by Various
Jack rolled her eyes. The glade magic let him hold back monsoons and blow out forest fires. It was a gift, not a curse.
“You could walk away and let humans take the treasure,” Jack said. The shiny things were not that interesting. She hadn’t even played with them since she was a whelp.
Father’s hackles rose. “I promised,” was all he said.
Tien came back often, bringing cooked meat. They talked.
On the sea-green grass beside the stream, she made herself a human face. Until she wore her human eyes, she didn’t understand green.
Tien ran his hands over her smooth skin in wonder and hunger. Her own whimpers sounded strange. He laughed when she licked his face, and taught her how to lick tongues in the human way. He gave her a name, Jackery, and said it meant “to be remembered".
He taught her to remember and to want.
She was not shy of nakedness, but shy of mating. It made her think about Father. She would squirm out of his hands, pull her fur around her. Fall to four paws and lope into the undergrowth to crouch and close her eyes. Tien smelled like palm-water left in the sun, sweet and fierce.
When he asked her to marry him, she made him explain about marriage. Then she said yes.
• • •
Jack stroked Father’s head goodbye with her new hands. Father grumbled, but didn’t stop her. His fur felt odd on her bare palms.
She thought he howled when she left, but her unfamiliar ears were insensitive. Her nose was a clumsy lump of cartilage on a flat face, smelling almost nothing. The single pair of teats made her unbalanced. Walking on two legs felt like falling. But the eyes were a wonder.
The wedding was beautiful, Tien said. He wore a dagger with a jewelled hilt in his belt, the blade hidden in the sheath. She wore nothing. Her wedding dress was her careful face. The cheekbones, Tien told her, were exquisite, the curled lashes maddening.
Tien officiated his own wedding. “Jackery of the Glade, will you be taken?”
“I will,” she said, and cried when it didn’t rain and it didn’t shine from the clouded sky.
“It’s a bad omen,” she said to Tien, who didn’t understand. “When a jackal marries, it’s supposed to rain and shine at the same time. Father told me it happened when he married my sister-mothers.”
Tien wiped her tears and kissed her muzzle. “Your face is slipping, my wife. You’re not a jackal any more.”
She forced her face into smoothness while he took his dagger and cut out his heart. He gave it to her to eat. While she chewed, looking at his eyes, he cut her heart out. She didn’t even feel it. He put it in his mouth in one great swallow, and she laughed.
They honeymooned that evening. Tien called the fine golden down on her body her “fur” to comfort her.
In the morning, while he took her from behind, she raised her face to the bright sky and raindrops wet her cheeks.
She sensed Father watching from the undergrowth and missed her fur. She took Tien’s shirt and struggled into it. It smelled like him.
Tien brought back fruit covered in tough green thorns, so sharp they drew blood from her palms. They stank but when he sliced one open, the flesh was yellow and sweet. Tien dug a refuse-pit for the husks, and in the evening they made a fire.
While he was gone the next morning, she lazed with her hands to her roiling belly. Too much new food, but oh, the pleasure of cooked meat. The stench of durian was everywhere. It made her queasy.
She crawled over to the midden and vomited. She couldn’t smell anything except durian, but she knew green when she saw it. The red of her discarded heart stood out among the thorns.
• • •
Jack ate her own heart for strength, shivering. She barely noticed when Tien returned. He stepped knee-deep into the stream and pulled a golden circle out of the water. It shone in the sun.
“I’ve killed your father,” he said. He held a spear with blood on the barbs. “My greatest heist, even if I had to lose my heart.”
“How?” Jack asked, voice breaking into a whine.
“I put a son in your belly,” Tien said. “I knew the terms of the king’s spell. A male child inherits and the old guardian loses his power.”
“But I don’t want cubs,” Jack said. She patted her belly. “I’ll make it go away. I have the changing magic.”
“It’s too late now,” Tien said, with a trace of the old patience with which he’d explained marriage or kings or gold or any other strange human thing. “You’ve helped me break your father’s magic. Without it, he was just an old jackal. Now the treasure is mine.”
He was watching her carefully. She could read human body language better now, and understood the casual grace of his spear, the way he was braced for an attack from jackal-height.
“I don’t care,” Jack said, at last. “I never cared about the treasure. You can have it if you want. I don’t care if you killed Father. He kept me trapped here and you’re my husband.” She walked over to Tien and ran her hand over his face. “Now we can leave this place together.”
It was almost true. She didn’t care about the treasure and she did love him, if this was love. When she stabbed him in the belly with his own dagger, it was for Father.
When she cut open his gut, that was curiosity. She had never cut with anything but teeth. Tien fell to his knees, trying to pinch shut his wound and hold the red sea washing out of him. He made noises like a dying hare.
Her belly settled a little. She was hungry after all.
When she dropped to all fours and snagged a corner of intestine in her jaws before darting away, unraveling him, winding him into the treasure glade by his guts, that was cruelty. She had finally learned a human thing.
She dropped it when she reached the glade’s edge, Tien’s screams fading behind her.
The bramble barrier parted, and she slipped beyond into the rain and the shine.
Anne Charnock became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of A Calculated Life (2013), from 47North.
Visit her website at annecharnock.com.
* * *
Novel: A Calculated Life (excerpt) ••••
A CALCULATED LIFE
(excerpt)
by Anne Charnock
First published as A Calculated Life (2013), by 47North
• • • •
But a thought swarmed in me; what if he, this yellow-eyed being—in his ridiculous, dirty bundle of trees, in his uncalculated life—is happier than us?
We — Yevgeny Zamyatin
Chapter 1
THE SECOND-SMALLEST stick insect lay askew and lifeless on the trails of ivy. Jayna lifted the mesh cover, nudged the foliage with her middle finger and the corpse dropped to the cage floor. It made no sense. The smallest of the brood, the outlier, should have died first. Why this one, the second smallest? She glanced at the temperature monitor. Surely, it wasn’t her fault? And it couldn’t be the food—she turned over a leaf—or they would all be ill by now. So what exactly…? The surviving insects shuddered indifferently.
Jayna placed the cover back on its base. One thing was certain. An autopsy was out of the question; she had no scalpels. In any case, she thought, it was a fact: in the normal run of things, people had autopsies; insects did not. She pushed a hand through her hair. One dead stick insect and now she was running two minutes late for breakfast. That’s all the death amounted to—a slight delay in her morning routine. The death would remain a mystery. No ripple of concern, no cascade of grief. She peered into the cage at the still-smallest stick insect.
“Maybe you’re… just lucky,” she murmured.
• • •
Jayna left Rest Station C7 with her friend Julie and together they headed towards the tower blocks of downtown Manchester. They looked like schoolgirls, holding their packed lunches and wearing identical office garb.
“Why would the smallest, feeblest one survive longer?” said Jayna.
“Was it feeble? Perhaps it w
as just… small,” said Julie.
By the time they reached the Vimto sculpture on Granby Row, Jayna had scanned through the data she’d compiled over the past three months on the eating habits of her stick insects, their rates of growth, their response to stimuli—light, heat and touch—morning and evening activity rates… thirteen variables in all. She plotted against time, overlaid the graphs, and compared. No help at all.
“I kept a close eye on them all but I only took measurements for two—the two closest to average size,” said Jayna.
“Hmm. Mistake.”
The morning street projections let rip with the usual inducements—half-price breakfast deals, lunchtime soup ’n’ sushi specials. Julie peeled off northwards. Jayna, still perplexed, pressed ahead and pulled up sixteen data sets culled over recent weeks from a slew of enthusiasts’ forums and from academic studies by the Bangalore Environmental Research Institute. Rates of growth, population size, mortality figures; it was all there. She plotted the longevity of stick insects against their size at death, and regressed the data. The correlation with size was… heck, weaker than she’d imagined. She tripped on a raised paving flag. And as for luck, she thought, the tiniest survivor in mind, that was without doubt a dumbed-down term referring to randomness.
On entering the high atrium of the Grace Hopper Building, she walked under the turquoise-leaved palms and bit her lip. She pushed the Bangalore data from her mind and considered her Monday schedule as she stepped to the back of the elevator. The doors closed with a whoosh-chang! and she tapped the back of her head against the elevator panel.
Time to think straight. How should she handle her entrance? Act as though nothing had happened on Friday? Walk straight past Eloise? Or should she apologize without any delay? It was just too awkward… and confusing. She hoped Eloise had calmed down over the weekend. According to Benjamin, it was a simple misjudgment. “A minor faux pas”—his exact words. The elevator doors opened and she stepped out. She was relieved Benjamin had said minor. A bit of a faux pas would be worse, definitely.
Pushing open the office door, she came to a decision. She would keep quiet, hope for the best.
Eloise jumped up, lifted a hand—not exactly a wave—and scuffled across the analysts’ floor at Mayhew McCline to intercept Jayna. “Tea!” she said, and pulled Jayna towards the kitchen galley. “Listen, I’m sorry about Friday.”
“No. I’m the one who’s sorry, Eloise. How was your father?”
“You were right. No real panic. He was comfortable and sedated when I got there.”
“You were worried. I wasn’t—”
“I overreacted. I didn’t mean it.”
“Is he still in hospital?”
“Yes, should be home tomorrow.” She cocked her head to one side. “It was a very nasty fall, you know… but nothing’s broken. They’re running tests, giving him a full check.”
“That’s—”
“I shouldn’t have barked at you.”
Jayna raised her eyebrows fractionally. She didn’t disagree. What had she said that was so bad? “Don’t forget the monthly figures before you go. Only take a minute.” It hadn’t exactly been a quarrel; too brief and one-sided. Jayna reassessed the incident: Eloise pushing things into her bag, one arm in her coat. She’d barged past and barked so the whole department heard, “You really are the bloody limit, Jayna.” The emphasis still caught her by surprise. And then Eloise had thrown open the office door. Her coat belt got caught on the handle. She’d yanked at the belt and shoved the door, which had slammed back against the wall.
“Darjeeling, black, isn’t it?” Eloise turned and hit the kettle switch. “Jayna, you have to understand. We can’t all be as calm as you.”
Jayna shook her head, “Nothing for me, thanks” and turned to leave but Eloise touched her arm. “Listen, to be honest, I wanted to clear the air quickly. Something serious…” She hesitated. “You’d better see Benjamin, now. It’s about Tom Blenkinsop.” Eloise frowned at Jayna’s blankness and, as if spelling things out for a child, “It’s… not… good.”
• • •
A bugbear, that Tom. She should have told him; if he needed so much help he should have asked through proper channels, booked some extra training, some official mentoring time. Maybe Benjamin had found out about his off-loading. It had started two months back when Tom sent her a research report before submitting it to Benjamin, with a request: Cast an eye over this, will you, Jayna? An aberration; an extra step in the accredited process. On the first three occasions the amendments had taken less than ten minutes but, from that point on, Tom’s requests had landed every few days and the reports had become weightier. She hadn’t complained because once she’d corrected the first report she hadn’t liked the idea of Tom’s errors reaching Benjamin. He might have missed them. So Jayna had developed the habit of charging the time to her own jobs; five minutes here, ten minutes there. She finessed his arguments, improved his executive summaries—his weakest area—and, when essential, she hunted down additional data sources to “beef things up,” as Tom himself would say.
Benjamin usually worked in the middle of the analysts’ floor on the thirty-first but this morning he summoned staff to the thirty-second, to his so-called quiet room.
“About Tom?” she said, poking her head around his door. Benjamin, slumped in his sofa, looked up at Jayna and seemingly had no inclination to say anything. She felt hot. “I thought his last report—”
“It’s not about his work,” he said, and gestured to the armchair. “You know he’s… he was on holiday?”
She did. Tom had dropped another tome on her before he left, with a brief note: Check and forward. Thx.
“Was on holiday?”
“Tragic accident,” he said. “I want to tell everyone individually.”
“Tragic?”
“Swimming in the sea….”
Benjamin, she realized, had already told the story several times. He didn’t continue. So she prompted: “Drowned?”
“His wife and kids were on the beach. Couldn’t do anything about it.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Swept out. His brother phoned me last night at home. He’s flying out today.”
Another silence. What was she supposed to say? She recalled a drowning incident reported in the news. What did the journalist ask…?
“Have they found his body?” she said with precision.
“No. Not yet. Only happened yesterday.”
“That’s terrible.”
“And it’s going to be a long time before there’s a funeral. There’ll be an autopsy when they find the body…”
Stumped.
“Jayna, can you help me out?” Benjamin, gray-faced, pulled himself up to sit straight-backed. Was this one problem too many for Benjamin, she wondered, or was he upset? Tom had only joined seven months ago. “Can you go through his files? Finish anything that needs finishing. I think the others might find it too upsetting, so soon.”
“Okay. I’m familiar—”
“Thanks. Don’t tell the others. Just fit it around your own work. Let me know if I need to do any firefighting.”
A secondary post-mortem, she thought. “Fine.”
• • •
Jayna stepped along the corridor’s repeat-pattern squares and dipped into the washroom. Inside the end cubicle, she leaned back against the door.
Such bad timing! Rebuffing Tom… of all the opportunities I could have taken, Jayna reproached herself. He didn’t bother to explain… just assumed. She flushed the toilet unnecessarily as though eradicating her response to his request: Tom, I can’t possibly find time until the end of the month. Send it to Benjamin, as is. He’d retorted: FU2. Thanks for nothing, wonder woman.
I didn’t know he was in a rush, going on holiday. How stupid of him to drown!
What, she wondered, were the chances of Tom’s death? In the entire working population of the Grace Hopper Building she’d expect a premature fatality… once a year?
But at Mayhew McCline, with only forty-five employees, the chance of anyone drowning was so small it was technically… She stopped herself and opened the door.
It was never negligible, it was always there. She turned the tap, too far, and water shot out from the basin. Accidents simply happened.
• • •
The kitchen became the unofficial, designated space for commiserations and the occasional sobbing over Tom as though the analysts were protecting their office space from permanent stains of association. Jayna observed Eloise zigzagging through the department with a condolence card. She averted her eyes as each person hesitated with pen poised. Eloise didn’t bring the card to Jayna. Hester, chief analyst, announced she was installing herself for the morning in Benjamin’s quiet room and they all knew what she’d be doing—she’d inform colleagues in London about Tom’s death and speak to his personal business contacts, get them reassigned to other analysts. Jayna imagined ripples of concern of varying magnitude spreading from all these subsidiary nodes. No such after-effects from her stick insect’s demise.
She brought up Tom’s files on her array. And immediately closed them. Instead, she pulled up her own studies and began drilling through her energy data sets. Hydrogen, she decided, was worth a closer look. She interrogated the data on hydrogen car ownership, rotated the charts and geographical visuals—global, continental and regional—and calculated a trend for global hydrogen car ownership over the past five-years. Next, she searched for a correlation with individual variables in other data sets: disposable income for the same period, fresh fruit exports, per capita holiday spending, a host of commodity production figures, wholesale energy prices… thirty-seven variables in all. Her array flashed, cycling through regressions and wildly fluctuating figures for statistical significance. She brushed twenty-one possibilities aside. Playing with combinations of the remaining variables, she derived seventeen relationships. A fair start, she thought. By instinct, she assigned a weighting for each variable and began her quest for the perfect curve, one that matched the five-year historical trend. And as she adjusted the weightings, the curves began their shape shifting. Benjamin appeared at Jayna’s shoulder. “How can you take it all in? I feel sick just watching.”