by James Morrow
“I intended to, naturally. I didn’t know I should be quick about it.”
“Then you’re the one to blame. The irony is, you’re also the one I must cling to. At least until she—” His look would freeze wine. “Will she recover, Mr. Noctus Expert?”
Francis started to swallow, got halfway there. “I wish I knew.” In the closet he found a spongy length of linen.
“A queer time to start hedging your bets, don’t you think?”
“I believe she’ll be all right.” His gawky fingers began bandaging Huaca’s face. “She attacked you at home?”
“The sun wasn’t up yet. She used a fire poker, all the time screaming about Father.”
“Where did she go afterward?”
“Out the door. God of peace, I wish I’d brought him flowers every day!”
“Once would have been smart.”
“Lostwax, at this point aren’t you just about the last person in our galaxy who has any right to criticize?”
“I won’t argue with you.” He spiraled the bandage downward.
“No, please, do argue with me. I’m good at it. What I’m not good at is beating people up. I must leave that sort of thing to you and the people you poison.”
“I didn’t want this!”
“And you haven’t yet agreed to be my bodyguard.”
“I have plans, Huaca. Nearth plans.”
“Look, Lostwax, we don’t know each other very well, and if we did I have a feeling we wouldn’t want to. But you owe me something after the puking shambles you’ve made of the art and science of biophotonics.”
“You don’t seem to understand. This is my last morning in Quetzalia.”
“Gather around, children. Get your genuine, official Scientist’s Kit, just like the one Francis Lostwax fools around with. Now you, too, can conduct secret and atrocious experiments on your loved ones.” His face was a linen ball. “You don’t care what happens to me, do you?”
Francis surprised himself by getting annoyed. “Huaca, you have no more to fear.” His voice held firm. “She’s had her revenge.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Burne blasts off at noon,” said Francis decisively, slipping out of the room. “The trains don’t run after that.” His clothing and his vitreousteel cage, Ollie scuffling inside, were still by the hearth.
Huaca called into the parlor. “Don’t you like it here? Is it our provincialism? What’s so special about Nearth, anyway?”
Francis reappeared, bent by his pack. “I’m off. There’s food—apples, at least—in the kitchen. Use the banquet table to barricade yourself in.”
Huaca got to his feet, every centimeter an agony. “I’m coming with you,” he said. “You can shield me from here to the ship. After that I don’t know what I’ll do. Take noctus myself.”
“You can’t.”
“Why?”
“Tez has the syringe.”
EVEN AT THIS EARLY HOUR Halcyon Road was a torrent of migration. Encumbered by a lipoca wagon, Francis had no choice but to plow through the Oaxa-bound crowds, kilometer after tedious kilometer. Occasionally he would twist in his seat and try to make conversation, but Huaca, supine and sullen in the back, confined his replies to the perfunctory. All right, Huaca, you win. I feel guilty as hell.
The suburbs finally came, went, and they veered west onto an open Kinship Road. Francis swatted the lipoca. The wagon sailed away, wheels meeting road with the sound of a marble crossing a table. Forest, then sand, rolled by, and the recumbent drawbridge was before them. Darwin sat spangled with noon sun.
Francis remembered the gatekeeper, remembered her would-be lover and taped-on head. Frost decorated her chitzal scar. Identifying himself as the extraterrestrial, he ordered her to raise the portcullis.
The great metal jaw yawned open. Iztac shone on its cuspids.
Returning to the lipoca wagon, Francis seized his pack and steeled himself for what he hoped would be his final confrontation with Huaca or any other Quetzalian.
“Take me with you,” said the debater. “You’ve got enough on your conscience already—if Tez maims me, you’ll never forgive yourself.”
“Wait here,” Francis replied. “We’ll see how Burne feels about picking up hitchhikers.”
Approaching the hatch, Francis noticed that Mouzon Thu had left the key in the lock. Quetzalian mores, he figured: shed all profane devices as soon as possible. He pocketed the key, opened the hatch.
Congested with the loot from Arete—the masks, the vases, the gods—the specimen room looked to Francis like the sort of museum exhibit he hated as a child. Untying his pack, he removed the vitreousteel cage and hooked it up to the food dispensing system, thus guaranteeing that Ollie would receive a pickled verneworm every hour on the hour for the next three days, by which time Planet Luta would again be nothing more than a phantom globule floating in Darwin’s holovision monitors. Francis opened the cage and scratched the beetle behind its ears.
His next stop was his cabin, into which he tossed his pack.
His final stop was Burne’s cabin, where he naturally expected to find Burne.
Burne was gone.
“Burne!”
Silence.
“Burne!”
Seconds later, Francis was racing across the drawbridge, shoes thumping oak. The gatekeeper milled near a windlass, absently plucking the cord as if it was the string of an immense lute. “Where’s the other Nearthling?” Francis demanded.
“I thought you knew—they took him to the hospital.”
“He’s very sick?”
“They needed a stretcher.”
Francis began whimpering like his boyhood collie. He wasn’t going home today.
BUILT BY A GERM-FREE CIVILIZATION, the Chimec pyramid lacked the fierce, nostril-drilling smells that Nearthlings associate with hospitals. No disinfectants, that’s why this place has never seemed quite real, Francis thought as he moved down the clean, frescoed corridors, Huaca puffing behind. It was the sort of foolish, out-of-context thought that typically came to him when, as now, he was delirious with gloom.
Outside the operating room, Tixo Mool studied a mural. An artist who hadn’t fought in it offered a brutal, blood-spurting impression of the recent Neurovorean War. The Quetzalians were dry, the Brain Eaters still wet.
“My son was in that,” said Mool as Francis approached.
“He’s probably alive. Only forty-three died.”
“Forty-three,” Mool repeated dully. He seemed to be in a trance. “Forty-four if we lose the Nearthling. How did it happen?”
“War wound. Is it infected?”
“I remember what a war wound is. You had one, Lostwax, the first day we met. That was on the whole a better day than today—before all this army business.” He spun away from the mural, found himself staring at a wad of bandages. “Who’s this?”
Huaca said his famous name.
“Clever idea you’ve got there, Mr. Yon, mummifying your brilliant brain.” Mool’s vacant gaze returned to the mural. “It’s worse than infected.”
“I know the word,” said Francis. “Gangrene.”
“Where was Darwin coming from?”
“Arete.”
“The planet must favor Clostridium welchii.”
“And we brought them into the ship?”
Mool grimaced. “There they stayed, waiting. We don’t see much gangrene here, Nearthling. What do you know?”
“Keep the wound clean. Trim the granulation tissue.”
“We’re doing that. The germs still get to the blood.”
“Cut the leg off,” said Francis stiffly.
“That’s what we’ve decided.” Mool swung through the archway. Francis followed, bristling with the memory of that amazing day when he was carted here and Tez went into his brain.
The gallery was empty. Near the farthest door a flutist, this time a woman, arched her fingers and made music. Trying to look indispensable and productive, but obviously waiting for cues fro
m Mool, the rangy young man who had assisted in Francis’s ablation walked in circles around the padded table.
Francis approached, and the sight of his friend lying unconscious tore from him a brief, involuntary moan. This was not the real Burne, the juicy man of action, but a wasted shape in which the real Burne had once lived. At the moment drugged sleep spared him the pain of his infection. Protruding from the swollen depths of his thigh, a catheter poured cleansing fluids into a ferocious battle with necrosis.
“We’re going to ablate the wound,” said Mool, more compassionate than clinical. The nurse jumped and left, returning shortly with a cart of brilliant tools: scalpels, saws, icesticks.
“I can’t watch this,” Huaca announced from the archway.
Francis sighed. “Do your best, Mool. Quetzalia owes its freedom to this man.”
“I’ll do my best, but I hope you know we’re on a desperate course. I also hope you know Burne Newman will not become our national hero.”
“In the Vij Arena you said our studies were…Now I remember, you called them classics. You were right. Burne knew what he was doing.”
“I’m afraid I’ve started to see the world Tez’s way. Zolmec and backward tradition are not the same thing. There will be no statues to Burne Newman, not if I can help it.”
“Hypocrite,” said Francis, almost inaudibly.
“Yes,” answered Mool with a wry smile. “But a harmless hypocrite—and less dogmatic than in earlier days.”
“Not even a small statue?” a husky voice called from the gallery. Tez sauntered down an aisle, her left hand bouncing along the backs of the seats, her right clenching a bright invention. “I think he should be a doorstop, at least. Or a paperweight.” With a cat’s competence she vaulted the railing and dropped two meters to the stage. “He was quite a genius, really, when he pumped our best citizens full of bile and sent them off to war.” She lifted her right hand. The blatant syringe, dark with noctus, made Francis choke.
“Throw that thing away!” he screamed.
“Soon, lover.” Her lips parted, unsheathing her teeth. “I’ve been to the Temple of Tolca, and it would be scandalous to waste such a luscious dream.” She pointed to the barrel. “You’re in here, Francis. Look hard, and you’ll see yourself confessing to a secret injection. This time you don’t survive my wrath.”
She tore at her sleeve, and it fell away like meat from bone. The men stared incredulous and immobile while the needle made its descent. “Going in is the best!”
“No!”
But the plunger was already traveling, bringing the moat to her flesh. Finished, she slipped the syringe out, licked the needle. “Don’t ever touch that stuff. It feels too good and it answers to no one.” She displayed her deltoid, which was multiply perforated, like a shower nozzle. As she touched the newest hole, a welt began to bloom.
Mool retreated, trembling, toward Francis. “What is she going to do?”
“I believe she intends to kill you,” he said, sucking air through his teeth. “You’d best leave.”
But already Tez was at the instrument cart. She chose a fine obsidian scalpel. Francis shuddered. He had seen this particular knife before, the night he sneaked into the temple. He had seen her use it—on Mool.
Tez charged. There was a slash, an astonished shout, and Mool staggered away. The incision in his side was shallow and as yet painless.
“Lostwax, can’t you control her?”
I’ll try, he thought, and ran for the flutist, a reckless plan firing his brain. He saw that Tez had circled back to the instrument cart.
“Why don’t you defend yourself?” she screeched at Mool. “A saw is worth plenty against a knife.”
She sprang forward, guiding scalpel toward neck, when the corner of the ablation table caught her robe. The inertia pulled the syringe from her hand—smash, it was a hundred glassy shards—while the now off-target knife burrowed deep into Mool’s left shoulder, staying in her hand as, bleeding, moaning, he lost hope and balance.
She kneeled, both palms wrapped around the handle: the sacrificial position. Mool writhed like a smashed worm. The blade arced toward the glass ceiling.
There was a thud.
The blade went down—not swiftly, not intelligently, but in a pathetic little jag that ended on the stone floor. Tez toppled forward and stayed still. Francis lifted the bent flute away. Blood encircled the blow hole.
“I’m taking her to the ship,” said Francis, crestfallen. “Help me, Huaca.” He scanned the archway, then the whole room. Huaca had vanished.
The flutist and the rangy nurse swarmed over Mool, dressing his wounds. He motioned them away and regained his feet. “Will this be the end of it?”
“It’s an unusual case,” said Francis.
Tez was groaning her way awake. On Francis’s orders the flutist poured a liquid sedative down her throat. Instantly she was seized by a sleep that the bottle label claimed would last ten hours. Skeptical that the sedative would be so soporific for a noctus addict, Francis tied her hands and feet with bandages.
“I owe you my life,” said Mool.
“And nearly your death. It was my idea to…humanize her.”
Mool touched his wet shoulder. “We’ll have Zoco finish the ablation.”
“When will Burne be fit to travel?”
“He shouldn’t go piloting spaceships for an opoch at least.”
“Suppose I flew us home?”
“We’d be willing to release him in two days, no sooner. He’ll need absolute rest. You must change his dressings constantly.”
“Yes,” said Francis slowly. He picked the bloody scalpel off the floor and put it in his coat pocket.
“Why do you want that?” asked Mool.
“I feel a sudden need of weapons.”
SHE WOULD HAVE KILLED HIM! The fact was as indisputable as it was unthinkable. Hunched beneath Tez, Francis descended the steps of the pyramid. To prying bystanders he feebly dismissed her unconsciousness as a fainting spell. Her bound hands and feet received no explanation at all. She fit snugly into the wagon, where, blankets shaped around her, she became just another load traveling down from Cuz or Uxco. There were no more questions. The crowds bustled across the plaza, trying to get someplace warm.
Would have killed him! Mounting the wagon, Francis pointed his lipoca toward Kinship Road. Hooves rattled on frozen stone. The road ran east, to Aca, and west, to the forest and the wall. Killed him! He went west.
The road undulated, the trees moved up and down like flotsam, and Francis brooded. He saw himself as the convicted sorcerer in one of his favorite kinepix, Mind Things. He was lying in the dirt, each of his four limbs roped to a different horse, each horse pointed in a different direction.
The quarter of him that loved Tez wanted to fly her to Nearth right away, leaving Burne behind. The quarter of him that pitied Tez wanted to return to Olo and hold her in his arms while she raged. The quarter that feared Tez wanted to abandon the wagon and disappear before she could wake up and attack. The quarter that understood Tez realized how his presence only aggravated her disease, so that the best course might be simply to lock her up like the werewolf in Mind Things until the noctus passed from her brain.
Assuming the noctus would pass from her brain.
Reining up before the Temple of Tolca, he jumped from the wagon and hoisted Tez over his shoulder. The snow corrupted his balance. Stumbling, he carried his curious burden toward the bridge, and the gatekeeper asked, “Who’s that?”
“The last neurovore,” Francis replied. “Why are you still here?” he added. “Quetzalia has no more need of guards.”
“Habits aren’t like people,” she said, sarcasm and anti-Nearthling sentiments printed on her face. “They can’t be killed instantly. I have a feeling that, after this fat machine of yours is gone, I’ll be told to raise the bridge.”
“You’ll just have to lower it again. One day Quetzalia will have colonies out there.”
“Possibly,” she g
runted.
“Raise your portcullis.”
Once inside his cabin, Francis eased Tez onto the bunk, studied her face. She looked vulnerable, just-born, beautiful. Pressing his lips against hers, he prayed to Iztac that his kiss might awaken her into innocence.
From the gallery he commandeered a shiny assortment of cans, carrying them back to his pantry. They comprised half a dozen square meals, enough to imprison Tez for two days. After two days of abstinence, he hoped, she would be rid of her addiction, and the overdoses would start becoming subject to the appetites of phages and what Vij’s notes had called “the normal processes of enzyme, gland, and duct.”
Moving to his desk, Francis located an electrostylus and flimsy, began to write. He smoothed out the note, pinning it in place with the electrostylus on one side, a locust-shaped paperweight on the other—a construction she could not fail to notice upon rousing.
I have brought you to Darwin, the one place in Quetzalia with a lock. The cabin is sealed beyond even your capacity to wreck things. Expect me back exactly thirty-five hours after you awake. Burne will be recovered by then, and we can go home. The pantry holds food. It is summer on Nearth now, and the roller coasters are rolling.
Love,
Francis
He returned to the daylight, secured the hatch, locked it. Good for you, ran his self-disgust. Burne was Quetzalia’s first general, now you’re its first jailer. You’ve certainly shown these people what being human is all about.
Climbing into the wagon, he urged the lipoca into the sun-flecked forest and set his course for Tepec.
24
PALMS DOWN, then up, then down, Minnix Cies warmed his hands over the steamy ghost rising from his tea. His father, Aras, crossed the kitchen, the cottage’s one grand room, and spoke yet another variation on it’s-good-to-have-you-back-son. This time it was “Lix and Lapca will go out of their minds when they see you.”
“I bought them a present,” said Minnix, “a desert gem that hums.” He never did figure out why his parents, normally quite reliable in their unpredictability, had capitulated to convention and given his twin brothers alliterative names. Right now the boys were in Tepec, helping a decrepit aunt begin her hibernation.
