Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  Riding upward on the straining elevators, Bree felt that the taint of un-cleanness was gone, washed away, maybe, by the sweet tears she had shed. She felt a great, general affection for the crowds she rode with; their patience with the phlegmatic elevator, the small jokes they made at it—“very grave it is,” someone said; “Well, gravity is its business,” said another—the nearness and warmth of their bodies, the sense that she was enveloped by their spirits as by breath: all this felt supremely right. What was the word the Bible used? Justified. That was what she felt as she rode the great distance to her level: justified.

  She and Meric made love later, in the way they had gradually come most to want each other. They lay near each other, almost not touching, and with the least possible contact they helped each other, with what seemed infinite slowness, to completion, every touch, even of a fingertip, made an event by being long withheld. They knew each other’s bodies so well now, after many years, since they were children, that they could almost forget what they did, and make a kind of drunkenness or dream between them; other times, as this time, it was a peace: it suspended them together in some cool flame where each nearly forgot the other, feeling only the long, retarded, rearising, again retarded, and at last inevitable arrival, given to each in a vacuum as though by a god.

  Sleep was only a gift of the same god’s left hand after these nearly motionless exertions; Bree was asleep before she took her hand from Meric. But, much as he expected sleep, Meric lay awake, surprised to feel dissatisfaction. He lay beside Bree a long time. Then he rose; she made a motion, and he thought she might wake, but she only, as though under water, rolled slowly to her side and composed herself otherwise, in a contentment that for some reason lit a small flame of rage in him.

  What’s wrong with me?

  He went out onto the terrace, his body enveloped suddenly in wind, cold and sage-odorous. The immensity of night above and below him, the nearness of the sickle moon, and the great distance of the earth were alike claustrophobic, and how could that be?

  Far off, miles perhaps, he could just see for a moment a tiny, clouded orange spark. A fire lit on the plains. Where no fire was ever to be lit again. For some reason, his heart leapt at that thought.

  In the mornings, Meric moved comfortably in seas of people going from nightwork or to daywork, coming from a thousand meetings and masses, many of them badged alike or wearing tokens of sodalities or work groups or carrying the tools of trades. Most wore Blue. Some, like himself, were solitary. Not seas of people, then, but people in a sea: a coral reef, dense with different populations, politely crossing one another’s paths without crossing one another’s purposes. He went down fifty levels; it took most of an hour.

  “Two or three things we know,” Emma Roth told him as she made tea for them on a tiny burner. “We know they’re not citizens of anywhere, not legally. So maybe none of the noninfringement treaties we have with other governments applies to them.”

  “Not even the Federal?”

  “It’s all men that are created equal,” Emma said. “Anyway, what can the Federal do? Send in some thugs to shoot them? That seems to be all they know how to do these days.”

  “What else do we know?”

  “Where they are, or were yesterday.” She was no geographer; the maps she had pinned to the wall were old paper ones, survey maps with many corrections. “Here.” She made a small mark with delible pencil. Meric thought suddenly that after all no mark she could make would be small enough; it would blanket them vastly.

  “We know they’re all one family.”

  “Pride,” Meric said.

  Emma regarded him, a strange level look in her hooded gray eyes. “They’re not lions, Meric. Not really. Don’t forget that.” She lit a cigarette, though the nearly extinguished stub of another lay near her in an ashtray. Smoking was perhaps Emma’s only vice; she indulged it continuously and steadily, as though to insult her own virtue, as a leavening. Almost nobody Meric knew smoked; Emma was always being criticized for it, subtly or openly, by people who didn’t know her. “Well,” she’d say, her voice gravelly with years of it, “I’ve got so much punishment stored up in hell for me that one more sin won’t matter. Besides”—it was a tenet of the cheerful religion she practiced—“what’s all this fear of sin? If God made hell, it must be heaven in disguise.”

  Meric returned to the recorder he was trying to fix. It was at least thirty years old and incompatible with most of his other equipment, and it broke or rather gave out in senile exhaustion frequently. But he could make it do. “Are they, what do you call it, poaching?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Somebody ought to find out.” With an odd, inappropriate sense that he was tattling, he said: “I saw a fire last night.”

  “A lot of people did. I’ve had pneumos about it all day.” With comic exactness, the tube at her side made its hiccup, and she extracted the worn, yellowed-plastic container. She read the message, squinting one eye against the smoke rising from her cigarette, and nodded.

  “It’s from the ranger station,” she said. “They are poaching.” She sighed, and wiped her hands on her coat of Blue as though the message had stained them. “Dead deer have been found.”

  Meric saw her distress, and thought: there are nearly a hundred thousand of us; there can’t be more than a dozen of them. There are a thousand square miles out there. Yet he could see in Emma the same fear that he sensed in Bree, and in himself. Who were they that they could rouse the Mountain this way?

  “Monsters,” Emma said, as though answering.

  “Listen,” he said. “We should know more. I don’t mean just you and me. Everybody. We should… I’ll tell you what. I’ll go out there, with the H5 and some discs, and get some information. Something we can all look at.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. They’re poaching. What else do we need to know?”

  “Emma,” he said. “What’s wrong with you? Wolves aren’t poachers. Hawks aren’t poachers. You’re losing your perspective.”

  “Wolves and hawks,” Emma said, “don’t use rifles.” She picked up the message. “Shot with old-style high-caliber ballistic weapon. Liver, heart removed, and most of the long muscle. Rest in a high state of decomposition.”

  Meric saw in his mind an image from the Birthday Show, a bit of some long-dead family-man’s home movies, he assumed: hunters, laughing and proud, in antique dress, surrounded a deer, shot, presumed dead. The deer suddenly twitched, its eye rolling, blood gushing from its mouth. The men appeared startled at first; then one drew a long blade, and as the others stood near, brave beside this thing so nearly dead, he slashed the deer’s throat. It seemed easy, like slashing a rubber bag. Blood rushed out, far more than seemed likely. Emma’s voice said: “As ye do unto these, the least of my brethren, you do unto me.” He’d always (however often, with repugnance, he passed this scene in his workprints) wondered what those men had felt: any remorse, any disgust even? He had read about the joy of the hunt and the capture; but that was over, here. Shame? Dread? That blood: that eye.

  “Let me go,” he said. “I’d be back in a week.”

  “You’d have to be careful. They’re armed.” She said the word as though it took courage to say, as though it were obscene.

  “Enemy is a name for someone you don’t know.” It was a proverb of the Mountain’s. “I’ll be careful.”

  The rest of that day he prepared his equipment, making as certain as he could that it would function, working from a checklist of emergency spares and baling-wire (a term he used, without knowing what it had once meant, for little things he found useful for making repairs, making do). In the evening he went to visit friends, borrowing things to make up a pack. He took a scabbard knife.

  He lay that night sleepless as well.

  “It makes me nervous,” Bree said to him. “How long will you be?”

  “Not long. A week.” He took her wrist, brown and smooth as a sapling. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If I’m not
back in a week, send a pneumo to Grady. Tell him something’s up, and to come on if he thinks it’s right.”

  Grady was a ranger whom Bree had once had an affair with: brown as she was, but humorless, dense, as hard and reliable as she was evanescent. He was a member of the small, highly trained team in the Mountain allowed weapons—net-guns, tranquilizing guns, theoretically only for wildlife.

  Wildlife.

  “Grady would know,” Bree said, and withdrew her wrist from his hand. She didn’t like to be touched while she slept.

  He’d often wondered what Bree and Grady had been for each other. Bree had been frank about other lovers she’d had. About Grady, when he asked, she only said, “It was different,” and looked away. He wanted to ask more, but he sensed the door shut.

  He wanted to see. He wanted to enter into darkness, any darkness, all darkness, and see in it with sudden cat’s eyes: nothing withheld. He realized, at the moment Bree took her wrist from him, that this was his nature: it was a simple one, but it had never been satisfied. Not so far.

  Genesis Preserve occupied a space in the northwest of the Northern Autonomy about where the heart would be in a body. The multilane freeways that cut it into irregular chambers were used now only by crows, who dropped snails onto them from heights to break the shells. Two hundred years ago it had been farms, hard-scrabble Yankee enterprises on a difficult frontier. Never profitable, the farmers had mostly given up by the beginning of the twentieth century, though the stone houses they had made by gleaning glacier-scattered fieldstone from their pastures remained here and there, roofless and barnless, home for owls and swallows. It had never ranked high in the last century’s ephemeral vacation places: no real mountains to ski in the cruel winters, and an unlovely, barren upland, in summer. Yet, by count, its swamps and variegated woods, its rocky fields and dense meadows harbored more varieties of life than did most equivalent cuts of earth. And it belonged to no one but them.

  Meric was no outdoorsman. It was a skill few in the Mountain possessed, though many held it up as an ideal; it was thought to require a special kind of careful expertise, like surgery. He bore his time on the ground well, though; life in the Mountain was austere enough that short rations of dull food, cold nights, long walking didn’t seem to be hardship. That was more or less how life was most of the time. And the solitudes, the sense that he was utterly alone in an unpeopled place that didn’t want him there and would take no notice if, say, he fell down rocks and broke a leg, the hostility of night and its noises that kept his sleep fitful, all this seemed to be as it should. He had no rights in the Preserve: its princes, who protected it, were, when they entered it, nothing.

  On the second day, toward evening, he came in sight of the pride.

  He stayed well away, behind cover of a brush-overgrown wall, on a rise above where they had made camp. From his pack he chose a telephoto lens and, with an odd shiver as though the false nearness it gave him could make them somehow conscious of him as well, he began his spying.

  They had chosen one of the roofless stone farmhouses as a base or a windbreak. Smoke from a fire rose up from within it. Around it were two or three carelessly pitched tents; a paintless and ancient four-wheel van; a kind of gypsy wagon of a sort he’d never seen before, and a hobbled mule near it, cropping. And there was an expertly made construction of poles and rope, a kind of gallows, from which hung, by its delicate hind legs, a deer. A doe. Focusing carefully, Meric could see the carcass turning very slowly in the breeze. There was no other movement. Meric felt the tense expectancy of a voyeur watching an empty room, waiting.

  What was it that suddenly made him snap his head around with a stifled cry? Perhaps while his eyes were concentrating on the camp, other senses were gathering small data from his surroundings, data that added up without his being aware of it till an alarm went off within him.

  Some fifty feet behind him a young male leo squatted in the grass, long gun across his knees, watching him steadily, without curiosity or alarm.

  “What is it you want?” Emma Roth said coldly, hoping to imply that whatever it was they wanted, they had no chance of getting it.

  The three Federal agents before her, to whom she hadn’t offered seats, looked from one to another as though trying to decide who should do the talking. Only the thin, intent one in a tight black suit, who hadn’t produced credentials, remained aloof.

  “A leo,” one of them said at last, producing a dossier or file of some kind and exhibiting it to Roth, not as though he meant her to examine it, but only as a kind of ritual object, a token of his official status. “We have reason to believe that there is an adult male leo within the Preserve, who at one time called himself Painter. He’s a murderer and a kidnapper. It’s all here.” He tapped the file. “He abducted an indentured servant north of the border and fled south. In the process he murdered—with his bare hands”—here the agent exhibited his own meaty ones—“an officer of an official Federal search party on other business.”

  “He murdered him on other business?” God, she hated the way they talked: as though it weren’t they but some dead glum bureaucratic deity who spoke through them, and they were oracles only and had nothing to do with it.

  “The officer was on other business,” the agent said.

  “Oh.”

  “We understand there is a formality to go through about getting safe-conducts or warrants to go into the Preserve and make an arrest….”

  “You don’t understand.” She lit a cigarette. “There are no formalities. What there is is an absolute ban on entering the Preserve at all, on whatever pretext. This is a protocol signed by the Federal and the Autonomy governments. It works this way: you ask permission to move onto the Preserve or enter the Mountain on what you call official business; and we refuse permission. That’s the way it works.” Twenty years of bribery, public pressure, and passive resistance had gone into those protocols and agreements; Roth knew where she stood.

  “Excuse me, Director.” The man in black spoke. It was a tight little voice with an edge of repressed fury in it that was alarming. “We understand about permission. We’d like to put in a formal request. We’d like you to listen to our reasons. That’s what he meant.”

  “Don’t call me Director,” Emma said.

  “Isn’t that your title, your job description?”

  “My name is Roth. And who are you?”

  “My name is Barron,” he said quickly, as though offering in return for her name something equally useless. “Union for Social Engineering, Hybrid Species Project. I’m attached to these officers in an advisory capacity.”

  She should have known. The cropped hair, the narrow, careless suit, the air of being a useful cog in a machine that had not yet been built. “Well.” The word fell on them with the full censorious weight of her great voice. “And what are these reasons.”

  “How much do you know,” the USE man asked, “about the parasociety the leos have generated since they’ve been free-living?”

  “Very little. I’m not sure I know what a parasociety is. They’re nomads…”

  With a dismissive gesture whose impatience he couldn’t quite hide, Barron began to speak rapidly, his points tumbling over one another, stitched together with allusions to studies and statistics and court decisions Roth had never heard of. Out of the quick welling of his certainty, though, she did gather facts; facts that made her uncomfortable.

  The leos’ only loyalty was to their pride. Whether they had inherited this trait from their lion ancestors or had consciously modeled themselves on lion society wasn’t known, because they felt no loyalty to the scientific community that had given them birth, and had freed them in order to study them, and so no human investigators were allowed among them to verify hypotheses. No human laws bound them. No borders were respected by them. Again, it was impossible to tell whether these attitudes were deliberate or the result of an intelligence too low to comprehend human values.

  Smug, thought Roth: “an intelligence too low…�
�� Couldn’t it be a heart too great?

  Given a small population, Barron went on, and the fact of polygamy and extended families, young leos find it difficult to mate. At maturity, they usually leave or are thrown out of the pride. Their state of psychic tension can be imagined. Their connection to the pride, their only loyalty, has been broken. Aggressive, immensely strong, subhuman in intelligence, and out to prove their strength in the world, the young leos are completely uncontrollable and extremely violent. Barron could give her instances of violent crime—crime rates among this population as compared to an equivalent human group, resisting arrest for instance, assaulting an officer…

  “Is this one you’re after,” Roth broke in, “one of these young ones?”

  “That hasn’t been determined yet.”

  “He is one of a pride, you know.” She wished instantly that she hadn’t said that. The officers exchanged looks; Roth could tell that in fact they hadn’t known. Yet why should she want to keep it secret? Only because the Mountain never gave away anything, no scrap even of information, to the outside society from which they took nothing? Anyway, it was out. “How did you come to learn he was in the Preserve?”

  “We’re not at liberty to say,” said the USE man. “The information is reliable.” He leaned forward, lacing his fingers together; his eyes rifled earnestness at her relentlessly. “Director, I understand that you feel deeply about the inviolability of your area here. We respect that. We want to help you preserve it. This leo or leos are in violation of it. Now, you’re very peace-loving here”—a fleeting smile of complicity—“and of course we interface with you there, USE is of course strictly pacifist. So we feel that these leos, who as we’ve pointed out are all armed and violent, can’t be handled by the means you have, which are peaceful and thus inadequate. The Federal government, then, is offering you aid in removing this violation of your space.

  “Of course,” he concluded, “you do want the violation removed.”

  For some reason, Emma saw in her mind Meric Landseer’s long patient fingers moving with fine sensitivity to find the flaw in an old, well-loved, much-used machine.