by James Morrow
She was steadier today. Grief had become to her something peculiarly worth experiencing. It must not be resisted or denied, she decided, nor even rushed through, but accepted as inevitable, natural, like giving birth or retching or rain. Speech came easily. “I wonder how the First Army’s doing?” she asked, casual as beer. “The battle was scheduled for yesterday.”
“The day before,” Francis corrected, surprised by her taste in conversation. “My intuitions place Burne at the ship now. He’s busy rendering your Quetzalian pollucite down for its cesium.”
“‘There are no necessary evils.’ Janet Vij used to say that. Was she wrong, friend? Is Burne’s war all to the good?”
“I am irrational on the subject,” he said, staring heavenward. Thin bronze clouds were scrawled across the sky.
“Now I remember. Ever since the neurovores ate your friends’ brains out you’ve had this grudge.”
“Tez!” Francis’s anger outstripped his amazement. “That’s no way to talk!”
She was giddy now. “How would you like me to talk? With a twig between my teeth?” She put a twig between her teeth. “Very clever, the way Burne killed that neurovore. Skewered fore to aft! Did he have to train it first—the bug, I mean?” The twig fell in two as she bit down.
Francis stopped paddling. “No, once a Cortexclavus starts drilling it just keeps going. It stops for nothing.”
“The ideal soldier,” she said without irony. “Burne should have raised an army of corkscrew beetles.”
“You don’t usually mention such things.”
“I still think about them, Iztac knows.” Her smile looked like a wound. “Only today I’m thinking about them in a new way. I ask myself, Could Burne be a hero? Could a certain kind of killing be right, if the aim is to foster civilization and if the enemy is…? But there I go, pigeonholing again.”
For some reason, these unpacifist jabberings brought Francis no joy. Unease crept over him. “I think we’d better leave now,” he said, eyeing the bottom of the canoe. It held puddles. “And besides, it’s wet down there.”
Tez pitched the twig pieces into the swamp and followed Francis’s stare. “God of the brain!” she screamed. “We’ve sprung a leak!”
“A first-rate reason to go home,” said Francis dully.
“Doesn’t he ever check these things ahead of time?” she pouted. “Doesn’t he care?”
They paddled with a frenzy that brought further puddles into the boat. The water slapped their clothes and woke their skin, sensations Francis might have enjoyed were he not preoccupied.
Shore was reached quickly, hours before the silly leak would have endangered them, but they still felt rescued. Tez was first to jump out and sally up to Popet. “Excuse me,” she commanded. “That tub you gave us is wormy!”
Popet stared unhappily at the beached canoe. “Just your luck, huh? I’ll find you another.”
Francis arrived in time to hear Tez say, “No, it’s cold out there. Give us our money back.”
“All of it?” Popet hammered his heel into the sand. “All of it,” said Tez stiffly.
“I’ll have to ask my father.”
“You’ll have to ask no such person” was her immediate reply. “We want our money now.”
Bewildered by this small woman’s unpleasantness, Popet detached a lipocaskin bag from his wrist. He spread it open and shook four cortas into his palm. “I see your point,” he said, meaning that he didn’t.
Tez snatched the money. “We were practically drowned!” Wheeling around, she started off. Francis followed for a few meters, then turned toward Popet and spoke his feeble explanation.
“Her father died two days ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Popet replied. “We don’t usually leak.”
Sprinting away, Francis pondered the change he had so deftly wrought in Tez and drew a deep orgasmic satisfaction. Never before had he seen her quite so feisty, quite so Nearthian. He liked it.
“You really got your way that time,” he said, pulling alongside her.
“I guess you’re having some sort of influence on me after all.” Confusion hobbled her voice. “I didn’t traumatize the boy, did I?”
“He’ll recover.”
“That’s the sort of forcefulness you have to use all the time on Nearth,” she asserted.
“Yes. All the time.”
“It’s not so bad. I rather enjoyed it.”
Without explaining why, Francis kissed her. Good for you, Tez. “Enjoyed”! Your word, not mine. Now it will be easy telling you about the injection. I’ll confess before the first booster falls due. Your father’s funeral will be a three-day-old memory by then. No more secrets between us, Tez. No sneakiness. Hell, you probably won’t even get mad.
MR. NOSE WAS BEING EVIL. With obvious deliberateness he had tangled his strings and left them on the workbench in a Gordian knot. Seeing the deviltry in his porcelain eyes, Tez decided to teach the puppet a lesson. She picked up her hammer and went at him with the claw end, chopping deeply into his forehead. Shards of skull exploded across the workbench.
The noise lured Francis into the room. The mess startled him. “God of the sun!”
“Poor Mr. Nose.” Tez’s contriteness was somehow sinister. “He tried to make me angry.”
“Zolmec permits revenge on puppets?”
She did not respond. Slowly she closed her hand around the largest fragment, offered it to Francis with a morbid playfulness. Her grin was ugly.
“Want a bite?” she asked.
Francis noted that she was simultaneously parodying neurovorean depravity and her own childlike qualities. He thrust his hands into his robe and left, shaking his head. Outside Olo, darkness descended.
IT WAS SAID that Teot Yon talked to his stones. He cajoled them, told them that, if they fell into neat blocks instead of splintering, they would go to Aca and become great public buildings. How poetic, Francis thought, that this pyre rests beside an eastern quarry, from which place the wind will lift Teot’s ashes and scatter them among the rocks he loved.
The people Teot loved stood in a stodgy fog and waited for the cremation. Huaca, typically, was the holdup. The day’s debate should have ended hours ago, but he had no doubt worked himself into a fit of discourse, and his thought-stream could not be diverted by anything so ordinary as a family tragedy.
Tez’s angry eyes probed the crowd. “Eat his brain,” she proclaimed in a husky whisper.
Francis heard her. “My vote exactly.”
Surrounded by the authentically mournful, Francis felt phony and small. He did not belong at this funeral. A symbolic wreath of leaves from the frail ipu tree, whose lifespan was the same as a human’s, ringed everyone’s head but his.
Many of these people, most of them, had been at the party. Today they wore new identities: gray faces and black clothes. Francis found himself constantly nodding in recognition—blind Umia, the emaciated fish catcher, et alii—and rattling off “Good to see you,” and each time he was struck with the peculiar dissatisfying continuity, the awkward mix of familiarity and mystery, that accompanies meeting a person for the second time.
A sour-looking young priestess approached, lighted torch in hand. The fog spat on the flame and made it writhe. “I don’t like eulogizing when wet,” she said coarsely.
Tez got a precarious grip on her composure. “We’ll start without my brother.”
Moving in a solemn, solitary procession, the priestess brought the torch near the pyre, which rose tapering from the fog like the ghost of a pyramid. Francis had assumed that the torch would be applied immediately, before the logs got soaked. Instead, the priestess faced the mourners and rattled off a short but considered summation of Teot’s life.
“As a race of scientists and thinkers,” she concluded, “we cannot claim with absolute certainty that Teot Yon’s personality is now beyond Heaven’s gates or inside Satan’s stewpot or about to enter the embryo of a bull. Some of us subscribe to the Afterworld Hypothesis, some to les
s cheerful views. We all know that as an empirical event Teot Yon’s existence is over, and it is time for his molecules to become air and ash and after that—where will his drifting pieces go and what new things will they help to form? Let the transformation begin!”
The priestess jabbed the pyre repeatedly with her torch. Francis noted the gratification he always experienced at seeing a fire take hold. He gripped Tez.
She watched dizzily and murmured, over and over, “Eat his brain.”
Thickening suddenly, the fog shut the fire from view. Sizzles resounded as the logs dried. Licks of bloody flame burst defiantly forth, sank back, died.
“Eat his brain.”
WHEN NOTHING OF THE PYRE remained but gray glowing lumps, when most of the sun was behind the bellying foothills that formed the eastern horizon, when all of the mourners had gone save a half-dozen with little better to do than mill and speak of things unrelated to the funeral, Huaca finally showed. He marched straight for his sister. The stragglers stopped milling and gaped. Francis backed off.
“Don’t forgive me,” the professional arguer began, “but realize that I am probably no less furious at Huaca Yon right now than you are.” He had meant to sound contrite, but it came out glib.
Tez tucked her moist hands inside her robe. Saying nothing, she faced him with feral eyes.
“Is my peccadillo really beyond words?” Huaca looked at the ashes. Already the wind was bearing them into the quarry. “God of the brain, Tez, I loved him too—perhaps as much as you. If I thought a funeral would do him any good, I’d have dropped everything. But I was on to something, a new theory of art. I owed it to epistemology to stay in the ring. Now please, let’s part amicably.”
Half from anger, half from icy fog, Tez shivered. “You…are…correct, brother. This…time…your thoughtlessness…has…gone…beyond words, and so…my response…must also…go…beyond words.”
From her robe Tez pulled a weapon: five fingers and a palm. She drew it back and sent it hard across Huaca’s mouth. His head pivoted with the blow.
All around, a hundred eyes swelled.
Gasping, Tez took two steps backward. She examined her hand as if it were a grafted lump of alien flesh, screamed “God of peace!” Huaca’s face was upright again and, but for an amorphous redness, bore no sign of her vengeance.
“I’m sorry, Huaca!”
His anger dropped away before he could shout it. The same happened to his fear. Only pity and perplexity remained. “Are you sick, Tez? Do you think you’re in church?”
“I don’t know what’s happening!”
I must tell her, Francis concluded. But before he could move he made the mistake of thinking.
This is the wrong time, he thought. She’s upset. She’ll miss the point.
Finally courage came. He walked toward her, but the space between them did not narrow. She retreated quickly, turned, and ran to where the fog was deepest. Again she screamed, “I don’t know what’s happening!”
“Tez!”
“Later!” Her words dissolved into snorts from a fog-bound lipoca. Mixtla’s saddle creaked as she mounted.
“Tez!”
But the only reply was six drumming hooves.
20
VAXCALA COATL, high priestess of the Temple of Iztac and spiritual adviser to the Quetzalian race, had a bellyache. She was in no disposition to receive further visitors. Hour after hour the troubled citizens had come with their burning, tiresome questions. Vaxcala, is it all right to give my little girl candy for telling the truth? (Yes, but only if she knows you are rewarding honesty and not mere obedience to your wishes.) Vaxcala, is the tiger sinful because it kills? (No, because the tiger does not hate.) Vaxcala, what should I tell my children about Burne Newman’s war? (I don’t know.)
Outside the pyramid, Iztac descended in coppery pomp. “Who else is waiting?” Vaxcala asked.
Mouzon Thu waddled out of the shadows. “Three. A wall mender, a chess master, and a young surgeon.”
“I’ll heal them tomorrow.”
Mouzon left the nave. Vaxcala rose from her divan and began blowing on the candles. They hovered between life and death until she found the precise intensity that would put them out: a childish experiment, but it kept her mind off her stomach.
Mouzon returned, his warty face twitching with annoyance. “The surgeon won’t leave!”
Vaxcala burped. “The name?”
“Tez Yon.”
“A cutter named Teot Yon was cremated this morning.”
“Your visitor is his daughter.”
“I’ll see her.” Vaxcala relit the candles.
Tez’s timid footsteps echoed down the passageway, past the flames, up to the dais. She doused her lantern and eased it self-consciously to the floor.
Leaning forward, Vaxcala offered her most reassuring smile, but the visitor remained rigid and sad. “Your father was famous for his kindness and his accomplishments. His death starves us all.”
“I’ve just come from the funeral. No, that isn’t true. I’ve just come from Olo.” Then she added, cautiously, “I live with Francis Lostwax.”
“Not without consequence, I see.”
“You can tell I’m pregnant?”
“Nobody on a surgeon’s schedule looks that healthy without reason. What’s the matter, won’t he marry you?”
“He wants our child to be raised a Nearthling.”
“And you seek my opinion on whether you should go?”
“I’ve already decided to go. My emotions are mixed, naturally. I love Quetzalia, its science. But my ties are dissolving. My brother dislikes me, my father is dead. Nearthlings have science too. One day I’m going to dethrone Charles Darwin for them.”
“Is Francis a good person?”
“Good, gentle—not brash like Dr. Newman.”
“From my own perspective I’m glad. You will be a constant reminder that they pledged to keep Luta a secret.”
“And, of course, there is the glamour of travel—adventure! Francis has given me an enviable opportunity.”
“Then why are you here?” asked Vaxcala sarcastically.
Tez chided herself with a smile. “Twelve days ago Francis told me that a Quetzalian’s happiness on Nearth would be guaranteed only if she were capable of aggression. He wanted to inject me with noctus—practically on the spot.”
“God of the sun! You could destroy your baby!”
“Not according to the animal experiments.”
Vaxcala continued protesting: “The capacity for violence vanishes in six days.”
“There would be booster shots. Naturally I found the whole idea repulsive. In recent hours, though, my feelings have changed.”
Vaxcala frowned. “Why?”
“I’m not sure. The influence of Francis? Anyway, I’ve become—this sounds coy—I’ve become less hostile toward aggression.”
The high priestess laughed unspontaneously.
“Yesterday,” Tez continued, “I yelled at a boy for renting us a leaky canoe.”
“Hardly a heresy.”
“The strange part happened this afternoon, at the funeral. My brother showed up late. Didn’t care. I was boiling. I wanted to kill him.”
“Still normal. Not average, but normal.”
“Yes, only this time I didn’t wait for Zolmec. I didn’t hold it in.”
Tez explained how she assaulted her brother. Never before had Vaxcala’s ears recorded such a confession. She swallowed a sphere of air.
“You slapped him?”
“Hard. On the cheek.”
The high priestess’s fingers snaked forward and coiled around the front edge of the divan. Her voice was brittle. “I suppose…you…were overwrought. Have you been missing services? Perhaps you should try something especially depraved next time. An ax murder.”
“There won’t be a next time. Darwin is due this week.”
Raw anxiety was unfamiliar to Vaxcala. “Dr. Yon, what is it like to slap somebody?”
; “That’s the bewildering part. It doesn’t feel sinful at all. It’s not very different from slapping somebody during a sacrament.”
“And so now you’ve started to favor Francis’s proposal?”
Tez’s answer was long in coming. “Yes, but I want your blessing, Vaxcala. You sanctioned injections for Burne’s army.”
“I did it under pressure.”
“I’m trying to pressure you.”
Vaxcala rose, cast dead eyes on Tez. Their light went inward, searching for an answer. “These are wearying, unsettled times, Dr. Yon. The Antistasists press upon us with new ideas. Who is to say these ideas are wrong? And now this whole war business. Change frightens me.” Turning away, she began again to torment the candles. “Tez, you are poised between two cultures. For reasons still murky to me, you have already behaved in a manner wholly opposed to Quetzalian conviction. Whether you know it or not, you are converting to extraterrestrial ways. I suggest that you now complete the process and—with my blessing—become a total Nearthling.” She whirled and attacked Tez with her sternest face. “Only don’t expect to find yourself welcome in Quetzalia ever again.”
Despite the harshness of this last remark, Tez felt comforted. “This will mean the world to Francis! I’m going to the wall right now!” She pulled a green towel from her robe, flashed a syringe.
“Does Francis know you have that thing?”
“No.”
“It sounds as if your scruples are decaying without help from noctus.”
“I didn’t steal it. I’ll return it.”
“You stole it,” Vaxcala explained.
“I stole it for the greater good—a surprise. The injection will be my wedding present to him.”
Vaxcala sagged onto the divan. “We’re finished now, Nearthling. I need to nurse my stomach.” She gestured Tez away. “Go. Drink the moat.”
