by John Meaney
She walked to the foot of the cliff and stood very still.
“Why here?” she asked.
I had no answer. I just knew that this was the right place, that there was no room on this Earth for both of us, that the existence of us both together was an abomination.
“Naakií,”; I said. “My twin. The one who is two…”
I placed the holoprojector down on the ground between us.
“Listen,” she said, and there was desperation in her voice, “I know the colony was hit by plague, what you’ve had to go through — “
I shook my head. She had no idea what I had had to go through, though I aimed to give her a glimpse of it before she died.
“But I — It wasn’t good here, either,” she continued. “You’re the heroic one, don’t you realise that?”
I stopped and look at her.
“I just generated you,” she said bitterly. “I flew out through the scull-gate, every particle duplicated as a tachyon, turned round and flew straight back home. The press used to hound me, wanting to know how you’d be feeling. You! Not me. As though I was just the cowardly one, the one that, that…”
She stopped. If it hadn’t been for Ash, I might almost have forgiven her just then.
Had I cared once about cowardice, or about what other people thought? Maybe. A long time ago.
“Do you still do image-sculpting?” I asked.
“Sometimes.” Her voice was calmer now. “Why do you ask?”
“The colony wasn’t wiped out by plague,” I said, thumbing on the holoprojector’s power unit. “I faked the video logs. We always had a talent for editing images, didn’t we?”
She swallowed uncertainly as I took the infocrystals out of my shirt pocket and slid them into the drive slot.
“Not plague,” I said. “But maybe a form of madness.”
The log images grew, dim in the blinding sunlight, but discernible all the same.
A dark purpose has descended on the colonists, and I trail behind them as they bear the unprotesting children out of the settlement and up into the hills. Frank, the volcano expert, leads the way. I am at the rear, following numbly, and Ash’s dear sweet body is lying back in the med-dome’s morgue.
Floating glowglobes trail overhead like playful orange fireflies, but the camera-drones were sent back to base, and I’m probably the only colonist who hasn’t thrown away her video lapel-pin.
Who knows how long we march, grim and silent? Finally, we reach the place. A long stone bridge, a natural arch, spans a long deep chasm of blue-grey shadow-bound rock, and down below a viscous river of golden lava writhes and spatters and the air waivers with the heat, and the stink of sulphur stings the nostrils but no tears come, not for that, not for anything.
And all I can do is watch…
Watch while they march out onto the bridge’s apex, hear their muttering, know what is in their hearts: the deep knowledge that Balance has cursed them, and that their offspring are not as they.
I don’t follow them onto the bridge. From the abyssal edge, I can see enough.
See young bodies falling, arms waving, just a little, as they plummet down towards the lava.
There are no screams. It is the ultimate accusation: nobody truly human, child or otherwise, could go to such death without a murmur.
One by one the children drop, and as they reach the flowing molten rock there’s a blaze of yellow light and at first it looks like flame as they’re incinerated but I sense that twisting distortion of all that is real and solid and now I’m not so sure.
Nobody meets my eyes as they trudge back off the bridge. Nobody talks. They file back towards Hope, whose name now mocks us, and I watch the burning river for a while, and turn to follow them.
When we get back to the settlement, Frank is waiting outside the med-dome, and, shrugging hopelessly, I lead him inside to see his son. The morgue room is gleaming and sterile.
I press the button, and one of the corpse-drawers slides open, and Ash’s white-skinned body is lying there, still and shrunken, hands crossed on his chest — its chest, the shell that was once my son —and his, its, eyes are closed, but not as in sleep. Our son is gone.
Silent tears track down Frank’s cheeks as he reaches out to touch Ash’s cold, still hands.
Ash’s eyes open wide.
In them, a dark light is dancing.
I told her, then, the other Nat, as I shut off the display, how the children had somehow reached inside Ash and killed him, or so we thought, and how they — and we, the adults — had always acted differently on Balance, as though reacting to things we could never quite see.
“What did you do?” she asked quietly.
“I grabbed Ash and a survival pack, and we ran for the hills,” I said. “Ash’s LXDS virus condition was gone. We had no microdoc, but he seemed healthier than ever except that he never spoke, not once, not even when they… “My voice faltered.
“They tracked you down, didn’t they?” said the other Nat. “The other colonists.”
“Oh, yes, they were good at that,” I said bitterly. “We eluded them for three days, Ash and I, but they came upon us at dusk as we were making camp and there were too many of them, just too many, and it was dark and I couldn’t get them off me, not while they, they…”
She was silent.
“Frank led them,” I whispered. “He was always good at tracking.”
“I’m sorry,” said the other Nat.
She took a step forwards, and I raised my blaster.
“I know,” I said.
She stopped, and death stared at me out of her eyes.
“Tell me,” I said. “In the video log, did you see something strange when they hit the lava? The children?”
“They didn’t scream,” she said. “Ah… A flash of flame, what you’d expect. That’s not the answer you’re looking for.”
I shook my head. Perhaps it was all in my imagination. Or perhaps you had to be there, to see that awful twisting of space, in a way that would not show up in the log. When I watched the log, for sure, it was my own memory I really saw.
“Remember old Agnes Arrowsmith?” she asked. “How she made us spend hours speaking and thinking in Navajo, then trying the same things in English and showing how impossible it was to transliterate thought?”
“I remember,” I said.
I didn’t want to remember. One thought filled my mind: one of us must die. Memories were an unsettling intrusion.
A verb-based, process-based language has a different view of the world. In Navajo, we would not have flown the flyer — only birds can fly — but would have caused it to fly (as pilots) or flown along with it (as passengers) in a way that would not admit of one entity being dominated by another.
“And Aunt Josephine angry at us for killing the scorpion that bit us? And how she would tell us how her grandparents were given their surname.”
“A hundred times,” I said. “A thousand.”
Her grandfather was a silversmith’s son, ‘béésh ligaiitsidii biye’, and a well-meaning Anglo had translated biye’, ‘son of’ as ‘Begay’, and that became his name. Not an uncommon story among our people.
“On Balance,” said the other Nat, “You had this other way of seeing things?”
“Oh, yes,” I said.
She knew what she was doing, establishing a bond, knowing I couldn’t kill her until she’d had her say.
“And that happened after the children were born?”
Cold claws running down my spine.
“No,” I said. “It seems to me, things were always that way there. We always knew, for example, if one of us was in trouble.”
“And is that what tells you I should die? That sense of the way things are?”
“Naakií,” I whispered. “The one who is two.”
And for a moment, then, I knew. I had not brought her here to kill her. But I had come here to watch her die. I knew, deep, deep inside, that if she just stood there in that spot for long e
nough, then she would die, for sure.
In the old Navajo way, crime was followed by a different kind of retribution; a murderer might support his victim’s family, to restore the tribal harmony. In this, I prefer to follow the way of my father’s people. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.
Death, now, was imminent. I had absolute certainty. I looked up at the pink and gold cliff stretching high above her, and death was fairly singing in the air.
“Surely not naakií,” she said. “Rather tá’i, the one who is three.”
I stared at her. Certainties began to crumble.
“What did you do after they killed your son?” she said.
“I healed up,” I said. “And when I could, I stole the Phoenix and lifted off, and deployed its scull-gate and went through, and spent the long days coming home fixing the logs and working out my story. Something that would persuade SWSA not to mount an expensive follow-up mission. Missions to plague worlds don’t look good on the budget reports.”
“Yeah, right.” She nodded. “So you found yourself replicated in the outer reaches of the solar system while the other Nat, our sister, is still in orbit round Balance, light-centuries away. You’re the third Nat, not the second.”
I lowered my blaster. Something was very wrong here.
“That’s right,” I said softly.
“Unless she’s done something really foolish.”
Like diving back into the atmosphere in an uncontrolled descent and burning up, deliberately.
“No,” I said. “She wouldn’t have done that. I know it.”
“Because of the connection between you?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Because of that.”
“Like the connection between you and me?”
I let out a long slow breath. That was it. That was what was wrong.
“Just like that,” I said.
I was wrong. The second Nat’s memories of betrayal flowed bitterly through me… but I was not her. She had duplicated herself to produce me, and she returned to face her fate on Balance, while I was safely here on Earth, stewing in my own guilt, focusing all my hate and rage on the first Nat when I was just as bad, just as guilty. I hadn’t chosen to be the third, the one who got back to Earth — I had the same memories as Nat Two, up to her flight through the scull-gate she’d deployed in Balance orbit — and I could just as easily have been her. Fifty-fifty chance. But by that token, I had the same memories, up to the first scull-gate jump near Io, as the Nat who stood here in front of me, fearing for her life. We shared our childhood memories, we shared our very lives — up to a bifurcating point — so I was the betrayer as much as the betrayed, equally deserving of death… No. More deserving, for the Nat before me was innocent of all that had come after, for she had not watched the children plunge to their death with not even her voice raised to stop the slaughter, had not let them take her son, her dear boy, her Ash, not let them take him and, and…
Then I saw it.
That rippling, twisting distortion of space, surrounded by a black glimmering, and high above us the canyon wall was cracking, splitting open, and a section spit off and fell straight down towards her, my sister…
“No!” she cried. “Don’t!”
I crouched as I raised my blaster two-handed and squeezed, and the falling rock smashed apart into a thousand fragments and span off in all directions.
That black ripple shook, and I swear I sensed it snarl, saw something like a black malevolent sneer, a rasping claw, then the distortion closed up and vanished, that force that wanted one of us to die, as though it had never been.
“Nat!” I shouted, and it sounded strange in my own ears.
There was blood on her forehead when I reached her, catching her before she could fall, and her eyelids were fluttering.
“Tsé dah hodzíílálii” she said in a distant voice. “The Monster Who Kicks People Down The Cliff.”
Or burying them at its base. So she had seen something too. A contagious madness, then.
“Funny,” I said. “I thought it might be Bits’íís lizhin, the Black Body.”
She gave a breathless shaky laugh.
“One of the holy Haasch’ééh dine’é?” she said dreamily. “Too much self importance. That’s your trouble.”
Then she went limp in my arms.
They’d made an effort with the decor — pink and orange pastel walls, flowering plants, free drinks dispensers, an hv terminal — but it didn’t help. Every hospital waiting-room’s the goddamn same, bleak and hopeless, tinged with the smells of chemicals and despair.
Cly was lounging back in the chair opposite mine, booted feet crossed at the ankles, and his hat tipped down over his eyes. His wide shoulders still strained his Tribal Police uniform.
He looked like a graven wooden statue. Maybe he was fast asleep. Or maybe he was content to be silent, having nothing to say, just as a good Navajo should.
The Anglo half of me was more restless. I got up from my seat and switched on the terminal, and accessed the news channel.
A glass skyscraper, strewn in shards across a Shanghai street. Corp-wars again.
Cly gave a quiet grunt.
“At least it’s outside your jurisdiction,” I said, waving down the audio volume.
He smiled, and I was very glad that it was he who had responded to my distress call. His souped-up police flyer had sped us from the Canyon de Chelly to Phoenix — the city, not the starship — at a sickening velocity, while I had used his microdoc on Nat…
“You can come in, now.” A smiling orderly was standing beside a doorway, beckoning us in. “Just for two minutes.”
Cly got to the door ahead of me, but let me squeeze by first.
Nat, my sister Nat, was sitting up in bed, and I carefully squeezed her in a hug, and kissed her cheek.
“Very odd,” she murmured as I drew back.
“You’re telling me,” I said. “Or you’re telling you, if you’d prefer.”
The gel across her forehead was already a fine tan colour, and I needed no diagnostic displays to tell me she was going to be alright.
Her laugh was healthy enough.
“I’ll be here for another four or five days,” she said. “Adam and Sam will be here tomorrow. They were in Paris.”
“Very nice,” I said.
“I don’t suppose…”
I glanced at Cly, and he was grinning.
“She can’t make it,” he said. “She’s attending a Ghostway ceremony, with me.”
“You’re joking,” she said, but she knew as well as I that I needed cleansing of ghostly contamination.
“No,” I said. “But I’d like to meet them. Please.”
“Any time,” she said. “Sam’s my son, by the way.”
The orderly chucked us out then, telling us that Nat needed her rest and we could see her again tomorrow. Waving, we left the room and the door sealed shut behind us.
In the waiting room, Cly looked around, spotted a fire exit, and we left that way.
“It’s okay,” he explained. “I’m a law officer.”
The baking heat hit us, rising up from the parking lot, and we hurried to get inside his air-conditioned flyer. Tomorrow I’d be in a sweat ceremony and ready to kill for coolth like this.
He opened the holo display and placed a call to Aunt Josephine’s code, but it was my nephew, Dave’s face which appeared.
“I’ve got Nat with me,” said Cly. “We’ll be with you by nightfall.”
“Okay. Great-Aunt Josephine’s skimmer returned in one piece, even though it was flying on auto. So I guess it’s safe for you guys to come back.”
“Don’t be cheeky,” I said, leaning into his view, and blew him a kiss, then killed the display.
Cly blew out a breath.
“Where are you going to go afterwards?” he asked.
“Shanghai,” I said.
“You’re kidding.”
I shook my head. Until he asked the question, I hadn’t known the
answer.
“It just seems,” I said slowly, “The right place to go, just now.”
“Where they’re blowing up buildings and stuff?”
“Yeah. Crazy, isn’t it?”
He gunned the engine into life.
“Crazy like a witch, perhaps.”
The parking lot and the sprawling white hospital fell away beneath us.
“So how do you control things with the butterfly effect, again?” I asked, teasing.
“Tame the butterfly.” He swung the flyer on a long banking turn to the left. “Shoot it, if you have to.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
Within seconds, desert with scattered mesquite was flying past in a blur beneath us.
“You gonna need some help out there?” asked Cly, looking carefully ahead.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I expect to poke around, call a few people and tell them what I find. Nothing dangerous. I’ll be back soon.”
“Good,” he said.
Red desert below, blue sky above, and us, hawk-like, in balance between them both. It is the land, and the spirit of the land, which defines our souls, and I knew in that moment that I would never die away from home. Far and forever, the flat desert and winding canyons stretch, harsh and serene, immediate and timeless, the nursing mother of life and the snatching hand of death, while ma’ii the coyote howls defiance at the edge of chaos and with that, my sisters, we must be content.
— T H E E N D —
About the Author
photo by Steve Davies
John Meaney is the author of three published novels - To Hold Infinity and the Nulapeiron Sequence, Paradox, Context, and Resolution. He also has numerous short fiction publication credits. His novelette "Sharp Tang" was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Award in 1995, and To Hold Infinity and Paradox were on the BSFA shortlists for Best Novel in 1999 and 2001 respectively. The Times called John Meaney "The first important new sf writer of the 21st century."
Meaney has a degree in physics and computer science, and holds a black belt in Shotokan Karate. He lives in Kent.
Visit John Meaney’s website at http://johnmeaney.tripod.com/.