Furthest

by Elgin, Suzete Haden

“It’s your own baby,” said Citizen Qu’e. “Of course you may hold it.”

  He picked up the warm little body and held it close, expecting to be awkward, but finding that he wasn’t awkward at all; the child fit into the curve of his arm and lay confident against his chest, as if he had always held it there.

  “Bring the baby along,” said Citizen Qu’e. “Bring her with you and we’ll go up to the garden.”

  “Her? It’s a little girl, then?”

  “Her name is Ratha. Bess chose that especially because it is one of the few names in our speech that you would be able to pronounce easily. And it’s a good name, as well; the Ratha is a kind of high grass, pale green and very lovely.”

  And when they were seated beside the running water on the upper floor, the baby close in his arms, he asked them.

  “Where is Bess?”

  “1 think you already know,” said her father, his voice harsh with his own grief.

  “I know that something is deeply wrong. That’s all I really do know.”

  RK’s mother spoke then, biting off her words like stones, “You are being cruel, husband. There is no excuse for putting it off just because you find it difficult to say, not when you are tormenting him like that. Citizen Jones, Bess has undergone her sentence. She was taken away and she has undergone Erasure, and there it is.”

  The pain of it might well be bearable later. Now what was important was not to drop the child that Bess had borne him. He took a deep breath and waited until he could control his voice, and said, “How did it happen?”

  “I will tell you,” said RK. “In a way it was my fault.”

  “No, son,” said his mother. “There was nothing else you could have done.”

  “We were alone, you see,” RK went on, “and no one except Bess and I knew about the child, and her time came early. And I was afraid. She was unconscious, and the pain had been so terrible, there was so much blood—Citizen Jones, forgive me, I did not know what to do. I went for a doctor because I was afraid that Bess would die.”

  “And he turned her in?”

  RK nodded. “We thought perhaps he would not, because he waited a week. But then they came. The police, I mean. And they took her away, and closed the MESH, as you saw it, and I took the child and came here to my parents.”

  “He should have come to us sooner,” said Citizen Qu’e. “If he had, perhaps something could have been done before the time came for the child to be born. But he was afraid we would not understand.”

  “And Bess forbid it absolutely,” added RK. “She would not have it that I should involve our father and mother as well.”

  Erasure. There was a final sort of punishment for you. It meant that somewhere, depending on just how long it had been, there was a tall strong woman who had been Bess but was no longer. Her mind would be empty as a cave. They would have changed her face, made sure that no one would recognize her and punish her for a crime she no longer even remembered. Someone, patiently, would be teaching her once again all those things she needed to know to function as a citizen of the galaxies. How to walk. How to dress herself. How to talk. How to read and write. How to fill some useful slot.

  How do you bear what you cannot bear?

  “I didn’t know,” he said wonderingly. “I didn’t know how much I loved her. And now I can’t tell her.”

  How could it be that he had not realized until she was irrevocably gone from him how much she had meant to him? Why had he not taken her with him when he left the first time? Because he was a foolish arrogant man for whom treasures had been thrown down with no payment asked in return, and he had walked away and left them without even thinking.

  RK’s mother reached over and touched his hand, a gesture he appreciated because he knew its rarity among these people.

  “Bess knew,” she said.

  “Nevertheless,” said Coyote, “I wish I had told her. It was one thing to know, and it was another to hear me say it. Perhaps she felt a need to hear those words from me, and I was too stupid to know.”

  “Enough,” said Citizen Qu’e firmly. “Enough and too much. It is a thing that had been done and is over. We cannot forget, but we must go on now, for ourselves and for this child. When I told you Bess was all right, Citizen, I meant it—she has no burden to bear, she remembers nothing. It is we who have the grief of it. And now we must put that grief aside and think of what there is to do.”

  “You are quite right,” said Coyote. “We will do as you say, as far as it is possible. And I have some questions.”

  “Shall I take the child?” asked RK’s mother.

  “No.” He shook his head. “No, I want to hold her, it comforts me. Tell me what the situation is now. Is there a sentence on RK, for instance? Was he charged with complicity?”

  “Oh, no,” said Citizen Qu’e. “He’s far too young. They simply assumed that Bess had used her mental abilities, which they knew to be strong beyond their comprehension, to force him to hide her and do what she wanted. He was reproved, scolded a bit. That’s all. And as for us, since we knew nothing of it at all, there was no question of our being held responsible in any way.”

  “That’s all good,” said Coyote with satisfaction. “And what about me? Am I a fugitive?”

  “Bess took good care of that,” her father laughed. “She was a very clever woman.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Well, like any other society, my friend, we have unfortunate newsmedia that capitalize on the scandalous and the sensational. Bess had prepared a full ‘confession’ of her so-called crimes long before they came for her, in anticipation of something like what did actually happen. When she heard the knock at the door and they knew it was the police, she had RK delay them long enough for her to send the full text she had prepared, by comsystem, to one of our scandal sheets. And they printed it, of course.”

  “But what did she say?”

  “That she was a wicked, wicked woman. That she had fallen in love with an offworlder. That she had used her vicious mental wiles to ensnare you and force you to do as she wanted, and that you had been helpless against her. That she had manipulated her brother as she had you, for the sake of her hopeless passion.”

  “I’m going to be sick,” said Coyote.

  “No!” said Citizen Qu’e. “Listen, it was genuinely clever. It cleared you completely of any complicity, it made it impossible that anyone should persecute this child, it cleared Ahr, it left the guilt wholly upon Bess, who was under final sentence in any event.”

  “Not only that,” said RK’s mother, “but it gave her a motive that the Ahl Kres’sah could understand. Guilty passion, irresistible love that drives one to unspeakable crimes, all that has a long tradition for our people. In a certain sense, it cleared her of guilt, too. Not in the eyes of the government, or of our church, of course, but the majority of people will forget the crimes that she committed against the state and concentrate on her ‘betrayal’ of our people to an offworlder for the sake of an overpowering love.”

  Coyote frowned. “You are telling me,” he said, “that they will forget that she was a revolutionary, and remember her as a lovestruck fool?”

  “Yes, yes. That’s just what I mean,” said the woman, beaming at him, apparently pleased that he understood. And surprised? Possibly.

  “I see,” he said.

  He did see. He saw very well. That she should have done that for him was amazing, and if she’d been around he’d have told her precisely what he thought of it. He wasn’t about to let her get away with it, either, clever or not, but there was no point in upsetting her parents in advance by telling them what he planned to do, so he let it go by.

  “Citizen Qu’e? Citizenness?”

  They looked at him expectantly.

  “I want to take the child with me,” he said.

  “We expected that you would.”

  “There are arrangements that I must make, though,” he went on. “I will be here perhaps two weeks, tying up details with your governm
ent and carrying out some commissions given me by the scientists of the Inner Galaxies. I must find out if Ratha can safely travel in hibernation, and arrange for her passage, or for both of us to take a slowship if she cannot. May I leave her with you during that time?”

  “You may,” said Citizen Qu’e. “And you will stay here with us. In that way you will not have to be separated from the child and she will learn to know you before she leaves with you. Will that be satisfactory?”

  “That is very satisfactory,” said Coyote. “I thank you with all my heart.”

  “And what will you do first?” asked RK’s mother, still smiling at him.

  “I am going to go for a walk,” he said.

  “On the surface?”

  “On the surface.”

  He had to have privacy. He had to think. Tomorrow he was to make a public telecast to the entire population of this planet, and he had a few changes to make in his planned speech. A hysterical lovesick woman swept by passion, indeed! That he could do something about.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “… and so you see, people of Ahl Kres’sah,” he said, “you see that she was something more than just a woman who had the misfortune to be overfond of me. She was something a great deal more important than that.

  “She was a woman who saw, before anyone else did, that you were a people enslaved by a myth. She was a woman who saw that you were being held back, as surely as if you had been shut away behind impenetrable doors, from the freedom that it really is to be a citizen of the Tri-Galactic Federation today.

  “For the sake of all of you, in order that you might enjoy that freedom, in order that the undignified and miserable burden of an ancient conscription that had turned into a meaningless masquerade might be lifted from your shoulders, Bess gave me the information that I had to have. She saw past the meaningless restrictions and the ludicrous secrecy that was imposed upon you, saw far enough and clear enough to know where her duty lay, and she sacrificed herself for you, for every last one of you.

  “She knew that she would not be believed if she tried to explain what she had done, and she knew that I could not return in time to save her. Nonetheless, knowing full well what lay ahead of her, she gave me the information that I set before the government of these galaxies, the information that will allow you people to go where you will, to move freely, to learn, to share the multitude of advances that are truly your right as galactic citizens, and that have been denied you.

  “She has set you free from slavery, and for that she has had her mind taken from her and Erased. If you remember her only for the crime of passion to which she confessed—to protect me, and to protect her family—you are unworthy of the sacrifice that she has made. You are to remember her as she should be remembered, as a heroine, as one who has brought you out of a slavery of centuries, as one who ignored the danger that she knew was certain, in order that all of you might at last take your rightful place among the people of the Tri-Galactic Federation…”

  That he was laying it on a bit thick, he knew perfectly well. He was quite sure that Bess could not have listened to it with a straight face. It served her right.