Warrior Women

by Paula Guran

  Just before the abrupt sunset of a planet with negligible axial tilt, they make camp. The copter, whose design demands lightness, can sleep two uncomfortably, but the back seats have been removed in order to store equipment and supplies. Ellen sleeps in the copter, curled across two front seats joined by a piece of removable foam. She can’t stretch out, but she feels calmer here. Josie pitches a tent beside the copter.

  Josie has still not said a single word to her.

  She is dancing, surrounded by vague shapes under a hot sun. Her bare feet move joyously, her arms wave. The vague shapes are also dancing, pressing close to her . . . closer . . . then away. She laughs. Her feet pound out complex rhythms that she never knew, on a grassy purplish ground that her toes never touched before. She dances faster, they all dance faster, whirling and jumping and shouting in frenzied joy, and still she doesn’t tire, she dances and dances and—

  A shot, followed by a high inhuman scream.

  Ellen jerks awake and fumbles for the copter’s floodlights. In their harsh glare she sees Josie, legs apart and braced, lowering the barrel of a gun. How could Josie have a gun? It takes a moment for Ellen to recognize the weapon. She throws open the copter door.

  “You stole that! From the base!”

  “Of course I did.”

  “What in hell did you fire at?”

  “An Eater.” Josie points at her tent. Something has gashed one side of the tough plasticanvas. Ellen drops to her knees to examine the rip. Impossible that it could come from an Eater, they are herbivorous and at the top of the simple Janus 4 food chain, with no predators. However, Dave Schwartz, the team zoologist, has described Eater mating rituals. Two males kick each other viciously, sometime inflicting considerable damage, until one or the other gives up. This gash could have been made by an Eater hoof, doing . . . what?

  Ellen feels dizzy. No Eater has ever attacked a human. If Tom was to be believed, the Eaters didn’t even mind when he joined their herd, running with them, dancing with them, feeding with them on Flora 1, the unintended hallucinogenic that destroyed his mind. Ellen herself has seen Eaters ignore the deaths of their fellows who brush against the force-field fence that is the Corporation’s grudging, expensive alternative to exterminating the creatures blocking agribusiness on Janus 4. The Eaters may be sentient, but it is a very primitive sentience, and it is not aggressive.

  Josie is watching her closely. Ellen raises her head to stare back, but cannot keep it up. Not against that cool, amused disdain. Josie says, “Surprised you, did they?”

  “Yes. No Eater has . . . has acted like that before.”

  “Well, they do now.”

  Ellen stands. “Give me the gun.”

  “Do you know how to use it?”

  Ellen doesn’t, or at least not very well. She says, hating the slight tremor in her voice, “It’s Corporate property.”

  Josie laughs. “It’s my property now. We’re out here in the bush, Ellen. You can’t control me, and you can’t edit me to remove any behavior you happen to not like.”

  Editing removes memories, not behavior, but Ellen doesn’t argue the point. “Give me the gun or I’ll fly the copter back to base.”

  “No, you won’t.” Almost casually, Josie points the gun at her, smiles, lowers the barrel. Oddly, Ellen isn’t afraid; she intuits that Josie is only playing with her. Nasty play, but not serious threat. Josie adds, “You can report this, get the second copter after me, file charges with the Space Force, whatever. But I’m not going back until I find my father, and I’m keeping the gun because I’m the one who knows how to use it. Understand?”

  Ellen understands. She understands that Josie knows that Ellen will not report the incident, will not destroy Josie’s life. Because Ellen has already destroyed Tom’s. Guilt is driving her now, the guilt that Josie Two Ribbons so completely disavows. That she leaves to the white man, so ready to accept it, bear it, eat it.

  The sky is lightening. Josie packs up her tent and climbs into the copter.

  They spend the day investigating oxbows, and Josie actually offers an explanation: “My father used to take me camping, always on oxbows or oxbow islands. He liked them because they’re easier to defend against attack.”

  Ellen tries to imagine this unknown Tom who was conscious of attack and defense. When she knew him, he seemed a quiet, pacific sort of man, absorbed in xenobiology. But how well had she actually tried to know him? Not very. It was Stan Michaelson whom she was in love with, and Ellen used Tom as both a convenient distraction and a (futile) ploy to incite jealousy in Stan. And when Tom presented his evidence of sentience in the Eaters and the terraforming team had to change strategy, Ellen was just as upset as anyone else. Upset and—yes!—irritated. The entire project was set back years. And then Stan took up with Julia. Ellen hated that, and she stopped sleeping with Tom, and then he went bonkers, running off to live with Eaters—three times!—and each time coming back more delusional, in need of more editing from Chang, gone just completely off the reservation—

  Off the reservation. She never thinks in those demeaning clichés—what is wrong with her?

  What has always been wrong with her? Something—

  Josie says, “What the hell is wrong with you? You’re red as a boiled lobster.”

  “Nothing,” Ellen says. “I’m going to gather samples.”

  The have just landed the copter beside yet another oxbow, the sixth one today. They are farther from base than Ellen has ever gone, nearly into Sector D, and yet she can see both Flora 1 and Flora 2 flourishing here. The seeds, designed for wind-scatter, have adapted incredibly well to Janus 4. She climbs out after Josie.

  “Stay near the copter,” Josie says. “I’m taking the gun.”

  “Okay.”

  Ellen gathers samples of both Flora 1 and Flora 2 and brings them back to the copter. She has brought a handheld gene scanner with her. The space in the front seat is cramped, but she prepares samples and runs them through the scanner. When the results are finally ready and she scrolls through the display on the small screen, her heart nearly stops.

  There has been massive genetic drift.

  Flora 1—white flowers and greenish-purple photosynthesizer, one of Ellen’s best recombinant jobs—shows the most genetic mutations. Not surprising—it has been here the longest. But even Flora 2’s genes have changed at an astonishing rate. Mutating, jumping, recombining to create new proteins that do . . . what? No way to tell, not in this copter. The scanner can record the simple facts of a shifting genome, the long strings of ATGCs, but the behavior caused by any genome is never simple.

  One of her samples of Flora 1 has passed the flowering stage. Ellen touches the little lemon-colored globe of fruit, not yet fully ripe. At her touch, it releases a whiff of sweet perfume. Ingested, it is a powerful hallucinogenic. This is what destroyed Tom’s mind, making him think that the terraforming team was still exterminating Eaters after the drops of neural pellets had been discontinued. Making him imagine that psychiatrists back on Earth had arranged the entire tragic extermination merely to help Tom Two Ribbons cope with anger about Indian wars two hundred years ago. Making him believe, finally, that his friends were evil enemies out to destroy him. Chang had edited and edited, trying to cut the poison out of Tom’s mind, but drug-induced schizophrenic paranoia is so stubborn . . .

  Liquid spurts onto Ellen’s hand. She has clutched the lemon-colored globe so hard that it ruptured. “Damn!” She reaches for a wipe, and her gaze focuses through the copter window. A circle of Eaters surrounds her craft.

  Human and aliens stare at each other. The aliens’ protruding, perfectly round eyes, set above narrow rubbery lips, have no expression, or at least not that Ellen can read. But their orange fur stands straight up, in what Dave has told her is male mating aggression. A long moment passes. Then all together, as if choreographed, the Eaters rush the copter and begin kicking it furiously. Their hooves ring on the light metal. The passenger door, thin since the copter is made of light meta
l both to save fuel and because there was never a reason for reinforcement, caves inward. Ellen screams.

  Gunfire erupts from the woods and two Eaters fall to the ground. The rest run off in a flurry of orange fur. Josie emerges from the trees. The whole episode has taken less than a minute.

  This is different from Eaters ingesting neural pellets and quietly dissolving. Josie, apparently an expert shot (Ellen never doubted it), has hit both Eaters in the head. The corpses lay inert, solid, their eyes still open. They will be there until they rot.

  Josie yanks open the damaged door of the copter. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing!” And I’m not hurt, thanks for asking.

  “They just attacked without provocation?”

  “Yes!” Ellen remembers the juice on her hands and fumbles again for the wipe. Her fingers shake. “Eaters never acted like that before!”

  “Well, they do now.” Josie climbs into the copter. “Lift off.”

  “Just . . . just give me a minute!”

  Josie does. Ellen cleans off the juice and tosses the wipe into the recycler. She reaches for the flight controls, but instead her hand goes to the cockpit storage compartment and pulls out a flask of whiskey. She doesn’t do this very often—and she never did it before Tom’s last disappearance—but there are some nights that it’s the only way through. The combination of mellow and burn, as always, steadies her, and she lifts the copter. “We’re returning to the base, I presume.”

  Josie doesn’t answer. Ellen glances over at her and finds Josie’s eyes locked onto the flask. Josie has not even heard her. Ellen could not have imagined that expression on Josie Two Ribbons’ face: could not have imagined that much hunger, that much despair.

  Oh, Ellen thinks. Oh.

  Eventually—and it is a long eventually—Josie again becomes aware of Ellen. The scowl returns. But Josie doesn’t try to lie; lying is not her style. Attack is.

  “So I’m not the only one bringing along contraband, huh? What is that supposed to be, the back-up plan, the ultimate way to control me? I’ll bet Tom told you that my great-great-grandfather died of alcoholism, my great-grandfather was addicted to hallucinogens, and so on. Whiskey for the Indian, huh? What else have you got stowed away here—blankets seeded with smallpox? I thought you were more original than that.”

  “Fuck you,” Ellen says, and immediately realizes she has never said that to anyone in her life. Never. Ashamed, she shoves the flask back into storage and slams the door close. The door bounces open. Josie reaches out and shuts it, but there is something wrong with the gesture: It is too slow and a little clumsy, as if the girl’s neural timing is off. Closing that door is costing Josie every gram of will that she possesses.

  Her voice comes out harsh. “Where the fuck do you think you’re flying?”

  “I told you. Back to the base.”

  “No.” She faces Ellen, wrenching her gaze from the storage compartment. “We’re going to find my father.”

  Is such determination a species of courage, or a species of delusion? Ellen can no longer tell.

  Carlos, with his usual democratic leadership, leaves the decision up to Ellen. She suspects he is far more interested in her reports of genetic drift and Eater aggression than in Josie Two Ribbons. Ellen sends him all the data from her handheld and describes the Eater attack to the entire base, gathered in front of the linkscreen to watch and listen.

  “Where are you now?” Hélène asks.

  “On an open plain. I have the camera and motion detectors turned on so we won’t be surprised again. Both Flora 1 and Flora 2 are everyplace, and in the morning I’ll gather more samples.” She is not going out onto the plain in the dark, motion detectors or no motion detectors. She spends another ten minutes being asked questions, most of which she cannot answer, by scientists concerned with their various fields. Xenobiology, zoology, geology, soil engineering. Ellen discovers that, for the moment, she doesn’t care about the answers she doesn’t have. She is so tired.

  Josie is not present for this conference. She has set up the tent and the instabake outside and heated their meals. In the harsh glare of the copter floodlights, Ellen climbs down and sits on the ground to eat. Every little noise makes her jump. Are they out there? Of course they are. It seems to her that she can smell their hatred, feel it on her skin.

  “Sleep in the copter,” she says to Josie. “We’ll unload enough equipment for me to squeeze back there, and you can have the front.”

  “Not a chance.” The scowl deepens. Ellen sees that this is somehow a matter of stupid pride. Or maybe Josie is just one of those people who cannot stand being cooped up for very long. Somewhere to the east, about a mile away, is a river with a wooded oxbow. Josie will search it in the morning, possibly before Ellen even wakes.

  Josie sits in the shadow cast by the copter on the floodlit ground. In that half-gloom, her heritage is somehow sharpened. Despite the military fatigues and bristly hair, she looks Sioux. It’s in the cheekbones and nose, the shape of her face, the dark eyes, the still posture. Not for the first time, Ellen wonders about Josie’s mother, who had refused to follow Tom to a better life. Who had instead raised her daughter on a reservation, probably in poverty and stagnation. Ellen has read about life on what remains of Indian reservations. When the United States went into steep economic decline, Native Americans were hit even harder than most others. As usual.

  Ellen picks up the plates, her excuse to go back into the copter; she puts them in the recycler. Josie stows the instabake and then disappears into her tent. When the flap has closed, Ellen quietly opens the copter door facing away from the tent. She empties the whiskey flask onto the ground, watching the amber liquid disappear into the thick purplish grass.

  It reminds her of Eaters’ bodies dissolving from neural pellets.

  We didn’t know. And as soon as we did know, we stopped. As soon as Tom convinced us the Eaters were sentient. That very second, we stopped.

  It is the same mantra she repeated to herself in the months that followed Tom’s revelation, through all his disappearances, recaptures, therapeutic edits. We didn’t know. It was the truth.

  Too bad truth could be so inadequate.

  When Ellen finally sleeps, she dreams. She is dancing, surrounded by vague shapes under a hot sun. Her bare feet move joyously, her arms wave. The vague shapes are also dancing, pressing close to her . . . closer . . . then away. She laughs. Her feet pound out complex rhythms that she never knew, on a grassy purplish ground that her toes never touched before. She dances faster, they all dance faster, whirling and jumping and shouting in frenzied joy, and still she doesn’t tire, she dances and dances and—

  Alarms shriek. Ellen cries out as she wakes. The motion detector has picked up something. Josie bolts from her tent, gun in hand. But it is not Eaters.

  Walking toward the copter from the direction of the oxbow, all alone, is Tom Two Ribbons.

  Almost Ellen doesn’t recognize him. Although Tom’s only been gone for six months, his beard and hair have grown several inches and he is much thinner. But it’s not that. Tom had a certain way of walking, a tentative and careful gait that could unexpectedly break into a brief swagger. Both tentativeness and swagger are gone. This man walks across the open plain as if across a well-known room, beyond which there might or might not be something interesting. When he is close enough, Ellen can see the lines of puzzlement cross his sunburned forehead. Something turns over in her chest. She turns off the screaming alarm, opens the copter door, and eases herself to the ground, standing behind and to the left of Josie.

  Now Tom stands a few yards from his daughter. He looks from Josie to Ellen; the puzzled lines deepen. Beyond the circle of floodlight, Janus 4 is shadowy and indistinct, but in the east the sky is already paling.

  Tom says, “Do I know you?”

  Ellen’s breath catches. He means both of them. He doesn’t recognize Ellen. How much memory had Chang edited out? “I’ll need to take a lot more to cure him of his delusions
,” a somber Chang had told Ellen. She hadn’t realized that “a lot more” would include her. And how much else?

  Josie says, “You don’t know me, no. Not since you just up and left Dakota.” The girl’s voice is so full of anger and hurt that Ellen winces. The very air around her seems charged. But Ellen doesn’t know what to do, and so she does nothing.

  “I’m Josie. Remember me, ‘Dad’?” You left when I was seven. You went on to the Space Force and a real life while my mother and me rotted away in that hellhole. And you never even contacted me again to see if I survived it.”

  The forehead lines deepen. Ellen sees the moment that Josie realizes that her father has no idea what she’s talking about. The girl’s back goes rigid. Ellen thinks wildly of an ancient Terran myth: people turned to stone by staring straight at Medusa. But that drama of deception and betrayal was Greek. What she is witnessing is an American betrayal, transplanted to the stars.

  “I’m Josie,” the girl says, and her voice cracks. “Josie.”

  “Josie? I can’t . . . I don’t think I know anyone named Josie.”

  “Y-You edited me out, didn’t you? Trashed me from . . . from your memory . . . ”

  Ellen can’t stand it. She steps out of the shadow of the copter. Maybe if Josie sees the extent of Tom’s editing, she will not take it so personally. “Hello, Tom. Do you remember me? Ellen?”

  He studies her—giving it a genuine effort—then shakes his head. “No, I don’t think so. Have we met?”

  She can’t go on. Tom, who always feared editing, has been edited down to nearly nothing. Or maybe it isn’t the editing; maybe it is his own fragile mind, forgetting what is too painful to remember. Behind her, in the copter, the linkscreen suddenly leaps to life. She can’t see it, but she can hear Carlos’ voice, both excited and weary. “Ellen? Ellen? Are you there?”