by Tanith Lee
How rare and chill the juice tastes on my tongue, the tip of which is burning now. I always imagine it’s like champagne, which I’ve never tasted, but how could it be?
“I wanted to talk to you, you see.”
Yes. I see. I know.
I mentioned those centuries-old dolls that used to speak (‘Momma!’). Dolls nowadays are robotic and can do anything your child programs into them. Eat, sleep, sob, dance, urinate, tell stories. And like dolls, humans, given a certain programming, will do . . . anything.
I put down my fruit juice.
“A relation of mine just died,” I said flatly.
“I’m sorry.”
“We were very close. It’s my turn to apologize. I’m not good company right now. I want to be alone.”
That was difficult to say. Laughable, but difficult.
“O.K.,” he said. “Of course.”
He stood up. The snake about his throat had blue eyes that comprehended me, and that glittered. But his eyes were innocent.
“My name is Sand—that’s really Sand Vincent. If you need anything.”
Magic formula, the exchange of names, but I only smiled at him, as stiffly and coldly as I could, and he went away.
It was so easy to make them come to me, like filings flying to a magnet. I was a lodestone. The boys on the neon-striped black candy streets of Hammerlake when I was sixteen, seventeen, seven or eight years ago. Hey, sister! Hey, baby!
There are still wolves in those damned hills!
The sound of guns, and the lights over the ridges, and the scent of burnt electric air.
I watched the cabin clock. Less than an hour to Ares. I wouldn’t fall asleep again.
* * *
* * *
The Brade air-bug landed at the Cliffton Terminus Strip. Aresport has twenty-seven landing strips. Ares is a big city, though not as big as Dawson and Flamingo in the north.
Cliffton was a ghost terminus at this hour, almost deserted. However, every port had its duty-check, for drugs, for guns, for stolen goods. Machines clear the luggage, and every now and then a bag was opened. Mine got opened. The electronic eye scanned inside and hit the metal cap of the container, and an alarm went off. Aresport is too sophisticated to let a mechanism handle such matters. Two human securiguards walked over and asked me to remove the container. Apart from the cap, it’s transparent, so they looked at the red juice inside.
“Christ, lady, what’s that, blood?”
Sand, having got through the check right in front of me, returned.
“Is anything wrong?”
“This lady is carrying a bottle of blood in her bag.”
The guards at the port were bored and power-conscious. But here was a malign brittle good humor I could match.
“Pomegranate and tomato juice,” I said. “Half a liter, concentrated, with added vitamins. My physician makes it up for me. Like to try some?”
The guards grinned. Sabella the proud beauty was turning them on, and it had been, was going to be, a long slow night on Cliffton strip.
I uncapped the jar, and they fetched plastic cups and distilled water and we mixed some and drank together. I hope they enjoyed it.
“It smells of flowers. Or hash,” said Sand, perplexed.
“You want to come round the back, son,” said one of the guards. “We’ve got confiscated Vulcan-grown hash up to the roof, no duty paid.”
“And good old frecking alcohol,” added the other.
“Are you going to be O.K.?” Sand asked me as we went out of the terminus building. The wide port highway strode up toward Ares. You never see the stars above a city. The revitalized atmosphere is thick, but oh the colors of their lights chalked on the under-swag of the clouds, greengage and peppermint and opal and strawberry ribs of color, as if the cities were on fire, and this their smoke.
“Yes, I’ll be all right.”
“Only, things seem to be happening to you, don’t they?”
“Yes, they do. But it will be fine now.”
“I’m not trying,” said Sand, outlined against the first hour of black cloud-blazing morning city, “to be a pain in the ear. But after this—the funeral—”
“Then, I’m going home.”
Say: To my husband and my twelve babies. Say it. Nothing comes.
Sand turned to the city.
“Pillar of fire by night,” he said. He must have had Revivalist biblical training.
My heart was racing. The sight of the city was hurting me with pleasure. I have none of civilization’s taint. A landscape of steel towers against hills of concrete, sings to me as does a landscape of rock pinnacles and gullies. All landscapes are one, dissimilar, yet still landscape. All one to me.
I swallowed.
“I must go now,” I said. I can’t even be nice to him. Dare not. “Excuse me.”
I brushed by him, and a cab crawled to the walkway.
I got in and gave it directions to drive me to any middle-price hotel. (Not cheap enough to attract random fellowship, not flashy enough to attract speculation.)
Sand stood by the window.
“You won’t even tell me your name?”
“I’d rather not.”
“That pendant,” he said.
The cab drove away.
My tongue’s tip was a scald of flame.
* * *
* * *
Sunrise was at six o’clock, sunset eighteen-thirty; Aunt Cassi’s funeral was set for sixteen in the afternoon. That was fortunate. The sun would already be westering behind the tall gray pines and cumulous trees and the white marble groves of the Koberman cemetery that uncle-in-law Koberman had sent me a picture of.
Why do you wear so much black, Sabella, baby?
It keeps the sun out, my parasol black. The women in the east of Earth knew that long ago. They knew other things. Anyway, what else do you wear for a Christian Revivalist burial? Black frock, black stockings, black shoes that seem to grow into the legs, as if I were born with three-inch heels. Big black hat. I am a raven. No, the ravens in the Ares Zoo are white.
I slipped the pendant inside my dress. It must have wormed out when I fell asleep on the plane and I didn’t properly notice. Only Sand noticed, and perhaps the securiguards.
The hotel had been sleazier than it should have been.
On the sidewalk, between the great golden towers and the glass shards of the city, the cab whooshed through the dust. But once I was inside, the cab disowned the city, throwing it over its shoulder, racing into suburbs of grass plantings and white colonial houses.
The shadows were long and red when I reached the cemetery. There were no drivers in these autocabs to argue. I put the necessary credits in the meter and left it parked among the pines.
Westering glow, yet the sun fell on my face, my hands, like embers. I walked quickly up the path and into the chapel. The Kobermans had a Gothic twist. The Christ was white and warped and screwed by pins to his length of wood and apparently screaming. To be mercilessly nailed forever in a window; who could blame him?
There were two or three people already there, dark figures kneeling between the white bench-pews in the white light of the window. The huge jeweled cross by the lectern took your breath away. If Cassi had paid for that, Cassi had been in clover. Now she was in a box. My eyes touched the coffin in its snow drape and the nausea began as it had to. The last coffin I saw had been my mother’s.
“Miss Quey, I’m so glad you were able to come. When we received no stellagram, I’m afraid I’d almost given up on you—”
The big tusker in the black formal two-piece suit spoke to me in a hushed monotone. . . . This was how you spoke in front of the dead, because they mustn’t overhear the huge secret of what had happened to them. He thought I’d come to listen to the will read, shed a crocodile tear (I’ve never seen a crocodi
le), and collect, like all of them, and so he was instantly at home with me. But he introduced himself as the sender of the stella, uncle-in-law.
“You’ll be coming back to the house. For the, er, to settle matters.”
“Yes.”
He was extra pleased. He’d got a word out of me.
“And stay over, naturally. Hammerhead is quite a way.”
“That’s all right. I have a cab waiting to take me back to town.”
“But Miss Quey—Sabella. Come on, now. You must be worn out already.”
No, I’m not worn out. The sun left a line of invisible blisters all over my skin, and through the blisters my nerves were thrusting like eager wires.
The chapel had filled up, and the priest appeared in his black cassock, the lilies of death embroidered on his shawl.
Uncle-in-law wedged me into a pew. Somewhere music started and my heart stopped.
Oh Christ, let me get through this. I shouldn’t be here. I’m on fire.
“Deus,” said the priest, authoritatively, as if he had a through line to God, “cui proprium est misereri semper et parcere—”
The Revivalists revived the Latin with the rest of the Revival. It’s beautiful. It plays me like a harp. Everything’s so bright and clear and full of pain and sorrow. Six years since I heard such words.
“Dicit illi Jesus: Resurget frater tuus.”
I was leaning on the pew, and weeping and I didn’t really know her, and it was wrong. And it makes it worse if anyone thinks it’s right I should be weeping.
If it goes on much longer I shall faint. They’ll carry me out and the sun will smite me by day between the pine needles. It will kill me and they won’t know why. They’ll say I died of grief for Cassi and now I’m going to laugh.
I didn’t laugh. Something made me turn, maybe the acute instincts of the hills. And there, at the back of the chapel, his dark head bowed over his gentle mourning and the snake coiled round his throat, was Sand Vincent.
* * *
* * *
Big hog uncle took me by the arm, and guided me, guided all of us away, when it was over. At a C.R. mass you often don’t see the box go in the ground. I don’t know why not. Dissociation from the mortal to the spiritual things, perhaps. The way to the house lay across some open land, acres of the Koberman Ares holdings. It was a distance of half a mile, but most of them got into their cars to do it. Cars like black-sharks nosed up the road. Uncle and I walked side by side—between the tall hedges of stonework, over the lawns, the ugly house like a big pillared air-raid shelter ahead of us on the rise. Sand Vincent, head still bowed, walked about twenty yards behind us.
What should I say? I didn’t at that time believe in coincidence.
“We’ve kept it as informal as possible. She wanted it like that. Cassilda, I mean.”
Who could I think he meant? Who else had died?
“I know you saw very little of your aunt since childhood, but toward the end, you were in her thoughts.”
I didn’t even know what she’d died of.
“One thing,” I said.
“Yes, Sabella. May I call you Sabella?”
“The man behind us.”
Hog Uncle Koberman shot a glance behind us.
“Yes?”
“Is he a relation?”
“I don’t know who the hell he is, Sabella. He’s not with our party.”
“He was in the church.”
“The hell he was. Some funeral freak. Stay here, Sabella, I’ll deal with it.”
I stood where I was while knightly Uncle Hog went back and stopped Sand on the lawn. They exchanged words I couldn’t hear, didn’t try to hear. Uncle’s wide back blocked out my view of Sand. I knew he’d followed me, all the way from the port. I didn’t know how. I knew why.
Sand didn’t try to look at me and now the exchange of words was over. Sand stood on the lawn, his thumbs in his belt, cat’s paw velvet on the velvet grass. The Hog Uncle came to me with the blood dinning in his face. “That’s that.”
He didn’t tell me what had been said. I didn’t ask. Sand got smaller and smaller as we went up the slope.
Flowers wilt in too much sun. They were wilting in the hall of the air-raid shelter, petals like paper.
“You need something to eat,” Hog Koberman said to me.
They were all at the buffet, like the sin-eaters of old, gobbling up the crimes of the deceased along with the pâté, cakes and exotic fruit segments in silver dishes.
But I convinced him I’d eaten before I left my hotel, and I sat and watched the others. When the eaters glanced at me, they felt antagonism. Uninvolved in their activity, I was outside the pale, I had an advantage. Besides, I had refused to consume the sins of the dead. Hog Koberman introduced me to everyone, but their names slipped off the surface of my mind, and their breath smelled of sugars, proteins and digestion. They were only extras on the set.
After a while, we went into Cassi’s library. One wall was book tapes, and the rest actual books, bound in leather. Long windows sliced between the stacks, and there was a globe of Novo Mars in polished rose quartz, pierced and mounted to demonstrate the axial tilt, and pierced by the sun rays, too. Even the dust was gilded by the last sun against the windows. In the middle of the oak table where we were seated was a jeroboam of wine, slightly cobwebbed from the cellar. Cassi had had human servants, who now served us with this ancient valuable drink. Cassi had really schemed things, for this was the one way you reached back from the grave, with instructions to be obeyed, rituals to be performed. I pretended to sip from my goblet.
The Hog read the will slowly and carefully. Everybody waited breathless, as if at a lottery. The prizes were big ones, and everybody got a prize.
I was last of all. Now they could observe me in turn. The sunlight lay over me in a broad shining spotlight.
“Of course, Cassilda wanted me to intimate to you, Sabella, something of the form of this bequest,” said Uncle, displaying to the others, in parentheses, the reason for my mercenary attendance at the funeral. “But what it amounts to, and here I read, ‘To my only niece, Sabella Quey, the entire stock investments of the Kobercor Trust, which come to her, tax paid, as the sum of eighty thousand credits.’ ”
The extras smiled archly. My prize was good, but not so good as the others.
The servants came around to refurbish the drinks and the Hog closed his portfolio. He drew me aside, against a blazing window.
“It may not seem a great deal, Bella, but with wise reinvestment, it could amount to a tidy sum in a year or so. How about you sign the investment procedure over to me? I’d be happy to assist any way I can.”
The sun was pouring through me. I felt, maybe I looked, translucent. My skin often has that quality, but were my bones showing now? Uncle was blurred as if I stared at him through smoke. I thanked him. I’d had to keep thanking him. People like you to thank them. They do you kindnesses so you’ll have to say thank you, thank you.
“And there’s one other small item,” said Uncle playfully.
I stood in the sun’s X ray, waiting.
“Cassilda entrusted this to me, this extra small thing, to be dealt with privately. It’s a little casket, and I think, well, I know, Bella, it has a very fine piece of jewelry in it, which your aunt meant you to have. Her mind was on you a lot, you know, Bel, the last days. But she wanted it secret. You know how families are, Bel, squabbling, getting jealous. Not about the value of the token, but its sentimental worth. Now, what I want you to do. Our John Trim over there is going to go out, and I want you to slip out after him. He’ll take you upstairs to Cassilda’s bedroom and direct you to the casket. O.K.?”
I nodded. The Hog turned away and John, one of Cassi’s servants, walked between the library doors.
As I stepped out from the sun, the room sizzled and went dark, but I moved through t
he darkness, after John, across the flower-garden hall. John was much older than Cassi. Had John been mentioned in the will?
The stair was mobile with white carpet over the steel. John operated the button and we rode up in silence to the third floor.
His hands on the rail, and on the bedroom’s enameled handles were like parched old brown leaves. A life of sun had done that to him. Were my hands shriveling too?
“In here please, Miss Quey.”
The bedroom was white silk, with bronze blinds down over the windows, hot, with that smell of too-much hygiene that supplants sickness. On the vanity table, all was laid out as if in readiness for her return, platinum-backed brushes, tetra-shell boxes; she should have been buried in here, like a pharaoh’s wife, among her treasures, side by side with her long-dead spouse in the big white bed.
The casket was on a separate table. It was made of ivory, with gold on the clasps, and a gold key hanging by a ribbon.
“Excuse me, Miss Quey.”
Servant John shut me in with his brown leaves, closing the doors softly.
I was supposed to open the casket, so I took the key and put in the lock, and as the lock clicked I thought, Maybe it will explode.
But the box didn’t explode. Inside it, lying on satin, was a tiny replica of the gold jeweled crucifix I’d seen in the chapel, a lectern cross from Lilliput. It was worth about twice what she’d left me in credits.
The bedroom in the bronze blind-light was full of menace. Cassi had lain in here, propped up and guttering, and she’d plotted, and here was the result. And I didn’t grasp what it was. Like death itself, the threat was invisible.
Then I saw the envelope tucked under the cross, and when I drew out the envelope my fingers were oddly desensitized, but I wondered if poison would spurt into my face when I tore the paper across.
Poison spurted. Poison pen.
I know what you are, Sabella. I didn’t know until I came to God, but when I found God, He told me. His angels told me. I know what you’ve done. I know you killed my sister. I hope the cross cripples you, as it should. If it doesn’t, I’ve made another arrangement. Don’t try to guess what it is. You’re just one of the wolves, Sabella, an animal, and animals can’t guess things. Not till it’s too late. But you don’t have so long, Sabella. I hope it’s soon, and then you’ll rot, and your soul, if you have one, will writhe and shriek in Eternal Fires, Sabella, and God will let me hear you as I rest on His bosom.