“It’s Daughter Ann.”
I grabbed the top sheet off my bunk and started lining my shuttle bag with it. Holy scut, this would be the first place Brown would look. I rifled through my desk drawer for a pair of scissors to cut some air slits with. Zibet still sat petting the horrid thing.
“We’ve got to hide it,” I said. “This time I’m not kidding. You really are in trouble.”
She didn’t hear me. “My sister Henra’s pretty. She has long braids like you. She’s good like you, too,” and then in an almost pleading voice, “she’s only fifteen.”
Brown demanded and got a room check that started, you guessed it, with our room. The tessel wasn’t there. I’d put it in the shuttle bag and hidden it in one of the spins down in the laundry room. I’d wadded the other slickspin sheet in front of it, which I felt was fitting irony for Brown, only he was too enraged to see it.
“I want another check,” he said after the dorm mother had given him the grand tour. “I know it’s here.” He turned to me. “I know you’ve got it.”
“The last shuttle’s in ten minutes,” the dorm mother said. “There isn’t time for another check.”
“She’s got it. I can tell by the look on her face. She’s hidden it somewhere. Somewhere in this dorm.”
The dorm mother looked like she’d like to have him in her Skinner box for about an hour. She shook her head.
“You lose, Brown,” I said, “You stay and you’ll miss your shuttle and be stuck in Hell over Christmas. You leave and you lose your darling Daughter Ann. You lose either way, Brown.”
He grabbed my wrist. The rash was almost unbearable under the band. My wrist had started to swell, puffing out purplish-red over the metal. I tried to free myself with my other hand, but his grip was as hard and vengeful as his face. “Octavia here was at a samurai party in the boys’ dorm last week,” he said to the dorm mother.
“That’s not true,” I said. I could hardly talk. The pain from his grip was making me so nauseated I felt faint.
“I find that difficult to believe,” the dorm mother said, “since she is confined by an alert band.”
“This?” Brown said, and yanked my arm up. I cried out. “This thing?” He twisted it around my wrist. “She can take it off any time she wants. Didn’t you know that?” He dropped my wrist and looked at me contemptuously. “Tavvy’s too smart to let a little thing like an alert band stop her, aren’t you, Tavvy?”
I cradled my throbbing wrist against my body and tried not to black out. It isn’t beasties, I thought frantically. He would never do this to me just for beasties. It’s something worse. Worse. He must never, never get it back.
“There’s the call for the shuttle,” the dorm mother said. “Octavia, your break privileges are canceled.”
Brown shot a triumphant glance at me and followed her out. It took every bit of strength I had to wait till the last shuttle was gone before I went to get the tessel. I carried it back to the room with my good hand. The restricks hardly mattered. There was no place to go anyway. And the tessel was safe. “Everything will be all right,” I said to the tessel.
Only everything wasn’t all right. Henra, the pretty sister, wasn’t pretty. Her hair had been cut off, as short as scissors could make it. She was flushed bright red and crying. Zibet’s face had gone stony white and stayed that way. I didn’t think from the looks of her that she’d ever cry again. Isn’t it wonderful what a semester of college can do for you?
Restricks or no, I had to get out of there. I took my books and camped down in the laundry room. I wrote two term papers, read three textbooks, and, like Zibet, recopied all my notes. He cut off my hair. He said I tempted men and that was why it happened. Your father was only trying to protect you. Come to Papa. I turned on all the spins at once so I couldn’t hear myself think and typed the term papers.
I made it to the last day of break, gritting my teeth to keep from thinking about Brown, about tessels, about everything. Zibet and her sister came down to the laundry room to tell me Henra was going back on the first shuttle. I said goodbye. “I hope you can come back,” I said, knowing I sounded stupid, knowing there was nothing in the world that could make me go back to Marylebone Weep if I were Henra.
“I am coming back. As soon as I graduate.”
“It’s only two years,” Zibet said. Two years ago Zibet had the same sweet face as her sister. Two years from now, Henra too would look like death warmed over. What fun to grow up in Marylebone Weep, where you’re a wreck at seventeen.
“Come back with me, Zibet,” Henra said.
“I can’t.”
Toss-up time. I went back to the room, propped myself on my bunk with a stack of books, and started reading. The tessel had been asleep on the foot of the bunk, its gaping pink vaj sticking up. It crawled onto my lap and lay there. I picked it up. It didn’t resist. Even with it living in the room I’d never really looked at it closely. I saw now that it couldn’t resist if it tried. It had tiny little paws with soft pink underpads and no claws. It had no teeth, either, just the soft little rosebud mouth, only a quarter of the size of the opening at the other end. If it had been enhanced with pheromones, I sure couldn’t tell it. Maybe its attraction was simply that it had no defenses, that it couldn’t fight even if it wanted to.
I laid it over my lap and stuck an exploratory finger a little way into the vaj. I’d done enough lezzing when I was a freshman to know what a good vaj should feel like. I eased the finger farther in.
It screamed.
I yanked the hand free, balled it into a fist, and crammed it against my mouth hard to keep from screaming myself. Horrible, awful, pitiful sound. Helpless. Hopeless. The sound a woman must make when she’s being raped. No. Worse. The sound a child must make, I thought, I have never heard a sound like that in my whole life, and at the same instant, this is the sound I have been hearing all semester. Pheromones. Oh, no, a far greater attraction than some chemical. Or is fear a chemical, too?
I put the poor little beast onto the bed, went into the bathroom, and washed my hands for about an hour. I thought Zibet hadn’t known what the tessels were for, that she hadn’t had more than the vaguest idea what the boys were doing to them. But she had known. Known and tried to keep it from me. Known and gone into the boys’ dorm all by herself to steal one. We should have stolen them all, all of them, gotten them away from those scutting god-fucking…I had thought of a lot of names for my father over the years. None of them was bad enough for this. Scutting Jesus-jiggers. Fucking piles of scut.
Zibet was standing in the door of the bathroom.
“Oh, Zibet,” I said, and stopped.
“My sister’s going home this afternoon,” she said.
“No,” I said, “Oh, no,” and ran past her out of the room.
I guess I had kind of a little breakdown. Anyway, I can’t account very well for the time. Which is edge, because the thing I remember most vividly is the feeling that I needed to hurry, that something awful would happen if I didn’t hurry.
I know I broke restricks because I remember sitting out under the cottonwoods and thinking what a wonderful sense of humor Old Man Moulton had. He sent up Christmas lights for the bare cottonwoods, and the cotton and the brittle yellow leaves blew against them and caught fire. The smell of burning was everywhere. I remember thinking clearly, smokes and fires, how appropriate for Christmas in Hell.
But when I tried to think about the tessels, about what to do, the thoughts got all muddy and confused, like I’d taken too much float. Sometimes it was Zibet Brown wanted and not Daughter Ann at all, and I would say, “You cut off her hair. I’ll never give her back to you. Never.” And she would struggle and struggle against him. But she had no claws, no teeth. Sometimes it was the admin, and he would say, “If it’s the trust thing you’re worried about, I can find out for you,” and I would say, “You only want the tessels for yourself.” And sometimes Zibet’s father said, “I am only trying to protect you. Come to Papa.” And I would climb up
on the bunk to unscrew the intercom but I couldn’t shut him up. “I don’t need protecting,” I would say to him. Zibet would struggle and struggle.
A dangling bit of cotton had stuck to one of the Christmas lights. It caught fire and dropped into the brown broken leaves. The smell of smoke was everywhere. Somebody should report that. Hell could burn down, or was it burn up, with nobody here over Christmas break. I should tell somebody. That was it, I had to tell somebody. But there was nobody to tell. I wanted my father. And he wasn’t there. He had never been there. He had paid his money, spilled his juice, and thrown me to the wolves. But at least he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t one of them.
There was nobody to tell. “What did you do to it?” Arabel said. “Did you give it something? Samurai? Float? Alcohol?”
“I didn’t…”
“Consider yourself on restricks.”
“It isn’t beasties,” I said. “They call them Baby Dear and Daughter Ann. And they’re the fathers. They’re the fathers. But the tessels don’t have any claws. They don’t have any teeth. They don’t even know what jig-jig is.”
“He has her best interests at heart,” Arabel said.
“What are you talking about? He cut off all her hair. You should have seen her, hanging onto the wallplate for dear life! She struggled and struggled, but it didn’t do any good. She doesn’t have any claws. She doesn’t have any teeth. She’s only fifteen. We have to hurry.”
“It’ll all be over by midterms,” Arabel said. “I can fix you up. Guaranteed no trusters.”
I was standing in the dorm mother’s Skinner box, pounding on her door. I did not know how I had gotten there. My face looked back at me from the dorm mother’s mirrors. Arabel’s face: strained and desperate. Flashing red and white and red again like an alert band: my roommate’s face. She would not believe me. She would put me on restricks. She would have me expelled. It didn’t matter. When she answered the door, I could not run. I had to tell somebody before the whole place caught on fire.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, and put her arms around me.
I knew before I opened the door that Zibet was sitting on my bunk in the dark. I pressed the wallplate and kept my bandaged hand on it, as if I might need it for support. “Zibet,” I said. “Everything’s going to be all right. The dorm mother’s going to confiscate the tessels. They’re going to outlaw animals on campus. Everything will be all right.”
She looked up at me. “I sent it home with her,” she said.
“What?” I said blankly.
“He won’t…leave us alone. He—I sent Daughter Ann home with her.”
No. Oh, no.
“Henra’s good like you. She won’t save herself. She’ll never last the two years.” She looked steadily at me. “I have two other sisters. The youngest is only ten.”
“You sent the tessel home?” I said. “To your father?”
“Yes.”
“It can’t protect itself,” I said. “It doesn’t have any claws. It can’t protect itself.”
“I told you you didn’t know anything about sin,” she said, and turned away.
I never asked the dorm mother what they did with the tessels they took away from the boys. I hope, for their own sakes, that somebody put them out of their misery.
In the Realm of the Heart, In the World of the Knife
by Wayne Wightman
Introduction
Wayne Wightman was first discovered when he published stories in Elinor Mavor’s Amazing. Since that magazine was barely clinging to life at the time, his work was barely noticed, and there followed several years when he published nothing in the field of science fiction.
When he was rediscovered by Ed Ferman, and his stories started appearing in F&SF in the mid-eighties, he had made a quantum leap forward. In fact, it was his fiction that brought me back to reading short stories. I had burned out after a couple of years of writing my short-fiction review column for Richard E. Geis’s Science Fiction Review at the turn of the decade. Months of reading every story published had finally brought me to a point where I couldn’t bear to pick up a magazine. It felt too much like work. I was no longer a fit audience for the stories these writers had to tell.
In fact, for several years I stopped reading science fiction altogether. I was working on graduate degrees in literature—I had enough of Milton, Spenser, Joyce, and Thackeray to read that there was no time for contemporary literature, short or long. Until in the middle of a business trip, far from home, I found myself with nothing to read. This is an unbearable situation. The only store nearby was an all-night grocery, and it happened that there was a lone copy of Fantasy & Science Fiction on the magazine rack. Perhaps it had been enough years that I had lost my aversion to the magazines; or perhaps it was simply the fact that the other magazines were things like Road and Track and Biker and Professional Wrestling. Anyway, I bought it, took it to the lonely guest room, and opened it to Wayne Wightman’s first story in F&SF.
It was powerful. It was fresh. It made me realize that I had been missing something during the years I had ignored current sf. And when, in later years, more and more of his stories appeared, his became one of the names I learned to look for. He has yet to disappoint me.
Wightman is a junior-college English teacher. He is also a romantic whose stories confess his belief that individuals can be larger than life, that their decisions can change the world around them. “In the Realm of the Heart” is perhaps his simplest, plainest tale. Superficially, it’s a thriller in an almost timeless milieu. But I don’t put stories in this book for superficial reasons.
Obese and sweating, Errit Stattor strolled smiling through his outer office, reviewing those who served him. He tried to be humble. The archaic incandescent lighting made his aides look paper-yellow, hollow-eyed, and slack. When he entered those immense and weirdly anachronistic stained-glass doors, all voices ceased, all movement stopped, and in a single motion, everyone stood. They bowed, and as he passed by them, he smiled and nodded.
“Please,” he said, “please sit—these formalities…”
But they remained standing and bowing. Stattor sighed. “Your devotion impresses me,” he said, “but…please…”
No one sat, and he was impressed, but today, as he reviewed them, smiling, the fat of his cheeks pushed up in tight sweat-sheened balls beneath his eyes, he had more reason to appear pleased than they could know. Today, at 11:00 A.M., Usko Imani was going to be brought to him. She was the last woman who had voluntarily made love to him, and he had not seen her in twenty years, as of today. Seeing her, speaking to her, was to be a sort of anniversary gift to both of them. It was one of the several loose ends in his life that remained to be tied up.
As Stattor crossed through his office, sweat ran in crooked streams out of his scalp, and he smelled of deceased generations of sweat-loving bacteria. It was unfortunate, he knew; he did what he could about it, but nothing helped much. No one mentioned it.
With the yellow light hazing the air, Stattor’s two dozen aides remained standing beside their desks, bowed and dead-faced, waiting for him to complete his passage among them.
Supervisor Stattor surveyed the nerve center of his domain, the place where he could order any action on any of twenty thousand worlds, and today he felt not only a peculiar sense of serenity beyond that which he normally experienced, but he also felt one of those increasingly frequent twinges of immortality. It seemed as though something grandly mysterious was about to happen to him. He suspected that it would not happen to him today—but then, it would happen, and it would be a surprise…. And it would be strange and wonderful, and this entire branch of humanity would know of it, because he was Errit Stattor, Supervisor of United Tarassis, and he had opened to mankind the treasures of alien technologies, and he was admired and respected on more worlds than he could comprehend. Without him, they knew and he knew that they would have become backward, a slave race, trashlife.
“Please,” he said, “be comfortable. Treat me a
s anyone else.”
No one moved, and Stattor appreciated their devotion.
He nodded and smiled at his personnel and left them in the yellow-aired room. The crystalline door of his private office sensed his presence, opened, and he passed grandly through it.
Alone, he folded forward and clasped his distended guts in his arms. His intestines felt like a tangle of fire, and waves of pain flowed up his legs and pooled in his thighs, reservoirs of agony. Being chain-whipped, he thought, would probably not hurt more. After so many organ replacements, so much reconstructive surgery, and with fifteen or twenty biomechs floating somewhere beneath his tides of fat, with all this, he could not walk far, or sleep well, or think as sharply as he once could. But he no longer needed to.
From a dozen light-years above the hub of the galaxy, in this space station that housed over fourteen thousand workers, he directed the ebb and flow of wealth and workers from world to world, eliminating obstacles and annoyances as this part of humanity moved in a swarming tide across the galaxy.
Stattor forced himself erect. The sight of his office usually soothed him. Standing just inside the doorway, on the carpeted area, where those who came to see him would stand, he relished the awesomeness of his design. The entry area was carpeted with the textured skin of some alien beast or other, but this was just a small part of his vast office, which was inside a transparent blister on one of the non-rotating rings of the station. To approach Stattor’s gleaming desk, one had to step onto the thermoplast floor where underfoot, looking close enough to touch, stars and gasses defiled the purity of the void.
When one came to do business with Stattor, to ask his aid or intercession, one felt suspended in space, and Stattor would sit at his shining black desk, smiling, saying, “Please, allow me to help you. Ask what you need.” And behind him, through the transparency, the frozen hub of the galaxy was smeared across half the sky. Just above his head and to the right was a globular cluster that looked too perfect to be real. Sitting there, like that, listening and smiling, Stattor listened and judged.
Future on Fire Page 29
