~ * ~
5
I am afraid of nothing on the face of the earth, or under it. The living and the dead. Her dead child, borne nineteen miles by horse in this limbo of stunted, rotten apples; oh her brother-in-law’s little son, killed by venom: in the ground, in the ground. I press my nose to the crack. I will snatch the filthy thing out and break its back. I will meet its bright blackness with my own. I’ll never go droving, skinned nose or no. I have a marked dislike to friends or relations of the family; will make friends (mysteriously, by my wise nose) with strangers; will bark horribly at the Wife (no-legs in long pioneer skirt; hmm) when, blackened by soot, two-legged in trousers, drenched in oily sweat from the fiery beat (well, wouldn’t you?) she reaches for the (swaddled? no-legs?) baby. Sank my six inches of manly doggish grin into his moleskins she wore, you bet.
~ * ~
6
Many miles further down the creek a man kept throwing an old cap into a water-hole. The dog would bring it out and lay it on the opposite side where the man stood, but would not allow the man to catch him, though it was only to wash the blood of the sheep from his mouth and throat, for the sight of the blood made the man tremble. But the dog was also guilty.
~ * ~
7
And she hugs and kisses him while the sickly daylight.
<
~ * ~
A PASSAGE IN EARTH
Storytellers once spun out their inventions by the hour with rhythm, bold colours, engaging or horrid characters: simple tricks. Then they took up pens.
After fiction and journalism parted company, manner swiftly put out a thousand blooms. Matter grew baroque. On the tables of the languid, grand operatic works groaned unread.
Future shock put a brutal stop to that. Bullrings and blood and short hard words.
The kids of those kids went to school and studied fine art, high culture, and the sentences went lacy again, and irony caught every word in a trap. Who knew how to read?
Some of those without reading accreditation did it anyway, with factory fairytales. They built bigger muscles in fourteen days or had their money back. Sf was anti-mandarin. Punched like a rivet. It was, as well, magic out of a whirling adolescent heart: it sang incantatory romance.
Finally the thing went decadent with over-use. Sf risks expiring in this terminal generation of embroidery on ideas which once ... blazed.
Still, opportunities arise in a decadent art-form. As in a retirement village or a gaol, everyone knows the narrative shorthand. You can write whole novels in the number of words it once took to get the spaceship out of the lab.
~ * ~
I grew her in a pod, and she was the best baby I ever made. The big collapsicle field was shut down by then, on our last slowing skid back to Earth, which might explain why she didn’t come out raddled like the earlier tries. Or maybe it was love, for I put that child together with devotion, blended her nucleotides with an haute cuisine passion. Delicious enough to be gobbled down on the spot. But that’s Shaun’s diction, concupiscent and lip-smacking, lustful-eyed and carnivorous, and she was never meant for Shaun. Not my Mahala, bright birdsong for the ravishment of austere Shem.
Which is being gallows smart-arse after the fact, of course. When I started growing Mahala I knew she’d be my benediction to an altered Earth, spinning sixteen solar years ahead and to one side of our cruddy battered prow. But the details were up for grabs. You can’t trust humans to sit still, even when they’re riding an e exponent rollercoaster. I knew they’d have changed in ten thousand years, Mahala’s distant genetic cousins, but I certainly didn’t guess then that they’d have done the demigod thing: wound up strutting out their own archetypes. Maybe (in the limit, as we analytic types say) it was inevitable.
‘Cloth Mother,’ she asked when she was eight, smart-arse herself, ‘will I have a prince to love when we get there?’
I stopped cuddling and tried to sound stern.
‘Fiddle-faddle, long shanks. This is a vessel of the People’s Anarchy and I’ll have no backsliding on my bridge.’
She did that thing with her nose which everyone except a parent considers sickeningly cute, and went mercurial eight-year-old scornful. ‘It would be nice to have a prince, Captain, and if you’re going to go Hard-Wire on me I think it’s purely a shame.’ The little beast had got to H in the biography matrix and kept mixing Freud up with Harlow, largely to get a rise out of me (see what I mean?). When she was sixteen and stepping out on Earth, Mahala was innocent and bashful, if she felt like it, as peach blossom, but at eight she just powered away like a savage with every joule of the five sigmas of savvy I’d woven into her nucleic acids.
~ * ~
We came down without much noise but with fine star-bursts of fiery light to the Versailles they’d made of temperate Earth. They’d forgotten about us, as predicted, having long since shed interest in the rest of the universe. There’s no game to compete in drawing power with immersion in the archetypes. I ferreted out the way of it and congratulated myself on my forethought in having prepared my pretty spanner to throw into their stock repertoire of byzantine elaboration. Then I shot back up to orbit without opening the front door—while Mahala blinked in surprise at her mirror, getting her hair ready—and there I mused for a while.
‘We’ll nip in the back way.’
‘All right,’ she nodded without complaint, trusting me. She was a generous, utterly beautiful young woman, and I loved her far too much to toss her into the lap of some whirligig god-prince. (Shaun was ruling at that time, but I didn’t much like the looks of Shem either.)
I decided to give a wide berth to all their crystal towers and grandiose pleasure domes and deer-browsed ecological pastures—the chocolate-box stuff. On the other hand I wasn’t just being perverse; there was no percentage in squatting down on the Gobi Desert (they’d left it alone) and twiddling our thumbs. I needed a place with a measure of natural hostility but not wholly denuded of people.
This time we snuck in over the new South Pole and I dropped us inconspicuously in a mess of crow-berries and bilberries on the basalt crags of Heimaey Island, near the remains of the Whorled City of Vestmannaeyjar. The big magnetic polarity flip-flop had been in the offing when I’d left Earth, and the massive soft-iron spirals of Vestmannaeyjar were nearing completion. Obviously it hadn’t worked. I guessed that those gritty, argumentative Utopians who’d built my vessel had been zilched when the ozone layer blew off.
It was crazy cold, just the same. Plate spread had ripped Iceland up somewhat, and the geysers boiled heartily in new locations, but snow was in the air and ice on the ground. We’d frightened a mob of reindeer and there was quite an amount of filthy, exhausted complaint coming from the grubby, exhausted locals who’d been herding them into a sort of rudimentary corral outside a mean little village whose construction might well have antedated the Vikings. There was a coarse lilt to their obscenity, as befitted poets and scientists down on their luck, and I knew I’d come to the right place. I bundled my dear pet up in thermal undies and synthetic furs and sent her out to find true love.
Mahala hesitated on the top step and looked doubtfully back at my warm, food-scented interior.
‘Last stop, sweetheart,’ I told her. ‘All out.’ It broke my heart, but you have to see these things in perspective. I induced a warm current in her coffee-brown cheek, for a parting kiss, and wrapped her in a long tight pulse for a hug. ‘Good luck, my darling. Now don’t fret,’ for her lashes shone with tears, ‘I’ll keep watch. Off you go, Mahala. The real people are waiting for you.’ They were, too, shin-deep in slush, gawping and gaping and muttering scornful couplets to one another to keep their nerve up.
‘Who shall I ask for?’ she said in a small appalled voice, staring down at their red-tipped faces.
‘It’s simple, honeybun. You must look for your beloved, the most miserable of men.’
I thought she was going to bolt back in but she just stood the
re for a time blinking slowly, her throat moving in the shadow of die furs. Then, ‘Oh, shit,’ she said, and went gracefully down the icy steps to meet the outcasts.
~ * ~
Did Mahala believe I’d be able to keep her under observation wherever she went? I don’t know. She had trust in me, of that I’m certain. But I had never told her about the hefty cloned neural net I kept fed and watered, welded behind a bulkhead, flesh of her flesh, supine and mindless but resonating to her awareness and consciousness. My own sensory electrodes were anchored all through the net, so I was able to monitor Mahala (and, though for ethical motives I’d never done it, evoke ideas in her brain) at any distance on the planet’s surface. So I pursued many billion thises and thats while she slogged through the snow to their rocky shacks and kept a small but sufficient part of myself tuned to her adventures. If anyone were brutish enough to lay a finger on my baby without her permission I’d zap him hard enough to fry his balls.
As it happened, the only animosity Mahala met was sour and envious looks from some of the outcast women, but she had even them charmed fast enough. She seemed so fragile, and was demure with the men, and the information she offered freely was meat and drink to this community. None of them had been as far off-planet as the moon. Mahala herself, of course, had not been with me to the edge of the universe but I’d provided her with a liberal education.
‘Actually I’ve just eaten lunch,’ she told them, but they seemed so disappointed that she smiled nicely and ate their reindeer milk curd with glistening bilberries and mango from the greenhouse. The folk whose beasts we’d put the wind up sat with her at the long bench and chewed with gusto on steaks, tossing bones to gigantic gentle dogs with far more hair than manners. Mahala declined the meat.
‘The quasars are intelligent?’ asked a biologist, a gaunt, lined woman with intent eyes.
‘Much more than that,’ Mahala said, putting her empty bowl aside. ‘They’re wise.’
Triumphantly smiling, the biologist cried: “I knew it! For centuries I’ve been telling that arsehole Kerala—‘
There was hubbub; one of the herders seized Mahala’s wrist with unreflective eagerness. (I did not kill him. My jealousy is under perfect rational control.) ‘Could you communicate with them? What did they tell you?’
For a moment she allowed his grip, before drawing her hand away. I detected the ambivalent shock of alternating current: never before had she known a human touch.
‘Of course, I wasn’t born then. But They spoke to the vessel, to the Holistic Cybersystem Executive. I don’t think hesh wanted to come home after that, but They told shim it was sher duty.’
Wind whined about the broken walls. The herder cracked his knuckles, looking at the rough grain of the table. He said: ‘Child, what did They convey to the cybersystem?’
‘Well, the main thing, I guess, was the secret of creation.’
Everyone stared at her, and I could sense the ion balance tremble in the room. They had all been exiled here from the courts and great places of the world because asking questions about large enigmas had gone out of fashion when Shem was deposed. The air shivered with intellectual greed.
‘Tell us,’ a faint shriek. So she did. Arctic twilight (or was it now Antarctic?) draped the windows, and logs fed the fire. A dog nosed closer to the hearth and began to snore. People sighed as she spoke, and snorted in angry disbelief when treasured hypotheses tumbled with the logs into the flames, and were shushed by their fellows. Mead and spirits went into glasses and down throats, and I had to make some minor adjustments to Mahala’s hypothalamus to prevent her getting completely sloshed. She loved the attention from this lot, grotty as they were; there might be no princes among them but they all had brains like razors (even the poets) and Mahala had always been a bright kid.
When she finished, a young, pregnant mathematician heaved herself up from her cushions near the heat and eased in next to my own baby. ‘You’re saying that the entire universe is a single string, weaving backwards and forwards from one singularity to the other? One elementary particle only?’
Mahala nodded, and sipped at her mead. ‘Exactly, Belina. The state vector collapsed, specifying this particular reality, when It sort of opened Its eye and, well, regarded Itself with approval. Do you mind if I ask a question now?’
‘My God. My God.’ Belina closed her eyes and placed her hands on her bulging uterus. ‘Mahala, what can we possibly tell you?’
My baby glanced around the rapt table, at all of them, shyly, and said: ‘How can I find the most miserable man in the world?’
In the incredulous interval, Nigel’s serrated laugh caused her to jump. He was one of the poets, dissolute and haggard, with irises the colour of the polar sky at noon. ‘We can tell you where the bastard is, my lovely, but not how to find him.’
‘But I must find him,’ cried Mahala in alarm. ‘He is my beloved!’
There was a lot of confusion for a while, the scientists not having the faintest due what was afoot and the poets seeing instantly and not liking it, each moiety trying to shout the other down, and my dove bursting into pissed tears in the midst of it. Nigel muscled in at once and led her aside to the fire, speaking into her ear.
‘I don’t know why you want him, when you could go to the high places and find your welcome in Shaun’s plump bed—or stay here with us, and share mine—but I’ll tell you where you have to go. Maybe your big metal friend up there on the hill can get you in to him.’ And he told her where the Prisoner was held: the whole world’s most wretched creature, bitter in defeat, ancient in the cycle of victory and loss and now at the nadir of his fortunes: yes, the lord Shem, patron and betrayer of knowledge, incarcerated in his brother’s fastness at the centre of the world.
~ * ~
I hadn’t expected Mahala back on board quite so soon, if at all, if ever; the advice They’d given was heuristic, not a point-by-point flowchart. I’d shut the habitation environment down to standby. Shucking off her furs in my soft yellow light Mahala shivered, dazed by the booze, the wind belling outside, her expectation.
‘Come right in, darling,’ I said. ‘I’ll make you a mug of hot chocolate.’ I nuzzled her broad nose and got a flowered filmy thing for her to wear and popped her into bed, and by the time she was asleep I’d lifted in a suborbital parabola, heading for daylight and old gloomypuss.
As she slept I wrought that small miracle which I saw was necessary, touching her brimming ovaries and, releasing a single egg, prepared her womb for its nurturance. This much I had expected to come about in the course of nature; now I understood the urgency of our passage in Earth. And I was filled with a dread I put down to a parent’s pre-nuptial jitters.
We fell without sound across the lush grasslands of the drained Med, across the early spring thaw-brawling rivers plunging through that immense canyon, hovered finally above his place of bondage: Elba, a fist thrust from the ancient seabed. I settled at the peak of Monte Capanne and gazed down with my magnified vision on the shabby roofs of his villa, old San Martino, once the summer home of Napoleon, restored a hundred times by the look of it and a hundred times gone again into decay. In the ample grounds male birds of paradise scratched and strutted, wing plumes like segments shaved from the golden apples of the sun, their chubby bodies emerald in the morning light. Drab females scurried in the long shadows of heraldic topiary wild with seed, dragons bristling beards, cancerous lions, the slower shrubs still brown and scrawny. Nobody cared. I waited until Mahala had woken, draped her this time for the milder air and the breathless hope of her love in cloth insubstantial and translucent as ectoplasm, tucked tight beneath her lovely breasts and flowing like a comet’s veil behind, and I gave her a glass of milk and sent her off down a path I cleared through the dead vines and brambles to the villa.
She passed through the dusty portrait-hung hallways without hindrance, her heart pumping fast, me interposing between the dreadful tools of mayhem his captors had contrived. Charges shorted l
ike rainbows. I’m swift and I’m powerful and I know more than they did (for they had never hung enraptured under the torrential glory of Those Who watch from the rim of the universe), so she was safe from the inanimate, no matter how terrible.
Entering the final sanctum, the air itself tugged at her like the surface of a fluid, a meniscus. Her garments floated, pressed the firm shape of her body for an instant like wet clinging muslin, floated again. Shem stared at her with constricted eyes from his escritoire at the centre of a room of spiteful mirrors (every surface hard, curved, brilliant as mercury, throwing his infinite images and, now, hers) his left hand slowly lowering a quill cut from a pinion of the dazzling birds outdoors, his right hidden at his lap. With a voice like some old industrial mechanism he told her: ‘It is too soon. Nobody is here. Go away.’ But his hidden hand jerked in a spasm.
The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Page 17