Brother Termite

by Patricia Anthony

  “The sleep is thin, and only one thing can make it better. You have been tested and found viable. Go meditate your decision now, as custom dictates. Remember, not for Tali’s goals but for simple, full sleep this is what we must do.”

  Simple, full sleep. Reen’s exhaustion was back. His head was heavy, his arms and legs felt weighted, and he fought to swim against the current of the old Cousin’s words. Somewhere in that cold numbing deluge was meaning, but Reen was too tired to find it.

  “I have chosen you to be consort,” the Sleep Master said.

  REEN WANDERED the echoing halls that once had teemed with Cousins. He had brought extinction on his Community too quickly, too soon. He thought he could avoid the unavoidable with Angela. Fifty years of dreams.

  He wanted to see her grow up. Wanted to know and love her children. He should have gone with Oomal while he had the chance. Even now he could escape to Mars, where Thural and Oomal and Angela waited.

  Guilt stopped him; remorse brought him back. Angela was only his hope. Cousins, no matter how doomed, were his future.

  When he returned to the room, he found three Cousins waiting. Two were standing together at the window. The third rose at his approach.

  That Cousin. That unfamiliar Cousin.

  “He has come a long way to see you,” the Sleep Master said, turning.

  Beside the Sleep Master, Thural turned, too. One final betrayal: Thural had left the children. Reen’s pulse slowed as if it were coming to a stop.

  “Reen,” Thural said, hands fluttering. “Oomal didn’t go to Mars. He went home.”

  Bewildered, Reen tipped his head to one side.

  “Home,” Thural explained. “He went through the Window to Setis. The home place.”

  Setis. The planet with a sky as blue as Earth’s. Reen remembered the vast buildings riding the red oceans of its grass.

  Oomal had taken Angela home.

  The Sleep Master pointed nervously to the solemn wordless Cousin. “Mito-ja. Cousin First Brother of home place.”

  Beside the fretful Sleep Master and the embarrassed Thural, Mito stood as Reen himself must have once stood, as they all must have stood before being tainted by human impatience. With slow inevitability, Mito turned to regard Thural and the Sleep Master.

  He did not order them away. He did not speak at all. But after a hesitant moment, the pair left.

  The hush in Mito’s eyes was spellbinding. How beautiful he is, Reen thought. And how alien. Reen had become accustomed to fleeting human expressions. Had become inured to faces in which fear, bemusement, and irritation chased and tumbled after each other like puppies.

  Mito was an elegant still life.

  “I come,” Mito-ja finally said, “for Brother’s love for Brother.”

  Reen felt the habit-formed human urge to ask Mito to sit down. He restrained himself and stood, feeling awkward.

  “Oomal sends his message.” Mito’s words were eerily deliberate. If a mountain could speak, it would speak like this.

  “The message is that he has done as he saw best, to seek my protection.”

  Reen looked at the floor and was silent so long that he thought Mito would leave. A human, an Earth Cousin, would have. But when Reen finally looked up, Mito was watching him, the universe in his eyes.

  Reen shuddered. The Cousin First Brother of home was no ordinary Cousin sheltered from alien contact. No. Mito was a completely unfamiliar thing.

  The First Brother of Setis was so still that for a moment Reen wondered if he was conversing with a ghost. Then Mito said, “Oomal wishes you to know that the children are welcome.”

  “Will they live with you?”

  With stately grace Mito raised his hands. “We tunnel,” he said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We tunnel. The aboveground no longer interests us.”

  We tunnel. Perhaps that was the solution every Cousin should have sought. Mito seemed larger, taller than other Cousins, and Reen wondered if it was poise alone that lent him height.

  “Will Oomal live with you?” Would Oomal succumb to Mito’s tranquility–that heady, abbreviated end to Cousin evolution?

  Mito made a regal gesture with one arm, as though he were sweeping away thirty million years of history. “Oomal is nadiye. He is other.” He gazed at Reen–sadly, it seemed, if the sea, the sky, could be thought sad. “You are, all of you, nadiye.”

  Without another word he left the room.

  Reen watched the door close and fought the urge to run after. There was so much he longed to ask.

  Did I fail, then? was the obvious question.

  From that long black tunnel which led to extinction, Reen had plucked the closest and easiest answer. Mito had chosen the hard way: reaching farther than an arm’s length.

  Do I disappoint you?

  The answer was plain. Mito had taken the Community in his keeping to where life was as ordered as crystalline structure. And in that unemotional order there was no place for disappointment. No room for heartache.

  The door opened. The Sleep Master walked in and stood by the door as motionless as Mito, but stiffly. “I did not think to give you food. You might be hungry.”

  “No.”

  “So. Will you come?”

  Before he lost his courage, Reen straightened his tunic. Taking a deep breath, he walked through the doorway.

  He followed the Sleep Master down the hall to the right, down the next gray, sloping passageway. Down and down. In front of the female’s chamber was a wall painted pale yellow in warning. There a knot of Cousins waited.

  Reen came to a halt and stared at Tali, the Brother who had seemed most ordered until Mito came to show them the true pattern. If Reen had been wrong to cheat destiny for Cousin survival, Tali, so loyal to the old laws, had been wrong, too.

  Reen’s eyes must have contained something of his contempt because Tali quickly looked away.

  “You do this willingly?” the Sleep Master asked.

  Reen regarded the gathered Cousins one by one. No matter how much he loved Angela’s new race, no matter how much he loved the humans, the Community always came first.

  He caught Thural’s eye. His aide would not have been able to live comfortably among the too-human Michigan Cousins, but he was too corrupted by alien contact for Mito to take in. Thural, in sympathy, Reen supposed, was trembling.

  Reen walked on. As he neared the yellow wall, it opened. Inside was another wall, the next-to-last barrier, paler than the first.

  DANGER, DANGER, the color said.

  When Reen’s people first left their nests in the earth and sought food and room above, the gleam of the yellow sun meant death. From its radiance fanged predators swooped. After thirty million years all that remained of those deadly hunters was the color from which they had come. Everything ended. Everything.

  Turning aside to the antechamber, Reen pulled off his uniform and, for the second time that day, slipped into the bath. The ocher water was acidic and soothing. He washed until he was free of all human smells.

  Nude, dripping, he walked up the steps to the second yellow wall and saw the Sleep Master standing there. They didn’t speak. Dipping his head slightly, the old Cousin gathered Reen’s uniform from the table where he had left it. Then he retreated to safety, where he would stand at the window and watch Reen die.

  Reen stood, water droplets from his body making dark pimples on the floor. Suddenly he realized that he had gone through the ritual without having answered the Sleep Master’s question.

  He wanted to blunder back through the safe wall and shout “Yes ! Yes!” to the Cousins waiting there.

  But willingly? Die willingly? All the other decisions he had made had hurt those around him. And how could he watch as the rest of Earth Community declined?

  We tunnel, Mito had said. All intellig
ent creatures tunneled. The burrowing itself should have been enough. It was for Mito. But Reen, digging for truth, had unearthed spurious and faulty answers.

  His body had always been the ordered part of him, had always done the correct thing. Now, like a law-abiding good citizen, it moved him toward the second door. Beyond that would be the third door. The last. Between the two he would pause for a while, and gather his courage.

  The door opened to cloudy light, and as he stepped through, it shut fast. The air was heavy with spice and with the narcotic torpor of Communal Mind. He halted in confusion. Instead of the final yellow wall there was a vast dim chamber where a huge shape moved.

  High-voltage terror. Reen’s heart raced into a frantic beat. He had made a terrible mistake. In those few paces from the second door he had somehow got lost and missed the meditation room.

  Mito’s stoicism now failed him, as did the Cousin instinct to stand and die. Reen whirled to the door and was dumbfounded that it didn’t open.

  He pounded his fists against the yellow wall even as he realized that it wasn’t meant to open. No consort was that willing, not at the end. And that was the reason behind the final trick for the condemned: that missing meditation room.

  A Cousin was watching him from the chamber’s small window. Not the Sleep Master.

  “Tali!”

  Reen ran to the window and slapped his hands to either side of his Brother’s face. His claws screeched against the glass.

  “Tali, please!”

  In his Brother’s eyes was an expression so unexpected that Reen barely recognized him; for shame came naturally to Cousins, but repentance had to be taught. Tali lifted his fists to the glass as though he wanted to batter down the wall between them.

  Too late. There was a slap on Reen’s leg. His skin flamed from ankle to hip as the thick burr of the female’s stingers pulled away. He howled and leaped to the side. His leg crumpled. He hit the wall with a thump and lay there, dazed.

  “Tali?” he whispered. “I changed my mind, Tali.”

  A curious nudge at his hip brought him instantly alert. It was the female. Reen limped to the far side of the chamber. She was watching him, her eyes bright, not with intelligence but with something like cunning.

  The huge body shifted.

  The burning sensation was gone. Now tendrils of ice sprouted from his knee. He took another step, realized too late that his leg was numb, and toppled, his fingers splayed on the soft floor.

  Something touched his arm.

  “Tali!” he shouted and snapped his head around.

  Pigeons on the south lawn. Pigeons, the feathers at their necks gleaming rainbow shades of emerald and lavender-pink.

  “Pigeons,” Marian said. “I like pigeons. They graze just like cattle, don’t they?”

  Reen looked at the fat compact bodies dotting the grass.

  “A whole herd of pigeons.” Marian laughed. “Must be forty head of pigeons.”

  And, just then, one took to the air. Reen’s eyes followed it. Against his face it seemed he could feel the dry flutter of its wings.

  Marian put her hand on his shoulder, and love rose in him like baking bread, a love so different, so alien, that it took his breath away.

  He grasped her hand and held it, as though afraid that she, too, would take flight. He held her so hard that his claw must have dug into her flesh. He held her. He held Marian. And she didn’t pull away.

  The pigeons were gone, and the opalescent skin of the female was right against Reen’s face. He tried to rise and failed. The vaginal tube detached from the base of the female’s tail and wavered, as if trying to catch his scent.

  Run, he told himself, just as he had shouted to the doomed Anacostia Cousins. Run.

  He tried to pick himself up but fell, burdened by drowsy spice, by the stupor of Communal Mind. Numb, he tried to think. Something was happening. Something ... Then he remembered he was dying.

  Reen watched the tube approach. It was fluted, the outside pearl, the inside a rich golden brown.

  The air was thick with the waxy smell of crayons. Kevin, large gray head down, was coloring a kitten. Beside Reen, Angela was working to fill in the stark, simple lines of a horse. Her small hands held the crayon in a stranglehold, and she sighed in disappointment when the brown strayed outside the lines.

  Don’t try so hard, he wanted to tell her, but then Angela had something of the Cousin drive for perfection. Warning would do no good.

  She colored, she colored, her expression as intent as that of an engineer working on the blueprint of a bridge, or of a physicist laboring over an equation.

  “I love you,” he told her, swelling with so much affection that it seemed his chest might rupture.

  She stopped coloring to look up. Kevin looked up, too. And at the end of the table Mrs. Gonzales paused in tutoring a clumsy Michelle to look at Reen in wonder.

  “I love you,” he told his daughter.

  Angela went back to her coloring book. “I love you, too,” she said.

  An ache. Disoriented, Reen looked down at his chest. The female had already pushed his plates apart and had burrowed inside. He gasped as he felt the first sucking theft of sperm.

  Run, he told himself. But he couldn’t.

  Desire blossomed from her touch, desire as quick and disabling as the ice of her drugs. He groaned and shoved the tough muscle of her deeper. His greedy hands reached out to the iridescent flesh, his claws digging, pulling her closer.

  His body shuddered as lust gave way to satiation. His insides loosened. There was a gout of pain as his lungs tore free.

  Oomal was handing him a box all wrapped in colored paper while humans gathered around the birth, their eyes as wide as Cousins’ and black and deep as night.

  “Open it, First Brother,” Oomal said with shy, fierce pride. “Open it for Angela.”

  Reen ripped the paper. It bled and shrieked. And from Reen’s hands blue worlds spilled out like doves.

  When the planets had spun away, Oomal spread his arms. Reen had forgotten how warm, how soft his Brother’s body could be.

  Love, that never-ending thing. If only Marian had seen their daughter grow from a single cell, maybe then she would roll her name around in her mouth like candy.

  Angela, small as a mustard seed, tiny as faith.

  Angela, large as an arm’s span.

  In a wash of pewter light from the window Jeff Womack sat rocking, a gun stoppering his mouth. His silent eyes met Reen‘s, and there was something like ecstasy in them.

  Oh, how strange, Reen thought. The Old Ones loomed in the chamber like mountains, while in front of him, under a female, a Cousin lay motionless and nearly consumed.

  I must be dreaming.

  Reen was a tiny creature, growing smaller, a being on the intoxicating edge of disappearance. He clutched at the rim of oblivion until he realized that there was nothing to hold on to, and no reason to be afraid of the fall.

  Yes, the Old Ones breathed. You are.

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