by Nancy Kress
I have seen aliens before, but not so many together. Fallers, about our size but very dark, as if burned crisp by their distant star. They wear their neck fur very long and dye it strange bright colors, although not in prison. Terrans, who don’t even have neck fur but instead fur on their heads, which they sometimes cut into fanciful curves—rather pretty. Terrans are a little intimidating because of their size. They move slowly. Ano, who had one year at the university before I killed her, once told me that the Terran’s world makes them feel lighter than ours does. I don’t understand this, but Ano was very intelligent and so it’s probably true. She also explained that Fallers, Terrans, and World people are somehow related far back in time, but this is harder to believe. Perhaps Ano was mistaken.
Nobody ever thinks Huhuhubs could be related to us. Tiny, scuttling, ugly, dangerous, they walk on all fours. They’re covered with warts. They smell bad. I was glad to see only a few of them, sticking close together, in the corridor at Aulit.
We all move toward a large room filled with rough tables and chairs and, in the corner, a trough for the Huhuhubs. The food is already on the tables. Cereal, flatbread, elindel fruit—very basic, but nutritious. What surprises me most is the total absence of guards. Apparently prisoners are allowed to do whatever they wish to the food, the room, or each other, without interference. Well, why not? We aren’t real.
I need protection, quickly.
I choose a group of two women and three men. They sit at a table with their backs to the wall, and others have left a respectful distance around them. From the way they group themselves, the oldest woman is the leader. I plant myself in front of her and look directly into her face. A long scar ridges her left cheek to disappear into grizzled neck fur.
“I am Uli Pek Bengarin,” I say, my voice even but too low to be heard beyond this group. “In Aulit for the murder of my sister. I can be useful to you.”
She doesn’t speak, and her flat dark eyes don’t waver, but I have her attention. Other prisoners watch furtively.
“I know an informer among the guards. He knows I know. He brings things into Aulit for me, in return for not sharing his name.”
Still her eyes don’t waver. But I see she believes me; the sheer outrage of my statement has convinced her. A guard who had already forfeited reality by informing—by violating shared reality—might easily turn it to less pernicious material advantage. Once reality is torn, the rents grow. For the same reason, she easily believes that I might violate my supposed agreement with the guard.
“What sort of things?” she says, carelessly. Her voice is raspy and thick, like some hairy root.
“Letters. Candy. Pel.” Intoxicants are forbidden in prison; they promote shared conviviality, to which the unreal have no right.
“Weapons?”
“Perhaps,” I say.
“And why shouldn’t I beat this guard’s name out of you and set up my own arrangement with him?”
“He will not. He is my cousin.” This is the trickiest part of the cover provided to me by R&A Section: it requires that my would-be protector believe in a person who has kept enough sense of reality to honor family ties but will nonetheless violate a larger shared reality. I told Pek Brimmidin that I doubted that such a twisted state of mind would be very stable, and so a seasoned prisoner would not believe in it. But Pek Brimmidin was right and I was wrong. The woman nods.
“All right. Sit down.”
She does not ask what I wish in return for the favors of my supposed cousin. She knows. I sit beside her, and from now on I am physically safe in Aulit Prison from all but her.
Next, I must somehow befriend a Terran.
This proves harder than I expect. The Terrans keep to themselves, and so do we. They are just as violent toward their own as all the mad doomed souls in Aulit; the place is every horror whispered by children trying to shock each other. Within a tenday I see two World men hold down and rape a woman. No one interferes. I see a Terran gang beat a Faller. I see a World woman knife another woman, who bleeds to death on the stone floor. This is the only time guards appear, heavily armored. A priest is with them. He wheels in a coffin of chemicals and immediately immerses the body so that it cannot decay to release the prisoner from her sentence of perpetual death.
At night, isolated in my cell, I dream that Frablit Pek Brimmidin appears and rescinds my provisional reality. The knifed, doomed corpse becomes Ano; her attacker becomes me. I wake from the dream moaning and weeping. The tears are not grief but terror. My life, and Ano’s, hang from the splintery branch of a criminal alien I have not yet even met.
I know who he is, though. I skulk as close as I dare to the Terran groups, listening. I don’t speak their language, of course, but Pek Brimmidin taught me to recognize the cadences of “Carryl Walters” in several of their dialects. Carryl Walters is an old Terran, with gray head fur cut in boring straight lines, wrinkled brownish skin, and sunken eyes. But his ten fingers—how do they keep the extra ones from tangling them up?—are long and quick.
It takes me only a day to realize that Carryl Walters’s own people leave him alone, surrounding him with the same nonviolent respect that my protector gets. It takes me much longer to figure out why. Carryl Walters is not dangerous, neither a protector nor a punisher. I don’t think he has any private shared realities with the guards. I don’t understand until the World woman is knifed.
It happens in the courtyard, on a cool day in which I am gazing hungrily at the one patch of bright sky overhead. The knifed woman screams. The murderer pulls the knife from her belly and blood shoots out. In seconds the ground is drenched. The woman doubles over. Everyone looks the other way except me. And Carryl Walters runs over with his old-man stagger and kneels over the body, trying uselessly to save the life of a woman already dead anyway.
Of course. He is a healer. The Terrans don’t bother him because they know that, next time, it might be they who have need of him.
I feel stupid for not realizing this right away. I am supposed to be good at informing. Now I’ll have to make it up by immediate action. The problem, of course, is that no one will attack me while I’m under Afa Pek Fakar’s protection, and provoking Pek Faker herself is far too dangerous.
I can see only one way to do this.
I wait a few days. Outside in the courtyard, I sit quietly against the prison wall and breathe shallowly. After a few minutes I leap up. The dizziness takes me; I worsen it by holding my breath. Then I ram as hard as I can into the rough stone wall and slide down it. Pain tears through my arm and forehead. One of Pek Fakar’s men shouts something.
Pek Fakar is there in a minute. I hear her—hear all of them—through a curtain of dizziness and pain.
“—just ran into the wall, I saw it—”
“—told me she gets these dizzy attacks—”
“—head broken in—”
I gasp, through sudden real nausea, “The healer. The Terran—”
“The Terran?” Pek Fakar’s voice, hard with sudden suspicion. But I gasp out more words, “…disease…a Terran told me…since childhood…without help I…” My vomit, unplanned but useful, spews over her boots.
“Get the Terran,” Pek Fakar rasps to somebody. “And a towel!”
Then Carryl Walters bends over me. I clutch his arm, try to smile, and pass out.
When I come to, I am lying inside, on the floor of the eating hall, the Terran cross-legged beside me. A few World people hover near the far wall, scowling. Carryl Walters says, “How many fingers you see?”
“Four. Aren’t you supposed to have five?”
He unbends the fifth from behind his palm and says, “You fine.”
“No, I’m not,” I say. He speaks childishly, and with an odd accent, but he’s understandable. “I have a disease. Another Terran healer told me so.”
“Who?”
“Her name was Anna Pek Rakov.”
“What disease?”
“I don’t remember. Something in the head. I get spells
.”
“What spells? You fall, flop on floor?”
“No. Yes. Sometimes. Sometimes it takes me differently.” I look directly into his eyes. Strange eyes, smaller than mine, and that improbable blue. “Pek Rakov told me I could die during a spell, without help.”
He does not react to the lie. Or maybe he does, and I don’t know how to read it. I have never informed on a Terran before. Instead he says something grossly obscene, even for Aulit Prison: “Why you unreal? What you do?”
I move my gaze from his. “I murdered my sister.” If he asks for details, I will cry. My head aches too hard.
He says, “I sorry.”
Is he sorry that he asked, or that I killed Ano? Pek Rakov was not like this; she had some manners. I say, “The other Terran healer said I should be watched carefully by someone who knows what to do if I get a spell. Do you know what to do, Pek Walters?”
“Yes.”
“Will you watch me?”
“Yes.” He is, in fact, watching me closely now. I touch my head; there is a cloth tied around it where I bashed myself. The headache is worse. My hand comes away sticky with blood.
I say, “In return for what?”
“What you give Pek Fakar for protection?”
He is smarter than I thought. “Nothing I can also share with you.” She would punish me hard.
“Then I watch you, you give me information about World.”
I nod; this is what Terrans usually request. And where information is given, it can also be extracted. “I will explain your presence to Pek Fakar,” I say, before the pain in my head swamps me without warning, and everything in the dining hall blurs and sears together.
Pek Fakar doesn’t like it. But I have just given her a gun, smuggled in by my “cousin.” I leave notes for the prison administration in my cell, under my bed. While the prisoners are in the courtyard—which we are every day, no matter what the weather—the notes are replaced by whatever I ask for. Pek Fakar had demanded a “weapon”; neither of us expected a Terran gun. She is the only person in the prison to have such a thing. It is to me a stark reminder that no one would care if all we unreal killed each other off completely. There is no one else to shoot; we never see anyone not already in perpetual death.
“Without Pek Walters, I might have another spell and die,” I say to the scowling Pek Fakar. “He knows a special Terran method of flexing the brain to bring me out of a spell.”
“He can teach this special method to me.”
“So far, no World person has been able to learn it. Their brains are different from ours.”
She glares at me. But no one, even those lost to reality, can deny that alien brains are weird. And my injuries are certainly real: bloody head cloth, left eye closed from swelling, skin scraped raw the length of my left cheek, bruised arm. She strokes the Terran gun, a boringly straight-lined cylinder of dull metal. “All right. You may keep the Terran near you—if he agrees. Why should he?”
I smile at her slowly. Pek Fakar never shows a response to flattery; to do so would be to show weakness. But she understands. Or thinks she does. I have threatened the Terran with her power, and the whole prison now knows that her power extends among the aliens as well as her own people. She goes on glaring, but she is not displeased. In her hand the gun gleams.
And so begin my conversations with a Terran.
Talking with Carryl Pek Walters is embarrassing and frustrating. He sits beside me in the eating hall or the courtyard and publicly scratches his head. When he is cheerful, he makes shrill horrible whistling noises between his teeth. He mentions topics that belong only among kin: the state of his skin (which has odd brown lumps on it) and his lungs (clogged with fluid, apparently). He does not know enough to begin conversations with ritual comments on flowers. It is like talking to a child, but a child who suddenly begins discussing bicycle engineering or university law.
“You think individual means very little, group means everything,” he says.
We are sitting in the courtyard, against a stone wall, a little apart from the other prisoners. Some watch us furtively, some openly. I am angry. I am often angry with Pek Walters. This is not going as I’d planned.
“How can you say that? The individual is very important on World! We care for each other so that no individual is left out of our common reality, except by his own acts!”
“Exactly.” Pek Walters says. He has just learned this word from me. “You care for others so no one left alone. Alone is bad. Act alone is bad. Only together is real.”
“Of course,” I say. Could he be stupid after all? “Reality is always shared. Is a star really there if only one eye can perceive its light?”
He smiles and says something in his own language, which makes no sense to me. He repeats it in real words. “When tree falls in forest, is sound if no person hears?”
“But—do you mean to say that on your star, people believe they…” What? I can’t find the words.
He says, “People believe they always real, alone or together. Real even when other people say they dead. Real even when they do something very bad. Even when they murder.”
“But they’re not real! How could they be? They’ve violated shared reality! If I don’t acknowledge you, the reality of your soul, if I send you to your ancestors without your consent, that is proof that I don’t understand reality and so am not seeing it! Only the unreal could do that!”
“Baby not see shared reality. Is baby unreal?”
“Of course. Until the age when children attain reason, they are unreal.”
“Then when I kill baby, is all right, because I not kill real person?”
“Of course it’s not all right! When one kills a baby, one kills its chance to become real, before it could even join its ancestors! And also all the chances of the babies to which it might become ancestor. No one would kill a baby on World, not even these dead souls in Aulit! Are you saying that on Terra, people would kill babies?”
He looks at something I cannot see. “Yes.”
My chance has arrived, although not in a form I relish. Still, I have a job to do. I say, “I have heard that Terrans will kill people for science. Even babies. To find out the kinds of things that Anna Pek Rakov knew about my brain. Is that true?”
“Yes and no.”
“How can it be yes and no? Are children ever used for science experiments?”
“Yes.”
“What kinds of experiments?”
“You should ask, what kind children? Dying children. Children not born yet. Children born…wrong. With no brain, or broken brain.”
I struggle with all this. Dying children…he must mean not children who are really dead, but those in the transition to join their ancestors. Well, that would not be so bad, provided the bodies were then allowed to decay properly and release the souls. Children without brains or with broken brains…not bad, either. Such poor unreal things would be destroyed anyway. But children not born yet…in or out of the mother’s womb? I push this away, to discuss another time. I am on a different path.
“And you never use living, real children for science?”
He gives me a look I cannot read. So much of Terran expression is still strange “Yes. We use. In some experiments. Experiments who not hurt children.”
“Like what?” I say. We are staring directly at each other now. Suddenly I wonder if this old Terran suspects that I am an informer seeking information, and that is why he accepted my skimpy story about having spells. That would not necessarily be bad. There are ways to bargain with the unreal once everyone admits that bargaining is what is taking place. But I’m not sure whether Pek Walters knows that.
He says, “Experiments who study how brain work. Such as, how memory work. Including shared memory.”
“Memory? Memory doesn’t ‘work.’ It just is.”
“No. Memory work. By memory-building pro-teenz.” He uses a Terran word, then adds, “Tiny little pieces of food,” which makes no sense. What does food have
to do with memory? You don’t eat memories, or obtain them from food. But I am further down the path, and I use his words to go further still.
“Does memory in World people work with the same…‘pro-teenz’ as Terran memory?”
“Yes and no. Some same or almost same. Some different.” He is watching me very closely.
“How do you know that memory works the same or different in World people? Have Terrans done brain experiments on World?”
“Yes.”
“With World children?”
“Yes.”
I watch a group of Huhuhubs across the courtyard. The smelly little aliens are clustered together in some kind of ritual or game. “And have you, personally, participated in these science experiments on children, Pek Walters?”
He doesn’t answer me. Instead he smiles, and if I didn’t know better, I’d swear the smile was sad. He says, “Pek Bengarin, why you kill your sister?”
The unexpectedness of it—now, so close to almost learning something useful—outrages me. Not even Pek Fakar has asked me that. I stare at him angrily. He says, “I know, I not should ask. Wrong for ask. But I tell you much, and answer is important—”
“But the question is obscene. You should not ask. World people are not so cruel to each other.”
“Even people damned in Aulit Prison?” he says, and even though I don’t know one of the words he uses, I see that yes, he recognizes that I am an informer. And that I have been seeking information. All right, so much the better. But I need time to set my questions on a different path.
To gain time, I repeat my previous point. “World people are not so cruel.”
“Then you—”
The air suddenly sizzles, smelling of burning. People shout. I look up. Aka Pek Fakar stands in the middle of the courtyard with the Terran gun, firing it at the Huhuhubs. One by one they drop as the beam of light hits them and makes a sizzling hole. The aliens pass into the second stage of their perpetual death.
I stand and tug on Pek Walters’s arm. “Come on. We must clear the area immediately or the guards will release poison gas.”
