“Hush little baby, don’t say a word
Mama’s gonna buy you a mocking bird
And if that mocking bird don’t sing
Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”
The mutated child’s eyes began to close, and a smile stretched across Abigail’s face. After years of searching, she’d finally found a place to belong. She was home.
This Silent Country
By Vicki Keire
"Thhh," the pretty graduate student prompted, her pink tongue touching white teeth. "Come on, Finn. We've done this sound before."
Finn liked gutturals and sibilance. Hisses and growls and low howls of anguish. He hated making people sounds the most. Outside, the low winter moons cast their dim light across Skrael’s frozen landscape. Beyond the University compound’s security field, cold white silence stretched on for kilometers. Finn wished he could walk out into the silence and stay there. Snow crystals and winter moons would not force his tongue into nonsense shapes. The inhuman cold of this barely habitable planet would kill the silent and the speaking equally fast. Almost as fast as the Skraeling beasts that prowled its hard surface.
"Finn.” The graduate student softened her voice in an invitation to trust her. “Is there a reason you won’t talk today? I notice you keep looking at the snowscape. Are you well, Finn?”
Well. He tasted the word. Is that what I am? He didn’t know. In a minute, she would call in a supervisor or even a psych specialist. Finn was tired of them. He visualized the sounds in his mind, willing them to come out right. He laid them down like smooth paving stones.
"Teh- thhh," he managed half-heartedly.
"You got that last one right. Let's try again." Finn squirmed in his chair.
“Teh-teh-thh,” he spat, sick of the routine. Her face fell as she darted a nervous glance at the mirror. The mirror that was really a window that he wasn’t supposed to know about. Who was back there, anyway?
The door burst open so fast and hard that it struck a plastic chair and sent it crashing against the wall. “You’re relieved,” his grandfather thundered, looking only at Finn. The graduate student scuttled backwards. Finn did not have to look to see her trembling. They all reacted like that, every single person who dealt with his grandfather.
Everyone but him.
“Commander, I’m sorry, I was… we were really close,” the girl stammered.
“Enough,” snapped Commander Iverson. The girl fled.
Finn couldn’t flee. He watched as his grandfather, commander of the northern settlement on Skrael, dropped into a chair in front of him. Hard blue eyes identical to his own caught and pinned him. “No growling today?” the older man asked. “Have you decided to act civilly?”
Finn didn’t answer. He hadn’t decided. Instead, he cast a sly glance at the snowscape, imagining the Skraelings as they ghosted across flat diamond ground unrelieved by any kind of shadow. After the attack, all family settlements relocated back to the main University or the military outpost in the south. Then his grandfather led a team that destroyed every last family home so that the beasts would have no cover.
“You go someplace else in your head, don’t you, Finn?” his grandfather asked. “Someplace violent. Someplace scary.”
Finn pressed his lips together. Grandfather had it wrong, but he wasn’t treating him like a baby who’d forgotten how to talk. He hadn’t ever, not even when he came to take Finn away from the emergency responders.
Finn had woken that night to his parent’s screams. He didn’t know how long he hid under his bed, but when Emergency came for him, his parents had already been devoured. Torn up, chewed on, butchered.
After the first screams, he hadn’t heard a thing.
He remembered cold, and silence, and looking out into the luminous chunks of snow through the vidscreen his parents had set to “view” as they did every night. He saw nothing, heard nothing, and felt nothing. Emergency whispered things like “shock” and “trauma” when he couldn’t answer their questions. When he tried to describe the cold white peace that came over him during the killings, the doctors keyed their data pads furiously. Then they sent him here. He wanted to tell them: it’s not that I can’t talk about it. Human words don’t work; there are only beast sounds.
He saw he was making fists again, and stilled himself. Fists made everyone nervous, even though they worked better than words.
Finn decided to try to explain. “Not scary.” His grandfather didn’t move. “It’s safe. The place I go.”
Grandfather rubbed his stubbly face. He never had a stubbly face before the attack. “This safe place. Can you go there now?” Finn shook his head. The white place just happened. He didn’t go there, like it was school or his bedroom.
A doctor entered with a small box. Finn smelled fear rolling off him in waves. “Sir, are you quite sure? We don’t know how long the effects linger. He could still be infect…”
“Enough.” Grandfather cut him off sharply. “That’s what we have to find out.” When they were alone again, Grandfather touched his hair. It was a rare gesture. He lowered his voice. “I won’t let them take you, Finn. No matter what I have to do.” He straightened and pulled things from the box. A necklace. An old watch. “Recognize anything?” Finn shook his head. “They belonged to your parents.”
Then Grandfather, grimacing, removed a piece of a bloodstained blanket.
“That’s mine,” Finn said in clear, perfectly unaccented Republic Standard. “But… they weren’t in my room. The Skrael beasts weren’t. I was in my room. Nothing happened there.” He realized he was standing, fists raised.
“Nothing, Finn?” his grandfather asked softly. He suddenly looked very old.
He felt it, then, the cold white feeling rising. It cut through him like a wind blast. It was blinding as diamond ice and just as numbing. He welcomed it; he’d missed it, for while it held him, he answered to nothing else.
But it faded, as it always did, and Finn found himself in a sterile while room with overturned chairs and a broken table. His grandfather was bleeding from a long gash down one side of his stubbly face. He had his blaster out.
“Why won’t my arms or legs work?” Finn asked him.
Grandfather looked at him so sadly and for so long that he wondered if perhaps he had lost people speech, too. But he finally lifted Finn in his arms. “Let’s get you to Med Center.” Then, with forced cheerfulness, he said “You seem to have recovered your words.”
Maybe, Finn thought as his arms and legs tingled their way back from numbness. But he didn’t have to like it. Instead, he thought of low winter, letting its ice wrap around his heart.
***
"Jesus, Iverson," Sumner yelled above the roar of the busy cantina at lunchtime. "Watch the beverage, compadre. This place is so damn busy, it might be closing time before we get another one."
Finn realized he was holding a full pitcher of foamy beer suspended in mid-air. Across the room, the brown-skinned bus boy who'd delivered it tried to shake an angry customer off his arm. The customer kept demanding his food, getting more and more belligerent; the boy tried to explain, first in Spanish, then in broken English, that he had no idea where his order was.
Not broken English, Finn realized. A stutter. The boy stuttered. The customer frightened him, and he’d lost his words. Relieved to have pinned down the source of his irritation, he placed the pitcher carefully in the center of the table. It was their third, and his fellow soldiers were well on their way to getting drunk. What else was there to do near Earth’s equator at high noon? But he resolved to keep an eye on the boy anyway. Finn hated bullies.
"No worries with Iverson," Jacob Anders assured them all. Anders had served with Finn on three special-ops missions before. "His brain is completely separate from the rest of him.” Anders grabbed the pitcher and began filling mugs. Finn shook his head. Anders shrugged and skipped his glass.
Finn contemplated a chip dripping salsa like an open wound. "I could take that as an insult,
Anders," he said mildly, popping the whole chip in his mouth.
“I put up with your shit for years at the Academy, and I’m still stuck with you.” The skinny blond man leaned back in his seat, his boots propped carelessly on the back of their newest member's chair. "I get a special dispensation," he said firmly, drinking deeply.
"What, to be a pain in my ass?" Finn asked softly. Everything he did was soft, slow, and deliberate. Just as he had learned to lay his words out carefully as a boy, to make sure he got them right, he had learned to do the same with his thoughts and actions and even with his body.
Cedric Meyers, newest member of the elite Red Hands special ops unit and his friend’s grumpy footstool, rolled his eyes and banged his mug against the table. "Jesus, please. Someone put this arrogant Aussie bastard in his place." The blond Anders kicked him; Meyers slammed his mug down and spun in his chair.
"You wouldn't dare," Anders challenged, eyes shining.
"What?" Meyers growled again, his midnight eyes narrowed to slits. But a smile fought the curve of his mouth. "Start a fight in this cantina at noon? 'Cause you kicked me? Think again, asshole. I've killed men for less."
“That’s enough,” Commander Hale chided, finally speaking up. "Save it for the mission." Later, in the cool of the evening and the security of their quarters, they'd go over the operation again. Watch a nearby group of rebels before extracting a deep-cover Republic agent from their midst.
For now they were content to play the part of regular soldiers, just a handful among many, stationed in South America at the request of Earth's Central Council in an effort to stabilize the area. Civil war was ripping the northern hemisphere apart as the overdeveloped nations made desperate grabs for plentiful South American resources. Refugees streamed south through what had once been Mexico. Things were getting messy.
Can't have the United Republic’s home planet seem anything other than perfectly peaceful, Finn thought with a snort, and then swung his attention back to the belligerent customer who'd harassed the bus boy. It seemed he'd found a new victim. A young, very pretty victim. The waitress couldn't be very far out of her teens, with skin like pale cinnamon and dark curls down to her waist, threaded through with a loose violet ribbon. She struggled to pull free of the man's grip on her arm, telling him sharply in Spanish, English, and French that he was making a mistake, but the man only laughed. Finn grew very still. U.F. forces were the only real peacekeepers in the rapidly destabilizing region. No one would step in against a U.F. soldier, except another bigger, badder one. He watched and kept his silence.
His silence always preceded a storm.
"Are we released, then?" Finn asked tightly. He took note of the customer's rank, branch of service, what he'd eaten for lunch, the number of empty shot glasses stacked at his elbow, the strength of his grasp on his new victim's arm, and the way the young boy stood protectively near the girl.
"Until tonight," Commander Hale agreed. His glance skimmed over all of them. Finn sat so perfectly still, betraying no emotion at all, that he thought Hale noticed nothing. "Time for a siesta. It's going to be a long night. Get some rest, and stay out of trouble. Especially you two, Meyers and Anders." Jacob Anders grinned wickedly and mimed a halo around his head.
"Still kick your ass. At poker," Meyers offered. “Anybody else in?" Several assents followed the two men out of the cantina. Only Commander Hale lingered, watching Finn with thoughtful eyes.
"Something on your mind, Commander?" Finn asked. He gave Hale the full brunt of his gaze, but every other sense was on the situation unfolding just a few tables in front of them. The boy wouldn’t leave her side. The girl had gone perfectly still, her face hidden in her mass of curls. Her arm was turning red and purple where the soldier gripped her. Finn felt himself go cold and very still. These were the symptoms of a killing rage, the kind that made him such an asset to the Red Hands. It was the reason he’d been recruited; he was too solitary for regular service, too violent for intelligence and espionage. But the clinical detachment he felt towards killing, the cold white veil he’d carried with him since childhood, was perfect for the Red Hands.
Hale just nodded behind him, never once turning his head. "I trust you'll be discreet," he said. "We need you, maybe more than anyone, in good form for this, Iverson."
Finn shouldn't have been surprised as he watched his commander walk away, but he was. No other member of the Red Hands had noticed. Or maybe they just hadn't given a damn. But Hale was Commander for a reason. He noticed things. Sometimes, he even cared.
***
Elena.
Her name was Elena.
For the rest of his life, in whatever dark place he found himself, he never forgot her face, even if it was all he could remember about her, and if only for the span of a breath.
"Be discreet," Hale had said.
Finn tried. He really, really tried. He grabbed the chair across from the man who held the girl. He turned it around backwards, throwing his weight into it as if it had offered him personal insult. Everyone at the table looked at him, including her. When that happened, all of his control, all of his careful plans came crashing down like a house of cards.
He meant to say, "Enough of this," or, "What kind of soldier picks on women and kids?" Or just "I'm your worst fucking nightmare and I'm here to kick your ass." It would have been hard to ignore that one.
But the woman he came to know as Elena looked at him, holding herself as still as a baby rabbit pulled unwilling into the light. Her shoulders, half-hidden by a mass of curls, shook slightly. Her eyes were huge and deep and brown, as if none of this made any sense to her at all, as if she had suddenly awoken on a strange planet, in a body not her own. Those dark brown eyes sought his and held them. They were fringed with lashes thick as black velvet, and as he watched, they grew impossibly bright and wet.
The tears were his undoing. Already she had taught him something: it was better to kill some things than watch them cry.
The soldier he meant to punish was hurting her with words. Perhaps no one had ever spoken to her in such a manner before, turning her arm dark purple with bruises while he suggested the things they could do in the dark. Perhaps no one had ever told her that his friends would like to watch, too. Perhaps no one had ever put a price on her body. Finn watched as things broke inside her, innocent things he didn't think were left alive anywhere, in any person. All he could think was: not her. The room turned white and cold as a Skrael winter sky. Time slowed down around him as it always did when he was in a killing rage.
"Get away," he managed to say in plain, cold English, to the enraged boy behind them. The boy who talked funny. The boy who’d made him remember his grandfather and low winter moons and started all of this. The boy took one look at his face and went.
Smart boy, he had time to think as he reached out and grabbed the soldier by the wrist. He heard a satisfying snapping sound and watched as the man's squat, fleshy fingers slowly loosened from her arm. Finn saw the finger marks flood from white to red to deep purple. His other hand held a fistful of the soldier's hair. It moved towards the table too slowly, skin and hair separating from scalp like a peach peel leaking blood. Finn had time to clear the table before he cracked the man's head against it. Table and chairs scattered. He twisted the soldier's arm behind him and heard yet another satisfying snap. The man's mouth was open. He might have been screaming, but that was another thing the cold white rage did. It kept the screaming out.
When the man collapsed at Finn's feet the room began to return to normal. Time sped up. His heart beat again, breathing returned, fast and hard, and emotions crept back in. Rage. Hate. A strange, fierce protectiveness that was new to him.
The girl with the violet ribbon slipped up to him from a spot of sunlight in the middle of the floor. Her touch across his hand was like a live wire finding wet skin. "You're bleeding," she said, pulling his knuckles close to her face. "Are you hurt elsewhere?"
"I was... wa... I..." Finn snapped his mouth shut. He coul
dn't gather his thoughts, his speech. He hadn’t lost his words since he left home to join the U. F. He just shook his head, sharply, angry with himself.
She ran one thumb over his bloody knuckles. "I understand. Sometimes the words won't come. So we wait until they do. I'm Elena, and this is Paulo, my son. He struggles with words, too." Finn stared at her, surprised. She looked too young to have a child. What kind of country was this, with its beautiful women-girls and days too hot for anything but drinking and fighting? He felt unbalanced. But Elena smiled at whatever she saw in his eyes, as if it never occurred to her that he might judge or condemn. "You had better go with us. The Policia will come, and who knows what side has bribed them today, no?"
***
A pattern developed.
The days were theirs. She showed him her country, with its churches, crumbling pyramids, lush patches of jungle, hidden waterfalls, tiny towns on market day, and bright obscure festivals. He was assaulted by color, sound, smell. Flowers were almost too bright, birds too beautiful and melodious. And when she stood there in the middle of it all, wearing the bright cotton skirts and embroidered blouses of her people, he felt as if he were in the midst of a hallucination.
“I come from a pale country,” he told her. “Silent and cold. This,” he swept a battle-callused hand from azure sky to sulky jungle and back to her red cotton skirt. “It’s like diving into the sun.”
She only laughed and tossed her midnight curls, winding her fingers through his, drawing him onward to some town where she knew a woman who wove baskets so tight you could use them for a boat, or a man who carved animals so life-like you would leave them food and water on the shelf, or a priest who could cure anything, even a broken heart. He bought her things, and Paulo, too, because he could. He'd never had anyone to buy things for, before her.
She cooked for him, huge picnics to eat on grass as green as jewels. He tried to describe snow and winter to Paulo, who had never left Earth’s equator. The boy listened with huge eyes while he talked about his childhood on Skrael, and going to clinics to learn how to talk. Elena listened, too. "Such a pale, silent country. I do not know if we could survive, away from the sun and all our loud colors, as you call them." Then in a whisper, as if the jungle was listening: “It frightens me.”
Dark Tomorrows, Second Edition Page 20
