Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Oh,” he said, clearly disappointed. “I heard the Taj was a sort of holo of all these exotic sex positions.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, well.” He sighed deeply. “Good luck, Captain.”

  “Thank you.”

  The Citadel—our Human name for it, of course—turned out to be the entrance into a mountain. Presumably the Teli had excavated bunkers in the solid rock, but you couldn’t tell that from the outside. A veteran NCO met me at the guard station. “Captain Porter? I’m Sergeant Lu, head of your assignment detail. Can I take these bags, sir?”

  “Hello, Sergeant.” He was ruddy, spit-and-polish military, with an uneducated accent—obviously my “detail” was not going to consist of any other scholars. They were there to do grunt work. But Lu looked amiable and willing, and I relaxed slightly. He led me to my quarters, a trapezoid-shaped, low-ceilinged room with elaborately etched stone walls and no contents except a human bed, chest, table, and chair.

  Immediately, I examined the walls, the usual dense montage of Teli symbols that were curiously evocative even though we didn’t understand their meanings. They looked handmade, and recent. “What was this room before we arrived?”

  Lu shrugged. “Don’t know what any of these rooms were to the tellies, sir. We cleaned ‘em all out and vapped everything. Might have been booby-trapped, you know.”

  “How do we know the whole Citadel isn’t booby-trapped?”

  “We don’t, sir.”

  I liked his unpretentious fatalism. “Let’s leave this gear here for now—I’d like to see the vaults. And call me Jon. What’s your first name, Sergeant?”

  “Ruhan. Sir.” But there was no rebuke in his tone.

  The four vaults were nothing like I had imagined.

  Art, even stolen art—maybe especially stolen art—is usually handled with care. After all, trouble and resources have been expended to obtain it, and it is considered valuable. This was clearly not the case with the art stolen by the Teli. Each vault was a huge natural cave, with rough stone walls, stalactites, water dripping from the ceiling, fungi growing on the walls. And except for a small area in the front where the AI console and a Navy-issue table stood under a protective canopy, the enormous cavern was jammed with huge, toppling, six- and seven-layer-deep piles of . . . stuff.

  Dazed, I stared at the closest edge of that enormous junkyard. A torn plastic bag bearing some corporate logo. A broken bathtub painted in swirling greens. A child’s bloody shoe. Some broken goblets of titanium, which was almost impossible to break. A hand-embroidered shirt from 78-Alpha, where such handwork is a folk art. A cheap set of plastic dishes decorated with blurry prints of dogs. A child’s finger painting. What looked like a Terran prehistoric fertility figure. And, still in its original frame and leaning crazily against an obsolete music cube, Philip Langstrom’s priceless abstract Ascent of Justice, which had been looted from 46-Gamma six years ago in a surprise Teli raid. Water spots had rotted one corner of the canvas.

  “Kind of takes your breath away, don’t it?” Lu said. “What a bunch of rubbish. Look at that picture in the front there, sir—can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be. You want me to start vapping things?”

  I closed my eyes, feeling the seizure coming, the going under. I breathed deeply. Went through the mental cleansing that my serene Dalo had taught me, kai lanu kai lanu breathe . . .

  “Sir? Captain Porter?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. I had control again. “We’re not vapping anything, Lu. We’re here to study all of it, not just rescue some of it. Do you understand?”

  “Whatever you say, sir,” he said, clearly understanding nothing.

  But, then, neither did I. All at once, my task seemed impossible, overwhelming. Ascent of Justice and a broken bathtub and a bloody shoe. What in hell had the Teli considered art?

  Kai lanu kai lanu breathe . . .

  The first time I went under, there had been no Dalo to help me. I’d been ten years old and about to be shipped out to Young Soldiers’ Camp on Aires, the first moon of 43-Beta. Children in their little uniforms had been laughing and shoving as they boarded the shuttle, and all at once I was on the ground, gasping for breath, tears pouring down my face.

  “What’s wrong with him?” my mother said. “Medic!”

  “Jon! Jon!” Daddy said, trying to hold me. “Oh gods, Jon!”

  The medic rushed over, slapped on a patch that didn’t work, and then I remember nothing except the certainty that I was going to die. I knew it right up until the moment I could breathe again. The shuttle had left, the medic was packing up his gear without looking at my parents, and my father’s arms held me gently.

  My mother stared at me with contempt. “You little coward,” she said. They were the last words she spoke to me for an entire year.

  “Why the Space Navy?” Dalo would eventually ask me, in sincere confusion.” After all the other seizures . . . the way she treated you each time . . . Jon, you could have taught art at a university, written scholarly books . . .”

  “I had to join the Navy,” I said, and knew that I couldn’t say more without risking a seizure. Dalo knew it too. Dalo knew that the doctors had no idea why the conventional medications didn’t touch my condition, why I was such a medical anomaly. She knew everything and loved me anyway, as no one had since my father’s death when I was thirteen. She was my lifeline, my sanity. Just thinking about her aboard the Sheherazade, just knowing that I would see her again in a few weeks, let me concentrate on the bewildering task in front of me in the dripping, moldy Teli vault filled with human treasures and human junk.

  And with any luck, I would not have to encounter General Anson again. For any reason.

  A polished marble doll. A broken commlink on which some girl had once painted lopsided red roses. An exquisite albastron, Eastern Mediterranean, fifth century B.C., looted five years ago from the private collection of Fahoud al-Ashan on 71-Delta. A forged copy of Lucca DiChario’s Menamarti, although not a bad forgery, with a fake certificate of authenticity. Three more embroidered baby shoes. A handmade quilt. Several holo cubes. A hair comb. A music-cube case with holo-porn star Shiva on the cover. Degas’s exquisite Danseuse sur Scene, which had vanished from a Terran museum a hundred years ago, assumed to be in an off-Earth private collection somewhere. I gaped at it, unbelieving, and ran every possible physical and computer test. It was the real thing.

  “Captain, why do we gotta measure the exact place on the floor of every little piece of rubbish?” whined Private Blanders. I ignored her. My detail had learned early that they could take liberties with me. I had never been much of a disciplinarian.

  I said, “Because we don’t know which data is useful and which not until the computer analyzes it.”

  “But the location don’t matter! I’m gonna just estimate it, all right?”

  “You’ll measure it to the last fraction of a centimeter,” Sergeant Lu said pleasantly, “and it’ll be accurate, or you’re in the brig, soldier. You got that?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Thank the gods for Sergeant Lu.

  The location was important. The AIs algorithms were starting to show a pattern. Partial as yet, but interesting.

  Lu carried a neo-plastic sculpture of a young boy over to my table and set it down. He ran the usual tests and the measurements appeared in a display screen on the C-112.The sculpture, I could see from one glance, was worthless as either art or history, an inept and recent work. I hoped the sculptor hadn’t quit his day job.

  Lu glanced at the patterns on my screen. “What’s that, then, sir?”

  “It’s a fractal.”

  “A what?”

  “Part of a pattern formed by behavior curves.”

  “What does it mean?” he asked, but without any real interest, just being social. Lu was a social creature.

  “I don’t know yet what it means, but I do know one other thing.” I switched screens, needing to talk aloud about my findings. Dalo wasn’t here. Lu woul
d have to do, however inadequately. “See these graphs? These artifacts were brought to the vault by different Teli, or groups of Teli, and at different times.”

  “How can you tell that, sir?” Lu looked a little more alert. Art didn’t interest him, but the Teli did.

  “Because the art objects, as opposed to the other stuff, occur in clusters through the cave—see here? And the real art, as opposed to the amateur junk, forms clusters of its own. When the Teli brought back Human art from raids, some of the aliens knew—or had learned—what qualified. Others never did.”

  Lu stared at the display screen, his red nose wrinkling. How did someone named “Ruhan Lu” end up with such a ruddy complexion?

  “Those lines and squiggles”—he pointed at the Ebenfeldt equations at the bottom of the screen—“tell you all that, sir?”

  “Those squiggles plus the measurements you’re making. I know where some pieces were housed in Human colonies, so I’m also tracking the paths of raids, plus other variables like—”

  The Citadel shook as something exploded deep under our feet.

  “Enemy attack!” Lu shouted. He pulled me to the floor and threw his body across mine as dirt and stone and mold rained down from the ceiling of the cave. Die, I was going to die . . . “Dalo!” I heard myself scream and then, in the weird way of the human mind, came one clear thought out of the chaos: I won’t get to see the Sistine Chapel after all. Then I heard or thought nothing as I went under.

  I woke in my Teli quarters in the Citadel, grasping and clawing my way upright. Lu laid a hard hand on my arm. “Steady, sir.”

  “Dalo! The Sheherazade!”

  “Ship’s just fine, sir. It was a booby trap buried somewhere in the mountain, but Security thinks most of it fizzled. Place is a mess but not much real damage.”

  “Blanders? Cozinski?”

  “Two soldiers are dead but neither one’s our detail.” He leaned forward, hand still on my arm. “What happened to you, sir?”

  I tried to meet his eyes and failed. The old shame flooded me, the old guilt, the old defiance—all here again. “Who saw?”

  “Nobody but me. Is it a nerve disease, sir? Like Ransom Fits?”

  “No.” My condition had no discoverable physical basis, and no name except my mother’s, repeated over the years. Coward.

  “Because if it’s Ransom Fits, sir, my brother has it and they gave him meds for it. Fixed him right up.”

  “It’s not Ransom. What are the general orders, Lu?”

  “All hands to carry on.”

  “More booby traps?”

  “I guess they’ll look, sir. Bound to, don’t you think? Don’t know if they’ll find anything. My friend Sergeant Andropov over in Security says the mountain is so honeycombed with caves underneath these big ones that they could search for a thousand years and not find everything. Captain Porter—if it happens again, with you, I mean, is there anything special I should do for you?”

  I did meet his eyes then. Did he know how rare his gaze was? No, he did not. Lu’s honest, conscientious, not-very-intelligent face showed nothing but pragmatic acceptance of the situation. No disgust, no contempt, no sentimental pity, and he had no idea how unusual that was. But I knew.

  “No, Sergeant, nothing special. We’ll just carry on.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  If any request for information came down from General Anson’s office, I never received it. No request for a report on damage to the art vaults, or on impact to assignment progress, or on personnel needs. Nothing.

  The second booby trap destroyed everything in Vault A.

  It struck while I was upside on the Sheherazade, with Dalo on a weekend pass after a month of fourteen-hour days in the vault. Lu commlinked me in the middle of the night. The screen on the bulkhead opposite our bed chimed and brightened, waking us both. I clutched at Dalo.

  “Captain Porter, sir, we had another explosion down here at oh one thirty-six hours.” Lu’s face was black with soot. Blood smeared one side of his face. “It got Vault A and some of the crew quarters. Private Blanders is dead, sir. The AI is destroyed too. I’m waiting on your orders.”

  I said to the commlink, “Send, voice only . . .” My voice came out too high and Dalo’s arm went around me, but I didn’t go under. “Lu, is the quake completely over?”

  “Far as we know, sir.”

  “I’ll be downside as soon as I can. Don’t try to enter Vault A until I arrive.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I broke the link, turned in Dalo’s arms, and went under.

  When the seizures stopped, I went downside.

  We had nearly finished cataloguing Vault A when it blew. Art of any value had already been crated and moved, and of course, all my data was backed up on both the base AI and on the Sheherazade. For the first time, I wondered why I had been given a C-112 of my own in the first place. A near-AI was expensive, and there was a war on.

  Vault B was pretty much a duplicate of Vault A, a huge natural cavern dripping water and sediments on a packed-solid jumble of human objects. A carved fourteenth-century oak chest, probably French, that some rich Terran must have had transported to a Human colony. Handwoven dbeni from 14-Alpha. A cooking pot. A samurai sword with embossed handle. A holo cube programmed with porn. Mondrian’s priceless Broadway Boogie-Woogie, mostly in unforgivable tatters. A cheap, mass-produced jewelry box. More shoes. A Paul LeFort sculpture looted from a pleasure craft, the Princess of Mars, two years ago. A brass menorah. The entire contents of the Museum of Colonial Art on 33-Delta—most of it worthless, but a few pieces showing promise. I hoped the young artists hadn’t been killed in the Teli raid.

  Three days after Lu, Private Cozinski, and I began work on Vault B, General Anson appeared. She had not attended Private Blanders’s memorial service. I felt her before I saw her, her gaze boring into the back of my neck, and I closed my eyes.

  Kai lanu kai lanu breathe . . .

  “Ten-hut!”

  Lu and Cozinski had already sprung to attention. I turned and saluted. Breathe . . . kai lanu kai lanu please gods not in front of her . . .

  “A word, Captain.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She led the way to a corner of the vault, walking by Tomiko Mahuto’s Morning Grace, one of the most beautiful things in the universe, without a glance. Water dripped from the end of a stalactite onto her head. She shifted away from it without changing expression. “I want an estimate of how much longer you need to be here, Captain.”

  “I’ve filed daily progress reports, ma’am. We’re on the second of four vaults.”

  “I read all reports, Captain. How much longer?”

  “Unless something in the other two vaults differs radically from Vaults A and B, perhaps another three months.”

  “And what will your ‘conclusions’ be?”

  She had no idea how science worked, or art. “I can’t say until I have more data, ma’am.”

  “Where does your data point so far?” Her tone was too sharp. Was I this big an embarrassment to her, that she needed me gone before my job was done? I had told no one about my relationship to her, and I would bet my last chance to see the Sistine Chapel that she hadn’t done so either.

  I said carefully, “There is primary evidence, not yet backed up mathematically, that the Teli began over time to distinguish Human art objects from mere decorated, utilitarian objects. There is also some reason to believe that they looted our art not because they liked it but because they hoped to learn something significant about us.”

  “Learn something significant from broken bathtubs and embroidered baby shoes?”

  I blinked. So she had been reading my reports, and in some detail. Why?

  “Apparently, ma’am.”

  “What makes you think they hoped to learn about us from this rubbish?”

  “I’m using the Ebenfeldt equations in conjunction with phase-space diagrams for—”

  “I don’t need technical mumbo jumbo. What do you think they
tried to learn about Humans?”

  “Their own art seems to have strong religious significance. I’m no expert on Teli work, but my roommate at the university, Forrest Jamili, has gone on to—”

  “I don’t care about your roommate,” she said, which was hardly news. I remembered the day I left from the university, having spent possibly the most terrified and demoralized first-year ever, how I had gone under when she had said to me—

  Kai lanu kai lanu breathe breathe . . .

  I managed to avoid going under, but just barely. I quavered, “I don’t know what the Teli learned from our art.”

  She stared at my face with contempt, spun on her boot heel, and left.

  That night I began to research the deebees on Teli art. It gave me something to do during the long, insomniac hours. Human publications on Teli art, I discovered, had an odd, evasive, overly careful feel to them. Perhaps that was inevitable; ancient Athenian commentators had had to watch what they said publicly about Sparta. In wartime, it took very little to be accused of giving away critical information about the enemy. Or of giving them treasonous praise. In no one’s papers was this elliptical quality more evident than in Forrest Jamili’s, and yet something was clear. Until now, art scholars had been building a vast heap of details about Teli art. Forrest was the first to suggest a viable overall framework to organize those details.

  It was during one of these long and lonely nights, desperately missing Dalo, that I discovered the block on my access codes. I couldn’t get into the official records of the meteor deflection that had destroyed the Teli weapons base and brought General Anson the famous Victory of 149-Delta.

  Why? Because I wasn’t a line officer? Perhaps. Or perhaps the records involved military security in some way. Or perhaps—and this was what I chose to believe—she just wanted the heroic, melodramatic holo version of her victory to be the only one available. I didn’t know if other officers could access the records, and I couldn’t ask. I had no friends among the officers, no friends here at all except Lu.

  On my second leave upside, Dalo said, “You look terrible, dear heart. Are you sleeping?”