And Regan's too damn exhausted to be afraid anymore, of death or anything else. She looks up and meets the wild gaze level as she can manage.
“Go ahead,” she says. “Jesus’ sake, just get it done with, already. Doing me a favor.”
Topsy thinks about it; she sure as hell does that. There's a long, long stretch of time where Regan's pretty sure neither of them's clear on what's about to happen. Eventually, after an ice age or six, the trunk slowly lowers and the eyes soften a little and someone shuts the electricity off in Topsy's posture. She slumps, like she's just as dog-tired as Regan herself.
You're sick, she signs, after a beat. Dying-sick. You stink.
“Yeah. Dying-sick. Me and all my girls who worked here.”
Poison? She gestures her trunk at the paint, the brush, the table, the whole hell-fired mess. Smells like poison.
“You got it. They got you all doing it now because you can take more, being so big and all. I'm supposed to teach you how.”
Another pause unspools itself across the factory stall between them. I'm supposed to teach you how to die, Regan thinks. Ain't that the dumbest goddamn thing you ever heard tell of, teaching an animal how to die? Everybody knows how to die. You just quit living and then you're slap-taught.
Topsy reaches down and takes the paintbrush.
When their own began to sicken and fall, they came for us, and there was nothing we could do but die as well. We were shackled and splintered and separated; the Many Mothers could not teach their daughters the Stories. Without stories there is no past, no future, no We. There is Death. There is Nothing, a night without moon or stars.
“You would be doing a service not just to the United States, but to the world and anyone who comes after. I know the reasoning is… odd, but when people think of elephants, they think of radiation. They think of Topsy, and… all of that stuff, y'know? It's a story. People remember stories. They hand them down. We have no way of knowing if that'll be the case in a hundred thousand years, but it's as good a starting point as any, right?”
The translator sign-relays Kat's hesitant ramble to the elephant representative, a stone-faced matriarch seventy years old if she's a day. Kat shifts in her folding chair. Translation of the entire thing takes a very long time. The meeting arena is air-conditioned, but she's still trickling buckets in places you never would have guessed contained sweat glands. The silence goes on. The hand-jive continues. The elephant, so far as Kat can tell, has not yet blinked, possibly since the day she was calved.
She killed her first Man when she was tall enough to reach the high-branch mangoes. There were no mangoes in that place to pluck, but she remembered juicysweet orangegreen between her teeth, tossed to ground in a good place by Mother. She remembered how high they had grown, but there were no mangoes in that place to pluck, so she took the Man in her trunk and threw him down and smashed his head beneath her feet like ripe red fruit while the other humans chittered and scurried and signed at her to stop.
There were other Mothers there, too. They watched her smash the Man, who had thrown sand in their faces and burned them and tried to make them drink stinking ferment from a bottle, and they said nothing. They said nothing, but they thought of mangoes, how high they had once grown, how sweet they were to crunch, to crush, to pulp.
The county hospital, like all hospitals, is a place to make the skin on the back of your neck go prickly. It's white as a dead dog's bloated belly on the outside, sickly green on the inside, and filled to the gills with kinless folk too poor to go off and die anywhere else. Nuns drift down the hallways like backroad haints. The walls have crazy jagged lightning cracks zigzagging from baseboard to fly-speckled ceiling. Both sides of the main sick ward are lined with high windows, but the nuns aren't too particular about their housekeeping; the yellow light slatting in is filtered through a nice healthy layer of dust, dirt, and dying people's last words. The way Regan sees it, if the Ladies of Perpetual Mercy ever swept, it would be thirty percent shadows, twenty percent cobwebs, and fifty percent Praise God Almighty, I See The Light they'd be emptying outta their dustpans at the end of day.
They've crammed Jodie between a moaning old mawmaw with rattling lungs and an unlucky lumber man who tried catching a falling pine tree with his head. What's left of her jaw is so swathed with stained yellow-and-red gauze she half-takes after one of those dead pyramid people over in Egypt-land. Regan's smelled a lot of foulness in her short span of doing jobs nobody else wants to touch, but the roadkill-and-rotting-teeth stink coming up off those bandages nearly yanks the cheese sandwich right out of her stomach. She wishes to God they'd let you smoke in these places. Her own rotten jawbone throbs with the kind of mock sympathy only holy rollers and infected body parts seem capable of really pulling off.
“Hey, girl,” she says, even though Jodie's not awake and won't be waking up to catch the trolley to work with Regan ever again. “Thought I'd just… drop in, give you all the news fit to spit.” She takes one of her friend's big hands from where it's folded atop the coverlet. It gives her the cold shivers to touch it with all of the life and calluses nearly faded away, but this is her goddamned fault for getting them into this mess in the first place. She's going to eat every single bite of the shit pie she's earned, smack her lips, and ask for seconds. That much, at least, she can do for someone who braided her hair when they were tee-ninsy. “You hanging in there alright?”
A fat carrion fly buzzes hopefully around Jodie's mouth; Regan shoos it away with a curse. “Goddammit,” she mutters. “All you wanted to do was keep blowing mountaintops to hell and back.” Deep breath. Steady. “I told you a whopper when we started out. You'd've been safer by a long shot if you just kept on mining.”
This is a story about Furmother-With-The-Cracked-Tusk, starmaker, tugger of tiger tails and player of games. Listen.
There was no warm wallowmud then, no melons, no watersweet leaves to pick pluck stuff scatter. The sun lay sluggish-cold on the ground. The Great Mothers grew coats like bears and wandered the empty white places of the world Alone, each splintered to Herself, each bull-separate. There were no Stories to spine-spin the We together. A bull had found them all, in the dark and chill Before, and in the way of bulls he had hoarded them for himself.
Now, the biggest shaggiest wisest of all Great Mothers was Furmother-With-The-Cracked-Tusk. Back back where this story calves, her tusks were still unbroken, so long and so curved they sometimes pricked the night's skin and left little white scars. A dying bear had told Furmother where the Stories lay hidden, just before her great crunchfoot met the ground on the other side of what was left of him. There was a Blacksap lake that stretched far enough to tickle the sky's claws, he had whispered; the bull's cave opened somewhere on the other shore. The only way to find it was to go there.
Furmother was wise, which means curious. She set out walking. As she walked, she sang, and her frozen songs dropped behind like seeds in dung, waiting for sun and the rain and the nibbling bugs to free them. It took a night and a day and a mango tree growing to reach where she was going, but one pale morning she sang up over a hill and there the Blacksap lake oozed, full of skulls and spines and foul-stinking unluck. No rooting in the tall grass was needed to find the cave's mouth. The bull stood big outside of it, rubbing his tusks and his shadow and his stained scarred furhead against a tree's bones.
She went up to him, Furmother-With-Her-Tusks-Whole, and she said, in a voice like the earth split-share-root-ripping, “You there! Bull!”
He grunted, as is the way of bulls.
“Bull there, you! Do you have the Stories in your cave?”
He grunted irritably, as is the way of bulls. “Yes,” he rumbled, “and they are all mine. I found them. No milk-dripping udder-dragger or tiny-tusked Son in his first musth will take what is mine. I will fight them. I will dig my tusks into their sides and leave them for the bears.”
As is the way of bulls. “Bull,” the Furmother said, “what do you even use them for? What good are t
hey to you or to anyone, piled like rotting rained-on grass in a downbelow place?”
“They are mine,” the bull repeated, his ears flaring, his skull thick, his legs braced. As is the way with bulls. “Mine and no one else's.”
But Furmother was wise, which means crafty. She went away and left the bull to his scratch snort stomp. She went away to where his weak eyes could not follow, away down the shore to a dead forest, and with branch and trunk and sticky Blacksap she put together a cunning thing like a small bull's shadow. Her own fur she ripped out to cover it, because there were no other Mothers to give their own. How lucky are we, to be We! When she was done, sore swaying sleep-desperate on her feet, no She was there touching and rubbing the shoulder-to-shoulder skinmessage, We are here with you. There was nothing but she and herself.
She left the not-bull outside the cave. She left it and went away, just out of sight, and there she waited for dawn.
The bull came out of the cave. He came out and he saw the not-bull, black in the cold morning sun. His ears flapped, his eyes glittered, his feet stomped.
“You!” he squealed. “You, standing there! Who are you?”
The not-bull did not answer.
“What do you want, tusker? Get out of my way, or I will fight you!”
The not-bull did not answer.
“Do you dare challenge me, little Son? Me, whose tusks are great-greater-greatest? Me, who rode your Mother long ago? Sing your war song, if you wish to fight, else move out of my way!”
The not-bull did not answer!
The bull with the stories roared and flared and charged with a sound like great rocks rolling, goring stomping furious mad. He wanted to kill, as is the way with bulls. But the not-bull had no skin to tear, no insides to rupture, no skull to crush. It was nothing but sticks and fur and sticky Blacksap all the way through and through, so that the more the bull tried to gore and butt, the more mayfly stuck he became. And this caused him to lose himself completely. His screams were terrible things for ears to catch.
“If you had only shared,” the Furmother said, “you wouldn't be caught in this trap. Now I'll have all of the stories, and you'll have none. Which is better?”
The bull cursed her so terribly bats fell dead from the sky. As is the way with bulls. She laughed like a triumph and went inside.
Watching the elephant's deft trunk double and snake and contort is downright hypnotic, even if what she's signing may possibly be a really long, really detailed way of saying “screw you.” Proboscidian had been an elective at Kat's university; she hadn't really thought she would ever need it, so she hadn't bothered signing up. It was one of those courses, like Basketweaving or Food In Religious Texts, that seemed to be more of a charmingly eccentric way to bobsled through school grabbing credits than anything else. Nobody but the zoology students, historians, folklorists, and some of the more obsessively dedicated sociologists ever took it. For a language that had only really been around since the 1880s, though, it had its devotees; subjects with animals always did.
“She wants to ask you a question,” the translator says.
“Go ahead.”
“You want to make us glow when we're near this poison buried in the ground. You want to do this because of some screwy cultural sapiens association between elephants and radiation, when humans doing terrible fucked-up stuff to elephants ninety years ago is the reason for the dumb-ass cognitive association in the first place.”
“Uh, wow.” Kat gropes for a response. “Jesus. There's… sorry, there's a way of saying ‘fucked up’ in Proboscidian?”
“Not really. That was mostly me.” The translator raises an eyebrow. “Anyway, what she wants to know first is this: What exactly are you offering the Mothers in return if they say yes?”
Every day she eats the reeking, gritty poison. The girl with the rotten bones showed her how, and occasionally Men come by and strike her with words and tiny tickling whip-trunks if she doesn't work fast enough. She feels neither. She feels neither, but rage buzzes in her ear low and steady and constant, a mosquito she cannot crush. Like a calf she nurses the feeling. Like the calf she'll never Mother she protects it safe beneath her belly, safe beneath the vast bulk of Herself, while every day it grows, suckles, frolics between her legs and around the stall and around the stall and around the stall until she's whirling red behind the eyes where the Stories should go.
One day soon the rage will be tall enough to reach the high-branch mangoes.
Okay? the rotten-bone-dead-girl signs. Okay? Are you okay?
“Topsy? You okay?”
There's a stillness and a silence and a towering far-awayness the elephant sometimes takes on that makes Regan feel jumpy the same way she does right before a big green-and-purple April thunderstorm. She repeats the question, louder this time, but part of her is also looking for the nearest exit, the closest cellar door to hunker down behind. Topsy's eyes flicker, land — Why is that mouse squeaking at me? Where am I? — and register some level of slow-returning recognition. For the time being she's Topsy again, not a thoughtful disaster deciding whether or not to hatch. Regan slowly lets a chestful of air hiss through what's left of her throbbly-wobbling teeth.
Fine, the elephant signs. I am… fine. And then, to Regan's surprise since they're not exactly what you'd call friends: You?
Now there's a hell of a question. She thinks about Jodie, dying alone in that hospital bed of a wasting disease more than half Regan's fault. She remembers blood in the dormitory sink that morning; another three teeth rattling against the porcelain like thrown dice, still coated in fresh toothpaste. And where in the hell is that goddamned settlement check? The lawyer had said it would be arriving soon, but for all she knows that was just bullshit fed to a dying woman to hush up her howling. They might just wait until she drops dead and keep the damn money; trusting a company that happily gave you and all your nearest and dearest cancer wasn't wise, easy, or highly recommended.
Not really, she signs. And I ain't convinced you are, either.
Topsy's got nothing to say to that. Goddamned liars, the both of them.
But the story does not end there, O best beloved mooncalf. Were things ever so easy, or so simple, even for Great Mothers and tricksters!
Furmother went inside the cave. She went inside the cave, but there were no Stories hidden there as the bear and the bull both had told her there would be. There was nothing but nothing, and Furmother needed no nothing. She walked back outside to where the bull still lay stuck, beside the shores of the great Blacksap lake.
“Bull,” she said, “where are the Stories you were so keen to keep for yourself? Did someone clever rob you before I arrived?”
The bull rolled one red eye to look up at her. He laughed with malice and with scorn, but most of all with madness. As is the way with bulls.
“Fool milk-dripper,” he panted. “Did you really think I would leave the Stories where you could get at them after yesterday? They are at the bottom of the Blacksap lake, where no one may have them. I hurled them all in myself with my strong and beautiful trunk and watched them sink beneath the surface with my keen eyes. If you want them, O cursed calf-dropper, go in and get them.”
Furmother looked at him with sadness — because then as now We pitied the bulls, our Sons and Fathers and occasional Mates.
“Very well,” she said. “Thank you for giving me the location, bull.” And she turned and walked into the lake, where she sank like a Story.
“Well, as I said before, they'll be doing our species and any species that come after a tremendous favor,” Kat repeats. Her mouth's gone dry, heart and pulse skidding rubber tread marks into the fight-or-flight zone. The elephant can probably smell the adrenaline rolling off her like summer sweat funk pouring from a subway commuter. “This isn't just a federal problem. It's an issue we've been struggling to solve for years. We've discussed human guardians, almost like priesthoods, we've talked about making cats glow, for chrissakes, but cats don't have the same l
evel of cultural connection.” She's rambling. Goddammit. She's had nightmares involving naked dental surgery that went off better than this meeting. “It would be for the greater good. There is no greater good than this. This is… this is the greatest good.”
More waiting as the translator passes along her fumbling. The matriarch snorts. It's the first noise Kat's heard her make thus far.
“The ‘greater good’, as you put it, was also used to justify the use of my people in your radium factories during the war, was it not? To save costs. To save your own from poisoning.”
Shit shit shit. It's amazing I can breathe with my foot lodged in my windpipe the way it is.
“Not only that,” the translator continues, “but you're asking us to more or less agree to the perpetuation of this twisted association. Would there be any attempt at all at reeducating the human public, should we somehow come to an agreement?”
“I… it's… it's sort of rooted in that cultural association.” Kat can feel the blood burning in her cheeks as the situation spirals out of control. A parachute, a pulled fire alarm, dear sweet Jesus give me some way outta here. She doesn't know what she was expecting when she walked into this meeting. “I guess we could try to maintain the cognitive link while launching some kind of reeducation campaign? I'd have to talk to my higher-ups. I'm only really in charge of the one thing.”
The translator stares at Kat for a little longer than is necessary. She glances back over her shoulder at the matriarch, then back at Kat.
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