Fish Tails

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “And your talent is . . .”

  “Why, charm, of course. Charm and humor and being a generally delightful character. Not a bad carpenter either.”

  She stared at him, lost in a weird delight mixed with a terrible confusion. “But that’s an intervention, Joshua! It’s not bao. It’s not fabricky at all, and bao says we’re just part of the fabric, you know. We are not the purpose of creation. We are not a creature that has been specially created and anyone would intervene for specially. I do believe that!”

  “You’re saying ‘anyone.’ No, the Creator would not intervene for ‘anyone’ of its creatures. But another ‘anyone’ might. ‘Anyones’ have been interfering with one another since the dawn of time. You are one of the anyones. Xulai is. Abasio is. For example, did you make that sock?” He pointed to the one she had been darning.

  She hadn’t really looked at the sock before. It didn’t look as though it had been hand-­knitted. “No. It’s one of Willum’s. Needly told me his socks were all holes. Someone back in his village probably made it. Or it was bought from some peddler going through. Someone in my family told me about knitting machines. Maybe there are still places where ­people use machines to make ordinary things like socks and mittens and winter hats . . .”

  “Yes, you didn’t make it, but you’re darning it?”

  She looked at the sock in her hands. Not a pretty thing but . . . “There’s wear in it yet.”

  “It suffers from an absence of part of its substance. And even if one didn’t make it, one could still be interested in mending it?”

  “Well, of course one mends things. Otherwise one would be spending a fortune on underwear and socks and winter mittens . . .”

  “Yes, one would.” He sat back in his chair and stared into the west, where the sunset was beginning to color the horizon over the mountains. “So if one had a race of ­people who were useful in various ways but certainly not the center and purpose of the universe, and if that race of ­people by and large, unfortunately, had an unfortunate absence in part of their substance, anyone might be allowed to darn it. To fix the hole in their nature. One might use various implements to mend it. Perhaps a Lillis-­shaped darning egg, and a Needly, and someone skilled at the job of being a well-­intentioned male hank of yarn.”

  “One being who?”

  “One being a human person selected by Balytaniwassinot to fulfill a certain role and prepared for that role by being given an intensive education on the future of mankind.” He frowned. “Oh, and one who found a certain person named Lillis to be irresistible. The other candidates were enthusiastic, but not nearly as enthusiastic as was this candidate. We were allowed to choose; that was part of the deal. The Camrathsexipedes are a remarkably ethical race. Except for occasional jesting, they tell the truth as they breathe, being unable to live without either air or veracity. Fixit would not have allowed me to attempt pretending an enthusiasm I did not feel.”

  His face moved as though it were liquid, expression and shape wavering. She put out her hand to touch it, the touch turning into a caress. “An egg and a needle and yarn and a dozen young ones. All of them brothers and sisters?” His face settled into familiarity. “Now you look like Joshua again.”

  “Is he your favorite one of me?”

  She struggled to remember. “He was . . . the Joshua you was just the only one who . . . who wasn’t in Hench Valley. I did hate Hench Valley so. Anything done there was done under a shadow. Not being there made life sunlit. But he wasn’t a separate he, was he. What you are saying is that all of you were one you.”

  “All were one and one was all. You are correct. Fixit had several candidates, me among them, and I won the job by being several good candidates for it.”

  “You mean, by being several ­people I could be very happy with. Each one of you? Who weren’t really that different! Which makes a good deal of sense. So much easier to have one all-­purpose man than doing them by dozens.” She tried the thought. It had awkward corners, but . . . but it could be made to fit. It actually could explain . . . rather a lot. “So all of them were you. I’m glad. That way I don’t have to mourn for any of them, and I don’t have to feel a fool for being foolish over all of them. Did you make up all that business that Abasio was telling us about Fixit’s ­people. All that dancing and pibbling and fringe swatting?”

  He shook his head slowly and emphatically. “Fixit itself told Abasio all about it. I had no part in the telling, but I will say the Camrathsexipedes breed in exactly that way. I was not in cold storage the whole time. I have had guided tours of some quite remarkable worlds, during one of which I witnessed from beginning to end the procreation procedure of Fixit’s ­people. Fixit also had to tell Abasio about it so it would be in his log. Nobody knew about all the tours I’d already had . . .”

  “You told me his ­people were totally ethical.”

  “I did. And Fixit knows that sometimes it is much more ethical to ignore a regulation than to obey it. Especially regulations made by ­people who are in high office because they have used low tactics to get there and are often regulating things for their own profit. Fixit’s ­people derive great pleasure from what amounts to a good deal of healthful community exercise. Admittedly, it is strange, and if you knew how it evolved, you would think it even stranger. Each step in it evolved over many millennia in response to a particular environmental danger. When one learns how each step developed, one can only admire and revere the Creator, for relying on evolution makes everything perfectly reasonable. As is everything in the universe, perfectly reasonable—­once you know everything there is to know about it.”

  “You’re not . . . HIM, are you? Or HER, IT, or THEM?”

  “You mean the Creator? Don’t let your bao slip, Lillis! Reason should tell you the Creator would not bother with such a matter, truly. Earth is not even a blip in the fabric of the universe. This is simply too small a matter to be of interest. No, I am a human minion, a descendant of ­people who were on the ships that went to Lom, a descendant who inherited shapeshifting as my talent and who was recruited by Fixit to do covert work part-­time for one particular minor branch of the Galactic Affairs Office. Their overview is large, but not universal. There are no records of my recruitment or my equipment.”

  “I imagine you’re really busy,” she said, the sadness in the words not her intention at all. Nor the tear that dropped onto the sock she had been mending.

  “Ah, Lillis. You’re lonely.”

  Now the tears were a flood, choking her, so the words were drowned. “Well, of course I am! It does somehow make it a great deal easier to know you were all the same you, you know, so I’m not a . . . what did they used to call them in the old books? A loose woman.”

  “A passionate, loving woman who thought being faithful to an ideal was more important than being faithful to any particular male creature who came and went as the mood took him.”

  “Him, it, or them! But I’m still glad they, you were all the same . . .”

  “ . . . the same . . . minion. And, Lillis my love, I’d so much rather you didn’t say ‘were.’ I didn’t stop being, you know. I still am. I’ve worked part-­time until now, but it’s full-­time from here on out.”

  “You still are what?” she cried. “I’m very well read, but I don’t know what a ‘minion’ is! And if you were always the same one, then why didn’t you just stay in Hench Valley the whole time? Why all that back-­and-­forth-­ing?”

  He frowned, very slightly. “Because the children could not be identical. They are not copies of one another. One does not make an orchestra of all oboes. Or violins. Or cymbals and kettledrums. Each is an individual. And in order to assure that, one had to be . . . what is it that Xulai is always fussing about?”

  “Being fiddled with!”

  “One had to be fiddled with. Rebuilt. No, not really rebuilt at all, as a shapeshifter, that came automatically, but I did
have to be reequipped.”

  She choked on her tears again, trying to laugh. “You had . . . have very nice equipment.”

  “Thank you. I particularly like the shapely nose and this manly jaw.”

  “That’s not what I—­”

  “No? What else could you have been thinking of?” He sat there, quietly staring at her, a slight smile coming and going. “How old are you, Lillis? You were seventeen when we met. Our firstborn was . . . were the girls Sarah and Sally. How old are they now?”

  “They are apparently postpubertal. How ‘post,’ who knows. Did they age at all while those creatures had them?”

  “Unfortunate creature, the Oracle . . .”

  “While those idiots kept them in storage. Did you know about that?”

  “I did. They were not suffering. They were not conscious. They were merely arrested. As you were.”

  “As I were what?”

  “Arrested. Everyone calls you ‘Grandma.’ Yet . . . your hair is not gray. I see no lines in your face. If I had to judge, I would say you are probably in your early to midthirties. One reason for Hench Valley would be its everlasting sameness. You could (and did) miss great chunks of Hench Valley time without noticing it at all because Hench Valley did not change. A three-­year chunk there, a five-­year chunk here, it would still be the same. You wondered, ‘Why Hench Valley?’ That’s why. Though you only had six of the babies, it took a sizable chunk of time to accumulate a dozen children . . . thirteen, if we count Trudis.

  “Besides, we should count Trudis. As it turned out, you were right to fight for her. When we got to that stage, the Silverhair stage, she turned out to be the only one to have the genetic mix that was needed. Which was a good thing.”

  She gave him a look of frank disbelief. “Don’t tell me you planners and conspirators didn’t have such a person located in advance.”

  “I wasn’t one of the planners and conspirators. They did have such a person in mind, but they had neglected to recruit a real seer when they recruited me. A seer would have told them the person they were depending on would die before her contribution could be made. Which she did. Died.”

  “Chastised to death in Hench Valley, no doubt.”

  “No. That they could and would have prevented, but she was not kept under constant surveillance. One cannot prevent a woman deciding to go visit her mother in the middle of the night by way of a mountain trail which she had no doubt traveled hundreds of times, and, as she rounded a corner, being confronted by—­way, way below his natural range—­a pugnacious mountain goat going the opposite way. It is probably unnecessary to speculate whether, when on a narrow trail, a pair of horns and four feet firmly planted will always outperform two feet totally surprised.”

  “Do you mean Ma Beans! That was why she fell?”

  “She woke in the night with a premonition of death, thought it was her mother, and went to prevent it.”

  “You’re inventing that.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m not. She told her sister she was going and why. You knew her?”

  “I helped her in childbirth. Several times. The babies were always early and died within a few days. I’m sure it was a genetic thing. I told her how to prevent the pregnancies. She said no, she was going to keep on doing what she wanted to do. I had her help me, I thought it might show her where things were going wrong . . .”

  “Her mother probably told her not to walk the trail after dark. But she kept on doing what she wanted to do.”

  “She had a good reason for staying pregnant, Joshua. Her man of the house didn’t chastise her when she was pregnant. Oh, Joshua or whoever . . . What am I supposed to call you? I don’t want to talk about Hench Valley. I want Hench Valley to . . . go away.”

  He leaned close and put his arm around her, whispering urgently, “Listen to me, Lillis. I am your fairy godfather and can grant your wish! Hench Valley has only about half a year to go. At which point it will be gone.” He hugged her. “The two little girls who are still there will disappear. The Home at Saltgosh has agreed to take the two little girls. They are mentally very slow but they willingly do easy tasks like dusting and washing things: dishes, pots, pans, floors. They love music. They enjoy food and any bit of new clothing puts them into ecstasies. Their lives are not without pleasure. In the Home, they will be well treated, probably even loved, much as a pet is loved, and they will be protected.

  “In Hench Valley the last fertile woman has recently gone through the ‘change’ and this is known throughout the valley. Very shortly, now, the men remaining in Hench Valley will know females have to be found if they’re to continue pointing at some hungry little boy and bragging that ‘he’s one a’ mine.’ They will decide to go over the pass, down toward Catland and Artemisia, where they plan to steal a ‘whole buncha wimmin.’ There are far fewer men left in Hench Valley than you might guess. They’ve been leaking away for the last decade. They will, of course, follow tradition by first dancing around the fire and getting thoroughly drunk.

  “While still in that frivolous state, as they approach Catland, they will encounter Sybbis escorted by a large group of her gangers, all well armed and not drunk. Sybbis will be on a mission to find out what has happened to her stinkers, left in her charge by old Chief Purple. This meeting of the two groups will result in carnage. None of the Hench Valley men will return to Hench Valley.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. By then, all the stinkers will have been . . . disbanded by Fixit. They are not a race of ­people; they do not have the abilities necessary to survive, even if taken to some hospitable and untenanted planet; they are without mentality and have no emotions but a recurrent mating urge and consistent hunger. There are no female hunters, the male hunters will be relocated to live out their lives.

  “In Hench Valley, after a quiet and really rather enjoyable winter, when spring comes the few older women and the scatter of little boys remaining will be looking for a leader. Someone to guide them and their remaining livestock out into the world. Perhaps a small committee of female Artemisians could be persuaded to undertake a rescue mission?”

  “And you know this how?”

  “The likelihood of each event is well over the ninetieth percentile. As is the probability that Sybbis, while hunting for her stinkers and getting involved in the fray between her gangers and the Hench Valley men, will be very slightly scratched and will subsequently die of an easily preventable infection. This will result in the population of Catland being dispersed into the surrounding countryside. I have not described the interventions which will help this whole plot along, but they are simple and nonviolent.”

  “If the infection is easily preventable . . .”

  “Sybbis will refuse to use an antiseptic solution because ‘it stings.’ ”

  “And you know this how?”

  “You and I played games, love. Remember? We played cubies, sometimes: one asks a question, then one rolls the cubies and writes down the letters on top, and if it’s a long question maybe they are thrown twice. Then you make up the answer out of the ten or twenty letters you have.”

  “You played cubies to determine the future of Earth?”

  “It’s only a similarity. For questions pertaining to something the size of a planet, one needs something a bit larger and more reliable, so one has this enormously complicated machine that figures out likelihoods. One tells the machine everything one knows about a situation. Then one asks it to research the situation and give the likelihood of X happening. Or X and Y and Z. Or the whole alphabet. And the machine asks for certain other information, which one provides—­after taking some time and effort to find it out—­then one goes around and around with the machine, refining the information, changing it here, goosing it there, and eventually it says the likelihood is even both ways. And then one asks this and that and the other thing, and when one has spent enough time changin
g the variables, one learns that there are a ­couple of little interventions, as follows.

  “If someone goes to Grief’s Barn in Hench Valley in the afternoon of a certain day this coming spring, and asks a certain Pa what the men are going to do now that there are no childbearing females at all left in Hench Valley, everything I mentioned will happen.”

  “With a ­couple of little interventions?”

  “First intervention was having someone go in and get the little girls out of there before we ask the question. Second intervention is somebody getting there and asking the question. Fixit and I will do that.”

  “Why do you have to get the little girls out?”

  “They are not bright, but they are willing and seemingly tireless, and will do almost anything to please others. Which can be a deathtrap we wish to avoid. Because we don’t want them trying to please the men of Hench Valley, do we?”

  She shuddered. “No. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “The machine forecast death by gang rape if we didn’t get them out first, so we’re getting them out first.”

  “And everything we did, you and I and the Home that kept the Silverhairs and the stupid Oracles and Needly and . . . everything was because that sort of machine said DO?”

  “That machine doesn’t have a DO button. A human person has to decide to do. Fixit’s machine, now, oh yes, it has a DO button, but he’s in another line of business.”

  “Which is what, really?”