“Rain! Clouds!” she bellowed. “I saw you!” Did she think I’d brought the rain? Most vagrants I’ve known are superstitious as hell.
“The rain is not my fault,” I said carefully, close to her ear. She pulled back, looking supremely irritated.
“I saw you. Sky come down and kiss you!” She stared at me, her eyes hard and demanding and expectant. I burst out laughing. The one person who might have appreciated what she’d said had been dead for almost a quarter of a century and had nothing to do with either one of us anyway.
“Sky comes down to kiss you, too, soon,” I said, poking her breastbone with my finger. She slapped my hand away, but not very hard, and blinked at me in the rain, which was becoming an honest-to-god pavement-cleaning and gutter-clogging downpour. I got up and hustled her across the street to a Metro entrance, but she balked at the top of the steps, holding onto the railing with both arms and kicking out at me.
“Okay, okay, I get it: you’re a claustrophobe.” I pushed her into a doorway just big and deep enough to keep the worst of the rain off us. “Or something bad happened to you down there. More likely, eh?”
She looked up at me, puzzled. I smoothed both hands over her face, letting my fingers slide into her hair. Her body stiffened but she didn’t try to get away. In her life, there was always something like this. Living through it was important; how, less so.
I had never tried to yield to a human or to another of my kind before. The idea had never even occurred to me until now. I wasn’t even sure I could, although there certainly was enough left in me. They never took everything, maybe because there are so many similar things, or maybe because some of the things just aren’t to their taste.
In any case, once the idea was in my head, I wanted to try it. It would be an experience that was mine alone. I’d never thought in terms like that before and it was like the notion was tickling me with an urgency all its own.
The rain was machine-gunning on the sidewalk, splattering us with mist from the impact as I pulled her face close and put my mouth over hers. Her lips were cold and thin like the rest of her, though not entirely unpleasant. Things weren’t quite right—I moved her jaw so that her lips encircled my mouth instead. She wasn’t sure about this and started to pull away, but I had one fist braced against her upper back and the back of her head cupped in my other hand. She had no organ of taking the way they did, or rather, no specific organ, but what she had should serve.
She struggled a little more, and I could feel the panic start to rise in her. The noise of the rain was almost unbearable now, the kind of white noise people must hear in the depths of madness, I thought, and wondered how long I’d be able to tolerate it myself.
Then I felt it give; the place inside me reserved for them opened gently, sensing the nearness of a recipient, and found her in a matter of seconds. It was not what I or the ability was accustomed to and I had some bad moments when I thought she might reject what I had to yield. But then some instinct took over and she accepted in the same way she had been accepting everything else in her life.
Some time later, we just stood holding onto each other. The rain pounded as if it meant to pulverize the cement. Used transit tickets dissolved into aqua pulp and then disappeared altogether.
“You bastard,” she whispered to me in French. “You abortion. If you were human, the best part of you would have run down your father’s leg.”
I pulled back from her, not understanding. She was radiating a satedness that didn’t go with her words. “Some would say I carved off the best parts, or at least the most useful,” I said, “but why do you?”
“You pet. Are you really going to give that to these—whatever, these things that live in clouds—”
“They don’t live there,” I said.
“Shut up. Fuck you, you don’t understand. You betray your own kind, surrendering to them when we could be doing this for each other.” She stared up at me, her no-color eyes moving so very slightly as she searched my face. “Now do you get it, you stupid robot? You stupid slave!”
She clamped her mouth over mine again, but there wasn’t much left and after a few moments she pushed me away. “C’est bien, I know what to do now,” she told me. “And not as somebody’s dog to kick, either. How about it, you want to walk on your hind legs for a change?”
That didn’t sound so bad, even though I knew I’d done something very wrong and precipitated something even more wrong. But, I thought, what was it to them anyway? Did they even look at me until they wanted what I had? Did they protect me, did they find me any place to go? For all I knew, they thought as much of me as a maid thinks of a vacuum cleaner when the inside bag needs to be changed.
“Come on, pet,” my blonde spat at me. “Let me show you what it’s like to be something real, if you think you can face it.” She pulled me out of the doorway into the rain, which was still heavy, though not as bad as it had been. I wiped my face with my forearm and she laughed at me. “Bête! Stupide!” But she didn’t run very far ahead of me before coming back to lead me along.
The word ripped up and down the paved banks of the Seine faster than a tourist-borne chancre. I waited to see what this would bring, who would come forward and either denounce us or beg to join in. Well, nobody did. She and I were the only ones of our kind there, it seemed. If others were in the city, they were far away and/or uninterested.
My little blonde ran a come-on that made all the johns hot and bothered to the extreme and then, just before they would have nailed her by force, she came across. To one of the ones she had originally enlisted to protect her from me, no less; the experience totaled him. He agreed to pimp for both of us for no more reward than to be allowed to partake again.
That she and I would pleasure each other that way was understandable, but what could humans find so enthralling about the human experience? And if they had no natural method or organ of accepting the yield, how did they do it?
She only laughed when I said anything, spoke rapid, incomprehensible French at me, and trotted away to some tourist waiting for what he’d been told would be the ultimate in delectables, unusual even for unseen Paris.
“She says you ask a slave’s questions,” one of her new bodyguards told me helpfully. “She says you may talk to her directly again when you have evolved a backbone.” He thought this was hilarious; I was simply amazed that he knew what it meant. He was a dirty pervert who had evolved a belly to balance off his own backbone. I meant to spit on his pants but for some reason I couldn’t get enough wet in my mouth.
I suppose she got rich, by vagrants’ standards. I hid out closer to where the tourists took the dinner boats. Many drank themselves into near-stupors, enough to allow themselves to be lured away for interludes they never remembered afterwards. It was more dangerous, though, because the boat owners and the police cared more about who was hanging around there, and less satisfying because it was on the fly and in secret—not like finding people who will take you in, talk to you, and give you a little help when they throw you out again. I was not working right. So much for my hind legs. I wondered what they would think when I yielded again. And then I wondered if they would even notice.
The big-bellied pervert was the one who came to get me in the middle of the night. I woke up over his shoulder in a familiar though distasteful position, not understanding at first that I was being carried off. He had to let me down to explain that there was something wrong with her and she had been calling for me.
“A good trick,” I said, “since she doesn’t know my name.”
“Nobody knows anyone’s name,” he told me, “but we all knew who she meant, and we all knew where you were.” I let him lead me up the Seine to where she was, on her old spot where she had once confounded the Batobus people with her nude sunbathing. The moon was full, or nearly so, and there were a lot of people with her. Some seemed to be trying to tend to her, while others were grouped around a man who was apparently waiting with great and graceless impatience for something.
I knew, of course, what that was.
She lay on the pavement like a used rag and I thought she was unconscious. But she must have smelled me; I saw her push herself up on one elbow. Croaking something in French, she pointed at the man who didn’t look all that thrilled to see a creature like me come on the scene.
“She says you’re the only one who can take care of him and they’ll both die if you don’t.” This from her pimp/protector.
“Just give him back his money and tell him to go home,” I said, squatting down in front of her and lifting her face to the moonlight. Her skin looked bruised. I thought the john had beaten her up but I was wrong; she’d done this to herself, straining to yield what she no longer had.
“I can’t,” said the john warily. “We have a problem here. What are you, her keeper?”
“Not hardly,” I said. He spoke English well but in a slow and deliberate way that suggested he wasn’t comfortable with the language.
“Her partner, then?” He didn’t sound hopeful about it.
“What if I were?” I asked him, standing up and facing him. “What if I were and you had to do the thing with me if you wanted to do it at all?” His eyes narrowed and I laughed at him. “Go home, monsieur. Give it up. Hit the road, Jacques.”
“I told you, I can’t.” He produced a handkerchief; the blood on it looked black, which was how I knew it was blood. Blood always looks black in the moonlight. “You want to see, I’ll show you.” He took a few steps back and I saw it happen. He was crying blood.
“It feels worse than it looks,” he said, moving toward me quickly. “And pressure in my ears. Any further, I’ll bleed from those, too.” He dabbed at his face, shaking his head. “I am not a superstitious man or a bad man. But she came to me—”
“Yes, yes, the woman tempted you,” I said. “It’s going around, eh?”
“She came to me,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken, “and sometimes I am a weak man. But what did I do so bad to cry blood?” I looked down at her and she looked back at me, breathing in deep, shuddery gasps. Probably no hope for her, unless there was something I could do—
“I don’t want to do a thing with anyone now,” the john said. “Especially you. But to end this—” he shrugged. “Is there some other way?”
I had to shake my head.
He spoke through a painful breath. “Then we do this quick. If we can.” I could see that he wanted to ask me if that was possible, but he couldn’t quite because he was afraid that the answer would be no. I didn’t know if we could do it quick or not. I wasn’t really ready to yield yet, I didn’t know how long it would take me. Especially with an audience. I looked around. Such a big audience, too; every Seine rat seemed to be in on this tonight, and maybe a few regular citizens in vagrant drag as well, for all I knew.
I had a few moments of pity for this weak man and for my blonde, also weak, and for myself, perhaps the weakest of all. I might have wanted to blame her rat’s greed and lust, but this was my fault. Careful to stay within a certain distance of her, I pushed the john into the shadows of the willows along the wall.
“Here,” I said, backing him up against the stone. He stiffened as I took him by the throat, but he didn’t try to push me away. At least he knew that it was going to be something other than an especially adept handjob.
I had thought to make it as quick and painless as possible, but after five minutes fading in and out of a halfassed trance state, I knew I couldn’t do it for him. Quirk, mine or hers? Either mine for being unable to do a human, or hers for being able to?
“She—” he croaked, and then began coughing. I loosened my grip on his throat, realizing he was right. She, indeed. She would have to complete the circuit before anything could happen.
I pushed him back against the wall and gestured for him to stay, and then went to get her. Lifted her up onehanded. She’d been siphoning off her own substance so that now her very bones must have been hollow tubes. Hollow tubes with a little soft-chewed leather stretched over them; she dragged along under my arm, her feet bumping the pavement but no complaints about it, none whatsoever.
As soon as he saw me coming back with her, he knew it was right. “What do I do?” he half-whispered to me.
I put her hands on each of his shoulders. “Hold her,” I said. “Lean back so she can stay up on you without trying.” Her head flopped forward and nestled under his chin, so that they really did look a lot like lovers. I yanked her head back by her hair and managed to maneuver his face into position, so that finally her mouth was on his eye. It was difficult, given our height differences and her limpness, but I was able to position my own mouth on her eye.
I had barely done so when her need seized on me and ran all through me, searching for the best and the most substantial that I had. This would not be a yielding, I realized, no matter how passive I was to it, to her. What there had been in her to gather information had mutated into a drive rapacious, hungry, and without intelligence or compassion.
It found the issue from the dinner boat patrons I had lured: a man who had had the experience of loving one person but being bound to another for many years, until the one he had been bound to had died; discovering, once he was free to join the other that it had been the barrier and not the hope of consummation that had kept that love alive;
a woman who had filled her emotional needs with material goods so that objects were passions for her now while other people’s passions were messy and distasteful;
a man who had done terrible things to his children in the sincere belief that it would prepare them to live in a world that would do far worse;
a woman who stole things without understanding that she was trying to recover something she believed had been stolen from her long ago;
a man who was a man by accident and a woman by intention;
a woman who had carved off in spirit what I had carved off in fact;
a teacher who had never learned a single one of her own lessons;
a priest whose faith had failed when he realized that he loved another priest.
Each was seized, examined, gobbled up, digested, and claimed. I relived each one, felt the explosion of knowledge in the pivotal moment and then felt it ripped away from me and absorbed by my skinny blonde, who then applied it to the man with such force that I thought she might be purposely trying to kill him.
She couldn’t help it, I saw; this had become something she had to do, or die. I felt him trembling under the onslaught, unable to produce enough will in himself to want to refuse her. Her need would kill him, and probably me, too, while leaving her alive, though just barely, and still in need.
I didn’t want to do it just then but there was no good time; while his body was in spasm, I pulled up both my hands and snapped her neck.
The sudden absence was deafening, blinding, dizzying; we swayed from side to side with her still pressed between us, and I heard him sob, or groan, or just make meaningless noise. He did it again and I realized he had said Gaston—in the act of saving us from her, I had let that come through and he knew now what I had done.
I stepped back and let her fall to the pavement. “You can go safely now, I think,” I told him.
He was clutching his head with both hands but he managed to nod.
“Don’t even think about telling anyone what you know,” I said, “or what you think you know. And don’t come down here again looking for anything, or I’ll eat you alive myself.”
He promised, wiping quite ordinary tears from his eyes, and staggered up the steps to the rue whatever-it-was.
The Seine rats weighted her body with stones and dumped it in the water. One of them bet that it would dissolve down there before it had a chance to float. I cleaned up and gorged myself at the Louvre and at Notre Dame. All tourists, of course, nothing but tourists, who spoke French to me in accents of varying atrociousness and gave me more information about themselves than I had ever thought of asking for. I kept hoping one of them would take me home, wherever that was
.
I couldn’t stand the smell of that river any more. It was as if the rat had been right and her body really had dissolved, poisoning the entire body of water and everything it touched. The essence of her seemed to be in the air; I didn’t understand how the tourists didn’t choke, or how the rats themselves could stand it. Till the end of Juin, then, I lived in the Metro with the beggars, emerging when I thought they should come again for my yield.
They didn’t. I waited at L’Opera, near the Louvre, below the Eiffel Tower and finally on the banks of the Seine, but they didn’t come. They weren’t coming—not just taking a long time about it, but really not coming. I went a little crazy, and then a lot crazy. The Seine rats, sensing my trouble with that bizarre and unerring instinct for hurting someone by helping, directed her old johns my way, telling them I was the sole surviving practitioner of her odd art.
Her art. It’s a laugh.
I held on as long as I could, but I was made to yield and I did, choosing those as clean as I could find for it. I could do it without her now; the circuit, once completed, stayed completed. Humans did not have much capacity, so it took more of them to yield to, and they weren’t as good at it, but they were better than ceasing to be.
Or maybe they weren’t. I just didn’t have the nerve to test that out.
It’s because I turned from them to her, of course; I chose her to yield to and whether they consider this is some unforgivable sin or just a dirty, unnatural act, I’ll never know, because they have left me here to go on or to cease on my own, and I can tell by the great empty sky that they will never be there again for me. I’ll never even see them come for another of my kind.
(Maybe it was her. Maybe she was defective and they consider me tainted because of my association with her.)
So everything is a little bit looser and messier than it used to be, but the world being what it is won’t notice, so I don’t imagine it will ever really matter. And since it won’t, I tell what I know promiscuously, to anyone, everyone within my range, wherever I am. I’ve learned to do what she should have, to siphon off here and siphon off there, and I have a Seine rat’s instincts as well now, so that I only dispense the exact knowledge nobody wants at the exact moment they don’t want it.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 45
