by Tanith Lee
I seemed to be looking at him down a funnel. He appeared small and made by an able craftsman. My nausea was a kind of feathering through my whole body. But he couldn’t see it.
“I sometimes have guests, Jason.”
“I thought you did, Miss Kwole.”
The machine gave a sort of hiccup. Something a little too big for the pipe was being lugged up, sucked in. The dust would whirl off the top of the pit first, then the lighter noncombustibles, the metal bits he spoke of. Down below, where the soil-returning mulch had begun, the machine wouldn’t take hold. Between the two lay the heavier unburnt leftovers of the furnace. The pipe bucked a fraction, coughed, renewed its grip. Like a dog worrying a bone—
“Jason, leave that. Come in the house.”
“Suddenly the lady is gregarious.”
“Last night . . . just wasn’t the right time, Jason.”
Go to him, Sabella. Go closer.
I could scent him, and he was like Sand, a clean masculine odor, unmistakable, potent. In fact, he was very like Sand, but Sand crystallized, fused into essentials and into strength. Sand’s weakness drew me to him. All their weaknesses. But this one wasn’t weak.
The pipe gurgled.
He glanced at it. I was close enough to reach out and run my finger across his skin. Chest and belly were like sculptured rock. He turned back to me and I lifted my finger away from him.
“What did Sand tell you about me?” I said.
“A couple of things.”
“Tell me.”
I couldn’t see any whites to his eyes, they were so dark and so still.
“Sand has a knack for permanent trouble. We keep in touch because that way I’m ready to bail him out. One stellagram a month, and if anything comes up, an extra stellagram. And he always tells me about the women he runs with. Women are mostly bad luck for Sand. So I know all about you, about Cassilda and Trim and how you turn Sand on and how he’s following you to this old colonial house on the Plateau. And how there’s two months’ nothing from him after that. Which is what you’re waiting to find out, Miss Kwek. Why I’m here.”
“Do you know all about me, Jason? Why don’t you come and see for yourself.”
“First, you tell me where Sand is.”
He’s in that pipe, in that damn pipe, choking it, but it’s going to spit him out, any moment, right where you’re standing—
“He had something else to do. I don’t know what, he didn’t tell me. I guess he’ll be back. You could wait around.”
“He left his car in a tunnel on the Hammerlake Road. There was a girl. You have a sister, Miss Kwade?”
The pipe gave a big choke and dislodged the obstacle.
Black and brown, the sticks of bones hailed down into the dust and cinders.
We were both looking at the bones.
“What the hell is that?” His voice had changed. For a second there was no strength, no assurance in it after all.
“Oh God, how horrible,” I said. “My dog. He got sick and he died. I had to burn his body.”
The blazing day had turned to paper. Rose aluminum sky, reddish floor of congealed parchment. The man, a paper cutout, with drawn-in shaded musculature, hair and features.
“A dog,” he said.
Then the machine vomited out something else. It ripped over the paper sky and landed, and skidded. It skidded to our feet. It was unrecognizable, blackened, jagged. But there was a dull glowing smear on it, like melted debased metal. Jace Vincent bent forward a little. Now he could make out the curious wedge-shaped formation in the middle of the smear, and the two calcified burned drops that glared up out of it.
It was Sand’s snake, the gold jewelry around his neck, what was left of it. And the two blue gem eyes of the snake, no longer blue, were still unclosed.
There wasn’t any time anymore. There was leisure to let my gaze drift up to Jace’s profile. His face had gone yellow. He couldn’t have known it all, then. Of course, it was terrible to learn this way. I felt an instinctive, momentary idiotic pity, and then I remembered that I was part of this.
I sprang and I spun and I ran. I’d run after the wolves. I was quick. The open door was only around the side of the house.
I could see the door, I was twenty feet away, when he brought me down, his weight like thunder, like a lion.
The ground hit me, the ground crammed into my mouth and thrust into my breasts, and the man lay on me like stone, and then he pulled off and I was flung around, onto my back.
He knelt over me. His face wasn’t vulnerable anymore; how could I ever have reckoned it was? It was the face of God turned toward Gomorrah.
I brought up my hands and scratched at his face and jackknifed my knees into his stomach and his groin—but somehow his flesh eluded me, it wasn’t there. He caught my hands and impaled them on the earth and he lay over my legs. I arched and strained my throat, but even my mouth couldn’t come near him now. He said into my face, without expression, “So you killed him. How and why?”
When my voice came, I was surprised, it was hoarse and naked with terror. I screamed at him.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Listen,” he said, “I know that murder has become a sickness, and the Planetary Federation puts murderers in doll houses on a hill with pretty flowers and trees to make them happy. I know that. So this is our business, Jezebel. Yours and mine. Nobody is going to rescue you and institutionalize you and keep you safe. You have to deal with me.”
I didn’t fight anymore. The sun was washing me away like mud from a lake shore. I was blind, I was quiet, and blindly, quietly I said, “Sand was sick. I tried to take him to the hospital outside Hammerlake, but there was a roadblock and they checked the car and Sand wandered away and he died. I didn’t want to get involved.”
“Don’t pass out,” he says. “I’ll only bring you around and we’ll start again.”
I was whispering, with my eyes shut tight.
“De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine . . .”
“Stop that,” he said. He slapped my face lightly, wanting to keep me with him.
“Domine, exaudi vocem meam.”
He held my hair, not really painfully, and repeated to me in English, “Out of the depths I have cried to you, O Lord: hear my voice. The only one who’s going to hear you is me, Jezebel.”
“Please take me in the house.”
I didn’t really think he would, but he did. He picked me up and carried me. He put me on the floor exactly where my mother lay when she was dead, under the crimson spillage of the window, and I wondered how he knew to do that, or if he knew.
I was listless. Was I afraid? Probably.
He didn’t need a special weapon or ritual to kill me. Anything would do. A gun, a cord, a blow.
“What you’re doing to yourself, Bel,” my mother said, standing over me with her sad and fallen face.
“I know, momma.”
I’m crying, momma.
“I know, momma.”
I’m crying.
II
WHEN I FOUND the pendant, it was a few days after my eleventh birthday, and it was the day I started to bleed. My father had been dead for nine years, and our house was a woman’s world. Women tend, as do men, to turn into clans when thrown in with too many of their own gender, and then those clans practice mysteries. From my tenth birthday on there’d have been these mystery hintings: Once you start. Once you get to be a big girl, Bel. I knew about menstruation, school took care of that. But somehow the science had never fully related to my body. A picture on a screen was just a picture on a screen. Then one day the picture happened inside me. Even when you know, it shocks. Even when you understand it’s nothing bad, somehow it’s still bad. Now you’re different, not yourself anymore. In that moment, I turned for reassurance, applause perhaps, I turned to find mys
elf in the eyes of another, because this is where generally human beings find themselves. But my mother gave me a tape book to play which told me what I had to do now, although I’d already heard it through at school. So I went out of town and along the road over the hidden mines and by the refineries and over the river into the meadows. Where a couple of the old dry canals opened under the rosy sands of Easterly’s neck of the deserts, that still make up four-fifths of Novo Mars, I found a hole in the ground.
Anice (or is it Alicia?) fell into a hare’s warren. Do bats eat cats she wondered, as she plunged into the dark. I suppose Sabella had climbed trees, dug into holes; I don’t recall. I think I’d even seen this hole before, assumed it was but another pit in the quarry that overhung the canal bed. Why did I go in? I foresee an analogy, the womb of the earth, Sabella’s womb. But I think it was just somewhere to hide, and maybe Alicia’s was also a hiding place from her womanhood. Certainly, the tunnel had no exclusive feminine aura. In fact, an old catapult, the sometime gadget of most Easterly boys, lay near the entrance, but when I knelt on it it broke, brittle with age.
When I dreamed about the tunnel on the plane to Ares, my mother was there, but when it happened she hadn’t been, I was alone. Nor were there tall thin pillars, as at Dawson, or up in the Calicoes. The tunnel roof was actually low, and I didn’t go far before I came on a slab of rock set endways across the tunnel. All this I discerned by feel, because my body had shut out most of the light that came in at the entrance. Even then, I thought the slab was a grave.
The rock of the slab was worn or planed as smooth as satin, and, as with the other ruins of New Mars, there was no sand blown in, no dust, except their own, as if they had had dust-eaters at work. I was stroking the texture of the smooth rock when my fingers found a crevice. In the crevice was a pebble, also silken smooth.
When I took it out and held it toward the light, trying to see, it was opaque and dull, the shape and size of a small plum. But at the narrow end was a ring fixed through the stone. I was only eleven but I recognized the metal of that ring, the amalgam they christened areum, stuff of meteors that die here, unreproducible.
So I bore my prize out into the sunlight, holding it in my closed fist.
By planetary law, an item discovered on the site of a previous civilization is Federation property, which means property of Earth. I knew that, but I wasn’t about to renounce what the day had given me when it had already taken away so much.
I sat in the rough meadows beyond the dam, and picked the stone up, and held it, and put it down. It was ugly, but pleasing to touch and caress.
I watched the sun dive off the slope of the world, and then I got up to hurry home. I had my first cramps, and the tape book had recommended which analgesics were the best. When I was into town, I stopped at the drug store. I had been sentenced but I knew my rights.
On the street, as I started to smell the aniseed grass of our lawn, I looked at the stone, and it wasn’t dull anymore. It was clear and bright as crystal, as diamond, its facets all inside and winking, blinking back at the stars.
I made a deduction. The heat of my hands and my palm’s pressure had burnished the stone free of sediment.
My mother hadn’t told me I was wonderful to become a woman, so I didn’t tell her about the stone.
I saved my expense money, and I bought a chain of white metal at a store on the far side of town. I never wore the stone then, except in my bedroom. Then I let it rest against my skin, between my breasts, which were growing fast now. I felt secretive when I wore the stone, and sensual and afraid and—as if I hungered, but I didn’t know for what until that night when I was fourteen.
Six months before I was fourteen, I’d started to wear the stone all the time. Other girls wore crosses or medallions or good-luck pieces. The stone was mine. Nobody saw it. When I had to go into the school shower or the changing room, I’d have an adhesive tape wrapped round the stone. The girls laughed at that. They didn’t like me. I was different, I didn’t have a father, and their mothers didn’t like mine because she was a widow with a bit of ephemeral money and maybe she’d seduce their men, so the daughters, catching the virus unconsciously, didn’t care for me either. And now that I was beautiful they liked me less and less. And strangely, the boys didn’t like me any more than the girls did. I didn’t look soft or alluring or yielding or admiring at them. I was too beautiful to be pretty.
I didn’t really know why I was on the highway near the beer shop that night. Restlessness, hunger. When the boy picked me up, I was flattered and amazed. He had very blue eyes and fair hair and he self-drove a car. He said we’d go to a cinemat, and to a roadhouse and dance. But he parked by the road under great dripping fern trees.
I knew about sex, too. We all did. We were taught about it and then told to leave it alone. The boy explained with his hands and his mouth that it wasn’t to be left alone. I was excited, and then I felt the stone, pulsing against my breast. I became so fascinated by the pulsing of the stone, I lost track of what the boy did to me, all the burning sensations passing into each other, the stone their focus. And then he laid me on my back and he tried me, and when he couldn’t ride easy, he forced me instead. It wasn’t that I attempted to prevent him, but I felt roughly torn like a garment and the scald of blood. He’d taught me to kiss, the kiss that draws the blood against the skin. His neck was against my mouth. It was natural. I took his flesh into my mouth, and my teeth met through the vein. When he screamed out, I thought it was in pain. He was holding my arm, and he bruised it black; the other hand was clutched on the seat beneath us, and his nails went in the fabric. He was crying oh God, oh God, oh God, and then he didn’t cry any more, and only the movements of his body went on, and then even they stopped.
I was satiated and drowsy and I lay there half an hour under him before I comprehended he was dead. I had continued too long, you see. I hadn’t known.
I stopped menstruating when I was fourteen, about the time my body recognized I was no longer human.
* * *
* * *
“Is there some reason why you haven’t killed me?” I said to Jace Vincent.
“There’s a good reason why I might.”
I couldn’t see him. My eyes were still dazzled from the sun, though the dark glasses helped. He had let me put them on; at least he didn’t stop me. There were no tears in my stockings, because nylon doesn’t run anymore, but there were runs in the long pale calves of my legs, and across my hands. I needed to replace what the sun had done to me out there. But it hardly mattered, if he was going to kill me. The fact was, he didn’t want to kill me, not yet. He wanted to get the truth, or he thought he did. He wanted his vengeance drawn out, to break my back and watch me squirm, because he imagined I was a whore-lady who killed his brother for cash or kicks, and in a way he was right.
Presently I said, “Can I have some water?”
He didn’t speak.
I didn’t add anything, and then he got up and got my wrist and pulled me with him into the kitchen. I fell against the siphon unit. My fingers were cotton wool and I couldn’t make the button work, so then he did it for me.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like let’s pretend.”
I drank the water, which nearly came back, but didn’t. “Maybe I’m just afraid of you.”
“It’s more than that.”
“I have photophobia. I can’t take much sun.”
“I know about photophobia. You don’t have the right symptoms.”
That’s funny. I laugh, and he shakes me and lifts and holds me against the wall.
“Now, you tell me what you did to Sand, Photopho-bella”
My eyes are getting clear. I can focus on his golden throat. It would be easy. Do it.
I can’t.
Why can’t I?
“I told you, S
and was sick. I tried—”
“To take him to a hospital. Yeah. What did he have? Something he caught off you?”
I could see the orange tree through the blind.
“Let me down. I’ll tell you everything.”
I didn’t know what I was doing, half-blind, dizzy. My instinct was, of course, still to run, but by day my escape route had to be limited. When he swung me down and let go of me, my instinct nevertheless mastered me stupidly.
I wasn’t unexpected or fast anymore, I simply pushed by him and floundered out of the kitchen, toward the stairs, and up through the daggers of stained glass sun. He let me do this, although I had told him nothing, and I was aware that he let me. When I fell and pulled myself on hands and knees, he let me do that too. I had only one direction to go. I went into the bedroom, and thrust the door shut, and buttoned the lock. All that he allowed, but only in order to prove it was futile.
As I lay on the bed, stunned and mindless and panting with the effort, I heard that soft step of his that he permitted me to hear when he wanted me to. Then he put his shoulder to my door, a dazzling brazen machine, and the lock sizzled and shorted and the door crashed inward.
“Just so you know,” he said.
I’m so tired. Suppose I told him the real truth. I killed your brother for his blood. He was beautiful. I couldn’t get enough of him, I drank him nearly dry and his heart stopped because he loved what I did to him too much.
“I don’t think we can go any further with this,” I said.
“You don’t.”
“Because I told you the truth and you won’t accept what I’ve told you.”
“I can accept that Sand was working for the old guy, Trim, and that maybe Sand dug up some news you didn’t want printed. Cyanide between bread and butter might be something you’re good at.”
“Would I tell you if I were?”
“You might,” he said. “You see, Jezebel, you’re curling at the edges. I don’t know what you’re on, but there’s some kind of stuff you have to have, and until you get it, you’re shaking. When you start to shake enough, you’ll tell me anything I want.”