Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘But you must have some idea. Your hunter has to have some trail to follow.’

  ‘A profile, Ms Harridi,’ Roisin Dunbar says. ‘Give us the same trail. We have a law here, you know. It’s different from yours, we can’t just blow each other away because some angel-thing in our heads tells us it’s a good idea, or to save the honour of your Nation.’

  ‘You kill each other by the millions for the honour of your nations,’ Thetherrin Harridi says. ‘And your law gives you full permission. Our way, I think, is the saner. There is a little blood, and it is always personal. There is no collateral; there are no innocent victims.’

  ‘The children,’ Gillespie says. ‘What about the children?’

  ‘Where do you get this idea from that children are innocent?’ Thetherrin says. ‘Children are terrible creatures. They treat each other with cruelty and injustice and blatant tyranny. They inflict pain without thought, both physical and mental. It is the same with your children, I have seen how they are with each other. Any difference, any imperfection or deformity, is mercilessly exploited. They make victims of each other. They have no kindness or compassion. They are not innocent, neither yours nor ours. They are terrible, yet we will go to any length to protect them.’

  ‘And the killer?’ Roisin Dunbar asks. In her beige policeperson’s coat, she’s cold, a shiver in the soul. She doesn’t know if it’s the architecture of the sacred that’s put it there, or the truth behind Thetherrin Harridi’s words. Our young are aliens to both of us. We imagine that because we necessarily passed through childhood ourselves we can communicate with our children, but they are as alien to us as the Shian are.

  ‘Little more than a child itself,’ Thetherrin says. ‘Are you authorized to negotiate?’

  ‘The law doesn’t negotiate.’

  ‘Ours does. It is what our law is, negotiation. If I give you the information you need to find the Fool Killer, the Queen’s Island Hold will recall its hunter and you will blame the Soulereya death on the Fool Killer.’

  ‘You have got to be kidding. I can’t make a deal like that. There is no way we could agree to that. Your hunter killed one Outsider and seriously wounded another. We have a law, it’s called Withholding Evidence. You can go to jail for a long time for it. Ask Gillespie what it’s like for an Outsider in jail.’

  ‘I do not need to ask Gillespie,’ Thetherrin Harridi says. ‘The genro Mehishhan was once a lover of mine, on another world.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Andy Gillespie says.

  ‘His communications with his children counted you and Eamon Donnan as his lovers,’ the Outsider says.

  Andy Gillespie knows that Thetherrin is using the Shian sense of the word. ‘It’s over,’ he says, sadly. ‘They’ve got you. Tell her.’

  Thetherrin is silent for a long time. The dimensions of the sacred space stretch its few seconds into a long pause. Things flock in the edges of the humans’ vision. Then the Outsider says, ‘Sergeant Dunbar, were any of the bodies you examined in this position?’ She clenches her fists, places them on the middle of her belly a few centimetres apart.

  ‘The adults at the Welcome Centre. Why? What does it mean?’

  ‘At the end of the hunt, when the quarry is run down, there is a moment when it knows that it cannot run any further, that escape is impossible, that all its skills and evasions have been bettered and that death is inevitable. It cannot run, and it will not fight, for the prey does not hunt the hunter. So it turns to its hunter and goes gladly to the blade. That is a moment of most pure and intense love between hunted and hunter. Death is a joyful culmination. The mystery of the hunt is celebrated. My fellow Harridis in the Welcome Centre understood that they could not escape the hunter, and so gave themselves gladly to it. This is the gesture of it, a baring of the heart for the knife. I am making it to you, Detective Sergeant Dunbar.’ Thetherrin shifts a step. In those few centimetres she seems to grow in stature. Miles high. Towering.

  ‘I met a hahndahvi the other day,’ she says. ‘It was not one I had ever met before. I met it at the place where two rivers join. One river ran down to the sea, the other river straight. It did not follow the curve of the world, it was not a prisoner of gravity. It flowed into the mountains, it flowed around the shoulders of the mountains, it rose up through the mountains and beyond the mountains; it flowed over the edge of the world. The hahndahvi that I met had sailed down this river in a boat clasped in the skin of human women and human children. The skins were of all the colours of the human races; the faces had been cut away but the scalps left whole so that the hair floated in the river like weed. The hahndahvi stood in the join of the two rivers, its feet were in the water. It was not at all tall; it was dressed in denim, with brass buttons on the pocket flaps. Its hair was black, its nose pointed, it had round white eyes. Human eyes. It had muscles on its muscles; ropes and knots of muscle, like cables, like the roots of trees. It could rip out the roots of trees by its own sheer strength. In one hand it carried a long club, in the other a football. It called me to it and told me it might harm me or it might not harm me; it was all a question of feeling. From across the water I told it that I had not seen its like before in my travels across the Dream Place. It answered that I should not be surprised, for it had come from another dreaming in its skin boat. In that other dreaming it had owned no form, no smell, no name. It had been shapeless fear, it had lived in the dark at the base of human brains for all history. But in this place where the rivers joined, it had a body, it had a face and a spirit and it could walk and talk and kill things, for that was its chief delight: to fight, to overcome. Then I asked it its name. Its name, it told me, was Sex and Violence.’

  Gillespie waits for the kicker. It doesn’t come.

  ‘Nice story. So, what does it mean? That you’ve discovered men are dangerous?’

  ‘It is not a story, Mr Gillespie. Your archetypes are infecting our dreaming. There is leakage between our racial unconsciousnesses. You are taking from us, we are taking from you.’

  ‘Sex and violence.’

  ‘Perhaps we are more alike than we thought, Mr Gillespie.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  The warden of the Sacred Space does not answer.

  ‘Why won’t you tell me? Why does everything have to be a riddle with you?’ And he feels himself losing it, like he almost did that time in this place with Eamon Donnan. The subtle dislocations of sacred space kick out the blocks, the big ship slides. He lunges for Thetherrin Harridi. She’s fast; he’s faster. Two fistfuls of shirt pull her down to his height. Face to face. ‘I’ve had enough of your pissing around, never being straight, never knowing where you’re coming from. I’ve had enough, you hear me? I want to know how to find this Fool Killer. Tell me how to find this fucking Fool Killer or I will break you in two.’

  Thetherrin Harridi blinks slowly. Her throat convulses, she spits into her hand. Then, too fast for Andy Gillespie’s anger, she clamps the hand over his mouth. Something squirms over his lips, up the back of his nose. He retches, chokes, reels backwards.

  Roisin Dunbar has her gun out, aimed two-fisted at Thetherrin Harridi.

  ‘I’m all right. I’m all right.’

  And then suddenly he isn’t.

  Suddenly he is somewhere else entirely.

  He is in woods, by running water. Broken light falls through the branches of conifers, reflects from the surface of the slow-moving brown water. There are shapes moving in the surface. Ducks. Mallards. A path runs by the water’s edge, following the bend of the river. Gillespie smiles. He knows this Dream Place. He used to come here as a kid. He’s in Belvoir Forest. Walk down that path and you’ll come to Annadale Flats, the city, the docks and shipyard, the sea. His sounyok, his private world-forest. Joggers round the bend in the riverside path, a dogwalker emerges from the trees on the far bank. The dog leaps into the river, chasing a thrown stick, dog-paddling happily in the water. Of course your dreaming is a place you know.

  He can smell the water, the resinous
scent of the trees.

  Beats the shit out of that so-called virtual reality bollocks. Computers fake it. Lookee no touchee. The chemicals embody.

  He hears movement in the branches behind him. He turns; a figure stands at the edge of the trees. It is a tall Shian, dressed in a long crimson coat. On its head it wears a tall, out-flaring crown woven from tree twigs, hung with mirrors and tiny bells like you put in budgie and parrot cages to stop them pulling out their feathers in boredom. The figure carries a short, thick-bladed hooked knife in its left hand.

  ‘Red Earth,’ Gillespie says, remembering the names of the hahndahvi.

  ‘Divider of Waters,’ it says.

  ‘The Cutter.’ Gillespie completes the trinity.

  ‘As your hahndahvi have entered our dreaming, so we enter yours,’ the Slayer of Fools says.

  ‘Who are you?’ Gillespie asks. The joggers bounce past. They show no surprise at the Shian avatar standing by the path. That’s how Gillespie can be sure he is in the dreaming.

  ‘Sex and Violence,’ the figure in red says. ‘It is for us as for you. Sex and violence.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Gillespie says. ‘You can’t even be straight with me in dreams.’

  The Slayer of Fools smiles. It flips the knife end for end, catches the point, offers the hilt to Gillespie. He finds he has a genro staff in his hand. He does the Shian ‘no’ and shakes out the staff.

  The Fool Slayer looks at the staff, looks at the blade, looks at the joggers vanishing around the bend and the dog paddling up and down in the water with a stick in its mouth, and lunges forward, too quick for Andy Gillespie, seizes him as only a dream can seize. It leans over him, bares sharpened teeth. Jesus, I’m dead, Andy Gillespie thinks; throat bitten out in my own childhood dream. And the Fool Slayer whispers the word of grace in his ear.

  In the Shian dreaming, when you are given the word of grace, you know that you can trust it absolutely. God has spoken. Alleluia.

  And he’s back, kneeling on the floor, trying to cough the clinging, niggling thing that isn’t there any more out of the back of his throat. The concrete is very hard and cold and solid. The arcane geometries of the sacred space whirl above him. But he knows. The word of grace is sharp and clean and true. Sex and violence.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Dunbar actually sounds concerned.

  Gillespie shakes the scraps of dreaming out of his head.

  ‘Woo.’

  ‘It would not have worked had your brain not been imprinted with receptors for Narha,’ Thetherrin Harridi says. ‘It worked for Eamon Donnan, it should then work for you.’

  ‘What did he see?’ Gillespie asks.

  ‘What you saw.’

  ‘You were telling the truth,’ Gillespie says. ‘All along.’

  ‘Of course,’ Thetherrin Harridi says. ‘You had to see it for yourself.’

  ‘The children,’ Andy Gillespie says.

  ‘Yes, the children,’ the Outsider agrees.

  ‘The children?’ Roisin Dunbar asks as Gillespie buckles his seat belt. And again at the lights at the end of Queen’s Quay Road.

  ‘The children?’

  ‘The children,’ Andy Gillespie says carefully.

  ‘What did that Outsider do to you in there?’

  ‘Showed me how to work it out for myself. Showed me the Slayer of Fools.’

  The traffic is slow over the bridge. Not even woo-woos can get you through solid crush-hour.

  ‘And what did this Slayer of Fools looks like?’

  ‘A child,’ Andy Gillespie says. ‘It’s all sex and violence. Like Littlejohn says, murder is sex misspelled. It’s the same for them as it is for us. The mechanics are different because the biology is different, but it’s still sex and death.’

  ‘The mechanics.’ She treats Cromac Street to a two-second excerpt of woo-woos. The traffic scatters like seed. Ah, the abuse of power.

  At least something will move for her. Something will recognize her.

  ‘It’s all chemicals with these people. They make them love, they make them fuck, they make them travel between stars, they make them kill. We’ve no idea, no idea at all, what kesh does to them. We think it’s like a good party, or doing a dozen poppers, or a Marbella night club on an eighteen-to-thirty holiday. We think it’s a couple of degrees hotter than the hottest we can go. We aren’t even close to it. It tears their fucking souls out. It burns away everything they are. It destroys their minds. It’s insanity. Racial insanity. The whole species goes mad. If it turns adults into animals, can you imagine what it’s like for a kid when the chemicals hit that first time? Nine, ten years old, you’ve just got used to having a sex, when one morning you wake up and you’re someone else full of desires that scare you stupid, that you have to obey or you’ll explode. And you’re far away from home, on your own, a stranger in a very very strange land, no one to help you, no one to guide you, except the dreams in your head. You turn to them, those old friends you’ve grown up with through your childhood, who’ve guided you and helped you and seen you right and all that; and you can’t find them. They’re gone, the chemicals have changed them into something else. Something with a knife in its hand that’s telling you what you already know, that it’s a big, wide, scary world full of shit and humans. You’re alone, you’re afraid, you don’t know what to do, except stop the things that scare you, any way you can.’

  ‘Kids.’

  ‘Gensoon. Shian singletons on their first wanderjahr. Transients caught out by the season. The ones who’ve found Holds have the support to make it through the season and back to sanity.’

  Dunbar turns into University Street, slows down to cruise for a parking space.

  ‘And you have records of all transient movements into the province at the centre?’

  Gillespie nods. He’s still rocky, but Dunbar can’t judge if it’s the lingering effect of vodka, sacred space and whatever that Outsider put into his head, or the vertigo of the Shian species falling from grace.

  ‘You admire them, don’t you?’ she ventures, finding a space, swinging the car into it.

  ‘I did admire them. I thought I knew them. I thought I could trust them. Now I don’t know anything any more. I don’t know what anything means. I’ve got these words of theirs in my head, but they’re just jabber. Just sounds.’ He pauses. You look in hell, Roisin Dunbar thinks. ‘I’m going to need your help with this.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  They both stop in the hall outside the open office door. Each knows the other is seeing it as it was, and that they will never be able to see it any other way. Gillespie takes a deep breath.

  ‘Hardcopy or computer?’

  ‘I don’t know your database architecture. I’ll shuffle papers. What am I looking for?’

  ‘Gensoon referrals since the autumn season. If they don’t find a Hold within six months, they either move on or form one with whoever’s around. You can probably chuck out any that have been sent direct to Holds, unless the Hold’s called back here to ask us to refer him or her to another Hold. They move about a lot, these people.’

  Us. These people. Which are you, Gillespie? Which Nation do you belong to?

  Roisin Dunbar opens the filing cabinet and groans.

  ‘Oh, God. Any chance of some coffee?’

  ‘There’s a jar in my office. They were allergic to it. Came out in lumps. Break in fifteen minutes?’

  All those clambering clockwork names. Jangs. Ongs. Anks, Ouns. What kind of place is Shelter from the Sky to come from? Or Cool in Summer, or We Built it Good? As much as Dungannon or Dunmurry or Ballymena or Belfast would, literally translated. Sasammaven Seyonk, from Fifth Small Hill Hold in Ontario. Eleven years old. You read eleven years old and you see a human eleven-year-old sitting strapped into a seat on a 747, wandering lost around airport transit lounges, being scammed by taxi drivers, driven off into white slavery. At eleven they are adult. Fully grown, complete sexual beings. We think our children grow up too quickly. But our children want to grow
up. They’ve no patience with childhood.

  How would you feel if it were Louise fully grown, flying out on her eleventh birthday into the rest of her life? How would you feel if Mikey could breast feed her too, be as much a mother to her as you are?

  Redundant. Old. A walking womb.

  If you were Shian, you would just walk away from Mikey. No recriminations, no unravelled ends to tie off, no mess, no fuss. A little hurt, a few tears — except they don’t cry, they go dark around the eyes — and onwards to new lives and loves. Maybe there is a big sanity in the way they keep sex and love separate. Love is sanity, sex is insanity. But could you live that way, never having sex with those you loved, never loving those you have sex with?

  And how do you feel about Mikey right now?

  ‘Got one.’ She never noticed that coffee has arrived, and gone cold.

  ‘There’ll be more.’

  She finds the next one within the minute. Gillespie’s got three.

  ‘We’ll need to cross-check these. It’s possible some of them may have formed their own Holds,’ he says. Pages flick at epilepsy speed across the screen.

  ‘I can see the connection in this, but I still can’t get the logic,’ Dunbar says.

  ‘What logic was there to Jeffrey Dahmer, Fred West, Denis Nilson? There’s a logic to this, but it’s Shian logic. Dreaming logic. They’ve rewritten the rules of murder, like they’ve rewritten the rules of everything else we know. The killer is protecting his unborn children from the threat of the fools. That’s the logic. And he won’t stop until the threat is exterminated.’

  ‘Where do you stop in this country?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I think I get the logic now. The children are protected by the adults, but who protects the adults from the children?’

  ‘You’ve got it. That’s the irony of the hahndahvi. Bitch, isn’t it?’

  They work without speaking for another hour. More coffee goes cold. It all comes down to going through the files, Dunbar thinks. Willich should have told her that as the third secret key of detective work. It’s only in the movies that you get the car chases and final cliff-hanger shoot-outs.