by Robert Reed
The terror didn’t retreat, and it didn’t have the chance to charge. It simply crumbled, knocked limp, a one-word command from Trinidad engaging a Few-made system, and suddenly the courtyard had fallen silent, not even the tiniest bug daring to squeak.
Porsche spoke first.
Not quite shouting, she said, “Jey-im,” once, then again.
A muted voice came from somewhere below. “Po-lee-een? Is that you?”
She worked her way back to the ground, then followed the trail into a stand of young red trees.
“Is that you?” the quavering voice repeated.
Past the red trees was the familiar clearing, smaller and more constricted than she remembered. The jungle had crept closer in recent years. The sky was a window, brilliant but small. Porsche’s very first thought was that the lovers who came here wouldn’t be able to watch the sky as she had watched it. Then Jey-im appeared, standing in the brightness, and she realized that he had changed more than the clearing—in stature and weight, and showing the sculpting of time—yet strangely, she recognized him in an instant, and that despite the night-colored robe, despite the massive, doubly-thick mask.
“Po-lee-een,” he muttered. “Is it?”
“Always,” she replied.
But he acted skeptical, coming close but not quite touching her, breathing hard for a few moments before asking, “Can we step into the shadows?” A security medallion hung around his neck, denoting his rank. “Can we show each other our faces?”
It was a painful ritual, thankfully brief.
Porsche clamped her eyes shut, then lifted her mask. In sympathy, Jey-im cupped his hands over her eyes, trying to protect them. Random colors swirled and faded away. She felt misery as well as a pair of thumbs wandering from her mouth to her cheeks and back again. Then a quiet, reverent voice gushed, “It is you,” and he lowered her mask, admitting, “I had my doubts that you’d come.”
“Of course I came,” she countered. “Didn’t I promise?”
He didn’t answer, but instead said, “Now. Look at my face now.”
She repeated the ritual, her hands flush against his rubbery eyes and her long, extremely strong thumbs playing over portions of his handsome face.
Blind now, wincing against the scorching light, Jey-im offered, “You’re very beautiful still, I think.”
Because it would help, she reflected his compliment. “And you’re still very handsome, too.”
Beneath her palms, the eyes began to smile, vibrating hard in their sockets. The man made a whistling sound, a kind of contented sigh, then clasped his white hands over hers, sucking air into his mouth once, then again. Much of jarrtee recognition was olfactory; it was one reason Trinidad couldn’t keep pretending to be her. Then Jey-im suddenly pulled her hands to his chest, averting his face from the light, making her feel the feathery-quick beating of his hearts as he confessed, in agony, “I betrayed you…that one time…and for a long time I thought I did right…”
Once before, Jey-im had let her feel his honesty; she didn’t intend to fall for that trick twice.
“Do you forgive me, Po-lee-een?”
“But I already have,” she responded, avoiding the lie. Trinidad had accepted his apology for her, half a dozen times, at least.
“Please,” he begged. “Forgive me now, please!”
Trapped, she whispered, “All right. I do.”
“Yes?”
“Of course, yes!” She pulled her hands free, then slapped his mask into place. “But there’s nothing to forgive. You were a child; I was an idiot. I’m the one who made the mistakes by telling you, and showing you—”
“Not mistakes!” he interrupted. “Now that I’m older and can understand…I mean, I’m thankful that you entrusted me with the truth.”
Porsche took a short step backward, saying nothing.
“I’ve thought about you often. In the night, and by day, too. But always in secret, Po-lee-een.” He seemed to come alive, talking about his devotion. “After I told my father what had happened, and all the security people, too…after that, I never again spoke about you or the sky that you showed me. Not to anyone. My wife knows nothing. My children, nothing. And I never even mentioned it again to my father.”
Like an obedient dog, Jey-im had probably obeyed orders, but Porsche resisted the urge to cross-examine him.
Instead, she asked, “How is your father?”
There was a brief, telltale pause. Then he quietly admitted, “He died last year.”
“I’m sorry,” she offered, for no reason but politeness.
“There was an attack on the government,” he explained. “The Order of Fire had set mines during the day—clever, undetectable mines—and several dozen administrators were killed the instant they sat at their stations.”
The Order, it seemed, had a gift for surreal justice.
“It’s just as I told you,” he insisted, referring to past conversation. “This world has turned into a sad, wicked place. The fighting is endless. Not in the City, not yet. Here we just have incidents and bombings and mysterious disappearances. And we have carefully sanitized news. But at night, when the skies clear, people can see what’s happening. Nuclear weapons and terrible energy beams are seen. Every night, another distant city-state burns itself into extinction. These creatures that we’re fighting are everywhere, yet they aren’t real enough to defeat…which is their secret, I think. I think.”
In different circumstances, Porsche could have told this timid man plenty.
But instead she simply conceded, “I see why you’d want to escape.”
“I have nothing here anymore. Nothing worthwhile, surely.”
“I know that,” she reminded him.
Jey-im began to dance back and forth, years of pent-up emotion seeping out under pressure.
He asked, “Is it true? Can you take me to where you live?”
“Yes.”
“Now?”
She shook her head, the human gesture baffling him. “Soon,” she explained. “The intrusion is up in the mountains. When my work is finished, I can’t see why you wouldn’t be welcome.”
The lie amazed Porsche.
She was stunned, simply stunned, to hear how easily she had told Jey-im what he was desperate to hear. Suddenly her words were hanging in the bright hot air, left to fend for themselves, and she could take a full step backward, waiting for her ex-lover to make the next move.
“This other world,” he began uneasily. “Did you tell me about it?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But what kind of place is it?” Liquid emotions passed across his face, and he confessed, “I wouldn’t want anything too strange.”
“It’s not too different from Jarrtee,” she told him. Then, fearing that might scare him, she added, “And in other ways, it is.”
Jey-im acted disappointed, and afraid, and more than anything else, curious. He took a deep contemplative breath, then asked, “What is the world’s name?”
“EE-arth,” she managed, remembering when she had first heard that word. The moment; the speaker; the mood.
Jey-im didn’t try repeating it. Instead, he took another careful breath, then asked, “What will I look like?”
There was bare ground beneath an old colo tree, and kneeling, she began to draw simple portraits in the mud—a woman first, then a taller man with his hand gripping the woman’s head from behind. Neither figure wore clothes or hair. In crisp detail, she described humans, carefully mentioning everything that Jey-im would find comforting as well as everything comfortably strange.
There was a long pause.
Then, once again, Jey-im asked, “What was the world’s name?”
She repeated the clumsy word, then added, “Soil. That’s what the name means.”
With two fingertips, he touched the male human’s face, then the groin, smudging both features. “And if I don’t like this soil-world?”
“Thousands more are in easy reach,” she promised.
With the smallest finger on her left hand, Porsche repaired the face, lending it a sorrowful grin.
“If you still love me, I mean…”
Trinidad was watching. She could clearly feel the pressure of unseen eyes, the electric sense of anticipation.
“Please, Po-lee-een,” he whispered, “tell me how you feel toward me.”
Thankful for the mask, Porsche looked up and replied with a delicate firmness, “I have always loved you, Jey-im.”
He sagged as if punched in the stomach.
“And I trust you,” she assured. “Now that I can see you, and smell you.”
“But something’s wrong,” he interjected. “Isn’t it?”
“I came here with friends,” she admitted.
“Yes?”
“We have a job to do. An important assignment.”
Jey-im was silent.
“I told them about you. I’ve assured them that we can trust you. But my companions…well, they know about the incident with us…how you betrayed me, and what happened as a consequence—”
“Oh, shit,” he muttered.
“They didn’t even want me to meet with you. I had to fight with them, and that was just to come here.”
The man collapsed inside his robe.
“Trust,” she repeated.
“I knew it—”
“What is that old expression? About trust and buildings?”
“‘What is beneath the ground, unseen, is what matters,’” he quoted.
“‘And once the foundation is cracked,’” she continued, “‘the building is forever in peril.’”
Jey-im stared at his empty hands, and after a long pause, he asked, “Is there anything that I can do?”
“Prove yourself.”
“Yes?”
“By helping us.”
His masked face lifted. A dry, low voice asked, “How?”
“You have a remarkable job, as I understand it.” A pause. “You watch over how many Masters?”
“Three hundred and twenty-nine.”
“The intellectual heart of the City,” said Porsche.
Again, he looked at his hands.
“We don’t need you,” she threatened, “but if you did help us, think how far that would go toward proving your worthiness.”
The hands closed into frail, chalky fists.
“Without the others’ approval, I can’t take you with me.”
“I suppose not,” he whispered.
In the distance, over the prattle of insects and day birds, came the warning scream of an angry terror.
Porsche placed her hand on one of the fists, saying, “I’m sure you can guess what we need from you. So the question is: For me, will you?”
The fists fell open, then dropped to his side.
With a mild, almost disinterested voice, Jey-im asked, “What will you do with them?”
“Great minds are precious,” she promised. “Think what those scientists could accomplish, given adequate resources.”
The head tilted, in surprise.
“That’s all you want?” he said. “You just want to take them with you?”
“What else would we want?” Porsche countered, genuinely puzzled.
“I thought…I don’t know,” he sputtered. “Honestly, I don’t know what you people need from us at all.”
“But you will help us? You’ll help me, won’t you?”
Jey-im moved behind Porsche, then began to hug her, softly at first and then desperately. She could feel him shivering with emotion, and she felt the pointed pressure of his phallus, aroused and thrusting its way out of his body cavity, tapping against her strong jarrtee rump. Then she heard the shivering voice come across her shoulder, telling her, “What you want to do is to take people to a better world?”
She leaned backward, back onto his phallus, trusting him with her weight.
“Of course I’ll help you,” she heard, an incandescent joy building. “This is the kind of person I’ve become, Po-lee-een. Good, I hope I am. At least good enough.”
The terrors were building their night nest.
Jey-im was leading her back into the school by a longer, easier route. A stand of mature trees had been uprooted in the last few years, probably beneath an irresistible gust of wind, and as they passed through the young clearing, Porsche saw a dozen terrors expertly weaving together thorny vines, then poisoning the barbed surfaces with toxic berries and their own infectious wastes.
Noticing her gaze, Jey-im slowed. “Remember how the terrors used to scare us?”
She said nothing.
“But we never actually saw them. Which was a big part of why we were scared.” He laughed, carefree whistles sounding out of place. “Living in the day, like I do now…I get to see a lot of terrors. If you don’t corner them, and if you don’t posture, they’re really nothing but noise and bluster.”
She had caught him and passed him. There wasn’t time to gawk at nature.
Jey-im’s robe swished as he ran to pass her again.
The waiting door led into another portion of the school. In the sudden darkness, Jey-im pulled up his mask, and with a confessional tone, he told her, “People think our species is doomed. It’s common knowledge. The Order is stronger every day. None of us will survive, most say, except the converted.”
“Maybe not,” she offered. “Apocalypse stories are nearly universal. What looks like the end rarely is.”
Jey-im’s head dipped, in shame.
“I’m sorry,” he whined. “I’ll try to be more original for you.”
She didn’t mean to insult.
But perhaps he wasn’t insulted. Perhaps he was trying to rise to the challenge. After a long moment of contemplation, Jey-im asked, “What if the Order and the various city-states…what if we simply destroy each other?”
“Maybe so,” she conceded.
They were in a portion of the school reserved for the oldest children. Porsche had rarely walked here, and she felt the instinctive sense of being the outsider. But Jey-im was comfortable, wading through dense clouds of nostalgia. Eyes smiling, he looked back at her, explaining, “I was just recalling one class. We had a master scientist come talk. In that room there, as if happens.”
She was barely listening, concentrating on important problems.
“The scientist was very old, but still very brilliant,” Jey-im continued. “He was a master in the Gargantuan—”
Cosmology, in essence.
“—but when he spoke to us, he spent most of his breath on the Minuscule.”
Porsche said nothing.
“He talked about matter and its opposite. In the beginning, he told us, there was almost exactly as much of one as the other.”
Silence. Then she prompted with a crisp, “And?”
“The particles annihilated each other perfectly. But there just happened to be a little more matter than antimatter. Which is the only reason there was anything left over to create us.”
“I learned those same laws on the EE-arth,” Porsche admitted, walking quickly over a floor decorated with tile fish. “In a place called TEEK-zas.”
He continued, pressing toward some vital point. “That image has always troubled me, Po-lee-een. All that violence, and waste, and everything that is us is built out of the ash that happened to survive. We—the entire universe—were that close to nothingness.”
Porsche was in the lead. The great steel gate and tiny access door were up ahead, and closing.
“I have a question,” she heard.
Glancing over her shoulder, she felt a knifing pain that threatened to split her open.
“You’ll be happier on the new world,” she lied.
“I know I will be. But that’s not my question.”
“What is it?”
“If this war kills everyone—every city-state; every member of the Order—will I be able to return to Jarrtee?”
Sh
e slowed slightly. “Why do you ask?”
“Long ago, you told me how intrusions work…how they shape bodies to look like the local species. But if there aren’t any more jarrtees, does the magic still work?”
Porsche stopped entirely.
Someone watching at a distance would assume that she was watching the access door, trying to guess if anyone was waiting on the other side. After a moment, and wearing a false disinterest, she told Jey-im, “The intrusions would eventually forget how to build jarrtees. But not right away. It takes a generation, usually.”
“That’s good,” he replied, as if there could be any good in extinction. “And I suppose in the future, if something else intelligent were to evolve here…a new species of terror, maybe—”
Porsche turned abruptly, dropping Jey-im’s mask for him, then she dropped and secured her own mask.
“We’ll talk later,” she promised.
“On EE-arth,” he replied, full of hope.
“You said that very well,” she lied. Then she opened the door, forever astonished by the brightness of the world, and after a quick string of breaths, she added, “I can’t tell you how glad I am, being here with you again, Jey-im. After so long, I feel alive again!”
11
“I’ve seen you before,” Jey-im remarked.
Porsche assumed that he was referring to Trinidad, but after climbing into the car, and after removing the cumbersome mask, she realized that her cousin was sitting where Cornell had been sitting. Their new ally was staring back at Latrobe, of all people.
“We spoke once,” said Jey-im.
“We did,” Latrobe allowed.
“You asked if I knew the whereabouts of Master Ko-ee. And I said—”
“‘Her laboratory is in Yellow Compound, in the Fifth Section.’” The jarrtee eyes smiled, and the mouth attempted a human smile. “Did I thank you for your help?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Jey-im was puzzled, and wounded. “I thought it was strange,” he told Porsche, in self-defense. “His medallion put him with a minor payroll bureau, but to me he looked like a soldier. Which is why I remember him, I suppose.”
Trinidad reached across Porsche, shaking Jey-im and saying, “Don’t be modest. We know you have a wonderful memory.”