Twelve months. I had tried to get out of the gig, now that I had the shirt and a new era of good relations with my son was upon me. But canceling would have cost me my accreditation with that work center, which would make finding another job almost impossible. A year away from Thede. I would tell him when I saw him. He’d be upset, but the shirt would make it easier.
Finally, I called and he answered.
“I want to see you,” I said, when we had made our way through the pleasantries.
“Sunday?” Did his voice brighten, or was that just blind stupid hope?
Some trick of the noisy synthcoffee shop where I sat?
“No, Thede,” I said, measuring my words carefully. “I can’t. Can you do today?”
A suspicious pause. “Why can’t you do Sunday?”
“Something’s come up,” I said. “Please? Today?”
“Fine.”
The sea lion rookery. The smell of guano and the screak of gulls; the crying of children dragged away as the place shut down. The long night was almost upon us. Two male sea lions barked at each other, bouncing their chests together. Thede came a half hour late, and I had arrived a half hour early.
Watching him come my head swam, at how tall he stood and how gracefully he walked. I had done something good in this world, at least. I made him. I had that, no matter how he felt about me.
Something had shifted, now, in his face. Something was harder, older, stronger.
“Hey,” I said, bear-hugging him, and eventually he submitted. He hugged me back hesitantly, like a man might, and then hard, like a little boy. “What’s happening?” I asked. “What were you up to, last night?” Thede shrugged. “Stuff. With friends.”
I asked him questions. Again the sullen, bitter silence; again the terse and angry answers. Again the eyes darting around, constantly watching for whatever the next attack would be. Again the hating me, for coming here, for making him.
“I’m going away,” I said. “A job.”
“I figured,” he said.
“I wish I didn’t have to.”
“I’ll see you soon.”
I nodded. I couldn’t tell him it was a twelve-month gig. Not now. “Here,” I said, finally, pulling the package out from inside of my jacket.
“I got you something.”
“Thanks.” He grabbed it in both hands, began to tear it open. “Wait,” I said, thinking fast. “Okay? Open it after I leave.” Open it when the news that I’m leaving has set in, when you’re mad at me, for abandoning you. When you think I care only about my job.
“We’ll have a little time,” he said. “When you get back. Before I go away. I leave in eight months. The program is four years long.”
“Sure,” I said, shivering inside.
“Mom says she’ll pay for me to come home every year for the holiday, but she knows we can’t afford that.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “‘Come home.’ I thought you were going to the Institute.”
“I am,” he said, sighing. “Do you even know what that means? The Institute’s design program is in Shanghai.”
“Oh,” I said. “Design. What kind of design?”
My son’s eyes rolled. “You’re missing the point, dad.”
I was. I always was.
A shout, from a pub across the Arm. A man’s shout, full of pain and anger.
Thede flinched. His hands made fists.
“What?” I asked, thinking, here, at last, was something “Nothing.”
“You can tell me. What’s going on?”
Thede frowned, then punched the metal railing so hard he yelped. He held up his hand to show me the blood.
“Hey, Thede –”
“Han,” he said. “My... my friend. He got jumped two nights ago. Soaked.”
“This city is horrible,” I whispered.
He made a baffled face. “What do you mean?”
“I mean... you know. This city. Everyone’s so full of anger and cruelty...”
“It’s not the city, dad. What does that even mean? Some sick person did this. Han was waiting for me, and mom wouldn’t let me out, and he got jumped. They took off all his clothes, before they rolled him into the water.
That’s some extra cruel shit right there. He could have died. He almost did.” I nodded, silently, a siren of panic rising inside. “You really care about this guy, don’t you?”
He looked at me. My son’s eyes were whole, intact, defiant, adult. Thede nodded.
He’s been getting bullied, his mother had told me. He’s in love. I turned away from him, before he could see the knowledge blossom in my eyes.
The shirt hadn’t been stolen. He’d given it away. To the boy he loved. I saw them holding hands, saw them tug at each other’s clothing in the same fumbling adolescent puppy-love moments I had shared with his mother, moments that were my only happy memories from being his age. And I saw his fear, of how his backwards father might react – a refugee from a fallen hate-filled people – if he knew what kind of man he was. I gagged on the unfairness of his assumptions about me, but how could he have known differently? What had I ever done, to show him the truth of how I felt about him? And hadn’t I proved him right? Hadn’t I acted exactly like the monster he believed me to be? I had never succeeded in proving to him what I was, or how I felt.
I had battered and broken his beloved. There was nothing I could say.
A smarter man would have asked for the present back, taken it away and locked it up. Burned it, maybe. But I couldn’t. I had spent his whole life trying to give him something worthy of how I felt about him, and here was the perfect gift at last.
“I love you, Thede,” I said, and hugged him.
“Daaaaad...” he said, eventually.
But I didn’t let go. Because when I did, he would leave. He would walk home through the cramped and frigid alleys of his home city, to the gift of knowing what his father truly was.
THE HEART’S FILTHY LESSON
Elizabeth Bear
ELIZABETH BEAR (matociquala.livejournal.com) was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of 26 novels and over a hundred short stories. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes. Her most recent book is science fiction novel Karen Memory.
THE SUN BURNED through the clouds around noon on the long Cytherean day, and Dharthi happened to be awake and in a position to see it. She was alone in the highlands of Ishtar Terra on a research trip, five sleeps out from Butler base camp, and – despite the nagging desire to keep traveling – had decided to take a rest break for an hour or two. Noon at this latitude was close enough to the one hundredth solar dieiversary of her birth that she’d broken out her little hoard of shelf-stable cake to celebrate. The prehensile fingers and leaping legs of her bioreactor-printed, skin-bonded adaptshell made it simple enough to swarm up one of the tall, gracile pseudo-figs and creep along its gray smooth branches until the ceaseless Venusian rain dripped directly on her adaptshell’s slick-furred head.
It was safer in the treetops, if you were sitting still. Nothing big enough to want to eat her was likely to climb up this far. The grues didn’t come out until nightfall, but there were swamp-tigers, damnthings, and velociraptors to worry about. The forest was too thick for predators any bigger than that, but a swarm of scorpion-rats was no joke. And Venus had only been settled for three hundred days, and most of that devoted to Aphrodite Terra; there was still plenty of undiscovered monsters out here in the wilderness.
The water did not bother Dharthi, nor did the dip and sway of the branch in the wind. Her adaptshell was beautifully tailored to this terrain, and that fur shed water like the hydrophobic miracle of engineering that it was. The fur was a glossy, iridescent purple that qualifi
ed as black in most lights, to match the foliage that dripped rain like strings of glass beads from the multiple points of palmate leaves. Red-black, to make the most of the rainy grey light. They’d fold their leaves up tight and go dormant when night came.
Dharthi had been born with a chromosomal abnormality that produced red-green colorblindness. She’d been about ten solar days old when they’d done the gene therapy to fix it, and she just about remembered her first glimpses of the true, saturated colors of Venus. She’d seen it first as if it were Earth: washed out and faded.
For now, however, they were alive with the scurryings and chitterings of a few hundred different species of Cytherean canopy-dwellers. And the quiet, nearly-contented sound of Dharthi munching on cake. She would not dwell; she would not stew. She would look at all this natural majesty, and try to spot the places where an unnaturally geometric line or angle showed in the topography of the canopy.
From here, she could stare up the enormous sweep of Maxwell Montes to the north, its heights forested to the top in Venus’ deep, rich atmosphere – but the sight of them lost for most of its reach in clouds. Dharthi could only glimpse the escarpment at all because she was on the ‘dry’ side. Maxwell Montes scraped the heavens, kicking the cloud layer up as if it had struck an aileron, so the ‘wet’ side got the balance of the rain. Balance in this case meaning that the mountains on the windward side were scoured down to granite, and a nonadapted terrestrial organism had better bring breathing gear.
But here in the lee, the forest flourished, and on a clear hour from a height, visibility might reach a couple of klicks or more.
Dharthi took another bite of cake – it might have been ‘chocolate’; it was definitely caffeinated, because she was picking up the hit on her blood monitors already – and turned herself around on her branch to face downslope. The sky was definitely brighter, the rain falling back to a drizzle and then a mist, and the clouds were peeling back along an arrowhead trail that led directly back to the peak above her. A watery golden smudge brightened one patch of clouds. They tore and she glimpsed the full unguarded brilliance of the daystar, just hanging there in a chip of glossy cerulean sky, the clouds all around it smeared with thick unbelievable rainbows. Waves of mist rolled and slid among the leaves of the canopy, made golden by the shimmering unreal light.
Dharthi was glad she was wearing the shell. It played the sun’s warmth through to her skin without also relaying the risks of ultraviolet exposure. She ought to be careful of her eyes, however: a crystalline shield protected them, but its filters weren’t designed for naked light.
The forest noises rose to a cacophony. It was the third time in Dharthi’s one hundred solar days of life that she had glimpsed the sun. Even here, she imagined that some of these animals would never have seen it before.
She decided to accept it as a good omen for her journey. Sadly, there was no way to spin the next thing that happened that way.
“Hey,” said a voice in her head. “Good cake.”
“That proves your pan is malfunctioning, if anything does,” Dharthi replied sourly. Never accept a remote synaptic link with a romantic and professional partner. No matter how convenient it seems at the time, and in the field. Because someday they might be a romantic and professional partner you really would rather not talk to right now.
“I heard that.”
“What do you want, Kraken?”
Dharthi imagined Kraken smiling, and wished she hadn’t. She could hear it in her partner’s ‘voice’ when she spoke again, anyway. “Just to wish you a happy dieiversary.”
“Aw,” Dharthi said. “Aren’t you sweet. Noblesse oblige?”
“Maybe,” Kraken said tiredly, “I actually care?”
“Mmm,” Dharthi said. “What’s the ulterior motive this time?”
Kraken sighed. It was more a neural flutter than a heave of breath, but Dharthi got the point all right. “Maybe I actually care.”
“Sure,” Dharthi said. “Every so often you have to glance down from Mount Olympus and check up on the lesser beings.”
“Olympus is on Mars,” Kraken said.
It didn’t make Dharthi laugh, because she clenched her right fist hard enough that, even though the cushioning adaptshell squished against her palm, she still squeezed the blood out of her fingers. You and all your charm. You don’t get to charm me any more.
“Look,” Kraken said. “You have something to prove. I understand that.”
“How can you possibly understand that? When was the last time you were turned down for a resource allocation? Doctor youngest-ever recipient of the Cytherean Award for Excellence in Xenoarcheology? Doctor Founding Field-Martius Chair of Archaeology at the University on Aphrodite?”
“The University on Aphrodite,” Kraken said, “is five Quonset huts and a repurposed colonial landing module.”
“It’s what we’ve got.”
“I peaked early,” Kraken said, after a pause. “I was never your rival, Dharthi. We were colleagues.” Too late, in Dharthi’s silence, she realized her mistake. “Are colleagues.”
“You look up from your work often enough to notice I’m missing?”
There was a pause. “That may be fair,” Kraken said at last. “But if being professionally focused –”
“Obsessed.”
“– is a failing, it was hardly a failing limited to me. Come back. Come back to me. We’ll talk about it. I’ll help you try for a resource voucher again tomorrow.”
“I don’t want your damned help, Kraken!”
The forest around Dharthi fell silent. Shocked, she realized she’d shouted out loud.
“Haring off across Ishtar alone, with no support – you’re not going to prove your theory about aboriginal Cytherean settlement patterns, Dhar. You’re going to get eaten by a grue.”
“I’ll be home by dark,” Dharthi said. “Anyway, if I’m not – all the better for the grue.”
“You know who else was always on about being laughed out of the Academy?” Kraken said. Her voice had that teasing tone that could break Dharthi’s worst, most self-loathing, prickliest mood – if she let it. “Moriarty.”
I will not laugh. Fuck you.
Dharthi couldn’t tell if Kraken had picked it up or not. There was a silence, as if she were controlling her temper or waiting for Dharthi to speak.
“If you get killed,” Kraken said, “make a note in your file that I can use your DNA. You’re not getting out of giving me children that easily.”
Ha ha, Dharthi thought. Only serious. She couldn’t think of what to say, and so she said nothing. The idea of a little Kraken filled her up with mushy softness inside. But somebody’s career would go on hold for the first fifty solar days of that kid’s life, and Dharthi was pretty sure it wouldn’t be Kraken.
She couldn’t think of what to say in response, and the silence got heavy until Kraken said, “Dammit. I’m worried about you.”
“Worry about yourself.” Dharthi couldn’t break the connection, but she could bloody well shut down her end of the dialogue. And she could refuse to hear.
She pitched the remains of the cake as far across the canopy as she could, then regretted it. Hopefully nothing Cytherean would try to eat it; it might give the local biology a belly ache.
IT WAS IRONICALLY inevitable that Dharthi, named by her parents in a fit of homesickness for Terra, would grow up to be the most Cytherean of Cythereans. She took great pride in her adaptation, in her ability to rough it. Some of the indigenous plants and many of the indigenous animals could be eaten, and Dharthi knew which ones. She also knew, more importantly, which ones were likely to eat her.
She hadn’t mastered humans nearly as well. Dharthi wasn’t good at politics. Unlike Kraken. Dharthi wasn’t good at making friends. Unlike Kraken. Dharthi wasn’t charming or beautiful or popular or brilliant. Unlike Kraken, Kraken, Kraken.
Kraken was a better scientist, or at least a better-understood one. Kraken was a better person, probably. More generous,
less prickly, certainly. But there was one thing Dharthi was good at. Better at than Kraken. Better at than anyone. Dharthi was good at living on Venus, at being Cytherean. She was more comfortable in and proficient with an adaptshell than anyone she had ever met.
In fact, it was peeling the shell off that came hard. So much easier to glide through the jungle or the swamp like something that belonged there, wearing a quasibiologic suit of super-powered armor bonded to your neural network and your skin. The human inside was a soft, fragile, fleshy thing, subject to complicated feelings and social dynamics, and Dharthi despised her. But that same human, while bonded to the shell, ghosted through the rain forest like a native, and saw things no one else ever had.
A kilometer from where she had stopped for cake, she picked up the trail of a velociraptor. It was going in the right direction, so she tracked it. It wasn’t a real velociraptor; it wasn’t even a dinosaur. Those were Terran creatures, albeit extinct; this was a Cytherean meat-eating monster that bore a superficial resemblance. Like the majority of Cytherean vertebrates, it had six limbs, though it ran balanced on the rear ones and the two forward pairs had evolved into little more than graspers. Four eyes were spaced equidistantly around the dome of its skull, giving it a dome of monocular vision punctuated by narrow slices of depth perception. The business end of the thing was delineated by a sawtoothed maw that split wide enough to bite a human being in half. The whole of it was camouflaged with long draggled fur-feathers that grew thick with near-black algae, or the Cytherean cognate.
Dharthi followed the velociraptor for over two kilometers, and the beast never even noticed she was there. She smiled inside her adaptshell. Kraken was right: going out into the jungle alone and unsupported would be suicide for most people. But wasn’t it like her not to give Dharthi credit for this one single thing that Dharthi could do better than anyone?
She knew that the main Cytherean settlements had been on Ishtar Terra. Knew it in her bones. And she was going to prove it, whether anybody was willing to give her an allocation for the study or not.
They’ll be sorry , she thought, and had to smile at her own adolescent petulance. They’re rush to support me once this is done.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten Page 30
