The Wine of Violence

by James Morrow

  “Let’s go for three mysteries,” Kappie added. “This is not just any ship. Fill in the blanks, gentlemen. We are first witnesses to the fate of Eden Three!”

  Francis retreated into the library of his memory, walked through stacks he had not visited in years, and selected a dusty schoolbook called Ancient History: Grade Seven. Turning to the chapter about the twenty-first century, the age of the space arks, he recalled the whole story.

  The whole story was that not one but two arks were built for the Canis Major adventure. Eden Two reached Nearth on schedule, and Eden Three was never heard from again. Presumably the twin was obliterated by a meteor shower, ingested by a black hole, diverted from lofty purpose by internal war—any of the numerous logical Armageddons that had made the founding fathers insist on redundant arks in the first place. Who would have guessed that, just around the solar corner, Nearthlings had whole batches of slightly-off-course relatives?

  Burne and Kappie, having entered the wreck, were huddled in interdisciplinary conference. Archeology and anthropology squared off, met, reached consensus.

  “The first thing to notice,” Kappie began, “is the lack of structural damage to the hull girders. This suggests that the vessel was landed by rational minds. We may therefore assume human civilization came to Carlotta in pretty much the same condition it came to Nearth.”

  “But then Nature got the upper hand,” said Burne. “The harshness of the planet, the maddening sand, the ice, all kept the pilgrims from constructing the sort of high culture we have on Nearth.”

  “What high culture?” asked Francis. The high culture of Nearth consisted of one olfactory-comicbook stand, two Uncle Andrew’s Liver-on-a-Stick franchises, three Mother’s Mocha Milkshake bars, and four hornopornovision theaters on each and every corner.

  Burne ignored the question. “The years dragged on, generation following generation, and the human race dissolved into its earliest, animal ways. The people here, when we meet them, will be outright savages—no table manners or indoor plumbing.”

  “Behold the wages of atavism,” Kappie declared, pulling a ravaged skull from her pack. “Dog-eat-dog.”

  Francis felt nauseated. Until now, he had seen Kappie’s finds as badly mistreated cousins. Could it be that within these bony walls no symphony had ever rung? No proof of Euclid’s? No dirty joke?

  Luther rapped a girder with his pipe. “Your theory has a rather sorry hole in it, Burne. Among us chemists there’s an old saying: Matter can be neither created nor…I forget the rest. And yet this thing is missing nearly all its vital parts. There’s only the merest hint of the quadrillion devices it needed to sail across the light-years, stay on course, and keep everybody amused for two centuries.”

  “Erosion?” asked Francis.

  “What kind of erosion can clean out a space ark as neatly as an Aretian can clean out a three-eyed fish, yet leave the girders barely bruised?”

  “The girders are made of steel,” Burne explained.

  “So are hull plates, ion chambers, you name it. No, I propose that some well-formed intelligence has carefully and systematically looted this ship.” He yanked a panel from the remains of an airlock. “Look at this.”

  Burne conceded that it had been cut away by neither savage whim nor random sand. “My answer is simply that the devolution process did not begin immediately. After they landed, our would-be ancestors found reasons to cart everything away.”

  Luther lifted a finger toward the horizon. “Yes, but where did they cart it? Does a more livable country lie out there somewhere? A civilization?”

  Civilization! To Francis the word was sweet. It rang of deliverance.

  “Those are cute questions,” said Burne, “but if we meet any natives this week, you can be the one who starts talking religious philosophy and Schillachi equations with them.” He flashed his yeastgun. “I’ll be betting this is the language they understand.”

  A SCANT TWO KILOMETERS past the canyon, an oasis pushed out of the desert like a vast creeping plant. No mere anomaly in the sand, this was a world unto itself, a dense network of pools, waterfalls, boulders, stalks, vines, fruit, and flowers. Collectively each blossom’s sex organs looked like, and were the size of, a human face.

  Entry was along paths whose weaving randomness suggested that their makers had followed no plans, only instinct and thirst. The learned citizens of Luther’s more livable country apparently did not come here.

  The scientists parked the magnecar under a huge fibrous leaf that could probably have supported its weight, then followed the handiest path to a lagoon. Waiting for Luther, the others snapped pictures and sniffed the thick, steamed-vegetable air. “This one reminds me of an awful boy I knew once,” said Francis, commenting on a nearby configuration of stamens and pistils. “Robert Poogley.”

  Luther arrived and stabbed the bright water with a wistar rod, perusing the lights, meters, and litmus plates on its bulbous top. The rod said the water was not water, but a greasy Carlottan facsimile of water. Francis condescended to let it kill his thirst.

  His romantic bone began to sing. Here he was, Dr. Francis Lostwax, the soon-to-be-great entomologist, trapped on a secret planet, exploring a fabulous garden, questing a forgotten civilization. Inspired, he walked alone to a paradisiacal spot where a small gamboling stream dropped like a toy waterfall over the edge of a cuboidal boulder. Surrounding the cuboid were occasional clumps of tufted organic parasols, the scene’s one prosaic feature. Under the largest clump Francis, drained, flopped down. The parasols blocked the blistering star.

  Doubtless these are trees, Francis thought, much as the Yorkshire terrier is doubtless a dog, however lean the glory it brings to the name. Francis was a collie man. He liked their smiles.

  LATER, THE WORLD BEGAN to scream. Dazed, afraid, Francis groped his way upright. Then, from above, the horror came. Like wormy fruit, in clusters of three and four, the dark shrieking shapes quit the trees.

  Stone ax in hand, a gap-toothed bipedal thing rushed up. Francis felt a stunning thwack on his left shoulder. Miraculously the bone held. But a second blow, straight on the mouth, brought blood.

  Steadying himself on the cuboid, Francis faced the savages. There were over two dozen, all looking broken and pain-wracked and only nominally human, like gorillas who as babies had been swaddled in barbed wire. Their eyeballs were yellow with disease, their hair was matted with nameless ooze, and from their putrid lips saliva rolled uncontrollably.

  Somehow Francis cut through his confusion, his pain, and got to the path. Parasols flew by as he dashed from pool to pool, desperate to solve the maze. Finally the Poogley blossom was before him, marking the way to the desert. As he reached the magnecar, he looked ahead and saw, approaching, two welcome faces, Burne’s wrenched with fury, Luther’s with the pain of overworked lungs. Fifty savages followed in a vicious pack.

  “Lostwax, the microputer!” Burne’s voice stuttered between panic and resolve.

  Obeying, Francis ripped back the viewbubble and dived in. He pushed the right keys. His friends arrived, and Burne guided Luther into the back seat.

  “Where’s Kappie?” Burne demanded.

  Francis was about to moan that he didn’t know, when, thirty meters away, something leaped out of the oasis. “Behind you!”

  Kappie emerged only slightly closer to the tribe than to the magnecar, but the margin proved fatal. In seconds she was overtaken and encircled. Realizing that she had only two choices—helpless screams or rational arguments—she struck a pose that said: I am not about to let five years of costly instruction in the virtues of cultural relativism fly suddenly to hell. “Stop!” The savages did not stop. “We’re all the same kind!”

  They were at her throat.

  “Have you forgotten everything? We’re all the—” Suddenly she could no longer talk but only gargle blood.

  Burne had aimed the yeastgun carefully, but when he hit the relay there was just a dull electronic whimper.

  “Get in here!” yelle
d Luther. “You can’t save her!”

  Burne jammed the failed weapon into his belt. Returning to the magnecar, he ordered Francis out of the driver’s seat, then secured the viewbubble. The savages did not follow. Kappie’s corpse commanded their total notice.

  Francis strained to witness what he did not want to see. He fought to ignore what he made himself know. One savage was kneeling, using his tool, entering her forehead.

  Even as the magnecar sped away, Francis could see them scooping out morsels of cortex, chunks of medulla, bits of cerebellum—the whole wondrous engine of Kappie’s once formidable mind. The blood in his mouth now mingled with gushing vomit.

  Thus ended Francis Lostwax’s third experience with violence.

  THE TRIBES WERE SOON OUTDISTANCED, the oasis was soon gone, and the rest of the day brought nothing but passing sand and hot, crawling anguish. Luther banished his camera to the magnecar’s storage compartment, and he collected no more rocks. Burne started leaving his yeastgun in careless places. Francis stopped using words.

  They parked long before the sun went down, knowing it would take hours to camouflage the magnecar and dig themselves under the dunes. Once holed up, each man warmed a meal with the inconspicuous heat of a kelvinsleeve, eating right out of the can, burying the evidence half a meter deep. They took scheduled turns watching for savages, and unscheduled turns weeping.

  The loss of Kappie was like a surprise yeastbullet in the leg. The full pain does not hit right away. At first you say: Is this all there is? Then you burst open.

  This death, Francis decided, must not be allowed to happen. Barry gone…now Kappie. His life couldn’t lose two major characters. Only the extras, at most the supporting players, were supposed to die.

  By midnight, Francis had been hit full, had rallied, and was thinking. He had so much lost thought to regain he couldn’t sleep. It was Burne’s watch.

  “Burne?”

  A grunt from the west, then a low, “Yeah, Lostwax?”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “Is it your lip still? I could try a stitch.”

  “No, it’s fine, provided I don’t smile, something I’m not planning to do for three years.” He crept out of his hole. Burne sat with glittering pieces of yeastgun spiraling around him like the suns of Andromeda. Before the night was over he would have fixed the weapon and gone on to outwit the finicky luminon.

  “Move slowly,” Burne cautioned. “Keep your voice down.”

  “Burne, is it sensible to keep chasing after cesium?”

  “A goal will keep us sane.”

  “Suppose we returned to the ship? We could make a wide circle around the oasis, then wait inside until Carlotta brought us within transmitting distance.”

  “You’re talking half a standard year, Lostwax! What do we eat? Sand? And getting past the tribes won’t be as easy as you think. For all we know they’ve found Darwin by now.”

  “They’d stray that far from home?”

  “For a predator the distance isn’t great. They could reach it in one day—less. And you might recall that the first skull was practically on our doorstep.” Burne pointed to a sad western star. “No, the next time I move in that direction, it will be with an army.”

  “You’re counting on Luther’s civilization?”

  “What else can we count on?”

  Francis annihilated the star by easing it into his retinal blindspot. Yes, dammit, Burne is right. For the moment we must leave the tribes to their lush nation, leave them sleeping on high, defecating on flowers, feeding on fruit and each other’s thoughts. For the moment we must run.

  THE RIVER WAS WIDE and deep. Like a mirror, it looked from some angles dark, from others silvery. The dark moments were impossibly dark, dark as the inside of a sin. The silvery moments suggested eels made of mercury. They were fast, dazzling, metallic moments, and they caused you to notice that a low electric hum snapped across the surface.

  Was it a geological accident? Or a human canal, the enterprise of Eden Three engineers? Most puzzling of all, why did a mammoth stone wall rise from the far bank? None of the three scientists who walked the river’s edge cared just yet to guess.

  Francis got down on all fours, leaned over the bank, and prepared his nostrils for a dung beetle’s socks. But the river’s smell was far more pleasurable, like the various aromas spouted by one’s own body.

  “Bad?” asked Burne.

  “Merely unsubtle.”

  The river was pungent and thick. It was a Mother’s Mocha Milkshake compounded of polluted milk, depraved sugar, degenerate solids, and evil fats.

  “A moat that only a chemist could love,” Luther concluded. He inserted the wistar rod, noting how its colors shifted and its meters twitched. “Well, it sure as hell isn’t water, and the wand asks us to believe that the genetic materials and amino acids are biologically integrated.”

  Francis dropped his jaw. “You mean this broth is alive?”

  “I will merely say that it has too much silver halide to be organic and too much tissue to be anything else. Imagine a substance that is neither animate nor inanimate. It can grow, like a crystal, and reproduce, like a cow. Now imagine somebody melted it—”

  “Luther!” Burne was pointing to the wistar rod. All eyes shot toward it. The middle was now a stump. The bottom, gone. Chewed off by the hungry moat.

  Luther performed one last test. He took out a crysanium pipe and sacrificed it to science. “There are three more in my pack,” he explained.

  The pipe floated with the current, dissolving like brain in a cannibal’s maw.

  The river was malignant and vile. Why, then, did Francis permit himself to be fascinated by it? Why was its wickedness so alluring? “If I jump in,” he said to Luther, “will you give my bones to the institute?”

  Their attentions went to the wall. At thirty meters, it was as high as the great screwrocks. Hidden from view, the thickness was impossible to gauge, but intuition said: think grand: grand enough to play blasterball and land space arks.

  The wall was everything the river was not. It was beautiful, gray, and still. Its massive interlocking stones had been set by a master’s hand, every joint clean, unshowing, and tooled to last forever.

  One thing was certain. The wall had not been built by savages.

  4

  DR. TEZ YON, whose race had built the wall, was looking for an herb. The sun, once called UW Canis Majoris, now Iztac, daubed its light on the plump leaves and knobby bark, reaching even the ground, a latticework of naked roots. A good time to be in the forest, she thought, remembering her last herb hunt, two opochs ago, when Iztac was visibly closer and her skin had blistered like an aging fresco.

  Tez did not normally bother to distinguish Iztac the ball of gas from Iztac the idea of enlightenment, nor Iztac the idea of enlightenment from Iztac the god. Thus ran the antidichotomy bias of Quetzalian philosophy. Quetzalian philosophy was simultaneously a religion—Zolmec—and a science—biophotonics. Nobody had ever heard of biophotonics until Tez’s childhood heroine, Dr. Janet Vij, invented it. Dr. Janet Vij said things like “It is far more arrogant to profess intuitive knowledge of the sacred than scientific knowledge of the tangible.”

  Zolmec admitted that some dichotomies were inevitable, even useful. Quality versus quantity. Having your teeth fall out versus not having your teeth fall out.

  Nevertheless, Zolmec held the neat schisms of primitive days—art/logic, mind/brain, spirit/flesh—accountable for all sorts of ignorance, most notably the idea that the physical world was something to be transcended. After all, had not Tez’s Earthling ancestors smuggled their measuring devices unnoticed into the atom itself, cleaving quark from quark and ferreting out the Divine Ulticle? Had they not proved the mystical quality of matter and healed forever the rift between science and spirituality? Zolmec issued few taboos, but one of them, surely, was The Putting of Things into Pigeonholes.

  Today, for the first time in memory, the pigeonhole taboo was causing Tez pain. Dr. Mool
is a dogmatist, she thought. Yet in calling him that, I am doubtless dropping him into a pigeonhole, so that for me he stops being wholly human. Yet without that pigeonhole, dogmatist, I can’t even picture the oily bastard in my mind.

  The forest was thinning now. Trees became bushes. Bushes, grass. Her shy mount, Mixtla, found the footing suddenly to its liking and so bore its mistress with a happy bounce. Mixtla was a lipoca, the six-legged species that the Quetzalians had years ago domesticated from the wild huanocez. The lipoca looked like a child’s drawing of a horse.

  Dr. Mool is deft, Tez told herself, respected throughout the entire Hospital of Chimec. Dr. Mool is wise, she told herself, and his wisdom says that coyo root, once boiled into serum, will revive my father and restore his health.

  Dr. Mool is wrong, she told herself.

  Under Mixtla’s hooves, soft humus melted into softer sand. As Mool had predicted, the border between forest and desert bloomed with coyo flowers, their fleshy petals feasting on the noon sun. Tez dismounted.

  Why was Mool so willing to stake her father’s life on a notorious herb like coyo? How could he be sure that the warnings so decisively lettered into a dozen antique texts—forecasts of dire side effects, including profound coma—amounted to little more than myth? It was not a question of regressive old ideas versus enlightened new ideas, but of reasonable caution versus arrogant caprice.

  She remembered disclosing her doubts to Mool on the front steps of the Hospital of Chimec. As usual, he answered not the question he was asked, but the question he felt like answering. “Left to orthodox treatments,” said Mool in his growly-bear voice, “your father may never regain certain motor functions. Left to my approach, given what I have learned about the proper administration of coyo—you’ve read my acclaimed studies of dosage schedules and keyta counteraction in chactols and chitzals—given what I have learned, your father will dance out of here.” Keyta was a nerve-growth culture that commonly snapped people out of profound comas.