“Don’t think that’s going to get you off the hook of explaining the Kolnari defeat, my pet,” Niall said. He had been propping up a wall just beyond the view of the one screen she had activated to receive the Commodore’s call. “And will I have performed my part there in true heroic form?”
“What else? I’ll not have you go to your grave without every bit of honor due you. And you did perform your designated role on Ravel. You stayed out of sight.”
“Not entirely, evidently,” Niall said with a wicked grin, waggling a finger at her.
“If you mean that Helvana woman’s little surprise remark, forget that. A lucky guess, since she would have known I’d have to have had a brawn with me somewhere.”
“She knew me by name.”
“Maybe she can talk to the dead. And you are dead, you know. Can’t you stay down?”
“Why should I? Miss my own obsequies? How can you ask that of me?” He pressed one hand against his chest in dismay.
She laughed. “I should have known you’d pull a Tom Sawyer.”
He laughed, too. “Why not, since you have provided me the ability to watch? I’ve always wanted to hear what people thought of me.”
“You won’t hear any candor at your funeral. It’s not good manners to speak ill of the dead, you know. Besides which, I do NOT want Psych checking my synapses for fear I’ve blown a few by concocting your holo program.”
“No one will see me, my love, I assure you,” he said.
She had intended to delete the program totally, even the petabytes that had once stored it, when she reached Regulus Base. Now she changed her mind. He had the right to see the ceremony: all of it from the slow march with his bier, the atmosphere planes doing their wing-tipping salute, the volley of rifles, the whole nine yards of changeless requiem for the honored dead. This time, she was not mourning the sudden, unnecessary death of a beloved partner: she was celebrating the long and fruitful life of a dear friend whom she would also never forget.
When the burial detail came to collect the mortal husk, the stasis in the coffin replaced that in which she had held his body intact during her long journey home. Regulus officialdom turned out in force, from the Central Worlds’ current Administrative Chief with every one of his aides in formal-dress parade uniforms to the planetary Governor in her very elegant black dress and fashionable hat, to the parade of mixed armed services as well as whatever brawns were on the Base, and all the brawn trainees. The service was just long enough. A little longer and she’d have believed the fulsome eulogies about the man they mourned, who was sitting in the pilot’s chair and watching the entire show with the greatest of satisfaction. She’d remember that as the best part of the whole show.
“I wouldn’t have missed this for the damned Horsehead Nebula we never did get to,” he exclaimed several times. As Helva was parked where her cabin could not be seen from those either on the ground or on the raised platform for the dignitaries, he could peer about, wisecracking and reminiscing as he chose.
She did, as she had done before and as it was expected of Helva, the ship who sings, let the heavens resound with the poignant strains of the service song of evening and requiem. But this time her tone was triumphant, and as her last note died away across the cemetery and all the bowed heads, she deleted Niall’s holographic program.
They left her alone until she had decided she’d had enough solitude. She ought to have held off deleting Niall a few days longer, but there was a time to end things, and his funeral had been it. Then she contacted Headquarters.
“This is the XH-834 requesting a new brawn,” she said, “and you’d better arrange a time for the Fleet to query me on that Ravel incident. I want it down on the records straight. I want a top priority message to the Marian Circle Cloister on Vega III that Ravel needs to have its warning satellite replaced. The Kolnari blew the old one out of space.”
“New brawn?” repeated the woman who had responded to her call. Her brain had gone into neutral at being unexpectedly contacted by the XH-834.
“Yes, a new brawn.” Helva then repeated her other requests. “Got them? Good. Please expedite. And, as soon as you’ve informed the brawn barracks of my availability, patch me over whatever missions are currently available for a brain ship with my experience.”
“Yes, indeed, XH-834, yes indeed.” There was a pause through which Helva heard only sharp excited words clipped off before she quite caught any of the agitated sentences. Surprise always gives you an advantage.
She laughed with pure vindictive satisfaction as the brawn barracks erupted with people hastily flinging on tunics or fixing their hair or adjusting buttons. The scene brought back fond memories as the young men and women, all determined to win this prize of prizes, raced to be first aboard her.
They had not quite reached the ramp when she suddenly became aware of a hazy object. The outlines were misty, but it was Niall Parollan, striding to her column, laying his cheek once more against the panel that covered her.
“Don’t give the next one any more grief than you gave me, will you, love?” He started to turn away, his outline noticeably fading. “And if you ever use that Sorg Prosthesis with anyone else but me, I’ll kill him! Got that?”
She thought she muttered something as she watched his image drift to the hull by the forward screen, not towards the airlock. Just as she heard the stampede of the brawns outside, he disappeared altogether with one last wave of a hand that seemed to flow into the metal of her ship-self.
“Permission to come aboard, ma’am?” a breathless voice asked.
MY SHE
MARY ROSENBLUM
Mary Rosenblum is the author of four science fiction novels, including her latest, Horizons, and The Drylands, which won the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. Water Rites—a compilation of The Drylands and the three novelettes that preceded it—is recently available from Fairwood Press. Her short work frequently appears in Asimov’s, but has also appeared in Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and has often been reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction annual.
Under the name Mary Freeman, Rosenblum is also the author of four mystery novels. Lately, she has returned her short fiction roots, but is currently working on a young adult fantasy novel and an alternate history project.
Communication is power, and this tale is a story of communication on a couple of levels. But it also tackles one of Rosenblum’s favorite themes: Where does the boundary lie between human and non-human?
I wait outside the speaking chamber, where the young Speakers learn to Hear and Speak. The walls and carpeted floor are purest white, the color of this God place and the Speakers who live here walk by, all dressed in white like the walls and the floor, their palms on the shoulders of their guides. They all look the same with their pale hair and pale eyes. Only their smell tells me who they are. I am a guide for my Speaker. Until she puts on the robe and is sent to another place to Speak between the worlds for the citizens. Then I will have a new pup to raise. I will miss this puppy. Her scent comes to me from beneath the door of the learning room, smelling of trying hard and not sure.
She is never sure, my she, not since I first came to her, when she was just small. I sometimes smell her silent tears at night and slip into her room from my cubicle to lie beside her. She strokes the fur on my head and shoulders and it comforts her. It is our secret—kept secret, I think, because she does not know if it is permitted for me to sleep on her bed at night. I, myself, do not know, even after all these years here. Never before have I slept beside a pup in my charge.Perhaps there is nothing wrong. Perhaps there is. But it is our secret and it binds us. When I sleep in her bed, I hear my litter-brother in my dreams and I like that. I miss him always.
I will miss her, when she leaves. Unless they finally send me with her, the way they sent my litter-brother with his Speaker. But they say I am good at raising puppies and they have not sent me with a newly-robed Speaker yet.
While I
wait for her, I pull out my brother’s last mail to me. The tiny disk feels cool and hard in my palm. Disk-mail is not expensive, but it is slow. This disk traveled in four ships before it found its way here from the colony world where my brother now lives. But we guides are servants and servants are not entitled to use the Speakers; they are for citizens only. Perhaps they think that because we mostly smell to each other that we do not need to speak with words. But we cannot smell between the stars. I would like to speak to my litter-brother and hear his answer. I will never see him again, except on my she’s bed. There, he speaks to me, tells me how he misses me. We used to wrestle in the meadow around the school where we were raised, chasing each other into the creek, splashing and laughing. Sometimes it snowed and I still dream of snow, cold and white, stinging my palms and the soles of my feet, tingly as it melted in my fur.
There is no snow in the convent. Only spring, forever.
The door opens and I have been dreaming of snow and my brother. I am not ready. I leap to my feet, ears going flat.
“Siri? Where are you?”
Her hand goes out and I step beneath it so that my shoulder fur comes up against her palm. I feel the tickle of her mind finding my eyes and the white-walled corridor blurs just a bit as our minds share my eyes.
I wonder if that is how I speak to my brother when I sleep in her bed? “I had a mail from my litter-brother,” I tell her.
She understands litters. The Speaker puppies are born in litters of ten. We walk down the hall and I see that she is heading for the garden in the center of the convent. Sadness darkens her scent and I reach up to touch her hand lightly, wanting to make the smell go away.
“You don’t understand.” She shrugs me off but she does not smell angry. “What if I fail?”
Fail? The word chills me. My puppies to do not fail. Have never failed. We step out into sunlight, soft and gentle through the dome. Water trickles and the rich tapestry of dirt smells, the small beings that inhabit this space, the breath of the water itself make me dizzy. Most of the convent is clean of such smells. She sits on a bench covered with bright chips of color and I squat beside her, leaning lightly against her thigh because that comforts her. Her fingers slide into the long fur on the back of my neck and that makes me shiver. “Who said you would fail?”
“My Speaker-Mistress.” Her words are low and she smells sharp, unhappy. “The one who . . . trains me. I . . . Hear more than the voice I’m tuning to. I can’t shut the others out. But I don’t listen to them.” She smells distress and a tinge of anger. “I am good. I would not listen to any other voice. I would not Speak the God words to another. Not ever.”
I wince—I cannot stop myself—because her fingers digging in hurt me. She lets go and covers her face with her hands.
“I am not trying to Hear them. I listen only for the voice that speaks to me. Too sensitive she said, the Speaker-Mistress.” Her voice is hard to hear, but she smells frightened. “She said it could not be, that my genes will not permit it.”
I shiver as if I am a puppy again and have played too long in the snow.
“Will they make me leave?”
She does not understand. Maybe none of them do. Speaking only the God words, Hearing the God Words is all there is for them. Only Speakers live here in the convent. And we servants.
No one leaves, except on a ship, to Hear and Speak in another place, so that the citizens can talk between the stars. The way my brother left with the new Speaker assigned to him.
I try to distract her. I can smell the vanilla orchids opening and she loves them. Even she can smell them with her poor dead nose and she loves the touch of their thick petals. So I take her to them. And she puts on a face that means she is happy. But she smells sad.
And I smell afraid.
She is my puppy. She was given to me to raise. And none of my puppies have ever failed.
If she fails, I will no longer speak to my litter-brother in my dreams.
I wake in darkness and smell her tears. I leave my cushion and pad across the carpet in the soft, warm darkness, slipping on to the soft mattress beside her. She puts her arm around me and buries her face in the fur that covers my shoulders. I can feel the wetness of her tears as they soak my fur, like the melting snow, so long ago. But warm. She reeks of sorrow but no fear.
How can she truly know fear?
I envy her that.
“Tell me about snow,” she says.
“It is frozen water. It falls from the skies.”
“Tell me more. Tell me about when you were a child.”
She is using her command voice and it’s hard, very hard, to say no to her, even though we do not speak of things outside. Not in here. The God of Speakers will be angry. The God of Speakers is only angry at you one time.
But if she has failed? So I shrug. What can it hurt now? “I was never a child.” The tail stub that doesn’t show under my coveralls wriggles in amusement. “But my litter was born in a place where winter—the cold time when snow falls—lasts a very long time. So we were old enough to play in it before we were old enough to be sent to our homes.”
“You were young. So you were a child.”
“We are not called children when we are young.” I flatten my ears, uneasy. Never has one of my young Speakers talked to me like this. I suddenly want to tell her. “Our people have forever served yours. Even as I serve you now.”
“I do not understand.” But she has stopped thinking about it and she smells wistful. “I keep wondering what type of world they will send me to. I dreamed of snow, you know. Snow. White, fluffy flakes falling from a gray sky. And two furry creatures chasing each other through humps of white. Was that you?” She smells happy. “Did I dream of you?”
I flatten my ears and nod.
“I hoped they would send me to a world with snow.” She buries her face in my fur again. “But will they send me anywhere now?”
My ears are tight to my head and my nose quivers. I want to point to the moon that I remember but cannot see here and want to howl.
I have not howled since I was a puppy far younger than my she. Instead I kiss her cheek and let her soak my fur with her warm-snowmelt tears and my howl fills my belly. When she is gone, my litter-brother will be gone, too.
I dream of my brother. We are playing chase in the snow and it glitters like stardust from a thousand frozen galaxies as he catches me and we tumble over and over in the cold, dry whiteness. Then we are curled together in our sleeping place, warm, dreaming. That was a long, long time ago, before we learned to be servants, before we left to guard the Speaker pups. I will never forget the smell of him. How can I forget you? He blinks green eyes in the darkness and his tongue curls over his white, white teeth. We dream together every night.
Once, in his mail, he sent me a map of the place where he is, a sweep of glittering stars with their silent planets. He had flagged the world he was on, a mote of darkness in that sea of light. You are younger than I now, could be my puppy, I tell him and nuzzle his ears. That is what happens when you sleep on the slow ships that carry living things.
You look like you always look, he says, and then we romp off to play in the snow.
My she stirs and wakes and stares up into the darkness. My dream is gone, my litter-brother’s voice is gone, and even when she finally falls asleep again, it does not return.
She is quiet this morning. I take her to the dining room, her hand on my shoulder. She is not using my eyes, is looking inward, walking in darkness, trusting me to guide her feet. I bring her breakfast and take my own plate to squat along the wall with the others like me. Their ears flick and flatten as I pass and they smell sympathy for me. Ah, well, we know before anyone else, always. I have no appetite for my roll this morning but I eat it. I am a good servant.
Each litter of young Speakers sits at its own table, ten together, the oldest and tallest near the front, the young ones with their servants close in the rear, near the big doors. The room is light and warm. I have made man
y trips across it over the years, moving from door to the front of the room, then back to the door as my puppy assumes the Speaker’s gown and departs and I am assigned to a new puppy.
Now, my she sits at the front table with her litter, all identical, with the same, white-gold hair braided down their backs, the same white coveralls that mark them as Speakers-in-Training. The same faces and pale, lavender, unseeing eyes. Only the smell identifies them.
My she smells sad.
And this morning . . . afraid.
Perhaps, even among the Speakers, the news is spreading. Perhaps even they, with their nearly-dead noses, can smell failure.
The litters rise together at their tables, the youngest first, to return to their meditation where they can learn to Hear the words of God across the space between the stars. One after another, we rise as we smell our puppy and we follow. And it occurs to me as they pass—identical hair, identical pale, sightless eyes, identically curved spines and graceful fingers—that they are as created as we are.
That is a blasphemous thought because we are taught that citizens are not created. Servants are. I rise to join my she and I feel her arm brush against my shoulder. Secretly. I smell sympathy from the other servants, and think that she is like us.
I should not think it, but I do.
After breakfast we go to the room where she learns to Hear the God words. But when she gets there, an old one like she waits for her, wearing the full robe of a Speaker. Her servant flicks his ears at me then flattens them slightly and my own flatten in return. I want to squeeze against my she and comfort her. She lowers herself before the Speaker, like any pup. Respectfully. But her fear stings my nose and my ears flick back and forth.
“Your presence is requested at Council.” The Speaker offers a hand.
Federations Page 30
