I was about to give the danger call when Fortchee stepped up to me. “Fuhfuhfoom,” he said, the quiet call. “That’s Cat fighting Cat. The ones chasing us have strayed into another pride’s territory.”
I felt ice on our shoulders. We stood and watched and listened and our focusing ears seemed to pull the sound closer to us.
A battle between Cats.
“We can sleep on a little longer in safety,” he said. “I had to tell Leveza to stop singing.”
I started to walk. “I need to talk sense to that woman.”
“Good luck.” He pulled a cart aside, to make a gap for me. “Be careful anyway.”
As I walked toward the wagon the sound grew, a growling, roaring, crying, a sound like a creeping wildfire. It was as if all the world had gone mad along with me.
I slipped down the track, silently, rehearsing what I would say to her. I would tell her to come back to Choova and the herd and let the Cat do what she could to survive. I would tell her: You choose. Me or that Cat. I would force her to come back, force her to be sensible.
I got halfway down the track, and clouds moved away from the moon, and I saw.
At first I thought Leveza was just grooming her. That would have been enough to make me sick, the thought of grooming something that smelt of death, of blood.
But it wasn’t grooming. The Cat had not eaten for days, was wounded and hungry, and Leveza had leaking tits.
I saw her suckling a Cat.
The Earth spun. I had never known that such perversion existed; I’d never heard of normal groom-mates doing such a thing. But what a fearful confounding was this, of species, of mother, of child? While my Choova starved, that Cat, that monster, was being fed, given horsemilk as if by a loving mother.
I gagged and made a little cry and stumbled and coughed and I think those two in the wagon turned and saw me. I spun around and galloped, hooves pounding, and I was calling over and over, “Foul, foul, foul!”
I wailed and I heard answering shouts from inside the camp. Ventoo and Lindalfa came hobbling out to me.
“Akwa, darling!”
“Akwa, what’s wrong?”
They were mean-eyed. “What’s she done now?” They were yearning for bad news about Leveza
I wept and wailed and tried to pull myself away. “She won’t feed Choova but she’s feeding that Cat.”
“What do you mean, feed?”
I couldn’t answer.
“Hunting! Yes we saw! Killing for that thing!”
“Foul, yes, poor Akwa!”
I hauled in a breath that pushed my voice box the wrong way.
“It’s not hunting!” I was frothing at the mouth, the spittle and foam splayed over my lips and chin. “Uhhhhh!”
I wished the grass would slash her like a thousand needles. I wanted hot embers poured down her throat, I wanted her consumed, I wanted the Cats to come and make good all their terrible threats. Yes, yes, eat your Cat lover and then be eaten too. Call for me and I will call back to you: you deserve this!
Grama was there. “Akwa, calm down. Down, Akwa.” She ronfled the soothing noise. I blew out spittle at her, rejecting the trigger from my belly outward. I shriek-whinnied in a mixture of fear, horror, and something like the sickness call.
“She’s suckling the Cat!”
Silence.
Someone giggled.
I head-butted the person I thought had laughed. “Suckling. An adult. Cat!”
Grama fell silent. I shouted at her. “Heard of that before, Midwife?” My eyes were round; my teeth were shovels for flesh; I was enraged at everything and everyone.
Grama stepped back. Fortchee stepped forward. “What is all this noise?”
I told him. I told him good, I told him long. Ventoo bit my tail to keep me in place; the others rubbed me with their snouts.
“Poor thing! Her groom-mate.”
“Enough,” said Fortchee. He turned and started to walk toward their wagon.
“Too true there!” said Ventoo. Old Pronto grabbed a gun.
We all followed, making a sound like a slow small rockslide, down toward the cart.
Leveza stood up in the wagon, waiting. So did the Cat.
“Give us your guns,” said Fortchee.
“We can’t. . . .”
“I’m not asking, I’m ordering.”
Leveza looked at him, as if moonlight still shone on his face. She sighed, and looked up at the stars, and handed him her gun.
“The Cat’s too.”
Silently Leveza held it out to him.
“Now get down out of that cart and rejoin the herd.”
“And Mai?” Such regret, such fondness, such concern for blood-breathed Cat.
The spittle curdled; the heart shriveled; I tasted gall, and I said, “She’s taken a Cat for a groom-mate. I don’t want her! I don’t want her back!”
Her head jerked up at me in wonder.
“All her fabricating!”
I felt myself rear up in the air, and I bucked. I bucked to get away from my own heart, from the things I’d seen, for the way I’d been stretched. I was tired, I was frightened, I wanted her to be as we had been. Our girlhoods when we galloped beribboned over the hill.
“She’d feed my child to that bloody Cat!”
Reared up, wrenching, I made a noise I had never heard before, never knew could be made.
It was like giving birth through the throat, some ghastly wriggling thing made of sound that needed to be born, and it came out of me, headless and blind. A relentless, howling pushing-back that flecked everything with foam as if I were the sea.
Triggered.
Even Fortchee.
All.
We all moved together, closing like a gate. Our shoulders touched and our haunches. We lowered our heads. We advanced. I saw Leveza look into my eyes and then crumple. She knew what this was, even if I did not, and she knew it had come from me.
We advanced and butted the cart. We pushed all our heads under it and turned the cart over. Leveza and the Cat had to jump out, clumsy, stumbling to find their feet.
The Cat snarled, toothless. Leveza shook her head. “Friends. . . .”
We were deaf. We were upon them. We head-butted them. Leveza slipped backward, onto her knees. Fortchee reared up and clubbed her on the head with his hooves. She stood up, turned. Fortchee, Ventoo, Raio, Pronto, all bared their teeth and bit her buttocks hard. Feet splaying sideways, she began to run.
The Cat bounded, faster in bursts than Leveza was, and leapt up onto her back. Leveza trotted away, carrying her. Her tail waved, defiant. Then milklight closed over them as if they had sunk. We heard light scattering sounds of stones for a while, then even her hoofbeats faded into the whispering sound of spaces between mountains.
Without a word, Grama sprang after them. I saw her go too. There were no Cats on the plain to seize them as the horizon burned.
The herd swung to the left in absolute unison, wheeling around, and then trotted back to the camp. We felt satisfied, strangely nourished, safe and content. I looked back under the cart. Choova raised her head. “What was that, Mummy?”
“Nothing, love, nothing,” I said.
Fortchee told us quietly that we should get moving now while the Cats were occupied. We dismantled the windbreaks and packed the tools. Some of the men turned Leveza’s cart upright and old Pronto went back to his post in harness. Never did we pack with so little noise, so swiftly, calmly. Nothing was said at all, no mention of it. The horizon burned with someone else’s passion.
Choova ran out to graze, her mane bobbing. She never asked about Leveza or Grama, not once, ever. A soft glowing light spread wide across the pampas.
We followed the stream to the sea and then migrated along the sand. It got between our fingers. We did see the turtles. I would have asked them about acids, especially the acids in batteries, but they were laying eggs, and would have been fearful.
Fortchee led us to a wonderful pasture, far to the south, on a lake ne
xt to sea, salt and fresh water so close, beside tall sudden cliffs that kept Cats at bay. Oats grew there year round; the rains never left. By digging we found rust shoals, thick layers of it, enough to make metal for several lifetimes. There was no reason to leave. We waited for the trigger to leave, but year in, year out, none came.
Fortchee had us build a stone wall across the small peninsula of land that connected our islet to the mainland, and we were safe from Cats. When he died, we called him our greatest innovator.
On top of a high hill we found the fallen statue of an Ancestor, his face melted, his arms outstretched. As if to welcome Ancestors back from the stars.
No one came to me in the night to comfort me or bite my neck and call me love. I suppose I’d been touched by something strange and so was strange myself. I would have taken a low-rank drifter, only they did not get past the wall. Still, I had my Choova. She brought me her children to bless, and then her grandchildren, though they never really recognized what I was to them. Their children had no idea that I still lived. My loneliness creaked worse than my joints and I yearned for a migration, to sweep me numbly away.
Not once did anyone speak of Leveza, or even once remember her. Our exiled groom-brothers would drift by, to temporarily gladsome cries, and they told us, before moving on, of new wonders on the prairie. But we blanked that too.
Until one dusk, I saw the strangest thing picking its way down toward our lagoon.
It looked like a fine and handsome young girl, beautifully formed though very very long in the trunk. She raised her head from drinking and her mane fell back. The top of her face was missing, from right above the eyes. It was terrible to see, someone so young but so deformed. She whinnied in hope and fear, and I ronfled back comfort to her, and then asked her name. But she couldn’t talk.
A horse. I was looking at a full-blooded horse. I felt a chill on my legs and wondered: did they bring the Ancestors back, too?
“Leveza?” I asked it, and it raised and lowered its head, and I thought the creature knew the name. It suddenly took fright, started, and trotted away into the night, as someone else once had.
Then there was a sound like thousands of cards being shuffled, and a score of the creatures emerged from the trees. They bent their long necks down to drink. Their legs worked backward.
A voice said softly, “Is that Akwa?” Against a contrast sky, I saw the silhouette of a monster, two headed, tall. Then I recognized the gun.
She had trained one of the things to carry her, so she would always sit tall and have her hands free. I couldn’t speak. Somewhere beyond the trees carts rumbled.
“Hello, my love,” she said. I was hemorrhaging memory, a continual stream; and all of it about her – how she spoke, how she smelled, how she always went too far, and how I wished that I’d gone with her too all those years ago.
“We’re going south, to find the Bears, get us some of that writing. Want to come?” I still could not speak. “It’s perfectly safe. We’ve bought along something else for them to eat.”
I think that word “safe” was the trigger. I did the giggle of embarrassment and fear. I drank sweet water and then followed. We found writing, and here it is.
CITY OF THE DEAD
Paul McAuley
Here’s another story by Paul McAuley, whose “Incomers” appears elsewhere in this anthology. In this one he takes us to a distant world that’s littered with the ruins of vanished civilizations to unravel an enigmatic – and deadly – biological mystery.
How MARILYN CARTER first met Ana Datlovskaya, the Queen of the Hive Rats: late one afternoon she was driving through the endless tracts of alien tombs in the City of the Dead, to the west of the little desert town of Joe’s Corner, when she saw a pickup canted on the shoulder of the rough track, its hood up. She pulled over and asked the woman working elbow-deep in the engine of the pickup if she needed any help; the woman said that she believed that she needed a tow truck, this bloody excuse for a pickup she should have sold for scrap long ago had thrown a rod.
“I am Ana Datlovskaya,” she added, and stuck out an oily hand.
“Marilyn Carter,” Marilyn said, and shook Ana Datlovskaya’s hand.
“Our new town constable. That incorrigible gossip Joel Jumonville told me about you,” the woman said. She was somewhere in her sixties, short and broadhipped, dressed in a khaki shirt and blue jeans and hiking boots. Her white hair, roughly cropped, stuck up like ruffled feathers; her shrewd gaze didn’t seem to miss much. “Although he didn’t mention that you have a dog. He is a police dog? I met one once, in Port of Plenty. At the train station. It told me to stand still while its handler searched me for I don’t know what.”
The black Labrador, Jet, was standing in the loadbed of Marilyn’s Bronco, watching them with keen interest.
“He’s just a dog,” Marilyn said. “He doesn’t talk or anything. We can give you a lift into town, if you need one.”
“No doubt Joel told you that I am the crazy old woman who lives with hive rats,” Ana Datlovskaya said to Marilyn, as they drove off towards Joe’s Corner. “It is true I am old, as you can plainly see. And it’s true also that I study hive rats. But I am not crazy. In fact, I am the only sane person in this desert. Everyone else hopes to make fortune by finding treasure, or by swindling people looking for treasure. That is craziness, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“I don’t mind in the least, because that’s not why I’m here,” Marilyn said.
She’d become town constable by accident. She’d stopped for the night in Joe’s Corner and had been sitting in its roadhouse, minding her own business, nursing a beer and half-listening to the house band blast out some twentieth-century industrial blues, when a big man a few stools down took exception to something the bartender said and tried to haul him over the counter by his beard. Marilyn intervened and put the big guy on the floor, and the owner of the roadhouse, Joel Jumonville, had given her a steak dinner on the house. Joel was an ex-astronaut who like Marilyn had fought in World War Three. He also owned two of the little town’s motels, ran its radio station and its web site, and was, more by default than democracy, its mayor. He and Marilyn got drunk together and told war stories, and by the end of the evening she’d shaken hands on a contract to serve as town constable for one year, replacing a guy who’d quit when a scrap of plastic he’d dug up in one of the tombs had turned out to be a room temperature superconductor.
It wasn’t exactly how she’d imagined her life would turn out when she’d won a lottery place on one of the arks.
This was in the heady years immediately after the Jackaroo had arrived in the aftermath of World War Three, and had given the survivors a basic fusion drive and access to a wormhole network linking fifteen M-class red dwarf stars in exchange for rights to the rest of the Solar System; a brief, anarchic age of temporary kingdoms, squabbling emirates, and gloriously foolish attempts at building every kind of Utopia; an age of exploration, heroic ambition, and low farce. Like every other lottery winner, Marilyn had imagined a fresh start, every kind of exotic adventure, but after she’d arrived in Port of Plenty, on the planet of first Foot, short of cash and knowing no one, she’d ended up working for a security firm, which is what she’d been doing before she left Earth. She guarded the mansions and compounds of the city’s rich, rode as bodyguard for their wives and children. Some had earned vast fortunes founded on novel principles of physics or mathematics wrested from discarded alien machineries; others were gangsters feeding on the underbelly of Port of Plenty’s fast and loose economy. Marilyn’s last job had been with an Albanian involved in all kinds of dubious property deals; after he’d been killed by a car bomb, she’d had to get out of Port of Plenty in a hurry because his family suspected that the assassination had been an inside job. She’d drifted west along the coast of first Foot’s single continent and ended up in Joe’s Corner, but, as she told Ana Datlovskaya, she didn’t plan to stay.
“When the year’s up I’m moving on. I have a whole
new world to explore. And plenty more besides.”
“Ha. If I had a euro for every time I’d heard that from people who thought they were passing through but couldn’t find a reason to leave,” Ana Datlovskaya said, “I’d be riding around the desert in style, instead of nursing that broken-down donkey of a pickup.”
Ana was a biologist who’d moved out to the western desert to study hive rats, supporting her research with her savings and the sale of odd little figurines. Like Marilyn, she was originally from London, England, but their sex and nationality were about all they had in common – Marilyn had been born and raised in Streatham, her mother a nurse and her father a driver on the Underground, while Ana’s parents had been Russian exiles, poets who’d escaped Stalin’s postwar purges and had set up residence in Hampstead. Still, the two women quickly became friends. Ana was a prominent member of Joe’s Corner’s extensive cast of eccentrics, but she was also an exemplar of the legion of stout-hearted, sensible, and completely fearless women who before World War Three had explored and done every kind of good work in every corner of the globe. Marilyn had met several of these doughty heroines during her service in the army and had admired them all. The evening she gave Ana a lift into town they had a fine time in the roadhouse, swapping war stories and reminiscing about London and how they’d survived World War Three, and on her next free day Marilyn was more than happy to make a fifty kilometre trip beyond the northern edge of the City of the Dead to visit Ana’s desert camp.
By then, Joel Jumonville had told Marilyn a fair number of tall tales about the Queen of the Hive Rats. According to him, the old woman had once shot a bandit who’d tried to rob her, and cut up his body and fed it to her hive rats. Also, that the little figurines she sold to support herself, found nowhere else in the City of the Dead, were rumoured to come from the hold of an ancient spaceship she’d uncovered, she kept a tame tigon she’d raised from a kitten, and she’d learned how to enter hive rat gardens without being immediately attacked and killed. Joel was an inveterate gossip and an accomplished fabulist, so Marilyn also took his stories with large pinches of salt, but when she pulled up by Ana’s shack, on a bench terrace cut into a stony ridge that overlooked a broad arroyo, she was amazed to see the old woman pottering about the edge of a hive rat garden. The garden stretched away down the arroyo, crowded with the tall yellow blades of century plants. Columns of hardened mud that Marilyn later learned were ventilation chambers stood here and there, hive rat sentries perched on their hind legs at intervals along the perimeter, and there was a big mound with a hole in its flat top that no doubt led to the heart of the nest.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection Page 74