“I could have had an escort they’d respect.”
“You’re better off with us.”
They descended the tunnel. The light never grew less; on the contrary, it grew brighter. When they emerged, the Heaven Lake was above them: a mass of blue-white radiance, indigo shadowed, shot through with rainbow refractions. It was extraordinarily beautiful. It seemed impossible that the ice had captured so much light from the poisoned smog. Far off, in the centre of the glacial depression, geothermal vents made a glowing, spiderweb pattern of fire and snowy steam. Patrice checked his telltales, and eagerly began to release his helmet. The Shet dropped a gauntleted fist on his arm.
“Don’t do it, child. Look at your rads.”
“A moment won’t kill me. I want to feel KiAn—”
The odd couple, hidden in their gear, seemed to look at him strangely.
“Maybe later,” said the Ki-anna, soothingly. “It’s safer in the Grottos, where your sister was headed.”
“How do we get there?”
“We walk,” rumbled Bhvaaan. “No vehicles. There’s not much growing but it’s still a sacred park. Let your suit do the work; keep up your fluids.”
“Thanks, I know how to handle a hard shell.”
They walked in file. The desolation, the ruined beauty that had been revered by both “races,” caught at Patrice’s heart. His helmet display counted rads, paces, heart rate: counted down the metres. Thirty kilometres to the place where Lione had last been seen alive.
“Which faction mined the Lake of Heaven parkland?”
“To our knowledge? Nobody did, child.”
It was a question he’d asked over and over, long ago when he thought he could get answers. Now he asked and didn’t care. He followed the Shet, the Ki-anna behind him. His pace was steady, yet the display said his body was pumping adrenaline; not from fear, he knew, but in the grip of intense excitement. He sucked on glucose and tried to calm himself.
As the radiance above them dimmed, they reached the Grotto domain. Rugged rocky pillars seemed to hold up the roof of ice, widely spaced at first, clustering towards a centre that could not be seen. There was a Ki community, surviving in rad-proofed modules. The Ki-anna went inside. Patrice and the Shet waited, in the darkening blighted landscape. She emerged after an hour or so.
“We can’t go on without guides, and we can’t have guides until tomorrow. At the earliest. They have to think it over.”
“They weren’t expecting us?”
“They were. They know all about it, but they may have had fresh instructions. They’re in full communication with the castle: there’s some sophisticated kit in there. We’ll just have to wait.”
“Do they remember Lione?” demanded Patrice. “I have transaid, I want to talk to someone.”
“Not now. I’ll ask tomorrow.”
“Can we sleep indoors?” asked the Shet.
“No.”
The Shet and the Ki-anna made camp in the ruins of the former village, using their suits to clear ground and construct a shelter. Patrice moved over to a heap of boulders where he’d noticed patches of lichen. He had fragments of Lione’s incense in the sleeve pocket of his inner, in a First Aid pouch. The police were fully occupied: furtively he opened the arm of his hardshell, and fished the pouch out. He was right, it was the same—
Lione had stood here. The incense was not a gift, she had gathered it. She had been standing right here. His need was irresistible. He released his face-plate, stripped his gauntlets, rubbed away quarantine film.
KiAn rushed in on him, cold and harsh in his throat, intoxicating—
“What is that?”
The Ki-anna was behind him. “A lichen sample,” said Patrice, caught out. “Or that’s what I’d call it at home. It was in my sister’s room, in the An Castle. Look, they’re the same.”
“Not quite,” said the Ki-anna. “Yours is a cultivated variety.”
He thought she’d be angry, maybe accuse him of concealing evidence. To his astonishment she took his bared hand, and bowed over it until her cheek brushed the vulnerable inner skin of his wrist. Her touch was a huge shock, sweet and profoundly sexual. She made him dizzy.
This can’t be happening, he thought. I’m here for Lione—
“I don’t know your name.”
“We don’t do that,” she whispered.
“I felt, I can’t describe it, the moment I met you—”
“I’d better keep this. You must get your gloves and helmet back on.”
“But I want KiAn—”
Gently, she let go of his hand. “You’ve had enough.”
The shelter was a snug fit. Sealed inside, they shared rations and drank fresh water they’d brought from the Habitat. They would sleep in their suits, for warmth and security. Patrice lay down at once, to escape their questions and to be alone with his confusion. He was here for Lione, he was here to join Lione. How could he and the Ki-anna suddenly feel this way?
“Were you getting romantic, with Patrice, over by those rocks?” asked Bhvaaan. “Sniffing his pheromones?”
“No,” said the Ki-anna, grimly. “Something else.”
She showed him the First Aid pouch and its contents.
“Mighty Void!”
“He says it was in the room Lione used, in the castle.”
“I don’t think so! We took that cabin apart.” The Shet’s delicates unfolded from his club of a fist. He turned the clear pouch around, probing her find with sensitive tentacles. “So that’s how, so that’s how—”
“So that’s how the cookie was crumbled,” agreed the Ki-anna.
“What do we do, Chief? Abort this, and run away very quickly?”
“Not without back-up. If we run, and they have heavy weaponry, we’re at their mercy. I see what it looks like, but we should show no alarm.”
“I have had thoughts about him,” she murmured, looking at the dark outline of Patrice Ferringhi. “Don’t know why. It’s something in his eyes.”
“Thaap’s the way it starts,” said the Shet. “Thoughts. Then wondering if anything can come of them. They say sentient bipeds are attracted to each other like … like brothers and sisters, long separated. Well, I’ll talk to the Greenies. And you and I had better not sleep.”
The suit was a house the shape of her body. She sat in it, wondering about sexual pleasure: pleasure with Patrice. What would it be like? She had only one strange comparison, but that didn’t frighten her … What Roaaat Bhvaaan offered was far more disturbing.
She glimpsed the abyss, and fell into oblivion.
Patrice dreamed he was in a strolling crowd, among bronze and purple trees, with branches that swayed in the breeze. He knew where he was, he was in the KiAn Orientation, a virtual reality. But there was something sinister going on, the crowd pressed too close, the beautiful trees hid what he ought to see. Then Lione came running up and bit him.
He yelled, and shook her off.
She came back and bit his thigh, but now he was in the dark, cold and sore. Lione was gone, he was being hunted by fierce hungry animals—
Suddenly he knew he was not asleep.
He was completely naked. Where was his suit? Where was he?
He had no idea. The air was freezing, the darkness almost complete. He stumbled towards a gleam ahead, and entered a rocky cave. There was ice underfoot, icy stalactites hanging down. A lamp burned incense-scented oil, set on the ground next to a heap of something—
That’s a body, he thought. He went over and knelt down. It was a human body, freeze-dried. She was curled on her side, turned away from him, but he knew he’d found Lione. She was naked too.
Why was she naked?
He lifted the lamp and saw where flesh had been cut away, not by teeth, as in his dream, but by sharp knives. Lione had been butchered. He tried to turn her: the body moved all of a piece. Her face was recognisable, smooth and calm in death, the eyes sunken, the skin like cured leather. Was she smiling? Oh, Lione—
But why
am I naked?, he thought. Who brought me here?
The Ki entered the cave, and surrounded Patrice and his sister. They had brought more lights. One of them was carrying, reverently, a flattened spherical object, dull grey-green, the size of Patrice’s fist. It had a seam around the centre, a bevelled cap. That’s a vapor mine, he though shaken by an explosion of understanding. Then the An came. The Ki made no attempt to interfere with the banquet. They were here to witness. Patrice screamed. He fought the knives with his bare hands, kicked out with his bare feet. The An, outraged, kept yelling at him in scraps of English to keep still, be easy Blue, you want this, what’s wrong with you?
The Ki-anna and the Shet had ditched their hard shells, to search the narrow passages. They arrived armed but badly outnumbered and they couldn’t get near Patrice. “I was the Earth In Heaven!” shouted the Chief of Police. “I say that flesh is not sacred, not yours to take. Let the stranger go!”
She held the fanatics at bay, uncertain because of her former status, until the Green Belts joined the party. Luckily Bhvaaan had summoned them, before he and the Ki-anna followed Patrice into that drugged sleep.
Patrice’s injuries were not dangerous. As soon as he was allowed he signed himself out of medical care. He had to talk to the police again. He met the odd couple in the same bare interview room as before.
“I’m sorry, I need to withdraw my statement. I can’t press charges.”
If the next of kin didn’t press charges, KiAn law made it difficult for Interplanetary Affairs to prosecute. He knew that, but he had no choice.
“I realise the tablet I found in Lione’s room was planted on me. I know her words, if some of them were genuinely hers, had been rearranged to fool me into accepting atavism. It doesn’t matter. My sister wanted to die that way. She gave herself, her body. It was a ritual sacrifice, for peace. She was my twin, I can’t explain, I have to respect her wishes.”
“A beautiful, consensual ritual,” remarked the Shet. “Yaap. That’s what the cannibal die-hards always say. But if you scratch any of these halfway ‘respectable’ atavists, such as our Ruling An here—”
“You find the meat-packing industry,” said the Ki-anna.
Patrice heard the blinkered, Speranza mindset.
“My sister was willing.”
“I believe she was.” To his confusion, the Ki-anna reached out, took his injured hand and held his wrist, where the blood ran, to her face. The same sweet, intimate gesture as on KiAn. “So are you, a little. It’ll wear off.”
She drew back, and placed an evidence bag, containing his First Aid pouch and the scraps of lichen, on the table.
“In English, the common name of this herb, or lichen, would be ‘Willingness.’ It grows naturally only under the Lake of Heaven. Long ago it was known as a powerful aphrodisiac: the labwork kind has another use. It’s given to a child chosen to be the Ki-anna, which means sold to the An as living meat. It’s a refined form of cannibalism, practiced in my region. A drugged child, a willing victim, with a strong resistance to infection and trauma, is eaten alive, by degrees. If one of these children survives to adulthood, they are free, the debt is paid.”
The Ki-anna showed her teeth. “I made it, as you see; but I haven’t forgotten that scent. When I smelled your flesh, under the Lake, I knew you’d been treated for butchery—and I understood. They drugged Lione until she was delirious with joy to be eaten, and they sent her to the atavist fanatics under An-lalhar. Then they tried the same trick on you.”
Bhvaaan tapped the casefile tablet with his delicates. “Your sister died too quickly, that was the problem.”
“What—?”
“We couldn’t prove it, but we knew they’d killed Lione, Messer Ferringhi. We could even show, thanks to the Chief here, who was pulling the strings, and how they got the prohibited ordnance into the Grottos. Your sister fell into a trap. She had to get under the Heaven Lake and that suited the atavists just fine. It would have been a powerful message. A Speranza scientist ritually eaten, then consumed by the very air of KiAn—”
“Controlled annihilation,” whispered Patrice. “That’s what I saw, in the cave. Something they would understand—”
“Thap was the idea. The atavists are planning to bring back the meat factories, once their planet has an atmosphere again. Your sister was going to help them: except something didn’t work out. You were right about the tropo sampling: there’s also stringent military activity monitoring. If a mine had gone off under the Lake, we’d know. If a human-sized body had been atomised, there’d have been a spike. So we knew the ‘consummation’ hadn’t happened, and we couldn’t figure it out. We think we know the answer now: she died too quickly. She had to be vaporised alive, a dead body can’t be willing. But she wasn’t a Ki, and they hit an artery or something.”
Patrice had gone grey in the face.
“You going to crash out, child—?”
“No, go on—”
The Shet rearranged his bulk on the inadequate office chair. “The autopsy’ll tell us the details. Then you came along, Patrice. We saw a chance to get ourselves to the crime scene, and wasted Diaspora funds pushing on an open door. And you nearly died, because we drank the nice fresh water from this Habitat. Which happened to be doped—”
“The atavists thought the willingness they’d cooked up for Lione would work on you,” explained the Ki-anna. “They’ve never heard of ‘fraternal twins.’ Ki litter-mates can be of any sex, but otherwise they are identical. You were begging to be lured to the Grottos, it was perfect, you would replace Dr Ferringhi. Luckily, you and your sister weren’t clones. You were affected, but you weren’t ready to be butchered. You fought for your life.”
“You see, Messer Ferringhi,” said Bhvaaan, “what really happened here is that a pair of murdering atavist bastards thought they’d appoint themselves as Chief of Police a child who had been eaten. A girl like that, they thought, will never dare to do us any damage. Instead they found they had a tiger by the tail …” He opened the casefile tablet, and pushed it over to Patrice. “They’re glamorous, the Atavist An. But your sister would never have fallen for them in her right mind, from what I’ve learned of her. Still want to withdraw this?”
Patrice was silent, eyes down. The Ki-anna saw him shedding the exaltation of the drug; quietly taking in everything he’d been told. A new firmness in the lines of his face, a deep sadness as he said farewell to Lione. The human felt her eyes. He looked up and she saw another farewell, sad but final, to something that had barely begun—
“No,” he said. “But I should go through it again. Can we do that now?”
The Ki-anna returned to her quarters.
Roaaat joined her in a while. She sat by her window on the streets, small chin on her silky paws, and didn’t look round when he came in.
“He’ll be fine. What will you do? You’ll have to leave, after this.”
“I know. Leave or get killed, and I must not get killed.”
“You could go with Patrice, see what Mars is like.”
“I don’t think so. The pheromones are no more, now that he knows what making love to the Ki-anna is supposed to be like.”
“I’ve no idea what making love to you is supposed to be like. But you’re a damned fine investigator. Why don’t you come to Speranza?”
Yes, she thought. I knew all along what you were offering.
Banishment, not just from my own world, but from all the worlds. Never to be a planet-dweller any more. And again I want to ask, Why me? What did I do? But you believe it is an honour and I think you are sincere.
“Maybe I will.”
Eliot Wrote
NANCY KRESS
Nancy Kress (www.sff.net/people/nankress/) lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband, Jack Skillingstead. She is the author of twenty-six books: sixteen science fiction novels, three fantasy novels, four short story collections, and three books on writing. Her stories are rich in texture and psychological insight, and have been collected in
Trinity and Other Stories (1985), The Aliens of Earth (1993), and Beaker’s Dozen (1998). She has won two Nebulas and two Hugos for them, and been nominated for a dozen more of these awards. Published in 2010 were Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories, her fourth collection, and Dogs, a bio-thriller. She published several fine new stories in 2011, and her novella, After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, is out as a chapbook in 2012.
“Eliot Wrote” was published online at Lightspeed. It is a story about the powerlessness of a fiercely intelligent fifteen-year-old kid who has lost his mother and is now losing his hospitalized father, whom he loves and needs, and who uses revisions of his high-school writing assignment on metaphor to explore his feelings. It is a story that interrogates ageism.
Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
J.B.S. Haldane
Eliot wrote: Picture your brain as a room. The major functions are like furniture. Each in its own place, and you can move from sofa to chair to ottoman, or even lie across more than one piece of furniture at the same time. Memory is like air in the room, dispersed everywhere. Musical ability is a specific accessory, like a vase on the mantel. Anger is a Doberman pinscher halfway out of the door from the kitchen. Algebra just fell down the heat duct. Love of your sibling is a water spill that evaporated three weeks ago.
Well, maybe not accurate, Eliot thought, and hit DELETE. Or maybe too accurate for his asshole English class. What kind of writing assignment was “Explain something important using an extended metaphor”?
He closed his school tablet and paced around the room. Cold, cheerless, bereft—or was that his own fault? Partly his own fault, he admitted; Eliot prided himself on self-honesty. He could turn up the heat, pick up the pizza boxes, open the curtains to the May sunshine. He did none of these things. Cold and cheerless matched bereft, and there was nothing to do about bereft. Well, one thing. He went to the fireplace (cold ashes, months old) and from the mantel plucked the ceramic pig and threw it as hard as he could onto the stone hearth. It shattered into pink shards.
Year's Best SF 17 Page 40
