“Maybe by then the ice will have come back.”
“Despite all our heroic efforts, I don’t think we will be able to preserve the ice cap. Not all of it. Not as it is. In a thousand years, yes, who knows, the ice may return. But right now we have the beginnings of something new. We’ve helped it along. Accelerated it. We’ve lost much along the way, but we’ve gained much, too. Like the mammoths. Although, of course, they aren’t really mammoths, and mammoths never lived in the Antarctic.”
“I know,” Mike said, but Will was the kind of earnest pedagogue who couldn’t be derailed.
“They are mostly elephant, with parts of the mammoth genome added,” he said. “The tusks, the shaggy coat, small ears to minimise heat loss, a pad of fat behind the skull to insulate the brain and provide a store of food in winter, altered circadian clocks to cope with permanent darkness in winter, permanent day in summer … Traits clipped from a remnant population of dwarf mammoths that survived on an island in the Siberian Arctic until about four thousand years ago. The species hasn’t been reborn, but it has contributed to something new. All of this is new, and precious, and fragile. Which is why we shouldn’t try to live out here just yet.”
“Who is this ‘we’?”
“Oh, you know, people like me,” Will said vaguely. “Natural history enthusiasts you might say. We live in cities and settlements, spend as much time as we can in the wild, but we try not to disturb or despoil it with our presence. The mammoths aren’t ours, by the way. They’re an authority project, like the arctic hares and foxes. Like the reindeer. But smaller things, insects and plants, the mycorrhizal fungi that help plant roots take up essential nutrients, soil microbes, and so on—we try to give a helping hand. Bees are a particular problem. It’s too early for them, some say, but there’s a species of solitary bee from the Orkneys, in Scotland, that’s quite promising…” Will blinked at Mike. “Forgive me. I do rattle on about my obsessions sometimes.”
Mike smiled, because the guy really was a little like a pixie from a children’s storybook. Kindly and fey, a herder of bees and ants, a friend of magical giants, an embodiment of this time, this place.
“I have trouble accepting all the changes,” he said. “I shouldn’t really like the mammoths. But I can’t help thinking they seem so at home.”
And with a kind of click he realised that he felt at home too. Here on the foggy beach, by one of the rivers of Antarctica, with creatures got up from a dream sporting in the iceless sea. In this new land emerging from the deep freeze, where anything could be possible. Mammoths, bees, elves … Life finding new ways to live.
Presently, the mammoths came up from the water, out of the fog, long hair pasted flat, steam rising from the muscular slopes of their backs as they used their trunks to grub at seaweed along the strandline. Will followed them with his camera as they disappeared into the fog again, and Mike stood up and started to undress. Leave on his skinsuit? No, he needed to be naked. The air was chill on his skin, stones cold underfoot as he walked towards the water. He heard Will call out to him, and then he was running, splashing through icy water, the shock if it when he plunged into the rolling waves almost stopping his heart. He swam out only a little way before he turned back, but it was enough to wash himself clean.
The Baby Eaters
IAN MCHUGH
Here’s a shrewd look at the social consequences—sometimes disastrous—of humans misunderstanding and misinterpreting alien customs and lifeways.…
Ian McHugh’s first success as a fiction writer was winning the short-story contest at the national science fiction convention in his native Australia in 2004. Since then he has sold stories to magazines, webzines, and anthologies in Australia and internationally, and recently achieved a career goal of having his number of published stories overtake his number of birthdays. His first collection, Angel Dust, was short-listed for the Aurealis Award for Best Collection in 2015.
Meychezhek is big, even among badhar-krithkinee, a circumstance exacerbated by the fact that I’m both already nervous and kneeling in anticipation of her entrance.
Her skin is purple-black, more textured than human skin. Her head crest, flattened now, is white, banded with orange. Her eyes are red-shot yellow, horizontally slit. When she smiles, her teeth are noticeably stained. Meychezhek acquired an addiction to coffee during her times as an ambassador on Friendship and Perunu-Zambezi.
The smile is a human expression, meant to put me at ease, but her fangs are intimidating.
I bow—correctly, I hope—and she kneels.
Krithkinee don’t sit. They bend in the same places as humans but the proportions are different. Shin bones shorter, feet longer—pivots for burst sprinting. The extra pair of arms raises the centre of gravity. The body leans forward, balanced by the short tail. Feet and fighting arms have triple talons, one opposed. The four fingers of the inner manipulative arms have retractable claws.
Meychezhek signals for me to be at ease and I relax my pose fractionally. My pulse races.
“Thank you, Dhar, for welcoming me into your home.” My Babel implant turns Euraf English into crude but passable Junkhin before the words reach my mouth. It never stops being disconcerting, to speak a language you don’t fluently understand, nor the sense of your muscles moving contrary to the brain’s commands.
“You are honoured,” Meychezhek replies, accepting what is due to her rank. A dhar is part military officer, part civil administrator and part feudal lord—a Japanese daimyo in the era of the shoguns, combined with an Indian civil service mandarin.
Our solicitation of an invitation to trade had followed the correct form: approaching the provincial dhar with an appropriately personalised gift, in this case, an antique coffee set, unsuitable for krithkinee mouths but Meychezhek is a collector. Given the modest scale of our enterprise, we’d expected her to defer to a subordinate lord. A further round of gifts would follow, and possibly a second deferral, depending on the status of the lower-ranked lord, the social and commercial advantage for them and the particulars of their patronage relationship with Meychezhek.
What we didn’t anticipate was that the dhar would accede directly to the solicitation and offer to host me herself.
“The commendations from your peers are impressive,” Meychezhek says. “You are highly esteemed.”
Again, there’s the disconcerting awareness that the words my ears hear aren’t the same as those my brain receives. If I concentrate, I can hear both.
Meychezhek’s statement is both a compliment and a challenge. I’m confused, though. “Forgive me, Dhar. The commendations of my peers?”
“At the university.”
“I…” I haven’t studied or worked at university in a decade. I’m surprised enough that it’s an effort to avert my gaze. Staring is more that just rude among krithkinee. A person of equal or inferior rank holding another’s gaze may be seen as a challenge to fight.
“I have not conversed with a fellow sapientologist since I returned from Perunu-Zambezi,” she continues.
My thoughts blank for an instant, then race. The dhar’s interest is personal: in me. This is both better and worse than we’d assumed. Better, because the mercantile stakes aren’t so high as we feared—it seems the dhar’s intent is not to levy any uncomfortable political demands. Worse, because it means that the success or failure of our enterprise weighs far more heavily on Meychezhek’s impression of me, personally, than I’d anticipated.
“It will be your pleasure to converse with me,” she says.
* * *
I’m expected to join Meychezhek for the morning meal. Badhar-krithkinee traditionally breakfast at dawn. The dark-crested, orange-skinned junkhar house attendant allowed that it was proper for me to complete my morning prayers first, but it means that the dhar’s been waiting for me, now, and I’m half-jogging to keep up with the attendant’s loping stride.
Krithkinee are carnivores. Among high status badharee and junkharee it’s usual to eat whole animals, roasted,
baked or cured. Offal and pickled meats are common foods among the lower social classes. Raw fruits and vegetables are eaten as a garnish and digestive aid.
I don’t try to hide my surprise and delight to see the piled plate of leaves and fruit—many of which I even recognise.
Meychezhek raises her long chin to expose her throat. I immediately dip my head, pressing my chin to my collarbone in the appropriate response.
She’s not alone. Her third and favourite son, Pathkemey, is also with her, as is Yzgushin, the junior-most of Meychezhek’s wives, currently heavily pregnant and nursing an enormously round belly.
Pathkemey, the “son,” is female, as is Meychezhek, “father” and “husband”. Yzgushin, “wife,” is male.
Krithkinee social gender roles align rigidly with the physiological reproductive functions of impregnator and impregnated, and along comparable lines to those found in human traditions of patriarchy, but the actual biological sexes are inverse to the human norm. Evidently the providers of my Babel’s Euraf-Junkhin thesaurus were ideological pedants of similar stripe to my old professor of comparative sociology—equating gendered social roles to their human patriarchal approximates, but aligning gendered pronouns to biological sex.
It means I have to be infuriatingly careful how I think, so that I’m not—one way or other—constantly addressing people as the wrong gender.
Yzgushin is dwarfed by his husband and stepson. His fighting arms are tucked discretely into the folds of his frock, as is appropriate for a wife. He dips his chin as I do.
Pathkemey casts a glance at Meychezhek, evidently unsure of my status relative to hers. After a brief hesitation, she raises her chin as her father has.
Formalities completed, I’m invited to kneel at the table. Meychezhek serves—her wife first, then Pathkemey and then me.
The balcony, on the exterior of the house’s uppermost storey, affords a view over the city. The squat, drum-shaped towers of manor houses, manufactories and communal tenements rise out of the bustle below, of traffic-packed roads winding between garden plots, orchards, animal pens and tented markets. Elevated railways connect many of the towers.
I’m offered a middle leg from the roasted creature on the central platter. All six of its feet have opposed thumbs. They look like children’s hands. The little carcass reminds me of the xenophobic slur that krithkinee eat their own young. I fill up the rest of my plate with salad.
“Curious, is it not?” Meychezhek says. “I expose my weakest point to demonstrate that I am unthreatened by you. Among krithkinee the convention is so deeply ingrained as to be hardwired. Yet you are an alien, bound to different conventions. In my instinctive show of strength, I expose myself to unintended risk.”
Pathkemey’s expression of alarm transcends species boundaries. Had she made a mistake in exposing her throat to me? Yzgushin observes with frank curiosity.
I say, “You do not perceive me as a threat.”
“No, but my interpretation of your human signals could be flawed.”
“Do you believe so?”
Meychezhek flashes her fangs in another of those human grins. I have a sudden suspicion that she knows the expression is intimidating and is being mischievous. “No.”
“What do you sense from me?”
Meychezhek picks at her meat with the claws of her inner arms. Badharee of the dominant culture eschew cutlery. There are bowls of scented water on the table for washing between courses.
“Consciously, you are excited and curious. Nervous, perhaps. It is in your gestures and the movement of your eyes. But your body is reacting like prey. The smell is so strong I can taste it.”
I’d put the butterflies in my stomach down to my queasiness that a provincial dhar had taken a personal interest in me. It’s more than that, though. The monkey in my hindbrain is barely holding itself together. “You are right. I am afraid of you.”
Pathkemey is affronted. “Why? We offer no threat. You are a welcome guest in the house of my father.”
Meychezhek holds up a hand to stay her.
Is she testing me, or Pathkemey? Or seeking to educate her son? Pathkemey didn’t accompany her father on her ambassadorial postings. Her exposure to non-krithkinee can have been minimal, at best. Is this the real reason why Meychezhek chose to invite me herself? To be a sample specimen, capable of educated conversation?
I pick up the spouted cup beside my place and take a sip of water, trying to think like an academic. “Humans have mixed instincts,” I say. “We evolved as prey until our intelligence developed to the point that we could turn the tables on our hunters. Since then, we have grown accustomed to being at the top of the food chain. But the hunted monkey is still in there.” It occurs to me, belatedly, that they’re unlikely to know what a monkey is, since badharee tend to eschew encyclopaedic implants. I indicate the dismembered beast on the table, which seems near enough. “In you, I see a predator, stronger than I am, and in your element.”
Pathkemey says, “Like hunting near mhaharrtee.”
A mhaharrt is a keystone predator in the primary terrestrial ecosystem that the badharee-junkharee export to their terraformed colonies. Mhaharrtee have a reputation for ignoring smaller predators, such as krithkinee—but not always.
Meychezhek raises her crest, acknowledging her son’s astuteness. “Humans have a superficially similar idiom—‘like swimming with sharks’,” she says. “But krithkinee are not ‘hunted monkeys,’ as you say.” She flicks a finger towards my plate. “You are enjoying your meat.” It is not a question.
I’m yet to touch it. I pick up the little infant arm and, copying Pathkemey, sink my teeth into the roasted flesh. “I am. It is delicious.”
* * *
Meychezhek has given me into Pathkemey’s keeping to learn to ride a staigeg, alongside a group of the household’s children. The lessons take place in the manor house’s central courtyard. Members of the household look down at us from the curved interior balconies.
The children—with no more riding experience than I—hurl themselves up onto the staigegee with absolute recklessness and are tossed aside nearly as quickly. They take little if any heed of Pathkemey’s instruction and cheer the most spectacular falls, congratulating each other on their bruises.
I ask Pathkemey if their heedlessness disturbs her.
She considers silently for several seconds before answering. “They are children. This is the way children should behave. When they tire of falling off, they will become heedful of my words.”
“Are you not concerned for their safety?”
Again the pause—Pathkemey is as intelligent as her father, but weighs her words more slowly. “Yes. But it is a father’s unreasoning protectiveness.” She points out two of the children as being her own son and daughter. “Children are the wealth and joy of our house. The loss of a child is cause for grief. But see the joy that they find in this game. There is joy in this too for me.”
Needless to say, neither she nor the children can understand my own caution when approaching my designated staigeg.
* * *
“There will be war between humans and krithkinee,” Meychezhek says. “Sooner, rather than later.”
She has finally consented to escort me to the botanists with whom I’m hoping to negotiate the supply of pharmaceutical ingredients. I look down at Meychezhek from my sedan, perched high up on the hump of my staigeg. My riding is not yet proficient enough to control a staigeg on the city’s crowded streets. Consequently I find myself carted about like some frail and revered grandmother or religious sage. Meychezhek sits at the base of her mount’s neck, as does the badhar mahout who steers my beast. The blue-black skins and striped white crests of the badharee stand out starkly among the orange, scarlet and crimson faces and dark spines of the majority junkharee.
“There has already been war,” I say. “More than once. The Edoans and Austronese have fought the Reformationist junkharhee at Autaki. The League has fought beside the dzaiiree-rajhinee…”
/>
Meychezhek makes a sharp upward chopping gesture of one outer arm—silence.
“Skirmishes,” she says. “I mean a war that will encompass our two species. Total war.”
“Why do you think so?” It seems unlikely to me. Humans and krithkinee both have too much enthusiasm for intraspecies warfare to ever gang up on anyone else.
“Because neither of us learned not to hate before we climbed into space,” Meychezhek says.
My staigeg stops suddenly to avoid crushing a crowd of junkharee street children. I have to grab at the wooden case on my lap to stop it sliding off—full of coffee berries for propagation, my gift to the botanists. The mahout swears while guards jump off their wheeled sleds to shoo the urchins out from under the feet of the staigegee.
“Relations between the major human polities and the Empire have always been good,” I say.
Meychezhek shows an expression that I’m unsure how to interpret. “For how long? Badharee are a minority. We have held this Empire for thirty generations. But the Empire belongs to the junkharhee—they are the majority. The Reformationists nibble at our borders. Every year our rule becomes more overt, the krithzha more obviously our puppet, and more junkhar lords go over. The tighter we grip, the less we hold.”
“You think the Reformationist junkharhee will take over the Empire?”
“Yes.”
“Then there will be war between krithkinee and krithkinee.”
“There will be that,” she agrees. “But it will be limited. Neither side can afford not to find an accommodation. And then there will be war between krithkinee and humans.”
I’m not sure if she’s treating the badharee-junkharee Empire as synonymous with the krithkinee species, or expects that the lesser krithkinee polities will somehow fall in behind the Empire in the case of a major war with humankind. “Do you hate?” I ask.
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 26
