by James Morrow
Nazra waddled triumphantly into the crowd, eager to advance this latest argument for his reelection.
Mouzon clawed at Francis’s collar. “It’s horrible and obscene.” Then he added, after some thought. “But the planet is ours now. I should go thank him.”
“No visitors. He’s sick.” On cue from a line in Nazra’s speech, the crowd became a cheering throng. The noise buffeted the snow. Francis grew cautious. “Stay with me, Mouzon. I’ll need you if I’m going to reach my lipoca.”
The cheering had ended by the time they passed the portcullis. As the throng descended, Mouzon’s holy authority, radiating outward in all directions, kept Francis safely inside an invisible two-meter bubble. Names fell upon him with the snow.
“Kitu Pon! Is Kitu Pon alive?”
“My daughter was Quilo Loir!”
“Topi Hazpec!”
“Mochi Shappa!”
Each time he could offer only an agonized look and eight words. “No casualty list! Survivors return in two nights!” He said it thirty times.
Without breaking stride they reached the lipoca, still tied to its bony bush. “You’ll be taking off soon?” Mouzon asked. Blue flakes clung to his coat, giving him a snowman’s belly.
Francis displayed a bumpy cylinder. “This opens Darwin. Tonight I want you to find Tixo Mool and let him in.”
“The spaceship is a forbidden place, Dr. Lostwax.”
He fought to keep his voice strong. “It won’t be after you’ve blessed it.” His success surprised him.
Reluctantly, Mouzon accepted the key. “What should he do?”
“Examine my friend—cabin number two.”
“Dr. Mool may have other plans for the evening.”
“Look, cleric, you want to get rid of us, right? You won’t unless Burne recovers.”
“Is it really so very important?”
“Important,” Francis echoed, stretching the word into ragged syllables. Then, in an equally unsettling voice, “I think his leg is dead.”
22
THEY NEVER DID SOLVE the public lighting problem in this town, Francis thought as he steered his lipoca through the blunt, oily glow of the streetlamps. In this frantic time of year, all but the heartiest citizens left the northern population centers and escaped to Tepec, Aca, and Oaxa, where winter was traditionally a few degrees easier to take. Even after dark the immigration continued, and Francis rode amid thousands of Quetzalians rushing to install themselves in the sundry hotels and relatives’ houses they had arranged to occupy until the ordeal of aphelion was past.
“Say, did you come from the spaceship?” The voice was soft but perky. Its owner, a small boy, stood in the dim valley between Francis’s lipoca and a book-filled cart. The boy was unloading the books. That made sense; winter would go faster with books.
At first Francis thought he’d been spotted for the extraterrestrial that he was. “Yes,” he said tentatively, reining up.
“The Nearthlings will be leaving soon, won’t they?”
“Yes. Did you know anyone in the army?”
Despite the dark, pride swept visibly across the boy’s face. “My family, my friends, we were all against it. Everyone. Father says don’t kill your principles just because the government is paying for the funeral.”
“But now the planet is ours.”
“Father says it won’t help anything.”
Francis stammered, turned the noises into a forced cough. Just my luck, he thought, to run into a goddam budding priest. Lipocawool, thick and splendid with winter, oozed up around his thighs as he settled into his mount and sped away.
AT OLO EVERYTHING WAS SNOW-BLUE, quiet, normal. But then he got closer. Dismounting, walking through the gardens, he saw that the main door stood as glaringly open as an ax wound. Its source invisible, a yellow light spilled through the jamb. In this chummy country, where the people never heard of locks, only latches, anybody who felt like it could barge into your life, and somebody obviously had. His first thought was to arm himself against a mugging, but then he remembered with a chuckle that the planet under his feet was not Nearth. Probably he’d been invaded by some Cuzians who, like bugs, knew where the warmth was. No need to turn them out. If Mool revived that sorry leg tonight, Francis would have no further need of rooms.
Entering the villa, he soon located the light in the banquet hall, a vast cheerless cavity he normally visited only because it contained the door to the wine cellar. The table, in scale with the room, was sliced from a mammoth tree that antedated Eden Three. At the far end, starglow pierced a window to reveal three raw lambchops encircling a wine bottle, almost spent, that rose from the center of a ceramic plate. A small woman hunched over the meal, face wrapped in shadows.
“Tez?” He hated this moment, hated it for expecting him to dash forward like a kinepic hero and take her in his arms. Realizing he couldn’t do it, he was attacked by embarrassment, and he approached with a sluggishness suggestive of Darwin’s bogus gravity.
She raised her head, bringing her sculpted features into the starglow. Sagging eyes broadcast decay and dissipation.
“Your face looks like you slept in it,” said Francis, still moving.
“I’m sick.” The words came with a spite sufficient to stop his advance. “Sit down!”
Without quite knowing why, Francis sat down. An entire table kept him from his lover. “Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?”
“It begins with an A.”
“Alcoholism?”
“No.” Her mood leaped without transition from melancholy to joy. “Francis, dear, I have a sweet, most wonderful, entirely premeditated surprise for you! Well, don’t just stare. Can you no longer register pleasure with that crooked mouth and tinny voice?”
“A pregnant woman shouldn’t drink so much.”
This inspired her to grab the bottle and upend it over a nearby champagne glass. The wine ran dry just in time to prevent a flood. “A toast!” she said, lifting the glass and conducting a presumed orchestra with it. The wine sloshed. “A toast to…toast. Here’s to you, toast, you smug cosmetizer of stale bread.” Bringing the glass to her lips, she sent a rippling wind across the surface.
“What’s my surprise?” asked Francis.
“Your surprise is…I don’t remember. Give me a hint. Come on, is it digestible?”
Francis munched his lower lip. “Tez, where have you been? The hospital?”
“The Temple of Tolca. Six orphan chitzals and I. They all have names now. I got hungry. Have you ever tried eating fur, Lostwax? It can’t be done. So I came back.”
She went for the champagne glass, sucked up a mouthful, and Francis saw his chance. The speech came out in a jumble, words tripping over themselves, but the gist was clear even to Tez’s fogbound comprehension: the neurovores had been vanquished, Burne was wounded, they were scheduled to depart tomorrow, assuming he recovered. Did she still want to go?
“Of course I want to go. I think I’d make a good blasterball player, don’t you? Spiked kneecaps, how witty.”
“Why did you run away?”
“God of the brain, we won! I should have enlisted. It must have been a picnic, squeezing their rancid eyes out like pus.”
“Tez, dammit—!”
“Burne makes a reasonable enough hero, doesn’t he? Truth to tell, there’s a part of me that always wanted to screw with him. I could say which part, but I’ll leave that to—”
Francis jerked up from the table. “For the last time: Why did you run away?!”
“I don’t know!” she fired back without skipping a beat.
“I know, Tez. Four days ago you chewed out a boy for renting us a bad canoe.”
“I should have chopped his family jewels off.”
“And then you slapped Huaca at your father’s funeral.”
“Father made me this bear, Lostwax.”
“You’ve been feeling strange lately.”
“A panda of some kind.”
“There’s something I must
confess. You owe this change to something I did.”
“I love confessions.”
Francis cavorted internally. This was going smoother than he had dared imagine. “I knew you’d understand. Sometimes you love somebody so much, you have to do what’s best for them.”
She grew suddenly sedate. Her latest guzzling was not yet in her brain. “And so, you did what was…”
“Best.”
“For me?”
“Best for you.”
“I was asleep?”
“You’d had a lot to drink. Like tonight.”
“Three cubic centimeters?” She was breathing hard now, catching on.
“Of a ten percent solution. The right and proper dose.”
“With a hypodermic?”
“How else?”
“With this hypodermic?” She rose, trembling, to full height. Despite the cold, a robe was all she wore. From it she yanked Francis’s syringe and plunked it on the plate, splashing lamb blood.
He nearly strangled on his amazement. “Why do you have that? It’s a machine.”
She poured her wine onto the table, slapped the puddle like a child playing with food. “You call yourself a scientist. And yet you break its laws the way you’d break a—” She seized the empty champagne glass, and when she’d finished there was only the stem.
“You’re right,” he said. “I was rash.”
“You were rash. A rash on the ass! Snot sucker!”
“I deserve those names.”
“Brain Eater! In my sleep? I suppose you raped me while you were at it.”
“It was only three cubic centimeters.”
“Three cubic centimeters! You’ve no idea what you’ve done!” Her ears thundered with blood. “I thought it was all a dream! Thought I’d made it up!”
“Made it up?”
“I can’t face this, not without—” Before he could repeat his question, she had picked up the syringe and plunged, robe billowing, into the wine cellar. He decided not to follow.
SOUVENIRS DID NOT HOLD much status in Francis’s life. When he had gone to Nearth’s famous Natwick Desert, everybody was appalled that he’d returned devoid of singing cacti; he’d come back from Orchard City without a single graven image of the famous Cathedral Bridge. And so it was natural for him to leave Quetzalia empty-handed. The half-full, ready-to-travel pack he placed by the parlor’s smoldering hearth contained only his Nearth clothes and, on top, the vitreousteel cage.
He went to the kitchen and returned with a greasy pile of sausages. Cortexclavus sat silent and inverted, feet gripping the barred lid. In the insect mind, Francis decided, upside down must be remarkedly like rightside up. He inserted the sausages between the bars, and the beetle scrambled after the scent.
“Ollie,” he said, “I could pin your wings, sever your antennae, file your nose into a spoon, and you’d still be happier than I.” The beetle drove its mandibles through the meat. “Burne is half-dead, Tez half-crazy. Do you hear me, bug? I love her, no less now than opochs ago when she brought me—”
A crescendo of glass cut him short. He jumped to his feet, and there were more brittle reports as he followed his ears through the banquet hall and into the wine cellar. Realizing he would have to deal with Tez again, he said aloud, quickly, “I want to cry.”
She sat on a moldy cask, back propped against a champagne rack. Over her shoulder the wall degenerated into its constituent bricks, which she was freeing and heaving one by one at her designated target, a façade of claret. Even drunk she could not miss.
A carpet of glass and wine spread before Francis, and he crunched forward. Loathing and fear mutilated Tez’s face. The bursts of wine on her robe looked like wounds.
“Tez, you should go to bed.”
“I remember what your surprise is,” she said droningly. “I remember what your surprise is.”
“Yes?”
“Your surprise is…three.”
“Three,” he repeated.
“Three and three make six.”
“Six what?”
“Cubic centimeters. I wanted to be human, Francis.”
“You injected yourself?” He was touched, also terrified. “When?”
“The night of the funeral.”
Francis fought to master his dread. At least there was a three-day interval. “If the overdose were dangerous,” he stuttered, “you’d have known by now.”
As if mimicking the floor, her eyes became red and glassy. “But I do know. Noctus has made me angry.”
“I deserve your anger.”
“Angry at Huaca.”
“So does Huaca.”
“At Mool.”
“Mool gave your father coyo root.”
Suddenly Tez’s face opened into a huge horrid grin. “At our baby.”
This was unexpected, and Francis took a moment to collect his thoughts. “He should be angry at you, the way you’ve been drinking.”
Tez had held the grin so long that it was no longer a grin but something far less natural. “He kicked me. Not now. I ate an herb.” She pointed to the mess on the floor. “What do you suppose it’s like to make love on that? Does life hold thrills we don’t know about?”
“What herb?”
“Azti. My illness begins with an A, remember? I just walked into the hospital and grabbed a jar. When you’re a thief, everything is free.”
“Azti lulls a foetus?”
“Lull, lull, lullaby,” she said autistically.
A foreign, tingling fear weaved through Francis. “Tez, open your robe.”
Casually she undid the cord and pulled the halves apart. Her stomach was starkly flat. “It’s gone,” she gurgled. “The loathsome thing that leased my body kicks no more. A is for azti, A is for aborticide.”
Francis screamed until he felt his throat would rip.
Tez hugged herself, closing the robe. Four terse strides brought her to the steps, which she ascended until reaching Francis’s height. “I’m no longer a Quetzalian,” she said, an infinite exhaustion in her voice, and left him with his tears.
PARAGON OF WINTER CONSTELLATIONS, Lamux’s Teapot lit the room. Francis moved woozily toward the bed, wishing for a miracle. He wished that it were six days ago, that he were approaching Tez with a polluted syringe—not this champagne bottle—that he were changing his mind, that he were throwing the syringe out the window.
He shoved the bottle into his mouth and swilled. A meter away, Tez’s unpregnant form rested beneath a bulky blanket. “Lover?” he slurred.
She moved. “Yes?”
“Tez, I’ve thought this out, and if we leave for Nearth tomorrow and try to forgive each other and simply realize that, hell, we can have another child, I think everything, all the splinters, will still fit together, as long as we feel hope…”
Tez’s reply was a warm, wanting hand that rose from the bundled wool and in one motion undid the knot at Francis’s waist. Closing around the sash, the hand hauled him to bed. The moment the two bodies touched there was a flurry of movement that left him feeling slightly molested but nevertheless satisfied.
Spurred by the winish blood in his brain, sleep came to Francis in one unbroken wave. He dreamed that he and Tez were painting a huge rainbow bird on an outside wall of the Galileo Institute. A small male child with Tez-brown hair mixed the colors.
23
OTHER DREAMS DEBUTED that night, none of them odd enough to be remembered but daybreak found him getting his stolen insects back from Robert Poogley. The two enemies were adrift on an acid sea, a circumstance that plainly argued for reconciliation. Poogley reached behind his back, ready to draw forth the glass cigar box, when an insistent banging arose, capsizing the boat. Francis hit the acid and surfaced into consciousness, the bedroom swirling around him. In an instant he took stock. Reality was now. There would be no baby. Tez had been overdosed with noctus.
“Tez!” Ears still numb with sleep, he was practically screaming. “Answer the door!”
No mov
ement on the left, her usual place. Groaning, he performed a sit-up. The banging continued to punch its way into the room.
He studied the bed. Empty. His patience hit rock bottom. So you’re out of my life again! This time please just stay there!
He launched his bare feet over the side of the bed. The floor shot coldness through his body, rousing him so completely that, after throwing on a robe, he found the front hall without a single wrong turn. He opened the door cautiously, as if it led to a possibly-occupied toilet, then shuddered to see a frightening, familiar face.
Huaca Yon looked mauled. His murm suture was fissured and awry. Gore bubbled from his bruised nose and divided lower lip. His left eye was split and running. He appeared to be crying blood.
“God of the brain!” said Francis.
The debater lurched into the hall. “Good morning,” he said, torturing himself with a smile.
“You should be in the hospital.”
“No, there’s no protection.”
“From Tez?”
“She’s gone crazy.”
“I think she’s just gone…a bit plucky.”
“Plucky.” In Huaca’s mouth the word sounded unbelievably dumb.
“I gave her noctus. Three cc’s, same as the army.” He guided Huaca toward the bedroom.
“You gave her what?” The silence meant: You heard me. “In Iztac’s name—why?”
“So she’d survive on Nearth.”
“I expect she’ll kill me next time.” He followed Francis through the doorway. A large chair, gorged with wool, cushioned his hurting limbs.
Francis left, returning shortly with a water-beaded kettle. He sent cool rivulets down Huaca’s face.
“Well, Lostwax, what’s the root of this evil? Tez? Science?”
“The problem is that she went and injected herself before the dose I administered had worn off. Frankly, I’m surprised that six cc’s would affect anybody so strongly.”
“My sister isn’t anybody. She’s Tez. She’s like our lipocas—a pacifist by nature, not just by conditioning. Her system has built up no immunities. God of the brain, didn’t you tell her she was infected?”
