Fish Tails

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Then he could be back here by tomorrow!” Willum turned a face that glowed with happy surprise onto Needly. “By tomorrow, Needly!”

  She reached for his hand. “Perhaps. If Abasio was at the foot of the mountain himself. If the animals did not have to hunt for him. But it’s wonderful to know that someone is on the way.”

  The Griffin breathed deeply, the huge bellows of her lungs stirring the lower branches of the nearest trees. “Abasio may be coming, yes. And you have already helped my wing. Can you tell me what is wrong with my leg?”

  The children went to look at the Griffin head-­on, peering along her right side. “If you can pull the injured wing close to your backbone and roll a little bit onto your belly and left side, I can get a look at your right leg. If it’s just bruised, some of the same healing stuff as I put on the wing will work for the leg, too. If it’s broken, we have a problem.”

  “Impossible?”

  Needly reached out a hand and actually stroked the Griffin’s great shoulder. “Nothing is impossible, Sun-­wings. Nothing is impossible.”

  The children went to stand on her other side while the great beast strained, thrust, managed to roll slightly toward them.

  “Can you move it?” called Needly.

  Sun-­wings shifted, crying out in sudden pain. Willum saw at once what the trouble was. “Her leg is jammed up against a rock!”

  “I should have checked this yesterday!” Needly cried.

  “Do not fret, child. I don’t think I could have moved yesterday,” whispered Sun-­wings.

  Needly and Willum labored at the stone, digging around it until they could get Willum’s walking stick far enough into the hole to lever it loose—­though they broke the stick in the process. When they managed to roll the stone out of the hollow it had been half buried in, Sun-­wings strained to lift the leg that had been cramped beneath her. She grunted deeply as she managed to straighten it out to the side, and again as she bent it under her in its natural crouched position. They children looked it over, looking for blood. “We don’t see any injury,” Needly called. “Of course, we can’t see the bones. My guess is that when you fell, you jammed your leg against the half-­buried stone. You were too weak and stunned to lift yourself out. It’s probably bruised, but now that you have it in a better position, it should become less painful.”

  They circled Sun-­wings once more, stopping at her head so that Needly could whisper words of encouragement. From behind her, Willum, who had been holding himself quiet and being helpful and trying desperately not to think of what that For’ster could do to Needly, what he might do to both of them. Might do to Dawn-­song and her mother if they couldn’t figure a way out of this, only he couldn’t . . . hadn’t, not yet, maybe couldn’t at all . . . Surreptitiously wiping away a few tears, he put his lips together stubbornly. “Nothin’,” he said to himself firmly, quoting Needly. “Nothin’s impossible.”

  Chapter 10

  Cultural Confrontations

  THE DARKNESS IN THE CLEARING WHERE XULAI AND Precious Wind were waiting was full of murmurings, rustling, fluttering, a myriad of moth and bat sounds.

  “The fork in the road is several miles east,” Precious Wind said, her own voice a mere whisper. “They should be getting close about now.”

  Xulai murmured, “Ever since his adventure with the men who were going to rob Saltgosh, Willum has been defining travelers on the road as ‘Friend or foe: we just don’ know.’ ”

  “Willum sounds like a terror,” Precious Wind murmured in return.There was no need for their extreme caution. No one could hear them from the vicinity of the Artemisian camp. The atmosphere of the almost silent mountain seemed to require it, but surely the actual situation didn’t . . . Of course, she had just arrived. Did she know what the actual situation really was?

  Xulai mused, “I’m sure he likes to think he’s a terror, but there’s something gallant about him. The care he takes of Needly is sur­prising!”

  “Nothing prevents small boys from having large ideals, once they know such things are possible. It’s alerting them to the possibility that’s sometimes difficult. Tell me about this place he was reared. What did you call it? Gravy . . . ?”

  “Gravysuck.” Xulai went on to describe the town, Willum’s ma, the uncle called Lorp.

  “A Lorpist!” Precious Wind exclaimed loudly, immediately clapping a hand over her mouth. “That almost made me forget we’re supposed to be hiding out. Lorpists! Ooh, yes. We’ve met Lorpists along the coast and in several places on our way cross-­country toward Artemisia. The last group of them we met—­five of them, men, I suppose, though they looked rather more like pictures I have seen of prehistoric apes—­saw the rings in my ears and decided they needed to examine the whole group of us for what they were pleased to call ‘wholeness.’ We would, of course, strip in order to allow them access.”

  “I trust you escaped them?”

  Precious Wind had a very mobile, expressive face. Xulai could often interpret whole orations without hearing them. Or, at least, know what was coming, as now, when her friend’s lips curved into her recently-­very-­well-­fed-­tiger smile: “Well, since I had ul xaolat it wasn’t a fair fight, I admit. I told the group that my god insisted that all men are complete only when they have no hair and nothing resembling a testicle. They cried heresy. I declared a battle of the gods, Lorp and his deity against me and ul xaolat, which had already painlessly removed all the features mentioned from each of them. Cries of dismay degenerated into violent argument. Some thought ritual suicide was the answer. We left them still arguing.”

  “The Lorp we knew was destined for the ‘cata-­pull-­it.’ ” Xulai went on to repeat Willum’s description of the process, concluding: “He had died before being launched, but it was all more than a little strange. Many of the small villages we’ve traveled through have been strange . . .”

  Precious Wind went to the wagon door, peered out into the darkness, where nothing seemed to be happening, then returned, shrugging her shoulders and twisting her head from side to side. She dealt with emergency situations very well, but waiting for things to happen invariably gave her a stiff neck and a headache, probably from clenching her jaw. “I don’t have answers to all the riddles of what went on in this area. Those who do know the answers say they are still too busy to discuss the matter.”

  Though Xulai had grown more accepting over the past few years, occasionally she still reverted to fury at whole generations of “fiddlers” who had been involved in her own genetic heritage. Abasio, though he had been interfered with at least as much as she, did not fret over it. He said one’s ancestors had always influenced who and what one was. The addition of a little purpose to the process did not seem to him worth fussing about when there were so many more immediate concerns needing attention. Abasio, however, was not there at the moment to calm Xulai down.

  “I wish someone would discuss the matter,” Xulai said in a venomous tone. “I know the why well enough, but I’d very much like to be told the when and who and where of it. There had to be some reason for all this local genetic interference beyond our becoming capable of producing sea-­children!”

  Precious Wind summoned patience. “Well, of course there was something beyond that, Xulai! Yes, someone had to create the first sea-­egg. That was your mother. Yes, someone had to swallow that one to enable more to be produced, and then produce them! That person was her daughter, the Princess Xulai: you! That was a tricky part, because we were fighting random forces left over from the Big Kill that wanted to stop it happening! To say nothing of that killing machine’s sorceress daughter who killed your mother.

  “But that was less than half the battle. Then the sea-­eggs that you produced had to be passed on to others, and they had to be hatched in environments that were prepared to accept them! Didn’t they? You’ve been disappointed in the ­people who refuse, but what you should have felt was a
mazement at how many young ­people have accepted! Would you have guessed so many would be willing and capable of the change? And when they proved to be both willing and capable, did you believe that fortunate result was entirely due to the warm personalities and eloquent salesmanship shown by Abasio and Xulai?”

  Xulai was stunned at the question. “We have thought we were doing it rather well.”

  “Did you think the planners left it totally to chance that you would do well? Most of the ­people who are accepting now have been moved in the direction of acceptance for at least four generations.”

  Xulai stopped breathing. After a moment she gasped. “I thought there were other teams doing what Abasio and I are doing, teams spreading out from Tingawa.”

  “They aren’t doing quite as well as you are, mostly because none of them have sea-­babies yet. The fact they are having any success at all, however, may be attributed to an extensive genetic predisposition! You and Abasio were the . . . the tip of the iceberg. A lot of ­people were fiddled with, not just you. And I really don’t understand your irritation, Xulai. ­People have always selected their mates on the basis of their characteristics. All that was done, here, was to see that those with useful characteristics met one another. You and Abasio were merely introduced. You weren’t forcibly locked in the bedroom together!”

  “Presh!”

  “Well, you weren’t!” Precious Wind rubbed the back of her neck, moving her hands down onto her shoulders. She ached. The journey had been tiring. She too was in a “Why me?” sort of mood, and surprised at that fact. Serenity was a much-­valued virtue among Tingawans, but she was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain even a semblance of it. As Xulai herself put it, “Things keep happening!” Sybbis and her gangers. Lorpists. Griffins getting demanding. Children being abducted. Probably very important children.

  She repeated a discipline jingle to herself, one her own grandmother had taught her, managing to achieve a mild, almost indifferent tone: “One of the men who has been working on this project for most of his life told me that ‘this part of this continent’ was among those selected because it had accumulated an extremely broad spectrum of genotypes from all over the world. It had been settled and resettled in prehistoric and primitive times, from various directions.”

  Xulai made an angry face. Precious Wind murmured, “This area west of the mountains was geologically stable and there were no wars happening in it; that made it a magnet for ­people seeking to improve their lives. They came from everywhere; when they got here, they interbred, mixing themselves thoroughly. Our ­people saw it as a place ready for intensive recruitment. We, our ­people, were interested in the inevitable genetic drift in the area. We wanted to encourage some genetic clusters that mightn’t have turned up accidentally. Or not until it was too late.”

  “Inevitable genetic drift?” Xulai raised a beautifully formed and very irritated eyebrow. “Who says, inevitable?”

  Precious Wind allowed herself to feel angry. “You are determined to believe you have been ill treated. Well, we should have taken your discomfort more seriously, but it is not too late. It should be possible for us to set things right for you. I can arrange for that to happen.”

  “Not likely!”

  “Oh, yes. I can. Tingawan medics can erase memory. I will tell your grandfather how deeply you resent the fiddling; we’ll take you to Tingawa, where they will erase your memory. Then I will personally settle you in another life in a place where no one has done any recruitment or selection at all. No man wants to think of himself as unwanted, and Abasio is an extremely attractive man. We can relieve him of memories of you, which—­inasmuch as you resent his part in it—­I’m sure he’ll agree to. Among the various Sea Ducks, I’m sure we can find another attractive woman who’s been given a sea-­egg, and I’ll make sure the children are taken care of while he gets one lined up.”

  Xulai looked at her blankly, as thought she had been struck by something very large and heavy. “That’s not . . . I wasn’t . . .”

  “Yes, you are, you were, you have been, constantly carping about it, and it’s going to become an impediment to the entire project. It’s as though everything we’ve achieved, your mother’s life, her death, must take second place to your irritation at being part of it. Xulai, if we hadn’t hidden you, you wouldn’t have survived. You know that as well as I do. But if you really don’t like your present role, we can take you out of it!

  “Do you know how much you hurt Abasio when you complain about the planning that went into your meeting each other? It’s as though you’re saying you’d have chosen someone else if you had free choice. How do you think that makes him feel? Perhaps he’s wondering if he couldn’t have made a better choice as well. Perhaps we can find someone else who’s delighted with him and the children, and you can exercise totally free choice to go wherever you wish and do whatever you wish.”

  “I didn’t mean that.” Now she was on the verge of tears. “I didn’t. It’s just . . . I’m not sure anymore who I am! No. There’s no anymore to it. I’ve never been sure who I am!” She shook her head.

  Precious Wind, weary of the entire discussion, asked, “Make up your mind. If you want out, we can take you out. We can minimize Abasio’s pain in the doing of it. Where did you intend to go with this discussion, Xulai?”

  “You said the ­people we’ve been recruiting have been . . .”

  “Predisposed . . .”

  “Predisposed to accept our story. How?”

  “Well, let’s suppose ­people in Area One were found to have a high level of adaptability. Let’s suppose in Area Two the ­people had a high level of practicality. Our first move might be to send a job recruiter from Area One to Area Two, and from Area Two to Area One. They would all be recruiting ­people of reproductive age to take jobs in the other area. Anything that gets ­people moving between the two areas will result in a certain amount of intermarriage. In three or four generations, many of the ­people in these areas turn out to have a high level of practical adaptability. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s essentially what happened.

  “Then, since it was absolutely necessary that the sea-­children project have a high initial acceptance rate in order to succeed, where would you send the first ­people who had swallowed sea-­eggs? Hmm? You’d send them to areas known to have a larger-­than-­average number of adaptable, practical ­people, Areas One and Two.”

  “So that’s why we’re here!”

  “The project has a limited time span, so it has to focus on getting an initial high rate of acceptance. Once we reach a certain critical level, momentum will take over, but we can’t afford to waste any time or effort on ­people who are headed toward atrophy, like those few murderous villages you’ve told me about. We’ve already developed a system of prescreening, so our recruitment won’t even visit such places. And you have to admit, they have been in the minority.”

  “There couldn’t have been many places like Burned Hat,” Xulai growled. “They rejected all possibilities of survival. Their beliefs were more important than their lives. I really struggle to understand that!”

  “It shouldn’t surprise you in the least. Way back before the Big Kill, ­people were told they were overpopulating the world; killing the oceans; using up prehistoric aquifers. Even in the early twenty-­first century, when ­people knew they were adding billions of humans that the world couldn’t feed, they disbelieved the world was getting hotter, less friendly to life. Even after the famines started, after all the aquifers ran dry, certain religious groups still disbelieved it.”

  “Oh, come on, Presh!”

  “I’m not joking. While millions of children were starving at various places on the earth, some religions were still insisting that it was sinful to prevent excess births. I’m fascinated by the religions of that time. Without exception they simply denied reality. They were completely myth-­driven. Self-­inflicted pain was
a common religious practice . . .”

  “How did they arrive at that?”

  “Pleasure wasn’t justifiable for any reason, Xulai. In those days ­people were encouraged to offer up pain as a sacrifice to God. If a man crawled ten miles over thorny ground to a certain shrine; if he arrived bloody, infected, perhaps crippled, and offered this bloody, dirty mess as a sacrifice to the Creator, it was considered praiseworthy. Now, let me ask you: if it was offered to you, would you want it?

  “In the real Creator’s universe, almost all creatures are born with good, strong bodies and with organs that allow them to see, to hear, to feel, and to learn; in the Creator’s universe, pain is there to warn us when something is wrong and needs help or protection. Now, why would the Creator of the universe be pleased when someone throws a bloody, suffering broken person back in the Creator’s face and says, ‘Here, whoop-­dee-­do, I’m giving you a lot of bloody pain as a sacrifice.’ ”

  Diverted from her original plaint, Xulai thought it over. “I guess it’d work only if their god is a sadist.”

  “Well, Xulai, they already know their god is a sadist because they’d been told it had invented hell. Only a sadist could have invented hell! Of course, before that particular God invented hell, men had to invent that particular God. That tells you something about mankind!”

  Precious Wind sighed. “Sybbis is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. She’s requiring ­people to ignore reality and worship her, and she uses pain as the tool. She doesn’t understand that ­people—­all creatures—­have evolved to seek satisfactions out of life. If they get none, they either die or rebel.”