by James Morrow
“It may surprise you to learn that quite a few of us around here believe in nonviolence.”
“What I meant is—”
“You meant that Tez was an exquisite person. She is the Heroine of Quetzalia.”
Suddenly the weariness lifted. “I’m glad you know,” said Francis slowly.
As she often did, Vaxcala measured the sanctum with her stride. Nine paces: it never changed. “What do you want out of life, Francis Lostwax?”
Francis smiled. “To never hurt anybody again.” His lack of hesitation surprised him. “To feel clean.”
“What do you know, Nearthling—I’ve decided to bar you from Zolmec no longer. You may, if you wish, attend the next service.”
“We’re taking off tomorrow afternoon.”
“Yes. Just the same—you are now an honorary Quetzalian.”
“I feel like I’m receiving a posthumous award.”
“You aren’t dead, Francis Lostwax.”
SOON THEY PARTED, and Francis descended the eastern steps of the great pyramidal library, his thoughts confined to a mild envy of the Quetzalians who tomorrow and the next day and the day after that could explore this massive convoluted brain where all knowledge lay stored in countless cells of rolled parchment and bound paper. He looked over his shoulder and saw how Iztac loved her temple. Setting, she kissed it till it went all gold. Back on Nearth, they ought to erect a temple to UW Canis Majoris. He would see to it.
In the plaza below, Quetzalians scurried with apparent happiness and purpose. It hadn’t snowed for half an opoch, and the remaining drifts, pushed aside, had long since ceased to slow the public pulse. In Francis’s imagination spring bloomed. He saw bright flowers array the causeway with reds and purples. Beyond, a hundred agricultural terraces offered their green succulence to the world. Lagoons shimmered in a rejuvenated sun. Francis smiled. It was an honor to be an honorary Quetzalian.
ON DARWIN’S CONTROL DECK, the corkscrew beetle sat silently in its cage, thinking cryptic insect thoughts. Having fed his specimen, Francis turned to the holovision monitor and played with the buttons. The screen glowed white, then yellow as Burne switched on the running-lights.
“Damn, but it’s good to be near coffee again.” Although belted firmly into the pilot’s chair, Burne could still reach Darwin’s urn. He pressed the lever and it responded like a squeezed teat, his mamula-shaped mug catching the stream. “At the hospital we drank tea till we pissed it. You could serve our urine samples at a ladies’ lunch, and if you had a lemon nobody would know.” He emptied the mug in three slurps.
Francis said nothing.
“This phantom-limb pain is the damnedest thing,” Burne continued, refilling his mug. “I wonder if eunuchs have phantom testicles.”
“That’s where the ghosts come from,” said Francis dully.
“You’d better go strap down, chum.”
Francis hammered his boot against the metal floor. I’m ready to say it now, he thought. My mind is rooted.
“Burne, there’s something you should know about this trip.”
“What?”
“I’m not going on it.”
Burne spat coffee. “God’s holy fastball!”
“I thought you’d say something like that.”
“You’re pulling my phantom limb.”
“I want to make Quetzalia my home.”
“For what conceivable reason?”
“I like the weather.”
Burne pointed to the vitreousteel cage. “What about your Poelsig Award?”
“I don’t sacrifice it with ease—be assured of that. But there are insects on Luta, too. Experiments to do. The next time you visit Arete—you’re certain to get financed—release the beetle. There’s no life for it here.”
“She converted you, didn’t she?”
“Tez was a person, not a pronoun.”
“Tez converted you.”
“You were always envious of me and Tez. That’s why you never use her name.” In a sudden hara-kiri move, Francis unzipped his pressure suit.
“Let’s not quarrel, Francis.”
“All right, yes. She did convert me.” He moved to the cage, lifted the lid. “She converted me from the first day I met her.”
“I thought you were an atheist.”
“I am. But I believe in what they’re trying to do here.” He stroked Cortexclavus with his index finger.
Burne pried a splinter from one of his crutches. “It won’t be easy keeping this place a secret.”
“You can do it.”
“There might be an investigation.”
“You’re a capital liar.” Peeling the last of his suit away, Francis walked toward Burne.
“People will want to know why you didn’t come back.”
“You’ll think of something.”
“How Kappie and Luther died.”
“Place the savages on Arete. Nobody goes there.” Francis brushed Burne’s crutch. Burne put it aside.
The men pressed together in awkward affection.
“I’ll miss you, friend,” said Francis, drawing away.
“Yes.” Burne went back to his coffee. “I’ll forward your mail.”
MINUTES LATER Francis stood on the far bank of the river made of hate, watching Darwin’s lights rise like moons and glide across the night. A halo of ions encircled the chemthruster’s exhaust. Knowing he was too dim to show on the monitor, Francis waved without enthusiasm.
The gatekeeper of the moment, a blowzy man in his thirties, trudged across the drawbridge and drew up next to Francis. “You’ll have to come inside. I’m raising the bridge.”
Francis kept watching the ship. “I’m Dr. Lostwax, the Nearthling.”
The gatekeeper imitated Francis’s gaze. Darwin’s lights congealed into a solitary, shrinking dot. “Was he your friend?”
“Not a good friend. Not like—”
“That’s quite a machine.” He tracked the dot with his finger.
“Why are you raising the bridge?”
“I have to go to church tonight.”
Francis followed his companion to the windlass, then continued alone through the gateway. He gave himself X-ray vision, imagining the wired chapels that surrounded him. As he stepped onto the sand, the squeal of the windlass announced the bridge’s ascent. A hollow bong: it was raised. Hoisting his collar against the nightwind, Francis began the long walk back to Tepec.
When he reached the forest, his ears caught the low wail of a Zolmec hymn. Now the night lost its blackness. Four hundred shimmering robes waltzed the wind. Sleeves and hems moved in ghostly undulation. Slowly the parish advanced through the trees, lanterns sparkling like the faces of Light People.
Francis stopped near a bush, waiting for the white tide to sweep over him. When it came he allowed it to control him, turn him, bear him back to the sands.
The parish got no sermons that night, no tales of Janet Vij, only a short improvised speech by Mouzon Thu. He waddled back and forth atop the temple, exclaiming in his musical voice how grand it was to see the bridge up again. He hoped that it would remain up.
A young woman at Francis’s shoulder shuffled in discontent. “We aren’t here for politics, Mouzon,” she growled softly. Francis turned and beheld a face that by lantern light looked staggeringly strong and smooth, as if shaped from bronze. He had seen this comeliness before, but he couldn’t place it.
“Cut his leg off, Ticoma,” whispered a clinging young man, probably her husband.
Ticoma chuckled. Francis’s memory still failed. “I’d do it,” she said.
“Really?” asked her husband.
“In my dreams—but tonight I’ve got bigger fish to fry. I need to get back at you about that freeloader remark.”
“Fry away,” said the husband amiably.
Mouzon began the benediction. “Are you ready, followers? Are you ready to cast your sins, your biophotonic sins, into the river made of hate?”
“Yes!”
“Are
you ready to tame your instincts and appease your teeth? Are you ready to show Chimec, god of the human brain, the black humming pitch that pastes your dreams together?”
“Yes!”
Francis was readiest of all. When Mouzon removed his cranium, Francis was the first to do likewise. Braced for a chill, he felt nothing, recalling in time that the human brain is nerveless as a brick.
All along the wall, cortices rose from heads like eggs from eggcups.
“To the temple!” screamed Mouzon.
As the pilgrims mounted the stairs and filed into the hatchways, Francis kept his glance on Ticoma, determined that this time he would not get lost. Around corners, through corridors, down, down, he followed the bob of her lantern.
At last a vaulted decagon yawned before him. Nine pilgrims, Ticoma included, distributed themselves about the room. Each vanished through the handiest door. The tenth chapel is mine, Francis thought.
Once inside, he rested his cranium near the red cushion and plucked the electrode from its cradle. The chapel groaned to life. Lifting the electrode, he pushed it deep into his cerebral commissure, where it stayed erect, like a spoon in pudding.
He turned his eyes, his kinepic-addict’s eyes, to the screen. Within its walls green haze swirled and bubbled in languid revolution. Francis molded the haze, pressing it with his thoughts, slapping it with his passions.
A swamp emerged. He recognized it. Half a kilometer from this place he had gone to elementary school.
Francis concentrated.
A small-eyed, curly-haired boy squished across the screen, briefcase in tow. Suddenly a shadow unfurled, blocking his path. “They in there?” asked the shadow’s owner, an especially farty incarnation of Robert Poogley.
“My best insects,” the boy assured him. Robert Poogley snatched the briefcase, clawed at the latches, flipped back the lid…
When it was over Francis lingered in the chapel, watching his hostility ebb. A small contribution, not the monument Tez deserved, but a beginning at least. He felt sleepy and bathed—also clever.
Just before it jumped, he had figured out how to make the corkscrew beetle smile.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Morrow was born in Philadelphia in 1947. Since receiving degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, he has worked as an English teacher, textbook writer, filmmaker, and cartoonist. Among his previous projects are A Political Cartoon (an award-winning short film codirected with Joe Adamson), Suspicion (a murder-mystery board game produced for TSR Hobbies), and A Teacher’s Guide to NOVA (a periodical supplementing the PBS science series). Mr. Morrow lives in Westford, Massachusetts, with his wife, preschool daughter, and cat. The Wine of Violence is intended as the first in a series of science fiction novels about hypothetical technologies and their discontents.