The Ape's Wife and Other Stories

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  The sappers have a phrase for what happens to the human faculties out on the woestenij, and that phrase is gone vergessenen cranio. Or just gone, gone, gone. Same on either, and what it means is that the wanderer loses track of her or his intent, and, bereft of purpose, might turn feral or suicide on the red sands, the Kyzyl-Kum, or, luck shines down, poor soul might find its way home again or to some other home of men. But mad as Easter in Rishabha, Ramadan at Xmas. Oh, she dy jarroo, betcha flat.

  Alieka bows her head, driving back the dust between her ears to uncover the memories of the one kilo canister tucked in her knap, the explosives, cush and hyped HNB, which took a hefty chunk of her savings before the meet with the datswap. Here to there, old girl, and if here was the bomb, then there was making a hole in the House big enough confusion might aft ensue she’d have time to find Muirgheal and beat a hasty get-shy before the Maafa fucks knew what had swatted them. “You don’t forget that again,” she whispered to the desert night, and might be the wind blowing down from the Tharsis listened and took note. But she doubted it. Alieka promised herself another five minutes rest, and then she go on about her southerly way. Just another four and one, ja, ja, shì. Safe than sore, though, so she pulls the prox rod from her knap, unfolds it, and sticks it into the sand. When she switches it on, it hums like bees.

  2.

  Here we are now, in the then of now, past and present and future always leapfrogging, and all cohabitating in the same instance, anyhow. But on this day, four solis before that night at the foot of that tall, tall dune out on the freezing plateau of the Lunae Palus, this day, Alieka Ferenczi is at the shop, just like any other Jovis afternoon. She’s goggles down, grinding valves smooth enough the hydro farms won’t put the boot to her boss, which means he won’t put the boot to her. Five hundred ingots down, five hundred more to go before the whistle blows go home, because the boss sure ain’t gonna spring for over. The shop noise is a scream to put the season of storms to shame, those perihelion sirens screeching down alleyways and street, and howling over rooftops. But these are not the thoughts Alieka Ferenczi is thinking on that four days ago now, if only because the earphones dampen the racket to the dullest whine of its true self.

  She’s thinking, instead, of the tix she’s lucked into for the evening’s match, right down front, her and her ma will be able to hear the whack, whack of the sticks against the leather balls. But then the siren sounds, the repeating triple bleats to warn all low sector of a Maafa sighting within the borders of Annapolis. Not that business as usual stops. She doesn’t shut off the bonnet grind. The lane helmer doesn’t pop round to end the shift and call it a day and send them safely home, send them to be sure family and friends are accounted, and, besides, all Alieka has is her ma and an elderly hound, and neither is on the Maafa’s shopping list. They go for the young and the pretties. So, let the others worry, and let the militia do it’s job while she does hers.

  And it’s only later, over their quick dinner before the match, that ma tells her how the slavers grabbed five before the law drove them away, and one of those, wouldn’t you know, says she, was an old schoolmate of yours, Alieka, that sweet girl Muirgheal who always made such fine grades and wore sky-blue ribbons in her silver-grey hair. Alieka, though she’d not thought on Muirgheal Hemingtrust for years, hardly noticed the game, the goals, her ma so jubilant when home sector won, the cries of the fans, the press of the crowd, the smell of hot crisps and bags of fresh roasted chapulines. She only had room in her head for Muirgheal, whom she’d once loved, first crush and never a love thereaft. Too plain, too gruff to win a wife, and no eye for men. Muirgheal hauled away by the Maafa, chained in one of their bamboo wagons and rattling across the sands to her torture and eventual death behind the basalt walls of the Yellow House.

  That night she dreamt of Muirgheal, and of all the rumored tribulations and harrows doled within those halls, how the Maafa butchers saw about their work such as no one went quickly. And before sun up she wrote a letter to her ma, packed her knap, and set about town gathering that which she imagined she would need, visiting ill-rep kiosks up west sector, spending for the tram because time was of the essence. The Maafa moved fast on gyped-up, seven-tread rollers, and might easy be fifty kilos in any direction by the now of then. It was mid-morning before she left Southgate, and too soon left the pave for southeast and the Lunae and the reputed location of the Yellow House. She knew she was pressing the mini past its castaway limits. But time was of the essence. Time was slipping by sure as the dust devils and the few birds wheeling overhead.

  What you after, Alieka? Something you ain’t ever had, something wants no part of you? Half forgot dream of a dream of a dream? Kiddish wishbegones? What you think you’re gonna find, you find anything at all?

  There was supposed to be a well at Pompeii, but the settlement had vapped since last she’d heard. The plains herders had moved on, as herders do. A dry, dry set of months, worse than usual, and the crater was cracker dry. The stones laid round the rim of the well had fallen over in the wind, and the bore had filled with dust in however many days since. She’d have to watch the level of her jug, and hope for better in the Maja. She’d have to keep the thirst in the back of her mind, lest it lead her to despair or lead to try for home again.

  What you after, dirty factory prole? Cognations that slice of quim gonna have anything but plain and simple gratitude even should you get yourself in and get herself out, which you ain’t gonna do, anyway? You think eve a half that you’ve gone soft long ago, eh? She dy jarroo, betcha nothing and get nothing back.

  “I don’t know,” she said aloud, jostling along, astride the roller. She said these self-assurances to herself, but aloud, as the roller topping dunes and rushing down the other side, rattling kidneys as the vehicle bounced and lurched when rocky terrain was come upon. She only thought the bad thoughts, so she had to speak the good ones, even if her voice was lost in clack, clatter, roar of the conversion coils and the last-legger engine.

  You after a few wadda for hauling this girl home again, home again, jiggity quick? Maybe a hero’s tumble you get lucky and make it back? And you won’t, ’cause you and luck ain’t no kinda intimates. You, Alieka Ferenczi, gonna get no better off them Maafa fucks but maybe a slug in the gut, a cattle bolt to the skull, ’cause how they ain’t about to waste the tribulations on a slag like you.

  “Mysterious ways, his wonder to perform,” she mutters. “Ain’t that what the liturgicals say? So, I might be that mysterious way, I might, and this might be a wonder to perform, might not?”

  Not even a believer, and look at you burbling holy muck.

  “I believed once,” she replies, talking back at herself and thinking of the news of her da dead in a Phobos blowout. That might have been what took away her faith, but it might have been half a hundred other things. “And since that’s fact, I might well find divine again, might’n I not?”

  And this now of then, this moment passed, but not passed then, is when the roller growled, and sparks came showing off the coils, and Alieka only just managed to throttle back and avoid a tump down a gully. She sat on the dead roller a long time, watching diminutive twin Diemos rising above the western horizon, one night past full, but still hardly brighter than Earth or Venus. She sat and thought on the walk, and on water, and on the canister of HNB in the roller’s side basket. It would fit easy in her knap, not much weight at all. She sat ten or fifteen minutes, thinking on all the ways a woman can find her death in the arms of Kyzyl-Kum, as the Turkics named the wastelands. And then she took what would fit into the knap, checked the straps on her boots, and started the slog towards the fabled but all too factual Yellow House of the Maafa.

  3.

  She thinks, distantly, through a dumb obscuring haze of thirst and muscles stripped down to copper threads, a mouth full of ferric dust and the ferric taste of blood, not even a tear left in her, so long since a decent sip of water. She thinks, distantly, of how a sound mind would pause to gape at all this bahà, for no mat
ter the scratch and scrab of the worst of the wind-raw Lunae scape is not out beyond the reach of the hand of beauty. Alieka Ferenczi, who, since birth and across all her days, has never left the smothersome abbrayshio sanctuary of Annapolis. The sun is up, but she has not stopped walking. I am at the edge, she thinks. Few more steps, moments, and here I go gatherin’ vergessenen cranio and never gonna strike the prize, just gonna lay me down to sleep and Mama Red will rock me off to sweet blivie. I won’t need wet in the blivie black.

  She squints at the lat-long tracker on her belt, and soft blue characters glow 12.5N, 58.3W, which has got to be too far east and not near enough south, way up at the northern wind of the Maja (the terraforms promised a river here, flowing down to the Chryse wide; there’s another failure). She shakes it once, a tad hard to read with the sun shining down, shakes it to see whether the box is reading wrong, because humanity will never be shed of the notion that violence convinces tech to get its shit together. It doesn’t change, and so Alieka accepts the reading. She accepts she’s strayed, and she’ll never have the time, the strength, the will to change course now. There was meager water and food before dawn. She came across a poor excuse for a cienega in the hour before dawn. There wasn’t a savior pool, but there were cacti, and she pierced her hands all over good sawing off the top of a prickle pear with her knife, and now her palms and fingers sting and ache. They’ll be infected soon enough, sure, but at least there were damp and bites of that green meat. Her throat’s and stomach’s forgotten about that by now, and she can’t have any idea why she didn’t cram a few of the cladodes into her bulging knap. Junk in there she could have tossed away to make room for so precious a commodity, but rarely do the dying bother to think straight.

  Alieka Ferenczi mulls over 12.5N, 58.3W, and wonders if it doesn’t matter, because maybe the datswap had no damn idea of what he spoke. Maybe he only made something up there and on the spot to get her wad. Then she starts waltzing again, onwards south, even if there’s no meaning in the movement, in the one foot in front of the other. It’s something to do, and she’s not yet (though she does not fathom why) ready to knock, knock, knock’a death’s front door.

  She could have kept up with the time by the arc of the sun across the sky, or by the lat-long, but where’s the point, she was thinking when one is walking from nowhere to nowhere else and it can only end one way. Where’s the minding clocks?

  And it is while thinking this thought she sees the high mustard walls of the Yellow House, and stares a long time, because maybe it’s only a mirage, cruel in its persuasiveness. This means she has to decide to follow this which might be nothing but a lie, or sit down now and pass over tricks of heat shimmer and exhaustion and sun-shuttered eyes. Moment of truth, she dy jarroo, now or not ever, fold or raise, sure. But here’s the bright memory of Muirgheal, too luxe by far to ever even give the likes of oily handed Alieka two shits and a howdy you do. Here is she. Teener wants and formative urges to lift up those heavy boots and set them back again.

  Maybe there’s not a pork’s whit of honor it what I do, thinks Alieka. Maybe only my cunny leadin’ my head, but what of it, sure. If the out’s the same, then why the why. Ain’t that in the gospel somewheres?

  And she thought of the canister of hyped hexanitro riding on her shoulders, and she tries to reckon the distance between her and the mustard adobe. Can’t be more than a mile, she assures herself, though it turns out to be more like four. But she stumbles, often falling, often on her knees, through poison scrub and wadi, once almost steps on a rattler might have been as big around as her arms, coiled and rat-tat-tat, and why it didn’t strike she’s never going to know. But she makes it, and the walls are higher than anyone she’s ever heard hold forth of subject have ever claimed. There are char-skinned, forever burned black, brown, gold-skinned men and women perched atop the caliche, armed with spears and crossbows and sonics and punch guns. There are iron gates half as tall as the enceinte, so rusty Alieka wonders how the wind hasn’t whisked them away to palus. The Maafa guards don’t do anything she expected. They don’t open fire. They call out profanities and warnings in their glottal creole, which she only just, and just barely, understands every thirdish word.

  Why am I not dead? she thinks, as an auto clicks loud enough to make her stumble back a step or two, and the gates swing inwards. Might be, hell takes them what come looking after it, might be, sure, and why had nobody thought of this? Because. We had our expects, didn’t we. We thought we knew the beasts, all on what they raid snatch, but maybe that’s bein’ picky in the market stalls after so much risk and troubles.

  The men and women on the wall shout some more, and something whizzes loudly, then there’s a bolt, thunk, protruding from the ground at her feet. She shades her eyes and stares up at them. She points at herself, and they shout again, all in harmony it seems to her addled brain. So, knowing not else what they could mean (plus, all those only third words to help), or if they’ve understood her, Alieka steps through the gates that lead to the Yellow House itself, and they bang closed behind her. When children dream of Sheol, the gates sound like that. Just like, she thinks, then wishes that she hadn’t.

  There are more guards, dressed more raggedy than her by far, to escort her to tall lancet doors as rusty as the gate. None of them touch her, and this surprises Alieka as much as anything yet has. The house is not the shade of yellow that she always imagined it would be. Whenever she chanced to think on the color of the house, she saw it so bright it almost hurt to see, a bright shade of yellow that stood out stark against the brick-red plain. Maybe it was that color, to start with, the yellow of fields of sunflowers or rapa. Maybe the dust and sand have scoured it this color, over the many decades since it was built. Or maybe whatever transpires on inside, maybe that’s what took away the bright. She goes along, because what else would she do? She lets them drive to and then through that gigantic doorway. And if the gate closing was the sound of the gates of Sheol banging shut, the clanging of those doors are simply beyond the terrors dreamt up by dull women of Alieka’s sorry sort.

  Inside, the Yellow House is not yellow. It might be no color at all, or it might be those walls, archways, ceilings, and stairwells are all black. She tries not the think on it overly much. In all directions – not so unlike the palus – it seems to go on forever. Why had she not expected that? Why had she underestimated its vastness? Well, why had she seen it the yellow of a rippling field of rapa flowers? If we have not seen, we do not know, ’cept rumors, what the mind may conjure, and pictures, and nobody’s got no pics of the Yellow House. But, sure, on goes the halls forever, or so seems, and she is led without ever once their hands upon shoulders, arms, back, and without the prodding of spears or gun muzzles. Perhaps this is of her compliance, and perhaps it’s not.

  Somewhere in this place is Muirgheal, or whatever they’ve left of her, or made of her. Alieka does her best not to dwell on that. She wonders what’s to be done with her instead, as that’s far less disturbing a set of possibilities. She silently chortles to herself for ever having reckoned the one kilo canister of HNB would be enough to bring down this sprawling rack. Maybe twenty kilos might have turned the trick. Maybe all the trumpets of the army of Joshua on that day he felled Jericho. But the one is enough for a suicide, and enough to take a few of these shits with her.

  They lead her to a round room with a fire pit at its center, and above the fire pit is a hole, a chimney drawing the smoke, which must lead up to the sky, the world outside. There’s something turning on a spit above the fire, and to her starved self it looks as good as any pig or chicken ever yet has. But it was human once, a man or a woman, though now it’s impossible to be sure which. Her mouth waters, and she curses herself to already have sunk half so low as a Maafa cannibal.

  In the round room, across the fire and its grisly, broiling fare, is a dais of basalt, and on the dais is a basalt throne. A man sits there, all skin and bones and raggedy as the rest and as raggedy muff as Alieka.

  “What did
you come here to find?” the man asks, and it shocks her that he speaks Anglo as well as any school teacher or party member, after hearing only the creole from his pack. “Someone lost, and perhaps you have a mind we stole them away? Or are you here for something else, hoping we might take you in? Or just to satisfy a deadly curiousity that’s haunted you so, so long.” The man’s head is shaved, or he’s bald. His skin is a maze of tattoos, and maybe they mean something, something she could puzzle if she had the lux.

  “Why am I not dead?” she asks him. Her voice is raw, and it hurts to speak.

  “Someone bring her water,” the man says, and someone does. She is careful to drink slowly, lest she vomits it all right back up again, shi, shi. She wipes her wet lips on the back of her hand, and her hand comes back bloody. She also glances down at the lat-long tracker: 21.3N, 79.1W, and that doesn’t seem right at all, not after the last time she checked.

  “Are you hungry, Alieka Ferenczi?” the man on the dais asks, not unkindly. She doesn’t ask how he knows her name, because black witches, the lot.

  She glances at the thing on the spit, fat dripping to sizzle in the coals, crispy skin, and split open here and there to reveal…

  “No,” she says. “I had a snake this morning.”

  “A snake?” he asks, skeptically.

  “A rattler,” she replies.

  “Resourceful of you. So, I ask my questions the second time, and know my patience is not unendlich, as your people would say.”

  My people. My people. His people.

  It’s almost impossible not to drool at the odor rising from the spit above the fire pit, so, now, now, whose people has she become? Does the desert work magic, and transform Annapolis words into Maafa.

  “May I sit down?” she asks.

  “You may do ever as you wish.”