by James Morrow
Ras in tow, Burne rode straight for the nearest path, a broad stream of earth lined with tufted organic parasols and fat blue fruit. At the path’s end, Burne knew, sanctuary awaited—momentary sanctuary, to be sure, but a moment was all he needed. Only three neurovores guarded the start of the path, only four more thought to reinforce them. The defenders released their spears simultaneously. Burne veered, whiplashing the astronomer, and the sharp stone points flew harmlessly into a dune. The neurovores readied their axes.
“Jump!” Burne screamed, returning Ras’s reins to him.
If other choices existed, the astronomer did not notice them. Reaching the path, he nudged his frightened lipoca in the manner that meant “Jump!” Ahead of him, Burne was already off the ground, sailing smoothly over the neurovores, whose axes whizzed forward but cut only air. Ras followed, stealing a glance at the hairiness below. He had never before seen a neurovore close up, never been face-to-face with devolution’s crowning calamity. It was fascinating. Hooves hit sand, and he was off.
Blue blurs jumped by as twenty, eighty, a thousand meters grew between the soldiers and their pursuers. Suddenly Burne screamed, “Dismount!” The blurs stopped, and Ras beheld a bright placid pool whose surrounding trees were weirdly silent, save for an occasional bird-squawk.
Ras dismounted. “Why are we here?”
Burne unsheathed his sword. “I need a place where my army can’t see us.”
“You’re going to kill me?”
“No…your lipoca.”
“He’s my pet.”
“We need blood. I want you to play possum.”
“That’s deceitful.”
“That’s an order.”
“An evil order.”
“Here’s a virtuous one.” Burne removed his jacket, epaulets fluttering. “Tie this around its head.”
The astronomer took the jacket, held it listlessly. “Can’t you kill your lipoca, sir?”
“Look, soldier, I’m at the end of my wistar rod. I want this victory. So either I slit this animal’s throat or…yours!”
Persuaded, Ras glided the jacket across the lipoca’s face, tying the sleeves like bonnet strings.
“Stand back!” said Burne, readying his sword, and the astronomer kissed his friend good-bye.
Ten minutes after Burne and his captive disappeared into the oasis, a rider burst forth, outrunning the spears that followed. The nearest soldiers, leaning forward on their mounts, soon recognized their general—and more. Sprawled across the lipoca’s shoulders, the naked body of a Quetzalian astronomer dripped blood-puddles onto the sand.
Burne charged for Minnix Cies, reined up. The nude victim showed more blood than skin. More blood than skin! For Minnix the thought became an inner call for vengeance. He started to itch. The noctus was in command now, spitting its demands into every cell of his body. His arousal peaked and spontaneously he drew back his bow.
Burne galloped around the circle, one hand waving his sword, the other steadying Ras, who continued to act a corpse. “The enemy has struck!” Burne bellowed repeatedly, watching in satisfaction as arrows were again nocked. Completing his journey, he lowered the astronomer to the ground, gently, though not so gently as to reveal the ruse, and screamed “Fire!”
“Fire!” echoed the officers. A swarm of arrows took off. For five seconds the neurovores watched in dull-headed contemplation, wondering why these intruders would use such small spears and why they would release them from such a hopeless distance. The seconds ended, the arrows arrived, and the neurovores wondered no more. Even as dozens fell—pierced, bleeding, shrieking—a second volley was in the air. Ignoring the throes of the dying, the chiefs dashed onto the sand. Each took command through yelps that in the protolanguage of neurovores said, “Get them in range of your spears!”
The neurovores charged in an ever-widening wave. More arrows arrived; the wave left bodies behind. By the time their tormentors were in range, the tribes had lost half their numbers.
“Shields!” shouted Burne as the tribes halted and, at the growls of the chiefs, drew back their spears. From his lipoca’s shoulder every other soldier snatched a huge oval shell that had once guarded the back of a Lutan tortoise. Like hailstones the onrushing points slammed into the raised carapaces, and the shafts rattled to the ground.
But something was wrong. Instead of shouting triumphantly, the First Army found itself gasping in bewilderment as gravity went every which way. Surprised by the spear attack, the lipocas, normally phlegmatic creatures, were running in berserk circles.
What else can go to hell? The question almost managed to amuse Burne as he dismounted, pulling the insulin kit from his shirt and an ampule from his saddlebag. Very well, he thought as he filled the syringe, if that’s how Mother Nature wants to play the game, then we’ll turn these goddam lipocas into soldiers.
Taking advantage of the animals’ madness, the neurovores scuttled forward, retrieved their spears, threw them toward the turned backs. Dozens of Quetzalians, run through and screaming horribly, fell. Burne responded by ramming the syringe into the flank of the first lipoca that happened along.
“What in Tolca’s name are you doing?” the rider called down.
“Giving you a mount worthy of yourself!” But before Burne could push the plunger, the already crazed creature bolted away, taking the syringe with it.
Even now Burne refused to accept the possibility that his army was on the brink of retreat. He ran around the battlefield, exhorting everyone to “Dismount and fight!”
Minnix dismounted but he did not fight. Reluctantly he drew his sword. Neurovores, Quetzalians, and riderless lipocas whirled around his body, anesthetizing his mind. In vain he tried to think. Have I killed today? For answer he had only muddled memories—aiming his arrows at neurovore organs, releasing his bowstring, closing his eyes before he could see what happened.
Staggering forward, Minnix beheld dozens of his fellows prone on the sand, spears in their backs. Many were still flailing, like a gigantic insect collection come horribly to life. The sight rekindled his sense of purpose. “Revenge!” Minnix cried, rushing into the thick of it, his sword oscillating fiercely. Soon he found a life to end. The neurovore’s weapon, a clumsy slice of stone roped to wood, was no equal of First Army alloys. Neither was the neurovore’s skull. Head split, the thing fell forward.
“Eat your own brain, you—” Minnix cawed, stopping short on recognizing the Quetzalian who fought beside him. It was Ras, glistening head to toe with blood. Minnix gasped. “Back from the dead!”
“I never went!” Ras shouted, burying his sword in a liver.
The battle raged on like a slowly dying animal. The sand was cemented by blood, excrement, urine, and vomit. Cries vibrated the reeking air. It was a day disconnected from all decency and humor.
Minnix reveled in his potency. Never before had he been the equal of a Brain Eater, much less its master. Seize the opportunity, he thought. Give yourself a war story to tell, something that will spellbind your little brothers.
He slashed his sword and an arm came off, sailing by on a comet tail of blood. In its agonized unwholeness, the resulting neurovore was sickening to behold. Minnix, having one of his few rational thoughts of the day, decided that the mind’s need for bilateral symmetry ran deep. He wanted to throw up.
A second slash ended the monster’s misery. So, he thought, this is how my Earthling ancestors ran their affairs. This is how lands were won, empires expanded, insurrections resisted, prisoners taken, slaves kept, heretics converted, captives made loquacious. For the first time in his life, Minnix felt himself a part of history.
History, he decided, was a terrible idea.
BY EARLY AFTERNOON 957 Quetzalians and one neurovore stood. The one neurovore stood because its own spear had been rammed through its stomach and into the ground below. The day belonged to Burne.
Cautiously the First Army entered the oasis and, following orders, marched to the largest pool. Burne, posing on a high rock,
awaited them, as did his mirror image, reflected in the liquid below. With exultant sweeps of their sword arms, the twin generals spoke in lofty tones.
“Soldiers! Today you have won a great victory. Quetzalia is free!” Abruptly the gestures stopped, the tones descended. “But let me remind you that the vilest work is still to come. Scattered throughout this oasis are the final remnants of the neurovore race, the ones who could not join the battle. I speak of the sick, the old—and, yes, the infants that the sick and old are watching over.”
“Must we kill infants, sir?” asked a pale lieutenant.
“In a few days you’ll be practicing Zolmec again, and your weapons will be of no use to you. Meanwhile, the children grow to malignance. It’s that simple.”
“We could inject ourselves when the time comes,” the lieutenant persisted.
“You won’t be any more anxious to kill them in fifteen years than you are now. Draw your swords!”
THE MASSACRE LASTED through a blood-red sunset. So unspeakable was this final violence that when it ended the soldiers ran pell-mell from the oasis, making their camp in the desert. Again the pools belonged to the neurovores, to their slain corpses and angry ghosts.
The desert bloomed with flames. Campfires cooked dinners, bonfires consumed dead Quetzalians. Wakeful, Burne wandered among the pyres. Their heat warmed but did not cheer him. Winter’s air was more easily defeated than the ice he felt inside.
Come on, Newman, he told himself, feel victorious. That’s an order. God’s sacred tax return! The neurovores didn’t produce children! They produced hairy little things!
A brusque voice broke out of the darkness, ending Burne’s torment. “Who’s that?”
“General Newman.”
Teakettle in hand, a private stepped into the light of a pyre. His puppy face and hesitant manner suggested that the brusqueness was forced. “I thought you were a neurovore.”
“There are no more neurovores. What’s your name?”
“Petla, sir.” He rested his kettle on the ground.
“Walk with me, Private Petla.”
The pyres made a well-lighted avenue. Burne attempted conversation. “Did you know any of these people?” he asked with an inarticulate wave of the hand. Petla nodded. “You probably feel like crying.”
“That will come. In front of us, Ras is burning, my old tutor. Behind us is Mochi Shappa, a cousin.”
“Ras the astronomer?”
“Yes. The one who was killed right away.”
“No, he wasn’t really dead, not then. I guess he lived a few hours longer.”
Petla said, “I wonder if those hours mattered to him?”
They continued in silence, making only left turns. In a few minutes they were back at Petla’s kettle. He put it in the pyre, pulled from his jacket a ceramic mug decorated with a subtle visual pun, a glazed eye. “Want some tea?”
Burne did not answer but said, “I saw lipocas burning. Did we lose many?”
“I’ve counted eight. Seven fell to neurovores and the other you know about.”
“I do?”
“Yes—it belonged to my best friend. He says you tried to dose it with noctus.” Petla explained that, as the battle was winding down, he came upon a supine, exhausted lipoca that had a syringe protruding from its flank. Recognizing the animal as his friend’s, he started to approach, when suddenly it rolled over, simultaneously injecting itself and crushing the syringe. A few seconds later the lipoca went mad, and Petla had to slaughter it.
“I suppose they’re an unusually sensitive species,” said Petla, “unable to handle noctus in any amount.”
“Was it absolutely necessary to kill the animal?”
By way of answering, Petla stretched a bare arm toward the firelight. Plunging four millimeters into his flesh was a serrated valley. “Can you believe that, general? My best friend’s pet tried to eat me!”
WHEN IZTAC’S FIRST RAYS groped across the battlefield and struck the heaped, unburied corpses of three hundred neurovores, it became horribly evident to Burne’s soldiers that they had done murder. Of course, one could claim that the enemy deserved it, that neurovores were murderers of a far less redeemable sort than a Quetzalian would ever be. But without the corpses of slain compatriots on view, this point was easy to forget. Some soldiers grew nauseated, some catatonic. All wanted to leave the desert without delay.
The general had no objections. Within two hours the well soldiers were mounted, the wounded lashed to caissons. Nothing was done about the neurovore corpses. To bury them would be to admit that they existed.
Burne arranged his army in three concentric circles. Riding to the center, he sadly noted a block of riderless lipocas. “Soldiers!” he began. “Today I leave you.” He reached a hand toward the sun, stretching the index finger until it curled upward. “That way lies my ship. I can ride there in one day, fuel it in two.” Here he smiled. “I’m going to beat you home.” His hand made a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep. “That way lies Quetzalia. Return to it as civilians. There is no more business between us. Here and now I renounce my command.”
From the outermost circle a reedy voice arose. “Wait, Dr. Newman. There is further business between us!” The tone, resentful, stirred in Burne a seething memory, as if a dread disease once thought cured were suddenly back.
All eyes on her, the speaker trotted through the middle circle, then the inner circle, soon reining up before Burne. The former general forced his smile to return. The pretty woman he had raped grinned back.
“Draw your weapon, doctor”—Ticoma’s words mixed sound and spit—“before my power deserts me.”
From a belted sheath Ticoma slid her blood-stained sword. Urging her lipoca forward, she brought two thrusts hard upon the tortoise shell at Burne’s knee. The halves hit the ground together.
“Defend yourself, doctor. It’s a better chance than you gave me.” Staring past Burne, she pivoted her mount and addressed the First Army. “He raped me!”
“We should discuss this,” said Burne.
In reply Ticoma shot forward, her weapon poised for slaughter. Burne raised his sword, checked a fierce blow. He spurred after his attacker. Twice Ticoma circled the lipocaflesh arena. Turning suddenly, she advanced her sword with the full fury of all her muscles, all her loathing. The swing was at its strongest when Burne’s weapon arrived, and the shock unseated him. The waiting sand, soft, was not soft enough to muffle his headfirst fall.
Ticoma dismounted, noting with a sly laugh that Burne’s weapon sat in a dune. She rested her blade gently on his crotch.
Straining to steady his dazed thoughts and spinning vision, Burne examined the crowd. Their faces showed curiosity, plus the smugness that typifies bystanders to melodrama and anger, but none seemed ready to help.
“Soldiers!” was all he said.
“They aren’t soldiers anymore,” Ticoma reminded him gleefully. Burne groaned. “You mustered them out. But don’t fret, Nearthling. I won’t kill you, much as I’d like to. And I won’t geld you, much as you deserve it. I’ll merely even the score between us. At my hands you will know humiliation and pain. The humiliation comes from losing a fair swordfight to a lifelong pacifist! And the pain—that can only come from the ancient act in which you have tutored us so well!”
Someone called, “Ticoma, don’t!” Too late. The runner had already pushed her sword deep into Burne’s left thigh. She drew it out, and there was much blood.
19
TEOT YON WAS DEAD. It happened by degrees, without melodrama, during the same hours that Tez reveled in farewell wine and Francis listened to Umia tell tales, but the lovers did not learn of it until late the following afternoon. Francis’s unwritten agenda for the day originally read: observe effects of noctus injection. He had planned to be a relentless bother. With luck he would inspire Tez to curse him out, threaten his life, or at least throw crockery across the kitchen. With luck he would prove the wisdom of his treachery.
Now, clearly, such experime
nts would not only border on cruelty, they would probably fail. Whatever furies the moat aroused, they were certain to be this day neutralized by grief.
Dinnertime came, and Tez ate nothing. Between bites of chactol Francis said, “Perhaps we should go to Witch’s Fen tomorrow.”
“Why not?” Tez mumbled. She retired to the courtyard and watched the stars and wondered which of them had died before its light reached Quetzalia.
Appetite lost, Francis rose and joined her. “A year from now it won’t seem so bad,” he said, immediately wishing he hadn’t. He added a non sequitur—“Perhaps you’d like privacy now”—as if this would cause his remark to become unuttered.
“No.” She turned and pushed herself into the softness of his robed shoulder. His hands swung up behind her like doors.
“Mool deserves whatever you give him,” said Francis. Her living belly felt warm and right.
“When Father was a hauler, money was scarce. And I saw this bear. A big stuffed panda. Real pandas don’t occur on Luta. The ark brought four real Kodiaks. Huaca once saw a Kodiak in the mountains. That was…last year, I think.”
“You wanted the stuffed panda?” Francis eased his grip, and she slid away.
“The vendor said twenty cortas. My sixth birthday came and there on the breakfast table was a bear, only it wasn’t the right one. It wasn’t the bear the vendor had.”
“Where did it come from?”
“It’s amazing, isn’t it? The man hauled rocks, and he sewed this thing together from…things. The horrible part is, I let him know I was disappointed. Children can be so…I mean, he hauled rocks…” Weeping, she grabbed clumsily at the stars. “There’s our Toy Queen.”
“Did the bear have a name?”
“His name was Fropie,” Tez replied, and Francis was weeping too.
A SHARP BREEZE etched its way through the Quetzalian National Park. The lovers glided into Witch’s Fen knowing full well they wouldn’t stay long enough to justify the four-corta canoe rental they had paid to a goofy, good-hearted kid named Popet. The canoe was disreputable—peeling paint and no seats—but it rode high in the rumpled water and kept its passengers dry. Francis paddled from the stern while his lover leaned over the bow, dragging a twig and meditating on eddies. Muscles knotted with cold, the swamp’s imported reptiles did not move.
