Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Well away from the Quantists, a woman from the Mission of Fruitful Life sat on a folding stool. She was obviously pregnant. “Go forth and multiply” meant, to the Fruity Livers, just that; they were fulfilling their mission to fill the whole galaxy with humanity, starting with Genji. What was with these people, to send a pregnant woman to do anything in this gravity? But the woman herself looked calm enough, if very uncomfortable.

  No one at all had come from the small weird collective of the time artists.

  “I think we should get started,” Dane said genially. Faces turned toward him, first reluctantly and then with determination.

  “We’ve all looked at the data and the images,” Dane said. “I’d like to organize the meeting in three parts, if that’s all right with you all.” He smiled. Conciliatorily. “First, I’d like a brief summary of all the questions raised by each group by the events of the last few days. Second, I’d like to ask for possible interpretations of those events or answers to those questions, by way of sharing speculation and information. Finally, we’ll determine together what needs to be done. If anything.”

  People nodded. Before Dane could speak again, one of the Quantists spoke. “Why isn’t there an Ihrdizu at this meeting?”

  Dane said, “Well, I . . . it didn’t seem appropriate. We’re sharing human perspectives, and we have researchers with us well qualified to share Ihrdizu ideas—”

  “Not the ideas of those Ihrdizu who already believe in the Ascendancy!”

  “Sit down!” someone else called. “It’s not your turn!”

  “Tom can speak for your culture-contaminated tame Ihrdizu,” someone else said, with contempt. Dane saw the nonconfrontational Japanese wince.

  Dane said, “How many people vote to invite an Ihrdizu representative to this meeting?” Only the Quantists raised their hands. “All right, let’s start with the questions we don’t know answers to. Dr. Kaneko?”

  Miyuki Kaneko rose heavily. Twenty years on Chujo’s lighter gravity, Dane thought. He could picture her younger, more lithe, although her present appearance—small, serene, not yet old when the average life span stretched to nearly a century—pleased him as well. Nor had he overestimated her capacity for organized thought.

  She said, “One: We do not know what has triggered the snug mats to start re-forming in Chujo’s highland valleys, after they have not done so for twenty-eight years. Two: We do not know whether this snug-mat formation is larger than the ones twenty-five years ago, because then no measurements were made. Three: We do not know what is in the ‘books’ in the library cairns, since for twenty-eight years the Chupchups have not let us examine a single one. Four: We still do not know why the Chupchups abandoned their elaborate and technologically advanced cities to live as nomads, or when, or why they seem to have no interest in the cities now. Nor in the bioengineering that, to judge from what they did to Aaron Kammer, they once knew how to perform.”

  There was a moment of silence; to those newer to Genji or Chujo, Aaron Kammer’s weird history was almost as unsubstantiated as the bioloons.

  A Quantist said derisively, “You sure haven’t learned much in nearly thirty years on the moon!”

  Dane said swiftly, “That is not a useful comment. Please remember that this meeting is being held on Lorentz Expedition property and that anyone who disrupts it can be evicted.”

  Miyuki said, just as if the comment had been a reasoned and constructive criticism, “It is difficult to study a people who will not acknowledge your existence, yes. We have been much distressed.”

  Dane looked at her admiringly. She, too, might have been a First Conciliator.

  “Five,” Miyuki said, and now her voice did change, taking on a slight hesitation. “We still do not know if the carvings in the abandoned cities have any meaning. Or ever did have.”

  Dane said, “Describe one for us, just to fill in those people who have not been to Chujo.” This covered much of the room.

  Miyuki said, in that same hesitant voice—the carving had some personal meaning for her, Dane guessed, that she herself was having difficulty defining—“There is one of a tigerlike creature whose tail curves around and around, forming a Chupchup face, before it comes into the mouth of the tiger to be consumed. In the background are bioloons. This is how we know the bioloon phenomenon did not happen for the first time twenty-eight years ago.” Abruptly, she sat down. Dane said, “Next?”

  Kara Linden stood, a brisk, no-nonsense woman who was chief of the Lorentz Expedition. “There are fewer things we don’t know about the Ihrdizu than about the Chujoans, of course, because the Ihrdizu are so cooperative. But they are also factual, practical, and much more hardwired to their basic biological patterns than are humans. This means they don’t question their own lives very deeply, and even their ‘religions,’ if I can use that word, are usually taken very casually. Religion seems to be mostly valued as a source of enjoyable stories and festivals than anything else, and even the Carnot temples”—she glanced contemptuously at the Quantists—“currently are mostly used as community recreation huts, with amiable religious frosting. Given all this, the main thing we don’t know about the Ihrdizu is why they continue to regard Chujo with some reverence—as much reverence, I may add, as such a practical and no-nonsense people seem capable of.”

  Dane hid a grin; it was obvious Dr. Linden approved of this trait in the Ihrdizu. She might have made a good Ihrdizu herself.

  She finished with, “The Ihrdizu say the Masters live on Chujo, but they are unable to define what these ‘masters’ are masters of. They say they will go to Chujo one day, but questioning them about whether this means they will go there after death produces only bewilderment. They have

  no afterlife myth. We have offered repeatedly to take a few of them to Chujo in the shuttle, but they always decline, with what seems a total lack of not only interest but comprehension. They are not stupid, but on the subject of Chujo they are . . . are opaque, and I have come to the conclusion that they are opaque to themselves as well. The most you can get out of an Ihrdizu, even a highly intelligent Ihrdizu in a technological capacity in one of the largest villages, is ‘Oh, Chujo . . . The Masters are there. In time, we will go, too.’ Then they change the subject.”

  “All right,” Dane said, “the list of things we don’t know is growing nicely.” A few people laughed. “Who will speak to the carpet-whale migration?”

  After a moment a young man stood, younger even than Dane. “I can’t really say . . . I mean, Dr. Holden and his wife report to me, but not on a regular basis.” The young man blushed. Dane guessed that Dr. Holden reported to this timid person only because no one else would take the job of supervising the irascible and caustic researcher.

  “But, anyway,” the young man ventured, “what we don’t know about the carpet whales is why they’re suddenly migrating to moonside, where exactly they’re going, when they’ll get there, what triggered the migration, or what they’ll do when they arrive.”

  That about covered it, Dane thought. “Now, does all our ignorance constitute a crisis of any sort? Several people have talked to me”—besieged me, he wanted to say but didn’t—“about the reallocation of research territories, given that current events have made some areas suddenly much more desirable.” Everybody wanted to be near where the action was, even if nobody knew what the action meant. “Now, we had all agreed—voluntarily—to spread out far enough not to contaminate each others’ sphere of culture.” This was not strictly true; the Quantists went around contaminating everywhere they could, but nineteen people with limited resources couldn’t influence very much. If the Ihrdizu had taken up Robert Carnot’s Church of the Ascendancy, that might have been a different thing, but as Kara Linden pointed out, for the most part they had not.

  Dane drew a deep breath: Here goes. “So the question before us is whether or not we want to reallocate research spheres, on what basis, and to whom, given the difference in each party’s equipment and interests.”

  Immedi
ately a dozen voices clamored for the floor. Several people rose to their feet, with varying degrees of clumsiness. No one could be heard. Dane simply waited; if he recognized no one, eventually they would quiet down and restore order. Unless, of course, there was a fistfight, and he didn’t think the scientists would do that. The Quantists might—twenty years of frustration, starting with plague and massacre, was not exactly calming—but the scientists, eager to claim research rights, ignored the religious groups. The Fruity Livers, as usual, simply sat, multiplying.

  Bruce Johnson yelled, “Ihrdizu genetic patterns . . .”

  Somebody else called, “—informally agreed that after fifteen months . . .”

  “—carpet whales—”

  “—Chujo—”

  The door at the back of the room slammed open.

  Everybody turned. A woman strode in, brisk even in the heavy gravity, carrying a holocorder. Dane had never seen her before. Then, with a shock, he realized that he had: a year ago, at her wedding. Rita Byrne Holden. Her skin was burnt and mottled—the ultraviolet radiation she must be permitting herself to take in the name of open-sea research! Born on Genji, she had always had a squat, compact body heavily muscled, as human anatomy shaped itself to Genji gravitational imperatives. Now, however, her muscles in the brief indoor tunic—she and Holden must live nearly naked, when they were not in suits—bulged like a caricature of a sumo wrestler, although without the fat. She was impressive but oddly deformed. Dane would not want to have to tangle with her in a fair fight.

  Jane Johnson looked at her with something very like terror.

  “Listen,” Rita said, without ritual pleasantries, “I’ve got something to show you. Holden sent me because he wanted to be sure you all saw this without any screwups or evasions.”

  The rabbity young man whom Holden was supposed to “report to” opened his mouth, then closed it again.

  Rita plugged the holocorder into the QED, blanked the pictures on the two-dimensional screen, and turned the device on. For a moment Dane wondered how Holden, the fringe researcher, had wangled a rare and expensive holocorder, but then he forgot that, and everything else, in the three-dimensional hologram that sprang to life in the four-foot square of alloy floor in front of the QED.

  Carpet whales. Twelve, sixteen, twenty of them, already arrived at the strait between Nighland and Southland, their dark hugeness reduced to absurd miniaturization by the holo. But not so miniature that he could not see that one whale had rolled over. Its ventral side, grayish white, was exposed to the sky. Above it, clearly shimmering in ribbons of red and green light, floated an enormous representation of a twisted human figure covered in snug that could only be Aaron Kammer.

  Rilla looked out the window of the flyer as it skimmed over the surface of Genji toward their dome. Hurry, hurry! Oh, what if Tmafekitch had already left on her mating journey and Rilla never even got to say good-bye? Daddy had promised they would get back before Tmafekitch left, but then the stupid meeting had gone hours and hours past what it was supposed to, all because of Rita Byrne. People shouting, arguing, talking, just sitting there. A whole day, almost, and all the while Tmafekitch may be setting out to look for a stupid mate and leave Rilla behind forever.

  And her parents were still at it, talking even while Rilla’s throat hurt so much it might just break.

  “Not light,” Daddy said, for the hundredth time. “Exudates, gases and water, reflected and refracted through thousands of precisely placed bits of shiny minerals embedded in the flesh and acting as mirrors. All to produce a sort of holo of Aaron Kammer. Of Aaron Kammer! It’s not possible.”

  “We saw it,” Mommy said. She sounded scared. “It was photographable. Not a drug-induced illusion or hypnosis.”

  “No wonder Rita Byrne brought the pictures herself. No one would have believed her.”

  “A lot still didn’t.”

  “Not even the QED could specify an exact moving arrangement of mineral embedding and exudate control to produce an illusion like that,” Daddy said. “Well, all right, maybe the QED could, but . . . it’s not possible. It doesn’t make sense. How could it happen?” Unlike Mommy, Daddy didn’t look scared. His eyes were bright, and his big rough hands moved restlessly over the flyer controls.

  Mommy didn’t answer. Rilla leaned forward, to get there sooner, or make the flyer go faster, or something. Hurry! Hurry!

  “It’s not possible,” Daddy said.

  “Will you stop saying that?” Mommy said sharply. “Obviously it is possible. The himatids did it. Genetic engineering, all that time they’ve been growing out there, multiplying, reaching some kind of critical mass to do whatever it is they do out there for millennia . . . it’s obviously possible, because it exists!”

  “Don’t shout, Jane.”

  “I’ll shout if I want to!”

  Daddy said, “You used to be a researcher. Intellectual questions used to engage you.”

  “I used to be a lot of things,” Mommy said, and turned her back to watch their dome approach portside.

  Rilla sealed her helmet. The moment she was out of the flyer, she was running, ignoring Mommy screaming behind her. “Rilla! You didn’t check your tanks or your safety devices!” Ignoring Daddy, who started to run after her, then stopped. He couldn’t catch her. Not in this gravity she had been born in and he had not. I was the fourth one born on Genji, she chanted to herself desperately, Rita Byrne and Seigi Minoru and Cade Anson and . . .

  The chanting didn’t help. She reached the village, and there stood Tykifizz, Tmafekitch’s daddy, and Rilla knew just from the expression on the small male’s four-eyed, snorkeled head that Tmafekitch had already gone.

  Rilla didn’t even hesitate. She had filled her tanks, packed her supplies, done her safety check before they left Okuma Base, while Mommy and Daddy had been talking and talking and talking about carpet whales. What were carpet whales compared to Tmafekitch, her friend? Just nothing. She didn’t have the translator because that might have made her parents suspicious, but probably Tmafekitch’s daddy could understand her well enough without the translator. And, of course, once she found Tmafekitch, she wouldn’t need any stupid old translator.

  Speaking very slowly and putting in as many Ihrdizu sounds as she could—only it was hard to know which ones were really Ihrdizu and which ones were hers and Tmafekitch’s!—she said to Tykifizz, “Which path did she take? Where does she search? Through whose food pond does she mate?”

  She asked all the questions she could think of, keeping one eye out for Mommy or Daddy. But they didn’t come. Still fighting? Or did they just think she was sulking and would be back?

  She would, of course. She knew that, no matter how much of a baby they thought she was. She knew she couldn’t really live off the Genji land, and she knew Tmafekitch couldn’t really take Rilla with her. But Rilla could say good-bye. They weren’t going to cheat her out of that.

  Once she had all the information Tykifizz could give her, she started off after her friend, her lost soul mate, to say good-bye.

  Jordan Dane was not a scientist. He had been chosen for First Conciliator precisely because he was not and thus was assumed not to favor any one scientific discipline over another. He had come to Murasaki System as librarian, highly trained at storing, cross-referencing, retrieving, and preserving other people’s science, a QED specialist considerably less valuable at what he did than the QED itself. Looking at the screen displaying close-up transmissions of Chujoan Chupchups camped in rings around writhing vast mats of snug, Dane found himself wishing—for the first time—that he was a scientist.

  Tatsumi was watching him with her quiet eyes. What she said surprised him.

  “Where were you born, First Conciliator?”

  “I’m a Spacer, Tatsumi-san. I thought you knew that.”

  She bowed slightly, apology for the inquisitiveness. “From what place?”

  He smiled at her. “A habitat. It no longer exists. An accident. They were attaching antimatter thrusters to t
he hollowed-out asteroid, preparing to move it to a better location. The whole thing blew.”

  “Ah. Clayton’s World.”

  He bowed in return, a playful mimicry. So the details had reached even Murasaki. He didn’t like talking about it. But one more sentence seemed necessary: expiation. “I was away at graduate school on Earth. Harvard.”

  “So you are an exile,” she said, so neutrally he knew he did not have to say any more. She would not probe. Together they watched the Chupchups camped around the snug vats, until Suzy Tatsumi said in her formal, pretty voice, “I think, First Conciliator, that someone should go talk to Mr. Philby.”

  She was shocked at how much Philby had changed.

  Tatsumi looked in her mirror every morning; although the changes there were gradual, she did not delude herself that the lined face and smooth, gray-flecked hair belonged to the same young woman who had sobbed on the beach as the Ihrdizu stoned to death Robert Carnot and Aaron Kammer. She was slower, thicker, in her prime but past her bloom. Yet she was still the same person, recognizable in that mirror. Edward Philby was not recognizable. For a long, heart-stopping moment, he did not look human.

  But that was illusion. Of bulk: the once sleek and well-fed body weighed no more than sixty kilos. Of hair: Philby had none left. Most of all, of skin: Philby’s very brown face, neck, arms, and bare chest were covered with melanomas, as if he had sat deliberately in the ultraviolet light for a very long time. As perhaps he had. The cancers, Tatsumi could see, were killing him.

  She tried to hide her shock as she approached him. He sat on a bench in front of a standard portable dome among five other domes at the time artists’ “colony.” He wore pants, boots, and a breathing filter. Tatsumi, who wore a full suit, thought that at this air pressure, not sea level but not mountaintop either, he must be very uncomfortable. He gave no sign of it.