadly technology; they just don’t like to use it. Peaceful people, as long as they’re left alone.”

  “Ah,” Claree said. “The baby’s asleep, can I put it in its basket?”

  “Yes. She’s a girl, you know.” The woman smiled; to her, the children were people. “Her name is Drina.”

  Claree put Drina in her basket and returned to the main room just as Yani came in from outside. He looked hot and dirty, as if he’d covered a lot of ground on foot. Outside, it was full dark.

  “Julu!” he called. “Get all personnel out here as soon as they can. Leave just one nurse on duty. Anders, shift signal routing. Make them think we’re at B now. Kel . . . where’s Kel?”

  “Here,” he said, materializing beside Claree. “Where’s Tuki?”

  “Dead,” Yani said. “They shot down the skimmer. Kel, get the—” He suddenly noticed Claree. “You, go in with the children, close the door, and stay there. Now.”

  “Yes, Master,” she said automatically, and did as she was told, simmering with resentment. How was she going to learn anything if she was left out of everything?

  “What’s happening?” the nurse said, alarmed.

  “I don’t know. Give me something to do.”

  For the rest of the evening, Claree grimly tended children. She set them to watching a software cube of some idiotic animals cavorting, and then she helped put them to bed. Eventually she fell asleep on a blanket herself. If any of the children had bad dreams, she didn’t hear them cry out.

  In the morning, Brak lay on a cot beside her blanket, heavily asleep.

  Claree helped herself to cold food and hot tea from a pile of stuff beside the closed nursery door. She brought tea to Nurse Ada, too, who took it gratefully. “I haven’t had any time for tea yet this morning.”

  There were only four children in the room, including the boy who had been missing yesterday. Claree sat beside Brak and waited for him to wake.

  An hour passed. “What . . . who. . .”

  “It’s Claree,” she said, managing a smile. “How do you feel?”

  “Sick. No, weak. Hungry.”

  Nurse Ada came bustling over. “You’re hungry, young man, that’s good. The post-op drugs these days are amazing! Claree, you brought him something, you’re that thoughtful, dear. Give him plenty of water.” A child wailed and she moved away.

  “What happened?” Brak demanded.

  Claree didn’t want to admit that she didn’t know. “Here, eat some of this.”

  He looked at the bread she held out with distaste. “Is it animal flesh?”

  She had no idea. Portable field cookers mixed up nutrients for optimum balance out of whatever raw foodstuffs were put into it, animal or vegetable, then molded and baked the result into “bread.”

  “I don’t know,” she said truthfully.

  “Then I don’t want it.”

  “You have to eat.”

  “Animal flesh? No, I don’t. Do you grant animals the right to use you that way?”

  Claree wasn’t interested in this ideological foolishness. She put down the bread and poured him a cup of water. Brak drank it, wincing as he raised his head. “All right, Claree, what did they do to me?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t tell me.”

  To her surprise, he accepted this. Because the Treemon were so honest, or because he was so willing to believe she was so negligible? Irritation suffused her.

  He said, “That woman mentioned ‘post-op drugs.’ Did I have an operation?”

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  He lay back on his pillow, frowning at her. The door to the nursery opened and two men entered, carrying two sleeping children.

  “Put them here,” Ada said. “Everything went all right?”

  “Perfectly,” a man said. He looked very tired. “Which three next?”

  “Three?” Ada said. “I thought it was only two at once.”

  “No time,” the exhausted man said. “One will have to just not get it. Yani says we only have a few more hours at the most before we have to get out.”

  “Hours?” Ada said. “But you can’t! Recovery—”

  “They have to go back, Ada,” the man said. “Don’t argue with me, and don’t argue with Yani if you value your head. The kids will be all right. But Treemon weapons and detection are better than we thought. We have to get off-planet.”

  Claree began, “I have to find Benn Ko—” but nobody was listening to her.

  Ada said grimly, “We’ll be ready.” Claree saw an Ada she hadn’t glimpsed before, the committed Servant of Peace inside the soft baby nurse.

  Brak said, “What the dung is going on?”

  “Christ,” the man said, lifting a child in either arm, “nobody told hi
m?”

  “Yani wants to do it,” the other man said. “He’s a special case, after all. And a valuable asset.” The two left, carrying three children.

  Claree couldn’t sit still. Ignoring Brak’s furious questions, she paced over to the child who hadn’t been taken. A girl, about three, sitting with a plastic cube into which various plastic shapes were inserted through the correctly shaped hole. Claree watched as the child, with enormous concentration, tried to push a cube through a triangular opening. What had this child missed having done to her?

  “He’s a special case, after all,” the Servant had said of Brak. Well, wasn’t she a special case, too? The Master had said she was. Maybe Yani would enlighten her when he enlightened Brak. Maybe somebody would.

  The main room, which Claree crept into cautiously for the first time in sixteen hours, was completely deserted. She stopped on the threshold, shocked.

  Blood smeared the floor. Objects were strewn around, some half-packed in canvas bags, some smashed. Two of the big boxes that Claree had seen the two men lug in a few days ago stood in the room, both lids raised. Claree looked inside.

  The first one held only smears of blood. In the second was a dead cave hylut. She reached in and touched it; the body felt very cold, although Claree recognized that the cooler had been turned off. Had the animals been brought in for food, to be dumped into the field cooker to supply protein for bread and soup?

  No. Snaking from the inside of the cooler were various tubes, probes, injectors still connected to the cave hylut’s body, although none were activated. Animal protein for a field cooker was kept cold, but nothing else. Or was it? Claree hadn’t taken her Field Survival courses yet; they were for third years.

  The door to the back room opened and a woman came out in bloody disposables, which she stripped off as she walked. “All three are going well,” she said to Claree in a contented, exhausted voice. “They don’t need me. Wake me when we have to go.” She lay down on a blanket and immediately fell into the dead sleep of someone who’d been awake for days.

  Claree recognized her own small canvas bag in the corner. Someone had packed and closed it.

  Yani came out of the operating room with two Servants, talking in low tones. Claree couldn’t make out the words. When he finished, all three walked toward the nursery, and Yani beckoned Claree to follow.

  “Ada, we’re going. The other three kids will be out here in a few minutes. It has to be that way. You’re on the last skimmer flight, we only have one craft now and can’t leave all together, so you’ve got about an hour. Do what you can for the children. It might take as long as five or six hours for the Treemons to get to them. I don’t want any of them so much as mildly dehydrated or scratched from tripping over their own feet. Kel is bringing you soft restraints.”

  Ada nodded, her face harder than Claree thought possible.

  “Claree,” Yani said, “come over here with Brak.”

  Yani took Ada’s stool, the only actual seat in the sparsely furnished room, and set it beside Brak’s cot. Claree stood.

  Brak glared at Yani. “What did you do to me!”

  “Made you an asset for peace between your country and the Ignati.”

  “I don’t understand!”

  “Of course you don’t.” Yani closed his eyes briefly and Claree was afraid that he, like the doctor, was going to instantly fall asleep. But Yani pulled himself together and gazed at Brak with remote kindness.

  “Brak, who is going to win the war?”

  “Nobody knows that yet.”

  “Wrong. We know. Your people, the Treemon, will win, and pretty soon. You have the technological advantage. Plus the better land, crop yield, mining rights, and literacy.”

  “They attacked us first,” Brak said, and Claree saw that somewhere inside himself, this boy felt guilty over the advantages he didn’t deny.

  “Of course they attacked you,” Yani said, running his hand through his dirty hair. “They have a very high ratio of young men to old rulers, which nearly always leads to war, civil war, or revolution. Demography is destiny.”

  Brak gaped at him.

  “You thought it was about ideology, didn’t you? Freedom versus repression. Education versus ignorance. Equality versus fixed places in a society ruled by the women born to be at the top. It’s not. It’s just war.”

  Claree couldn’t restrain herself. “But . . . but what have we done to stop it?” What have we done to these kids, and why?

  “We couldn’t stop the war. Instead we’re stopping the deadly aftermath, the violence after the war, by shifting the conflict. It isn’t going to be a united Treemon against a conquered Ignatus, not any more. It’s going to be a bitterly divided Treemon against itself.”

  “Why?” Claree demanded.

  “Because we’ve just violated their deepest beliefs about their most valued possession, their children. Ten of them, nine small appealing ones plus Brak here, have had their biological integrity irreversibly compromised. Their hearts removed, destroyed, and replaced with the hearts of cave hyluts.”

  Claree stared at him. She couldn’t take it in. Brak began to scream and claw at his chest.

  “You . . . we . . . tortured children?” Claree said.

  “No,” Yani said wearily, “they’re not tortured, not harmed. The xenotransplant has been treated to eliminate bodily rejection or malfunction. The hylut hearts will function perfectly throughout the children’s normal life span. Ada, we need you here. Give the boy a sedative.”

  “But . . . why?”

  “Because we’re Servants of Peace,” Yani said.

  Claree stared at him. The bloody cave hylut in the cooling tank, the blood smeared on the floor . . . the baby she’d held on her shoulder, crooning to it, with the heart of that stinking foul carrion-eater . . .

  She cried at him, before she knew she was going to say anything so childish, “Why did you keep me here? Why didn’t you send me on to Benn Ko, the way the Master said you would?”

  He didn’t reply, but she saw the answer in his face: He was Benn Ko. This was whom the Master had wanted her to observe, what he’d wanted her to witness. She turned her head just in time to vomit on the floor and not on Brak, the victim, the accidental sacrifice, the asset to peace.

  VI. BRAK

  It didn’t make sense. Even after the nurse gave him a patch of something and Brak could feel the horror drain away, the panic and anger, he retained the idea of senselessness. The artificial calm was a drug, he knew, but the senselessness was real. He had to understand. Understanding this was the most important thing in the world, because even in his inexperience, he knew that the drugged calm was not going to last.

  He had a cave hylut heart in his chest. He was a monster, biologically compromised, a bestial heart from a reeking dangerous animal . . .

  He had to understand.

  The man, Yani, seemed to know Brak’s need. He said to Claree, “Sit down. No, don’t clean up that puke, this is more important. Have some sense of proportion, postulant.”

  She did as she was told, looking, Brak thought, as numb as he felt. Had they given her a drug, too, while he was screaming? But wasn’t she one of them?

  Yani said, “Brak, when your people win this war, which they will do, what do you think will happen?”

  He didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. But he struggled to sit upright on the cot. It suddenly seemed important to sit upright, to not be flat on his back like an infant. No one helped him sit.

  “I’ll tell you what will happen, Brak. You will try to make Ignatus over into Treemon. You will dismantle their military, break up the rigid autocracy, make men equal to women, try to teach everyone to read well and farm organically and stop eating flesh.”

  “So?” Brak said.

  “You believe you will replace bad values with good ones. What you will really do is replace the arrogance of power with the arrogance of self-righteousness. And you will cause a revolution, with much more destruction and violence than the
war you win. Much more violence. Tens of thousands will die. Because Ignatus does not want your values: individual freedom, personal tolerance, anti-centrism. They are not the only values.”

  Brak burst out, “But they’re the best!”

  Yani smiled wearily. “Perhaps. But freedom, tolerance, anti-centrism . . . they leave many people feeling disconnected, with no assured place in a settled authority structure of family and caste.”

  “They must make their own places,” Brak said stoutly.

  “Some cannot. Some will not. Some will always feel unmoored in such a shifting world. You are very hard on these people, Brak, who include the old and the weak and the untalented and the fearful. You would cut them all adrift from anything they can count on.”

  “But—”

  “You assume,” Yani went on, as if Brak hadn’t spoken, “that everyone must think like your people. You assume that if they could only be shown the error of their ways, they’d want to think like you. Such a stance is wrong, immoral, and dangerous.”

  Anger flooded Brak, breaking through the calming drug. “ ‘Immoral?’ The Ignati attacked us!”

  “Yes, I know,” Yani said, “but to the Servants of Peace, that’s immaterial. What matters is managing further violence so it stays at a minimum.”

  “By using violence on me? By cutting open children and replacing their hearts with beasts’ ?”

  Yani shrugged. “Your people’s beliefs grant to beasts spiritual equality with yourself, and you locate your souls in your thinking mind, not in your cardiac organ. So why should you mind what we did to you?”

  Brak gaped at him. Claree burst out, “It’s only that same old shit—‘The end justifies the means’ !”

  Yani smiled. “Very good, Claree. Sometimes it does.”

  “No,” she said. “No!”

  “Not even to prevent or curtail genocide? Brak, do you know what will happen in Treemon as a result of what we’ve done? Your people will be told in a few hours. They will come to get you kids. Then a tremendous public attention will focus on you: on the villainy of what we’ve done, the monsters we’ve created, the children who are those monsters but are still their children. Factions will form. Beliefs will be severely questioned. Unity and complacency will both fall like huge asteroids in the middle of your puritanical society, sending up clouds of dirt and grit. The self-righteous purists will never be able to be so pure or so self-righteous again. One of those little girls with a cave hylut’s heart is your lieutenant governor’s daughter.”