by James Morrow
Not far from Olo a Quetzalian National Park was under construction, and on opening day Tez and Francis rented a canoe and explored a moody artificial swamp called Witch’s Fen. All around, reptiles imported from Big Ghost Bayou dived, breached, hissed, and did their level best to amuse every last visitor.
It was on this day that a formless apprehension grew in Francis. He sat looking at his beautiful fiancée, her sensuous mouth, the roundness of her seeded uterus—sights that normally brought only serenity—when some old words of Burne’s set upon like him like a sudden fever. “Have the Quetzalians sacrificed their humanity for the sake of absolute domestic tranquility?”
Have the Quetzalians sacrificed their…?
Tez’s humanity was beyond question. He knew this. He resolved to tear the notion from his mind.
It returned like a spring bird, again and again.
BRIGADIER GENERAL BURNE NEWMAN strutted to his tent through a frigid twilight, oil lantern in his grip, arm swinging, flame arcing. He brushed back the tent flap and found himself looking at the last thing he expected to see, a human face. It belonged to, of all people, Lostwax.
“What happened, another lovers’ quarrel? Shall I cancel her flight home?” Burne slid the lantern onto a table crowded with arrows, noctus pots, jerry-built compasses, and Francis’s insulin kit.
“I need to talk.”
“My schedule is tight.”
“Just give me your opinion about something. How do you think Tez is going to fare back on Nearth?”
Burne sat on his cot, tugged his beard. “You mean, what happens when a pacifist is transplanted to a place where violence is an established way of doing business? I wouldn’t worry.”
But Francis had examples ready. Take your malfunctioning magnecar to a Nearth repair shop and half the time you walk away with a magnecar that has not been fixed but merely diddled with, or a magnecar that has been not only fixed but overfixed, so you get billed for repairs you neither requested nor required. At such times one must resort to total anger, complete with a stabbing finger and a pounding fist. Then, of course, there is overt violence—rare, perhaps, but still part of the deal. When a punk tries to grab your wallet or a rapist corners you in an alley, the situation demands toughness. It’s a matter of survival.
Before Francis could offer yet another case, Burne shrugged and said, “As I remember my planet, one can expect to get through life without experiencing a single rape or even an intolerable number of phony repair bills. What’s really bothering you?”
Francis confessed. The true root of his fear was the question Burne had asked the night they dreamed up the war. “Have the Quetzalians sacrificed their humanity for the sake of absolute domestic tranquility?” For all her elegance and intellect, for all her ability to bear children and give love, Tez was to Francis not quite whole.
Burne said nothing to lighten his friend’s anguish. He stood by his thesis that tranquility was the inverse of humanness. “If I were you, I’d be wondering whether there’s a way to make her a bit less placid. I’d probably want to find out before I bothered taking her all the way back to Nearth.”
The conversation drifted to more innocuous topics. Nearth politics. The stunning incompetence of the Galileo Institute’s administrators. Was Albert Thorne really on the verge of time travel?
Burne rose from the cot, moved toward the tent flap. “Like I said, my schedule is tight. Tonight we’re making swords. In four days we ride across the drawbridge.”
“I’ll wave good-bye.”
“Come at noon—Tolcaday. At the last minute I’ll talk you into joining us.”
“Let’s not start on that.”
And then Burne said something neither of them expected. “If I get killed you’ll care, won’t you?”
Francis choked down his surprise. “God of the brain, of course I’ll care. You’re my friend.” Was Burne stifling tears?
“I’m a tough old turd, Lostwax. But don’t think for a minute that I like violence. I’m for mercy every time, and decency.” His words, in their rareness, seemed ready to crack. “The human conscience—it’s not just in Quetzalia, right?”
“I understand you perfectly.” Rummaging uncomfortably among the table’s oddities, Francis picked up his insulin kit. Burne had never moved him before, never shown his underbelly. Francis was befuddled.
As Burne started out of the tent, a sudden impulse made Francis thrust the insulin kit under his friend’s nose. “I have a foolish fear. While you’re out on the desert, I might have a relapse. Could one syringe stay in Quetzalia?”
“I’d like to have a spare.”
“I’m nervous, Burne, and besides”—Francis forced a cough—“you’d prefer to bring nothing but Nearthlings back to Nearth, right?”
A knowing smile parted Burne’s beard. “Leave me the crysanium box.”
After Burne was gone, Francis removed one syringe and wrapped it in a green towel. Tucking the towel under his sash, he made a conscious decision to leave the insulin flask in its box. It was perfectly obvious, after all, both to Burne and to himself, that fear of recrudescent diabetes was not his reason for taking the syringe. Why pretend otherwise?
A squall of activity greeted Francis as he emerged from the tent. Steel cauldrons the size of kettledrums dotted the camp, their contents made bright and molten by firemoss. Nothing seemed real. The world was ending. The sun had exploded and these glowing buckets served to catch the pieces.
Francis went to the palace’s rear portico, untethered his lipoca, mounted.
Sparks made quick bright stitches in the air as metals were blasted from their ores, then fused into alloys of crysanium hardness and nyoplene flexibility. Before viscosity was lost the alloys were poured out, pounded, folded, pounded, folded, until the result had the form and strength of a sword.
Despite the fire and clamor, Francis soon spotted Burne. He sat in the middle of the camp, straddling a lipoca and looking like an equestrian statue. Attached to the lipoca was an iron vat, suspended on wheels and filled with something silver-black. The general addressed his troops.
“Soldiers! In thirteen days you will be fighting a lethal enemy. Are you ready to risk your lives for Quetzalia’s freedom?”
“Yes!” said at least half the army in unison. Apparently Burne had finally managed to instill a mild jingoism.
“In thirteen days you will have conquered this planet and made it safe for your descendants. Are you ready to open frontiers and build cities?”
“Yes!” said the army, few holding back.
“Listen! This past opoch you have doubted the need for unanimous action. But today we are one, for all of us have fashioned swords, and now it is time to temper them.” Burne dismounted and from a sweaty woman took a transpervium cylinder where rested a blue-hot billet, shaped and pointed and folded twenty times. He raised its glow for all to see and walked to the vat. “Let the river made of hate now pour its secret powers into these crystals, so that we may slay our enemies on the desert as surely as we do in the Temple of Tolca!” In one decisive move he inverted the billet and submerged it point-first. Sizzling steam rushed up as the molecules were locked into place. He withdrew the billet, now tempered and whole.
Burne remounted. Slowly he weaved his lipoca through the camp, and as the vat got within reach each soldier came forward.
Francis did not wait for his friend to notice him, but left the camp at a gallop before even ten swords were quenched. Riding back to Olo, he realized that he had not seen so much noctus since the day Burne drew their experimental samples from the moat. It really wasn’t such horrible stuff. He remembered once telling Luther about its holiness.
17
NO CHEERING THRONGS, no flapping pennants, no show of any kind honored the First Army as it trooped through Quetzalia. A thousand lipocas carried as many soldiers plus packs gorged with everything from refried beans to sleeping bags, granite pegmatites to noctus ampules. The soldiers reached the wall and milled around, waiting f
or the bridge to drop. Sins sloshed as lipocas pawed the ground.
Hostile stares rained down from above. So profound was the ambivalence Quetzalians felt toward this expedition, and so meager the admiration, that the smiling sympathizers on the wall, a scant three dozen of the volunteers’ friends and relatives, were outnumbered by the war protesters mixed among them.
Neckbands emblazoned with wolf heads marked the protesters. Centuries ago, Earthling ethologists had discovered that when a thrashed wolf admits defeat by exposing its neck, the conqueror wolf never, almost never, chomps. Wolves were one of Zolmec’s few lapses into symbolism.
Francis, who wore neither a neckband nor a sympathetic smile, stood gawkily among the civilians, fingering his chitzal scar and shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “You shouldn’t have bothered coming,” he said to Tez. “The army can’t see your silly wolves.”
“I don’t care, as long as they see my silly fiancé. I want them to know you aren’t going.”
“They already know. You think my presence will inspire last-minute desertions?”
“Only last-minute doubts. That’s enough for me.”
Detaching himself from the press of soldiers and animals, Burne galloped to the base of the wall, a caisson trailing behind his lipoca. His chest displayed a crude approximation of a Nearth Police Academy jacket, complete with blue sash and orange epaulets. “Good morning, Lostwax!” he called toward the elevated road.
Francis waved anemically.
“I’m John Philip Sousa,” Burne persisted, “the great Earthling troubadour who wrote the soundtrack for World War I.”
When Francis neglected to laugh, neglected, indeed, to do anything at all, Burne decided to try for a conversation with Tez. “What’s that on your neck, lass?” She grimaced and stomped away. He tried shouting. “If we’re going to be shipmates, we’d better act civil with each other.” Tez folded her arms and stared toward Iztac.
Returning to Francis, Burne said, “Why so glum, Nearthling? You’re not going into battle.”
“It’s my nature to be glum.”
“Good for you, Lostwax. Sneer, frown, and be miserable, for tomorrow you live.”
Finally Francis said, “Bring me a souvenir.”
Burne gripped his sword, unsheathing it far enough to mirror the sun. “I’ll bring you a nice shiny spaceship.”
“Good luck. And don’t get eaten or anything.”
Burne released the sword, let it slide home. Wheeling his mount around, he rode into the gateway, where a female civilian glanced questioningly toward the windlass. Receiving Burne’s nod, she began unreeling the cords.
This was the second time Burne and Francis had seen the portcullis climb skyward while the massive bridge creaked down to the far bank. The memory brought shudders. A kilometer from here, the moat scrubbed Luther’s bones.
Burne rode onto the planks as soon as they came to rest. “Death to all Brain Eaters!” he shouted, hoping the soldiers would chorus back his cry. Instead they started somberly into enemy territory. The wall erupted with the sympathizers’ waving hands. The protesters began to boo.
BY THE TIME FRANCIS spoke again, the last of the civilians had started home and the First Army had snaked far into the desert. “We’re finished here.”
“Nothing good will come of this,” said Tez. “If the battle’s lost, the neurovores will slaughter them all. If it’s won, Zolmec acquires a permanent taint, and I become a Nearthling.”
Suddenly Francis saw his chance to broach an impossible subject. “I understand your reluctance to leave. In fact, you may have more reasons for fearing Nearth than you know. You might not fit in.”
“Fit in?”
He gulped audibly. It had to be done, had to. “I mean, don’t you think that our plans for the future may be a shade too dreamy? You won’t necessarily find happiness. Nearthlings are different from Quetzalians.”
She massaged her baby, smiled. “You mean I might give birth to a grasshopper?”
“Suppose a Nearthling buys a bachbox and it doesn’t work when she gets home. She takes it back and they won’t refund her money because they say she broke it. At that point the customer screams and makes threats. But what could you do?”
“I could pay for the repair.”
“A wasteful response.”
“Can’t bachboxes be repaired?”
“It could be anything. An electrostylus.”
“Oh, birdturds, Francis. You needn’t be Attila the Hun for somebody to exchange a crummy pencil!”
Francis blurted, “What if somebody tried to rape you? You’d be helpless. Burne proved that long ago with one of your runners.”
“Burne is neurovorean.”
“What would you do?”
She gave the question a due measure of thoughtfulness. “I guess I would…try to survive it as best I could, the way I’d try to survive a flash flood or a fall down a mountain.”
“People die from being raped.”
“People die from flash floods.”
“Tez, I have an idea. There’s a way you could become aggressive enough to handle all the hazards of Nearth life.”
She hooked a finger around her neckband, took the pressure off her jugular vein. “I hope not.”
“You know what I’m talking about. Three cc’s make a person capable of fighting back. You saw Zamanta and Momictla. It didn’t hurt them a bit, not a bit.”
“You want to pollute me with noctus?”
“Plus a booster shot after six days, another after twelve, then twenty-four—eventually no more whatsoever. It’s all in Janet Vij’s notes.”
“Francis, I’m pregnant!”
“Noctus is not teratogenic—our animal trials were quite conclusive on this point. The solution doesn’t pass the placental barrier.”
“You vivisectionists think of everything.” She banged her heel against the stone road, walked toward the nearest stairs. “I’ll have none of this!”
He pursued her, pulling the green towel from his robe. “Don’t make a snap judgment.” As he unwrapped the syringe, a glint of Iztac exploded on its cold, immortal needle.
“God of the brain! Isn’t it enough that I’m giving up my planet? Must I now give up my personality?”
“Your personality? The injections will only add to it. They’ll make you more…”
“What?”
“Human.”
Tez’s eyes shrank to small molten beads, and the corners of her mouth plunged downward, as if grabbed by fishhooks. “I’ll try to pretend you didn’t say that, Francis Bastard Lostwax. You think aggression makes us human?” She threw back her head to show her wolf. “Wolves are aggressive, and so are birds, and your damn roach. People are unique only because they use the ability in consistently pointless ways. Nearthlings flatter themselves when they call their cruelties inhuman. They should call their restraints animal.”
“I’m only trying to help you survive a harsh world. Think about it a few days, and—”
She moved a trembling finger toward the syringe. “Put your penis away, Francis. I’ve already thought about it.” Suddenly she laughed. “Listen, this whole conversation is ludicrous. On Nearth I can’t practice the rites. That alone will make me live up to your standards, whatever the hell they are. I can’t promise to beat our child or torture the neighbors, but I imagine I shall become much more like you.”
“You’re guessing. The moat is direct.”
“Why do you think Zolmec requires us never to miss a single service? Give me a year away from the Temple of Tolca, and I’ll be as…as goddam human as you want.”
NOT UNTIL FRANCIS had met and tested the eyeless woman at the going-away party did he start doubting that simple abstinence from Zolmec would prompt Tez to repent her pacifism.
Blind Umia looked fifty at least, thin as an electrostylus, and for the first half of the evening she was the star attraction. Sitting on the floor in the middle of Olo’s largest drawing room, she spun, for anyone who w
ould listen, wondrous tales of fantasy laced with dark humor. Yarns designed to unravel your mind, she called them. There was one about a villainous but seemingly whole man who turned out to be a cripple at the end, another about a Dead Little Pig who built his house of ectoplasm.
The party was Huaca’s idea. Now that he and Tez verged on a fifty-million-kilometer separation, he figured he should do something nice for her. His niceness, however, did not extend to donating his house for the party; instead he had everybody pop in and surprise her Olo.
Overcoming her girlhood tendency to associate parties with terminal illness, Tez grew gayer with each arrival. Huaca’s gesture made her know that despite his chronic aloofness, his constantly becoming wrapped up in himself like a turtle, he was still a lovable brother. Francis had never seen her laugh so many times in a single hour.
Midnight came, went, and the jam of guests around Umia began breaking up and moving to other parts of the villa. For fully half an hour, Tez’s friends passed Francis around like a blasterball, demanding that he clear up a succession of banal mysteries about his culture. Do Nearthlings take afternoon naps? Keep pets? He expected to be asked whether he could sneeze.
Of all the Quetzalians at the party, only Umia interested Francis. Eventually he returned to the large drawing room, worked his way to the bowl of brittlebread chips at her knee. A meager audience heard her coyest yarn yet, about a scientist who one day discovered that the Biblical story of God making the first woman from Adam’s rib was literally true; through alchemy this genius converted his wife back to rib form, but then a dog buried her in the backyard.
God of the brain, Francis thought, an imagination like that in the room, and they would rather find out how many times I fold my toilet paper.
The story had a cryptic ending that Francis suspected of allegory. No one stayed for the sequel. At last she was his alone.
Blindness, Francis learned, had not always been Umia’s fate. Six years ago she was seeking a new anesthetic when a failed attempt exploded in her face, scorching her eyes beyond the reach of Quetzalian herbs. Francis made sympathetic noises, then said what was on his mind.