by James Morrow
Seeing the bridge for the first time in her life, Tez gave no thought to its lacy beauty. In her eye it was merely practical—it would take her to the ten thousand brains of Cuz. Even from here she sensed the throbbing meat.
Breaking into a run, she got nearly to the deck when a tower door creaked open. “Hello, Tez.” Francis’s voice ripped into her like a repulsive odor. He stepped forward, the last of the sun catching his tiny eyes. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
She faced him without chagrin. In her small dark features Francis saw what he, wanted to see. Not the lunatic who had almost killed Mool and had surely butchered the young man at the crossroads—and others—but the distinguished human he loved.
Francis said, “I’ll give you a choice.” He raked his palm down a jutting tower stone. “It’s warm as tea in here. I’ve got some firemoss burning.” Stepping forward, he touched the puffy front of her coat. “Let’s get out of the cold. I’ll show you how to be loving again.”
“I don’t want to be loving.” She looked down at the defiling hand, and, coughing a fat wad of mucus into her mouth, spat with precision. “I want to be Nearthian.”
“Very cute,” said Francis, drawing the humiliated hand away.
“What’s my other choice?”
“You can cross the bridge to Cuz. Do that, and I guarantee you’ll—”
“Regret it?”
“Yes.”
“Naturally you expect the moral thing from me. But I’ve learned something, friend. Morals don’t count for a hell of a lot in this galaxy. I rank them somewhere between straight teeth and the ability to carry a tune. Mool killed my father and he goddam deserves whatever—”
“Did the man at the crossroads deserve to die too?”
“I can’t have reasons for everything I do, Francis Bastard Lostwax. People die anyway.” The words spewed through drooling lips. “Next time I’ll pry open Mool’s rib cage like I’m eating a hen.”
Francis clutched his abdomen. The voice mouthing these grotesqueries came from some sick parody of Tez. Tez herself was already dead.
“Then the hell with you! Go to Cuz, stinking cannibal!”
She whirled around and approached the bridge with short crippled hops. Something—a premonition—made her stop.
“You’ve doctored that thing,” she said, spitting onto the deck. “I know it.”
Francis said nothing.
“Do you think it makes you any less a murderer if you don’t touch me—if I just fall to my death?”
Silence.
She jerked a thumb toward her pack. “You have more reasons to warn me than you know. Once I carried your child, now I carry your beetle.”
“A yarn worthy of Blind Umia.”
“When I hit bottom, Cortexclavus does too. We both get crushed.”
I’ve seen that evil look before, he thought, that snide bug-plundering look Robert Poogley used to wear. Suddenly Francis’s hands were inside his coat, seeking the firemoss knife.
Eyeing the cold erect blade, Tez felt her initial fear yield to a peculiar mix of anger and relish. “God, but I hate you!” At last she had found not just another victim, but a bona fide enemy.
The shadow of a cloud rolled across Francis’s face. “Give me your pack.” She merely grinned. Slowly he advanced, knife poised. “I’ll throw this, Tez. God of the brain, I’ll throw it.”
Tez pondered his threat, judged it sincere. She hunched and wriggled until the pack swung freely on her forearm. Released, it thudded into the snow, turned over once, lay still.
“I just saved your roach’s life, Lostwax. You owe me something.” Her insistent foot thumped the nearest plank, as if in time to a dirge.
Francis stopped moving. Was that an Ollie noise he heard coming from Tez’s pack? He could not be certain, but in any event he was grateful for this excuse to postpone her murder. He spoke without hesitation. “Don’t use the bridge. I sawed through the cables.”
A smooth sphere of ice, large as an opotree stump and obviously as heavy, brushed Tez’s calf. With a furious tug she uprooted it, raised it aloft in her strong surgeon’s hands, heaved it like a shot put. Ice met wood, and the cables above her head joined the deck in a violent, audible swoop. Like a shutter in a hurricane, the bridge slammed the chasm and flew to pieces.
A foul laugh, escorted by spittle, leaped from Tex’s throat. Francis heard her mutter something about a crafty bastard, and the next thing he knew she had turned and bolted west.
HE LOOKED AT HIS KNIFE HAND. It was shaking uncontrollably, as if connected to a badly injured brain. Would I have stabbed her? he wondered. Cut the flesh I used to kiss?
It came to him that if his next action did not consist of retrieving Tez’s pack and giving chase, it might very well consist of walking toward Cuz and jumping into the chasm.
As he lifted the pack, its shape and heft convinced him that the vitreousteel cage was indeed his again. Entering the warm tower, he freed the cage and found himself staring into Ollie’s right compound eye. The bug fluttered its antennae.
“Friend,” he said, kicking the fire to death, “this is the worst day of my life.”
Outside, Francis took a deep swallow of wind. The coldness pained his teeth. Decisively he rejected the gorge and ran to where the hulking drifts and onrushing dark had borne her away.
HE PASSED THE NEXT HOUR watching Tez’s footprints, shallow pits made bottomless by shadows. Proceeding stealthily, imagining her ready to pounce behind every drift, he eventually reached the endless Temple of Tolca. Here he stopped, shivering forlornly as Iztac touched the earth and vanished.
Why the temple? Could it be that Tez was reformed, was returning to the Zolmec fold? The notion prospered for an instant, dying when he saw that she had not ascended the wall. Two meters from the nearest stairway her footprints veered sharply and followed the foundation to a huge indiscernible shape.
The temperature was dropping now. In the sky, The Toy Queen blazed forth. Francis stomped the ground, anything to keep warm, then, wrapping himself in his arms, each rubbing its mate, he resumed the hunt.
Why the temple? The answer became clear when he arrived at the dark shape—the gateway of the Northern Drawbridge—and saw at its base a male, human body. Below a stubbled chin the throat was open, slit in gross facsimile of a laughing mouth, blood vomiting through parted, pulpy lips. And, of course, there was the usual scooped-out cranium, adrift on red starlit puddles. This time Francis could not rise to nausea. Whether actual or holojected, the gaudy violence of Quetzalians no longer shocked him. He felt only a renewed purpose in his mission. Tez must die. That was all. Every other truth dropped away.
It was the easiest decision he had ever made.
The portcullis was raised, its long fangs reduced by the night to a black cutout. Beyond, the lowered bridge reached across a wide ribbon of frozen noctus. Francis advanced, booting snowchunks off the planks and watching them explode on the ice below. Here and there the day’s thaw had penetrated the snow completely, dotting the river with great round pools that seemed to suck the light from the stars, leaving behind only the blind sheen of polished obsidian.
In the distance a green light burned. Francis kicked at the nearest snow until a patch of oak lay ready to receive his body. He sprawled chest-down, sliding his legs over the edge of the bridge and easing himself by degrees toward the ice. At the point of no return he pushed away and, without losing his balance, dropped two meters into a slushy mound of snow. His senses collected, he forced his heel through the slush and in slow motion began hammering, ready to run for the wall at the first hint of frailty.
But the river was hard as a fossil. Satisfied, he struck out for Tez’s campfire.
Crossing the first ice pool, he recalled his initial impressions of noctus. The most harbored evil—you could feel it—but not the crude mindless evil that sickens good souls. Noctus was creative evil.
It was evil made tame and holy.
“Who’s there?” Tez’s voice dr
ifted feebly on the nightwind. “Don’t come any closer. That gatekeeper had a firemoss knife. I’ll split your head.”
He stopped abruptly near the third ice pool. She was probably telling the truth. What chance had he against an armed, practiced killer? To advance was suicide.
Studying the wan plain that stretched between himself and Tez’s campfire, Francis realized that he knew this place—not from direct observation but from his map studies in the Library of Iztac. He knew, for example, that while she probably thought her camp lay on the far bank, the river grew so wide here that she was practically…in its center!
And suddenly Francis saw exactly how he would do it.
“I’m in pain,” Tez called. “I wrecked my hand on the bastard’s jaw.”
“I wish I could see you,” said Francis, letting Tez’s pack slide from his shoulders.
“Yes,” said Tez, meaning, I wish I could see you too. “I love you.”
“Yes.” He was on his knees now, chopping into the ice with his firemoss knife. In seconds the blade touched noctus. He sawed in a circle.
“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
Francis lifted the ice disk away. Pinpoints of starlight settled into the flowing gall. Of the knife blade nothing remained but charred and twisted junk.
Tez was babbling now. “We named our own constellation. The Shit Queen!”
Shedding his gloves, Francis opened the vitreousteel cage and grasped Ollie by the thorax. He stroked the bug affectionately, then lowered it into the hole, stopping at midthickness and aligning it with the campfire. “Perhaps we’ll meet again,” he whispered as he jammed Ollie’s proboscis hard against the inside surface of the hole.
The beetle responded reliably, behaving as its kind had always behaved and always would behave until extinction knocked on the door: it drilled and shot forward, tunneling through whatever matter blocked its way.
Like tissue under a surgeon’s knife, the ice began to part. The incision bled onto blue snow.
Tez kept ranting. “You called me a cannibal! You think I can control this?”
Francis backed away from the treacherous rivulet, kicking the cage as he went. It scudded across the ice and burrowed into a snowdrift. “There’s an old cannibal joke!” he shouted, hoping to distract her. “A missionary says to the native chieftain, ‘I know a horrible rumor. I’ve heard that you kill people and eat them.’ And the chieftain replies, ‘Yes, it’s true. But I know a rumor that’s even more horrible. I’ve heard that you kill people and don’t eat them.’”
Too late, Tez saw it coming. Ever-advancing, a hissing geyser steamed upward from the beetle’s swirling proboscis. A terrible ripping sound, the ripping of a giant’s bedsheet, spread through the frigid night.
Suddenly the creature was past her, and she found herself facing an ugly silver-black crack. On the other side, spurting noctus attacked her campfire. She turned dizzily and broke for the shore, but the way was fissured. The shelf beneath her feet snapped off. Her weight upended it.
She went down soundlessly, surrendering to the current, and the glutinous sins of Quetzalia rolled over her like an ebony coffin lid.
BENUMBED, FRANCIS DID NOT STIR from the opening to the Cortexclavus tunnel. He wept as children do, with discharges from his nose as well as his eyes, the mucus making stiff waxy stains on his face. He was trying to find some way out, a door—perhaps he should gulp the noctus, let it carve open his throat, boil the fat of his heart—but there was no door, only the grotesque emanations of his boots, the snow piles, The Toy Queen, everything his stare touched. Unlike his past experiences with violence, this particular one, Francis knew, would never, never end.
27
DARWIN, AIRBORNE, gyrated like a wet dog. Snow hurtled outward in all directions until the hull was clear. On the control deck, Burne smiled to see his plan work so well. The shakedown flight completed, he dropped below the clouds and roared across the barren sleeping blueness that showed on the monitor.
Its ice gone, the river made of hate zoomed up, a running sore on the land: though far from over, winter was clearly in remission.
Considering that she had been so long encased in snow, Darwin performed miraculously. She needed no major repairs, save a new viewbubble to replace the one eaten by the damn bug. But Burne’s thoughts were not on Darwin. They were on his stump.
The healing had taken a full opoch. He passed these days in planning rejoinders to anyone who might ever call him crippled. Galileo Institute intellectuals he would threaten with physical harm. Crippled? You want to see crippled? Wait till I tie a sheepshank in your spinal cord. (He makes a sudden move, and the intellectual runs fearfully away.) In the case of his Nearth Police Academy buddies, satisfaction would lie only in baffling them. Crippled? Just remember: behind closed doors, laughter sounds like crying. (The buddy smiles weakly.)
Once out of bed, Burne set about mastering his crutches. The vile appendages at first made him feel like some mutant that Nature kept around only to remind herself never to try three legs again. Phantom-limb pain, from which he suffered acutely, complicated his rehabilitation. But then one afternoon he found himself oscillating around the hospital corridors, happily convinced that crutches made him a wilder character than ever.
On this same day, Tepec hummed with a rumor. The last neurovore had been hunted down and killed by Francis Lostwax.
But close behind came a second rumor, muzzling all cheers. The mass murderer was not a neurovore but a Chimec Hospital surgeon driven mad by a noctus overdose. When Francis himself, stumbling into Tepec with a thirty-day beard, confessed to the swarming crowds that his victim was Dr. Tez Yon, Burne became so disturbed that his missing leg began immediately to ache.
Burne had reasons to be furious at Francis. Francis had lied—not only about the Quetzalians regarding their general as a savior (hell, they’d sooner erect a statue to a child molester) but about the real purpose of his trip to Cuz (how did he ever bring himself to kill her?). Yet Burne was not furious at Francis. He was in awe. After all, he mused, a Hero of Quetzalia fantasy was exactly what my one-legged ego needed at the time. And Lostwax could have blamed me for that whole Tez Yon disaster. I’m the one who decided that Quetzalians aren’t human.
And so, as Darwin chewed a broad furrow in the snows lining the moat banks, Burne found himself looking forward to the imminent homeward voyage. In the coming weeks he would try to get to know, really know, this sad, peculiar entomologist. He had obviously underestimated the man.
IN A SNUG SANCTUM in the Temple of Iztac, by a fire that projected its audience as massive shadows on the plastered walls, Francis Lostwax and Vaxcala Coatl took afternoon tea.
“I understand that you got your insect back,” said Vaxcala, trying to rescue a foundering conversation.
“A wall mender spotted the cage, and Cortexclavus was only a few meters away.” Francis’s voice ached with an unfathomable weariness. “My guess is that the specimen surfaced soon after reaching the shore, then turned around.”
The reunion with Cortexclavus had been notably joyless. For Francis the thing was now permanently tainted.
He no longer called it Ollie.
Still, he did not intend to let the specimen’s new-found connotations keep him from a Poelsig Award.
Vaxcala said, “Are you depressed?”
“Not exactly. I feel…contaminated.”
“Con-tam-i-na-ted.” Taxcala rolled the word around, found it to her liking. “Yes, good. You’d never harmed anyone before?”
“On Nearth they give you a yeastgun for your thirteenth birthday,” said Francis coldly, “and if you bag a schoolteacher you’re considered an adult. I thought you knew that.” A sudden shame whipped through him. “I’m sorry. I get bored with hating myself, so I try hating Quetzalia.”
“Do you?”
“What?” Francis’s shadow grew as he went to the fire.
“Hate Quetzalia?”
“No.” He turned and watched his huge twin
on the wall. “If Nearth ever learns about this planet, it won’t be from me or Burne.”
Vaxcala gulped tea, left a tear’s worth. “Good. But that’s not why I invited you here.”
Francis frowned, not at Vaxcala but at Vaxcala’s shadow.
“It occurred to me, Dr. Lostwax, that somebody from Tepec ought to say good-bye to you. You went through hell for us. So…” She approached, smiled, and gently slipped her hand into his.
Francis was moved, a condition he proceeded to conceal under bitterness. “You owe me no gratitude, Vaxcala, only blame.” He shook her hand with the same detached efficiency he might have used to steal the ring off a corpse. “I’m the real mass murderer.”
“I’ll make that clear at her funeral.”
“Do all surgeons rate an oration from their high priestess?”
“No. Tez is special.”
“Because she died violently?”
“Because her tragedy teaches us that noctus is…noctus. It’s not the answer to anything.”
“But she was overdosed by mistake.”
“Yes, and until we find a cure for the common mistake, I think we’ll go back to total pacifism around here. We’ll leave our river in its bed.”
“Along with Tez’s bones. The cremation will be a flop, Vaxcala. You haven’t got a body.”
“We could burn her tools, perhaps—her scalpels.”
“Why don’t you burn me?” said Francis, almost meaning it.
“No. That would be…violent.” Her smile was sly.
“Tez’s victims, they all had friends, families.”
“Yes. But you misunderstand Quetzalians if you think they’d relish any actual suffering on your part.”
“So instead they’ll rip my flesh in the Temple of Tolca. That won’t end their sorrow either. The irony is, Tez believed in nonviolence. She didn’t even need the sacraments.”
