Secret walked or bicycled almost everywhere. She considered biking to see the new plastic surgeon, but decided to take the tram to at least get to the other side of the city.
Nuev Dia’s districts had grown up around their own centers, and the tram line had not been allowed to knock down anything more than 25 years old when it was built, so crossing from district to district meant that the track wound slowly through a series of small arterial roads, over gullies and around walls, past parks and stands of trees. She lived on the east side of Nuev Dia and was heading west, but more often than that the track traveled north or south along an obstacle, looking for a road that might lead around.
As they made their way through a particularly old and well-populated neighborhood, the tram slowed almost to a crawl. She increasingly regretted her decision not to ride her bike. Studying the map of where they were vs. where they were headed, she concluded that she could shave an hour off the trip if she just got out and walked, and hopped out at the next stop.
Secret had never been in this part of Nuev Dia before, though as the path led through neighborhoods of boxy apartment buildings and small Temples, she felt almost as if she were walking through her own. Outside of the tram, she was on familiar territory even when she wasn’t. She skirted the local marketplace and wound her way through the crowd of devotees heading for the Fire Temple. The faithful stared at her nose, but stepped politely out of her way. She cringed and resisted the urge to cup her hand over her deviant facial feature.
As she’d expected, a walking path out to the next neighborhood wound behind the Fire Temple and past the local hospital and clinic. She was tempted to duck into this neighborhood’s clinic and look for a plastic surgeon who could treat her, regardless of the doctor’s opinion on tails—she could keep her mouth shut this time—but she’d sent a message over to Rain’s clinic and he was expecting her sometime that day.
Secret was a taken aback when her path dead-ended abruptly at a high brick wall. She made her way north and found a gate. It was unlocked and unguarded, but as soon as she stepped through, she knew why this area had been marked off so clearly. This was the foreign district.
Offworlders who embraced the Ashari religion and way of life were welcomed as immigrants. They were given access to the nanotechnology that would restructure their bodies and their gene code. Most immigrants lived in Ashari neighborhoods, where their neighbors (after some initial reservation) usually tried to make them feel welcome.
Technically, offworlders who didn’t wish to become Ashari were allowed to live wherever they wished. In practice, although tourists would occasionally wander through neighborhoods distant from the spaceport, the diplomats who had to live on Asha for long periods of time lived in their own carefully delineated district. Here they had houses in the style they were accustomed to, as well as their own Temples, shops, restaurants. The only native Ashari who lived here were missionaries who maintained a Fire Temple to share the Good Religion with the offworlders.
The streets of the foreign district were straight and carefully laid out; from the map posted at the gate, Secret could see that the road she was on would take her due west to a counterpart gate on the other side of the quarter. Well, it wasn’t as if the foreigners were going to hurt her. She was even safe from ritual contamination. With a deliberate shrug, she stepped through the gate.
In the middle of the day, there weren’t that many foreigners on the streets. Most were at work at one of the embassies, working to represent either Terra or one of the other colonies. Everyone on Asha was human; the various alien races contacted were uninterested in setting up embassies on such a relative backwater.
Still, Secret was struck by the visual variety. There were yellow-haired offworlders with skin as light as yogurt and others with skin several shades darker than her own. It was the people with orange hair that looked the strangest, especially the man she saw with orange speckles all over his body. He looked almost diseased.
No one turned to stare at her. Even in the foreign district, there were enough Ashari that she was unremarkable—and her nose, as horrible as it looked to her, was an uninteresting distinction.
The road was straight, but the foreign district was larger than it had looked on the map, and Secret was starting to get hungry and tired. She decided to find a restaurant; she could rest her legs and satisfy more of her growing curiosity about the people who lived here. So she stopped off at the next restaurant she saw. Eden, said the sign on the door. A bell tinkled as she pushed it open.
Heads swiveled as she came in. The restaurant had the same polyglot mix as the street, except for one thing: there were no other Ashari here. Even the brown-skinned black-haired woman waiting tables was clearly Earth-Asian, and not Ashari. Secret almost went back out, but swallowed hard and looked for an open table.
“May I help you?” the woman asked. She spoke heavily accented Angelino. “You want a table?”
“Yes,” Secret said. “For one. Please.”
“This way,” the waitress said, and Secret fell into step behind her. The waitress led her to a table by the window. Nearby, a group sat at four tables pushed together; Secret saw them looking at her, and one of the women said something in a low voice that made everyone else burst out laughing. But it was too late to flee without looking ridiculous, so she pulled out a chair and sat where the waitress showed her. The waitress handed her a menu and walked away.
Secret glanced over at the crowded table, to see if they were still staring at her. Quite the contrary, no one was even looking in her direction. She studied the menu of unfamiliar foods. Pad Thai. Lo Mein. Spaghetti. Irish Stew. She saw one item she recognized, tabouli, but it seemed absurd to come to a restaurant in the foreign district and then order something she could make at home.
The waitress was back, with a glass of water and a pot of tea. “Are you ready to order?” she asked. At least, that was what Secret thought she was saying. The waitress had a problem that was not uncommon among people who’d acquired a language through nanotech, like Secret’s French: she could understand everything you said, but she couldn’t pronounce the words she saw in her head.
Secret put down the menu. “I’d like you to bring me something you think I’d like,” she said, speaking slowly and clearly. “Something good. Anything.”
The waitress looked at her dubiously. Secret closed her menu and handed it back. “You choose for me,” she said. “I’d like to try something new.”
One of the women from the crowded table nearby called out a suggestion to the waitress, and the waitress laughed and said something back. Secret couldn’t understand any of it, so whatever they were speaking, it probably wasn’t French. The waitress went off to the kitchen, and the woman from the other table waved at Secret to catch her eye. Secret gave her a nervous smile back, which the woman took as an invitation to come over.
“I have just one question,” the woman said, and Secret fought the urge to cover her deviant nose with her hand. “Are you Ashari? We were debating that at the table.”
“It’s just a broken nose,” Secret said.
The woman blinked at her. “What?” She focused on Secret’s nose. “Huh, that does look painful. But are you Ashari? Because we never see Ashari people in here. And you’re not acting like you think you’re better than anyone else.”
Secret bristled on behalf of her planet. “Excuse me? Aren’t most of the foreigners here members of the diplomatic corps? You sure don’t act like a diplomat.”
“I’m not, I’m a hairstylist. I just mostly style hair for diplomats.” There was a peal of laughter from the table and the woman glanced over, then pulled out a chair and sat down with Secret. “Screw ‘em. So what are you doing here?”
“I took a shortcut, and then got hungry. Where are you from?”
“New Philly, originally. And you are Ashari—native?”
“Do I really look like an immigrant to you?”
“Who the hell can tell? You make them all get cosm
etic work so they look like the rest of you.”
“We don’t make immigrants do anything. It’s just that people who want to move here usually want to fit in.”
“Oh yeah.” The stranger, who still hadn’t introduced herself, rolled her eyes.
The waitress came out with a plate of food, which she set down silently in front of Secret. She said something to the stranger, who snickered, and then added in Ashari, “Eat up. It’s on me.”
“What? You don’t—I have—”
“Too late, I already paid. So you’d better like it.”
It was a sausage of some kind, in a roll, with some kind of relish strewn on top. Secret took a bite, and was disconcerted to find something yellow and runny in the sausage. She liked sausage, normally, but this tasted different from the spiced soy mixtures she was used to, and the yellow stuff tasted really odd, almost spoiled. The relish was sour and limpid. The flavors melded together into something just barely tolerable. The stranger was watching her with interest, though, so she ate it all and said politely, “That was very good. Thank you.”
“It’s called cheddarwurst,” the woman said. “With sauerkraut. I usually put ketchup and mustard on it.”
“I thought maybe the yellow stuff . . .”
“No, you put mustard on top. The yellow stuff was cheese.”
“Oh.” Secret hadn’t had cheese before.
“And the sausage—real meat. Have you had it before?” The woman’s voice was tinged with just a hint of malice. Most Ashari were vegetarian, if for no other reason than the cost of meat on a colony world. “Natural intestine casings, too.”
“Damn.” Secret wiped her hands on the napkin; the meal had been messy. “If you were going to pay for me to eat real meat, I wish you’d told me first, so that I could have attended to the flavor more closely. I don’t often get meat. Let alone sausage. It must be shipped in?”
“From Wisconsin.” The stranger was disappointed that Secret wasn’t horrified, but doing her best to hide it. She stood up. “Well. I’m glad you enjoyed your meal.”
“Hey,” said one of the men from the table, standing up. “I can’t believe you bought her bratwurst but no beer, Kathleen. Come here, stranger, and I’ll buy you a beer.”
Nervously, Secret joined the table, but the others, if more reserved, were a bit less hostile than Kathleen. They mostly worked at or around the embassy for the European Federation. They wanted to know what she was doing in the foreign district, and why she was crossing Nuev Dia, and eventually the story of the corpse, the broken nose, and the grumpy plastic surgeon came out. Her beer finished, she decided that she really had to get going. “Come back sometime,” one of the men said. “Try something that isn’t cheddarwurst. Lo mein, maybe, or spaghetti, I bet you’d like any of the noodle dishes.”
“Hmmm,” Secret said, and made her way to the door as quickly as she could. She headed west again, and found her way to the gate with immense relief. At last. The foreigners had been rude and hostile; Kathleen (how did they ever remember names, with just random syllables to go on?) had deliberately tried to offend her with inappropriate food.
Secret realized, as she started up the last hill to the clinic, that she felt more alive than she ever remembered feeling.
And in over an hour, tails hadn’t come up even once.
There were a handful of patients in the clinic office when she arrived, all of them foreigners in various stages of naturalization. She took a seat, surreptitiously studying the immigrants and trying to guess what they’d looked like to begin with. She wondered if any of them had had red hair.
“Secret?” the receptionist called. “Rain will see you now.”
Rain had let his face age more naturally than Flowerpot had, despite the doubt this might cast on him as a plastic surgeon. He had his assistant do a new set of scans, since he couldn’t just send over to Haurvatat hospital for the original set. “It’s well on its way to healing naturally, but of course you wouldn’t want it crooked,” he said. “I’ll give you some anaesthetic, then we’ll set your nose and give you some nanotech to put it back to normal.”
Secret stirred.
“Unless you want a different nose?” He looked a little surprised. “Your original nose was quite a nice one.”
“Actually,” Secret said, “I don’t mind keeping it crooked. I’d just like you to adjust it to make sure the passageways are clear and I can breathe properly.”
Rain set the scans down, surprised. “Are you sure?”
“I can always make it straight again if I change my mind, right?” Secret asked.
“Yes, of course. But in the meantime—you’re definitely sure?”
Secret lifted her chin. “It gives people something to talk about other than those damn tails,” she said.
The corner of Rain’s mouth lifted. “All right then,” he said. “I’ll just make sure you can breathe freely.”
When he was done, Secret looked at herself in the mirror. The swelling was gone and her nose really didn’t look that different from the way it had before. It was just a little off, that was all. A little different.
Secret reached the foreign district as the sun was setting. I should go straight on through and find a taxi, she thought. I’d be home in time to go visit Path, or Candle . . .
But she could hear drum and fiddle music, somewhere close by; the building it came from said PUB over the door, and she could smell something cooking that she’d never tasted before.
A passport, she thought. I’m going to need a passport. And a visa. And—somewhere to go.
Holding her head high, she opened the door.
Author’s Note
One of my unpublished novels is a science fiction mystery novel set at an interstellar university. Secret was one of the secondary characters, and probably the best part of the book. (It was the second book I wrote and I wasn’t satisfied with it.) One of the details about Secret’s world you learn in the novel is that their coming-of-age ritual involves hallucinogens, and the name you pick is traditionally inspired in some way by the vision you had.
Secret’s name is Secret because she doesn’t like to talk about her vision.
THE GOOD SON
don’t just want to be with you. I want to live with you. In the kingdom under the hill, we could have been together forever. I didn’t want that. I wanted you—all of you. But that was before I understood what that meant.
*
Maggie was an American tourist when I first saw her, hiking across the Irish hills with a group of other college students. It was raining. Maggie had no umbrella, and when the drizzle turned to a downpour, the water plastered her hair to her cheeks in black curls. The other students ran back to the bus, but Maggie lingered, her camera dangling at her hip, and when everyone else had gone, she pulled a pennywhistle out of her pocket and played it for ten minutes before she turned and trudged back up to the road.
I made a door, so that I could slip out of the hill and follow her. My elder brother caught my hand and said, “Don’t do it, Gaidian. Bring her here, if you must have her.” When I didn’t answer, he shook his head. “You get nothing but grief when you follow a mortal.”
“I just want to see where she goes,” I said, and went out into the rain.
I caught up with her in Dublin. I put on a young face, and clothes to match the ones I saw around me. My first thought was to tell her I was an Irish student the same age as she was, but when I realized she would return to Chicago in less than two weeks, I decided to be an American student, instead—heading back myself at the same time, though to a different city.
There were fiddlers at the pub and Maggie danced with me, her black curls wild in the humid air. “Where did you say you were from, again?” she asked after last call as I walked her to the bus stop.
I named a city I’d heard one of the other students say earlier that evening: “Minneapolis.”
“That’s not so far! Maybe I’ll see you again,” she said, and gave me a long ki
ss. “Let me give you my address.”
Had possession been all I desired, I could have lured you under the hill. But I wanted your mortal love; I wanted you to choose me. Of course, it never occurred to me to tell you the truth. You’d have thought I was crazy. So I needed a mortal name. I needed numbers, references, addresses. I needed papers.
I never thought, when I started out on this, about all the other lives I would be embracing.
*
Making myself a door to Minneapolis was easy enough. I’d gone on outings to the mortal world before, so I knew how to change gold into money, and how to find someone to make forged papers. I wanted a common name, so I flipped through a phone book and chose Johnson. I’d told Maggie my nickname was Finch—I wasn’t going to give a mortal I’d just met my true name. I had the man make me a driver’s license, even though I didn’t intend to drive anything, and one of those number cards. Making up an identity I could use for more than a few days was a great deal of work. I finally settled into an apartment near the university, and got in touch with Maggie.
Less than a day after I sent her my address, she showed up at my door.
It turned out she went to school in Chicago, but she was from Minneapolis. And when I didn’t give her an address in exchange for hers, she’d figured I wasn’t really all that interested in her. We spent a very pleasant evening, and morning, and afternoon, and evening. And then she got up, made us both pancakes, and said, “You must have just moved in, huh?”
“Why do you say that?” I asked, already a little nervous that my lies would be uncovered.
Maggie laughed. “Your kitchen is so well stocked I’m guessing your mother did it for you. But nothing was open. Not the flour, not the eggs, not even the milk. The milk and eggs are fresh, though, I checked before I made the pancakes, so it’s not that you never cook. Do you cook?”
“Of course I cook.” I took the plate of pancakes she offered me and sat down at the kitchen table. “I’ll make you dinner.”
Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories Page 17
