The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  My father knew. In the end, after the tragedy, my father’s Maps certainly showed him. But in the daily lives of Hamusek’s children, the genetic truth has never mattered. We have characteristics of both peoples. They have served us well. The legends live on, and we sing the songs.

  Like all young children in the towns and cities, I had grown up hearing their melodies, their feelings, without understanding their strange words. As I got older I began to ask what the words meant, and as I learned, I explained them to my younger brothers, Toth and Gram. Our father would sing the song first in the old language, the way he would for my mother, who loved his voice, and then he would sing it again, in words we could understand.

  He would sing to us on the banks of Hanabata’s Pond, in the cool night, on the streets of Seventh City, in his office at the polytechnic university when we visited him. He would sing of things that did not feel like Hamusek, because indeed they had once belonged to another world.

  The song I remember best was his favorite. He would begin by saying solemnly: “This is a song about a love that even death could not extinguish. In this song a woman’s lover drowns and comes back to her as a ghost. When she sees him, she says to him—”

  And he would sing:

  Assunutli bi hoddentin ashi inzayu?

  Bi hoddentin ashi tahay-o?

  Bi hoddentin ashi ik’a-eshkin chiaona-ay

  Yandustan benanoyetl chi na?

  And then he would sing it in words we understood:

  Oh where is your soft bed of skins, my love?

  Where is your soft warrior’s sheet?

  And where is the fair one who watches over you

  As you lie in your long dreamless sleep?

  He would stop and say: “Her lover looks at her, as pale as death, and answers—” And then he would sing:

  The sea is my soft bed of skins, my love.

  The sand is my soft warrior’s sheet.

  And the long hungry worms they do feed off of me

  As I lie every night in the deep. . . .

  He had a good, strong voice (as our mother always said) but he would not share it at festivals or town meetings. In this way he was not Hamusek at all: he was alone, and he chose to be. The songs, I know now, were for him—so that he could, perhaps, feel the feelings lost to him as he made his Maps and dreamt of a Truth so bright that it blinded him. The songs were for us only as they revealed him to us. We did not sing them with him. He never taught us.

  And even they—these songs—were not enough to put a moon in the sky for him, to save him with their Light.

  The ship that carries me to the creature is small and unassuming. I am its one inhabitant. Who I am—my name, my biography in a variety of languages, my body as twelve different scans have rendered it, and my own genetic Map—has been broadcast for thirty interdays in the direction of the creature’s ship, in the broadest arc possible, on the chance that the creature (or its ship) might be listening . . . and that my identity might somehow matter.

  If it hears the transmission, it does not act; it does not fire at my craft.

  It lets me come to it . . . as a father would.

  I do not know what atmosphere it breathes, if it breathes anymore, with lungs, I mean—gasses in its blood. I carry my own—two days’ worth—in lightweight tanks on my back, praying that the creature’s ship will ask no more of me than one or two gravities and that it still breathes what I breathe. I carry two weapons of my own choice: a small, worn laser-aimed projectile-rifle of the kind every Hamusek father gives his son at thirteen, and a long blade of volcanic glass from The Hand, seventh planet of our star, a blade I made myself on that world half a century ago. The Council did not understand these choices. Why not a cyclic-grenader? An energy suit? An arm-launched missile? You would have so much less to fear, would you not, Rau Goni? They meant well—when has the Council not meant well?—but intentions are not understanding.

  I chose my weapons to show him I understood.

  I do not wear an armored suit of the kind soldiers wear. I do not wear an explorer’s atmosphere suit. I wear the clothes I wore on Hamusek: patterned shirt (in the “married tartans” of our family) and the plain, durable pants we wore to school each day and still wore when my father returned home from the university, eyes distant as we pleaded with him to tell us about his work, about the Maps, what it might mean: Women who looked like cats and were ferocious. Men who looked like serpents and were kind. Children who could jump across rivers with boulders in their arms! Eyes that could see living creatures at the heart of a star!

  In the end he would indeed tell us—his three sons and his daughter on the floor before him—what it meant: How human beings would, with the right machines, be able to alter themselves at any point in their lives, and, as they did, know the consequences of every change they made in themselves. Would lungs that let you breathe the air of ten worlds shorten your life in the end or lengthen it? Would growing talons keep you from seeing in the night? Would eyes as pretty as the rainbow fish of Dajonica make the grain crops of Hamusek poisonous to you? The Maps would be able to tell you.

  “There have never been maps like these,” he would say.

  It was like a legend—a Hamusek tall tale—and we would listen to the story with wide eyes: How simple the idea of the Maps was . . . how the idea had come to him one day while he was singing—singing . . . how he wouldn’t have been able to make them—in their exquisite detail—without the great computers on Tar and Rasi and the Council’s vast station in orbit around the twin stars of Goatcher . . . How he had spoken with those computers through satellites and relays and starlock communiqués for five Hamusek years, had come to know them like friends, even felt affection for them . . . Sometimes he would even dream at night of meeting them, of meeting those machines and finding human beings, not machines at all. . . .

  How he had given these computers his model—the “flowing paradigm,” the “open finity”—for the entire Map series and had asked them to generate the first Map, using the vast genetic, environmental, and social data of their memories to give flesh to his “paradigmatic paradox.”

  How they had done what he asked, and made the second Map, too, and the third, and how, even now, as he spoke to us that evening, they were helping him design the machines he would need to use the Maps . . . to let the Changing begin at last.

  We listened even when we did not understand, for it was a story about hope and that part was always clear. Our mother would listen, too, and in the end, to say good night, we would touch our foreheads to his, to hers—as sons and daughters of Hamusek always did—and would go to bed, happy to have had him to ourselves for a time.

  Everything was the Light in those days, though none of us could see because of it.

  I have with me two small, convenient “devices” to detect biomass and motion-in-darkness. The Council offered and I accepted. They believe they know how difficult my journey to him will be, how fraught with danger; they imagine a monster that wishes to consume me, and yet if that is what awaits me, it is not my father I go to meet. Or a battle between a man who has lost all sanity and his son—flesh against flesh, bone against bone; but if that is the struggle to come, it is not my father I am going to meet. I take the small, convenient devices simply because they may help me find him. I may not need them. We Hamusek see well in the dark, given the long nights of our planet, our breeding for five centuries, the genetic inclinations of those humans who first came to our world.

  I take the devices. I take, as well, a small container—one that holds nothing.

  The spacecraft that brought me to the great ship leaves and I stand in the silence of the lock, listening. I cannot hear the little ship moving away; I cannot feel its vibrations through the throbbing of this massive ship, but I know it will station itself just beyond the range of the ship’s odd weapons and wait for a signal from me. If the signal comes, it will return to this same lock and accept one human being, Rau Goni. If, after seventy-two ship hours, the s
ignal has not come, the little craft will report to the Council and the Council will send what armament it feels is necessary to end it.

  I pray that I do not stumble, that I do not fall unconscious. I pray that my tanks will work. I pray that there will not be an accident to set the end in motion.

  According to those who sent me, there are four thousand kilometers of corridors in this ship. That does not matter. Whatever direction I move, I will know whether I am moving closer to him or farther away. A son—or daughter—of Hamusek always knows. It is in the Maps, in the genes of one “India” or another. As psychologists have shown since the Changing began, the first bonds of mother and child, or father and child, do not disappear even when the bodies Change.

  There is, I remember, a legend on Hamusek about a father who dies and leaves his body, but calls to his seven sons until the sons, unable to bear it any longer, forsake their flesh to be with him. It was that very legend—told to me by my father—which took me to The Hand fifty years ago, to my mother’s and sister’s grave there, to death itself.

  I have always wondered what the stories of a people—their legends, tall tales, and songs—do to them. That is, what power these stories have to shape human lives by their image, and the people’s own.

  My father has wondered, too, I am sure.

  The corridors are dark. I remove my tanks slowly, take a tentative breath. It is air—the air of Hamusek, stale but familiar, dusty yet full of trees.

  In this darkness I become what I was as a child in the forests there, what all Hamusek are—in their wilderness. My nostrils flare. I smell a hundred different things. The blood in my skull roars and I hear what I would never hear were these corridors in the light blinding all other senses.

  I sense the first child near a turn in the corridor and realize that the walls here are not metal at all, but skin—scales, blood, pores. Did I already know? Did I know this even as I stepped into the ship, smelling the molecules of secretions, hearing the blood rushing, seeping, and just not wanting to believe? As his son, I should have known, shouldn’t I?

  My feet, in simple boots, whisper through dust, through a tinkle like glass, a crackling. I reach down to touch it and it is what I imagined: Years of scales sloughed off from the walls, years of skin, brittle and turning to dust. My feet have stirred up a cloud and my lungs hurt. I cough, cough again and walk carefully, so as not to stir up the years.

  When I reach the sound—what I know must be the child—I hold up the motion-imager and play it across the wall. In the odd green light of the display I see the moving outline of it, head riveted to the wall, body jerking as it struggles to feed. There is an immense pore—a shadow on the display—and it is at this pore that the child suckles. The pore reeks of blood. It is blood that the child needs.

  I understand these things, as I should.

  As the small green image moves on the display, I hear the child’s hugeness—its scaled tail, sliding on the floor, atrophied arms grasping at the wallskin, heavy jaws pulling at the leather of the great pore.

  The tail slides across the floor toward me and I step back. When it doesn’t move again, I step over it, hold my breath against the dust, and hurry on. I know which corridors to take. I know where he is, because it is dark, because in the dark I am a son of Hamusek, descendent of “New Indians,” and I am his son. The smells grow worse. Excrement. Old blood flaking away, turning to dust like rusted metal in your mouth. New blood oozing from the walls like tears.

  A child like that will never leave you, I say to him. Even death cannot take such a child from you, can it, Father?

  Prihoda Delp and her Council were worried that I would not have enough food and water, that the ship would be too large, that I would collapse from thirst and hunger before I would find him. How could I tell them—that I would know where he was?

  I trip. I fall to my knees. I sniff, smelling dryness, skin without flesh. I move my hands blindly on the floor until I find it. I am afraid—my arms and legs are shaking—but I move my hands and find what I imagined: A bundle of dry bones. The twisted skin of a child dead for decades, injured by another perhaps, or lost between pores—its body mummified by an atmosphere that allows the bacteria of rot only if he wishes it . . . which of course he does not. You want skin and bones to remember them by, don’t you, Father.

  My right boot has separated a bone from its bundle. I reach down and pull. When I have freed it, I rise and take it with me, the ribbons of dry sinew and skin whispering against my skin.

  So this is what you want—what you would like us all to be?

  In the end I find him by the smell and by the sheer number of children, living and dead, that fill the corridors, the ones leading to the room at the heart of the ship. I find him by his smell and his sounds—the shifting of flesh against a metal that barely contains him, the rasp of scales wider than my face against the alloy, the whisper of nutrients moving through kilometers of tubes from distant hydroponics tanks to the buccal orifices of his body, and the whisper of waste through other tubing.

  He is exactly where I imagined he would be—in the room that houses the ship’s great brain, which is his only companion now: like a wife who will not leave him.

  The dry, mummified bodies of his dead children (how many generations?) litter the entrance. I climb over them on hands and knees, my boots tearing through the skin and scales and brittle bones, then holding. I hear him shift only meters away—scales against metal, talons against themselves, the great lungs inhaling the stale air of a room whose ceiling towers in the dark. The whole room sighs.

  It has not left this room in years, I know. The scanners were wrong: They saw his children, his immense children, and thought they were the father. It cannot leave the room. It fills it so completely that the electronic interfaces it once built between itself and the ship are embedded in its flesh now, have become its very neural wiring, the walls but another skin, the ship’s body inseparable from its own. I smell its breath, which reeks of ancient air, ancient tubing, nutrients that would kill me if I drank them, blood that has been changed by fifty years of Mapping into something no longer blood.

  I do not use the devices. I do not need to. I see him clearly, a reptile with the jaws of a demeer, that small, snarling demon of Hamusek no longer than a man’s arm, that nightmare of children scared of the dark: Don’t let the demeer night-bite! But this one is huge, a demeer-God, feeding on the Darkness.

  Father? . . . I say. I say it silently, eyes closed, my legs deep in the bones and skin of his children. He can hear me. I can feel his thoughts pass across my own, pass again, curious:

  Who?

  You know me, Father.

  He has taken our “sensitivity”—our “wilderness gifts”—and with the Maps made of them something greater, as I knew he would. I will talk to him, I told the Council. How? they said, incredulous. He is no longer human.

  He was the Master of Maps, I told them. I am his son. That is enough. . . .

  The body shifts. The floors creak. The secretions at the pores dry for an instant. The walls sigh.

  It has, it realizes now, wanted this moment for years, though it has not known why. It has wanted one of us to come—one of the man’s three sons—to come, to see what the man has made, to behold what he believes he is and, by believing, has made of himself.

  Father . . . I say.

  It does not answer.

  You are not, I tell him, what you imagine. I show it—what it imagines:

  A spark darker than any night burning in a body so inhuman that the gods who made it weep, turn away, deny their creation.

  A father who lets his children feed on his blood, only to consume them himself, in his hunger and hatred.

  A reptile who imagines itself a moth, imagining a moon that just isn’t there.

  Then I show it something else. I show it:

  Three sons and a daughter asleep on their cots in a quiet house, the four lights of their souls, their father in another room, unaware. I show th
e mother and the daughter dying, the two lights fading—while the three other lights live on. I show him the father again—in another room, larger and darker—unaware of these lights. I show it a man who imagines himself to be a reptile—to be the darkness made by the two lights that have gone out, because he has forgotten his own, and the living three. . . .

  No! the creature says and the room, the ship, the bones under me shake. I know that if I go on showing it what it must not see, it will kill me.

  I show it a pond. I let it hear a singing—a father’s—

  The floor buckles, metal pops, the hideous tail moves swiftly through a cloud of bones and scales toward me—

  Is this what you really want? I ask it.

  I hold up the bone I have brought so that it may see it. It sees what I see in the eye of my mind.

  Bones explode before me in the darkness, the great tail thrashing as it tries to reach me. Splinters rain on my face. Dust fills my lungs. I cry out, dropping the bone, protecting eyes with hands as light explodes inside my skull, goes dark, black bones taking their place, pulling me toward them, toward darkness.

  I am down on my knees in the bones, skin, and scales of his children. I show it a picture of the man’s daughter—

  And the jaws—those two reptile yet human heads—scream at me. The tail rushes and I fall again among the bones, hug them to me, feel myself lifted in the air, dropped. I lie coughing in the dust, and in wetter things.

  Tubing has pulled from the walls. The air stinks of nutrients. I hear trickling—down walls, across floors. I am afraid I will touch it—the fluid—that it will burn.