New Worlds 4

by Edited By David Garnett

  ‘Seyamang, it’s me.’ The lights were on. The music playing. The musk insistent, urgent. She was back. Why didn’t she answer? ‘Seyamang.’ Living room no kitchen no bathroom no study no. Knowing exactly what he would find behind it, he pushed open the bedroom door.

  He was nothing more than a kid, spreadeagled on their mattress. Eyes closed, whimpering ecstatic Narha, she rode the Shi’an youth. Easily. Naturally. Perfectly. None of the manoeuverings and compromises of her couplings with him. It was beautiful. For one thrilling instant he could not tell them apart.

  It was the Shi’an boy who saw Johnny first; his shocked freeze that alerted Seyamang.

  ‘Johnny ...’ She sounded like some semi-clever animal taught to mimic human speech without comprehension. Roaring incoherently, Johnny blundered into the room. The Shi’an kid fled, clutching at clothes. Somewhere in the red blur of his consciousness he heard the door slam. ‘Johnny…’ Seyamang retreated before him, hands crossed before her: the gesture of pleading. ‘Johnny, it doesn’t mean anything, honest, it doesn’t mean anything. I can’t help it. It’s my nature, it’s our nature. It’s kesh. Johnny, I need to know what I am, do you understand? It’s not like I love him or anything; it’s just ... sex, Johnny. Just fucking.’

  Johnny shook his head slowly. With all his hurt and anger and betrayal and jealousy and fear balled tight in it, his fist took Seyamang across the side of her head. She sprawled against the wall, a tangle of terracotta limbs that he thought for a moment he had shattered like an Etruscan pot. She stared at the trickle of dark red blood she had wiped from her forehead.

  She smiled at him.

  ‘Fuck you Johnny Considine, human. I hate you. With all my life, I hate you.’

  He seated himself cross-legged on the bedroom floor, numb, not looking, not listening to the sounds of her throwing needful things into an overnighter. Utterly numb. He wished someone, anyone would turn that fucking music off.

  For two days Johnny hung crucified on the tree of remorse while his database familiars showed him the enormity of his sin. Hideously expensive uplinks to the colonial library stored in the eighty-eight ships of the Fifteenth Interstellar Fleet out at the L5 point forced him to confront appalling conclusions. The kesh cycle with its complementary suites of matching male and female trigger chemicals meant that sex was always by female consent. Male full erection was only possible in the presence of a female hormone released during foreplay. Rape was a biochemical impossibility. Rape as a statement of male dominance was psychologically untenable; male violence against females as a power display unthinkable. Sexual violence was unknown among the Shi’an. Impossible. Seyamang could have been no more horrified had the sky fallen on her head.

  On the third day Johnny rose and went to seek Seyamang, her forgiveness, and that of her people. He went not knowing if she would forgive him. He went not knowing if forgiveness had any analogue in Shi’an emotionality.

  He walked along the disused Light Railway track which had become the major thoroughfare into Shi’ an town, down to Canary Wharf, the centre of the aliens’ domain. Dark-eyed androgynous children gave grudging directions: never once the slow blink of a smile. All Docklands, it seemed, knew of the star-crossed lovers. Seyamang had spoken the truth when she said she was not as free as she liked to think. Johnny Considine passed beneath the shadow of the Canada Tower and entered the heart of the Huskravidi Sorority.

  The British government had never admitted that IRA bombing of Canary Wharf had been a masterstroke. Seven hundred kilos of cross-polarized DBX had shattered every window within two kilometres and stripped the skin clean off the Canada Tower. Public denouncement hid private delight: since the popping of the property bubble the Canary Wharf/Docklands complex had been a real-estate albatross. With renovation estimates far exceeding rent-per-square-metre value, it was offered to the Shi’an immigrants to do with as they would, if they could. Their engineers had slapped up a containment field of the same type that protected their Interstellars at relativistic velocities, and moved the people in.

  Johnny was kept waiting by a software receptionist in a claustrophobic grey cube of a lobby with only a wall-mounted flatscreen for company. After an hour a middle-aged Shi’an - a woman, Johnny thought, learning the signs and symbols - gave him permission to enter. The Huskravidi Sorority Motherhouse occupied the twenty-fifth floor. To Johnny, stepping out of the gravshaft, it seemed as if he were standing on a great rectangle floating three hundred feet above east London. The floors ended where the horizon began. He clung to the walls like an acrophobic spider. The Shi’an woman who had told him to come up introduced herself as Manblong Erreth Huskravidi and led him by the hand to a chair one metre from the edge. Seyamang entered and seated herself in a facing chair some five metres away. The Sorority woman Manblong sat in a third such chair set at right angles to the line of communication.

  ‘Seyamang ...’

  Manblong looked at him. Words were not his to speak.

  Seyamang spoke. She spoke of the hurt he had done her, the sins he had committed upon her flesh, the pains he had inflicted, the deep wounds he had written in her. She spoke of her incomprehension and fear. She spoke of mistrust and betrayal and the natures of love, human and Shi’an. She spoke for a long time. Many aircraft slid over the top of the tower. The sun moved across the cinemascope sky. In all that she spoke there was nothing Johnny had not already heard from his own soul, yet spoken aloud, in her words, in her voice, it gutted him.

  Manblong then turned to Johnny. Now he might speak. All his justifications and defences and accusations fled from him.

  ‘Seyamang,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ He found he was crying. Open, unashamed, free. Manblong was staring at him. The Shi’an did not believe in tears. He was beyond care. He was destroyed. Broken. He felt hands cradling his head: the most intimate of Shi’an love-touchings. Seyamang was kneeling by the side of his chair, her hands stroking his skull.

  ‘Johnny, I hurt you and didn’t understand.’ She rubbed the side of her face - the wounded side - against his. He sniffed. She sniffed. ‘Still wearing that wonderful leather jacket.’

  Manblong left them touching. When they were ready to leave, she called them back from the gravshaft gate. A plastic vial of white capsules was clenched between her fingers.

  ‘You’ll need these,’ she said.

  ‘What are they?’ Johnny asked.

  ‘A synthetic hormone,’ Manblong said. ‘We women use it to experiment with sex out of season.’ The subject seemed gravely distasteful to her. Seyamang took the vial and stashed it in her pocket. Her head was lowered, her eyes were averted.

  ‘Will it keep me in kesh after the end of the season?’ she asked.

  ‘Not kesh. Something like it.’

  ‘Until the next season?’

  ‘Theoretically indefinitely. Seyamang.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We have been using this drug for thousands of years, but there has never been anything like this before. Never. Do you understand?’

  Seyamang made no audible reply but Johnny could see the skin darken around her eyes into a mask of emotion. The Shi’an did not believe in tears. They believed in personal darkness.

  ‘I can trust you not to say anything about where or who you got them from. Understand this, John Considine, we don’t die for love but we will kill for our children.’

  ‘I know that,’ Johnny said. As Seyamang stepped into the freefall field, he paused to add, ‘I know you used the hormone to conceive her, but if you can believe anything a human says, believe me when I say I will not let her be hurt again.’

  ~ * ~

  The warm damp winter came. The streets emptied of children, the music fell silent. The plastic banners tore and flapped in the wind, soft-running Shi’an vehicles splashed through the gurgling gutters. The air was just air again, no more, no magic, no thrill in every breath. Rain crazed the windows of the attic flat. Behind them Seyamang Erreth Huskravidi learned love.

&nb
sp; She tried to explain emotions utterly alien to her while the daily dose of drugs pushed her further and further into sexual terra incognita. ‘Warm, yet cool at the same time. Can you understand that, Johnny? Not the heat of the kesh, but neither the cold of the times between. I know that if I wanted to I could fuck you right now, but I also know I don’t have to, not the way I had to in kesh. Warm. Cool. At the same time.’

  She took to reading all Johnny’s deck could display of human erotica and romantic love.

  ‘That Romeo and Juliet. That wouldn’t happen - that couldn’t happen - among us. We don’t pair-bond. But I can understand how the way I feel, the constant tension between want and frustration, might make me need someone that much.’

  ‘You falling in love with me?’ Johnny asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Seyamang answered, blinking her eyes in a slow, intimate smile. ‘Perhaps.’ She preferred West Side Story anyway: the Sharks and Jets dancing their way to the rumble was how her people would have settled territorial scores.

  As the rain rained down and river floods drove the street people from their bashes and shacks, she reciprocated Johnny’s lessons in humanity by teaching him to be Shi ‘ an. She took him and her camera on photo-expeditions down to Docklands, seeing anew through his eyes. The truck gardens where semi-vegetative animals sucked nourishment out of the hacked-open earth. Click whirr. The titanic hulk of the lander beached in Heron Wharf. Click whirr. The stasis coffins in which her people had slept their five subjective years crossing to Earth, row upon row upon row racked up in the empty levels of Canada Tower. Click whirr. Sleepers awake.

  And each time, the subtle transaction between mother and daughter of inoffensive white capsules in their clear plastic cylinder. Johnny tried to contemplate a love that loved the sinner yet hated the sin.

  Seyamang pulled geographical and historical information down from the L5 point. Johnny saw the Shi’an motherworld unfold on his rollscreen, encircled by its wheel of orbital manufactories and habitats, spiked with space elevators. Motherworld’s nightside burned with the lights of ten thousand cities, its moons had long ago been reduced to massive organo-technic industrial complexes where starships reproduced themselves. He saw the nine colony planets of the Household of Worlds, where the Shi’an had walked before Rome was built.

  ‘I can’t take it in,’ he said. ‘It’s like an old sci-fi movie, FX by Industrial Light and Magic. It’s not real. I can’t believe in it.’

  ‘Nor I,’ said Seyamang Winterborn.

  She attempted to teach him Narha. He could not master a language that changed inflection and gender depending on the season of the year. He attempted to teach her Irish; when that failed, Ulster English. ‘Far more expressive than the bland Standard National Curriculum shit they talk here. Some of it is pure Elizabethan. The language of Shakespeare.’

  They had sex as the spirit moved them. Which was often. Always, Johnny was conscious of the price of the rough trade. The animal was gone. Never again did he experience the abandon, the self-loss, the sense of alien-to-alien that he had in the heat season.

  And the television news, waiting, biding, patient in its armouring of world trivia all these weeks and months, sprang. Ambushed by the lunchtime bulletin.

  Leicester police are investigating what appears to be the paramilitary-style killing of a young Belfast man outside a city-centre burger restaurant in the early hours of the morning.

  Jesus fuck.

  Eyewitnesses report that a motorbike with two riders drew up alongside the victim. After speaking briefly, one of them shot the victim in the head with a sawn-off shotgun before riding off. The dead man has been identified as ...

  Eugene Anthony Padre Pio Brady. Twenty-four. Formerly of Ardoyne Avenue, Belfast. Currently of hell. Always was a fucking stupid name, Padre Pio. Christ have mercy on you. Christ have mercy on me.

  ‘Seyamang.’

  She looked around from the kitchen space where she was joyfully chopping up some ghastly Shi’an vegetables that he was too polite to say gave him the shits.

  ‘Can I talk to you a minute?’

  ‘Sure, Johnny.’ She curled herself against him. Her unique musk had faded, victim of the white tablets, but her inhuman warmth comforted him.

  ‘Do you love me, Seyamang?’

  ‘Ah now, Johnny, you know better than to ask me that.’

  ‘Do you love me, Seyamang?’

  ‘Love. What is love? Love isn’t to me what it is to you.’

  ‘Do you love me, Seyamang?’

  ‘Yes, Johnny, I fucking love you, all right?’

  ‘Seyamang, I have to tell you something. Please don’t interrupt or say anything until I’ve finished.’

  He told her everything. What he was, what he had done.

  ‘West Drayton is the main air traffic control centre for British airspace. Our assault programs would have rendered it and its back-up systems inoperative for at least twelve hours. Any other traffic centre that tried to take control would have been infected also. Have you any idea of how many aircraft movements there are through West Drayton’s control sector in twelve hours? How many passengers?

  ‘I ran simulations. The probability of at least one mid-air collision was one hundred per cent. Total fatality. Hundreds dead. Men. Women. Children. Chinese. Indian. Japanese. Fucking Togolanders. Legitimate targets. The Stock Exchange, the Northern Bank, it was only money, it was only digits on a disc. Only things. These were lives. I couldn’t have that, Seyamang. Those Japanese, those Togolanders. So I betrayed them to the RUC. I told Eugene what I was going to do because he’s said he wanted out. I told him to stay until the peelers lifted them, so they wouldn’t suspect and run. Then I called the Confidential Telephone. They pulled me in to Castlereagh interrogation centre. I told them who, where, when, what, signed the dotted line and walked. Next day they raided them. Aoife and Charlie were arrested. Joey got shot. Dead, Seyamang. I don’t know if he was armed or not, but they shot him. Mikey escaped, changed his name, his identity, hacked into the files where his previous life was stored and erased himself. All the things I should have done if I’d been wise, but wasn’t. Two months ago I saw him on the television - the peelers had pulled him in on one of their regular paddy-bashes. Last night two guys on a motorbike rode up to Eugene in Leicester and blew him away. Classic execution. They knew who he was. They knew where to find him. Things I don’t even know, they knew. It was Mikey. Evening the score. Executing the traitors.’

  ‘You think he’ll come for you?’

  ‘I know he’ll come for me. I’ve been running checks through my deck. Someone’s been leaving muddy footprints all over my bank account.’

  ‘But that’s in Slovakia,’ Seyamang interrupted.

  ‘Someone with enough nous to mount a widescale datasearch, but clumsy enough to leave prints. Mikey never could hack worth a fuck, but he knows I’m alive and sinning, and, if he follows the account code, where to find me.’

  The rain rattled the big windows, reduced the visible world to rivulets of liquid grey.

  ‘I have to go, Seyamang. Now. Every minute I stay here puts you in danger. Mikey isn’t going to leave any witnesses. I can’t let you take that risk; you’ve no part in this. You’re innocent. Oh Jesus, what have I done, Seyamang?’

  ‘I don’t want you to go, Johnny.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave you, but I can’t take you with me. A human and a Shi’an together? He knows about us by now.’

  Seyamang smiled. It chilled Johnny to the pith of his being.

  ‘There is a way, Johnny. We can go together. We can hide in the future. The stasis coffins. We can sleep together fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years, let Mikey die and turn to dust while we wake up in another lifetime.’

  ‘But your family, your friends—’

  ‘Family? Friends? That’s you, Johnny.’

  ‘Do you think the Huskravidis will allow it?’ He thought of sun and seasons accelerating across the open window-wall, Canada Tower the g
nomon of an insane sundial, while he and Seyamang slept in each other’s arms. Years like seconds. In fifty, a hundred years anything might happen. Even an end to his country’s long, self-mutilation.

  Seyamang said she would go to her Sorority without delay. Johnny admired her faith. The Shi’an owed him nothing. Meantime Johnny, stay in the flat, don’t open the door to anyone who doesn’t say Our Day Will Come in Narha. He disobeyed her order to stay away from the windows to watch her skid off on her moped along the wet streets. Imaginings of long lenses in every door and window tormented him. He picked up the telephone and listened to the dialling tone, not reassured by its obdurate normalness. He went five times to his deck with thoughts of hunter/hunted, of simply finding and killing Mikey before he found and killed him. Each time he vanished the qwerty icons into the grubby plastic skin because he knew that was not how it was played. He was the dead man walking, the dead man talking. Nothing could change it. Another lifetime. A one way trip into the future. Only the impossibility of his situation made it thinkable.