A Lunatic Fear

by B. A. Chepaitis

  He turned to his computer, and pulled up a file he’d compiled on another interesting criminal from Ranalli, Connecticut who’d recently arrived on Planetoid Three. Brendan Farley, convicted of setting off a pesticide bomb in a local mall.

  As soon as Alex began to suspect his three new prisoners were exposed to Artemis he’d started checking on other crimes in their town. If there was a processing plant nearby, odds were high that other women would be feeling the results. He found aggravated assaults were way up among women, and there were an unusually high number of suicides in the last month. But the crime that really interested him was the mall bombing.

  There was no evidence that Artemis affected men, so this could easily be some other form of madness, but Farley was from the same town. And now he was on the Planetoid, in his zone, under Supervisor Sheila Radowitz and Teacher Nance Faddegon, two women he had a good working relationship with. He could certainly pay Brendan a visit and see what turned up.

  The information Alex had on him was just local news reports, so he continued staring at it only as a place to put his eyes while he waited for more. A knock on the door signaled that it had arrived.

  “Enter,” he said, and the door opened. Team member Rachel Shofet came in and put three disks down in front of him.

  “You find Jaguar?” she asked.

  “Here and gone,” Alex said. “Is this the Farley material?”

  “It is. You know he’s with Nance Faddegon?”

  “I do. She’s good with recidivist con men and frauds.”

  “I thought he was an ecoterrorist.”

  “He just wants to make it look that way.” He shook his head at her questioning glance. “It’s just something I suspect.”

  “Oh. That,” she said. She had reason to know the kind of empathic skills both he and Jaguar regularly used. “You need anything else?”

  “Just some research,” Alex said.

  Rachel’s face lit up at the prospect. She was his best researcher, and quickly becoming his best hacker, though he knew he probably shouldn’t encourage her in that.

  He tapped a finger against his lips and thought. Brendan Farley’s file would include his testing report, psychological profile, personal and professional history. Alex wanted more.

  “Just in case, go ahead and set up interview time with some of Farley’s co-workers, friends, if he had any. The usual.”

  “Won’t that be in his prelims?”

  “I’m guessing nobody asked how he felt about moon mining,” Alex said.

  Rachel, long-time friend to Jaguar and the most trustworthy team member Alex had, knew all about his suspicions. She’d be the only one who could ask the right questions, if it looked like they had to be asked.

  “You want me to poke around about it?”

  “That’s the idea. And you’ll let me know if there’s any unusual reactions. I also want a list of all the existing Hague research facilities, who’s running them, what they’re doing at them.”

  “That’s all public record stuff. Should be easy. Is that it?”

  “Just one more thing. I want Board agenda memos.”

  Rachel lifted her head from the notes she was making. “You mean - minutes of meetings?”

  “I mean memos. The kind they shoot back and forth to each other over their private lines.”

  “I don’t have access to that,” Rachel said. “Not officially.”

  “But you can get it.”

  She cleared her throat. “Technically, that’s a violation. In the code books.”

  Alex swiveled in his chair and said nothing.

  She sighed. “How far back?”

  “Six months’ll be fine.”

  She nodded. “What in particular am I looking for?”

  “Any mention at all about the moon. Any discussion of the Hague repeal of moon mining. Like that.”

  “Um – am I allowed to ask why?”

  “You are, but you won’t get much answer yet. Except I’m hearing rumors about Planetoid interest in repealing the moratorium and I want to check it out.”

  Rachel frowned. “Does Jaguar know about that?” she asked.

  “Not yet. I don’t want to get her motor running until I have more than local gossip to fuel it with. If you come up with anything, I’ll let her know right away.”

  Her frown deepened and Alex laughed. “We’ve avoided killing each other so far. I think you can relax.”

  “I’ll work on it,” she said, still not quite convinced. “When do you want this?”

  “No rush. Tomorrow is fine.”

  Rachel groaned and rolled her eyes. But Alex knew her. First thing in the morning, most of what he wanted would be downloaded into his computer.

  Chapter 2

  The deep green coating of the night surrounded them, a liquid blanket of breathing leaves and moss, the scent of rotting and growing and growing and rotting smooth in their nostrils.

  Jaguar surveyed the women crouched at her feet. Their eyes were big and their naked skin shone in the softly filtered moonlight. They stared up at her, not moving, not speaking, the rate of their breathing the only indication of their fear. They were her prisoners, and she’d brought them to the old forest eco-site between day and dusk to begin what looked like a challenging program.

  “You’re murderers,” she said. “All of you. What punishment do you deserve?”

  Terez lowered her head, silky blonde hair covering her face. Karena poked a finger into the dirt, her painted nail carving small holes through dead leaves. Fiore bared her teeth in a grin. Nobody spoke, but she could hear the hiss and spark of their answer.

  Death, they did not say.

  Jaguar chuckled. “Death would be too easy.”

  Terez and Karena swayed and moaned, rolled back on their haunches and covered their heads with their hands.

  Jaguar’s hand shot out and slapped Karena in the face. The moaning ceased.

  She cast her gaze around the eco-site, with its high pines, birch saplings that stretched toward light, and floor padded with soft, wet leaves. “We’re going to make a sweat lodge,” she said. “Start gathering wood.”

  The women stared at her blankly, and Jaguar shook her head. They were suburban women, all some flavor of Christian, used to the polite smiles and good clothes of Sunday church services. Spiritual ceremonies conducted naked on the damp earth were totally foreign to them. They had no idea what a sweat lodge was.

  “Just do what I tell you,” Jaguar said, and set them to their tasks.

  She took on the job of cutting saplings and bending them to the curves that would be the dome frame of a sweat lodge, which they would cover in the skins they’d carried into the woods from her vehicle. Fiore chopped wood into kindling for the fire they’d build. Terez gathered stones that would be heated in the fire. Karena dug a pit for the center of the lodge, where the heated stones would go once the ceremony began.

  Their three bodies moved like patches of moonlight through the trees. They worked without speaking to her or each other, only occasionally asking for her attention nonverbally, to make sure they were doing their jobs correctly. Jaguar worked and listened to the language of their gestures as they performed their various tasks.

  Terez, young and blonde and lovely, carried stones tentatively, one at a time, stumbling frequently over tree roots. She would place a stone near the circle where the fire was to be built, then stop and stare at Jaguar. When Jaguar smiled at her, she jerked her head away and went back to work.

  Until a few weeks ago, she’d been a mathematics professor at a University, studying infinity, enjoying a perfect life with a perfect house and marriage. Then she killed her husband with a meat cleaver while preparing a vegetable stir-fry. Her crime was discovered when a colleague of her husband showed up at the house to see why he hadn’t come to work, and found a blood-spattered Terez sitting at the table, staring at a plate full of cold human parts mixed in artful arrangement with miniature corn and straw mushrooms. All she would say at the t
rial was that she was tired of being a vegetarian.

  Since her sentencing to Planetoid Prison Three, she’d said nothing else, and it was Jaguar’s job to find out what lay under her continued silence.

  Karena worked awkwardly, shoveling dirt slowly, stopping to brush the dirt off her rings, clean out a nail. She would pat at her head, as if to keep her close-cropped, carefully groomed curly dark hair in its place. She didn’t seem aware of Jaguar’s watchful eye. All her concern focused on somehow staying clean as she worked the earth.

  In contrast, Fiore’s muscled back bent to her task with ease, and she didn’t stop to wipe the sweat off her face as she worked. Periodically, though, she would straighten her spine, press her hand against her lower back and lift her eyes to the moon, breathing deeply as if light and air were equally necessary for her lungs.

  Jaguar watched, and listened to the spark and hiss of their unspoken fears. They wanted her to kill them, she knew. It would be easier than facing the tangle of power, desire and fear they were caught in.

  The women worked together to pile the stones and cover them with wood and brush. The air, heavy and humid, defied the fire at first, and the three women struggled with matches as kindling caught and spit and refused to burn. Fiore stood over Karena and Terez impatiently, her dark skin shiny with sweat, and the silver streak in her black hair accenting the high color of her face and eyes.

  She was 44 when she discovered she was pregnant for the first time, after being told she’d never bear children. The pregnancy proceeded without trouble until she began having labor pains in her sixth month. She was home by herself at the time, but she didn’t call a midwife. Instead she gave birth alone and easily, and her husband came home to find her licking at the remains of the tiny head.

  Fiore pushed the other two women aside and grabbed the matches from them. She knelt in front of the fire and struck three against the box. She walked the circle of piled wood, directing the fire to the four quarters as Jaguar showed her. In her hand the blaze caught, her breath spreading the flames around the circle and toward the wood at the center, casting sharp points of shadow and light across the faces of the women.

  Jaguar watched, letting the moon pour light into her, chanting the song her grandfather taught her to invite the play of spirit in.

  Two hours passed as the rocks heated and Jaguar chanted and the moon ran in her course through the sky. The women began chanting with her, waiting for what they supposed was their punishment. They showed no signs of fatigue. The energy that coursed through them from the Artemis compound wouldn’t let them rest. Jaguar could feel the pull of it as the ritual space unfolded around them.

  When the fire began to die down, Jaguar let Fiore kick the logs out of the way to reveal the glowing stones, and instructed her how to pick them up with the pitchfork, welcome them into the lodge with sage and water, slide them into the pit at the center. Then, she led the women inside the lodge.

  As she knelt and pulled back the deerskin that covered the opening to the dome, she looked down and saw that blood stained the inside of her thigh, a warm trickle of red sliding from her body onto the earth. Fiore, looking at her from inside the dome, laughed as if she knew. The other women took up her laughter. They were all menstruating, sweat and blood mingling in a space much darker than any night.

  The heat rose to a palpable mass as she pulled the deerskin down to cover the entrance to the sweat lodge. Once inside, she fed the fiery stones with sage, then poured water onto them. They sang as steam swarmed them. Even in the first round, where they honored the spirits of the East, it was a hot sweat. By the second round the other women had lowered themselves to the baseline of the lodge where they sucked in cool earth and moaned out responses to her chanting. She could feel the breathy openness of empathic space in them and around them. None had tested positive for psi capacities, but the sweat lodge sometimes opened regions long closed. And there was no telling what effect the Artemis compounds would have on any latent skills. No one had ever studied that. She’d find out more in the third round, when she’d make her first empathic contact with them.

  She could hear Alex cautioning her against this, especially in the round of the West, called the House of No Words in Jaguar’s tradition. This was the place of death, the place of the ancestors and the black jaguar. Here you ceased being fully human or fully alive. You spoke only in the howls that came from the bottom of your belly and the scream that lived inside your throat. If she contacted them here she’d be touching primal energy, and that was risky. But it was also effective.

  When she closed the door after the second round and poured more water on the stones, an inescapable fury of heat blanketed their skin. Jaguar tilted her head back and howled, and the other women followed suit, moaning and keening, barking and yipping and growling as she crawled around the pit, feeling her way through the absolute dark.

  She reached Karena first. Karena, silent except for a whispered groan.

  Placing her hands around Karena’s head, she intoned the ritual words that asked entrance to this psyche. Terez and Fiore screeched, but the sound of their voices left her as she felt her way through Karena’s interior world.

  Hollow silence. Infinitely sterile emptiness, clamoring silently to be filled. To be filled. To be filled.

  Karena worked for La Femme, women’s health and beauty products, but her personnel file wasn’t included in her packet, so Jaguar didn’t know how long she’d shown signs of trouble. She was here because she’d walked into a department store and pointed a gun at a cashier. He frantically handed over the money in his drawer, but Karena fired on him anyway, then turned her weapon on the other dozen people there. When the police arrived, she was struggling with a shopping bag, dragging it toward the door. The policeman who took it from her went white when he looked inside, then dropped the bag, spilling dismembered hands and feet and ears and breasts all over the marble floor.

  “I was hungry,” Karena told the police.

  Jaguar drifted in the vast white emptiness she cradled at her core, and breathed in the necessity of it. She would go no further with her. Tonight was just the first contact with each woman, a brief listening.

  She released her hold and groped through the darkness to Terez, her beauty palpable even when vision was denied. Jaguar held her face gently, spoke quietly into the squealing terror of her mind, and found herself slipping into a space as rich and fertile as the rainforest.

  There was rapture here, fleshy and sinuous with desire. A pounding and pulsing life-force, wanting to feast not so much out of hunger, but out of a sense of abundance. Yes. It said only yes and yes and yes again.

  “Yes,” Jaguar whispered back, “and yes again.”

  She let her go and moved to Fiore, who barked and howled and called out all the sounds of wild animals caught in the grip of commune with the night. Jaguar had to struggle to keep a firm grasp on her, her hands caught in her hair as she worried her noises like a dog with a bone.

  There was joy in the storm of her voice, which managed somehow to remain profoundly serene within its own rage. A serene and free rage. A wild calm. Some improbable meeting of all that. A complexity, powerful and rich and complete as fire. To Jaguar it felt almost like home. With reluctance, she released her and crawled back over the slippery wet earth to her place.

  She took a ladle of water from the bucket and tossed it onto the stones. As the heat hissed and seethed around them she breathed deeply, releasing any toxins she might have absorbed from the contact through the air of her lungs and the water pouring from her skin.

  Aaiiyah, the women called out to the night.

  Aaiyah they sang into the darkness and into her and into their own souls. When it was time, she held her hand up for silence, and though they couldn’t see it, they were suddenly still. Jaguar spoke through the stillness.

  “I myself, spirit in flesh speak,” she said softly, and slid into her own center to meet what swam there.

  Saw a woman feral and balanced
. Saw a forest of knowledge she crawled through in darkness.

  Touched the edge of a wordless whisper. The sigh of movement. That swift blackness which led her with vision thirty times more accurate than human sight.

  She breathed in the blessing of that presence, and let it pull her into the spinning darkness, felt herself curling like a leaf within a coil of wind, lifted toward a translucent moon, trying to burst into fullness. She reached for it, all of her pulled to that source.

  Grandmother Moon.

  She was lifted to a place where light poured down around her, cool and sweet as a child’s hand in hers, bathing her in the same wild calm she felt from Fiore, who must be a daughter of the moon, a huntress. Light poured through her, cool and sweet as dreams.

  She rested in it, let it rest in her.

  In this light she saw herself facing a man. Someone young and old at the same time. Sad and quiet and full of rage, filled with death. She turned from him and saw another man, one she knew. She felt the warmth of his desire mixing with her own as the great grandmother light of the moon poured cool over them both. He raised a hand to her face, and it was covered in blood.

  Aaaiyah. Aaaiyah Nissa nissa.

  She saw his hand covered in blood and the moon pouring out a silken scarf of more blood to cover him, drowning them both in blood and more blood.

  Blood on the moon, and the scream of pain that followed.

  She opened her eyes, gasped, and shook herself out of the vision.

  Blood on the moon.

  “Open the door,” she said hoarsely to Terez, who sat nearest. Terez flung the canvas covering up and the three women crowded to it, gasping, steam flowing out in front of them like a river bursting through a dam.

  Jaguar lay down and let them breathe. They had one more round to go, but they’d get water and a little cool air before they started. She needed to regroup anyway. Needed to climb back in to her own skin so she could conduct the last round.

  Blood on the moon.

  Phase psychosis. Artemis compounds. Women bleeding, going mad. She was bleeding now, too. Blood on her thigh, and on the thighs of all the women here, and on the moon.