The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  I look at Ori, now tearing a table scarf into shreds and muttering. Her empty eyes turn to mine, and I have to look away.

  “This part is difficult,” Pek Brifjis says. “Listen hard, Pek. The Terrans truly did not hurt the children. They put ee-lek-trodes on their heads…you don’t know what that means. They found ways to see which parts of their brains worked the same as Terran brains and which did not. They used a number of tests and machines and drugs. None of it hurt the children, who lived at the Terran scientific compound and were cared for by World childwatchers. At first the children missed their parents, but they were young, and after a while they were happy.”

  I glance again at Ori. The unreal, not sharing in common reality, are isolated and therefore dangerous. A person with no world in common with others will violate those others as easily as cutting flowers. Under such conditions, pleasure is possible, but not happiness.

  Pek Brifjis runs his hand through his neck fur. “The Terrans worked with World healers, of course, teaching them. It was the usual trade, only this time we received the information and they the physical reality: children and watchers. There was no other way World could permit Terrans to handle our children. Our healers were there every moment.”

  He looks at me. I say, “Yes,” just because something must be said.

  “Do you know, Pek, what it is like to realize you have lived your whole life according to beliefs that are not true?”

  “No!” I say, so loudly that Ori looks up with her mad, unreal gaze. She smiles. I don’t know why I spoke so loud. What Pek Brifjis said has nothing to do with me. Nothing at all.

  “Well, Pek Walters knew. He realized that the experiments he participated in, harmless to the subjects and in aid of biological understanding of species differences, were being used for something else. The roots of skits-oh-free-nia, misfiring brain sir-kits—” He is off on a long explanation that means nothing to me. Too many Terran words, too much strangeness. Pek Brifjis is no longer talking to me. He is talking to himself, in some sort of pain I don’t understand.

  Suddenly the purple eyes snap back to mine. “What all that means, Pek, is that a few of the healers—our own healers, from World—found out how to manipulate the Terran science. They took it and used it to put into minds memories that did not happen.”

  “Not possible!”

  “It is possible. The brain is made very excited, with Terran devices, while the false memory is recited over and over. Then different parts of the brain are made to…to recirculate memories and emotions over and over. Like water recirculated through mill races. The water gets all scrambled together…No. Think of it this way: different parts of the brain send signals to each other. The signals are forced to loop together, and every loop makes the unreal memories stronger. It is apparently in common use on Terra, although tightly controlled.”

  Sick brain talks to itself.

  “But—”

  “There are no objections possible, Pek. It is real. It happened. It happened to Ori. The World scientists made her brain remember things that had not happened. Small things, at first. That worked. When they tried larger memories, something went wrong. It left her like this. They were still learning; that was five years ago. They got better, much better. Good enough to experiment on adult subjects who could then be returned to shared reality.”

  “One can’t plant memories like flowers, or uproot them like weeds!”

  “These people could. And did.”

  “But—why?”

  “Because the World healers who did this—and they were only a few—saw a different reality.”

  “I don’t—”

  “They saw the Terrans able to do everything. Make better machines than we can, from windmills to bicycles. Fly to the stars. Cure disease. Control nature. Many World people are afraid of Terrans, Pek. And of Fallers and Huhuhubs. Because their reality is superior to ours.”

  “There is only one comon reality,” I said. “The Terrans just know more about it than we do!”

  “Perhaps. But Terran knowledge makes people uneasy. And afraid. And jealous.”

  Jealous. Ano saying to me in the kitchen, with Bata and Cap bright at the window, “I will too go out tonight to see him! You can’t stop me! You’re just jealous, a jealous ugly shriveled thing that not even your lover wants, so you don’t wish me to have any—” And the red flood swamping my brain, the kitchen knife, the blood—

  “Pek?” the healer says. “Pek?”

  “I’m…all right. The jealous healers, they hurt their own people, World people, for revenge on the Terrans—that makes no sense!”

  “The healers acted with great sorrow. They knew what they were doing to people. But they needed to perfect the technique of inducing controlled skits-oh-free-nia…they needed to do it. To make people angry at Terrans. Angry enough to forget the attractive trade goods and rise up against the aliens. To cause war. The healers are mistaken, Pek. We have not had a war on World in a thousand years; our people cannot understand how hard the Terrans would strike back. But you must understand: the outlaw scientists thought they were doing the right thing. They thought they were creating anger in order to save World.

  “And another thing—with the help of the government, they were careful not to make any World man or woman permanently unreal. The adults manipulated into murder were all offered atonement as informers. The children are all cared for. The mistakes, like Ori, will be allowed to decay someday, to return to her ancestors. I will see to that myself.”

  Ori tears the last of the scarf into pieces, smiling horribly, her flat eyes empty. What unreal memories fill her head?

  I say bitterly, “Doing the right thing…letting me believe I killed my sister!”

  “When you rejoin your ancestors, you will find it isn’t so. And the means of rejoining them was made available to you: the completion of your informing atonement.”

  But now that atonement never will be completed. I stole Ano and buried her without Section consent. Maldon Brifjis, of course, does not know this.

  Through my pain and anger I blurt, “And what of you, Pek Brifjis? You work with these criminal healers, aiding them in emptying children like Ori of reality—”

  “I don’t work with them. I thought you smarter, Pek. I work against them. And so did Carryl Walters, which is why he died in Aulit Prison.”

  “Against them?”

  “Many of us do. Carryl Walters among them. He was an informer. And my friend.”

  Neither of us says anything. Pek Brifjis stares into the fire. I stare at Ori, who has begun to grimace horribly. She squats on an intricately woven curved rug which looks very old. A reek suddenly fills the room. Ori does not share with the rest of us the reality of piss closets. She throws back her head and laughs, a horrible sound like splintering metal.

  “Take her away,” Pek Brifjis says wearily to the guard, who looks unhappy. “I’ll clean up here.” To me he adds, “We can’t allow any servants in here with you.”

  The guard leads away the grimacing child. Pek Brifjis kneels and scrubs at the rug with chimney rags dipped in water from my carafe. I remember that he collects antique water carafes. What a long way that must seem from scrubbing shit: from Ori, from Carryl Walters coughing out his lungs in Aulit Prison, among aliens.

  “Pek Brifjis—did I kill my sister?”

  He looks up. There is shit on his hands. “There is no way to be absolutely sure. It is possible you were one of the experiment subjects from your village. You would have been drugged in your house, to awake with your sister murdered and your mind altered.”

  I say, more quietly than I have said anything else in this room, “You will really kill me, let me decay, and enable me to rejoin my ancestors?”

  Pek Brifjis stands and wipes the shit from his hands. “I will.”

  “But what will you do if I refuse? If instead I ask to return home?”

  “If you do that, the government will arrest you and once more promise you atonement—if you infor
m on those of us working to oppose them.”

  “Not if I go first to whatever part of the government is truly working to end the experiments. Surely you aren’t saying the entire government is doing this…thing.”

  “Of course not. But do you know for certain which Sections, and which officials in those Sections, wish for war with the Terrans, and which do not? We can’t be sure. How can you?”

  Frablit Pek Brimmidin is innocent, I think. But the thought is useless. Pek Brimmidin is innocent, but powerless.

  It tears my soul to think that the two might be the same thing.

  Pek Brifjis rubs at the damp carpet with the toe of his boot. He puts the rags in a lidded jar and washes his hands at the washstand. A faint stench still hangs in the air. He comes to stand beside my bed.

  “Is that what you want, Uli Pek Bengarin? That I let you leave this house, not knowing what you will do, whom you will inform on? That I endanger everything we have done in order to convince you of its truth?”

  “Or you can kill me and let me rejoin my ancestors. Which is what you think I will choose, isn’t it? That choice would let you keep faith with the reality you have decided is true, and still keep yourself secret from the criminals. Killing me would be easiest for you. But only if I consent to my murder. Otherwise, you will violate even the reality you have decided to perceive.”

  He stares down at me, a muscular man with beautiful purple eyes. A healer who would kill. A patriot defying his government to prevent a violent war. A sinner who does all he can to minimize his sin and keep it from denying him the chance to rejoin his own ancestors. A believer in shared reality who is trying to bend the reality without breaking the belief.

  I keep quiet. The silence stretches on. Finally it is Pek Brifjis that breaks it. “I wish Carryl Walters had never sent you to me.”

  “But he did. And I choose to return to my village. Will you let me go, or keep me prisoner here, or murder me without my consent?”

  “Damn you,” he says, and I recognize the word as one Carryl Walters used, about the unreal souls in Aulit Prison.

  “Exactly,” I say. “What will you do, Pek? Which of your supposed multiple realities will you choose now?”

  It is a hot night, and I cannot sleep.

  I lie in my tent on the wide empty plain and listen to the night noises. Rude laughter from the pel tent, where a group of miners drinks far too late at night for men who must bore into hard rock at dawn. Snoring from the tent to my right. Muffled lovemaking from a tent farther down the row, I’m not sure whose. The woman giggles, high and sweet.

  I have been a miner for half a year now. After I left the northern village of Gofkit Ramloe, Ori’s village, I just kept heading north. Here on the equator, where World harvests its tin and diamonds and pel berries and salt, life is both simpler and less organized. Papers are not necessary. Many of the miners are young, evading their government service for one reason or another. Reasons that must seem valid to them. Here government sections rule weakly, compared to the rule of the mining and farming companies. There are no messengers on Terran bicycles. There is no Terran science. There are no Terrans.

  There are shrines, of course, and rituals and processions, and tributes to one’s ancestors. But these things actually receive less attention than in the cities, because they are more taken for granted. Do you pay attention to air?

  The woman giggles again, and this time I recognize the sound. Awi Pek Crafmal, the young runaway from another island. She is a pretty thing, and a hard worker. Sometimes she reminds me of Ano.

  I asked a great many questions in Gofkit Ramloe. Ori Malfisit, Pek Brifjis said her name was. An old and established family. But I asked and asked, and no such family had ever lived in Gofkit Ramloe. Wherever Ori came from, and however she had been made into that unreal and empty vessel shitting on a rich carpet, she had not started her poor little life in Gofkit Ramloe.

  Did Maldon Brifjis know I would discover that, when he released me from the rich widow’s house overlooking the sea? He must have. Or maybe, despite knowing I was an informer, he didn’t understand that I would actually go to Gofkit Ramloe and check. You can’t understand everything.

  Sometimes, in the darkest part of the night, I wish I had taken Pek Brifjis’s offer to return me to my ancestors.

  I work on the rock piles of the mine during the day, among miners who lift sledges and shatter solid stone. They talk, and curse, and revile the Terrans, although few miners have as much as seen one. After work the miners sit in camp and drink pel, lifting huge mugs with dirty hands, and laugh at obscene jokes. They all share the same reality, and it binds them together, in simple and happy strength.

  I have strength, too. I have the strength to swing my sledge with the other women, many of whom have the same rough plain looks as I, and who are happy to accept me as one of them. I had the strength to shatter Ano’s coffin, and to bury her even when I thought the price to me was perpetual death. I had the strength to follow Carryl Walters’s words about the brain experiments and seek Maldon Brifjis. I had the strength to twist Pek Brifjis’s divided mind to make him let me go.

  But do I have the strength to go where all of that leads me? Do I have the strength to look at Frablit Brimmidin’s reality, and Carryl Walters’s reality, and Ano’s, and Maldon Brifjis’s, and Ori’s—and try to find the places that match and the places that don’t? Do I have the strength to live on, never knowing if I killed my sister, or if I did not? Do I have the strength to doubt everything, and live with doubt, and sort through the millions of separate realities on World, searching for the true pieces of each—assuming that I can even recognize them?

  Should anyone have to live like that? In uncertainty, in doubt, in loneliness. Alone in one’s mind, in an isolated and unshared reality.

  I would like to return to the days when Ano was alive. Or even to the days when I was an informer. To the days when I shared in World’s reality, and knew it to be solid beneath me, like the ground itself. To the days when I knew what to think, and so did not have to.

  To the days before I became—unwillingly—as terrifyingly real as I am now.

  Afterword to “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”

  What is reality? This is one of the two great questions that have preoccupied philosophers throughout the ages (the other is, How can I get more sex?) Is reality “objective,” outside of ourselves whether we are here or not, or do we create it through our limited perceptions, limited mental capacities, limited knowledge of large and unseen truths?

  I first explored these ideas in “Trinity,” where the search was for an unseen God. In “The Flowers of Aulit Prison” I was after something else: the creation of an alien perception of reality, from the alien’s point of view. And yet despite her consensus reality, Uli Pek Bengarin has many human traits: resentment, guilt, cunning, the desires for both revenge and atonement. Even when we try to create the alien, we are still bound to what is comprehensible to us as both writers and readers, to reality as we know it.

  “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” due to vagaries of award qualifications, won the 1997 Sturgeon Award and the 1998 Nebula.

  THE PRICE OF ORANGES

  “I’m worried about my granddaughter,” Harry Kramer said, passing half of his sandwich to Manny Feldman. Manny took it eagerly. The sandwich was huge, thick slices of beef and horseradish between fresh slabs of crusty bread. Pigeons watched the park bench hopefully.

  “Jackie. The granddaughter who writes books,” Manny said. Harry watched to see that Manny ate. You couldn’t trust Manny to eat enough; he stayed too skinny. At least in Harry’s opinion. Manny, Jackie—the world, Harry sometimes thought, had all grown too skinny when he somehow hadn’t been looking. Skimpy. Stretched feeling. Harry nodded to see horseradish spurt in a satisfying stream down Manny’s scraggly beard.

  “Jackie. Yes,” Harry said.

  “So what’s wrong with her? She’s sick?” Manny eyed Harry’s strudel, cherry with real yeast bread. Harry passed it
to him. “Harry, the whole thing? I couldn’t.”

  “Take it, take it, I don’t want it. You should eat. No, she’s not sick. She’s miserable.” When Manny, his mouth full of strudel, didn’t answer, Harry put a hand on Manny’s arm. “Miserable.”

  Manny swallowed hastily. “How do you know? You saw her this week?”

  “No. Next Tuesday. She’s bringing me a book by a friend of hers. I know from this.” He drew a magazine from an inner pocket of his coat. The coat was thick tweed, almost new, with wooden buttons. On the cover of the glossy magazine a woman smiled contemptuously. A woman with hollow, starved-looking cheeks who obviously didn’t get enough to eat either.

  “That’s not a book,” Manny pointed out.

  “So she writes stories, too. Listen to this, just listen. ‘I stood in my backyard, surrounded by the false bright toxin-fed green, and realized that the earth was dead. What else could it be, since we humans swarmed upon it like maggots on carrion, growing our hectic gleaming molds, leaving our slime trails across the senseless surface?’ Does that sound like a happy woman?”

  “Hoo boy,” Manny said.

  “It’s all like that. ‘Don’t read my things, Popsy,’ she says. ‘You’re not in the audience for my things.’ Then she smiles without ever once showing her teeth.” Harry flung both arms wide. “Who else should be in the audience but her own grandfather?”

  Manny swallowed the last of the strudel. Pigeons fluttered angrily. “She never shows her teeth when she smiles? Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Hoo boy,” Manny said. “Did you want all of that orange?”

  “No, I brought it for you, to take home. But did you finish that whole half a sandwich already?”

  “I thought I’d take it home,” Manny said humbly. He showed Harry the tip of the sandwich, wrapped in the thick brown butcher paper, protruding from the pocket of his old coat.