by Zion's Fiction- A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (retail) (epub)
In all my years of work I’d refrained from saying anything that would identify me with the missionaries, but now, seeing the tremble of her chin, I heard their words of consolation coming from my mouth. So be it. In any event, my work had come to an end.
“I know what you think, what they’ve told you. Lots of misunderstandings and rumors circulate in the Preserves. Listen to me, I promise you that no harm will come to the children.”
“Do you mean that you won’t take them?” the savage princess asked in a soft, strange voice. “That the decision has been revoked?”
“Decisions aren’t my field. People like me don’t make policy. What I want to explain to you is another matter. Maybe you think that accelerated growth will shorten this offspring’s life. Believe me, woman, that’s a mistake. Whoever told you that was either wrong or lying. Our life span is no shorter than yours. Actually, the opposite is true: progress gives us a longer life. If your son is ultimately given over to AOG, he won’t lose even a single day. On the contrary, he can enjoy all the years before him as an independent adult. You’ll see your son’s children, and your descendants will inherit the planets.”
The savage woman twisted her jaw to the side. “You think we’re stupid.”
The Slows have manners of their own. You can’t expect them to behave like us. Still, in her present situation I would have expected her to make an effort. But the very fact that she wasn’t making an effort held my interest. Perhaps this was an opportunity for me to hear something new. Usually they were so cautious when speaking to us and behaved evasively, even with me.
But just at that moment the larva started to bleat, and the savage woman instantly lost her impertinence.
“You may do it,” I said to her. “Pick it up. I’ve been in the Preserves for years, and I’ve seen such things.”
Without looking at me, she freed the larva from the carrier and held it to her chest. I observed six of my offspring during the process of accelerated growth, and the distress of the first weeks, before they reached decent maturity, comes back to me every time I’m forced to observe a human larva up close. There are times in a person’s life that are meant to be private, and the state of infancy is certainly the most pronounced of these. The larva was silent for a moment, then it started to bleat again.
“How old is it?”
“Eleven weeks.” The most horrifying human larvae are the big ones, which already look like people but lack the stamp of humanity. At least this one was similar in dimensions to our offspring. Nearly three months old. He could have been a productive adult already. Footsteps could be heard outside, and the sound of two people talking. The savage woman’s eyes widened. She put her hand first to her mouth and then to the larva’s open mouth.
“Don’t worry. They won’t come in here. They know that I hold interviews.” The touch of the woman’s hand on the creature’s lips increased its discomfort, and now it raised its voice, screeching until its wrinkled face turned almost purple. Someone was liable to enter after all. The savage woman stuck a finger into the larva’s mouth, but it turned its head away and looked for something else.
“Don’t you feel sorry for it?” I asked, but she seemed not to hear me, cradling the larva in her arms and also turning her head here and there with an unfocussed look in her eyes.
Human beings as we know them are excited by every development in their offspring, because what purpose is there for the hard labor of parenthood if not to send forth an independent, productive adult who can satisfy his own needs? But the Slows appeared to enjoy the helplessness of their larvae—the lack of humanity, the deplorable fervor of the little creatures, their muteness, their mindless appetites, their selfishness, their ignorance, their inability to act. It seemed that the most disgusting of traits were what inspired the most love in savage parents.
The screeches stunned me. I was so riveted by the sight of that wriggling caterpillar that I almost missed the moment when the woman started talking again. “If we knew how much time was left for us….” So she didn’t know everything: the invasion would start that day; it might already have begun. “If we knew that we had another year or two, if you would only tell us how much time there is, people could prepare themselves.” Had she come as a spy? If they greeted the police with violence, they’d only bring disaster down upon themselves. A few spontaneous uprisings were to be expected. After all, theirs was a volatile culture. But an organized attack would be a kind of stupidity that was hard to fathom.
“I’m asking for so little,” the savage woman said. “Just this—to know how much time remains for us. Listen to me. I know you’re different from them. You’re not a missionary. You know us. You’re merciful, not like them. I feel it. You could have called the guards when you saw me here, but you didn’t do it. Maybe you once also had a baby you loved.”
The larva arched its body backward, and the woman unconsciously fingered the opening of her shirt. Suddenly I knew what she wanted to do, and with that thought the sourness of the coffee rose in my throat. To give it her milk bulges—that’s what she wanted, that’s why she was plucking at her shirt. When I was a student, I was forced to watch a film about ancient nutrition customs. It was for a course restricted to advanced students, but none of us were advanced enough to view that sight without a sharp feeling of nausea. From close up we watched the ravenous face of the larva and the swollen organ thrust into its wet mouth. It was a rather large larva, at least thirteen pounds, and the depraved sucking noises that it emitted mingled with the female’s bestial murmur. White liquid dripped down its chin, and the woman tickled its lips with her gland, holding the organ shamelessly between finger and lustful thumb. I still remember the strong protest voiced by three women students, which was understandable.
“If you’ll just answer me that,” the savage woman said, and her voice shook with feeling. “Just that.”
The emotionality of the Slows had the strange characteristic of clinging to me like a stain. As sometimes happened after a few hours of conversation with one of them, I began to feel polluted. “The good of the children is the only thing that we consider,” I said finally. “Do you want a cup of water? I see that you haven’t touched your coffee.”
When I got up and went back to the machine, the woman bent her body over the larva, almost concealing it under a black curtain of hair. The cold water refreshed my mouth, removed the traces of yesterday’s drink and the bitterness of the coffee, dislodged the clinging feeling. I drank two cups. It is sometimes possible to identify rational thought among the Slows, but their emotional exaggeration dilutes it. Though I had hoped to calm the savage woman, at that moment it was clear that there was no point in trying.
When I returned to the desk with a cup of water for her, I saw that she was rocking slowly on the chair, moving the larva rhythmically back and forth. It was tired from so much screeching, and its voice was growing weaker. She was so deeply immersed in her drugged movement that she didn’t notice me. I watched the two tired bodies moving together, and knew that soon, very soon, there would be an end to their suffering. The larva would become a man in control of his body, and she would accept it and smile. With clarity I saw that image, and, as though to transmit it to her, I reached out and placed my hand on her shoulder. All at once, like an animal, the woman recoiled, raised her head, and bared her teeth. The sudden movement jolted my body backward, and for a long moment we were frozen, twisted in mid-movement, looking into each other’s face.
“Don’t touch me!” she spat out, as though at an enemy. Her face was transparent, and I could read everything in it, all her distorted thoughts. She believed that what I wanted was to hold her soft body, to curl my fingers and grasp her flesh, to press it against mine and rub, blind and hopeless, against her milk glands. Her eyes, like snakes, penetrated my thoughts and fed them her abominable vision, the visions of a lower animal. For nine years I had been in the Preserves, and never had I experienced such a defilement.
“No one’s touching
you,” I pronounced with difficulty, turning toward the door and putting my hand out to press the button. By the time the alarm went off, and the sound of the larva’s weeping reached me, I was already in the light—in the bright, bright light outside.
Burn Alexandria
Keren Landsman
The sound of the bell woke me up.
“Don’t take it,” murmured Yonit out of her slumber.
“I have to take it,” I said, but she was already fast asleep again. I rubbed my eyes and found the switch in the darkened room.
“We have a five-seven-twenty. Still closed. Military’s deployed. Waiting for us,” said Shir at the other end. I coughed. He waited, and when I didn’t reply, he sighed. I know exactly how he looks when he lets out that sigh. “Invasion. You, of all people in the Universe, should remember that—”
“I do remember that everything beginning with a five means invasion, and that this instance does not require urgent intervention,” I interrupted him. “But what’s with the twenty?” Shir had this talent for memorizing protocols in far too many details than our ordinary work required.
Shir sighed again. I knew he sighed again because he kept silent, and when he finally spoke, his voice was half-a-tone lower, and he was distinctly stressing each word. “Seven – twenty. Seven – twenty.”
“Seven – twenty,” I mimicked him.
“Multiple hits. But a single location, so far.”
“Shit.” Now I was fully awake.
“As I was saying.” He hesitated for a moment. “You’re coming, aren’t you? I don’t have to alert … the Others?”
“No, of course not. I mean, yes, I’m coming. You don’t have to alert anyone else.” Neither he nor I wanted to call our Superiors in the middle of the night. We never got any help worth a damn from them, and even just reporting things could have serious consequences.
“Sending you a bubble.” Shir hung up.
When I went out, Yonit opened half an eye and murmured, “Take care,” hogging the entire blanket.
The white bubble stopped outside our house and opened to my touch. Inside, the screen was showing the movie of the month, and the sound system played calming Muzak. I would have been happier if I could link up with the Office and download data rather than listen to a selection of identically senseless tunes, but I don’t have the budget for a secure download, and the Office doesn’t have the budget to send me a coded private bubble. Instead of linking up with the Office, I connected with the Cloud and downloaded instructions for knitting a complicated scarf.
The bubble stopped jarringly in a black, open square surrounded by blocks of darkened buildings. This was the new construction zone, not yet occupied. A network of reflectors pulsed light around a sphere of darkness. I left the bubble, which flew off immediately to take the next passenger. There were no other bubbles there. The network of reflectors turned out to be a cordon of soldiers. They were whispering when my bubble disappeared. One beam of light approached me, coming off a band around Shir’s head. He was dressed eclectically, like the rest of us, distinguished only by a white tag bearing the letter S.
“You’re scaring all these aliens away,” I said, stepping forward.
The beam turned toward me. Shir grinned. “I wish it were this easy….”
I smiled in reply, took out my headband, and put it on. The soldiers stood at ease. I gave them a nod. You couldn’t see their faces in the darkness.
“Did you know that Fraud Division has light implants?” Shir gestured at the darkness.
“That’s because they’re not as elegant as we are.” I waited for the implant to synchronize with the headband. The light was just an excuse. The really important part of the band was the add-on that interfaced directly with my nerve center. Space spread out in front of me, shining in various electromagnetic wavelengths, giving darkness shape and form.
Beside me Shir took an orange-red hue. The pineapples embroidered on his dress lay dark against his body. The air he breathed in became dark blue inside his chest, then turned red before it was exhaled. The line of soldiers pulsated in green. Their guns were totally black, except for the stocks, which were red where warmed by their hands. The buildings were painted violet, in threads. I could see where rooms were sprouting up at the tops of these buildings.
Between the buildings, in the space in front of me, lay darkness—a large, dark sphere, not radiating in any wavelength our headbands could identify. I ran a basic analysis. It came back empty. You could see the patch of ground touched by the sphere.
“They reported multiple hits,” Shir said quietly.
“Obviously.” I breathed in. The air smelled of burnt gasoline and fertilized soil. “Buildings were damaged,” I said. Buildings had to be grown and cultivated, at immense expense. We were a by-product of the planet, nothing worth preserving.
Shir crossed his arms over his chest. “Someday they’ll realize how important individual lives are.”
I patted his shoulder. “And then they’ll destroy the lot of us.”
He grinned, nodding toward the dark sphere. “Shall we take samples?”
“I’d like to send a query …,” I started.
Shir raised his hand to stop me. “Already checked. Analysis came back empty. No similar reports in the past, the Superiors don’t know what the external shell is made of, and it’s definitely not an alien we know of.”
I shut my mouth.
“Took you a lot of time to get here.” Shir shrugged. “I got bored.”
I shook my head. “We really ought to find you some hobby.”
I switched off my band. It sucked up too much energy and added no information. I removed it, put it in my jacket pocket. Shir did the same. I moved in across the cordon of soldiers, got down on one knee, and touched the ground with my hand. Analysis came back as ordinary soil, and I felt nothing unusual. Half a meter away from me, there was blackness. I pulled at the top of Shir’s cowboy boots. “Come here, tell me what you can feel.”
He knelt beside me and put his hand next to mine. His sensory interface was better than mine, more advanced. He turned his face to me.
“Feel anything?”
He nodded. “Something.” Shir dug deeper with both hands. “It doesn’t feel compacted.” He sniffed. “And the smell is ordinary,” he added.
“Nothing burned or destroyed. I don’t think it crashed here.”
Shir nodded, slowly, and stared at the darkness in front of us. “It grew up here?”
His processing interfaces were better than mine, but my intuition was much better than his.
“Appeared,” I said, quietly, “and swallowed up everything around it.”
Shir stopped breathing.
“This is a space-warp field,” I said. He nodded. I could almost hear his memories reappearing. We both had memories of all those invasions since the very first one, which also began with a warp field. Only that one had appeared in the middle of the ocean, split into dozens of smaller fields and spread all over the planet within days. While this sphere just … stood here.
Shir pulled his hands out of the ground. “Do you want to call … Them?”
“No,” I replied in a hurry, before he could send a query to Central. I pulled my own hands out of the ground and shook off the dirt. “And neither do you.”
Shir shook his head and said, not looking at me, “I don’t. But if it’s another invasion….” He looked at me. “Too late to transfer to Fraud Division?” He smiled.
“You really fancy their light implants, don’t you?” I gave him a hand. He took it and I pulled him up.
“Plus the fact that they don’t have to charge off into unidentified alien spaceships.”
I nodded. “How old is your backup?”
“Twenty-eight minutes, after I disconnected from the bubble.”
I patted his shoulder. “Well, then everything is alright.”
Shir rolled his eyes. “You really like reconstructing, don’t you?”
Instead o
f answering him, I sent a data cluster to my backup, turned around, and gestured, “After you, Assistant Regional Inspector Ben-Yair.”
Shir smiled and offered me a sloppy salute. “Affirmative, Deputy Regional Inspector Potashnik, Ma’am.” He started walking towards the darkness. “Congratulations on your promotion, by the way,” he said, stopping one step away from the sphere. “Didn’t have time to say this day before yesterday.”
“Yes you did.” I stopped beside him. “And congratulating me twice won’t change the fact that you owe me a cherry pizza for getting ahead of you.”
“It’s abominable and I won’t have it!” Shir was saying the right words, but his voice was too strained for the quip to work. He hated reconstruction as much as I did, or even more so, because no one was waiting for him in the house he was returning to.
The soldiers had moved into attack positions, following an order I couldn’t hear. One of them saluted us. Shir and I interfaced for a joint countdown and started a simultaneous data streaming that went directly into our backups as well as to the other members of our unit. We breathed in together, breathed out together, laid our hands on the sphere together. The hard shell moved under my hand and softened in response to my touch.
Data exploded into my interface. I sent out as much as I could. I remembered how it felt. Just as it did in the Superiors’ invasion. Then we hadn’t been fast enough, and our reconstructions lacked data. We have changed our procedures since. Come the following invasions, self-destruct was timed so that as much information as possible will have been sent out before we were destroyed.