by Glenn Grant
Wefia, the soldier, had a fight with Elieta when she was dismissed. “I’m staying! I’m a whore, too! We can put him between us!”
Tuagi reached out and held her until her tears wore out. “I’ll see you tomorrow after I show Elieta the horses. We can start working on that rifle. Think about the one you want to make.”
“I want to stay here,” she sniffled.
“Ah, little sheath, it would never do. I’m a virgin and you’re a virgin. We wouldn’t know which end the bullet came out. Wait until I have a lot of experience and then you will sleep with me alone.”
With great dignity she left his lap. “Good night, whore Elieta. Good night, soldier Bezek.” Then she kicked the bed, lifted up her robe, and ran away.
“My. She likes you.”
“That’s because I like her.”
“All she needed was a man. That’s all we all need.” The seductress was silent for a long time. She played some music. Again she was leagues away from him. He didn’t mind. She sat cross-legged on the bed, nude, playing her flute with the music. Time stood still and went on forever. He felt like a man, even if his thoughts were still rattled. Women weren’t all that different from soldiers.
He found her huge picture book of horses, famous horses, unknown horses caught by a hundred artists with and without their riders. She crept beside him on the bed and he put his arm around her.
“Look at that one! He’s so wild. Look at those eyes and his head!” She held the book out.
“Would you like to ride him?”
She trembled in his arms.
“He’s an Arabian stallion.”
“Is it true that Catherine the Great of Russia died trying to make love to a stallion when the structure holding him above her bed collapsed?”
Tuagi cracked up.
“But did she!”
He shook his head helplessly.
“All you men know about is wars! You don’t know any of the interesting things!”
Her hand reached out and the lights began to fall and flicker softly in some unpredictably sensual rhythm. She pushed the book away in a dismissing fashion that left her by herself on her belly, head away from Tuagi, tempting him. He slid over beside her, wracking his brain for dialogue from the simulations.
“Hello,” he said.
“You’re sure you’re a virgin?” she said to the wall.
He thought about kissing her and didn’t know if he dared. He had never kissed a woman before. Slowly he touched his lips to her back and rubbed his face against the smoothness of it. “Yeah.”
She pulled him closer. “Let’s just snuggle for a while. It’s better if we make it last. Touch me. Do anything.”
With one round buttock in the palm of his hand he found himself wondering about the exact nature of his relationship to the fifty thousand women of Enclad who, unknowingly, had acted as the seed group for the Grand Army. Why should he be thinking that? If Kartiel was right about sex, by now he should be lying here overwhelmed by lust.
She took his head in the crook of her arms, smiling, legs locked around him so that he couldn’t get away. “There’s a mystery about you. Tell me what it is.”
“Nothing.”
“Tuagi, I’ve been around soldiers too long and you wouldn’t believe the number of virgins I’ve had. Something is on your mind. Tell me. No matter how silly it sounds, tell me.”
He evaded Elieta’s request. “Do you know who your mother was?” he asked instead.
“Tuagi!” She laughed. “Tuagi! You know I don’t have a mother. I came out of the tanks just like you!”
“I’ve often wondered who my mother was.”
“But you don’t have a mother!”
“Don’t be silly. Everyone has a mother.”
“Except us.”
“The Getans are very careful with genetics. They know every gene in each of us and where it came from! They know everything!”
“Tuagi! Your mother was murdered when she was a baby for her artificially matured ovaries. Then she was butchered and added to some recipe up in the officers’ mess. What are you talking about!”
“I don’t mean that one. Four generations back we came from Enclad, our mothers did, grandmothers, whatever.”
“Four generations is a long time. That’s fifteen mothers if you go that far back—and with genetic splicing and dicing it could be even more.”
“Or less. Have you ever thought that those remote great-grandmothers of yours are still alive on Enclad? They are. Some of them would be younger than you are.”
“So? I remind you of your mother?” Elieta was amused.
“No. It’s just that women make me think of that. I’ve seen more women today than I have in my whole life, except in pictures. It’s a queer thought but when I go to Enclad I dream of meeting one of my mothers—just to satisfy something in myself. It will make the dreams go away, to meet one of my mothers while I’m awake.”
“So ask around. Find out who they are!”
“It’s impossible. The genetic data are in the main information vaults. Locked solid.”
“I’ve often heard you soldiers boast that you can outflank the cannibals.”
“A covert horseback ride in the Black Forest and cracking the main computers aren’t the same problem.” He was reminded that he was only a beardless youth.
She pondered his difficulty for six seconds. “I’ll tell you what to do, little boy. The Encladian political system is based on computer games and on cheating the computers. So your officers will let you study computers—they’ll want you to study them. After a while you’ll know enough to crack the vaults. Now isn’t that a good scheme?” She laughed at her own intelligence. “If you find out who your mother is, tell me about my father.”
“I know some of that story.”
“Oh?”
“All of our fathers are from the Clan of Itraiel, which has been bred for military intuition. The Base is crawling with them.”
“Oh, manure! The Getans have never won a war! Have you read about the campaign on Enclad so far? It’s a farce! How could they breed for military intuition! This whole war thing is a farce!”
“I work in their training devices every day. Military intuition they have.”
“Do you trust them?”
“Yes. Implicitly. I’ve never met a single case of corruption or incompetence in any of the Getans I’ve known. I’ve never met the officer who won’t knock himself out for me if I have a problem.”
“They ate your real mother when she was still a baby.”
“So? Babies aren’t human until they have memories.”
“If you were hungry, you young cannibal, would you eat me?”
It was a ridiculous question. She was a mature woman with obvious kalothi—but he was learning that whores didn’t always speak sensible things. Absurd questions required absurd answers. He smiled. “You’d be a bit tough. Just feel the muscle tone in your thighs. You might make a good stew if you were pickled in wine for a ten-day.”
“Shall we sleep?”
“No, I’m filled with lust.”
“Still thinking about your mother?” she jabbed. “All fifteen of them at once?”
Kartiel was so right. You felt different and talked differently when you lay with a woman. He felt very mature. He tried to think of some phrase that Encladian men used to appease their women. “How long has it been since a man told you that you are the most beautiful woman in the universe?”
“Not since earlier this evening!”
Then she melted in his arms. It was strange that such a silly phrase should work and get the effect he desired. He felt tenderly toward this whore who could pick his mind as if she had a cord into his brain, and he wondered why it had taken him so long to come here. Presently he was no longer a virgin.
Tuagi never mentioned again to anyone his obsession with his mothers. But he began to make a serious study of computers. He unraveled computers methodically, learning how to program the politi
cal games that Encladians played with them, learning how to cheat them, and cheatproof them.
Nine hundred days after commencing his studies he was ready. The central vault, he found, was impregnable, but the desks used by Getan officers were not. He faked a disease that had many genetic symptoms. A curious officer decrypted his genetic file into a desk’s temporary storage. He blocked the erase, duplicated the records, then repaired the erase. It was as simple as that. But it took four hundred more days to crack the file code since the recording was designed for direct input into a Getan’s peculiar brain.
Tuagi’s genetic map was anomalous. Forty percent of his genetic material was of diverse Getan origin. He had a total of eleven Encladian mothers but thirty-two percent of his genes came from only one of them. That puzzled him until he traced back his record through four female developmental generations (all of whom had been destroyed as infants during the oval decanting). The favored mother had many characteristics that showed amazing survival potential under the contingencies placed upon them by the Getan genetic engineers. A very unusual woman.
Her background was ordinary. She had been born on an obscure Akiran planet of moderately superior parents and had migrated to Enclad as a youth. Her pictures showed her to be of pure Akirani stock, Kiromashoi branch. The records indicated that ova had been taken from her covertly while she was still physically maturing into womanhood. She was one of the earlier donors and her genetic material had been widely used in soldier stock. Tuagi made a rough calculation on her age and came out with a figure of less than ten kilodays, younger than Elieta. He destroyed the stolen records, but kept the pictures. He certainly looked like her son.
Kyojida Nachirami.
He knew who his senior mother was! Promptly he dreamed about her. It was a nightmare. In his dream he met her after debarking at Enclad’s Ganatil spaceport and told her every detail of his life, and she coldly reported him to the Getan Command for disobedience and with stern faces they shipped him back to the cauldron to become a gigolo for the Female Army.
But when he woke up he found it wasn’t true. He stared at her pictures. There was such intelligence in the way she moved. Was he in love with her? That was silly. Was he obsessed? Yes. Was it only a crush? Perhaps. He was a trained soldier with a single purpose, to take Enclad and with his brothers lay the foundation for a Getan conquest that would last a megaday. But there would be an interesting side trip crossing his purpose.
Somewhere on that newly terraformed world he would locate his mother—come Nova or Kelvin’s darkness. When he found her she would tell him what it was like to grow up free without a destiny. Perhaps, perhaps he would kiss her on the cheek. That shouldn’t be such a hard task for a soldier who was the equivalent of any general who had ever walked the face of ancient Earth.
HAPPY DAYS IN OLD CHERNOBYL
Claude-Michel Prévost
Translated from the French by John Greene
Claude-Michel Prévost was born in Haiti and moved to Quebec in 1979, and from thence to Vancouver, where he now lives. He considers himself a Canadian writer, or a New World writer, and identifies with both British Columbia and Quebec. His mentor was Élisabeth Vonarburg; she was the first to appreciate and publish his work when she was editing Solaris. Rather than identify himself as a “science fiction writer,” he says that he is a writer who happens to write SF; he is proud of his SF, but does not feel limited to it, and cites Doris Lessing as an important role model in this respect. When asked what got him into writing SF, he replies: “Anger. I wasn’t happy with the way things were in the world outside. So science fiction was a way to escape inside, to imagine a world that was perhaps better. I am often prone to pessimism about the way things are going.”
He holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree and an Advertising Certificate, and is currently a marketing consultant with his own business, specializing in helping companies integrate new technologies into the marketing process. He is also writing erotica and an interactive Hypercard stack on voodoo.
* * *
In this story, there’s Michel. Michel with his pale skin despite three months of sun. Michel floating in his parka, pink gums, cracked glasses, weak wrist on the machete. Michel watching me dig in silence, he’s hunched against a dead tree trunk, shivering from time to time, like a rabbit. I put on his earphones, and he’s listening to Pink Floyd, “Dark Side of the Moon.” He is Michel Langlois.
In this story, there’s Daniel. Daniel chuckling in front of the Macintosh screen, nose to nose, dirty hair in his face, he was staring at the screen and chuckling softly in the fluorescent lab light, CHOM was going dididi, dididii, dididiii, he was jigging the mouse like an epileptic with withdrawal symptoms, just you wait, sluuuut, just you wait, and he brought into being a whole galaxy of RNA molecules, a colony of jellyfish children, a pink marshmallow chain-saw dancing the cha-cha on Broadway, cane in hand like the old Looney Tune cartoons … Daniel, his bass guitar was as heavy as a flame-thrower, he named it Slut, and he’d whip the strings of the Gibson on the apartment roof, with his paranoid Bugs Bunny silhouette ready to dive down the light well. His cage was at the top of fifty-six steps of a madman’s staircase, and at the entrance the aquarium walls tilted at a thirty-five-degree angle. Every night for exactly twenty-seven nights, twenty-seven, he screamed with laughter over it in the cafeteria, every night at two A.M. sharp, he ran silently over the roof, adjusted the anti-aircraft battery of the Yamaha Fender, yelled Viva Casa!! out over Sherbrooke Street blue in the mist, and BALLOUNG, volume at 15, BALLOOOUNG, a single note, a single howl made the neighbourhood taaaake off. The entire H2V 2K8 sector. And you could see them landing, eyes in painful trance, falling out of bed after two tough seconds of bewildered levitation. His next-door neighbour was starting to give him suspicious looks. Hi, Daniel.
At Bordeaux jail he had FUCK tattooed on his skull, starting from the left temple, a red scar slipping down onto the forehead at the verge of the hair; he came back with the tattoo, the clap, two front teeth gone and that way of looking without seeing, of slipping his personal bubble between other people’s, trying not to identify anything. The thunderscan was crackling over a picture pirated from Penthouse, but his pixels were hurting, he never used the least dot of orange any more, and now only coke helped him keep up his self-esteem in front of the screen. But in our tribe he was Wolfgang Megahertz or Daddy Satellite, he took a deep breath, lifted both arms over his head, and his fingers burned up the bakelite consoles. He was the one who took us from orbit to orbit over the sleeping mountains, who traced the monotonous rounds of an RCA spy satellite, the trill of a submarine drowsing off Ceylon, the low frequency grumbling of a B-52 scratching the gold of early morning. Even in bed, he searched for the quiver of other cells, his ear right up against the federal channels, just you wait, slut, just you wait; and when the day would end red and black, red with dust and with sleep in the eyes, black with rage and exhaustion after sixteen hours of panicked marching, when everyone was watching the glow on the other side of the mountain in exhausted silence, he was the one who tickled out Radio Amsterdam, No woman no cry, no, woman, no cry. And who made us laugh with the Voice of America, that sort of nervous laugh that makes your head shake, that finally forces your lungs to open. And who made us shiver when a voice whispered: friends, we call as friends …
Daniel Megahertz, Daniel Rainville. His moment of glory was when we spent three minutes embracing the members of SHAZAM, the pirate researchers of M.I.T., riding a couple of micro-hairs off the signal of Radio Canada International. Daniel Rainville. In this story, he’s the one who will join the loggers of ENGATE ONE, who will slip into one of the armed convoys toward the cities of the South. His favourite hero was, no, is, Doctor Spock: no feelings, man, no feelings.
Hi, Daniel.
In this story, there’s Aldridge. Aldridge Clearwater, the duke of cool springs, Aldridge who opens his soul wide when he walks in the forest, bazooka on his back, and who recites his doctoral thesis to the raccoons while he feed
s them. He can look at the stars and name them, one by one, by their real names. Aldridge taught us to eat roots and berries, to open our third eye when brute fatigue begins to win, to breathe in sync with the ferns while the patrolling troops’ boots march by our cheeks. He’s the one who sniffs out the trail of McLOEDGER’s soldiers, who silently watches the tiny trucks on the mountainside, who slides his heron body among the supposedly invulnerable gasoline tanks, among the immigrant workers gathered around the recreation trailers. He stuffed his hiding places in the hollow of century-old trunks, near mossy creeks smelling of mint, in warrens of needles capped by rocks. He knows the tiniest corners of the cathedrals of this forest, the smallest clearing where bearcubs play, he knows how to ask the trees for rest and energy, he’s crossed every carpet of branches and leaves covering the damp trail the Indians traced. Aldridge has been here for twelve years and eight eternities, eight seasons of loud and cluttered prime-time. Back then, he wasn’t called Aldridge, he wasn’t Aldridge yet. He seemed like just one of those loners with the high dry foreheads who can’t stand more than three people at once. Every time he went into town, when he turned his feet toward the guard of walls, he could feel his heart stifling with the first suburbs, tied down by ribbons of road, so he bought a cabin in the middle of nowhere and a satellite dish, and he kept doing his geology research while cultivating his two acres of ganja. The cabin quivered in the sunlight, in harmony with the firs; the logging companies’ trucks looked like DINKY TOYS driven by ants, their camps were still nothing but pimples on the mountains’ skin; a pirate radio hummed from the Aleutians, and Romeo and Juliet, tam, ta-tam-tatam, Samson and Delilah, tam, ta-tam-tatam, and Aldridge had a monumental tranquility. Until eight summers ago.
When the EARTH NOW fanatics sat on the explosives in front of the sniggering loggers, Aldridge agreed to grow up. That day, that third day, one of the eight kilo charges just went off. The foreman pleaded not guilty, the company hired the best lawyer in Vancouver. Accident. Technical defect. Sometimes Aldridge talks to me about the kid who blew up, he describes the birch slope quiet in the breeze, the arms closed around the dynamite sticks, embracing them while the boy leaned back against the tree, you could see him in all the binoculars, his breathing as calm as a November river. He describes the arms closing, then opening. Aldridge has already killed three supervisors, blown up two supply dumps, smashed millions of dollars worth of McLOEDGER equipment. He built around the camps an insubstantial web of informers and fears, retreats and traps, and we patiently write terror on the convoys in letters of quick ambushes at sloping corners, with ink of deadly raids on trailers guarded by throat-slit sentinels. No, I’m not talking about Afghan fighters with calm peregrine-falcon eyes, I’m not even talking about Fatheh, martyrs listening to the tanks rolling over their ruined walls, even if it is true that for all of us the evening news has a taste of the inevitable. All I know is my Leica lens faithfully holding to the driver’s head, searching for the spot between the eyes, under the yellow and gold helmet, searching patiently and charitably; all I know is the mines exploding on the road still muddy with snow, roughly standing up the giant Crane, the head hitting the back partition before slumping on the wheel, the Jeep flipping over in a red and blue howl while the whole mountain grumbles; all I know is forced marches, open eyes seeing nothing, wild goat plunges through cold sticky branches, while the Huey Cobras rake the landscape, with the stubborn patience of infuriated wasps, their thermal scanners full of venom. Aldridge Clearwater. He taught us to shoot and to breathe, he showed us the tombs of the village of Saida, nicely lined up in the main street, pushed out of line by ferns and wild-cherry roots. Fifty-eight tombs with no inscription, which became our pilgrimage.
