by James Morrow
That was it. End of episode. Curtain. No blood, no drubbings, not even a raised voice.
“You really thought they would kill her?” asked Tez.
“Before we realized that Quetzalia had a drawbridge, my friends and I tunneled under your wall. We ended up in a transpervium room.”
Tez tensed, not quite perceptibly. Francis explained that he had witnessed a murder whose inspiration was scarcely more goading than a ruined chess game.
“Everyone here seems so kind—even pacifistic.” He shot an involuntary and awkward glance at Zamanta. “Yet I saw it.” In the background, Black and White were telling the girl about the merits of Pawn to King Four. The chitzal was back in its tree. “Unless, of course, it was a dream.”
Anxious glances rebounded among Tez, Zamanta, Momictla.
“I’d better let my other patients know I’m still sawing bones,” said Tez. She turned, and the glowing Temple of Chimec bronzed her face. “Good-bye, Francis Lostwax. Let’s keep in touch.”
“I’ll keep in touch with you if you’ll keep in touch with me.” He liked talking about touch with her. “But what about my dream?”
“I suppose…I suppose it was only a dream.”
FRANCIS AWOKE the next morning to find his bed encircled by five overweight men who called themselves priests of the Temple of Iztac and no doubt were. The most forceful among them, also the fattest, gave his name, Mouzon Thu. Mouzon was homely, all bubbled by warts, with an incongruously musical voice.
“Please get dressed, doctor,” he sang. “Vaxcala Coatl expects a visit.”
Francis said, “And I suppose it would be lousy interplanetary diplomacy to keep the high priestess waiting.”
They escorted him through the ascending corridors, into the brilliant air, down the proliferous exterior steps of the hospital. A wagon waited at the bottom, its lipoca pawing and snorting. One priest, a swarthy adolescent, moved up front to steer, and the other joined their catch, their prize Nearthling, in the back. The wagon clattered off across a broad and dustless plaza. Narrowing, the plaza became a causeway threading drinkable lagoons together.
“That’s the place,” said Mouzon.
“The Library of Iztac, god of the sun,” added a priest whose face was mainly beard.
Pointing fingers led Francis’s eyes to a great truncated pyramid, twin to the Hospital of Chimec. The steep-sided giants, masterworks of well-cut stone, faced each other across five kilometers of causeway. Lesser pyramids and low stone buildings intervened, casting their reflections into lustrous waters.
“You can see her temple on top,” the bearded priest continued.
“No shortage of divinities around here,” Francis observed.
“We have three,” said Mouzon frostily. “Iztac, god of the sun. Chimec, god of the human brain. Tolca, god of peace.”
Francis touched his chitzal scar. “Temple of Iztac…Temple of Chimec…so where is the Temple of Tolca?”
Mouzon smiled haughtily. “The Temple of Tolca is all around us.”
Once inside the building, the party divided. Three priests lingered in a friendly sunlit anteroom while Mouzon, Francis, and the swarthy driver entered a passageway that eventually deposited them in the central nave, a vast and resonant belly. Francis felt like Jonah in the giant grouper. The women seated in the farthest corner seemed swallowed too, but swallowed so long ago that she had adapted and was thriving.
Vaxcala Coatl thrived amid smoking incense and dripping tallow. She sat on a sensuous red divan. The crowded shelves at her back held mechanical bric-a-brac and beautifully bound sacred writings. Francis noticed a telescope, a microscope, and a soldering iron. He scanned the titles, some familiar, most not. The Rig Veda, The Gospels, The Iliad, The Divine Cocoon, Complete Writings of Janet Vij, Biophotonics, Basic Wiring…
Vaxcala was tall, brittle, with a swan’s neck and bottomless eyes. Her scrawny face, its nose so thin you could open letters with it, seemed little more than a painted skull. Her fingers, long and powerful, were always working, like the legs of an overturned beetle. There was no telling her age. Somewhere between forty and forty thousand.
“So we meet at last,” said Vaxcala in a voice redolent of antique china.
“We?”
“Nearth and Quetzalia.” She gestured to a plush pile of lipoca wool, and Francis snuggled himself down. “When did our common ancestors last walk Planet Earth together?”
“Centuries by any calendar. I understand from Dr. Mool that yours is perfect.”
“Yes…Of course, everything Mool concerns himself with is perfect, or he wouldn’t concern himself with it. When he picks his nose, rare coins fall out. Would you like some tea?”
“Your planet makes the worst tea in the galaxy,” said Francis, good-humoredly. He liked this Vaxcala.
“Oh, you’ve been swilling that slug-drug they peddle at the hospital. Cast your lot with sacred herbs.”
Francis kneaded his scar, nodded.
“Mouzon, would you mind?” Whether Mouzon minded or not, he transcended his bulk and zipped out of the nave.
“I hope you realize that your coming creates difficulties,” said Vaxcala. “To be frank, nobody quite knows what to do with you, especially our governor. The whole affair is in my skinny lap.”
“Help us fight our way back to Darwin, and we’ll be off your planet”—Francis snapped his fingers—“like that.”
Vaxcala appeared to be experiencing a bad odor. “You’re proposing a war, is that it?”
“If we raised a large enough army, only the neurovores would die.”
“You don’t understand. The neurovores, whatever their depravities, are human.”
“You’re right, Vaxcala. I don’t understand.”
“Having conferred at tedious length with other Zolmec clergy, Dr. Lostwax, I have decided to tell you something about our race. Something you would have learned eventually from observation or loose tongues.”
“Or Burne Newman?”
Vaxcala’s thin mouth became a perfect crescent. “Then you’ve already guessed?”
“It has something to do with why Burne must kill your neurovore for you, and why that man Zamanta couldn’t defend his children.”
“I’m still against telling him,” the swarthy priest interjected, grunting for good measure.
“Shut up,” said Vaxcala, as winningly as a human can say those words. “The plain truth, Francis, is that Quetzalia is a country without violence. Since the building of the wall, no deathblow has ever been dealt here.”
The priest decided to make the best of his defeat. “Flogging is a fiction,” he chanted loftily, “assassination a legend, kidnapping a myth, torture a vanished nightmare.”
At this point Mouzon, carrying a full tea tray, bustled into the nave and continued the litany. “Thieves are unknown, warriors unnamed, rapists unthinkable.”
“We are without prisons, penalties, weapons, or revenge,” said the swarthy priest.
Francis poured tea and sipped. The dark drink quickened his wits as surely as anything Nearth called coffee. “But do you merely inhibit aggression, or are you actually incapable of it?”
“After two hundred years of Zolmec,” said Vaxcala, “incapable is the word. So whether you know it or not, you and Burne come to Quetzalia as walking bombs, thus far unexploded. The neurovore who got in comes as something even worse.”
A spiky despair swept over Francis. His hopes of a Cortexclavus triumph back on Nearth were starting to look dim. If only Burne were here. Burne would talk them out of this nonsense. “I have trouble believing a religion can be so effective.”
“Until now Zolmec has indeed been effective. There are liabilities, of course. Stability breeds boredom. We have a radical faction, the Antistasists, who want change of some kind. They haven’t decided what kind yet, and I’m not looking forward to the day they do. But the worst of it is our pathetic vulnerability.”
Francis gave a knowing smirk.
Vaxcala rotated the te
apot by its spout, eventually took the handle and poured. “We are guilty,” she said. “Guilty of assuming that our wall, if not our moat, if not our planet’s invisibility, would shelter us forever.”
“Let me assure you that Burne and I have no intentions here beyond getting home. Our arrival was a total mishap.”
“Yes, but once you return to Nearth the word is out. How long before another spaceship comes, and then another? Quetzalia is not without its tempting resources, and our capital, as you know, can be successfully invaded by an unarmed kindergarten.”
“You’ll just have to trust us.”
“True,” said Vaxcala without spirit.
“If you won’t kill neurovores for us, at least help us find fuel. Do you know what pollucite is?”
“A rare mineral. Find the high-grade stuff and you can count on thirty-six percent cesium oxide. It’s the cesium you want, correct? Your ship has ion drive?”
“The southern jungles are studded with granite pegmatites,” Mouzon volunteered, “and that could very well mean pollucite. We could also try the Ripsaw Mountains.”
“So, you traffic in science as well as faith,” said Francis.
“What makes you think Zolmec has anything to do with faith?” asked Vaxcala. Rising, she approached the shelves and gently swatted the telescope. It rolled into her arms. “This is here for repair. Upstairs we have an astronomical observatory.”
Francis was impressed. On Nearth, astronomy had always been religion’s least favorite brand of knowledge. But it would be a mistake to let Vaxcala win a point now. “Looks like a machine to me. Aren’t you afraid of contamination?”
“The clergy is allowed to touch anything.” She returned the heavy cylinder to its shelf. “We’ll organize a pollucite expedition the minute you give the order.”
Francis was about as good at giving orders as he was at giving milk. “Thank you. I think we’ll wait until Burne gets back.” He pursed his lips; siphoned tea.
“Meanwhile, we intend to make your stay here something out of a travel folder. You’ll get a private lipoca, a private fortune, a private house—Olo, the seminar center.”
“Not entirely private,” said Mouzon, unfurling a calendar. “There’s an herb conference next opoch.”
Vaxcala frowned. “Unfortunate. You’ll hear motherweed-talk far into the night. I’ll ask them to stay out of your hair.”
Francis patted his embryonic curls. “Am I free to come and go?”
“Yes, but try to pass yourself off as a native. Quetzalians are prejudiced against non-Quetzalians. You can’t blame us. Burne Newman kills. Maybe you do too.”
“No.”
“There is one restriction. I must ask you not to attend any Zolmec rites. Stay away from the Temple of Tolca. The presence of a nonbeliever could prove damaging.”
“Suppose I get curious?”
“You already are.”
“You can’t keep me out.”
“True,” said Vaxcala with an unnerving grin.
Francis shrugged elaborately. “I never went to church on Nearth,” he said. “I’ve got no reason to start now.”
THE OLO SEMINAR CENTER was a stark villa faced with stucco and beset by vines. The outside walls had been so scrupulously whitewashed they seemed made of silver. Cheerful patches of sun-god greeted Francis whenever he came home.
Three dozen rooms hemmed an ample courtyard paved with flagstones and sliced by rivers of flowers. The indoor swimming pool adjoining Francis’s bedroom prompted him to suppose that his corkscrew beetle liked to swim, its nose serving as a propeller. He would have to test this hypothesis on their reunion.
Learning to ride a lipoca is not difficult if one is willing to spend some time on the ground. Francis, being an entomologist, was willing. The day he conquered the beast he went into Tepec, touring incognito as Vaxcala had instructed.
The Quetzalian genius for building was everywhere on view. Fountains fed by masonry aqueducts sprouted where Nearthlings would have put videophone poles. Brimming agricultural terraces sloped down step by step to artificial lakes. Flawless causeways and sleek irrigation canals raced each other to the horizon. Green parks and yellow gardens made a lush chessboard when seen from the Library of Iztac.
“Library” was putting it mildly. The immense pyramid accommodated museums, lecture halls, classrooms, laboratories, stores, and restaurants. And, of course, books. Not only the entire Eden Three collection, but thousands of original Quetzalian manuscripts, hand-lettered, from plays to monographs, epic poems to cookbooks, arranged not by subject matter but by presumed degree of truth, so that a novel of psychological validity and a treatise on topology might be stacked together a half-hour’s walk from a trendy set of instant and absolute solutions to life’s mysteries.
From every library window Tepec looked good: tidy, purposeful, vast. Francis favored the east vista, not only because it included the verdant settings of the divine star for which the building was named, but also because it included the Hospital of Chimec. He hypnotized himself with the view, aching to master his bashfulness and pay Dr. Tez Yon a visit.
His library trips became daily, and each time Francis made a point of noticing Zolmec’s influence on average citizens. The faith was kept subtly. Children roughed and tumbled like children, but they did not kick, spit, or bite. Parents suffered the normal ordeals, cajoling and fussing all the way, but they never spanked. Athletes aimed for self-selected goals, not the humiliation of opponents. Even when it came to team sports, such as gobletball and flipflop, Francis saw no sympathy for the gore ’em, gash ’em, geld ’em mentality of the Nearth equivalents.
And yet there was that murder, a boy slaughtered in a glass room. The memory visited Francis with cruel constancy.
A WEEK AFTER HE HAD MOVED to the seminar center, Francis rode beyond Tepec’s western edge, all the way to the great unmortared wall. He followed it for hours, trying to convince himself he was looking for insects. But in time he knew what he wanted. In his mind he could picture it, adjacent to the wall, sitting surrealistically on the sand like a huge videophone booth.
Not until Iztac was low in the sky, balanced atop her own distant temple, did Francis admit defeat. He was exhausted, saddlesore, and ready to believe that not only the murder but the glass room itself was a ghost born of his grief over Kappie McKack. Then something happened.
The best way home took Francis through the suburban settlement called Motec. Local pride jelled around a park, a handsome expanse of bulbous trees and flat-topped hills.
On one particular hill, artists had collected; they daubed pigments, practiced pirouettes, wrote verse, and spun wondrous cocoons from yarn, hide, and strips of supple wood.
On one particular artist, a dense white beard came to a perfect point.
Francis stifled a yawp. Cautiously he approached the elderly child killer. “Hello.”
The killer cocked his head, smiled pleasantly. “Good evening.”
“Nice design. I think my eyes are in love.”
“This?” The old man plucked his cocoon like a lute. “It’s not going right, but I appreciate your praise. I don’t get comments as a rule, fewer than you’d think. People are shy.”
“Or jealous?”
“You’re not from around here, are you? I know everybody who comes to the park.”
“No, I’m not from around here.” Francis chuckled to himself.
“If you’re lost, I could draw you a very artistic map.”
I might have guessed, Francis thought. On the surface he’s eager to please, underneath he’s ready to strike. “Art is a blessing, isn’t it?” I need proof. “I mean, without it we’d all be athletes or something.” Suddenly the proper plan came. “I’m not just being friendly. I’d like to buy it.”
The sculptor glowed like a new luminon. “Wonderful! Can you afford eight cortas?”
“I’d like to buy it so I can take it home and wreck it. I want to smash the thing until there’s nothing left but sawdust. That
would make you mad.”
“Probably,” said the sculptor, apparently more confused than resentful.
“You’d want to drop by my house and beat me up.”
A counterfeit smile crossed the sculptor’s face. “Are you from Aca? There must be some sort of humor going around that hasn’t caught on here yet.”
“And then you’d kick my ribs in until I was dead.”
“I’ve never hurt anyone in my life,” the sculptor pouted.
Will nothing jog his memory? wondered Francis. He’s repressed the whole thing? “You’re a liar! I saw you.”
The reply was firm. “I don’t lie.”
“You’re a bastard liar with a whore for a wife, and this hideous sculpture looks like something a neurovore would make!”
“Are you feeling ill?” The sculptor’s voice rang with irritatingly authentic compassion.
In a sudden spasm, Francis leaned forward and yanked a crucial guyline from its moorings, so that the cocoon toppled over. He swung his feet away from the lipoca’s flanks, ready to jab its kidneys as soon as the sculptor advanced.
But the sculptor just stood there.
Francis gulped, his heart socking his rib cage. “Maybe I am ill,” he muttered, and the sculptor nodded. Reluctantly Francis urged his lipoca into the dusk.
The sculptor had unnerved Francis, more than if he’d attacked him with an ax. On the one hand, the man was evidently as sweet and moral as Quetzalians were supposed to be. And yet his anger had once expressed itself so powerfully that the treads of a magnecar were turned to oatmeal.
He knew the feeling was capricious and impermanent, but right then Francis decided that if he could just reconcile these two facts, he wouldn’t care if he never saw home again.
9
“HELLO, DR. LOSTWAX. Want to go on a picnic?”
Francis glanced up from his breakfast, a lumpy amalgam of whole grains, fresh opos, and milk. Lipocas, as it happened, supplemented their horsey virtues with all the best features of cows.
“Tez! How enchanting to see you!” Syrup dripped slowly off his words.
The doorway framed her. “I’m on a self-declared holiday,” she explained, her tongue tucked fetchingly into the corner of her mouth. She licked a morning sunbeam.