BIG CAT: And Other Stories

by Gwyneth Jones

  “You’ve been keeping yourself to yourself, Messer Ferringhi.’

  “I could say the same of you two, Officer Bhvaaan.”

  “Aaaap. But you made friends with the An-he?”

  “The Ruling An were very willing to help me.”

  “We’ve been working in your interest too,” said the Ki-anna.

  She pivoted her suit to look through the windowband in the landship’s flank. “Far below this plateau, back that way, was the regional capital; there were fertile plains, rich forests, towns and fields and parklands. ‘The ‘Roof of Heaven’ itself was never beautiful. It’s strange, but this part hardly seems much changed—”

  “Except that one dare not breathe,” she added, sadly.

  On the shore of the largest ice sheet, the Lake of Heaven, the odd couple and Patrice disembarked. The Ki-anna led the way to a great low arch of rock-embedded ice. The Green Belts had stayed in the ship.

  Everything was livid mist. “We’re going under An-lalhar Lake alone?” Patrice was startled.

  “The Green Belts will be on call,” said the Ki-anna. “Below the lake, it’s not their jurisdiction. It’s a treasured enclave where Ki and the An are stubbornly dying together.”

  Bhvaaan peered at him. “It’s not our jurisdiction either, Messer Ferringhi. If we meet with violence, then we can call for help, but thap’s after the event. The people under the Lake don’t have a lot to lose and their mood is volatile. Bear thap in mind. ”

  “I could have had an escort they’d respect.”

  “You’re better off with us.”

  They descended a tunnel. The light never grew less; on the contrary it grew brighter. When they emerged, the Heaven Lake was above them: a mass of blue-white radiance, indigo shadowed, shot through with rainbow. It was extraordinarily beautiful; it seemed impossible that the ice had captured so much light from the poisoned smog. Far off, in the centre of the glacial depression, geothermal vents made a glowing spiderweb of fire and snowy steam. Patrice checked his telltales, and eagerly began to release his helmet. The Shet dropped a gauntleted fist on his arm.

  “Don’t do it, child. Look at your rads.”

  “A moment won’t kill me. I want to feel KiAn—”

  The odd couple, hidden in their gear, seemed to look at him strangely.

  “Maybe later,” said the Ki-anna. “It’s safer in the Grottos, where your sister was headed.”

  “How do we get there?”

  “We walk,” rumbled Bhvaaan. “No vehicles. There’s not much growing but it’s still a sacred park. Let your suit do the work and keep up your fluids.”

  “Thanks, I know how to handle a hard shell.”

  They walked in file. The desolation; the ruined beauty that had been revered by both ‘races’, caught at Patrice’s heart. His helmet display counted rads, paces, heartrate: and counted down the metres. Thirty kilometres to the place where Lione had last been seen alive.

  “Which faction mined the Lake of Heaven parkland?”

  “To our knowledge? Nobody did, child.”

  It was a question he’d asked over and over: far away, when he still thought he could get answers. Now he asked and didn’t care. Landmines could be denied. In the chaos of a war zone’s emissions who could be sure? He walked between them, the Shet ahead, the Ki-anna behind. His pace was steady, yet the helmet display said his body was pumping adrenalin: not from fear, he knew, but in the grip of intense excitement. He sucked on glucose, and tried to calm himself.

  As the radiance above them dimmed they reached the Grotto domain. Rugged rocky pillars upheld the roof of ice: widely spaced at first then clustering towards a centre that could not be seen. Here there was a Ki community, surviving in rad-proofed modules. The Ki-anna was allowed to enter the warren. Patrice and the Shet waited, in the darkening, blighted landscape. She emerged after an hour or so.

  “We can’t go on without guides, and we can’t have guides until morning. At the earliest. They have to think it over.”

  “They weren’t expecting us?”

  “They were. They know all about it, but I think they may have had fresh instructions. They’re in full communication with the castle: there’s some sophisticated kit in there. We’ll just have to wait.”

  “Do they remember Lione?’ demanded Patrice, hardly listening to the delaying tactics. ‘I have transaid, I want to talk to someone.”

  “Not now. I’ll ask tomorrow.”

  “Will they lep us sleep indoors?” asked the Shet.

  “No.”

  The Shet and the Ki-anna made camp, using their suits to clear ground and construct a shelter in the ruins of the former village. Patrice left them to it, and went over to a heap of boulders; where he’d noticed patches of familiar lichen. He’d brought some fragments of Lione’s incense with him in a First Aid pouch, in the sleeve pocket of his inner. The police were fully occupied. Furtively he opened the arm of his hardshell, and fished the pouch out. Yes, it seemed exactly the same—

  Had Lione stood where he was standing now? Was the incense not a gift, but a souvenir she had gathered? He felt convinced that this was so. She had been standing right here, and his need was irresistible. He released his face-plate, stripped his gauntlets, rubbed away quarantine film. KiAn rushed in on him, cold, harsh and intoxicating in his throat—

  “What is that?”

  The Ki-anna was right behind him. “A lichen sample,” said Patrice, caught out. “Or that’s what I’d call it at home. It was in my sister’s room, in the An Castle, but I think it came from here. Look, they’re the same!”

  “Not quite,” said the Ki-anna. “Yours is a cultivated variety.”

  He thought she’d be angry, maybe accuse him of concealing evidence. To his astonishment she took his bared hand, and bowed over it until her cheek brushed the vulnerable inner skin of his wrist. Her touch was a huge shock, sweet and profoundly sexual. She made him dizzy.

  This can’t be happening, he thought. I’m here for Lione—

  “I don’t know your name.”

  “We don’t do that,” she whispered, equally moved.

  “I felt, I can’t describe it, the moment I met you—”

  “I’d better keep this. You must get your gloves and helmet back on.”

  “But I want KiAn—”

  Gently, she released his hand. “You’ve had enough.”

  The shelter was a snug fit. When they were sealed inside, the odd couple set aside a pack of ‘viands’ the An-he had provided, and shared out basic rations, with fresh water they’d brought from the Habitat.

  They would sleep in their suits. Patrice lay down at once, to escape their questions and be alone with his confusion. He was here for Lione, here to join Lione. How could he and the Ki-anna suddenly feel this way?

  “Were you getting romantic, with Patrice, over by those rocks?” asked Bhvaaan. “Sniffing his pheromones?”

  “No,” said the Ki-anna softly, grimly. “Something else.” She showed him the First Aid pouch and its contents.

  “Mighty Void!”

  “He says he found it hidden in the room Lione used, in the castle.”

  “We took that cabin apart.” The Shet’s delicates unfolded from his club of a fist. He turned the clear pouch around, probing the find with sensitive tentacles. “So thaap’s how, so thaap’s how—”

  “So that’s how the cookie was crumbled,” agreed the Ki-anna.

  “What do you suggest, Chief? Abort, and get out of here quickly?”

  “If we run, and they have heavy weaponry, we’re at their mercy. I see what it looks like, but I think we should show no alarm.”

  “I have had thoughts,’ she admitted, looking at the dim outline of Patrice Ferringhi. ‘Don’t know why. It’s something in his eyes.”

  “Thaap’s the way it starts,” said the Shet. “Thoughts. Then wondering if anything can come of them. They say sentient bipeds are attracted to each other like… like brothers and sisters, long separated. Well, I’ll talk to t
he Greenies. And you and I had better not sleep.”

  The suit was a house the shape of her body. She sat in it, wondering about sexual pleasure: pleasure with Patrice. What would it be like? She had only one strange comparison, but that didn’t frighten her… What Roaaat Bhvaaan offered was far more disturbing.

  She glimpsed the abyss, and fell into a syrupy oblivion.

  Patrice dreamed he was in a strolling crowd, among bronze and purple trees with branches that swayed in the warm breeze. He was in the KiAn Orientation, a virtual reality. But it had become thickly sinister; the crowd pressed too close, the trees hid what he ought to see.

  Then Lione came running up and bit him. He yelled, and shook her off. She came back and bit his thigh, but now he was in the dark, cold and sore. Lione was gone: he was being hunted by fierce hungry animals—

  Suddenly he knew he was not asleep.

  He was naked. Where was his suit? Where was he? He had no idea. The air was freezing, the darkness almost complete. He stumbled towards a gleam ahead, and entered a rocky cave: ice underfoot, icy stalactites hanging down. A lamp burned incense-scented oil, set on the ground next to something. That’s a body, he thought. He knelt down. It was a human body, freeze-dried. She was curled on her side, turned away from him, but he’d found Lione. She was naked too. Why was she naked?

  He raised the lamp and saw where flesh had been cut away: not by teeth, as in his dream, but by sharp knives. She had been partially butchered. He tried to turn her: the body moved all of a piece. Her face was recognisable, calm in death, the eyes sunken; skin like cured leather.

  Was she smiling? Oh, Lione—

  But why am I naked? he thought. How did I get here? Who brought me?

  The Ki entered the cave on soft feet, and surrounded Patrice and his sister. They’d brought more lights. One of them was carrying, carefully, a flattened spherical object, dull grey-green, and the size of Patrice’s fist. It had a seam around the centre, a bevelled cap.

  That’s a vapor mine, he thought. There will be no body to recover.

  Then the An came. The Ki stepped back, they weren’t here to prevent the banquet, they were here to witness. Patrice screamed. He fought the knives with his bare hands, he kicked out with his bare feet. The An, seeming outraged, bewildered, kept yelling at him in scraps of English to keep still, be easy Blue, you want this, what’s wrong with you?

  The Ki-anna and the Shet had ditched their hard shells to search the narrow passages. They arrived armed, but badly outnumbered and couldn’t get near Patrice, who was still fighting, but bleeding profusely—

  “I was the Earth In Heaven!”, shouted the Chief of Police. “I say that the flesh is not sacred, not yours to take. Let the stranger go!”

  She managed to hold the fanatics at bay, made uncertain by her status, until the Green Belts finally arrived. Luckily Bhvaaan had summoned them, when the Ki-anna followed Patrice into that drugged sleep, and before he succumbed himself.

  Patrice’s injuries were not dangerous. As soon as he was allowed he signed himself out of medical care and insisted on talking to the police again. He met the odd couple in the same bare interview room as before.

  “I need to withdraw the statement I made at the scene. I’m sorry, but can’t press charges.”

  If next of kin didn’t press charges, KiAn law made it difficult for Interplanetary Affairs to prosecute: he knew that, but he had no choice.

  “I know the tablet in Lione’s room was planted on me. I know her words – if any of them were genuinely hers – had been rearranged to fool me into accepting atavism. It doesn’t matter. My sister did accept, she wanted to die that way. She gave her body as a sacrifice, for peace. She was my twin: I can’t explain, but I have to respect her wishes.”

  “A beautiful, consensual ritual,” remarked the Shet. “Yaap. That’s what the cannibal die-hards always say. But if you scratch any of these halfway ‘respectable’ atavists, such as our Ruling An pair here—”

  “You find the meat-packing industry,” said the Ki-anna.

  Patrice heard the blinkered, Speranza mindset.

  “No. My sister was willing. I know she was.”

  “I believe it.” To his confusion the Ki-anna reached out, took his injured hand and held his wrist, where the blood ran, to her face. The same sweet, intimate gesture as on KiAn. “So are you, willing; a little, even now. It’ll wear off.”

  She dropped his hand and placed an evidence bag, containing his First Aid pouch and the scraps of lichen, on the table.

  “In English the common name of this herb, or lichen, would be “Willingness”. It grows naturally only under the Lake of Heaven. Long ago it was known as a powerful aphrodisiac, but the labwork kind has a different use. It’s given to a child chosen to be Ki-anna, which means sold to the An as a living meat source. It’s a dainty form of cannibalism, practiced in my region. A drugged child, a willing victim, with a strong resistance to infection and trauma, is eaten alive, by refined degrees. If a child like that survives to adulthood, they are free; the debt is paid.

  The Ki-anna showed her teeth. “I made it, as you see, but I haven’t forgotten that scent. When I smelled your flesh, under the Lake, I knew you’d been treated for butchery – and then I understood. The An-pair here drugged Lione until she was delirious with joy at the prospect of being eaten, and sent her to the atavist fanatics under An-lalhar, for a political purpose. Then later they tried the same trick on you.”

  Bhvaaan tapped the casefile tablet with his delicates. “Your sister died too quickly, that was the problem.”

  “What do you mean—?”

  “We couldn’t prove it, but we knew they’d killed her, Messer Ferringhi. We also knew, thanks to the Chief here and her work in the Refuge, who was pulling the strings; and how prohibited ordnance was smuggled into the Grottos. Your sister had fallen into a trap. She was determined to get herself under the Heaven Lake, and thaap suited the atavists just fine. It would have been a powerful message. A Speranza scientist ritually eaten, and then consumed by the very air of KiAn—”

  “Controlled annihilation,” whispered Patrice. “That’s what I saw, in the cave. I understood it when I saw the vapor mine—”

  “Thaap was the idea. The atavists want to bring back the meat factories, soon as their planet has an atmosphere again. Your sister’s death was going to help them: except it didn’t work out. You were right about the tropo sampling, young Blue. There’s also stringent military activity monitoring. If a mine had gone off under the Lake, believe me, we’d know. If a human-sized body had been atomised; we’d know. So the ‘consummation’ hadn’t happened, and we couldn’t figure it out. Now we think we know the answer. She died too quickly. She had to be vaporised alive, because a dead body can’t be willing. But she wasn’t a Ki, and they hit an artery or something.”

  Patrice had turned strangely grey in the face.

  “You going to crash out, child—?”

  “No, go on—”

  The Shet rearranged his bulk on the inadequate office chair. “The autopsy’ll tell us the details, anyway. Then you came along, Patrice. We saw a chance to get ourselves to the crime scene – and wasted Diaspora funds pushing on an open door. And you nearly died, because we drank the nice fresh water from thiip Habitat. Which happened to be doped—”

  “The atavists thought the willingness they’d cooked up for Lione would work just the same on you,” said the Ki-anna. “They’ve never heard of fraternal twins. Ki litter-mates can be of any sex, yet we are all what you call, er, genetically identical. You were begging to be lured to the Grottos: it was perfect, you would replace Dr Ferringhi. But you and your sister were not clones. The drug affected you, but didn’t make you thrilled to be butchered. You fought for your life.”

  “You see, Messer Ferringhi,” said Bhvaaan, “whaap really happened here is that a pair of mass-murdering atavist bastards thought they’d appoint themselves a Chief of Police who as a child had been eaten. A girl like that, they calculated, w
ould never dare to do them any damage. Instead they found they had a tiger by the tail…”

  He opened the casefile tablet, and pushed it over to Patrice. “They’re glamorous, the Atavist An. But your sister wouldn’t have fallen for them in her right mind, from what I’ve learned. Still want to withdraw this?”

  Patrice was silent, eyes down. The Ki-anna saw him shedding the last exaltation of the drug, and taking in everything he’d been told. A new firmness in the lines of his face, a deep sadness as he said farewell to Lione. The human felt her eyes. He looked up and she saw another farewell, sad but final, to something that had barely begun—

  “No,” he said. ‘I don’t. But I should go through it again. Can we do that now?”

  The Ki-anna returned to her quarters. Roaaat joined her in a while. She sat by her window on the streets, small chin on her silky paws, and didn’t look round when he came in.

  “He’ll be fine. What will you do? You’ll have to leave, after this.”

  “I know. Leave or get killed, and I must not get killed.”

  “You could go with Patrice, see what Mars is like.”

  “I don’t think so. The pheromones are no more, now that he knows what making love to the Ki-anna is supposed to be like.”

  “I’ve no idea what making love to you is supposed to be like. But you’re a damned fine investigator. Why don’t you come to Speranza?”

  Yes, she thought. I knew all along what you were offering. Banishment, not only from my own world but from all the worlds. Never to be a planet-dweller any more. And again I want to ask, why me? What did I do? But you believe it is an honour and I think you are sincere.

  “Maybe I will.”

  The Vicar of Mars

  Another “Aleutian Universe” tale, a ghost story this time. The downside of ‘information space’ ftl travel is that a Buonarotti Transit can fail in eerie ways5 – if one of the passengers carries undeclared psychic baggage for instance, and especially if they elect to remain conscious. Elements of the main thread (the story of Isabel Jewel) were suggested by one of R .H. Malden’s ghost stories, “Between Sunset and Moonrise”, but there are other (fictional) Old Mars ghosts making guest appearances, and references to stories by Malden’s great master, M R James.