A Heart For Lucretia
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“However,” said Whitey, “there is one way in which we might be persuaded to part with such a heart…”
“Yes?” said Gerard, afraid of the answer. He had volunteered his own heart before, but that had been with the assurance of care, faulty though it might have been, from the autodoc.
“It would involve both you and Flesh Dog,” said Yellow slyly.
“It would take six months,” said Whitey.
The delightful warmth had crept up his chest, the cold following behind.
“Afterwards we would let you go…” Whitey held his hands while Yellow caressed his neck. “And in return, we give Lucretia a heart…”
“How soon?” Gerard asked. “How soon?” He shivered under Yellow’s touch.
“Immediately,” whispered Yellow in his ear. “Flesh for flesh. You must simply show us on a map where your creche lies—you do know what a map is?—and we will send it by hovercraft. We do not break our word.”
“So what of it, friend Gerard,” said Whitey. “Do you agree?”
Gerard turned to Flesh Dog.
“What do you think, Flesh Dog?”
Flesh Dog peered at him through its fleshy folds. It turned to the Flesh Dog heads on the shelf—and howled. And howled, as though its heart had been broken. Then, with a sideways stutter, it leaned into the floor and was still, trembling around the mouth.
“Poor, poor machine,” hummed Whitey. “It has forgotten it is a machine. So many years in service. Poor, poor machine…”
“Rip their throats,” growled Flesh Dog from the floor. “Rip their throats?” The growl became a moan, and then incoherent. Gerard would have comforted it as it had comforted him in the elevator, but he was too numb.
“Do you agree?” Yellow asked, one eye on Flesh Dog.
“Yes,” Gerard said, immobile in the chair now, able only to swivel his head. He imagined he could feel his sister’s heartbeat become more regular, could feel a glow of health return to her cheeks. This, and this alone, kept him from panic, from giving over to the fear which ached in his bones. “Yes!” he said with a drunken recklessness, at the same time knowing he had no choice.
“You will leave with a smile upon your face,” Whitey promised.
“Oh yes, you will,” sang Yellow gleefully, taking out the knives.
As for the ending, there are many. Perhaps the next day, the next month, a new face stared up from the pits, the arms of the body reaching out but frozen, the eyes blank. Perhaps the meerkats never honored their agreement. Or…
That summer, as the stars watched overhead, an angel descended to the desert floor. And, when it departed, Lucretia arose from the dead and danced like a will o’ whisp over the shifting sands. She danced fitfully, anger and sadness throbbing in her new heart.
That winter, Flesh Dog and Gerard limped back to the creche. He did not speak now. Always, he looked toward the south, toward the great sea and the city with no name, as though expecting strangers. Always, as he sat by the fire and sucked his food with toothless gums, Gerard-Flesh Dog looked at Lucretia, the Lucretia who saw only that Flesh Dog had returned a mute, and smiled his permanent smile. Beneath the folds of tissue, Gerard’s smoky-green eyes stared, silently begging for rescue. But Lucretia never dared pull back the folds to see for herself, perhaps afraid of what she might find there. Sometimes she would dream of the city, of what had happened there, but the vision would desert her upon waking, the only mark the tears she had wept while asleep.
After a year, the men of the creche held a funeral for Gerard. After two years, Lucretia married a wealthy water dower and, though she treated Flesh Dog tenderly, he was never more than an animal to her.
Afterword
Cordwainer Smith has always been my primary SF influence. His ability to create SF that truly feels alien still startles and enthralls me.
I wanted to bring a mythical element to this — I wanted to write a story set in the far future that is actually written about the distant past. If that sounds contradictory, it really isn’t. As I wrote the story, I imagined myself as a storyteller in the year 12,000 AD writing a story about the year 11,500 AD. Thus the mythic can mix with the science fictional with no harm done to either.
Added to these elements were the real-life worries I had for my sister, whose heart problems had become life-threatening.
Finally, any far future scenario that is “realistic” — at least psychologically realistic — has to contain two elements: (1) the presence of some other sentient species than humankind, probably created by humankind and (2) consequences for our short-term environmental policies of the present-day. I have long been fascinated by meerkats — their quick, agile movements, their complex social and family life, and ability to survive human encroachment. So the idea of making the species created by humankind be based on meerkat genetic stock appealed to me greatly. As other stories in this cycle indicate, these are not just giant meerkats, but enriched with genes from other groups, including human beings.
The Flesh Dog character is stolen, in a way, from the 1977 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. When I saw the movie, there was one scene that stood out for me — a brief glimpse of a dog with a human head. It scared me to death — the juxtaposition really seemed alien. So the idea of Flesh Dog being remade to have a human face came from that movie. The other general idea behind Flesh Dog is to have a character, alien in the exterior, who is actually almost more human than the “hero” — there is something heroic and sympathetic about Flesh Dog. This also creates a nice juxtaposition with the meerkats, whose intentions are sinister…
All of this may sound rather calculated, but in execution it wasn’t. What I do is find elements I would like to deal with in a story, and then when the opportunity arises, because I’ve been thinking about them a great deal, they tend to organically embed themselves in the story.
As for the ending, it is implied in the beginning. One thing I like to do in stories is present the reader with a situation that seems clear and self-evident, but by the end of the story invert the meaning of the scene or situation that began the story. This process of transformation, if done well — not as a twist, but as part of the natural evolution of the story — doesn’t just dislocate the reader. It, hopefully, makes the reader question the assumptions he or she makes in processing what we call “reality”. It’s like a reminder that the world is more complex than the elements we break it down into.
Š Jeff VanderMeer 1993, 1999
“A Heart for Lucretia” first appeared in The Silver Web, Winter/Spring 1993.