Grazing The Long Acre

by Gwyneth Jones

  “I thought you were angels,” he remarked, shyly. “The weapons, all of that, it seems beneath you. Doesn’t your codename, “Debra” mean an angel? Aren’t you all messengers, come to us from the Mighty Void?”

  ‘Mighty Void’ was a Balas/Shet term meaning something like God.

  “No…Deborah was a judge, in Israel. I’m just human Baal. I’m a person with numinal intelligence, the same kind of being as you are; like all the KiAn.”

  I could see that the harsh environment of Right Speranza moved him, as it did me. There was a mysterious peace and truth in being here, in the cold dark, breathing borrowed air. He was pondering: open and serious.

  “Debra…? Do you believe in the Diaspora?”

  “I believe in the Weak Theory,” I said. “I don’t believe we’re all descended from the same Blue Planet hominid, the mysterious original starfarers, precursors of homo sapiens. I think we’re the same because we grew under the same constraints: time, gravity, hydrogen bonds; the nature of water, the nature of carbon—”

  “But instantaneous transit was invented on the Blue Planet,” he protested, unwilling to lose his romantic vision.

  “Only the prototype. It took hundreds of years, and a lot of outside help, before we had anything like viable interstellar travel—”

  Baal had other people to understand the technology for him. He was building castles in the air, dreaming of his future. “Does everyone on the Blue speak English?”

  “Not at all. They mostly speak a language called putonghua; which means ‘common speech,’ as if they were the only people in the galaxy. Blues are as insular as the KiAn, believe me, when they’re at home. When you work for the DP, you change your ideas; it happens to everyone. I’m still an Englishwoman, and mi naño Pelé is still a man of Ecuador.

  “I know!,” he broke in, eagerly, “I felt that. I like that in you!”

  “But we skip the middle term. The World Government of our single planet doesn’t mean the same as it did.” I grinned at him. “Hey, I didn’t bring you here for a lecture. This is what I wanted to show you. See the pods?”

  He looked around us, slowly, with a connoisseur’s eye. He could see what the pods were. They were Aleutian-build, the revolutionary leap forward: vehicles that could pass through the mind/matter barrier. An end to those dreary transit lounges, true starflight, the whole grail: and only the Aleutians knew how it was done.

  “Like to take one out for a spin?”

  “You’re kidding!” cried Baal, his eyes alight.

  “No I’m not. We’ll take a two man pod. How about it?”

  He saw that I was serious, which gave him pause. “How can we? The systems won’t allow it. This hangar has to be under military security.”

  “I am military security, Baal. So is Pelé. What did you think we were? Kindergarten teachers? Trust me, I have access, there’ll be no questions asked.”

  He laughed. He knew there was something strange going on, but he didn’t care: he trusted me. I glimpsed myself as a substitute for Tiamaat, glimpsed the relationship he should have had with his partner. Not sexual, but predation-based: a playful tussle, sparring partners. But Tiamaat had not wanted to be his sidekick—

  We took a pod. Once we were inside I sealed us off from Speranza, and we lay side by side in the couches, two narrow beds in a torpedo shell: an interstellar sports car, how right for this lordly boy. I checked his hook-ups, and secured my own..

  “Where are we going?”

  “Oh, just around the block.”

  His vital signs were in my eyes, his whole being was quivering in excitement, and I was glad. The lids closed, we were translated into code, we and our pod were injected into the torus, in the form of a triple stream of pure information, divided and shooting around the ring to meet itself, and collide—

  I sat up, in a lucent gloom. The other bed’s seal opened, and Baal sat up beside me. We were both still suited, with open faceplates. Our beds shaped themselves into pilot and co-pilot couches, and we faced what seemed an unmediated view of the deep space outside. Bulwarks and banks of glittering instruments carved up the panorama: I saw Baal’s glance flash over the panels greedily, longing to be piloting this little ship for real. Then he saw the yellow primary, a white hole in black absence; and its brilliant, distant partner. He saw the pinpricks of other formations that meant nothing much to me, and he knew where I had brought him. We could not see the planet, it was entirely dark from this view. But in our foreground the massive beams of space-to-space lasers were playing: shepherding plasma particles into a shell that would hold the recovering atmosphere in place.

  To say that KiAn had been flayed alive was no metaphor. The people still living on the surface were in some kind of hell. But it could be saved.

  “None of the machinery is strictly material,” I said, “in any normal sense. It was couriered here, as information, in the living minds of the people who are now on station. We can’t see them, but they’re around, in pods like this one. It will all disintegrate, when the repairs are done. But the skin of your world will be whole again, it won’t need to be held in place.”

  The KiAn don’t cry, but I was so close to him, in the place where we were, that I felt his tears. “Why are you doing this?” he whispered. “You must be angels, or why are you saving us, what have we done to deserve this?”

  “The usual reasons,” I said. “Market forces, political leverage, power play.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Then I don’t know what to tell you, Baal. Except that the Ki and the An have numinal intelligence. You are like us, and we have so few brothers and sisters. Once we’d found you, we couldn’t bear to lose you.”

  I let him gaze, for a long moment without duration.

  “I wanted you to see this.”

  I stepped out of my pilot’s couch and stood braced: one hand gecko-padded to the inner shell, while I used the instruments to set the pod to self-destruct. The eject beacon started up, direct cortical warning that my mind read as a screaming siren—

  “Now I’m going back to Speranza. But you’re not.”

  The fine young cannibal took a moment to react. The pupils in his tawny eyes widened amazingly when found that he was paralysed; and his capsule couldn’t close.

  “Is this a dream?”

  “Not quite. It’s a confabulation. It’s what happens when you stay conscious in transit. The mind invents a stream of environments, events. The restoration of KiAn is real, Baal. It will happen. We can see it ‘now’ because we’re in non-duration, we’re experiencing the simultaneity. In reality—if that makes any sense, language hates these situations—we’re still zipping around the torus. But when the confabulation breaks up you’ll still be in deep space and about to die.”

  I did not need to tell him why I was doing this. He was no fool, he knew why he had to go. But his mind was still working, fighting—

  “Speranza is a four-space mapped environment. You can’t do this and go back alone. The system knows you were with me, every moment. The record can’t be changed, no way, without the tampering leaving a trace.”

  “True. But I am one of those rare people who can change the information. You’ve heard fairytales about us, the Blues who have super-powers? I’m not an angel, Baal. Actually it’s a capital crime to be what I am, where I come from. But Speranza understands me. Speranza uses me.”

  “Ah!,” he cried. “I knew it, I felt it. We are the same!”

  When I recovered self-consciousness I was in my room, alone. Earlier in the day Baal had claimed he needed a nap. After a couple of hours I’d become suspicious, checked for his signs and found him missing: gone from the SV Facility screen. I’d been trying to trace him when Right Speranza had detected a pod, with the An leader on board, firing up. The system had warned him to desist. Baal had carried on, and paid high price for his attempted joyride. The injection had failed, both Baal and one fabulous Aleutian-build pod had been annihilated.

  Remembe
ring this much gave me an appalling headache—the same aching awfulness I imagine shapeshifters (I know of one or two) feel in their muscle and bone. I couldn’t build the bridge at all: no notion how I’d connected between this reality and the former version. I could have stepped from the dying pod straight through the wall of this pleasant, modest living space. But it didn’t matter. I would find out, and Debra would have been behaving like Debra.

  Pelé came knocking. I let him in and we commiserated, both of us in shock. We’re advocates, not enforcers, there’s very little we can do if a Sensitive Visitor is really determined to go AWOL. We’d done all the right things, short of using undue force, and so had Speranza. When we’d broken the privilege locks, Baal’s room record had shown that he’d been spying out how to get access to one of those Aleutian pods. It was just too bad that he’d succeeded, and that he’d had enough skill to get himself killed. Don’t feel responsible, said Pelé. It’s not your fault. Nobody thinks that. Don’t be so sad. Always so sad, Debra: it’s not good for the brain, you should take a break. Then he started telling me that frankly, nobody would regret Baal. By An law Tiamaat could now rule alone; and if she took a partner, we could trust her not to choose another bloodthirsty atavist…I soon stopped him. I huddled there in pain, my friend holding my hand: seeing only the beautiful one, his tawny eyes at the last, his challenge and his trust; mourning my victim.

  I’m a melancholy assassin.

  I did not sleep. In the grey calm of Left Speranza’s early hours, before the breakfast kiosks were awake, I took the elevator to the Customised Shelter Sector, checked in with the CSP and made my way, between the silent capsule towers, to Hopes and Dreams Park. I was disappointed that there were no refugees about. It would have been nice to see Ki children, playing fearlessly. Ki oldsters picking herbs from their windowboxes, instead of being boiled down for soup themselves. The gates of the Sacred Grove were open, so I just walked in. There was a memorial service: strictly no outsiders, but I’d had a personal message from Tiamaat saying I would be welcome. I didn’t particularly want to meet her again. I’m a superstitious assassin, I felt that she would somehow know what I had done for her. I thought I would keep to the back of whatever gathering I found, while I made my own farewell.

  The daystar’s rays had cleared the false horizon, the sun was a rumour of gold between the trees. I heard laughter, and a cry. I walked into the clearing and saw Tiamaat. She’d just made the kill. I saw her toss the small body down, drop to her haunches and take a ritual bite of raw flesh; I saw the blood on her mouth. The Ki looked on, keeping their distance in a solemn little cluster. Tiamaat transformed, splendid in her power, proud of her deed, looked up; and straight at me. I don’t know what she expected. Did she think I would be glad for her? Did she want me to know how I’d been fooled? Certainly she knew she had nothing to fear. She was only doing the same as Baal had done, and the DP had made no protest over his kill. I shouted, like an idiot: Hey, stop that! , and the whole group scattered. They vanished into the foliage, taking the body with them.

  I said nothing to anyone. I had not, in fact, foreseen that Tiamaat would become a killer. I’d seen a talented young woman, who would blossom if the unfairly favoured young man was removed. I hadn’t realised that a dominant An would behave like a dominant An, irrespective of biological sex. But I was sure my employers had grasped the situation; and it didn’t matter. The long gone, harsh symbiosis between the An and the Ki, which they preserved in their rites of kingship, was not the problem. It was the modern version, the mass market in Ki meat, the intensive farms and the factories. Tiamaat would help us to get rid of those. She would embrace the new in public, whatever she believed in private.

  And the fate of the Ki would change.

  The news of Baal’s death had been couriered to KiAn and to the homeworlds by the time I took my transit back to the Blue. We’d started getting reactions: all positive, so to speak. Of course there would be persistent rumours that the Ki had somehow arranged Baal’s demise, but there was no harm in that. In certain situations, assassination works—as long as it is secret, or at least misattributed. It’s a far more benign tool than most alternatives; and a lot faster. I had signed off at the Social Support Office, I’d managed to avoid goodbyes. Just before I went through to the lounge I realised I hadn’t had my aura tag taken off. I had to go back, and go through another blessed gate; and Pelé caught me.

  “Take the dreamtime,” he insisted, holding me tight. “Play some silly game, go skydiving from Angel Falls. Please, Debra. Don’t be conscious. You worry me.”

  I wondered if he suspected what I really did for a living.

  Maybe so, but he couldn’t possibly understand.

  “I’ll give it serious thought,” I assured him, and kissed him goodbye.

  I gave the idea of the soft option serious thought for ten paces: passed into the lounge and found my narrow bed. I lay down there, beside my fine young cannibal, the boy who had known me for what I was. His innocent eyes…I lay down with them all, and with the searing terrors they bring; all my dead remembered.

  I needed to launder my soul.

  THE TOMB WIFE

  “In Lar’sz’ traditional society,” said the alien, “a lady would often be buried with her husband. A rather beautiful custom, don’t you think?”

  The Active Complement of the interstellar freighter stared at him, slightly alarmed. Their companion, the illustrious “passenger” who had elected to share their vigil, liked to play games with their expectations. They never knew when he was joking. Humour glinted in Sigurt’s black eyes—sharply diamond-shaped as to the rims, a curious and attractive difference from the Blue Planet oval.

  “No, no! Not buried alive. Not like that, not at all. She would live in the tomb: she would retire there of her own free will, to spend the rest of her days in peace and solitude.” He reached a claw-like fingernail to scratch his ear. “Lar’sz nobles and peasants continued the practice well into historical times. It’s the sons of the soil and the owners of the soil who preserve old cultural features, isn’t it? And the dispossessed, of course. Refugees.”

  They were gathered in the mess: seven Blue Planet humans, vital components in the freighter’s wetware: plus one celebrated alien archaeologist. The hold was laden with precious ancient artefacts from “Sigurt’s World”, on their way to an exhibition. The Cultural Ambassadors and their staff were making the crossing in dreamtime, but this black-eyed, shadow-skinned, graceful creature preferred activity. They were not clear—they weren’t good at reading the small print—whether “Sigurt” was a generic name, or whether their archaeologist was also the actual “Sigurt” who had made first contact. None of them had yet dared to ask him.

  It was a pleasant, low-ceilinged saloon, decorated in silver and green, the traditional colour scheme of the young culture of interstellar transport. Light gleamed from above like sunlight through leaves, the floor had the effects of grass and mosses. They sat around a blond wood table, actually extruded ceramic fibre, that faithfully recalled polished birch. The air was fresh and sweet, the whole impression was as if they were in a roomy tent, a pavilion pitched in sunny woodland, somewhere in the Blue Planet’s beautiful temperate zones. But outdoors the blizzard raged, pitiless, unimaginable. The hum of the torus was never-ending, they no longer heard it. And if it ever stopped, that deep subliminal murmur, they would not have time to notice it was gone.

  The Active Complement had just found out—Panfilo Nube, Payload Officer, had discovered the small print of the manifest, in an idle moment—that one of the pieces in the hold was supposed to be haunted. It was a tomb, but the ghost was not the official owner, so to speak. It was something called a “Tomb Wife”, some kind of ghoul associated with tombs in Lar’sz culture. Nadeem, the moody, black-browed Homeostat Commissar, had asked Sigurt—half-joking—was this spook definitely dead? They didn’t know much, but they knew that the people of Sigurt’s World were very long-lived, with a propensity for long comas when
times were hard. Sigurt had answered cheerfully that one could not be absolutely sure; and hence the explanation.

  “A Tomb Wife did not provide for herself, you see,” he continued. “She was a hermit, a sadhu.” He smiled at Nadeem, who did not smile back. “Her family or her servants would supply food and necessities, but they never saw her. Among the peasantry of course the widow simply went to live in the graveyard, in full view of her neighbours. Her exclusion from society was formal, ritual…”

  Rafael, the young Assistant Navigator, frowned uneasily. “But how can you say you’re not absolutely sure she’s dead? The relics down there are thousands of years old, aren’t they? I don’t mind, I’d just like to know. A ghost is cool, but a thing that lives in a tomb and isn’t dead, well—”

  In a starship’s psychological topography, the hold is always down. Nobody laughed. Rafe suffered from transit nightmares, an affliction as crippling as seasickness—but it didn’t affect his efficiency, or his passion for this strange ocean.

  “I think we can assume she’s dead,” said the mischievous alien. “In the records of Tene’Lar’sznh, the royal house to which this princess belonged, it’s noted that the food-offerings first went untouched about fifteen hundred years ago, our time. That’s about four thousand of Blue years, I think?”

  The Active Complement nodded hurriedly, in unison. Vast timescales made them nervous. A little less, thought Elen, the Navigator. She was intimately aware of the relation between a Blue Planet “year” and the same period for Sigurt’s planet; as she was aware of every detail of the impossible equations of this journey. She wanted to put Sigurt right, but how would she reach the end of that sentence? But when, in what relation, at what particular moment? She closed the floodgates with an effort.

  “The food went untouched?” she repeated. “And that’s how they knew? So, what did they do, when a Tomb Wife’s food ‘went untouched’?”