Unnaturals

by Merrill, Lynna

  Gun fodder. She'd encountered the word in the same feeds as guns and bullets. There were no guns or bullets in the village. But it didn't matter. Old Carlos was gun fodder.

  A few moments later Nicolas was back. The man beating his wife hadn't let go of her. He was now dragging her in the street by her hair. Mathilda, Ronny's mom. Mel swirled, and both Nicolas and Carlos caught her arms.

  "You don't," Nicolas said in a low voice woven of icicles. "It's her own fault. Obviously she let her little boy go play with sand and fire, when the father had explicitly forbidden it. Just as he'd forbidden the boy to have any dealings with you."

  The man must have beaten the boy, too, then. The others would have protected Ronny just as much as they had protected Mathilda—or Meliora. Meliora thought she'd throw up but didn't, only because there were village bastards—men and women both—in the street, and she didn't want them to see it.

  "You can't deal with a primitive world," Nicolas had told her.

  But someone must.

  She didn't hit Nicolas or kick him. Because it wouldn't work. Not for any other reason.

  "Since when does he have the right!" she only said, and it was a shout hidden in a whisper. She wouldn't shout before that crowd. What would that give her—another pretend rape? And when would the real rapes start? The very chief had set a precedent.

  Old Carlos squeezed her hand.

  "This is what it is only so that it isn't worse," the old man managed to whisper before the chief dragged her away to his house.

  But of course—and how worse could it be?

  Nicolas' cottage had a single small rug on the floor. Elsewhere, trodden earth and dust reigned. There weren't even floor boards everywhere. The fireplace was cold. Of course. A hunter who was also an assistant chief, and now a full chief, didn't cook, didn't do housework. Other people, women, would cook for the likes of him. He'd eat at the common tables, it was a wonder he had a whole house to himself. Stone at that, not wood.

  Meliora sat on a chair and stared at the walls. Bare stone, cracked with time, coated with dust and smoke. The walls were crying for advertisements, or paintings, some color, something to cover them. Stone alone was so cold. She shivered even though the night was hot and stuffy.

  "So what is so interesting on the walls? Or do they remind you of home?" There was something strange in Nicolas' voice, but his expression was unreadable. "Of the first time you saw a train tunnel, perhaps."

  "Indeed. Bare walls remind me of just that—only, they are not really bare, neither here nor at home." The walls weren't just stone. Mortar kept the stones together, but one didn't find mortar in the village. Besides, Nicolas' stones were too evenly-cut, too smooth. Nothing in the village could cut stone so well. The villagers built with wood, and they couldn't even make the metal for axes.

  She looked at her husband's face. He sat beside her, silent. He didn't touch her.

  "Tell me, Nicolas," she said, "are we scavengers, or are we really sheep? What, my husband, are the exact duties of a chief?"

  Silence. That strange stare again.

  "Someone must stand above those who would do this to us," she whispered. "That's what he told me. Your granddad. Only, I used to think it was about fairytales and gods, and it is not. Who are they, Nic?" She gripped his shoulders. "Who are they!?"

  "I don't know." His eyes hadn't changed. They were heavy on her, as if fixing her to a wall with mortar. He didn't seem to feel her fingers and nails digging into his flesh.

  "But I can answer your other question, my beautiful wife. A chief's job is to be the sheepdog, and neither your dad nor I are good at it."

  Door

  That night he took her to the hunting cabin, but before that they went to old Carlos' house and to her dad's. Nicolas warned both of them that he'd be gone. He obviously didn't trust any of the younger men with the information.

  "You know what to aim for, if it comes to that." Nicolas told Carlos.

  "I do." Carlos sighed. "Not that I like it."

  "I am not telling you to like it. Just to do it. And leave that stuff alone." Nicolas grabbed the bottle from Carlos' hands and poured it away beside the table. It left a stinking puddle, which slowly soaked into the rug.

  The smell was no problem. The house had been smelling of an old man who lived alone, anyway. Her father's house, on the other hand, smelled of flowers, yet she could barely step through the threshold. Nicolas noticed and she thought he'd have put his arm around her, but then he must have seen her eyes. What did he think, that he'd protect her? Help her? After what she'd seen in the street today?

  Mel didn't take her husband's hand and didn't greet her father. The two men whispered something in the otherwise awkward silence, then Mel and Nicolas left.

  They didn't talk on the way to the hunting cabin. She'd determined that she'd only address him when it was strictly necessary.

  At first glance, the hunting cabin was just a wooden house. Nothing more special than the cottages in the village, rougher than most. But when Nicolas rolled the rug in the common room into a corner and then scraped away the earth from a certain spot on the floor, a metal plate with a folded handle appeared. He nodded at her silently, and she pulled the handle. Nothing. He smiled and entered a code just beneath the handle. Mel hadn't seen the buttons at first.

  The plate slid to the side. Beneath it was a winding staircase.

  There must be a train, Nicolas told her. Not that he'd ever seen it. Once you were down the stairs, you found a closed door. A tall, thick, metal door that no hunter, even Andreas, could open with a kick. It never opened—at least not when a villager was there. On certain days, items appeared before that closed door.

  Jars, candles, metal tools—anything the village possessed but couldn't harvest or produce. Forty years ago, Nicolas said, there had also been guns, bullets, colored clothes, trinkets. Probably other things, too, but Julian wouldn't tell him. Probably Julian himself didn't know.

  "He wanted to know as little as possible about this place. I think he was trying to convince himself that it had nothing to do with the cities. He never tried opening the door, and he wouldn't let me, either. He made me promise that I wouldn't try it by myself." He looked at her. "Not that I would have." She thought she knew what was in his eyes this time. "Not before I had all the information."

  "So you know about the train crashes."

  He shrugged. "Sometimes, not only material goods would come. Sometimes the chief or his apprentice would get a message. Rarely. I only got one the very first time Julian brought me here. It didn't say much. Just that machines can break and people can die without the interweb."

  She looked at the door. "So we open it now."

  "If you want to."

  "It is a computer."

  "I know it is."

  This computer, however, was encased in hard metal, without any working parts exposed. She could get to this computer just as much as Andreas could get into the room beyond it with a kick. She looked the door all over, touched it everywhere, even wrenched away the floor boards before it and dug up the earth with a hoe—nothing. The door seemed to go on forever inside the floor. It could extend miles down, for all she knew. If there were any accessible computer parts, they were well protected.

  "But there is a way," she told Nicolas. Despite the heat and sweat of digging, icicles had crept into her own voice. "If there weren't, they wouldn't have left us a door."

  "I guessed as much." He was sitting on the floor, typing. "I'd help you dig," he'd said earlier, "but I am the one who has connected networks for years. I'd better try something different."

  He was right. He'd explained about networks. Every computer emitted a signal, and if one knew how to detect it, they could connect a computer to another without needing the big interweb. Mel hadn't known. Doctors of Computer weren't taught this, and she'd never discovered it by herself. He also said that, once he was connected to another computer, there were ways to prevent it from emitting a signal to any computer other
than the one he had connected from. He thus disconnected it from any networks, without even needing physical access. Years ago, he'd connected to a computer like this. That computer had had a very strong signal, and cutting this had stopped the interweb of a certain mall in Lucasta.

  "How did you know which computer to connect to in Lucasta? Why did you do it?"

  He sighed. It was obvious he didn't want to talk about this or even remember it. But the time had come to remember and talk about the things one didn't like. Otherwise... She remembered sheep in the Academy. Besides, she recalled a wonderful experience she'd no idea she remembered before today. It involved little lambs and butchering.

  "I connected to a man's computer in Lucasta, all right? He caught me. No one else ever had. I, of course, didn't know what to expect, given that we don't get punished in the cities. I expected a doctor, perhaps. Pills, shots—which was punishment enough for me. In those days I was fiercely proud of being an unnatural. I immediately stopped the man's interweb, hoping that he wouldn't be able to call in the doctors. I also connected directly to whatever medstats I could in the vicinity and cut off their connections. The man looked at me. He was wearing a mask—there was some sort of hype just then about people walking around in masks—but I suddenly knew that behind the mask he must be like my weird granddad. Unkempt, wrinkled. He was even limping and wheezing. 'Bet you can't discover which computer controls the interweb for the whole mall,' he said. 'Bet you can't stop the interweb'."

  Meliora clutched the hoe until her fingers were white.

  "There, I am in!" Nicolas was typing furiously. "What now!?"

  He had earlier explained that he knew how to connect and disconnect computers, but other than that he couldn't control a computer remotely. Mel snatched the computer from his hands. She started typing so fast that she couldn't see her fingers. She couldn't get into an unknown network—but once inside a computer, she knew how to find the software equivalent of buttons and levers.

  A moment later, a piece of the door slid to the side and was swallowed up by the wall. The wall was stone here. The wooden cabin above ground was just camouflage. The door still remained in their way—but now they could see a system of two locks, too. Old, strange locks, like in the old feeds. It seemed that two keys of a strange shape were needed, and she saw keys nowhere.

  Mel almost reached for the locks with the blade of a knife—and then she remembered. She had better genes than her dad—and likely better genes than his friend who had been shot at Lucasta's gates. Nicolas jumped and held her hands, having obviously reached a similar conclusion.

  "It needs the keys, yes," Mel said. "The right keys. We have to find them."

  "I don't think we'll find any simply by looking around," He was at his computer again. "There is something like a message in there. It's like a puzzle, let me—Yes. It forms a word. Sand."

  Sand. Jars. Shapes made by fire.

  They looked at each other.

  "We make the keys ourselves," they both said at the same time.

  ***

  They went back to the village for the rest of the night. The moon, almost full, rose just as they stepped between the houses. The rough, wooden cottages looked out of place. So did the fields in the distance, wheat swaying with the wind, and the trimmed branches and felled trunks piled by the old chief's cottage. So did the deerskins spread to dry by the house of the new chief. None of this was right in a world where computers and connections existed. Neither did the sobs coming from Mathilda and Ronny's cottage fit in—in any world.

  Unused to walking in the dark outside the village, Meliora had taken Nicolas' arm. Now she let go. By the sound of those sobs, everything else seemed unreal. Computers. She and Nicolas solving a riddle together that perhaps neither of them would have solved without the other's knowledge and skills.

  Riddles. Children's games. But they weren't children.

  "What will you do with all this, Nicolas?" She waved towards the tree bodies and deerskins, towards the cottage of sobs. "Tell me that."

  "Nothing," he whispered. She could hear his heartbeat—his heart was thumping fast, even though they hadn't run or walked fast. Yet, his voice was calm.

  "All right. I guess then I will simply do it all alone," she said. Like I always have.

  Once you knew about sheepherders, and even sheepdogs, you had to do something about them.

  "You won't," Nicolas said. The heartbeat was even in his voice now. His eyes were fixed on Mathilda's cottage. The sobs had stopped.

  "Try me," Meliora whispered. "Try to stop me. I promise you that no violent demonstrations will work this time. Nothing will."

  He looked at her. He shook his head as if at a foolish, unruly child that he didn't care to beat up. "I suppose I will try you. I should get some chance of it on the way because I am coming with you."

  He would come. He really would. He'd leave everything here to the gods' whim, no matter that he was the gods-damn chief. So why did her own heart—

  She looked back at him. "All right. But know something. I won't be gone forever. I am not running away. I once told you that I would never run away again. This village is like a gaping wound on the face of the earth, and I won't let it be. I thought I'd heal it by staying—but this is no simple injury. This is disease. As such, it must be treated at the root—and will be."

  ***

  They slept in his cottage, in different beds, the floor of the bedroom dividing them. They talked, though she didn't want to talk to him. Each of them needed to know things only the other one knew. Networks, or hummie interfaces, or the delivery of tools, goods, and seeds to the village. The inside structure of medstats, the cycle a baby underwent from immaculate conception to medstat-assisted birth and development in the first months. They talked about the picture he'd used to get out of the Annabellan train—two entwined snakes biting their tails—and about her own train ride with Mom—about everything that might matter in their new journey.

  He was abandoning the village and didn't even say he would come back. He said nothing to defend himself.

  "If I take Lizzy to Lucasta," Meliora said after she described the baby cycle, "she will be all right. They will fix her up."

  "You can't take her. She may or may not survive the road to a city—even if you don't consider what they might have in store for us at a city's gate. Or inside."

  He was right and she hated this. They were like the pawns in Dad's game of chess. Worse than sheep. The sheep at least weren't pushed forward whether they liked it or not—at least not before butchering day. Many of them never saw butchering day at all.

  Pawns were different. Pawns were like old Carlos with a knife given to him by Nicolas.

  And why? What do they want from us?

  Not that we have to go. We can just stay here. But they know we won't. That much she already knew about them—whoever they were.

  "Where we are going—wherever we are going—is no place for a baby," Nicolas said. "Any baby."

  She hated him for it, but he was right.

  "So how about here? What will happen? Who will be chief?" she asked him. "You just went through all the trouble to remove my father and get the position for yourself—what now!?"

  "Whoever is fit will be chief," he just said. "Walter. Andreas. Maybe someone else. Your father and Carlos know what to do about it."

  "I think I know, too," she whispered at the wall. "They'll set the strongest men against each other so that only one wins. It will only be brutal. None of the men has as strong a following as you do. No one else will be able to rally a large faction of support. They will all fight each other, and that is supposed to be less frightening than a war between two or three serious groups. You've taken that much care of the village, haven't you? No serious bloodshed. To pay for it, you will leave a brute or a grief-stricken fanatic on top, with everyone else weakened, and the village will be a place more brutal than ever before. There won't even be a bloodshed to remember. Nothing too big to remind people that what they h
ave is not normal and not the right thing. Besides, you just took away the rights of half of the people. How convenient."

  "How convenient, indeed," he said. He sounded as if he hated her, and that was all right because she hated him, too.

  ***

  The next evening she went to see the baby. Old Codes had Lizzy that night, and she let Mel hold her, though she kept watching her.

  Meliora had promised—sworn—that she'd care for the baby, but she wasn't feeding or bathing her, wasn't changing her swaddling clothes or doing the washing.

  "I will do more for you, Lizzy," she whispered at the bundle in her arms. "I will give you a proper world to grow up in." Lizzy chuckled, waved her tiny arms, then gripped Meliora's hair and pulled. She hadn't been able to do so before. She hadn't been strong enough. Mel saw a tear drop on the swaddling clothes.

  Old Codes was still watching her.

  "It's normal, you know, girl, for those about to change their life for good, to be wrecked and nervous, right?"

  Mel went still.

  "Those, hm, young girls newly married," old Codes added.

  Mel said nothing.

  "May your journey start in a good hour, Mel," old Codes said then and reached out to take the baby back.

  Mel walked out of the cottage and didn't look back. There were still hours until she and Nicolas left. One way or another.

  "I am not ready to die," she told him. She had to tell someone. "But I will, if I have to."

  "Father's daughter," were his words.

  So, she went to see her father, too. She knocked softly on the door of the cottage that had been her home and entered the kitchen. Then she knocked on his bedroom door and woke him up.

  "I—I have a few things to tell you," she whispered at the nightshirt-dressed man. His eyes were blinking away sleep, and his face was becoming clouded with worry. "You should know that I love you, despite everything. And that she loved you—more than anything. She never, ever forgot you. And"—Mel swallowed, the words suddenly hard and bulky at her throat—"I know you tried your best to be a father, a husband, and a chief. I have your genes in me. I have your better genes, and Mom's—thanks to you. I have the knowledge you gave me about reading, and the knowledge you gave me about choices. That should do it, Dad. That should be enough. I should know what to do when I get there. I should know everything better than you. So, don't be sad. I am your daughter, and a part of me will always be yours—and thus a part of you will always go on. Even where you could not go. Farewell, Dad."