Shadow's End

by Sheri S. Tepper

  price for such a lease includes food and cleaning. The food mostly came from off-planet, but the cleaning was done by us.

  Each tenth day we took brooms and brushes and soft old rags and went into his cell, which is around the back of the main hive, on the cave-floor level, in a kind of protrusion built out from the body of the hive. We don't like outlanders stumbling about among us in the hive, so our leasehold has its own entrance. In case an outlander needs help at night, there is a corridor that comes into a storeroom of the hive, but it is seldom used except by those who serve the outlanders.

  The Cochim-Mahn leasehold is three cells built around a toilet place. We don't use the manure of outlanders in our fungus cellars. There is some feeling it might kill the fungus. Instead we buy these closet things from the Alliance for our leaseholders to use, and when they get used up, we trade for new ones. So Bernesohn Famber's place was a little corridor with five doors in it, one to the hive storeroom, one to the toilet, and three more to the three cells. The cell nearest the front, nearest the lip of the cave, had a door to the outside as well. All of the rooms had lie-down shelves around the sides. One back room was where Famber had slept, one he had used for storage, and the one with the door to the outside had his worktable and a comfortable chair and many strange devices and machines. These, Mama told me, were recorders and computers and analyzers, to help Bernesohn Famber with his work.

  "What was his work?" I always asked, each and every time.

  "Finding out about Dinadh," she always said, winking at me. Grown-ups wink like that when they hint something about the choice. Or the House. Or the other world we had, before we came here. Things we are not supposed to talk about.

  "Did he find out?" I asked.

  "Nobody knows," she said, marching back through the cells to the back one, where she started with the broom and I followed with the brush, sweeping down the smooth mud walls, brushing off the sleeping shelves, making a little pile of dust and grit that got bigger the farther we pushed it from cell to cell, until at last we could push it right out the door onto the floor of the cave. Then I took the broom and pushed it across the cave floor, farther and farther forward, until it came to the edge and fell over, all that dust and grit and sheddings of the hive falling down like snow on the canyon bottom.

  Sometimes, while Mama was sweeping, I'd sit and look at the machines, longing to push just one button, just to see what would happen. It was forbidden, of course. Such things were not Dinadhi things. We had to live without things like that. We had chosen to live without them. We had chosen to give them up in return for what we were promised instead.

  After we cleaned Bernesohn Famber's leasehold, sometimes we went down to the storerooms to pick something for supper. In summers, there are all kinds of things, fresh or dried melon, fresh or dried meat, different kinds of vegetables and fruit, pickled or fresh or dried. There is almost always grain, head grain or ear grain, eaten whole or cracked or ground for making bread. We have seeds for roasting, and honey too. We brought bees with us, from the other world.

  In late winter and early spring, though, there's mostly fungus from the cellars, pale and gray and tasting like wood. The only good thing about fungus is that it's easy to fix. It can be eaten fresh or dried, raw or cooked. We usually put some salt and herbs on it to make it taste like something. Most all of our cookery is done in the mornings, when the sun is on the cave. We use solar reflectors for cooking. The whole front edge of the cave is lined with them, plus all the level spots to either side, and any time of the morning you can see women scrambling across the cliff wall to get at their own ovens and stewpots.

  After food is cooked, it's kept warm in padded boxes until eating time. None of our food is very hot, except in wintertime. Then we have fires in the hive, and we sometimes cook over them. It would take too many trees to have fires in summer. That was part of the promise and the choice as well. We have to protect the trees and certain plants because the beautiful people need them.

  Even though girls had much to learn, sometimes Mama would tire of teaching me and say, "Go on, go play," and then I'd have to try to find somebody else whose mama had said, "Go play," to them too.

  Shalumn and I played together mostly. We played babies and we played wedding and we played planting and harvest, smoothing little patches in the dust and grooving them like ditches, and putting tiny rocks down for the vegetables. We had dolls, of course, made out of reed bundles, covered with cloth, with faces painted on. We didn't play with the boys, not once we were old enough to know who was a boy and who was a girl. Boys played sheepherder and songfather and watermaster, and they had games where somebody always won and somebody always lost. Shalumn and I played bed games together, and once Mama caught us at it and whipped us both on our bottoms. I still have a little line there, on one side, where the whip cut. After that we were careful.

  I remember those as pleasant times, but I can't make them sound like much. Nothing much happens with children on Dinadh. We don't have adventures. If we tried to have an adventure, we'd probably die right away. Maybe better … better I think of some other story. Not my life or Lutha Tallstaff s life, but someone else's. Another person entirely, the third one of us. The one Lutha and I met together. Snark the shadow.

  At the end of each workday the Procurator dismissed his shadows, allowing them to descend the coiled ramps that led from occupied areas to Shadowland beneath. There each shadow entered the lock as he was programmed to do.

  "Strip off your shadow suit," said the lock.

  The shadow stripped off the stiff suit with all its sensors and connectors, hanging it in an alcove in one side of the booth.

  "Place your hands in the receptacles."

  The shadow placed.

  "Bend your head forward to make contact with the plate."

  The shadow bent.

  Light, sounds, movement. Snark stood back from the plate, shaking her head, as she always did, bellowing with rage, as she always did.

  "Leave the cubicle," said the voice, opening the door behind her, opposite the one she'd come in by.

  "Goddamn bastards," screamed Snarkey, hammering at the cubicle wall. "Shitting motherfuckers."

  The floor grew hot. She leapt and screamed, resolved to obey no order they gave her. As always, the floor grew too hot for her, and she leapt through the door just in time to avoid being seared.

  "It's the mad howler," said slobber-lipped Willit from a distant corner of the locker room. "Snarkey-shad herself, makin' noises like a human."

  "Shut the fuck up," growled Snark.

  Willit laughed. Others also laughed. Snark panted, staring about herself, deciding who to kill.

  "Slow learner," commented Kane the Brain, shaking his head sadly.

  Snarkey launched herself at Kane, screaming rage, only to find herself on the floor, whimpering, her thumb in her mouth.

  "An exceptionally slow learner," repeated the former speaker, kicking Snark not ungently in the ribs. "Poor old Snark."

  "Good baby-girl shadow." Willit sneered as he passed on his way to the door. "Play nice."

  Snark sobbed as the room emptied.

  "Have you quite finished?" asked the mechanical voice from a ceiling grille.

  "Umph," she moaned.

  "I'll ask one more time. Have you quite finished?"

  "Yessir." The word dragged reluctantly from her throat, burning as it came.

  "Then get up and get dressed. The locker room will be steam-cleaned in five minutes. Besides, you are no doubt hungry."

  She was hungry. Procurator had hosted a banquet today, and shadows had served the food, seeing it, smelling it, seeing other people eat it. Shadows didn't eat. Shadows didn't get hungry or sleepy or need the toilet. Sometimes they got in the way of things and were killed, but if so, they did it quietly. Ordinary people didn't stare at shadows, it wasn't civilized, any more than wondering about them was. Shadows were a peculiar possession of bureaucrats in office in Alliance Prime, and that's all anyone really
needed to know unless one was a shadow oneself.

  The metallic voice preached at her. "If you'll make it a habit to eat just before you go on shift and immediately after, you'll feel less hunger and you'll be less uncontrolled. If you are less uncontrolled, you won't find yourself rolling around on the floor making infant noises and attracting the scorn and derision of your fellows."

  "Damn motherfuckers ain my fellows."

  "What did you say?"

  "I said I feel little collegiality for those sharing my conditions of servitude."

  In the sanctuary, when Snark was a little kid, the grown-ups had talked High Alliance. She could talk like that anytime. If she hadn't been able to remember back that far, she could mimic her fellow-shad, Kane the Brain. Kane talked like an official butthead.

  The voice said, "You aren't required to feel collegiality. You are only required to behave as though you do."

  Snark panted, letting the rage seep away. Each time she came off shift, it was the same. Everything that had happened to her, every glance that had slid across her without seeing her, every gesture she was supposed to notice, every need she was expected to anticipate, all of them boiled inside her all day, rising higher and higher, until the cubicle took the controls off and she exploded.

  Which was wasting time, she told herself. Wasting her own time. She only had one third of her time to herself, as herself. One third she was a shadow, under full control. One third she was asleep, also under control. The rest of the time, here in Shadowland, she could feel however she wanted to feel, do whatever she wanted to do. She could eat, talk, have sex—if she could find somebody willing. She could read, attend classes, engage in hobbies. If she wanted to kill somebody, have sex with somebody unavailable, the simulation booth would accommodate her. The booth would help her do anything! Anything except kill people so they stayed dead.

  If they didn't stay dead, what was the point! So she'd asked herself before. What was the point of living like this?

  "You are at liberty to end it," Kane had told her. "The fourth human right is the right to die."

  "Th'fucks that mean?" she'd screamed the first time she'd heard Kane on this subject.

  Kane had explained it all. Kane had even escorted Snark to a disposal booth and explained the controls. "Simple, for the simple-minded," Kane had said. "Enter, close door, press button. Wait five

  minutes to see if you change your mind. When the bell rings, press button again. Zip. All that's left are a few ashes. No pain, no blood, no guts, no untidiness whatsoever."

  So said Kane, but the last thing Snark wanted was a neat disposal booth and a handful of ashes. Where was the joy in no pain, no blood? Who got anything out of that? That was no way to kill anybody, not even yourself! God, if you were going to kill yourself, at least make it a real mess! Make 'em clean up after you!

  "Why you all the time wanting to kill folks?" Susso, one of her sometime sex partners, wanted to know.

  "Get in my nose," she'd snarled. "Push against me!"

  "Everybody gets in your nose," Susso said. "All the time. The only way you could be happy is if you killed everybody in the world and had it all to yourself."

  It wasn't true. There'd been some good kids at the sanctuary when they'd first brought Snark there. Snark hadn't wanted to kill them. She'd liked them. She'd been what? Nine or ten maybe? Old enough to tell them things. And to tell the supervisor as well.

  "Where are you from, little girl?"

  "From the frontier."

  "Don't tell lies, little girl. Children don't come from the frontier."

  "It's not a lie! I did so!"

  "Don't contradict me, little girl. Don't be a nasty, contradictory little liar."

  Her name hadn't been Snark then. It had been something else. And she hadn't wanted to kill people then. That came later, after they'd named her Snark the liar, Snark the thief. Not Snark the murderer, though. She'd never actually killed anybody, though she'd wanted to. Just her luck they'd caught her before she'd done it.

  The judgment machines were clear about that: "You are sentenced to lifetime shadowhood because of your emotional need to breach the first and second rights of man."

  "They got no right," Snark had snarled to Susso. "They got no right."

  "Why don' they?" he'd asked. "As much as you."

  "They're machines," she'd told him. "On'y machines. I'm a person, a human. The universe was made for me!"

  Susso had shaken his head. "You been listenin' to some Firster godmonger on the newslink, girl. Some belly-sweller. Some prick-waver. Forget Firsters. They don't talk for this world. Not for Alliance Central, they don't. Too many Fastigats on Alliance Central. Fastigats don't listen to Firsters. This world is different. This world has shadows, and most of the time shadows aren't human. One third the time, shadows got the right to live like they want except they try an' hurt somebody. The rest o' the time, shadows got no rights. That's the way this world is!"

  Snark knew that. When the invigilators had dragged her before the huge, unbearably shiny robo-judge, they'd read her the words printed across its front:

  EQUAL JUSTICE; THE SAME REMEDY FOR THE SAME CRIME, EVERY TIME.

  "On Alliance Central, human rights are those rights our people grant one another and enforce for one another," the machine said in its solemn, mechanical voice. "There are four human rights universally recognized. The first of these is the right of all individuals to do what they choose with an absolute minimum of interference. Man is not required to meet any standard of behavior so long as he is not adversely sensed by any other human. The second right is that of choosing one's dependents. Persons may not be taxed or otherwise forced to support dependents they have not chosen, though they are absolutely required to care for those they have signed for. The third right is to be protected from those who would infringe upon the first two rights through interference or unlawful dependency. Thievery, of which you have been convicted, is a crime of interference and dependency. You have put others to inconvenience and you have supported yourself at others' expense. You may be brought into alignment with social norms if you so choose. Do you so choose?"

  Of course she hadn't so chosen. And she never would! Which she'd said, not quite that politely.

  Imperturbably, the machine had gone on: "If one chooses not to be aligned, the fourth human right is to die. Do you choose to die?"

  She hadn't chosen that either.

  "On Alliance Central, persons choosing neither to be aligned nor to die have only one alternative remaining—to become shadows."

  Or, as Kane the Brain said later, "Spend two thirds of your time asleep or serving the bureaucracy so they'll let you think you're doing what you want one third of your time!"

  Which is what Snark had ended up doing. No fix for her. No having her mind changed so she wouldn't want to steal anymore. No having her chemistry changed so she wouldn't want to maim or kill. No, better be herself one third of the time than never be herself at all.

  "So go to the simul and kill somebody," Susso had yelled at her when she'd tried to damage Susso and found herself curled up on the floor, thumb in mouth. "Go to the simul and slap people around, kill people, that's what you want. Do it! But you can't do it out here!"

  It sounded great, but nobody stayed dead in a simul! How could you get any satisfaction killing somebody who didn't stay dead? You wake up the next day, the same person is still walking around, looking through you. No matter you'd disposed of him in the simul, you'd still be smelling him. And even when Snark was in the simul, something inside her just knew the people in there weren't real, even though they looked just like the ones, sounded just like the ones Snark hated!

  Sounded like Kane, talking like he did. Or looked just like that bastard Willit, egging her on that way, making her end up with her thumb in her mouth. Sounded like that bastard Procurator, him with his fancy tea parties. If Snark wanted, she could bring up the Procurator in the simul booth, or that black-haired woman he'd had with him the other day, Lutha
Tallstaff. There she'd sat, hair perfect, face perfect, dressed in clothes you could kill for, holding out a cup to be filled, never noticing who it was that filled it! Never noticing who brought the food, who served it! Not a nod. Not a smile. Pretending Snark really was invisible!

  Bitch! What she'd like to do to that bitch! She could tie her up and make her watch while Snark carved the old bastard into slices. Then, when it got to be her turn, let her feel what it was like not to exist! Let high-and-mighty Lutha Tallstaff learn what it felt like to be chopped up into bloody pieces, made into nothing!

  Whimpering in eagerness, ignoring her hunger, Snark ran from the locker room in the direction of the simul booth.

  The day I went to the House Without a Name, Chahdzi, my father, spent the morning cleaning the upper pool. In the afternoon it was his responsibility to carry food down into the canyon, so all day he kept an eye on the shadow at the bottom of the canyon, judging the progress of the day. If he was to return before dusk, he would need to stop work on the upper pool when the shadow touched the bottom of the eastern wall, or perhaps, for safety's sake, a little time before.

  When the shadow was where he thought it should be, he went up the short ladders to the cave floor, took a sack of Kachis-kibble from the storehouse, put it over his shoulders, fastened it onto the carrier belts that crossed his chest, swung himself around the ends of the ladder, and began the descent to the canyon floor. Tonight he needed to speak to songfather about the old outlander ghost who was causing so much inconvenience. When he had done that, perhaps he could also discuss certain conflicts in his own life that needed patterning. Had these conflicts been decreed by Weaving Woman? If so, could they be sung and acknowledged? Could his annoyance be exorcised in song? Or must it remain silent, part of the corruption inevitably incurred when the terrible choice had been made?