by James Morrow
Tez excused herself from the company, explaining that surprise holidays were always a mixed blessing because duties still accumulated. “Quetzalians owe you their lives,” she said to Burne. “We shall always be in your debt. I just hope it’s never the other way around.”
“WHAT DID SHE MEAN by that?” Burne asked when Tez was in the bedroom.
“She means we can’t expect much help getting Darwin back.”
Burne tipped his wineglass and gulped. “Do you love her?”
“She’s the finest thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“Finer than Cortexclavus? Is this really Francis Lostwax I’m drinking with?”
“You’re not seeing Tez at her best. Her father may die. And something’s come between us.”
“Something?”
“By which I mean nothing. The fifty million kilometers of nothing from Nearth to Luta. Love across planetary lines is folly, Burne.”
At this point Francis could not resist startling his friend with some casual clairvoyance. “Speaking of love, what became of that pretty woman you raped?”
Burne gagged. “She didn’t fight it!” He spat a tongueful of wine on the rug. “How in hell did you know?”
Slowly, and in great detail, Francis told how. He told about sneaking into the Temple of Tolca and seeing urges released in dreams. He repeated the history of Zolmec, from The Teller to the Brain Eaters to Janet Vij, the genius who invented her own private science.
Burne had visited too many planets, seen too many marvels, been appalled too many times to doubt a single word. When Francis was finished, his friend merely added, “It’s all rather clever, don’t you think?”
“Quetzalia is certainly unique,” said Francis. “Every religion says war is evil, but one way or another they end up playing along. There were the Toltecs, of course.”
“And the Quakers.”
“But none of them had a systematic way to blow off steam. They had no machines.” He said the word sneeringly. “Just ideals.”
Burne replenished his wineglass. “How do you feel about all this, Lostwax? Have the Quetzalians sacrificed their humanity for the sake of absolute domestic tranquility?”
“A good question. I wonder what they’d be like without Zolmec.”
“Maybe we could find out.” He dug a granite pegmatite from his robe, moved it toward Francis like a magician displaying a newly materialized dove. “Our ticket home. The southern jungles are lousy with pollucite ore.”
“Burne, you’re a certified deity!”
“The problem, of course, is transporting the stuff through neurovore country. We’re going to need a small army.”
“You’ve come to the wrong planet.”
“True, but suppose, just suppose, that a few hundred of these pagans stayed away from the Temple of Tolca? After four or five opochs, wouldn’t they be a little feisty? Hell, they’d be ready to kill.”
“How do we convince them to stop going?”
“How does a potter convince clay to become a vase? He pulls and pushes, and the message gets through.”
A choking dread crept over Francis. “Burne, you know I want to get out of here and win that Poelsig Award. As for the neurovores, they deserve whatever drubbings we can give them.” Edging toward the fire, he studied the darting spikes of flame. “But what you’re proposing is ugly. Zolmec goes back two centuries, and in that time no one has missed a service. We mustn’t tamper with such a tradition. It could wreck their whole society.”
“You sound like poor Kappie. But is there an alternative?”
Francis seized a poker, dueled the flames. Bold ideas did not normally come to him, but he could feel one growing. “Give me your indulgence while I plunge into unruly speculation. We’ve both studied cybernetics. As I see it, the Quetzalians are sentient computers grown weary of the knowledge of evil, so they’re deprogramming themselves. But as every schoolboy knows, such loops are eminently reversible.”
The theory Francis articulated presumed the possibility of introducing discrete bits of violence back into the system, enough to make somebody a soldier but not a maniac, a Nearthling but not a Brain Eater. “What we’re after is a temporary capacity. Yes, that’s it. A mounted Quetzalian could get to the oasis and back in less than an opoch. He wouldn’t have to forgo a single service!”
Burne, who treasured audacity wherever he could find it, took to the idea with glee. “But we need more than theory. We must know the chemistry of noctus. We must become biophotonics experts.” He proposed an afternoon rendezvous at the Library of Iztac.
“Why wait till the afternoon?”
Burne puffed up and announced in a blend of theatrical pomposity and authentic pride that, weather permitting, the clergy would tomorrow morning acknowledge his bravery with that most elaborate of honors, that most merry of spectacles, a parade.
THE PARADE TURNED OUT TO BE as elaborate as an overhand knot and as merry as a corpse sale. Its purpose was not to celebrate Burne’s triumph but to lament the occurrence of violence within the country. The last such ritual, held ten opochs ago, marked the two hundred twenty-fifth anniversary of a key Tellerist victory. One of the floats, a sculptor’s interpretation of the battle, showed how the neurovore bodies had been left in the sun quivering with maggots and pinned like memos on the sharp timbers that prefigured the Temple of Tolca. The children who watched the parade got no sleep that night.
The children who watched the current parade had trouble staying awake. Down the great causeway filed the black-robed priests and priestesses in thuddingly dull lockstep, their faces clothed in masks, their hands busy with stone gods and smoking censers. Vaxcala had situated Burne in a place of high symbolism, the niche of a masonry wall encrusted with friezes depicting neurovores engaged in assorted abominations. Passing him, each cleric bestowed gratitude and sympathy—you saved Quetzalia, we’re sorry you had to kill—and it was all Burne could do to keep from making one of his favorite irreverent remarks, which included not only “This looks like a beard but it’s really transplanted pubic hair” but also “Wouldn’t you agree that the average person likes the smell of his own farts far more than is commonly supposed?”
When the doleful parade had finally passed, Burne walked to the Library of Iztac and found Francis sitting on the north side reading a leatherbound copy of Janet Vij’s Biophotonics. Scholars streamed up and down the jaguar-lined steps. Nobody noticed the Nearthian cabal that met in the bright sun near the entrance to the reptile museum.
Francis reported that Biophotonics, sadly, was little more than a repair manual, hardly the seminal treatise they had anticipated. Doubtless the clergy found it indispensable for servicing the holy machines, but when it came to the fantasies themselves Vij made only the most perfunctory and grudging references. The chemistry of noctus remained a mystery.
But there was good news. By lying through his teeth, Francis had convinced Loloc Haz, the handsome biologist-puppeteer to whom he owed his entomology lectureship, that Vaxcala wanted her Nearthling guests to know all about biophotonics, so that this wondrous technology could proliferate throughout the galaxy. Loloc responded by taking a crow quill from his desk and penning a letter that entitled its bearer to an extended peek at Janet Vij’s unpublished notes. He surrendered it with a reluctance that was painful to watch.
“Whatever you learn, Francis, don’t spread it around Quetzalia. If Zolmec loses its glamour, it also loses its followers.”
The letter was addressed to one Loi Zeclan, whom Francis and Burne eventually located in the library’s whimsically named Bird Wing. Loi proved to be a daffy old woman with a bouncy gait and dimples.
“Perhaps you’ve heard of us,” said Francis, approaching. “Dr. Newman and Dr. Lostwax?”
She became pensive, then all winks and smiles. “The gentlemen from outer space! Your articles are superb, Dr. Lostwax, the summit of our encyclopedia.” Burne, Loi knew, was the one who could kill, but she still found something nice to say. “And what a pe
erless honor it is to meet our deliverer!”
Her response to Loloc’s letter made it clear that she was one of those people who could not discuss religion comfortably. Zolmec’s mystique had become in her befuddled thoughts akin to taboos regarding intercourse and excrement. “Nobody looks at those notes anymore. They’re full of talk about…circuits.” You could tell she would have preferred to say “motherfucking.”
“We realize that Loloc has given us a great trust,” said Francis.
Extending her index finger, Loi Zeclan pressed the dimple on her chin. “Follow me.”
She dribbled herself out of the Bird Wing, and Francis and Burne settled into the kind of unobservant somnambulism that typically afflicts persons being led through strange corridors. The journey ended at a door labeled UNBOUND. Loi opened it but refused to enter the same room with profanities.
“Number Twelve,” she said. “It holds everything Dr. Vij ever wrote.”
The room contained enough space for one marble table, two extraterrestrial scientists, and twenty large boxes luridly marked with numerals. Francis took Number 12 from its shelf. It was heavy. Lowering the box onto the table, he reached inside and removed a pile of loose, dusty pages, each coated with a spidery scrawl. With the side of his hand Burne sliced off the top half. “Here’s my night’s work,” he said.
Midnight found them still inching their way through Vij’s longhand. The lady was no duffer when it came to either brilliant complexity or self-important humorlessness, and the end of their search seemed remote.
Finally, just before dawn, Francis began grinning uncontrollably. He shoved a page under Burne’s nose. There, in simple biology, clean chemistry, comprehensible physics, rudimentary information theory, and plain English, was a full disclosure of noctus.
Minutes later Burne had an even stronger card to play. “Try this,” he said. Francis took the page and with a growing thrill read words of rarefied foresight.
In reviewing my work, several critics, Karnstein chief among them, have bemoaned the extreme vulnerability that the planned catharses will impose. “It’s a closed system,” Karnstein writes (personal communication). “A hostile outsider could massacre us.”
Thus I am obligated to consider the question, “What if our nation were invaded?”
For purposes of defense, I propose introducing diluted noctus into the bloodstreams of Quetzalian volunteers. Animal trials could determine whether the saline solution must be swallowed or injected and, if injected, whether the shot must be intravenous, intramuscular, or subcutaneous. Naturally I have no hard data, but my computations suggest that, if the dose is kept to one cc per ten kilograms of body weight, a twenty percent solution delivered intramuscularly will render an organism capable of moderate, provoked aggression for six days, after which the drug will be either devoured by phages or neutralized through the normal processes of enzyme, gland, and duct.
If six days are insufficient for thoroughly vanquishing an invader, it should even be possible to maintain a standing army through carefully scheduled booster shots, the first coming after a six-day interval, the second after twelve days, the third after twenty-four, and so forth. In no event should the rites themselves be canceled, as such a precedent could destroy the entire harvest of these wearisome and bloody years.
In their minds Francis and Burne toasted Dr. Janet Vij. A hundred and seventy years after her death, she had given them a way to go home.
Now Burne began narrowing his eyes and twitching his cheeks in a manner that said it was time to get practical. “We’ll need subjects. Animals…and humans.”
“Quetzalia has rabbits, chitzals—whatever we want. Humans? Zamanta owes you a couple of favors, one for each child.”
“We’ll need moat fluid, liters of it.”
“The markets have pots. Fired clay probably holds noctus for at least a minute, long enough to prepare a saltwater solution.”
“Then, of course, Vij favors injecting the stuff.”
“My needles are back at Olo, two five-cc syringes. Tez wanted me to burn them.”
Burne’s hands began writhing around each other. “Ah, Lostwax, this is going to be fun. I’ve been needing an adventure. Killing the neurovore was mostly work, but now I’ve got a whole goddam war to play with.”
LEAVING THE LIBRARY, Burne at his side, the noctus formula in his pocket, Francis felt the elation of the night’s accomplishment give way to embarrassment. In the mute simplicity of dawn, Tepec looked every inch a sacred city. This was a great civilization! What right had he, an obscure entomologist with a beanlouse theory, to tell them they must change their ways? Did he really expect pacifists to fight and die just so he could go home? He put it into words.
Burne, predictably, was unruffled. “Hell, these jellyfish have everything to gain by going to war. Do you think they enjoy having neurovores around? We’re offering them nothing less than their freedom.”
“Promise me one thing, Burne. Offer them their freedom, don’t force it on them. I don’t want anybody injected against his will.”
“You have my word.” There was enough heart in Burne’s answer to make Francis feel better. They continued down the steps, and the sun gave the city its first colors of the day.
“FRANCIS, WHAT IN IZTAC’S NAME is going on around here?” Tez was referring to the animals that for the past five days had been arriving at Olo sane and clear-eyed and frisky and leaving either crazed or comatose or dead.
“You don’t want to know.” As Francis continued down the hall, Tez at his heels, he drew a rude bronze key from his pocket. Burne in his romanticism had wanted to build their laboratory in the basement, mad-doctor style, a plan thwarted by their discovery that Olo had no basement; settling for the next best thing, they converted the villa’s grandest room, the library. Its door, like all Quetzalian doors, had no lock, so Burne built one. Francis inserted the key, turned it, heard the homemade cylinders clunking into place. He slithered behind the door with the motion one uses to keep a puppy from following.
“Secrets are so juvenile,” Tez called, thereby shaming him into leaving the door partially open.
“It’s a Nearth religious ritual. Quetzalian atheists aren’t allowed.”
“You’re doing something that you think will get your ship back.”
“Yes,” he confessed.
“I hope your experiments are going well,” she said, her conviction that of a physicist consulting a Ouija board.
“Our experiments are going very well.”
Their experiments were going wretchedly. Noctus was proving a cagey substance, resistant to forecast. Not that Janet Vij hadn’t been right about most things. The drug indeed needed to be injected—gastric juices inactivated it—and the injection indeed needed to be intramuscular. But while Vij’s recommended measure—a twenty percent solution, one cubic centimeter per ten kilograms of body weight—might have been mathematically rational, the newly created populations of chitzal-eating chitzals indicated that it was wrong.
The scientists cut the dosage to one cc per twenty kilograms, and the chitzals stopped being cannibals. They clawed each other’s eyes out, including the ones on stalks.
The solution itself was reduced to fifteen percent, and the chitzals left each other’s eyes alone. They went for the jugular.
Right now, however, Francis glowed with optimism. Today’s experiment would be the most conservative yet: a ten percent solution, one cc per twenty-five kilograms.
“Please tell me,” said Tez, almost moaning.
“All right. If we succeed you’ll hear about it soon enough.” He rooted himself behind the half-closed door. “The fact is, we’re experimenting with the moat.” Janet Vij’s original notes, he explained, predicted that a diluted-noctus injection would render a Quetzalian temporarily capable of violence. “Burne and I intend to raise a small volunteer army and cleanse your planet of Brain Eaters.”
Tez’s reaction was immediate and unmixed. “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever
heard. You must be out of your head.”
“My head and I are in the same place.” He started into the lab.
In a move that was as close as Quetzalians ever came to violence, Tez reached forward, found his arm, and grabbed it. “You must not do this.” Her voice had an edge that could draw blood. “Do you understand? Don’t do this.”
“Why not?” said Francis. “No avenue is forbidden to science.”
“If the reason isn’t perfectly evident, then I pity you and all your race.”
He could hear Burne mixing a batch of noctus. “Excuse me.”
“I have one more thing to say. If you dare go ahead with your scheme, I shall walk out of your life for good. What is more, I shall fight you. Do you hear me? That’s a strange word for a Quetzalian to use, but I’m going to fight you on this with every weapon I can think of.”
All Francis said was, “I’d better get to work.” Tez huffed off. He wondered: Was she serious? Didn’t she realize he had a right to avenge his friends and regain his ship?
Burne sat amid a congestion of noctus pots. Stripped of their books, the library shelves held cages filled with pacing, edgy animals. The air reeked. Pigs whimpered, monkeys scolded, birds squawked, rabbits and chitzals sat dumb.
On the center table six cages, two animals to the cage, were stacked in a chitzal high-rise. “It went into them five minutes ago,” Burne said, running his hand across the top three cages.
Normally noctus reached a chitzal’s brain in ten minutes. The five minutes that remained took about an hour apiece to crawl by.
Things looked good. Like their control-group cousins, the experimental chitzals showed not the slightest symptom of madness or mortality. But when Burne started banging them together like cymbals, thus convincing each it was being assaulted by the other, horrible fights broke out. This was the balance between civility and pluck they had been seeking. One cubic centimeter per twenty-five kilograms, a ten percent solution: magic numbers!
