Grazing The Long Acre

by Gwyneth Jones

  “Are religious ceremonies held here?” I asked Tiamaat.

  She drew back her head, the gesture for no. “Most KiAn have not followed religion for a long time. It’s just a place sacred to ourselves, to nature.”

  “But it’s fine for the Shelter Police, and Pelé and I, to be with you?”

  “You are advocates.”

  We entered a clearing dotted with thickets. At our feet smaller plants had the character of woodland turf, starred with bronze and purple flowers. Above us the primary sun dipped towards its false horizon, lighting the blood red veins in the foliage. The blue daystar had set. Baal and Tiamaat were walking together: I heard him whisper, in the An language, now it’s our time.

  “And these are the lucky ones,” muttered one of the Ki delegates to me, her “English” mediated by a throat-mike processor that gave her a teddy-bear growl. “Anyone who reached Speranza had contacts, money. Many millions of our people are trying to survive on a flayed, poisoned bombsite—”

  And whose fault is that?

  I nodded, vaguely. It was NOT my place take sides.

  Something flew by me, big and solid. Astonished, I realised it had been Baal. He had moved so fast, it was so totally unexpected. He had plunged right through the cordon of armed police, through the shield. He was gone, vanished. I leapt in pursuit at once, yelling: “Hold your fire!” I was flung back, thrown down into zinging stars and blackness. The shield had been strengthened, but not enough.

  Shelter Police bending over me, cried: what happened, Ma’am, are you hit?

  My conviction that we had company in here fused into certainty.

  “Oh, God! Get after him. After him!”

  I ran with the police, Pelé stayed with Tiamaat and the Ki: on our shared frequency I heard him alerting Colonel Shamaz. We cast to and fro through the twilight wood, held together by the invisible strands and globules of our shield, taunted by rustles of movement, the CSP muttering to each other about refugee assassins, homemade weapons. But the young leader of the An was unharmed when we found him, having followed the sounds of a scuffle and a terrified cry. He crouched, in his sleek tailoring, over his prey. Dark blood trickled from the victim’s nostrils, high-placed in a narrow face. Dark eyes were open, fixed and wide.

  I remembered the children in that school, staring up in disbelief at the ogres.

  Baal rose, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “What are you looking at?,” he inquired, haughtily, in his neighbours’ language. The rest of our party had caught up: he was speaking to the Ki. “What did you expect? You know who I am.”

  Tiamaat fell to her knees, with a wail of despair, pressing her hands to either side of her head. “He has a right! Ki territory is An territory, he has a right to behave as if we were at home. And the Others knew it, don’t you see? They knew!”

  The CSP officer yelled something inexcusable and lunged at the killer. Pelé grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him back, talking urgent sense. The Ki said nothing, but I thought Tiamaat was right. They’d known what the Diaspora’s pet monster would do in here; and he hadn’t let them down.

  Perfectly unconcerned, Baal stood guard over the body until Colonel Haa’agaan arrived with the closed cars. Then he picked it up and slung it over his shoulder. I travelled with him and his booty, and the protection of four Green Belts, to the elevator. Another blacked-out car waited for us on Parliament level. What a nightmare journey! We delivered him to the service entrance of his suite in the Sensitive Visitors Facility, and saw him drop the body insouciantly into the arms of one of his aides—a domestic, lesser specimen of those rare and dangerous animals, the An.

  The soldiers look at each other, looked at me. “You’d better stay,” I said. “And get yourselves reinforced, there might be reprisals planned.”

  Baal’s tawny eyes in my mind: challenging me, trusting me—

  The debriefing was in closed session; although there would be a transcript on record. It took a painful long time, but we managed to exonerate everyone, including Baal. Mistakes had been made, signals had been misread. We knew the facts of the KiAn problem, we had only the most rudimentary grasp of the cultures involved. Baal and Tiamaat, who were not present, had made no further comment. The Ki (who were not present either) had offered a swift deposition. They wanted the incident treated with utmost discretion: they did not see it as a bar to negotiation. The Balas/Shet party argued that Baal’s kill had been unique, an “extraordinary ritual” that we had to sanction. And we knew this was nonsense, but it was the best we could do.

  One of our Green Belts, struck by the place in the report where Tiamaat exclaims the Others knew it!, came up with the idea that the young Ki had been a form of suicide bomber: sacrificing his life in the hope of wrecking the peace talks. Investigation of the dead boy and his contacts would now commence.

  “Thank funx it didn’t happen on the live transmission!,” cried Shamaz, the old soldier; getting his priorities right.

  It was very late before Pelé and I got away. We spent the rest of the night together, hiding in the tenderness of the Blue Planet, where war is shameful and murder is an aberration; where kindness is common currency, and in almost every language strangers are greeted with love: dear, pet, darling; sister, brother, cousin, and nobody even wonders why. What an unexpected distinction, we who thought we were such ruthless villains, such fallen angels. “We’re turning into the care assistant caste for the whole funxing galaxy,” moaned Pelé. “Qué cacho!”

  The Parliament session was well attended: many tiers packed with bi-locators; more than the usual scatter of Members present in the flesh, and damn the expense. I surveyed the Chamber with distaste. They all wanted to make their speeches on the KiAn crisis. But they knew nothing. The freedom of the press fades and dies at interstellar distances, where everything has to be couriered, and there’s no such thing as evading official censorship. They’d heard about the genocide, the wicked but romantic An; the ruined world, the rescue plans. They had no idea exactly what had driven the rebel Ki to such desperation, and they weren’t going to find out.

  All the Diaspora Parliament knew was spin.

  And the traditional Ki, the people we were dealing with, were collusive. They didn’t like being killed and eaten by their aristos, but for outsiders to find out the truth would be a far worse evil: a disgusting, gross exposure. After all, it was only the poor, the weak minded and the disadvantaged, who ended up on a plate…Across from the Visitors’ Gallery, level with my eyes, hung the great Diaspora Banner. The populated worlds turned sedately, beautifully scanned and insanely close together; like one of those ancient distorted projections of the landmasses on the Blue. The “real” distance between the Blue system and Neuendan (our nearest neighbour) was twenty six thousand light years. Between the Neuendan and the Balas/Shet lay fifteen hundred light years; the location of the inscrutable Aleutians’ homeworld was a mystery. How would you represent our spatial relationship, in any realistic way?

  “Why do they say it all aloud?” asked Baal, idly.

  He was beside me, of course. He was glad to have me there, and kept letting me know it: a confiding pressure against my shoulder, a warm glance from those tawny eyes. He took my complete silence about the incident in Hopes and Dreams Park for understanding. A DP Social Support Officer never shows hostility.

  “Isn’t your i/t button working?”

  The instantaneous translation in here had a mind of its own.

  “It works well enough. But everything they say is just repeating the documents on this desk. It was the same in the briefing yesterday, I noticed that.”

  “You read English?”

  “Oh yes.” Reading and writing have to be learned, there is no quick neuro-fix. Casually, with a glint of that startling irony, he dismissed his skill. “I was taught, at home. But I don’t bother. I have people who understand all this for me.”

  “It’s called oratory,” I said. “And rhetoric. Modulated speech is used to stir peoples’ em
otions, to cloud the facts and influence the vote—”

  Baal screwed up his handsome face in disapproval. “That’s distasteful.”

  “Also it’s tradition. It’s just the way we do things.”

  “Ah!”

  I sighed, and sent a message to Pelé on our eye socket link.

  Change partners?

  D’you want to reassign?, came his swift response. He was worrying about me, he wanted to protect me from the trauma of being with Baal; which was a needle under my skin. I liked Pelé very much, but I preferred to treat the Diaspora Parliament as a no-ties singles bar.

  No, I answered. Just for an hour, after this.

  Getting close to Tiamaat was easy. After the session the four of us went down to the Foyer, where Baal was quickly surrounded by a crowd of high-powered admirers. They swept him off somewhere, with Pelé in attendance. Tiamaat and I were left bobbing in the wake, ignored; a little lost. “Shall we have coffee, Debra?” she suggested, with dignity. “I love coffee. But not the kind that comes on those trolleys!”

  I took her to “my” kiosk, and we found a table. I was impressed by the way she handled the slights of her position. There goes Baal, surrounded by the mighty, while his partner is reduced to having coffee with a minder…It was a galling role to have to play in public. I had intended to lead up to the topic on my mind: but she forestalled me. “You must be horrified by what happened yesterday.”

  No hostility. “A little horrified, I admit.” I affected to hesitated “The Balas/Shet say that what Baal did was a ritual, confirming his position as leader; and the Ki expected it. They may even have arranged for the victim to be available. And it won’t happen again. Are they right?”

  She sipped her cappuchino. “Baal doesn’t believe he did anything wrong,” she answered, carefully; giving nothing away.

  I remembered her cry of despair. “But what do you think?”

  “I can speak frankly?”

  “You can say anything. We may seem to be in public, but nothing you say to me, or that I say to you, can be heard by anyone else.”

  “Speranza is a very clever place!”

  “Yes, it is…And as you know, though the system itself will have a record, as your Social Support Officer I may not reveal anything you ask me to keep to myself.”

  She gave me eye-contact then, very deliberately. I realised I’d never seen her look anyone in the eye. The colour of her irises was a subtle, lilac-starred grey.

  “Before I left home, when I was a child, I ate meat. I hadn’t killed it, but I knew where it came from. But I have never killed, Debra. And now I don’t believe I ever will.” She looked out at the passing crowd, the surroundings that must be so punishingly strange to her. “My mother said we should close ourselves off to the past, and open ourselves to the future. So she sent me away, when I was six years’ old, to live on another world—”

  “That sounds very young to me.”

  “I was young. I still had my milk teeth…I’m not like Baal, because I have been brought up differently. If I were in his place things would be better for the Others. I truly believe that—” She meant the Ki, the prey-nations. “But I know what has to be done for KiAn. I want this rescue package to work. Baal is the one who will make it happen, and I support him in every way.”

  She smiled, close-lipped, no flash of sharp white: I saw the poised steel in her, hidden by ingrained self-suppression. And she changed the subject, with composure. Unexpected boldness, unexpected finesse…

  “Debra, is it true that Blue people have secret super-powers?”

  I laughed and shook my head. “I’m afraid not. No talking flowers here!”

  Pelé tried to get the DP software to change our codenames. He maintained that Baal and Tiamaat were not even from the same mythology, and if we were going to invoke the gods those two should be Aztecs: Huehueteotl, ripping the living heart from his victims…The bots refused. They said they didn’t care if they were mixing their mysticisms. Codenames were a device to avoid accidental offense until the system had assimilated a new user language. “Baal” and “Tiamaat” were perfectly adequate, and the Meso-American names had too many characters.

  I had dinner with Baal, in the Sensitive Visitor Facility. He was charming company: we ate vegetarian fusion cuisine, and I tried not to think about the butchered meat in the kitchen of his suite. On the other side of the room bull-shouldered Colonel Haa’agaan ate alone; glancing at us covertly with small, sad eyes from between the folds of his slatey head-hide. Shamaz had been hard hit by what had happened in the Hopes and Dreams Park. But his orange and yellow aura-tag was still bright and I knew mine was, too. By the ruthless measures of interstellar diplomacy everything was still going well; set for success.

  If things had been different I might have joined Pelé again when I was finally off duty. As it was I retired to my room, switched all the décor, including ceiling and floor, to starry void, mixed myself a kicking neurochemical cocktail; and applied the popper to my throat. Eyedrops are faster but I wanted the delay, I wanted to feel myself coming apart. Surrounded by directionless immensity I sipped chilled water, brooding. How can a people have World Government, space-flight level industrialisation, numinal intelligence, and yet the ruling caste are still killing and eating the peasants? How can they do that, when practically everyone on KiAn admits they are a single species, differently adapted: and they knew that before we told them. How can we be back here, the Great Powers and their grisly parasites: making the same moves, the same old mistakes, the same old hateful compromises, that our Singularity was supposed to cure forever?

  Why is moral development so difficult? Why are predators charismatic?

  The knots in my frontal lobes were combed out by airy fingers, I fell into the sea of possibilities, I went to the place of terror and joy that no one understands unless they have been there. I asked my question and I didn’t get an answer, you never get an answer. Yet when I came to the shallows again, when I laid myself, exhausted, on this dark and confused shore, I knew what I was going to do: I had seen it.

  But there always has to be an emotional reason. I’d known about Baal’s views before I arrived. I’d known that he would hunt and kill “weakling” Ki, as was his traditional right, and not just once, he’d do it whenever the opportunity arose; and I’d still been undecided. It was Tiamaat who made the difference. I’d met her, skin on skin as we say. I knew what the briefing had not been able to tell me. She was no cipher, superficially “civilised” by her education, she was suppressed. I had heard that cry of despair and anger, when she saw what Baal had done. I had talked to her. I knew she had strength and cunning, as well as good intentions. A latent dominance, the will and ability to be a leader.

  I saw Baal’s look of challenge and trust, even now—

  But Tiamaat deserved saving, and I would save her.

  The talks went on. Morale was low on the DP side, because the refugee camp incident had shown us where we stood; but the Ki delegates were happy—insanely, infuriatingly. The “traditional diet of the An” was something they refused to discuss, and they were going to get their planet rebuilt anyway. The young An leaders spent very little time at the conference table. Baal was indifferent—he had people to understand these things for him—and Tiamaat could not be present without him. This caused a rift. Their aides, the only other An around, were restricted to the SV Facility suites (we care assistants may be crazy but we’re not entirely stupid). Pelé and I were fully occupied, making sure our separate charges weren’t left moping alone. Pelé took Tiamaat shopping and visiting museums, (virtual and actual). I found that Baal loved to roam, just as I do myself, and took him exploring the lesser-known sights.

  We talked about his background. Allegedly, he’d given up a promising career in the Space Marines to take on the leadership. When I’d assured myself that his pilot skills were real, he wasn’t just a toy-soldier aristo, I finally took him on the long float through the permanent umbilical, to Right Speranza.
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  We had to suit up at the other end.

  “What’s this?” demanded Baal, grinning. “Are we going outside?”

  “You’ll see. It’s an excursion I thought you’d enjoy.”

  The suits were programmable. I watched him set one up for his size and bulk, and knew he was fine: but I put him through the routines, to make sure. Then I took him into the vasty open cavern of the DP’s missile repository, which we crossed like flies in a cathedral, hooking our tethers to the girders, drifting over the ranked silos of deep-space interceptors, the giant housing of particle cannons.

  All of it obsolete, like castle walls in the age of heavy artillery; but it looks convincing on the manifest, and who knows? “Modern” armies have been destroyed by Zulu spears, it never pays to ignore the conventional weapons—

  “Is this a weapons bay?” the monster exclaimed; scandalised on suit radio.

  “Of course,” said I. “Speranza can defend herself, if she has to.”

  I let us into a smaller hangar, through a lock on the cavern wall, and filled it with air and pressure; and lights. We were completely alone. Left Speranza is a natural object, a hollowed asteroid. Right is artificial, and it’s a dangerous place for sentient bipeds. The proximity of the torus can have unpredictable and bizarre effects, not to mention the tissue-frying radiation that washes through at random intervals. But we would be fine for a short while. We fixed tethers, opened our faceplates and hunkered down, gecko-padded boot soles clinging to the arbitrary “floor.”