Unnaturals

by Merrill, Lynna

  He looked angry now. He looked more like the father she remembered rather than this large, stern stranger she'd met in the Village of Life. He'd been often angry, long ago, when he'd taught her the letters and how to shape them into words through a keyboard. Angry at something, and just a little happy that she was a quick learner.

  "Everyone is welcome in the Village of Light," he said and it took him effort to not shout at her. "As long as they don't make waves."

  Waves? Like in the river and the big lake she knew wasn't too far. She understood, perhaps. You could drown in waves. Or you could sail.

  "Are you here to pray for Mom? Will she be healed by those gods of yours?"

  He clenched a fist. Slowly, he took a deep breath. He stared at her. Mel didn't like the way people outside of the cities stared, but this was even worse. For the first time in her life, Meliora the Unnatural thought that perhaps there was a point in healing ACD.

  "Those gods of ours," her father said, very quietly. "You shall not blaspheme in the temple. Say it. Say it now!"

  "Those gods of ours," Meliora muttered. "Will they help her?"

  "Yes." His eyes became just a bit more tender. "They already have."

  This is enough for me, then. I don't care that you don't love me and are not happy to see me. I don't care about anything else in this village!

  "Enough talking," her father said, stern again. "You were told not to go out at night. You are new, you don't understand order yet—this is why I am tolerating this. Today only. This is not Lucasta, Meliora. This is the real world, and you'd better get used to it quickly. Don't make waves, I said. Obey the rules. Don't ask questions. Now go back to Erika."

  "But you taught me to read—you taught me to think!"

  "Yes, I taught you to read. You haven't forgotten it in that city of humming and decay, have you? Now read what you should. The Book of the Gods. Out of here now."

  He came with her, but they didn't talk on the way.

  ***

  He didn't talk much to her in the following week, either. Or to anyone else except Mom. He went to the temple together with everyone to thank the gods for the hunters' success, and he did talk then but only to the crowd, not to any particular person. He stood before the two tables and told them all how blessed they were, and that with the meat, now cut and hung to be dried, and with the new harvest, they would survive yet another winter. He also pointed at Arisa and the other fat women and said that the city was doubly-blessed.

  Lizzy looked with longing; Meliora looked away and old Codes frowned at her.

  Then the chief pointed at the computers by the other wall. People turned, eyes followed his finger. Suddenly, without even realizing it, they were all standing closer together, and the looks they cast at that faraway wall made Meliora shiver.

  "Once upon a time," the chief said quietly, but his voice carried through the heavy silence like a bellow, "there were only the gods. There were many of them, and they walked the world free. They hunted as much as they needed to eat, but otherwise they lived in peace with all animals. They picked fruit to eat, and cut trees to make their houses and feed their fires in winter, but no more than that. Seasons turned. Plants and animals died and were born each year, as was proper and still is. Gods, too, died and other gods were born, the women-gods as fruitful as the trees. Life came and went, and all was good. And then...

  "One dark, stormy day a god tasted a fruit and thought it too bitter. The other gods told that god not to be stupid. Many fruit were bitter in those days and just as many were sweet. None were better than the rest. Yet, What, the god thought, if I made a cut in the bitter-fruit tree and put a shoot of the sweet-fruit tree in it? It was no sooner thought than done. A sweet branch grew on the bitter tree. Soon, the god destroyed all bitter branches. The world had changed, for the devils had come to it."

  The chief stepped towards his people, watching them with his eyes burning as much as Nicolas' had on that day when he'd stopped the interweb. Watching Meliora specifically. The people edged even closer to each other and to him, away from the computers and away from the temple's bare walls.

  Mom was smiling at her husband and taking today's gods-devils fairytale as if it were the absolute, only truth—just like she always had on the interweb. She'd forget it tomorrow. The problem was that the others would not. Meliora felt their looks and thoughts in the very air.

  Heaviness. Hatred, even, so much that Mel felt sorry for the dark, chipped computers. She turned to look at them, and the heavy looks got fixed on her back.

  Perhaps there was a point in people in Lucasta forgetting everything so fast. Perhaps there was a point in Theodore's new computer interfaces. Right now, Doctor Mel wished that the people in the temple had thoughtmotion interfaces instead of those looks and pursed lips, and that she had access to the database.

  Waves

  Mom must have remembered the temple's bare walls at least. On the next day, she asked old Codes if Lizzy could be allowed to paint them.

  "Why look at such ugliness," Mom said, "when this nice girl has the skill to make something pretty?"

  Lizzy, a restless Sylvannan artist, had befriended Walter, a restless boy, and had run away with him.

  Walter had been convinced that there was a way out if you took the train, and that more cities than four existed. "People take the train when they leave for the final time, you know?" he'd said. "They must be going somewhere."

  He'd found a picture of two entwined snakes biting their tales and a note that this picture could open a door.

  "Did anyone meet you?" Meliora asked. "Did you find the witch?"

  Lizzy shook her head. "No, Mel. I only found the sun, so bright and frightening—and the wind. And the autumn leaves, rustling so noisily."

  Lizzy and Walter had walked into the forest, where they'd met a hunting party from the village, who led them here and protected them from monsters. "They had us sleep in different cottages," Lizzy said. "It was frightening, Mel, no less than the sun was. Instead of with Walter, the only person I knew, I spent the night with young women who stared at me. I kept thinking that they were sick, that a medstat—or even a doctor—should come and give them ACD pills. Why, Mel, I told them so! Old Codes came and shouted at me."

  Lizzy, of course, hadn't shouted back. People were polite in Sylvanna. She'd curled into a ball inside the strange, scratchy bed and cried herself to sleep. Then, in the morning, she hadn't gone to work. Not because she was making a stand. Because she didn't know better. She didn't know better when she asked for a tablet to draw, too.

  They took her computer away.

  "Like they took yours. The chief and Mistress Codes always do. We can't go back..." Lizzy clasped a hand to her mouth. "Not that we want to! The cities are evil. They kill you if you try to come back—you know that, Mel, right?"

  No. She hadn't known.

  "We want to stay here, both of us. Walter has become such a good hunter. It's nothing that he fainted the first time he saw blood! He's become almost as good as Nicolas!"

  "So Nicolas is the best killer here?" Meliora wondered why her voice suddenly sounded stranger than a moment ago, both rougher and squeakier.

  "What? Mel, they only kill so that we can eat—well, yes. I guess he is. But Walter is almost as good."

  "Nicolas is better than people born here?"

  "No—yes—Mel, who cares! I want to marry Walter some day!" Her voice fell to a mutter. "If he'll ever notice me with Melanie always at his heels, that is. I think he likes black hair and green eyes better than brown hair and brown eyes. She's thinner than me, too, and taller."

  "But what does all that matter?" All that—hair color, eye color, thinness, fatness, little things—they could be all changed so easily in Lucasta. People always did.

  Yet, in the Village of Life, color was a constant, and fatness and thinness harder to control. There was no one to help you choose your mate, either, or help your mate choose you.

  Or, the gods were supposed to help. Their Boo
k said so. It said humans were their precious children—the ones created to fight the devils.

  The gods themselves had put the devils in the world. A god had messed with the balanced, perfect way of nature, twisting a fruit tree's essence. Once that had happened, it wasn't enough. It could not stop. There were gods who followed that god's example, who brought seeds where seeds should have never been brought; who experimented with pairing animals with other animals they should have never been paired with; who ate their meat and milk.

  "Finding a mate for another, even for an animal, is wrong," the Book said. "It is no coincidence that animals in nature have complex mating rituals each season.

  The wrong seeds brought to the wrong forests and fields took over, killing the native species. The wrong animals born out of unnatural breeding took over. Many of those were unable to live in the wild on their own. They grew fat and lazy. Decay, sickness of the soul, spilled into them because of the wrongness of their making.

  The gods stopped hunting. They ate their animals, their unnatural sweet fruit, and what grew of those grains they sowed into the earth themselves. Great forests fell. Prairies were devastated. The gods' seeds and sweet trees grew everywhere; the gods' fat herds grazed everything.

  The decay, too, grew. It grew too big to be contained in herds and seeds and in the gods themselves. It spilled.

  The decay made devils, and it made humans.

  Nature had a way to balance everything, the Book of the Gods said. At least, nature tried. The devils born out of the decay were pure decay, but the humans weren't. The humans were the devils' counterpart. The devils would try to destroy the world, but the humans might save it—if they stayed away from the devils and heeded the guidance of the gods.

  The gods pulled away from the world. It was a sacrifice, for despite their mistakes, the world was still beautiful. But a world full of devils and humans wasn't a world where gods should walk, the gods knew. The humans were of this new world, they could not live on hunting and bitter fruit. They needed their fields, and cheese, and sweetness. They must live according to the gods' mistakes—as long as they didn't make their own. The gods would help. The gods had made their mistakes already. Now, they knew what was right, both for humans and for the whole world.

  If only the humans would listen.

  ***

  Old Codes refused the painting of the walls.

  "Erika," she said, "the Book of the Gods says nothing about painting temple walls."

  "Exactly!" Mom exclaimed. She was easily excitable this day, prone to argue. "It doesn't forbid it!"

  "Erika!"

  "Yes, Mistress Codes!"

  Mom rose from her chair, waving the knife she'd been peeling potatoes with, eyes suddenly glowing. Lizzy, on the other hand, was huddled in her chair, making herself smaller. Mel had seen Mom like this—what?—once or twice in her life. Always, such moments were followed by medstats and shots or pills.

  This time, there weren't shots and pills. There was only the chief, who chose this moment to enter his kitchen.

  "The point, Mistress Codes," Mom continued shouting, "is that the Book makes sure to tell us if something is wrong! If it doesn't even mention it, well—the gods forbid advertising and waste, fine, we won't have advertisements on the walls. But they don't forbid just pictures! You have the wall of good and the wall of evil—why not pictures on those walls, of the good and evil? Just look at her! Look at the girl! You want to draw the gods and the devils, don't you, Lizzy? It will make you happy, right? And it will be easier for all of us to know something—be it good or evil—if we can look at it! Right, Julian?"

  He said nothing. Mel watched Mom look at him with glowing eyes and red cheeks, and watched old Codes look at him with a frown deeper than all wrinkles cutting through her forehead. Lizzy didn't watch him, she was chopping carrots with fingers white from squeezing the knife; she chopped as if her life depended on it.

  Mom sighed and sat back beside Lizzy. The glow had drained as fast as it had appeared, and she held her knife, but she didn't chop anything.

  Several days later, the chief told Lizzy not to do any harvesting or canning any more. She was to paint pictures on the temple walls.

  The chief didn't let Mel help Lizzy, however. He personally chased Mel away from the temple, saying that she was forbidden to deal with nonsense. Mom didn't know that—and Mel wouldn't tell her. She didn't want to interfere with Mom's happiness.

  Yet, that night Meliora didn't join the singing. Instead, she went to the village's edge and sat in the branches of something called the Dividing Tree. You had no business going further than that tree if you were a woman and had no work in the fields. Night was falling, and the air was becoming cold. Soon, the summer would be gone.

  Fallen leaves rustled. Mel turned to see a little boy, perhaps six years old, standing by the tree and looking up to her with round eyes.

  "Can't you sing?" the boy said. "Why are you here alone?"

  "I can't sing!" Mel shouted. She was in no mood to explain herself to a little child. "You have a problem with that?"

  The boy shook his head.

  "Granddad Carlos says you can read. Says Grandma Codes told him. Can you really?"

  "Yes. I can. I can program computers, too."

  The boy's eyes grew rounder. "You can tell the devils what to do? Will you show me?"

  Mel looked at the child. His eyes were fixed on hers, and she had neither a medstat nor relaxation pills.

  "Please, Mistress Mel, please! I can't sing, either! I can't"—he lowered his eyes—"be in your Mom's group, because the other children laugh at me. There're also Lance and Jake and Stephanie and Sybil, they'll come if you'll have them. Please!"

  The singing was Mom's other idea. Teaching little children how to sing properly. She said she felt the rules of music. In the village, only some people could sing well and others sang any old way—Mom thought she could improve that.

  "Why not." Mel sighed. "Let's tell the others I'll only teach you kids to read and write letters, though. As for the programming, we don't have working computers, so we'll do some primitive writing by hand and imagine the rest, and the whole thing won't really work—but at least you'll have the knowledge. This will be our secret."

  Lizzy was happy with her temple, Mom was happy with her singing children. Mel was happy for Mom and Lizzy—but she needed something for herself, and old Codes' endless chores wouldn't do it. She needed to make something. Anything that was allowed—or not—to be made.

  Fire

  Mom's singers would sing on the Day of Autumn, and there would be a dance. Suddenly Lizzy was going twice a day to the temple to pray. She was pale and knocked over the eggs and milk more often than normal when she cooked. Once, she almost dropped old Codes' breakfast pan in the fire.

  "Lizzy, are you sick?" Meliora finally asked. "What is wrong, Lizzy?"

  "Sick?" Lizzy looked at her from where she was wiping splattered egg from the floor. "No, Mel, not at all."

  "Lizzy." Mel swallowed. She'd never asked. "Did you have the treatment?"

  "Treatment? What treat... No! I didn't! I was spared that much decay! I will grow old! I will grow old just like everyone—well, not like everyone. I—I am sorry, Mel. You know..." She was wiping and wiping, though there was no egg left. "Arisa had the treatment, before she left Annabella. She was what they call a natural in the cities. She just took the train to Lucasta one day, and something happened. The train stopped where it wasn't supposed to stop, and she woke up. It was dark, and her computer didn't have the interweb, and she screamed and cried, but no one else woke up, and no one else came. She got off the train, and then the train left without her. When she found the stairs, there was an old woman waiting for her. She showed her how to work and showed her the way, and Arisa came and didn't even meet monsters. Because she is a proper woman! I think she's healed, Mel. Mistress Codes says it is because she is such a good worker and because she prays to the gods so much, and because of the new life growing insid
e her. There, you don't have to be a born-here-green-eyed-Melanie to be something! I...oh, Mel! Oh, Mel, the dance! Couples—so many marriages happen after the Autumn dance, Mel, and I've been here for more than a year now! I wonder if Walter finally will... Never mind." She got up from the floor. "Come on, let's bring the breakfast to the woodsmen."

  "Lizzy, clean your hands from that egg first."

  "Walter likes eggs slightly runny..." Lizzy absentmindedly wiped her fingers with her apron. A moment later another egg splattered on the floor.

  The evening before the dance Meliora went alone to the temple. It was almost dark, so almost no one was out. Soon, they would all huddle inside their cabins with their little candles, and soon even those would be snuffed. You didn't waste precious light in the village. Candles were few and hard to harvest. They only grew in caves, and only in a few of those, and you must walk in damp, cold darkness for a long time before you reached them.

  Doctor Eryn had taught Meliora about candles—those sticky, smoky, insufficient light sources from fairytales and wonderful experiences. Candles were made out of wax or tallow. The former was produced by bees, long-extinct animals, the latter was grown from animal genes.

  "But there are bees out here in the real world," Mel whispered at Lizzy's painted wall—the one with pictures of the gods. "I have seen them buzz all over the flowers. And anything grown from animal genes in Lucasta would not be grown from the stone of a cave here. Someone has lied to me, gods. Who?"

  The gods said nothing. There were no more bare walls. Smiling women and men, each naked but for a cloth around their hips, were gathering bright red fruit on the wall and hunting smiling animals.

  "Smiling animals, is it. You've never really hunted, Lizzy, right? You haven't seen their faces with the light still shining in their eyes. But you have seen them when the hunters drag them here with the light faded and the blood spilled. You have seen them. Should that not be enough?"