by James Morrow
“A picnic is exactly what I want to go on, Dr. Yon.” That blue robe was perfect. He had never before seen her in anything but drab medical gray.
“It’s a movable feast,” she said, gesturing toward Olo’s courtyard. Mixtla, her lipoca, was hitched to a wagon overflowing with the raw materials of a picnic: cheese, bread, meat, fruit, wine.
“Care for some breakfast?” he asked.
“Not too much,” said Tez, smiling, stepping forward. “I don’t want to become overnourished.”
Francis clanked around the kitchen. “There’s no second bowl,” he concluded, mildly panicked.
“Do you have a second spoon?”
“Yes.”
Together they ate cereal from the same bowl. The sensation was wonderful and obscene.
Tez explained that she had taken the day off to celebrate the seeming victory of coyo root over her father’s paralysis. Two afternoons ago Teot Yon had hobbled unaided from his room to the gardens and back again.
“And the side effects?” asked Francis.
“Too early to tell. Mool says I shouldn’t worry.”
A silence came, making Francis twitchy. On Nearth such silences were not permitted. Tez, contented, ate cereal. Thin white dribbles rolled from each comer of her mouth. She looked like a milk vampire.
“What is Vaxcala like?” she said at last. “I’ve never met her.”
“An intellectual witch,” Francis replied.
“Is that good?”
“Oh, I thought she was fine. She told me about your nonviolence.”
“It’s all true.” Balancing her chair on a rear leg, Tez pivoted away from the breakfast table until she could see the next room, a tapestried parlor in need of furniture. “I’ve never been at Olo before,” she explained.
“It’s strange to me, too.” A silly thing to say, he decided.
“It looks large and fascinating.”
“Too many rooms.”
Tez swung toward the doorway, studied Iztac. “We must drive northeast on Aspiration Road, toward Aca. My brother is debating in the Vij Arena.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know, but after you’ve followed his arguments around you’ll be plenty hungry for this picnic of ours.”
As they settled into the wagon, Francis realized that he should have invited Tez on a tour of Olo. He blenched.
Aspiration Road had the texture of decayed teeth. “It used to be the second worst road in Quetzalia,” Tez explained as they jerked along, “until they repaired it. Now it’s the worst road in Quetzalia.”
The passing scenery was a different matter. Trees of a hundred shapes and colors grew side by side in a peaceable vegetable kingdom. Clouds glided by like majestic airships. Voluptuous hills showed waving grass and nesting birds.
“So, Francis Lostwax, what do you think of our little civilization?”
“Not bad. For Utopia.”
“We’re hardly that. The winters are god-awful. The government’s in hock to the merchants. The economy is a lot of paper backed by a few crummy thermal-stones. And last year the crops went to hell.”
“Was there starvation?”
“No. Dwarf’s foot has kept the population in check: an herb.”
“It prevents ovulation?”
“No, the overwhelming majority of the Quetzalians who take it don’t ovulate. But it does knock down their sperm counts.”
Francis reddened, fixed on the lipoca’s silly kidney-shaped ears. Tez came to his rescue by changing the subject.
“Now, I must admit those hills are fairly utopian. Do you have splendid hills on Nearth?”
“Yes,” said Francis gloomily, “but they’re all under the ocean.”
A QUETZALIAN DEBATE, Francis learned, resembles nothing so much as a sleazy circus act sponsored by a disreputable philosophy department. There were no lecterns, nothing so refined. The opponents stood inside a pit. They stood inside adjacent circles, the better to run around in, carrying on.
By evoking her brother’s name, Tez obtained two enviable seats near the blue circle. Francis eased into a swiveling lipocawool cushion. Behind him, granite tiers carried rows of spectators aloft. The Janet Vij Memorial Arena stood at capacity.
The walls of the pit were broken on the north and south by ponderous iron doors. Francis wondered aloud if one of them would eventually swing open, thus giving a hungry lion access to the loser.
“You guessed it,” Tez replied. “Only we use rabbits. It’s slower that way.”
Francis thought: At least they have a sense of humor about this pacifism business. At least they don’t take it too far.
The sign on the north door said, HUACA YON VERSUS QU1LO LOIR.
Huaca was rubber-boned, aristocratic, with crystalline eyes and a scar-thin beard running ear to ear. He did not walk into the blue ring, he undulated into it, like protoplasm.
As Quilo stepped toward the red ring, Francis experienced dismal memories of his ex-wife Luli. Quilo was trim, peppery, presumably a champion arguer. Her young features, though less conventionally beautiful than Luli’s, made you look again. She was moon-faced, soggy-eyed, sensual.
“She’s an Antistasist,” Tez whispered, leaning on Francis in a way that made him sad when she stopped. “A radical.”
He replied, “If she wins, does the government topple?”
“Nobody wins, Francis.”
As far as Francis could fathom, the topic of the debate was the supposed rift between creativity and reason. Is art mainly emotional, irrational, and beyond words, intellect mainly cold-blooded, logical, and prolix?
Yes, said Quilo Loir.
No, said Huaca Yon.
Quilo came out swinging. She promised to cite neurological evidence. Francis was impressed. If you want to wow a crowd, cite neurological evidence.
Her neurological evidence turned out to be the old chestnut about the right cerebral hemisphere thinking pictorially and musically, the left thinking verbally. Cleave the hemispheres along the corpus callosum—the ancient “split-brain” experiment—and you have isolated two different kinds of intelligence, one artistic, one rational.
The crowd went wild.
Huaca oozed into action. He spouted words as a Kritonian morg spouts water, torrentially and inexorably. At first his line of reasoning seemed circuitous beyond salvation, but if you listened closely you realized that the half-formed proof he left stranded three corollaries from the main point was eventually rescued and nurtured to maturity by that reductio ad absurdum he picked up on his way back from the tangent. Huaca argued that human brains hold many species of intelligence, not just two, and that Quilo was courting the kind of pigeonhole mentality Zolmec warned against.
The crowd was on its feet, cheering.
The really weird part, Francis felt, was Quilo’s reaction. She conceded Huaca’s superior position with ease, grace, and something Francis was inclined to call enthusiasm. Crisscrossing her circle, smiling hugely, she would nod, chortle, and say things like “Good point!” and “You’ve got me there!”
The intermission was barely under way when the south door smacked the wall, dislodging mortar. A young man, shiny with sweat, breath gone, lurched into the center of the pit. Tez pinched Francis. “Runner.”
“The news is good!” the runner shouted. “The toll of the Brain Eater did not exceed one today, a farmer in Oaxa.” He added that fewer than twenty kilometers separated Burne and the juggernaut.
Murmurs of gratitude wafted through the crowd. Francis experienced alternating relief and guilt. It was good to know that his friend was thus far safe, good to imagine that, if Burne’s mission succeeded, the Quetzalians might be so thankful they would put away their scruples and aid in the recapture of Darwin. And yet…
He leaned against Tez, doing his best to mimic the sly way she had earlier leaned on him. “Of course, if it weren’t for us,” he whispered, “you wouldn’t have a neurovore in your lap to begin with.”
“I’m glad you admit
it,” Tez replied crisply. She led him back to the lipoca wagon, where they spent the intermission not resisting the temptation to start their picnic early. Francis ate an opo.
Tez said, “You know Burne. Will he stamp out this plague?”
“I suspect that Burne Newman can do anything he decides to do.”
Huaca Yon versus Quilo Loir raged on for another hour, and the hot, lazy sun made Francis lose interest, then consciousness. Every ten minutes he startled himself by waking up, always just in time to witness Huaca’s chess-knight mind zagging quirkily forward.
“If it were a black cat I’d dye it pink, and then you’d see it was just like any other kind of cat!”
To which Quilo replied, “I still maintain The Divine Cocoon creates an ipso facto inaccurate world in which there is no epic poem called The Divine Cocoon!”
Eventually the show ended with Huaca telling a joke, risqué by Quetzalian mores, about an Earthling convict who led so many brilliant prison breaks that when he was finally released they honored him by retiring his number. The debaters smiled and bowed amid a standing ovation.
“Very stimulating,” said Francis over the din, with a yawn more honest than his words.
Tez ignored him, hurled a “Congratulations!” into the pit.
The familiar voice caused Huaca to break through a circle of admirers. His fragile eyes looked up, scanned the disbanding crowd, alighted on Tez. “Sister! How beguiling!” He wriggled across the pit. “Who’s your friend?”
“You’ll never guess.”
“Good afternoon,” said Francis stiffly.
“Are you from the mountains?” asked Huaca. “You’re soft for a Cuz year-rounder.”
“Farther than that,” said Francis.
“What’s farther than that?”
Tez cut in: “Ask me about Father, Huaca.”
“I was going to.”
“He’s still alive, no thanks to your flawless record of absence from his bedside.”
“I’ve been busy. Training for a debate takes time.”
“So does dying.”
“He’s not terminal, Tez. Yesterday I saw Mool. Father can walk.”
“He walked once. And the side effects haven’t hit yet.”
“Keep me posted,” said Huaca laconically.
“Maybe you’d like to set a date for the funeral now, so there won’t be any conflicts.”
“Let’s be fair, Tez.”
“I’ll be fair if you’ll visit Father.”
Huaca extended his thumb, rammed it into his sternum. “I promise. Promise, promise, promise. Good-bye, sister.” He started toward his fan club. “And good-bye to you, spaceman,” he said in a loud whisper. “I mean, who else could you be?”
“I THOUGHT YOU WERE MORE OPTIMISTIC about your father,” said Francis as the Janet Vij Memorial Arena shrank to a dark mass on the horizon.
“I am optimistic,” said Tez. “But I need to keep my brother on his toes. I need to humanize him.” By Tez’s account, Huaca wanted a world where everybody was a disembodied brain floating like a kite through the aether, debating telepathically, spinal cord dangling for a tail. “Instead he was born into Quetzalia, where people have relationships and obligations.”
“He is a good debater.”
“Oh, Huaca’s an authentic genius, no doubt about it. But totally constipated when it comes to small kindnesses, simple favors. He’s never allowed himself a trivial moment in his life.”
“I’ve always regretted not having a brother. Maybe I shouldn’t.”
“For me it’s always been like having pubic hair. You have it, but what the hell is it for?”
Now silence came, and again Francis squirmed. The road got better, became concrete, while the surrounding grassland worsened, grew bald and patchy with sand. Finally he thought of something to say.
“Are we near an ocean?”
Tez was playing cat’s cradle with the reins. “Yes. Aca survives on fishing. I have a beach picnic in mind.”
Now there was nothing but sand, then a marsh, then the ocean itself, an endless glassy line, unexpectedly orange. Francis squinted north, studied the distant silhouettes where marsh and ocean joined. A range of pyramids, bleary and flat in the late sun, proclaimed a great city.
“By the way,” said Tez cheerily, “why don’t we agree that at some point this afternoon we’ll have sexual intercourse?”
Yeastbullets could not have disorganized Francis’s stomach more completely. He laughed a foolish, stuttering laugh.
“I thought if we settled the issue now,” Tez continued, “we’d save a lot of uncertainty and fuss.”
“Fine,” Francis gulped. He’d say one thing for these Quetzalians, they knew how to get to a point. “What about…?” He raced blindly through the word. “Pregnancy?”
“Dwarf’s foot is part of today’s picnic.”
“It won’t make me infertile?”
“Francis, if we can give you a detachable cranium, we can certainly restock your semen.”
Crashing symphonically, orange waves intruded on their conversation. It was a wonderfully hideous ocean. Tez directed the wagon south, where boulders subdivided the beach. Soon they found full rockbound seclusion, and Tez tethered the lipoca to a piece of driftwood that looked like a loon. They ate cheese, fruit, and contraceptive sandwiches. They collaborated on an entire bottle of wine. Not once during the picnic did Francis find himself bemoaning the outrages of Luta or the uncertainty of his fate; he was happy. Several kilometers offshore, a trawler slogged across orange sherbet.
They chatted idly about the Quetzalian fishing industry, and then Tez removed all her clothes.
Francis was shocked when he saw people without their glasses on. A missing wig stunned him. Nakedness overwhelmed him.
He needed Tez’s assistance getting his robe off.
Francis wondered if he looked as inharmonious to Tez as she did to him. Her body didn’t go with her face. Not yet, anyway. Eventually it would. It had the same qualities: inevitability, urgency, sculptedness. It had small but emphatic breasts, a concave navel, a straight stomach.
Tez did not find Francis’s nakedness especially intriguing. She had already imagined it accurately. In Quetzalia, bare flesh conveyed no automatic eroticism. Penises were flooded, frigidities thawed, through touching.
Tez touched.
Sex was not Francis’s forte, but he did his best. Tez copulated energetically, forthrightly. Quetzalian pacifism and human passivity were evidently two different things.
Iztac departed, off to light the sea. Francis started a driftwood fire, so romantic it was laughable. The day’s wine worked its blunting way, and he lay down for a nap.
Tez fed leftovers to Mixtla. She joined Francis by the fire. They nuzzled like newborn puppies. They slept.
Stars flecked the sky when Francis awoke. The sleeper at his side beckoned. He touched the moving stomach, the breathing breasts, the bumper-crop hair.
He touched something waxy and strange.
Slowly Francis rolled the curls back from Tez’s forehead. The thing he’d felt was visible now, lit by star-shine. A yellow band ringed Tez’s scalp. A chitzal scar.
Should he ask about it? No, it might pain her to discuss an imperfection. Yet he couldn’t forget it, couldn’t deny his urge to force a seashell into the murm, pull back her cranium, and see his lover in a nakedness beyond flesh.
Tez shuddered, opened her smiling eyes. “Hello,” she said huskily.
Francis kneeled over her like a sorcerer performing a levitation. “On your planet, how do you tell somebody that you love her?”
“It’s very complicated. You say, ‘I love you,’ and then you stand back and see what happens.”
“I love you, Dr. Tez Yon.” Her clever surgeon’s hand rose out of nowhere. Fingertips trickled like rain down Francis’s face. “And do you love me?” he asked.
The yes that came from her mouth startled Tez no less than it did Francis. Suddenly she knew that in his gui
leless bumbling, his selfless uncertainty, this Nearthling was the sort of person she’d been wanting. He did not represent the final end of a quest so much as a validation that quests are always worth undertaking, because life and goodness spring up unexpectedly.
Francis gave a whoop. Tez propped herself against his body. He licked the tip of her nose. She spiraled his curls around her finger.
“Let’s look for constellations,” said Tez. She told Francis how Janet’s Dragon, Lamux’s Teapot, The Cracked Mirror, and The Queen of Seasons had all ended up in the sky. She traced them with her index finger. Francis enjoyed this game. It was the most imagining he’d ever done with his eyes open.
“And now we must invent our own,” said Tez.
“Why?”
“It’s something Quetzalian lovers do. You want to be a Quetzalian lover, don’t you?”
“All right, I see one. Next to Janet’s Dragon there’s a woman bending over a triangle.”
“It’s not a triangle, it’s a marvelous toy. A sailboat.”
“And she’s the life in all toys,” said Francis. “She makes them real.”
“We’ll call her The Toy Queen,” said Tez. “Our own constellation.”
Before making love again, they found themselves on one last search. No words passed between them. Intuitively each knew the object sought.
“There it is,” said Francis.
“Where?”
“Between UWCM-2 and The Cracked Mirror.”
“Yes. I see it.”
The star was small, feeble, a redundancy among countless redundancies. But finding it mattered at this particular moment. It was their shared heritage, their common seed, their bond across the light-years.
They remembered that its name was Sol.
TWO
* * *
The Agnostic
10
IN THE CLEARING the predator paused, awaiting the star-shine. This was the leaden hour, the time between the passing of the sun and the inauguration of the night. It was the hour for the predator to rest his flesh, to gather his energies, and to picture his quarry at hand.