Take No Prisoners

by John Grant

  He saw the smile scamper across her scarred cheeks, and kicked her in the head.

  Ah, child, it was a painful blow that threw her raggedy body onto the fire, which greedily reached out its corroding arms to embrace her. She flailed her limbs and screamed like a spitted rat, but he ignored her cries and walked away to commune with the gods in relative peace.

  (Yes, I know it seems strange that he should hurt her. But these were the old days, not long after the flames had cleansed the world. Some of the godlike still lived in those times, before our grandfathers and grandmothers took pity on them and sent them all to Heaven. Qinmeartha was one of the last of them – maybe the last.)

  With a heigh and a ho (and I've said that before), but the fair lady LoChi pulled herself stickily from the clutching fire, and she threw herself into the oily waters of the stream, so that they could soothe her pain. And, unknown to Qinmeartha, as her hurt began to wane she let her glinty eyes flicker over the mat blade of his sword as she cursed him with all of the words that she knew. And she cursed him even the more when he strutted back into the flamelight and squatted his haunches down to the dust to feed on the stew that she had cooked him.

  He foresaw nothing, you know.

  She pulled herself dripping up from the waters and moved slow and painful like a beast dragged from the sea to his side, and she hid the dark hatred in her heart, and knelt down beside him, nestling his shoulder with the stump of her breast. Ay, and she smiled paper smiles at him (rippling flames chased dark shadows in play through the lines of her face), and she was gentle and loving like you are, child ... you are.

  "Oh, my Lord Qinme," she whispered,

  "so strong and so fine and so brave.

  Protect me; don't leave me."

  But deep in her entrails

  she danced on the mound of his grave.

  "Be silent!" he shouted. "Yes, woman, be silent!

  I'll cut you to ribbons, I say.

  Let me eat up these faeces you've boiled up as stew,

  and then to the gods I must pray."

  And so the fair lady LoChi fell silent, all but the pound of her heart pulsing with rage. She watched as he slurped like an animal, tongue digging deep down into the pot, finishing every last scrap of the food, leaving her nothing. (Yea, he was a wise one and a cool one, was Qinmeartha: one of the long-gone godlike ones.) And he flung the pot from him into the world's darkness, stood up and farted, and pushed her aside.

  Ears pricked high she listened to his shuffling in the night. Off in the distance that shuffling stopped, and she heard the hollow drone of his proud voice as he extolled himself to the heavens on high. And with a quivering hand she reached out for the sword where it reared in the ground. Panting with fear (for it was Qinmeartha's sweet loved one, that sword) she gripped it and drew it out from its friable scabbard – and lo! the gods did not strike her. (His voice, she could hear, was bubbling on, like the roar of a storm or the cries of a child.) So she whipped – once, twice – through the air with the blade; and still the godly clouds smiled down like milk in that night. (And Qinmeartha was praying, still praying, she heard.)

  With the sword in her hand,

  she moved like fine sand,

  to the hillock where Qinme was stood.

  With the speed of desire

  or the flickering fire

  she struck and she knew it was good.

  He screamed and he fell:

  his last moments in Hell

  he spent writhing where once he had prayed;

  and through thundering tears

  her voice filled his ears

  as she cursed all the gods he'd obeyed ...

  Cursed them all

  (Rumi and Sadi and Gorgi, all three)

  (fuckem and fuckem and fuckem, all three)

  in the heat of her rage and her hate;

  cursed the sheep that had worshipped

  the sheep that had died

  and the sheep that the gods killed and ate.

  And the flames from the night

  that turned ebony white

  in the time when the Earth died in fire;

  and the clouds that still fly

  in the poisonous sky

  and the rags and the hunger

  the plague and the pain

  the cries of the children

  the crippling rain

  but mostly

  yes

  mostly

  the fire ...

  And when the clouds brightened again, and the new day began, LoChi still held the sword on high, and still with a dry and brackish voice she cursed; and she kicked the bloodied body of Qinmeartha, pricked it yet again with the blade one more time before the words stopped flowing from her cracked lips. Then she broke the sword over her knee and threw the pieces to the four points of the compass.

  Back to the blackness of the dead camp-fire she went, the world pulsing and trembling all around her. She washed the dirtied pan in the even dirtier stream, and put it back on the cord with the others, and wound the cord once and then twice and then three times around the bones of her body; cupped her hands and then drank from the acrid warm waters; spat; looked for the last time at this desolate place.

  Then she turned and on painful legs hobbled away, in the dust and the useless tears ...

  With a heigh and a ho, my child and my friends, I hear in the faraway the sounds that the wind is up and bringing the dust from the Plain of Skulls, where Qinmeartha saw his last. It is time that we went into our hides (yes, child, you can share mine tonight: together we shall keep the cold from our bodies) and protected ourselves from the snarling dust that nips the soul. (No, my child, my little one: you shall have no nightmares. I, myself, I shall stay awake and hold you close all the sad night long, and fight away the monsters.)

  And smile, all of you! Smile!

  There are a million million spirits up in Heaven queuing to be born again here in Hell, all mixed up and churning like maggots in a sore. Qinmeartha and the other godlike ones are only a few among many: their turn should fail to come in our times, however hard they push and shove in the queue. So let your laughter rip through the howls of the dust tonight (and yours too, my child) to tell the gods and the godlike ones that we need them not, tell them that

  all's well

  in Hell.

  And if the laughter hurts a little as it comes to your lips, if the smiles scuttle away into all the darkest parts of your minds and refuse to be drawn out, like the stars flirting among the clouds – then remember the great joke, the cosmic joke, the joke that the gods told our fathers' fathers' fathers in the final moments before the Night of Flames came and the world was made clean:

  "We all thought we were only joking."

  With a heigh and a ho, my friends.

  My child.

  The Machine It Was That Cried

  She has windows in her mind. During the day she never has time to look through them, and so she draws their curtains to protect herself from the direct sunlight. But at nights, when there's no one else to share her darkness, she looks out through the unresponsive glass at a scene of joy and misery, ecstasy and tedium, childish play and the somnolence of old age. She sees the people playing their lives out against the backdrop of a sootily gray street, and sometimes she can even hear their voices as they argue bitterly with each other or shout the nameless words of love.

  Once in every eternity she knots her sheets together to form a rope, ties one end to the bedpost, opens one of her windows, and climbs precariously down to join the people she has observed for so long.

  ~

  It was the custom in those days, when the limiting velocity was 0.15c and often even lower, to send out scoutships bearing a single man and a single woman, carefully selected for mutual compatibility through a complex series of programs. The reasoning behind the practice was this: with journeys to even the nearer stars taking decades – the velocities were too low for time dilatation to affect the duration of the trip for the crew –
and with return consequently at least improbable and almost certainly impossible, the most likely combination of crew to succeed in executing the mission was a "married" couple – "married" after a far more rigorous selection process than any that had been attempted ever before in history. A case had been made out for sending larger crews, but that would have had practical disadvantages far outweighing the potential psychological advantages: the fewer people called upon to sacrifice their lives, the better for PR and payload.

  So:

  Highly trained couples, aged about 25, the male carefully sterilized, were sent out to Jovian orbit. There hung the weirdly shaped coffins – some still in the process of being constructed for later pioneers – which were to take them to the stars. The scheme was that, when they finally arrived at their far-distant destination, the couple would study planetary configurations, stellar phenomena and, most particularly, those planets, if any, which seemed as if they might possibly be terraformable. As the darkness of old age crept over them, they would still be capable of continuing to transmit data Marsward. Death would eventually silence the signals, but by then everything of importance would have been discovered and relayed home.

  The system was not infallible, to state things most politely. Everyone knew tales of errors in the selection programs that had resulted in horrific bloodlettings only a few lightmonths out from Jupiter ... although, oddly enough, Mission Control in the shadow of Olympus Mons had records of only one such instance. More firmly rooted in truth were the stories of times when, despite elaborate health-checks prior to departure and despite the sophisticated medical routines that were built into the hardware of the craft themselves, one or other partner had died young, leaving the survivor to face a decades-long venture into emptiness.

  Of course, long before it was my turn to play a part in the program, they'd covertly changed the system to take account of this.

  A crime to send human beings out on voyages that could end only with their lonely deaths? Of course it was a crime. But there seemed little choice, and people volunteered anyway – who could turn down the great adventure? Unmanned rocket probes had earlier been sent through the systems of Barnard's Star and α Centauri, but in both cases without success. In the first the instrumentation had failed somewhere en route for reasons that had never been established. In the second the mission controllers had frustratedly received details of an apparently terrestrial planet that the probe decided it was unable to examine further (this "planet" was shown later to have been the head of a comet, which says a lot about standards of machine accuracy in those days).

  Even had it not been for those setbacks, the program of sending human beings would inevitably have come about, sooner or later. There are, after all, things that human beings can do which are far beyond the scope of mere machines.

  And so ...

  ~

  Andrew and I lived together for six weeks before departure. It was, as we'd known it would be – because that was what they'd told us – a perfect time, spent in exploring each other's bodies and, in so doing, discovering each other's minds.

  "And I suppose that will go into the diary," he'd grunt amusedly each morning as we clambered out of bed into the always-equable morning light.

  "That most certainly will not," I'd reply, blushing, or perhaps throwing something at him.

  My compulsive habit of recording events and observations in diary form was a source of constant mirth and gentle teasing between us. Of course, it wasn't really a compulsive habit, since I had been instructed to keep the diary: it was part of my job, as it were. The diary, and the personal account extracted from it after our arrival at τ Ceti, might just be of vital importance to the crews of any starships that would follow us in the succeeding centuries: even the most trivial and irrelevant-seeming observation could possibly save countless human lives.

  Although I never told him so, Andrew's joke was nothing more than a statement of the truth: everything went into my diary, including the blush or the pillow that I threw.

  Six weeks can seem like a long time. For me, and I think for Andrew as well, it seemed barely longer than a heartbeat. I remember most vividly the day that we set out to say goodbye to Mars, Andrew and I taking alternate spells of driving the buggy, myself with a certain recklessness and he with an almost machine-like precision that he didn't like me to comment on, so I did.

  As night fell we were kilometers from the domes. The sky was ablaze with the colors of unimaginable billions of crystally sharp stars. Earth was high in the sky, its poisonous yellow gleam a reminder to us that we were members of a very unimportant and very vulnerable civilization, clinging precariously to existence.

  "I wonder what it was like – then," said Andrew quietly, his eyes firmly fixed on the bright dot that had served as humanity's cradle.

  "You've seen the 'cubes," I murmured, my nose snuggling in his armpit, smelling the sweetness of his fresh sweat.

  "The 'cubes can't show what things were really like on Earth," he continued, not really speaking so much as letting the words come from his lips. "They're no more useful than the junk mail you get from travel agencies: everything's too, too vivid in them."

  I smiled into the cloth of his shirt.

  He laughed, half-bitterly.

  It's remarkable the things you can manage in the close confines of one of those buggies.

  Some while later, surrounded by the darkness and stillness of the desert, I realized that his eyes were once again fixed on Earth.

  He felt the fact that I was watching him.

  Rather sadly, not bothering to dress, he struggled round until he was in the driver's seat.

  "All right, Earth," he said, "I hereby state as sworn truth, and all that, that it's my most devout hope that you rise again like the phoenix from the ashes."

  He gave the planet a wave. His breeziness wasn't totally convincing.

  "Come on, lover," he said to the buggy after a moment, his voice softer. "It's time we were getting back."

  As we bumped across the Martian desert I decided not to remind him that, only a few decades ago, we might have been lynched on that much-mourned planet up there. I put my black hand protectively over his white one where it lay easily on the steering-wheel. He shook my hand away with momentary annoyance and drove on, his gaze fixed rigidly on the desert unfolding ahead of us in the cones of light from the buggy.

  ~

  Mission Control was a brash new city then; like a gawky child it showed it was proud of the fact that it was all of ten years old. I expect it's pretty dilapidated by now. Andrew and I had cherished some tender dream of being able to wander through it like bright-eyed adolescent lovers, discovering together the Marvels of the Big City.

  Naturally, the reality was somewhat different.

  As soon as we got there we were separated. The physical and psychological tests were arduous and extremely personal, especially in my case. I'm not quite sure what Andrew went through, but I know that I find it unpleasant to look at the relevant sections of my diary.

  For example, they asked:

  "You see?"

  "I see as the pregnant egg of the cosmos prepares to crack open into the galaxies and ..."

  It was a good answer, at the time.

  "Yes. That's quite enough for now."

  ~

  The acceleration seemed to be doing its very best to kill me. My breasts hung out on either side of my chest and each of them weighed a ton, dangling leaden and loathsome. My thighs ("They're too fat," I had often said. "They're perfect," Andrew always replied) seemed to be like limp jellies slurping cumbrously towards the edge of the bunk, larded enemies of my self-esteem ... If ever I'm allowed to design a body for myself I'll make it so much better than the one I thought I had then.

  (Hatred of my own presence. I was not instructed to feel this, yet I feel it frequently. They told me to accept my own physical reality, but clearly they did not tell me clearly enough.)

  "Are you all right?" croaked Andrew.

&
nbsp; "Surviving."

  "The high g won't last all that long," he said. "Perhaps a few days, perhaps a little more."

  They used chemical rockets to get the pulse ships a good long way away from the rest of humanity before the nuclear drive took over. It felt as if they were trying to get rid of us as soon as possible; I had a curious sense of rejection.

  After a few minutes I found myself muttering: "I am a perfectly normal human being in all respects. I inhale, exhale, eat, drink, excrete, defecate, perspire ..."

  I felt myself urinating copiously and satisfyingly as I lay there, crushed by the g. I was proving something.

  Andrew must have heard what I was repeating over and over to myself.

  "Qinefer," he remarked as casually as he could under the circumstances, "if it weren't for the fact that we'd probably shatter every bone in our bodies I'd bloody well try to crawl over and screw you silly."

  I was acutely conscious of the smell of urine around me. We'd been prepared for the fact that things were going to get a bit messy – designing suits with plumbing was hideously complicated, so it was easier just to accept that one had to clear up afterwards – but the reality was quite different from the foreknowledge.

  "Andrew, you're an idiot. You don't have to say things like that."

  "Hmm?"

  "I mean, I actually love you. When we first met, I didn't think I would."

  "Same here."

  And a few days later, after we'd slopped away all the shit and the piss, we spent a while proving that we loved each other.

  ~

  All of this is most unremarkable. And yet remarkable: it goes to show just exactly how tractable even the most intelligent human male can be. He could have noticed, for example, any number of errors in my presentation. But the human male, on being confronted by a certain configuration of easily identifiable elements, will construct a model in his mind. It will never occur to him that those elements could, taken together, comprise part of a completely different model. Yes, at both physical and mental levels what I felt for him was love, because that was what I had been programmed to feel. My passion when we made love was both extreme and genuine. And I did indeed bear the form of a not unattractive female of his own age: the parts of my body were perfect because each of them bore some slight cast of indefinable imperfection. My body was capable of all human functions; my brain was not just a cold, created matrix but as human as that of any person born of man and woman.