The Wine of Violence

by James Morrow

  “I’m curious. Can a blind person practice the rites of Zolmec?”

  “Not fruitfully,” was the reply. “Without pictures the cybernetic loop is impossible to maintain. In six years I haven’t added a drop to the river made of hate.”

  “Aren’t you afraid you might become a killer?”

  “Hardly.” Amusement curled the corners of Umia’s mouth.

  “But don’t all those unrelieved urges make you more ready to do harm?”

  “Zolmec doesn’t merely help us to be gentle,” replied Umia in a tone suggesting this was all very basic stuff. “It teaches that gentleness is right.”

  “Still, you must be more capable of violence than anyone at this party.” Then he added, grinning, “Except me.”

  She shrugged. “Perhaps.”

  Shoving a fistful of brittlebread chips between his lips, Francis corked his mouth with his hand and chewed.

  Their conversation sidled into other matters. Burne’s tawdry war. (Umia found it wholly without merit.) The raptures and rigors of parenthood. (Umia had four daughters.) And, of course, corkscrew beetles. (Umia feigned fascination.)

  Now Francis noticed a curious bauble—the head of a clown sculpted in glass—dangling from Umia’s neck by a plant-fiber thong. He asked what it was.

  “I’m in the hospital, feeling like lipoca dung, when here comes my youngest daughter with a present for me. She didn’t buy it, no, she made it. Little Iztac’s own design. Look closely, you see? The clown has three cheeks—the perfect Quetzalian avatar. When we turn the other cheek, there’s another to be turned after that!”

  But for Francis the clown was not an avatar. It was a device. A device for measuring just how deeply Umia’s religious conditioning ran. A device for determining whether he must intervene in the Nearthianization of Tez.

  After noting that the clown indeed had three cheeks, Francis proceeded to steal it. Snapping the thong, he laid the glass mutant on the rug.

  “What are you doing?” Umia demanded as the familiar pressure vanished from her neck.

  Francis reached into the brittlebread bowl, collected four chips, stacked them on his palm. He moved his hand toward Umia’s ear and began making a fist.

  KRAACK.

  Umia interpreted the sound as Francis hoped she would.

  “God of peace!”

  “Your gods won’t help you, Chactol Eyes! I’m grinding your precious trinket to sand!”

  He was especially pleased at remembering about chactols, those sightless Lutan fish, and spontaneously inventing a corresponding epithet.

  “Go ahead,” said Francis. “Spit in my face! Poke my eye—I’m right in front of you! Lose your temper! Do something!”

  But Umia sat mute, her lower lip protruding and tremorous. Her expression was almost equal to the magisterial despair Zamanta had worn when the neurovore assaulted his children at the drawbridge. Tears flooded the cracks in Umia’s cheeks.

  “What a cruel race you Nearthlings must be,” she wheezed.

  “Perhaps…but you’re not a race at all. You’ve forfeited your membership in the human species.”

  “I feel sorry for you.”

  “Sorry?” said the betrayed extraterrestrial.

  “Sorry.”

  The test completed, Francis took Umia’s limp hand, flipped it, laid the clown on her palm.

  “I give up,” he said. “You win. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “Not a fissure,” she said, scrutinizing the treasure with her fingertips. Confusion blended with delight, and her face went blank.

  “I’m sorry I caused you pain, Umia. It was a kind of joke. On Nearth we have some unusual standards for humor. I keep forgetting I’m not home.”

  “Home is where I think you belong, Francis Lostwax,” said Umia icily.

  GUEST BY GUEST, the party dissipated. The exit lines ranged from the predictable “It’s getting late” to Umia’s “I have to feed my dead cat.” Everyone hugged the hosts and wished them well on their apparent marriage and impending child. The coming blasphemous voyage to Nearth, certain to be one of the major events of Tez’s life, was alluded to with “Have a safe journey,” but no one came out and mentioned the technology called space travel. Most Quetzalians still regarded rocketships the way a Christian might regard a croquet set made of the True Cross.

  Umia, cane in hand, clown on her neck, was last to leave.

  “I’m sorry about that joke,” Francis said, meaning it. Then, a lie: “I really thought you would laugh.”

  “He’s a very bizarre person,” Umia whispered to Tez. Good-nights were exchanged, and the blind woman tapped her way into the gardens.

  “How can she get home?” asked Francis.

  Staggering away from the door, Tez gave him an inebriate smile. “She keeps a seeing-eye turtle in her pocket.” Francis snorted and marched back into the large drawing room.

  Olo was suffused with an emphatic post-party quiet.

  After drifting through the villa for several minutes like an unmoored boat, Tez found the bedroom and collapsed. She snuggled into the sheets, shouted, “We could make love now, if you want!”

  “I don’t,” Francis replied, appearing in the doorway.

  “What’s the matter?”

  He explained how Umia had completely failed a test of aggression.

  Tez grimaced.

  “Umia hasn’t attended church in six years,” he persisted, “yet she wouldn’t even shove me. If abstinence didn’t change her, there’s no reason to suppose it will change you.”

  “God of the sun, Francis, don’t start on that.”

  “Were you familiar with Umia’s case all along?”

  “It doesn’t settle anything.”

  “Dammit, Tez, you lied to me. You knew Zolmec can be reversed only with a needle.”

  “I don’t lie, Francis, to you or anybody else.”

  “But you’ll admit it’s disturbing?”

  “Let me warn you about something, Nearthling. If I ever again hear you imply that Quetzalians are less than human, I’m going to take my pregnant body to some place where you’ll never find it. Do you understand? It’s the end of your fatherhood.”

  “Yes,” said Francis sneeringly.

  “I’m going to sleep.”

  “Go to sleep.” He faced the hall, saw the bedroom lamps die. Soon Tez snored. Returning to the drawing room, he kicked a dormant fireplace. Outside, an animal wailed. He stared at the pile of logs, trying to ignite them with his eyes. Sad, angry thoughts churned in his brain.

  Why is she so stubborn?

  I must make sure she is a Nearthling before I take her home.

  I love her too much to hesitate.

  On the mantelpiece sat a lantern. Francis inserted a lit match. The wick flared, the globe glowed to life.

  The lock on the laboratory née library had stopped functioning sometime between their discovery that noctus was not teratogenic and their successful attempt to sell the war to the Quetzalian government. Punching the door out of his way, Francis entered, lifted the lantern high.

  Dust heaps lay everywhere like fresh snow. Francis held his breath to keep from coughing. The searching flame swept past mounds of notes and a ghost town of empty cages, settling at last on a far nook. Reaching into the wall, he drew out a ceramic pot, the unused deciliters of the same solution they had put into Zamanta.

  Pot in hand, Francis left the lab, went to the kitchen, where, glistening in starlight, cushioned by its towel, the syringe lay on a windowsill. The stove was gorged with wood, and he had no trouble starting a fire and setting some water to boil. Feeble as Lutan germs were reputed to be, a sterilized needle still seemed proper.

  Gloom commanded the bedroom. Francis entered softly, stomach aflutter. Easing the pot onto the nightstand, he began prying the stopper, which was jammed in hard and further glued by caked nightmares. After two minutes’ effort, the noctus was free. The syringe drank deeply.

  Unlatching the window, Francis shot v
iolence into the night until the barrel held the correct dosage for an adult human, not a drop more. On silent feet he approached Tez, peeled a crisp sheet from her thigh. She stirred but stayed asleep.

  Sacrificing her humanity…a slave to Zolmec…will not pass the placental barrier…sacrificing her humanity…a slave to Zolmec…will not pass the placental barrier…sacrificing her humanity…a slave to Zolmec…will not pass the placental barrier…sacrificing her humanity…

  One day she’ll thank me for this, Francis thought as he slid the hair-thin crysanium needle into her flesh. Slowly he retreated the plunger. No blood, good. The needle had missed her veins. He gulped for air, moved his thumb, and injected his lover with three cubic centimeters of hate.

  18

  IT WAS NIGHT, he was exhausted, and still Minnix Cies had excellent reasons not to be asleep. For example, the journey across the desert had been so amazingly free of hazard that the probability of ambush now seemed doubled. Also, squirting through his veins was an animate, biophotonic stimulant called noctus.

  Also, tomorrow he might be murdered.

  Lying beneath the warm consolation of a thick, twice-folded lipocaskin, eyes wide open, Minnix stared toward the stones that paralleled his face and smelled their brisk mossy wetness. The shelf he had bedded himself under shot deep into a cliff, far beyond the reach of his lantern. Bored, he turned on his side and faced the desert, watching the place where the stars became campfires. First the fires had heated dinners, now soldiers, but how many of those soldiers were asleep? Only a few, he guessed, a very few.

  Even in this modest light the desert was stunning. Like the other volunteers, though, Minnix had crossed it in fear, his senses blunted by expectancy. Whenever he had scanned the horizon, it was not to notice the shifting colors of the dunes or the wind-sculpted wonder of the cliffs, but to learn if any Brain Eaters were about. Whenever he had cocked an ear toward the night, it was not to hear the breezy songs of rocks or the soothing hiss of desert lizards, but to intercept the bipedal crunchings of neurovores crossing sand.

  Day had followed day, and their luck had held. A case of exhaustion here, a delaying caisson repair there, but so far not a single authentic setback. Was Catastrophe waiting for the battle itself? Minnix shuddered. The burden of proof is on Newman, he thought, but no small measure of responsibility lies with my party, at whose urging dozens joined up. If we fail, there’s egg on our faces and blood on our hands.

  Suppose the moat betrayed them? In the case of two people named Zamanta and Momictla, of course, Janet Vij’s forecasts had proved true. For six days these citizens had remained in the grip of instinct, then on schedule became lambs. But what about people who weren’t named Zamanta and Momictla? What about people named Minnix Cies? In another person’s brain, might noctus fade sooner? What if it lasted three days? Or three hours? What if he were about to skewer a prone neurovore when suddenly…he can’t! Paralysis. The monster’s claws puncture its attacker’s throat…

  Grotesque fantasies came easily to Minnix Cies. He was Quetzalian.

  The injections had been meted out with typical Burne Newman efficiency. He arranged his thousand in a grid of forty ranks and twenty-five files. “Ampules!”

  Packs were swung to the ground, and, after an interval of unmilitary fumbling, each Quetzalian held a ceramic sphere containing one noctus dose.

  “Soldiers!” Burne continued, brandishing the syringe and his own ampule. “Tomorrow we attack the Brain Eaters. All signs foretell a total victory. You have only to aim your arrows and shoot. But first you must drink the moat!”

  The soldier at square one was Minnix Cies.

  “Do as I do,” said Burne, approaching, filling the syringe. On his own arm he demonstrated how to insert the needle and prove that it was not in a vein, but he did not advance the plunger. Burne Newman had so far in his life killed dozens of wild animals, a young crysanium mine striker, and a rampaging neurovore. Ersatz instinct was something Burne Newman did not need.

  “Watch what he does,” Burne commanded, rudely tapping the soldier at square two and ascertaining that he was ready to study his neighbor’s ordeal and learn from any blunders that might happen. Before handing the syringe to Minnix, Burne emptied its contents on the ground and sanitized its needle with a thermalstone.

  Minnix made no blunders. With a confidence he couldn’t account for, he drained his army-issue ampule and pushed the refilled syringe into his deltoid muscle. He injected himself slowly, blotting the needle’s sting by thinking about his little brothers, the twins, back home.

  “Pass it on,” said Burne, and Minnix handed syringe and thermalstone to the soldier at square two. “Dismissed.”

  Minnix walked to his lipoca, gave it some sugar, and waited to change. His arm, aching softly, bore a green welt. Soon he would feel evil—whatever that meant. Would he want to strangle his brothers? Thumb out the eyes of desert rats?

  No such urges appeared. Like Quetzalian herb tea, noctus was arousing, exhilarating even. It made him feel good, nothing more.

  The soldiers kept passing the needle. By midnight, the entire army was possessed of its secret weapon.

  There was no doubting that the stuff worked. All during dinner, scuffles erupted over portions. As darkness appeared, the excuses for roughhouse ranged from “You stole my canteen!” to “I had this campsite first!” Two women realized they had an old score to settle. It concerned a lover. They walked to the edge of the camp and beat each other up.

  But now, sprawled sleepless under the cliff, Minnix worried that his aggressiveness was waning. The thought passed as a soldier approached. From where he lay, Minnix could see only the feet, one of which swung back and rammed itself obnoxiously into his knee. He groaned.

  “Sorry,” said a cheery female voice. “I had to know that I could still do it.”

  “Yes…I understand.” And if you can do it, he thought, I can do it. Soon the wrenching pain in Minnix’s knee was helping him to fall asleep.

  LIKE AN INFLAMED EYE, Iztac rode the cold morning sky. Before Burne’s army the desert sprawled uninvitingly. Burne studied the distant oasis for two minutes, made nothing of it, and summoned Ras, a balding astronomer whose visual acuity was legend. Ras studied the distant oasis for fifteen seconds.

  “They haven’t spotted us,” he said, nervously rubbing his lipoca’s neck. “Business as usual.”

  “How many?”

  This time Ras took thirty seconds. “Five—no, six are stalking wild chitzals at the periphery, ten are in the nearest trees.”

  Attack now, Burne thought. The tribes will become enraged and rush into our arrows, or else panic and retreat: I don’t especially care which.

  The First Army of Aca was deployed in a huge circle around the oasis, rendering the enemy, as Burne put it, “outflanked, outfronted, and outassed.” At a prearranged signal from their general, a loud “Advance!” passed from officer to officer, the soldiers trotted forward, and the circle collapsed, dooming its center.

  “Stop us at fifty meters!” Burne shouted to Ras, fifty meters being the effective range of a Quetzalian long-bow.

  “All right,” Ras called back, and in fascination watched the approaching oasis. The facelike flowers and silvery waterfalls astounded him to the point of hypnosis. At the last moment he remembered his orders. “Now!”

  “Halt!” Burne cried.

  “Halt!” answered his officers, and the army halted.

  Ras’s fabulous eyes were no longer needed, for at this distance everyone could see that the oasis throbbed with action. The chitzal hunters had retreated toward the center, screeching warnings as they went. At first the camp reacted with the confusion of a termite colony whose nest is knocked open by a gorilla’s probing twig. Then, slowly, the scurrying became a concert. Enmities between tribes were hastily dissolved, alliances hastily forged. Dozens of neurovores poured forward from deep within the oasis, where scant seconds before they had been calmly bathing their children and quietly searching out r
ivals to eat. Dozens more abandoned their naps and leaped from the trees. Within minutes of the first warning-cry, every able-bodied Brain Eater, spear and ax in hand, was busily dispensing itself around the edge of the oasis.

  “They’ve seen us!” Ras sounded more thrilled than afraid.

  Burne studied the amassing enemy. “Arrows!”

  “Arrows!” came the echo. A thousand arrows slid from their quivers.

  “Load!” cried Burne.

  “Load!” came the echo. A thousand bowstrings snuggled into nocks.

  “Pull!” cried Burne.

  “Pull!” came the echo.

  “Mark your targets!”

  “Marked!” A thousand arrowheads were aligned with stomachs, hearts, brains.

  “Fire!”

  “Fire!” But for the moment not one arrow was fired.

  Burne waited for the neurovores to die, and after twenty seconds his patience decayed into fury. “Fire, I said! Open your fingers! Kill your enemies!” The bowstrings remained taut. “Cowards! Slime molds!” Nothing. He presented his helpless face to Ras. “What’s happening, astronomer?”

  Ras relaxed, restoring his bow to erect impotence. “I’m sorry, general, but the neurovores have done nothing to merit my killing them.”

  “The neurovores have devoured your countrymen and robbed your world of its rightful peace of mind!”

  “Peace of mind is relative.”

  “You eggheads, this is a battle, not a seminar!”

  “The enemy deserves another chance.”

  “If these monsters decide to rush us, it won’t take two minutes before we’re in range of their spears. Two minutes after that we’re in range of their axes.”

  “Then we’ll wait. We’re a defensive army.”

  “You’re a dead army! Come here!” Animated by a sudden scheme, Burne took the reins of Ras’s lipoca and burst away at full gallop. The slack vanished with a jerk that caused the astronomer to drop his longbow. Stubby as it was, the lipoca’s neck became something to grip for dear life.