by Ivan Cat
Jenette's father, Olin Tesla—the berator, accuser, and cold remote rock around which so much of her existence revolved—was dying. So many times she had wished death upon him, and now here he was, just as she had wanted, the planetary pathogen consuming from within what his attackers had not incapacitated from without. Conflicting emotions made Jenette queasy. Elation. Guilt. Fear.
Time was running out.
And Jenette desperately needed more time. Time to yell and scream. Time to hold her father accountable for his transgressions. Time to demand explanations and receive answers. How had he made such callous decisions? What could he have been thinking?
Didn't he see how badly those decisions hurt the colony? Didn't he see how badly he had hurt her? Fathers were supposed to make things better, not worse! Weren't they? Jenette wanted to know. And, deep down, maybe she wanted something else, too. Maybe she needed to find an intangible something which had been lost in all the anger and expectation and rebellion, whatever it was that fathers and daughters were supposed to have but which she and her father had never found. If only she knew what to say...
Her father's hands, thin and swollen-jointed, fumbled with a froog, a golden-pink fruit with spiky skin and succulent insides. He was too weak. His nails scratched the thick rind, freeing a few sweet vapors, but were not able to break through. They fell still in frustration.
Before Jenette knew what she was doing, she picked up the froog. Her own youthful hands made short work of peeling the spheroid and splitting the internal nodules into bite-sized clumps. Her father strained to eat them. Jenette put a hand under his neck to hold his head erect. The physical contact seemed electric to her, in a chilling sort of way. His body, so long robust, was shrunken and bony. She felt tremors of his pain as he slowly chewed and swallowed.
"Your mother used to peel froogs for me when we gathered flutterbys," her father ventured after consuming a few nodules.
The comment took Jenette by surprise. Her father never talked about her. "You and Mother gathered flutterbys?"
"Back at Elysium." Tesla's expression became nostalgic as he thought back. "Clouds of color in the air. Your mother liked the blue-blue ones best."
Jenette imagined her parents stealing away for a quiet afternoon on the open ocean, misting fresh-water on the wave crests to simulate rain and then angling hand-tossed nets to capture the clouds of damsel wings which sprang up to court, mate, and die in the course of their absurdly short life cycles.
"Some things you can't forget," her father continued. "You can put them away for a while, but they always come back. Even if you don't want them to."
"Don't you want to remember her?"
Wistful eyes said yes, but Tesla's words were full of self-reproach. "Now is now. Then is then. Living in the past is good for nothing."
To Jenette, who had no memory of her mother, the idyllic image sounded nice. Jenette remembered her father taking her flutterby hunting once, the two of them simply spending time together, not talking and far from the demands of the Enclave. She had liked it, but after a while he had grown sad. They stopped suddenly and he had never taken her again. Until that moment in the records room, Jenette had thought that it was because he did not want to go with her, but now she saw otherwise.
"You still miss her."
Tesla stopped eating. His neck, still cradled in Jenette's hand, bowed foreword and shook. It took a moment for her to realize he was weeping.
"You have her face, her nose, her chin," he said, without looking up. "I see her every time I look at you."
"Is that... good?"
A bony hand sought out one of Jenette's and clasped it tightly. This was a father she had never seen before, a father who showed emotion, a father who tried to communicate on a real, honest level. Jenette did not know how to react. All at once, the confrontation she had come for came out of her—but not in anger, in utter childlike disbelief.
"Why, father? Why?"
Tesla looked up with watery, uncomprehending eyes. "Why what?"
"I've been to a Feral city," Jenette said miserably. "To a place where they record history chemically in glowing roots. One of the roots told the history of humans coming to this world. It recorded everything those humans did when they came to this planet. I read it."
Tesla's face pinched, as if he knew what was coming.
"We could have made Pact!" Jenette wailed, verbalizing the awful revelation for the first time since reading the Roots of Wisdom with the Judges. "It said so in the Feral texts. Pact is not specific to Feral physiology. It's a substance they pass on to their children—and twenty years ago, when we were all born, there were childless Ferals willing to pass their Pact on to human children. But you didn't let them! None of this had to happen! All the fighting, all the suffering, all the dying...." Jenette choked up. The scope of the atrocity was too much to comprehend. Every year of Sacrament, the Feral Wars, every human or Khafra who was dead outside the Great Hall at that very moment, it all stemmed from the same incomprehensible decision. Jenette's head pounded so hard she thought it would explode. "Why? Why?!"
Her father's voice rasped quietly. "Evermore. If you could understand Evermore... but you can't."
"How bad could it have been?" Jenette railed. "Nobody on Evermore died just because they grew up!"
Tesla struggled to explain. "Our bodies lived, but our souls did not. Do you know how much you hate Sacrament? That is how much we hated Evermore. It was so beautiful, the white rolling hills, the rift valleys, the everblue forests, but... the sound of an evening breeze would chill our hearts. Narcotic pollens came on those breezes. They would come and our minds would numb and our bodies would do things that should not be done. Sick things. Immoral things." Tesla clenched his eyes. "And as if that that was not bad enough, humans on Evermore began to forget what was right and what was wrong, even when the winds did not blow. Whatever abomination occurred, they were not to blame. It was the breeze. The winds made them do it." Tesla's nostrils flared as if he could still smell those malevolent pollars. "But some of us woke each morning, remembering and knowing. We dreamed in the daylight what we could not dream at night. We dreamed to live our lives in control of our minds and souls, in bodies pure from the corruption of Evermore. We left to seek that Body Pure. That was what we wanted for ourselves and for our children. That is what I wanted for you."
"I can't believe you wanted things to turn out this way," Jenette said, unable to reconcile her father's wishes with the harsh reality of New Ascension. "Sacrament is not the Body Pure. It controls our minds and bodies as much as the narcotic winds of Evermore. It's just the same."
"No," Tesla wheezed. "We choose. That is different. If we do not choose Sacrament, it does not choose us. And it is not permanent. Making Pact would have been permanent, no more hope for a cure to eventually set us free. No more hope of the Body Pure, ever."
Jenette did not accept her father's reasoning. "No sickness, no disease, life in perfect health until you die—maybe Pact is the Body Pure, father. Did you ever think of that?"
Intravenous tubes rattled as he shook his head. "We came from Evermore to find our humanity, not to give it up. Besides, only infants can make Pact—or did your Feral friends not tell you that?"
"They did," Jenette allowed.
"You see, we did what we had to do."
"I do not see."
"Well, perhaps the best we can do, you and I, is to agree to disagree."
Jenette nodded; at least that was something. A fit of coughing overcame Tesla, and then his hand gripped hers harder.
"Jenette, it is time for you to take my place."
"Father, please, I don't want to talk about that."
Tesla persisted. "But it is time to talk about it. Someone needs to make the hard decisions for the Enclave when I am gone—and that person is you. You are ready for it. I can see that." Jenette opened her mouth to protest. "Shhh, please, let me finish. You say you don't want to lead, every time we talk you say that, but your actions sho
w me otherwise. They show me what a great leader you will make. Stop fighting it. Accept your fate. Accept your responsibility."
"If it means accepting Sacrament, then you know what my answer is."
Tesla frowned. "It means accepting responsibility for always doing what you think is right, always. You make the hard decisions no one else will make. And you must be responsible for every single human in this Enclave, not just those you like or happen to agree with. You must be responsible for the lives of those you disagree with as well as those who are your allies. No matter what they do, you are their keeper. You may guide, cajole, manipulate, threaten and punish—but you may never abandon. Never. That is the sacred trust. You are the only one who can do it. Say yes and let an old man die in peace."
Her father's icy eyes seemed bluer at that moment than they had every been before and Jenette wanted to honor his last wish more than anything, but... to keep every human in the Enclave alive without condoning Sacrament. It was impossible.
"Father, I will do everything I possibly can, everything within my power, everything I can think of, but..."
"There are no buts. There is complete acceptance, or not. Anything in between is only failure."
Jenette hung her head. "Then the answer is no."
Tesla let go of her hand, the color fading from his eyes. "Then, I need a favor," he said, doing a bad job of trying to hide his disappointment.
"What?"
"Find Toby. He was wounded. He may be in a temporary infirmary in the Guard barracks. Bring him here."
"Bring Toby here? But if he's wounded...?"
"Someone must make the hard decisions," Tesla said wearily. "If you are not ready for that burden yet, then it must be me. I must live."
Abruptly it hit Jenette, why her father needed Toby. "Final Sacrament!" she gasped. She could hardly comprehend it; after feeling closer to her father than at any other time in her adult memory, after reaching a level of understanding, if not acceptance, how could he ask her to participate in such an atrocity? Final Sacrament was a vile procedure where a mortally wounded human extracted all of a domestic's remaining immune venom in a desperate bid to stay alive. It never worked—at best it prolonged the human's life by hours or, rarely, days—but it always killed the domestic. In Jenette's opinion, only the most depraved humans engaged in Final Sacrament and, for all his obvious flaws, she had never counted her father among their number. "I can't believe you'd ask me to do that!" she said, in horror.
Because she would not allow herself to cry in front of her father, she turned and headed for the door.
"Jenette wait!" her father groaned. "Someone must make the hard decisions! Someone must make the hard decisions or we are all lost!"
Jenette fled. The door slammed shut behind her.
There were noises, outside. Inside, it was safe. It was dark, inside. Inside the Null. In-robert knew that. No one could see him, and that was good because he wanted to stay hidden. He mustn't be found. If he was found he would be taken away from the Null. And then how would he keep it safe?
But….
Something was different. After days of floating and flying, there had been a big bump. And then noise from lots of skins and Ferals outside, yelling and shooting. (In-robert remembered shooting from long, long ago, before he had discovered his purpose.)
Maybe the Null was not safe.
He had to find out! He squirmed about in the tight space until he felt the hatch below him. He fished a claw into the latch mechanism. Snikt. The hatch released. He held it from falling fully open as sounds poured in.
He heard the roaring of angry skins in the distance. Closer, he heard Feral footfalls in tall grass. Then he heard strident Feral voices.
"Arrou, Arrou!"
"Rusty! What wrong?"
"Trouble, trouble. Bragg humans doing bad things. Bad, bad things. Where Jenette?"
"In Great Hall, with Tesla. Come. Arrou take you."
Great Hall. Tesla. Those were things in-robert recognized. They were things important enough to make him leave his hiding spot. Without a second thought, he let the hatch swing down, and scuttled off, following the sound of Arrou's and Rusty's passage through the high polyp fronds.
Jenette leaned against the wall outside her father's sick room, head bowed and with a hand covering her wet face. Arrou and Rusty barreled around a distant corner and clawed to a stop. Their heads swung, searching the narrow service corridor, and then fixated on her.
"Jenette, Jenette!" Arrou called. "Must go, must go!"
Jenette swiped tears from her eyes. "What's wrong?" she asked, numbly.
"Eating him, eating him!" Rusty cried when she did not immediately follow him and Arrou.
Jenette looked up, her eyes sharpening with sudden concern. "Eating someone? Eating who?"
"The Pilot!" said Rusty. "Jenette and Arrou come quick! Come quick!"
The mob swept Karr through prefabricated colony structures.
"The Body Pure! The Body Pure!"
Karr's feet never touched the ground. Hands gripping painfully tight held him above a torrent of white-haired heads. Mob sweat stank in Karr's nostrils and mob fury roared in his ears. Occasionally voices challenged the mob from beyond the periphery of his vision; all Karr could see was the night sky and the tops of walls and roofs that bounded the winding streets and alleys. Sometimes scuffles followed the protests, but none lasted long. The mob's greater numbers always won out.
"The lab!" shrieked Subconsul Bragg. "Over to the lab!"
The mob turned. Karr's starry view narrowed and then disappeared, as the sky above him was replaced by a narrow ceiling with a line of stark bright glowstrips running up its middle. The mob jostled tighter under Karr, carrying him up a staircase into a second-story room. The gripping hands shoved him down onto a cold, flat surface. Straps cinched tight about his wrists, ankles, waist, and neck. Then the mob parted. The juveniles retreated to a doorway, revealing an antiseptic room. Karr lay on a shiny plasteel table. Intrusive-looking apparatus hovered over him on whirring, machine-controlled arms.
A man in lab whites adjusted an overhead light.
Karr squinted against the glare. "Where am? Who are you?"
In stark contrast to the rest of the colonists, the man was old, quite old. He spoke in a nasal voice. "I am Dr. Ponder Yll and this is, not strictly speaking, my lab." Yll's shoulders hunched apologetically. "Actually this is the domestic vivisection operatory. My lab has fallen to into Feral clutches. Twenty years of work," he mourned, "gone." Dejected, Yll selected a mediprobe from a nearby tray of instruments.
Upon the lab walls were charts detailing the proper procedure for dissecting a Khafra. And there was a blood-draining groove running around the edge of the table that Karr was strapped upon. He tried to remain calm. "Dr. Yll, there has apparently been some sort of misunderstanding. I am Pilot Lindal Karr of the fugueship Long Reach."
"Your identity is known to me."
"Then I request that you allow me to speak with Consul Jenette Tesla."
Yll looked pained. "That will not be possible. I am deeply sorry." Yll pressed the mediprobe against Karr's neck. It hissed. Karr felt cold seeping into the muscles around his throat and suddenly his vocal cords would not work.
"Ghaghkt!" Karr protested.
Yll patted a consoling hand upon Karr's shoulder. "It will be better this way, believe me."
Yll's fingers swapped the mediprobe for surgical cutters and he began to snip off pieces of Karr's uniform. Karr gurgled ineffectually as his arms and torso were exposed. Yll then picked up a syringe-like instrument. It had a small opening at one end and a mechanical plunger at the other. Karr did not like the look of it.
"Gugh whagh?"
"Indeed," Yll said, his brows pinching regretfully. "Anesthetic is contraindicated for this procedure, but I will endeavor to make the experience as painless as possible." Yll tested the plunger. A ring of tiny blades whirled out of, and then retreated back into, the instrument's open end.
K
arr squirmed in the restraints.
"Struggling will only increase the level of discomfort," Yll warned. He placed the device against Karr's arm. Cha-chick! The blades bit a half-inch divot out of Karr's flesh.
"Unngh!" he moaned.
The instrument emitted a pureeing whine. A diode on its tip blinked red. With a sneer of distaste, Yll placed the instrument against his own forearm and depressed the plunger again.
"Oh, yessssss."
The sneer disappeared as Yll's eyes rolled into the back of his head. His wrinkles drew into an idiot's grin. "Yesss, that is quite acceptable." The instrument left a purple welt. Yll did not care. Yll's countenance was fully transformed from apologetic and reluctant to euphoric. "Quite acceptable," he said happily. "More than consistent with expectations."
Colonists in the doorway began to lick their lips.
With a giddy spring in his step, Yll joined them at the entrance and opened a crate filled to overflowing with the same flesh-extracting instruments as he had just used on Karr. He passed them out. A queue of colonists formed. Sunken-eyed juveniles with pasty complexions stepped up to the vivisection table one by one. Karr noted that many of them were wounded and looked even worse than they normally did. They stacked their fists, each in turn bowing their heads. "Blessed be the Body Pure," they chanted, holding the syringes like holy icons. One by one, they removed sterile wrappers and applied the instruments to Karr's exposed skin.
Cha-chik. Whir. Hiss.
Eyes rolled and the colonists filed giddily back out the door as others pressed in to take their place in line. The gouges in Karr's arm did not bleed, but they hurt like hell.
Cha-chik. Whir. Hiss. Cha-chik. Whir. Hiss.
"Ergh! Aagh!"
Karr's arm soon took on the cratered look of a moon peppered by asteroids.
"Make neat incisions," Yll giggled from the doorway. "There are many in line."
More and more colonists filed in. Karr wracked his brain, trying to remember what the Enclave's population was. Two thousand? Three thousand? He did not think a human being could live long with the outer half inch of its body mass removed.