Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  But soon he began to breathe hard. The blows he rained on her grew harder and less calculated. “Whoring with the Whore of Babylon,” he panted. “I’ll teach you about whoring. See if I don’t!” He grabbed her by the shoulders and hurled her to the ground. One of her outflung arms slammed against a footstool, sent it spinning away.

  He threw himself atop her. Even then, she did not understand what he was about until he jerked her dress up toward her waist. “No, Mr. Griffin,” she exclaimed. “Not in the daylight!”

  “Shut up, whore!” He backhanded her. Clumsily, one-handed, he unbuttoned his overalls, yanked them down. She shut her eyes tight so she would not have to see the swollen organ that slapped against the inside of her thigh.

  He always took her roughly. But for the fact that she was down on the floor instead of in their bed, this was hardly different from any other time. But he did it now to punish her further, not to join them as man and wife. She knew that—how well she knew it. But somehow, even though she knew it, his harsh thrusts made her body kindle, transmuting pain to pleasure.

  She opened her eyes. His were closed, his face but a couple of inches from her own. Before her pleasure mounted to a peak—too soon as usual—he turned red and grunted like a pig. Then he abruptly pulled himself out of her. She did not want to be empty of him, not yet. But he rolled away, rearranged his overalls. “Cover yourself,” he growled.

  “Yes, Mr. Griffin.” She tugged at her dress until it went decently down to her ankles once more. She watched her husband warily as she got to her feet, fearful he wanted to beat her again.

  But he seemed sated. He stayed on the floor longer than she had. When he did get up, all he said was, “Fix me some supper.”

  “Yes, Mr. Griffin,” Victoria said again. She went back into the kitchen. The places where he had hit her ached at every step. Only a small part of her minded the pain, the animal part concerned solely with bodily well-being. She knew she deserved what he’d given her.

  The animal part of her also still wished he’d stayed atop her another minute longer. Her cheeks and ears heated in shame as she took out an onion and began to slice it. He hadn’t intended her to enjoy his body; he’d intended to humiliate her with it. And he had—but the humiliation itself was sweet. It almost tempted her to sin again, so that she might be chastised. . . .

  “Get thee behind me, Satan,” she whispered as she reached for the loaf of bread on the counter. She threw away the stale slice at the end. That waste of food was in its own way also sinful, but she wanted supper to be as fine as it could, to show Mr. Griffin she truly was contrite.

  Her husband was in his own way a fair man, and not one to hold a grudge—and perhaps that splendid supper did help mollify him. He read Scripture to her afterwards. And he spoke no more of her trip to the Federation research base. Their life together healed along with her bruises.

  Two weeks after the day he beat and raped her, her courses failed to come. When she was certain what that meant, she got down on her knees and praised the Lord: “Truly all things work together for good.”

  They named the baby Lavinia, after Mr. Griffin’s mother who was in heaven. She was a fussy child, and squawked for Victoria’s breast at all hours of the day and night. Between the baby and everything else she still had to do, Victoria stumbled about in a gray haze of fatigue. But Lavinia flourished, which made up for any amount of exhaustion.

  When Lavinia was asleep during the day, Victoria would sometimes steal a moment to stand by the cradle and look down at her. Part of that was the normal pride any mother knew, part the extra concern of a mother who’d already lost one child. And part was the urgent need she felt to keep the vermin away from her baby.

  Every so often, one of the round, revolting little bugs crawled out from under Lavinia’s swaddling and walked across her smooth cheek or through her thin, fine light brown hair. Then Victoria’s hand would swoop down like a stooping hawk, nab the pest, and crush it between the nails of thumb and forefinger. A couple of times, after she’d killed two or three vermin in the space of a couple of minutes, she cried because it was her daughter’s blood that stained her hand.

  She also found and destroyed a great many biting pinheads while she was changing the baby’s soiled linen: that only made a revolting task more so. The vermin seemed especially fond of Lavinia’s most tender places. Victoria wished she did not have to touch her in those parts, but had no choice. Once she satisfied herself no vermin remained on the baby, she would avert her eyes from what her hands were doing.

  The pests also seemed drawn to her breasts. In the moments before she dropped the privacy shawl over Lavinia and her bosom, she would flick away vermin one by one. Whatever she did was never enough. The bugs kept biting her and kept biting Lavinia, too.

  She laughed at the promise she’d got from the Federation research base, the promise to eliminate the vermin and with them the settlements of the Church of the Holy Mission. The vaunted technology that had seduced so much of humankind must have stumbled here, when confronting the true elite of God. Progress in the material world was a snare and a delusion, anyhow. Where were Babylon, Rome, New York? Gone, gone, gone.

  Victoria was tempted to go back to the research base and tell Janice just that, throw it in her face. Whenever she thought about leaving the baby with a friend for a day and making that long walk, she felt a curious stirring in her privates. That was a temptation, too, but one she managed to resist. She conceived again, but miscarried, which slowed her down for half a year.

  The baby grew. She began to walk, to talk, to lisp her first hymns. She got into everything, came home covered in every kind of filth. Victoria washed Lavinia far more often than she washed herself. She always used the baths as an occasion to get rid of as many vermin on her daughter as she could. By the time Lavinia turned three, she found fewer of them than she had before. By the time Lavinia was four, the blood-filled pinheads were almost gone. She noticed she wasn’t getting bitten so often herself, either. She did not know whether to rejoice or be afraid.

  When in doubt, she found out what her husband thought. “Fewer vermin lately, seems to me,” she said one evening after Lavinia had gone to sleep. She spoke cautiously, lest he remember how that might have come to pass.

  Mr. Griffin grunted. He was tired from another in the endless string of days out in the fields. “Can’t say I miss ’em,” he answered, and let it go at that. Victoria had been sitting at the edge of her chair, stiff with tension. She relaxed—not that the hard chair permitted much relaxation. Her husband truly forgave her long-ago transgression, then.

  The glow of relief sustained her only a couple of days. It turned to dread when Lavinia, trying to be helpful, knocked over the water jar and smashed it. She gave the child a sound switching and sent her to bed without supper, but that did not bring back the water jar. She would have to go to the Haldol village and dicker for another one.

  She prepared for the ordeal as best she could. She cooked double the next day, so she would only have to reheat the stew the day after that: God willing, Mr. Griffin would find no excuse to set hands on her. She arranged for her neighbor to take care of Lavinia. None of that, though, kept the real panic, the panic that sprang from having to witness Haldol depravity, from making her heart pound and race.

  When she finally got to the village, it was as bad as she remembered. In fact, it was worse. Two Haldols were mating in the middle of the street as she came up. They paid no attention to her; the rest of the Haldols paid no attention to them. They found the arrival of a pisquaa, a human, far more diverting.

  “Pot? Water jar?” one of them said in his squeakily accented smattering of English. “We have pot, water jar, God bless you. What you have, pisquaa?”

  The haggling started there. Victoria was glad to focus on the noisy Haldol potters rather than the lazily copulating couple behind them. Round Haldol eyes stared back at her from round Haldol faces. The red, rough patches on the sides of the males’ necks still reminde
d her of meat that had gone over.

  But the vermin were gone! Not a single biting pinhead crawled across smooth, slimy Haldol skin. The Haldols themselves took no special notice of that, but then, they had never seemed to mind the vermin anyhow. Victoria minded them. Not having to look at them wandering over Haldol bodies, not having to feel their tiny legs on her own flesh and in her hair, left her so relieved that she almost managed not to think about the open lewdness constantly on display in the village.

  One by one, the potters picked up their jugs and carried them away. At last Victoria was quietly bargaining with a single male, each of them sure goods would change hands, each intent they should do so on the best possible terms. Quietly bargaining . . . no sooner had the phrase crossed Victoria’s mind than she looked up (no risk to her sensibilities now, for the mating couple had long since finished). One of the reasons the Haldol village was quieter than she remembered from her last visit was that fewer immature Haldols were about, and no little yellow toddlers that she could see.

  “Where are all the children?” she asked the Haldol potter, who could use her language fairly well. “Are they out in the forest today for some reason?”

  The Haldol stuck out his tongue, a gesture of uncertainty. “Not so many childs, pisquaa. Few borns. Think maybe forest gods angry. Plenty pray them, plenty—” He pumped his arm in an obscene gesture that made Victoria blush. “But females, they no get childs.”

  “Your gods are false,” Victoria said. “Surely Jesus would hear your prayers. The true God gave His only-begotten Son that mankind might live forever. Accept Him and He will help you—you are His creatures, too.”

  Members of the Holy Mission Church had been preaching the Gospel to the Haldols since the day they landed on Reverence. Ever since that day, the Haldols had ignored them or, worse, laughed at them: all they’d taken was the God bless you that larded their speech. But now the potter stuck out his tongue and said, “Maybe we talk to this God of yours. Ours not hear.”

  Exultation filled Victoria’s body. It was sweeter than beet sugar, sweeter than anything she’d known save the spasm of her flesh when, as occasionally did happen, Mr. Griffin mounted her long enough to take her out of herself. She bit the inside of her lip, hard, at having the temerity to compare the carnal to his infusion of divine joy.

  She gave the potter an extra knife blade, above and beyond the price they’d finally settled on. “God bless you, you pisquaa really crazy,” he said. She did not care. Had he been only a little less repellent to her, she would have kissed him.

  Even her husband said, “If they truly do come over to Christ, you have done well, Mrs. Griffin.” That made her hold her head proud and high until she remembered vanity was also sinful. She hoped Mr. Griffin would choose that night to lie with her. When they were in bed, she even went so far as to brush her thigh against his, as if by accident, shamefully forward though that was. But he was already asleep. The day had been long. She soon joined him in slumber.

  Victoria was used to getting up at dawn. From sun to sun never seemed time enough to get through a day’s chores. But she was not used to being blasted out of bed by a horn that sounded as if Satan himself would wind it come Judgment Day. “That’s technology,” Mr. Griffin shouted, trying to make himself heard above the hellish din. “What are the damned Federation people playing at, using their accursed technology here?”

  Victoria did not answer. Lavinia was screaming in terror from the next room. She ran to comfort her daughter, who cried, “Make it stop, Mommy! Make the bad noise stop!” But Victoria could not make the bad noise stop.

  In fact, the noise got worse, for it turned to bellowed words, and terrifying words: “Victoria Griffin! Where are you, Victoria Griffin? Come out!”

  From the other bedroom, Mr. Griffin yelled, “Don’t you go, Mrs. Griffin! I’ll fetch the axe to protect you.”

  All at once, Victoria felt a warm burst of affection for her husband. She also felt fear for him—what could an axe do against the demonic dangers of technology?

  “We need to talk with you, Victoria Griffin,” the impossibly loud voice went on. “No harm will come to you; you have our promise.”

  “Don’t believe them, Mrs. Griffin,” Mr. Griffin said. “Those from outside the Church are by nature liars and cheats.”

  Now that the horn was no longer blaring, Victoria found she could think again, after a fashion. She said, “Let me go out, Mr. Griffin. How can they have any reason to wish me harm? And even if they should, well, as a martyr for the faith I will sit at the right hand of God and His Son. And besides,” she added, slipping from the spiritual to the purely pragmatic, “if I talk with them, maybe they’ll quit roaring.”

  Her sudden switch jerked a startled chuckle from her husband. “All right, Mrs. Griffin. God go with you.”

  “God go with you, Mommy,” Lavinia echoed as Victoria walked out of her room and went to the front door. Despite her brave words, her legs were fear-light, ready to turn and bolt the instant her will released them. She took a deep, determined breath and kept walking.

  Several men and women of New Zion were already out of doors, staring in disbelief and horror at the smoothly curved metal device that floated a couple of feet above the grass of the village square, and at the wantonly dressed man and woman sitting inside the device. Cornelia Baker’s avidly curious glance flicked from the flying machine to Victoria and back again. Victoria looked away, sick at heart. Cornelia would never let her live down such scandal.

  She decided the quickest way to be rid of the scientists (even thinking such a filthy word made her lips purse in dismay) would be to let them have their say. She forced herself to take a step toward the flier. “Here I am.”

  “That’s her, all right.” Victoria recognized Janice more by voice than by face. Janice jumped down from the flying machine. Even Cornelia Baker gasped at the sight of her uncovered legs. Several New Zion doors slammed shut as the folk who lived in those cabins protected themselves from the shocking spectacle.

  Janice strode toward Victoria. “I ought to knock your stupid, hymn-singing teeth down your throat, you stinking Churchie,” she snarled.

  Victoria stared at her. “How have I offended you? How could I have offended you, when we’ve not so much as seen each other these past five years?”

  “You didn’t do much then, either, did you?” Janice said bitterly. “All you did was set in motion the extinction of a whole intelligent species.”

  “What? The vermin?” Victoria said. “You are mad.”

  “Not the vermin—the Haldols. There won’t be any more Haldols after the last of this generation dies, and it’s all your fault.”

  “All I wanted to do was to get rid of the vermin, so the Haldols wouldn’t suffer so much from them.” And so they wouldn’t crawl on me, Victoria thought, recalling too well the feel of tiny legs moving through her body hair, of needlelike mouthparts jabbing through her skin to suck her blood.

  “So you asked us, and we did it. We took care of the bugs, all right—turn three tailored retroviruses loose on them at once and they go, go fast. Trouble was, we moved too fast. I’m going to hate myself every day for the rest of my life for that, and I’m not the only one. When the Haldols stopped having little Haldols, we tried to find out why. Turns out the vermin aren’t just vermin—the Haldols need them to reproduce.”

  “That’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard,” Victoria said with a shudder. “Besides, how could it be true? To my shame, I’ve seen what the Haldols do. It’s not—” Hot blood rose from her throat to the crown of her head, but she made herself go on, though her voice fell to a whisper: “It’s not that different from what passes between men and women.”

  “It doesn’t look that different,” Janice corrected her. “But male Haldols don’t put sperm into females when they fuck, they—”

  “When they what?” Victoria broke in.

  Janice clapped a hand to her forehead. “Churchies! When they mate, I mean. Anyway, t
hey don’t put sperm in. They just prime the females’—organs. Is that all right? Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes. Go on,” Victoria said. The sooner this was over, the better.

  “I am.” Janice glared at her. She still didn’t understand what she’d done wrong. The woman from the research base continued, “They prime them, they make them secrete a mucus loaded with pheromones that— Why am I bothering? Anyway, then the vermin that have been wandering over their bodies, the vermin that have picked up sperm from the males’ throat patches, those vermin go inside to feed on the mucus and incidentally to put the sperm where they’ll do the most good.”

  Victoria remembered watching vermin crawl into the female Haldol’s private parts after she was done mating, remembered how sick the sight had made her. Now, knowing why they did it, she felt even sicker. She said, “You’re telling me that without the vermin—”

  “No more baby Haldols, not ever again. That’s right, Churchie. How do you like being responsible for wiping out a whole race?”

  The weight of the accusation was crushing, a weight like the one Jesus had accepted when He assumed the burden of mankind’s sins. But He was the Son of God, Victoria a mere human being. I didn’t mean it, she thought. That wasn’t good enough. She tried, “You’re the ones who killed the vermin, not me.” That wasn’t good enough, either; she knew it the moment the words passed her lips.

  “We never would have done it if you hadn’t suggested it,” Janice said.

  The coldness in her voice brought back to Victoria how cold it had been inside the research base; it was the only time in her life, save after an infrequent bath, that she hadn’t been filmed with sticky sweat (and, she recalled, Janice had said something rude about how often, or rather how seldom, she bathed). Thinking of that unnatural chill helped her remember what had gone on in there, remember it with almost word-for-word clarity, as if it had happened yesterday, not five years before. She said, “You didn’t get rid of the vermin to do New Zion and the Church of the Holy Mission a favor. You did it for the Haldols—you thought your lying evolution would make them prevail over us. I told you then that the Lord would provide. Now I see that He has.” She dropped to her knees and clasped her hands so she could properly thank God for His blessing.