by Paula Guran
She says to Tom, “I’m Ellen Jenssen. From the base. Do you remember the base, Tom?”
“The base . . . no, I don’t think so.”
Josie says, so quietly that it’s almost a prayer, “Fuck fuck fuck.” Her shoulders tremble.
Carlos’ voice says, “We’ve been up all night with your data, Ellen, along with a lot of other—the results are just—call me right away!”
Tom says politely, “Are you here to study the Eaters?”
Josie chokes out, “You really don’t remember, do you? You’re not . . . you’re not you anymore. They got you.”
Carlos’ voice says, “Meanwhile, I’m sending you the analysis. Call!”
Josie says, somewhere between anguish and rage, “Damn you! Damn you, Daddy!” She raises the gun and fires.
“No!” Ellen screams. But by the time she reaches Tom, he is already dead. Josie lowers the gun and stares bleakly at Ellen and Tom—one alive and one dead.
“Why?” Ellen screams. “Why?”
Josie says nothing. She starts toward Ellen.
Fear squeezes Ellen’s chest. But Josie merely hands over the gun, butt first. She holds out her two hands in a mocking mimicry of being handcuffed, then returns to the copter and climbs into the passenger seat.
The situation has been given to Ellen. She tries to think what to do, can’t come up with anything, tries again. Nothing makes sense. Finally Ellen drags Josie’s tent, poles and all, over to Tom’s body and covers it. She weights the tent down with boxes of equipment from the copter. Carlos will have to send the other copter to retrieve it all. The sun rises.
A circle of Eaters advances toward her.
Ellen climbs in and lifts the copter. She doesn’t think the Eaters will disturb the body, even if they can move the boxes and unwrap the tent. After all, Tom has lived among them for six months, unmolested. Has lived and prayed and danced with Eaters. It’s Tom’s dreams she has been having, not because there is any sort of psychic connection between them, but because Tom haunts Ellen’s mind. And, she realizes, always will.
Josie has calmed down. As the copter skims over the ground, an Eater below munches on a bush of Flora 2. Pink flowers disappear between its rubbery lips. Josie opens the cockpit storage and takes out the whiskey flask. She says, “You thought I’d be into this by now, didn’t you?”
Ellen hasn’t thought about it at all. Josie is still focused on herself. But her action also reveals that she doesn’t realize that Ellen emptied the flask. Ellen risks a glance at the girl. Josie is staring at the opaque flask with the same hunger that Ellen witnessed before, but also with a kind of triumph. Congratulating herself on not giving in.
Neither of them speaks the rest of the way back to the base, where Josie surrenders herself to Carlos Sanchez.
Ellen refuses food, a shower, comfort, discussion beyond what is necessary to tell her story. As soon as possible, she locks herself in her quarters, a Spartan room in the back corner of Trailer A, and accesses the base library. She spends the next hour studying genetic data.
In one long night of feverish work, the team has cross-indexed botanical and zoological data. Flora 1 has diverged enormously from the base genome. Ellen built plasticity into the plant’s genes so that it could adapt to many soil conditions on Janus 4, fixing nitrogen over several ecological niches. But plasticity is plasticity, and there was no telling where future mutations might occur. Nor their effects.
The Eaters also possess a highly flexible genome, undoubtedly evolved so that they could digest a wide variety of plants. The lemon-colored globes of the original Flora 1 proved hallucinogenic to them, as to Tom. The mutations in Flora 1 apparently affected Eater nervous systems. It made large changes in what senior xenobiologist Stan Michaelson’s previous experiments had determined were Eater processing centers for perception, memory, and communication.
Dave Schwartz has an outstanding record in zoology. He’s very good, and his initial determinations ruled out sentience in the Eaters. They showed absolutely no signs of it. But aliens are alien. Eight years and four generations later, Tom observed ritual behavior, worshiping behavior, communicative behavior. Eight years and four generations of eating Flora 1.
Did humans cause that? The beginnings of sentience? We didn’t know, we told each other, and stopped the genocide. But did we not know because, up to that point, there’d been nothing to know?
“Ellen?” A soft tap at the door, Julia’s voice.
“Leave me alone,” Ellen says.
“Please, honey, come on out. Don’t isolate yourself.”
“Go away.”
She can hear Julia leave. Ellen turns back to the data. Later Eater specimens have all come from creatures killed by brushing against the force-field fence. Ellen studies the dates carefully. There are progressive changes to the Eater brains, in the areas connected to mating hormones. These are the hormones that produce aggression in Eater males. The changes correlate with the introduction of Flora 2. Flora 2 was designed to taste bad to Eaters, but only a few hours ago, Ellen herself saw Eaters munching pink flowers.
First we trigger their evolution into sentience, Ellen thinks, and now into retaliation.
Her eyes burn from reading, and she closes them. If the Eaters become more organized, the result will be the resumption of extermination. Only now it will be justified. The colonists who will be coming to Janus 4 must be protected. SettlerHome Corporation has a right to do that. In fact, it has an obligation to do so. Self-defense is always justifiable. Then, and now, and in times to come, amen.
People are back outside her door, she can hear them: Carlos and Julia and Chang and Stan and David and Hélène. Whispering, arguing, working out their concern for her. Because they care. Her family.
“Damn you, Daddy!” Josie cried just before she shot her father. But Ellen doesn’t know what to call Josie’s act. Not “murder.” Not “mercy killing,” either, because the girl had been too angry to be merciful. And Josie, no less than Tom, suffered from delusion: in her case, the belief that you could reject the past. However, to reject one’s past, you first had to be able to remember it. Tom was beyond that. Josie could do nothing with the blank space that Tom had become: not confront it, not rescue it, not stand looking at it. And Josie held the gun.
“The weaker culture always goes under.”
“Ellen,” Carlos says, with what passes here for stern leadership, “open the door. Please.”
Ellen rises from her chair. If she doesn’t open the door, she knows, they will break it down. Carlos is not about to lose another member of his team, thus compounding his error with Tom. Everyone feeds on something: Carlos on his own competence, the scientists on their guilt, the Corporation on profits. The Eaters on Flora 1 and Flora 2. Josie Two Ribbons on her enormous anger, now about to receive a massive infusion of nutrients from a court martial and imprisonment.
“Ellen!”
“I’m coming.”
No, you could not stop the clash of cultures, nor the weaker one going under. All you could do was resist. As Josie had resisted both the whiskey and thinking of herself as an ethnic victim, as Tom had resisted the base’s convenient genocide of a sentient species. Ellen deplores Josie’s anger, Tom’s mental fragility. But they had resisted, and so were . . . what? Admirable, in some twisted way?
She doesn’t know. This is unfamiliar territory for Ellen, and she hates having to inhabit it. But she is absolutely clear on one thing, at least.
Ellen opens the door. They are all there, huddled together, her friends and colleagues. The sharers of her guilt. They will, of course, suggest editing. She will not accept it.
Gently, but firmly enough so that there is no possibility of being misunderstood, she says to Carlos, “You need to find another botanical geneticist. I’m leaving Janus 4 tomorrow. I resign.”
When warriors return home from war, they are not the same as they were before; those they left behind have changed as well. An Owomoyela’s tale is about a mother who
became a war machine, and her resentful daughter who possesses the only thing that can restore her humanity.
And Wash Out by Tides of War
An Owomoyela
I am sitting at the top of the spire of the Observance of the War, one of three memorials equidistant from the Colony Center. The soles of my runners’ grips are pressed against the spire’s composite, they’re traction engineered at a microscopic level. But I’m not going to push off. I’m 180 meters up, and while I could drop and catch the festoons—my gloves get as much traction as my grips—that’s not what I want. I want to freefall all 180 meters, and catch myself, and launch into a run.
That’s crazy thinking. I’m good, but no human’s that good; I’m a freerunner, not a hhaellesh.
I shift my center of gravity. The wind is still temperate up here, fluttering cool under my collar. It outlines the spot of heat where my pendant rests against my skin.
The pendant is the size of my thumbnail, and always warmer than it should be. This has something to do with it reflecting the heat of my body back to me, so the pendant itself never heats up. It was built to do this because it’s no gem; its brilliant red comes from my mother’s cryopreserved blood.
It was, until the Feast of the Return that morning, the only thing I’d known of her.
The colony’s designed for freerunning. The cops all take classes in it. That’s what comes of a government that worships the hhaellesh, who can carve their own path through the three dimensions.
I’m not a cop, either.
I end up dropping, twisting so my fingers and toes find the carved laurels, and from there I make a second drop to the Observance’s dome. At my hip, my phone starts thumping like an artificial heartbeat. I pause with my fingertips on the gilt, and finally turn to brace my heels against the shingles and lean back into the curve. I clip the hands-free to my ear, and thumb the respond button. Then I just listen.
After a moment of silence, a human voice says, “Aditi?”
I let out a breath. “Michel,” I answer. He’s a friend.
“Are you okay—?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Obviously a hhaellesh could get up to my perch here, and so could Michel—he’s from a family of cops, so he’s been playing games with gravity for longer than I have. But effective or not, there’s a reason I’m nearly two hundred meters up, and that reason has a lot to do with not wanting to talk about how okay I am.
Michel digests that, then says,“Okay. Did you hear the new Elías Perez episode?”
My chest fills with a relief indistinguishable from love. I love Michel so much that it’s painful, sometimes, to know he’s not my brother. I wish the same blood flowed through both our bodies, and without thinking past that, my fingers go to the pendant at my throat. There, my voice catches.
There are moments when I feel so ashamed.
“I haven’t,” I say. “Put it on.”
The hhaellesh stand at least six feet tall, and usually closer to seven or eight. Their skin is glossy black. Their digitigrade feet end in small, grasping pads; their hands end in two fingers and two opposing thumbs which are thin enough to fit into cracks and gaps and strong enough to pierce titanium composite and tear apart the alloys of landships. They are streamlined and swift, with aquiline profiles and a leaping, running gait like a cat or an impala. They can fall from high atmosphere and suffer no injury. They can jump sixteen meters in a bound. They are war machines and killing machines.
They are also human sacrifices.
I envy them.
Gods, if there was anything in the universe Elías couldn’t handle, his writers haven’t thrown it at him yet. He would know how to tell his best friend about an enlistment option. He could figure out how to deal with a hhaellesh showing up at his door.
Michel starts the playback, and I tweak the audio balance so I can hear Michel breathing while we both listen. The serials are propaganda and we know it, but they’re enjoyable propaganda, so that’s fine.
[The esshesh gave us the hhaellesh and the hhaellesh handed us the war—but if we didn’t have the hhaellesh, we’d still have Elías Perez,] the canned narrator says, and I lean into the backbeat behind his words. [Welcome to the adventure.]
Around me, the colony spreads out in its careful geometry. There’s nothing left to chance or whimsy, here, or adapted from the streets and carriageways built by another, more ancient, society. There’s no downtown you can look at and say, this predated cars and light rail. No sprawling tourist docks with names that hold onto history. This place is older than I am, but not by much; it’s only about the age of my mother.
That’s why we cling so much to ceremony, I think: it’s what we have in place of tradition. We make monuments to an ongoing war, and when the soldiers return home we have feasts, and we plan holidays to rename the Observances to the Remembrances. The war’s only just ended and in a month we’ll have three Remembrances of the War, in shiny white limestone and black edging in places of honor.
I get it.
Seriously, I do. When you don’t have history in the place you live, you have to make it up or go insane.
Earlier in the day, my mother’d shown up to the crappy little allotment I cook and sleep in but don’t spend much time in. My allotment’s on the seventeenth floor of a housing unit, which makes for a perfect launch point, and doesn’t usually get me visitors on the balcony. I was on the mat in my room, with my mattress folded up into the wall, doing pushup jump squats. They weren’t helping. I’d split my lip just a bit earlier, and since I bite when I get restless, I had the taste of blood in my mouth.
Then there she was, knocking at the lintel, and I split my lip open again.
I did a thirty-second cooldown and made myself walk to the window. If it had been dark, if the light hadn’t been scattering off the white buildings and back down from the cyan sky, it might not have glinted on her skin. She might have just been a black, alien shape like a hole in the world.
“I expected to see you at the Feast of the Return,” she said. “I registered my arrival.”
“I was busy,” I lied.
She regarded me, quietly. And although I didn’t want to, I invited her in.
When I first met Michel, he was walking along the rails of the pedestrian bridge by the Second General Form School. I was in Second General Form mostly because my father had hired a tutor before we came to the colony; my education in Shivaji Administrative District hadn’t exactly been compatible with the colony’s educational tracks. I was new, and didn’t know any of my classmates. We knew each other’s names from the class introductions, so Michel didn’t bother to introduce himself.
“Settle an argument,” he said. “I think Elías is in love with Seve, and Seve just thinks he’s ridiculous. My cousin thinks Seve loves Elías but doesn’t want to show it, and Elías is just friendly and chirpy to everyone, so he doesn’t even see anything weird about acting like that at Seve. You should tell her I’m right.”
I shook my head. “Elías? Is that the government stuff? I don’t listen to that.”
“Wha-a-at?” Michel asked, bobbing the a. “Come on, everyone listens to Elías!”
“My dad says it’s just propaganda,” I said, and I remember that little preadolescent me felt damn proud of herself and all smart and grown-up to be slinging around words like propaganda. “They just make it so people will want to join the war.”
“Well, duh,“ Michel said. “Everybody knows that. But it’s cool! Come on, lemme tell you about this time that Elías got stuck on this planet; they were trying to make it into a colony, but there was a whole swarm of the enemy and his ship was broken and he couldn’t take off . . . ”
Elías always found a way through, and by the end of the day, I was listening to the show. I never helped Michel settle his argument, but I came to my own conclusions.
Today’s episode opens with the soundscape that means Elías is on the bridge of the Command and Control station in the sector designated as the Fro
nt. Meaning he’s on the front lines. Last time that happened, he was in a story arc that had him working with the Coalition forces, which he hates to do; Elías isn’t really an official sort of guy.
[“If our intelligence reports are correct,”] says the voice of Commodore Shah, [“we’re about to lose the war.”]
The art of the gentle lead-in is verboten in Elías Perez.
[“A larger enemy presence than any we’ve ever seen is massing at Huracán II. We believe they’ll use this staging ground to launch a major, unified offensive on the colonies.”]
[“You want us to what?”] That’s Seve, the captain of Elias’ ship. She snickers. [“Take out a whole fleet of the bastids? Hah. No bones in that dog.”]
“Oh, Seve,” Michel says. Seve’s got a stack of sayings that only make sense to her—and to Elías, nowadays, though they didn’t always. Elías and Seve have been partners since Episode 3, where Elías stowed aboard Seve’s pirate ship and ended up saving it when it was infested by the enemy. Seve turned around and said, there, that paid Elías’ boarding fee; what was he going to pay for passage?
I’m a fan of Elías and Seve. Love at first uncompromising deal. And she isn’t the kind to think the end of the war obligates her into anything.
[“If their war force goes unopposed, the enemy will be able to sweep through our territories unopposed. The Coalition doesn’t have the fleet strength to stop them.”]
There’s a subtle swell in the background music, a rumble of drums and solar radio output, and a thrill goes through me. The writers can play drama with our fear of the war: for most of us, it’s the fun kind of fear where something is technically possible but pretty damn unlikely, like an asteroid crashing into the colony. After we lost the Painter settlement, the war was always off somewhere out there; we sent out troops, we made our hhaellesh, but it’s not like we were really under threat of invasion. I don’t think our colony even had an invasion plan in place, beyond the esshesh defense emplacements. We all got a little afraid, but the fear was a what if, on an off-chance, someday . . . and not a when, as it will, this happens to us.