by Nancy Kress
Cam stared at the garden of moaning plants, her “escort” at a respectful distance, and pulled out her commlink. Fuck the reactions of these guys in their little skirts—if she didn’t talk to anybody normal, she was going to go mad.
“Soledad? Things have calmed down here. Everybody’s playing board games. Has Lucca’s smelliness returned yet?”
“Yes. But now he’s blind.”
Cam drew a sharp breath. The plants whined more loudly. “Blind? When did that happen?”
“Just this morning. I have a lot to tell you. Are you somewhere you can talk?”
“Yes. No. Just a minute.” Cam left the gallery and the droning garden, retraced her steps, and turned right. After only one false turn she found the only other room she’d visited since the interminable kulith game began: the “women’s area.” Not that Cam had seen any other women in it. Probably that bastard Uldunu didn’t want Cam to pollute his harem or concubines or whatever he had. Soldiers and advisors stopped as soon as Cam walked through the door curtain. The room, windowless but large and airy, was tiled in soft yellow, with more curtains to pull around holes in the floor. Modesty for pissing. Warm water filled shallow basins along the walls. If there were spyholes, Cam didn’t see them, and anyway, no spies would understand English. She just wanted to talk to Soledad away from the banks of impassive faces and watchful eyes.
She sat on a polished stone bench and said, “Tell me.”
“Lucca’s sense of smell returned exactly twenty-four hours after he lost it, and then a little while later he went blind. Cam, have you lost the use of any of your sensory organs?”
“No.”
“Have you experienced any changes in your body at all? Think carefully before you answer.”
Soledad’s caution and doubt, even worse than usual, scraped across Cam’s nerves. “I don’t have to think about it! I’d know if my body changed, and it hasn’t!”
“Okay. Have you observed anything strange about the Kularians?”
“Fuck it, Soledad, everything is strange here! What exactly do you mean?”
Soledad hesitated. “I don’t want to bias your perceptions.”
Cam couldn’t take this; she really couldn’t. Why did Soledad always have to sound so superior? But Cam tried to control her voice. “You won’t ‘bias’ me. Tell me what you’re talking about. Did Lucca see something weird? Does everybody on ‘A’ just go around losing senses every once in a while?”
“No. Just Lucca. And I don’t think that’s a result of being on Kular A. I think it’s some sort of side effect of the medical nanobots we received in the Atoner Dome.”
Cam had never understood about the nanobots. Also, she disliked thinking about tiny machines swarming in her blood. But Soledad was smart, and this felt important. “You mean the ’bots are screwing up Lucca’s blood?”
“More than his blood—his genes. Lucca might be having genes switched on and off. That could cause both the disappearance and reappearance of various senses.”
Cam struggled to understand. “But . . . why would the Atoners do that? And why to Lucca and not to me, too?”
“I don’t know,” Soledad said.
An insect of some kind buzzed past Cam’s ear. She shot out one hand, got it, and crushed the small body. At least it was one thing she could grasp. “Soledad—there’s something else, isn’t there? What did Lucca witness that you thought I might have seen, too?”
Silence.
“Tell me, damn it! Or I’ll call him and ask him myself!”
“Don’t call him. While he’s blind he can’t get away from people safely, and his Kularians of course shouldn’t see his commlink.”
As Cam’s already had. Well, too fucking bad. “Tell me, Soledad. I mean it.”
“All right. Lucca’s informant, a little girl, told him several things he did when he was absolutely alone. Things like take a sponge bath or commlink me.”
The crushed insect had left slime on Cam’s hand. She plunged it into the basin beside her bench. “But how could the kid know those things if Lucca really was ‘absolutely alone’?”
“Lucca thinks they might have some kind of telepathy.”
Cam stood so fast that water sloshed onto the floor. “Telepathy?”
“That’s what Lucca thinks.”
“You mean there’s another way to think about it?” Envy washed through her, followed by a bitter emotion she couldn’t name. Lucca got telepathy, and all Cam got was killing and kulith.
Soledad’s voice was careful. “The Kularians themselves have a different explanation.”
“What?”
“They think they can see and talk to the dead.”
Cam laughed. “That’s ridiculous!”
“Well, it sounds that way,” Soledad said, and why did she sound so relieved at Cam’s reaction? “But I think it’s important to postpone committing to any sort of hypothesis without further data. The information we have so far is . . .”
Cam had stopped listening. Talk to the dead. Was that possible?
No. It wasn’t.
But if it was—
Cam didn’t believe in ghosts, in religion, in God. Yet, even so . . . She broke into Soledad’s flow of intellectual blather. “What kind of ‘further data’?”
“Lucca is running some experiments. Or he was, until this blindness came up. I’m wondering if the two are somehow related.”
That made no sense. Cam said, “I want to hear all his conversations with that little girl. In English.”
Soledad, sounding exasperated, said, “You could have done that already. Just download Lucca’s uploads from my link the way I told you and let your translator learn Kularian A. Then all you have to do is—”
“Wait—I have to go! Talk to you later!”
A strange noise had sounded outside the door, somewhere between the droning of the god-awful garden and the chittering of demented insects. A moment later sixteen naked slave women, all looking terrified, burst into the room and surrounded Cam. None of them looked her directly in the face, none of them touched her, but from their distress and gestures it was clear that she was supposed to leave this room. One, a woman older than the rest, with a shaved head and gray in her pubic hair, held out a trembling palm. On it sat a single polished, highly carved kulith piece.
Cam was summoned back to Uldunu Four and his stupid game.
KULITH RAN FAR INTO THE EVENING. When Cam and Aveo were finally permitted to return to their apartment, the kulith board still looked cluttered and Aveo looked exhausted. Obu crouched at the foot of their bed, covering her face whenever Cam glanced at her. It was like having a cringing dog in the room.
Cam pulled out her commlink, downloaded the data from Soledad, and waited while her translator acquired the language of Kular A. She listened in English to Lucca’s conversations with the kid with the long name, and then listened a second time. None of it made sense.
Unless you believed Lucca’s Kularians.
Was it possible, even remotely, that those semi-savages were right? That you could talk to the dead for a little while after they died? How could that be?
Cam had stopped believing in religion when she was thirteen. But Lucca’s natives never mentioned any sort of god. Only the lunatics here in Uldunu’s city were religious. Still . . . strange and inexplicable things did happen in the world. In any world.
“Aveo,” Cam said in Pularit, “what do you think happens when people die?”
The old man jerked his head around to stare at her. She read the clear warning in his eyes: We are observed and understood. The spyholes.
He said, “When we die, the Goddess of All Green takes to Her those who are worthy.”
The party line. She tried again. “Can the people of this wonderful country”—a little grease never hurt, after all—“talk to their dead?”
“Talk . . .”
“To their dead. You know, to ghosts.” But the translator gave her no word for “ghost” in either Pularit or Uldunui
t.
“Talk to what?”
“Never mind. Let’s sleep.”
They got into bed, this time with her spooning him from behind, her personal shield enveloping them both. “Aveo,” she whispered against his ear, “now tell me the truth. Can anyone here talk to the dead? Hear them? See them?”
“No,” he said aloud, with such violence and longing that Cam was startled. But she also believed him.
So whatever the natives of Kular A did, it wasn’t happening here. But even Lucca, who was smart and skeptical, thought that something was happening in his frozen little village. He said it was telepathy, and he’d been to some important university in England. Soledad thought it was connected with Lucas’s blindness and that his genes were involved— how? And what had the Atoners done to Cam’s genes, or Soledad’s, or all the other Witnesses’?
Then Cam had another thought. If, just “if,” the dead weren’t really dead, then they could be standing here, right beside this bed on this forsaken planet, looking down at Cam and accusing her, their murderer, wishing her tortured and in pain and—
Fuck it, Soledad, why did you tell me all these horrible ideas?
But Cam had insisted on being told.
She curled closer to Aveo, holding on for dear life, wishing that Lucca’s telepathy existed on Kular B so that she could take comfort from whatever let Aveo sleep like that, snoring gently in her arms.
THE NEXT DAY, KULITH resumed in the throne room. Endless kulith, boring kulith, incomprehensible kulith, until Cam could no longer stand it. Without even asking Aveo, she left the room and walked to the long tiled gallery facing the whining garden. The same escort as yesterday followed her, and abruptly she couldn’t stand that, either. Anything to get away from these lunatics! Abruptly she veered into the garden of moaning plants, threading her way among them. Small insects swarmed off the leaves and dived directly at her, but of course they couldn’t penetrate her shield.
Amazed, outraged sounds rose behind her. Wasn’t she supposed to enter the garden? What if the plants were poisonous? Her shield protected against any solid object, but gases . . . She scurried back toward the gallery, but all at once the soldiers and advisors on the tiled gallery walk erupted.
Cam stopped, astonished—nobody had been this angry when she’d killed the Chief of the Royal Guard! They gestured and shouted and began raining knives at her. The knives bounced off her shield. Cam rooted herself and stayed put, while all around her the plants’ low moaning rose all at once to a high-pitched, ear-piercing wail.
Aveo plunged through the curtain, between milling soldiers and advisors, and stopped dead at the edge of the garden. He said in Pularit, “Cam! Leave the plants!”
So that was it—she’d walked on sacred ground or something! Well, big deal. Shrugging, Cam unrooted herself and moved forward, just as the plants attacked.
They were incredibly fast. In just a few seconds they’d swung vines and tendrils around her from several directions. None penetrated her shield, of course, and there didn’t seem to be any noxious gases, or at least she wasn’t getting sick from any. But to stand there like a dummy attacked by grass . . . the fuck with that! Cam pulled out her laser gun.
“No!” Aveo yelled, and it was in English.
Cam was so surprised that she froze, gun raised halfway from her hip, until she realized that Aveo must have heard her say that word involuntarily, probably more than once. And from his face, she knew he meant it: No. Don’t fire. Don’t move. She was so sick of doing nothing, understanding nothing, witnessing nothing—
An advisor, young and brawny, with red-painted breast and red skirt that fluttered with his abrupt movement, picked up Aveo and threw him into the garden.
Cam screamed. Aveo had landed on his feet and then sunk to his knees and he was only eighteen inches away from the tiled gallery, but the farthest plants had already sent tendrils to reach him. They wrapped around his skinny legs and waist and one snaked upward to his face. The stinging insects swirled around his face. No one moved to either help Aveo or pummel the man who had thrown him.
Cam unrooted herself and rushed forward. She snatched up Aveo, but he was outside her shield unless she turned it off, and the plants held him fast. Cam leaped onto the gallery and began firing at the people around her. She didn’t know how many she hit, but some fell and some ran and in seconds the gallery was empty except for corpses piled like chickens at a butcher counter. She turned off the shield, burned the vines holding Aveo, and snatched him to her. She reactivated the shield just as the unhurt soldiers regrouped and attacked.
“Fuckers! Monsters! Madmen!” She didn’t realize she was screaming at them in English until her voice caught and she stopped. She couldn’t move forward because if she unrooted the shield, they would knock her over. Against her chest Aveo’s body, still wrapped in the severed tendrils of the weeds, breathed shallowly. She had to get him to the shuttle, there were meds there, she knew the way to the roof—
One of the men she’d burned crawled at her feet. He reached out feebly and tried to grab her ankle. The next moment the hand fell. She could smell him, charred flesh. . . . Her gorge rose. In her arms Aveo groaned, a pitiful sound she could hear even over the shrieking of the furious plants. Despite his light weight, her arms were starting to ache from clutching him.
Carefully, so as not to shift him outside the shield, Cam moved Aveo enough to again reach her gun. She killed everyone who didn’t flee the gallery. When it was empty, she turned off the shield, shifted Aveo to a fireman’s carry, turned it back on, and started for the shuttle.
No one approached her on the steep staircase to the roof. No one prevented her from entering the shuttle.
Panting hard, she dumped Aveo on the floor and searched frantically for the med kit. The Atoners had carefully explained each med, but that was for use with humans— Fuck it, Aveo was a human! But what exactly was wrong with him?
“Aveo! Hang on, it’ll be all right—”
He stared at her uncomprehendingly; she’d spoken En glish.
Cam pulled down the collar of his robe and slapped a patch on his neck. The Atoners had described this patch as “general use,” for shock or infection or allergy. . . . God knew what-all was in it. After a minute she stuck on another patch, for parasites and food poisoning. For the first time, in a detached corner of her mind that she hadn’t known was even functioning, she realized that none of the twenty-one human Witnesses were doctors or medical scientists. Was that deliberate?
Aveo’s eyes opened and he gazed at her. She watched the pain clear from his eyes. “What . . .”
“Don’t talk. I gave you some medicine. I don’t know if it will cure you or not but— Fuck!”
The entire shuttle was rocking.
Cam jumped up and switched on the external display. Slaves— hundreds of them, it looked like—were massed outside the shuttle, pushing at it. Soldiers stood behind them, shouting orders. Fury surged in Cam like a tsunami. She commlinked Soledad and shouted, “Lift the shuttle. Immediately!”
Soledad asked no questions. A minute later the shuttle rose, and the Kularians dwindled into so many tiny, head-raised figures on the roof of a miniature palace.
Soledad said, “Cam? What’s happening?”
“Tell you later. But I’m okay now. Just set us down in some empty field someplace, far away from these damned assholes!” She returned to Aveo.
He tried to sit up but fell back. Cam brought a blanket and made him comfortable on the cramped floor space. She held a cup of water for him. The shuttle settled in the middle of an empty plain. Aveo looked, bewildered, from the wall displays to Cam, back again.
“We left the city, Aveo. Here, I’m going to take off those vines that—”
“Don’t touch them without your invisible armor! They’re poison!”
“I thought so.” She removed the dead tendrils and threw them in the disposal. Aveo’s voice sounded much stronger. Maybe he would be all right.
As soon a
s she thought this, Cam began to tremble. Aveo might be okay, but she was a murderer. She had killed God knows how many more people, just mowed them down as if they were grass or wheat or some fucking thing, fired over and over on people—
Aveo said something. “What?”
“How did you heal me?”
“I put on patches that— It’s hard to explain. You explain what the fuck happened back there!”
“The plants are mating. You went among them at the time the Goddess of All Green flows within them, or so think the people. Ostiu Cam, I told you—”
“I don’t understand anything you told me,” she said, still trembling. Firing over and over, all those murdered people . . . “I don’t even understand anything I saw for myself. How can the— Aveo, we’re going to stay right here for a while. You’re going to get better and I’m going to listen to you tell me everything you know, so I can do the job I was fucking sent here to do!”
She couldn’t read his expression—surprise, surprise. She had misread everything here. Aveo was her only success, and her only link to this so-called “witnessing” of Kular B. This weak, emaciated, intelligent old man who seemed more alien to her than the Atoners ever had.
“Yes,” he said, and once more closed his eyes.
22: LUCCA
THE MORNING AFTER HE’D GONE BLIND, Lucca’s sight returned.
It happened as he sat in a corner of the lodge where Hytrowembireliaz had dumped him on a pile of smelly rugs, and it happened instantly. One moment darkness, and the next a room full of people. Too many people. Lucca saw what he hadn’t suspected in his unseeing misery and had never expected to see until spring: strangers.
Not that they looked any different from the villagers. But by now Lucca could name every one of the eighty-eight villagers, describe every one of their faces, recite their kinship ties, and even detail what each ate and how well each danced. With nothing else to occupy his mind and the Atoners’ mandate to “witness,” the villagers had become his library, his newscasts, his d-vid games, his e-mail, his television perpetually tuned to a boring channel. But here were actual strangers!