by Tanith Lee
“Hey, lady!”
Good. That’s good. How it has to be.
I turned, and held out my hand, and three grinning human males lifted me into the jeep.
Even death can’t outrun this jeep.
Then I looked back.
I couldn’t see Jace. The pain was like tears now, like the tears I never did cry, the important ones I held inside me, keeping them, for they were all I had.
The boys in the jeep were laughing, touching my hair, my arms, insidiously my breasts, boldly my knees. They offered me a bottle of wine as the night burst on the front of the windscreen.
* * *
* * *
Where the plantations of trees ran out from Easterly, they spun the open-top off the road and down a track into darkness. Somewhere in the black they cut the engine and jumped out of the jeep, taking me with them. I didn’t have to do a thing, they did it all for me, transported me, put me down, began to strip me.
They were all over me. If I’d have struggled it would have been pointless, but they missed the struggle or some sort of wriggling, panicky response, and so they began to slap me about.
I’d known it. I’m the masochist you suppose me to be. Because I want you to hurt me for what I do to you, I want to expiate my sins with your blows ringing on my flesh. None of this is happening to me. I died, thirteen years back, sitting by a tomb in a hole in a rock.
One of them was sprawled on me, fumbling for the door. His body was hot and wet through his thin clothes, and the other two were rolling on the ground, tugging my arms, yelling. Beyond their heads, I could see stars, as if it mattered. And then the stars went out.
The boy screamed, dragged up and backwards and flung, like a jointless bundle. I could just see his face, the big howling mouth like the mouth of the angel. And then branches crashing, and he was gone. The other two had started up like dogs. I was alone on the ground, but I couldn’t really see what was happening. The stars kept going out then reappearing, as shapes went over them. And then one of the boys dropped down beside me, his face turned to mine, snoring wild-eyed through a beard of blood. His fists came scrabbling and were kicked aside, and I heard someone running away through the trees. My night vision had cleared, but I didn’t need it anymore. I knew the hands of death as they lifted me.
As soon as death touched me, I stopped being afraid. I relaxed totally, and let him carry me, with my clothes hanging off me in portions, and my hair white in my eyes.
There was a hire car parked up on the road. I didn’t ask him how he’d got to it in time to come after the jeep. Perhaps he stole the car, perhaps he lost the jeep in any case and found it again merely by luck. It seemed to me that it was inevitable, that he couldn’t lose me, he had never lost me.
The car started and he took the wheel. There was a crackle in the cab that must have been his anger, but I didn’t look at him.
Then he gunned the engine so the car screamed up the road back to town, and he shouted at me in one long sustained shout. I couldn’t hear half the words, and some I heard were off-planet obscenities. It was all distant from me, this shout. Then it stopped and there was silence. Then he said in the flat version of his voice, “Where are you staying?”
“You know everything, but not that?”
“Right.”
I told him the location of the hotel, and for a moment I was almost amused. But then I remembered Sabella had died thirteen years ago. Whatever I was, I couldn’t be amused.
We drove in silence again.
When we got to the hotel, he drove into the garage, told me to pull my dress together, and then ladled me out of the car and into the foyer and into the lift.
Sabella’s head was hurting.
My—Sabella’s—arms were bruised.
We went into my room and he shut the door.
He switched on the side lights. He said, “Go in the goddammed shower.”
So I went into the shower, and took off the remains of my clothes, and let the water wash the blood, their blood and mine, off me. And then I put my fingers to the chain around my neck. And I took off the pendant.
I held it in my hand, with the water splashing over my body and through my hair. The stone was paling again, a pale, pale rose.
I stood there, with the water falling on me, staring at the stone, and gradually the water beat me to my knees. I kneeled, and I could only see the stone in my hand, getting paler and paler, as if the life were rinsing out of it.
When Jace opened the cubicle door, I couldn’t raise my head from looking at the stone.
“See,” I said. “Just like the ghoul lady in the tomb.” And then the proper words came, and I said to him, “I’m afraid. I’m afraid,” and I couldn’t stop saying it, it was the only thing I wanted to say.
He switched off the shower, and came and lifted me. He held me very quietly, and I thought of Sand holding me, rain wet from a shower, but the thought couldn’t stay in my brain.
“I’m afraid, Jace.”
“I know you are.”
The stone was clamped tight in my hand, and my other hand held on to him more tightly. He took me through and put me on the bed, and rocked me. I’d supposed he was going to kill me. But of course he wouldn’t. He was like the rest, the lodestone had magnetized him like all the others, and now he was mine. Yet, Jace wasn’t like the others. Jace was like, was like—me. No, like Sabella, not like—me.
“Why did you want me to see the replicates?” I said.
“You don’t know why?”
“Unless—to make me afraid, to—”
“No, Sabella.”
“I’m not Sabella.”
“You’re as much Sabella as you need to be.”
“I’m something that killed Sabella, took her form, her skin, her memories—”
“And that’s all the memory you have. The human memory. No throwback Martian vignettes?”
I stared at him, at his real face, the only reality. He said, “You didn’t see all those Martian blocks, did you?”
“One block I didn’t see—”
“There’s something I’m going to tell you, Sabella,” he said to me. “But not just yet.”
He’d stopped looking at my eyes. He looked now at all of me, and as he looked at me, I too began to become real again, alive. When he touched me now it was like fire sponging into me.
“No,” I said. But he didn’t take any notice of what I said, only of the answer my body was giving back to his hands. “Jace—don’t.”
“Such a beautiful mouth,” he said. “Pity it’s a liar.”
“You saw me—with the boy in Ares.”
“I’ve seen plenty.”
“Jace, I can kill you.”
“No.”
“Yes I can. Like with the boy. Like Sand. I can, and I don’t—I don’t want—”
“Forget the others. When did you ever feel this before?”
Damn him, it’s true, when did I? But I must fight him, for his own sake—or is it just—
As he raised me, I seemed to be lifted out of myself quite literally, as if my body slipped away and the new body inside rushed free. Then he brought his mouth down over mine very gently and undeniably, and began to kiss me. A wonderful feeling washed through me. It wasn’t only sex, which I’d never truly felt before, it was a sensation of peace, of comfort almost. I couldn’t fight him. Neither could I fool him. Suddenly I understood I couldn’t do a single thing he couldn’t handle; I couldn’t take from him because he would leave me no space to take, no room for any response but one. Nor need I be ashamed, for I could commit no crime against him, only surrender, give in, let go.
That was what I’d confused with death. That was why I’d been afraid of him.
I was afraid now, but it was a different fear. It wasn’t fear at all.
He was beautiful. He had the
most beautiful male body I’d ever seen. He was terrible, too, that reality burning like the sun. But I couldn’t resist and the sun flamed over me and inside me and I couldn’t do a thing. I couldn’t even be wise, or try to give him pleasure. I could only take. Take in a new, another way. So this is what they felt, this was what, prolonged, had killed them. Yes—it has the taste of death in it. The great blaze carried me up with it in long gasping leaps of solar energy. And then the world exploded, the sixty-second dawn.
He was lying over me, big golden animal, looking at me with his black, black-lashed eyes half-closed, lazy, amused, tolerant, in control. My fingers ached from grasping him so hard. I dropped the stone, sometime.
I said rather stupidly, with a very human attempt at wit, “Nobody ever gave me a present like that before.”
“Relax,” he said, “it’s Christmas.”
* * *
* * *
He made love to me twice more, before he told me what was in the last museum block. Partly because he wanted me, partly to have that symbol of sexual command clear and definite between us.
In the last block was the other string of bones from the tomb. It had been a double burial, a woman and a man.
* * *
* * *
The Easterly news archive, like the bars, stayed open all night. It was fully automated, and, because Easterly hadn’t yet gained the city sophistry of Ares, there were no human attendants. Jace put me in a booth and dialed the year he wanted. The sheet came up on the screen and it read TRAGEDY IN COPPER: One man dead, twenty injured as ore-drill sparks on fire. It’s the year I was—Sabella was—two, the year and the day my father—Sabella’s father—died a hundred feet underground in the New Mine, here, at Easterly.
Dressed in our black clothes, as if in mourning, Jace and I were framed by the large white screen. I shifted, disturbed, my body soothed, my mind staring, at odds with each other. “What—”
“Just read down the column.”
I read. I read about Sabella’s father’s death, which left a widow and a two-year old daughter. I read about other injured men and company insurance. Then, at the column’s end I read, Luckier than some, Daniel Vincent, who should also have been at work on the ill-fated drill, had quit work that morning following an altercation with the drill ganger. Vincent, an off-planeter, who has lived in Easterly for five years, also found his luck holding good elsewhere. His twelve-year old son, missing for two days, came home yesterday, alive and well. The Vincents have another son, just one year old today.
Jace touched the button and the screen went blank. My mind seemed to go blank with it, so when he began to talk to me, I saw what he said in pictures on the that blank brain-screen.
Daniel Vincent brought his family to Novo Mars in the hope of striking rich with the ore boom. But the ore boom, which benefited many, failed Daniel, and in the end, he had to work for the company in Easterly, in order to make up losses. Five years was a long time to Daniel, who was at heart a drifter. A rough, tough hell-raiser of a man, his first son, Jason, bore much of the brunt of Daniel’s frustration. The head slaps, the off-hand beatings, were well outside the legal limits of assault, yet they were brutal enough. They served to convey, more than physical hurt, the unlove that Daniel had for his first son. Then, the second son arrived, and on this second son, belatedly and bizarrely, Daniel fastened a savage possessive affection. If Jason’s life was bad before, it got worse in the year which followed. The second son, named Sand for some romantic maybe drunken whim, was the blessing. Jason retained his position as the curse on the Vincent home. Jason ran with a pack of boys, caught in those bouts of hooliganism that plague all colonies once they become townships. Finally, trouble behind and the usual beating ahead, Jason, one sundown, didn’t go home. Instead he went climbing in the dry canals outside of town. In an abandoned quarry, his foot kicked through a pile of loosened rocks, eroded by exposure, by time and the moistening of a revitalized atmosphere, and a black pit gaped at him. To Jason, it was a cave to spend the night, a place of shelter. He crawled inside, and when the rock slab blocked his way, he climbed over it to the far side. It was black in the hole, but it seemed like sanctuary.
He stayed in the tunnel, the far side of the tomb slab, one whole night, and the next day he tried to go to Ares, but someone spotted him eventually and brought him home, and Daniel Vincent beat the hell out of him.
A month after the drill fire, Vincent moved off planet. He took his family to Gall Vulcan, and here he periodically deserted his woman and his boys, returning at uneven intervals, like a chronic illness, to pet Sand, and to curse and to beat Jason. He went on spasmodically beating Jason until Jason was fifteen, and then Jason broke Daniel’s nose and two of his own fingers. After that, Jace got free, becoming a drifter between the planets, enough of his father in him for that. Sand remained and let the father’s petting warp and smear him out of shape in a way Jason had never been warped or smeared by those blunt crusted hands and the belt between them. It had been the father who had rescued Sand, in the beginning, from the blunders he made in his own world of twilight morality and confusion. Later, when Daniel vanished into death, Sand turned incredibly to Jason, and perhaps more incredibly, Jason answered.
Jace had stopped talking and the mind pictures flowed away.
“Sand—” I said.
“No,” he said. “Ask me about the tunnel.”
I paused, because even in my bewilderment I saw he was asking to be spared any more of Daniel and of Sand. At last I said, “You made the tunnel.”
“I kicked it open again. It was already made.”
“And you never noticed the stone? But all this was ten years before I—”
“We haven’t finished with this, yet,” he said, and he spun the dial again.
The blank screen lights, and it’s last year’s newsout, styled quite unlike the earlier crisper bulletin, with capitals that curl, the modern penchant for harking further and further back to the modish past of Earth.
Another skeleton retrieved from the relic tomb cavity. Last night, robot diggers clearing the further debris from the quarry tunnel where last year the unique New Martian tomb slab was discovered, unearthed another mystery find of human bones. These latest ossa, believed to be those of a male around thirteen years of age, are registering as having lain in the tunnel behind the area of the tomb for twenty-odd years or more. Readers will recall the rather uncanny previous disinterment of a prepubescent female skeleton some months ago, identified by dental records as a former Easterly child, still supposed living. There is a possibility no identification, accurate or false, can be made with the latest find, since all teeth are present and perfect and conceivably no dental record exists.
The screen goes out. I can’t move. My brain, the blank screen, empty, frozen.
“The calliope man could have told you about that other parcel of bones,” Jace said, “if you’d given him a chance. He likes the buildup gradual.” I didn’t move. “Come on, Sabella,” he said. His voice was slurred, playful, unafraid. “We’re in this shit together.”
“You’re telling me that you’re—That you and I—No. You eat and drink and walk in the sun—”
“Sabella, you’re missing the sign.”
He walked me out of the archive, and across the street into a bar. And then we sat at a table, he with a long glass of golden beer, the very color his soul must be, I thought, I with a glass of strawberry juice, the sort I used to drink in Easterly long ago, pale satin pink, the color the bloodstone goes just before all color fades from it.
If you looked at us, we looked quite normal, and very splendid, very beautiful. You couldn’t see my hands shake from where you’re sitting, or my heart shake, or my mind.
I didn’t believe him, or the newsout, because he was so calm, so uninterested: So, I’m dead. So.
“If you believe this,” I said, “I just wish to God I could be like yo
u.”
“You don’t have to be like me,” he said. “I’ll be like me for both of us.” He took my hand lightly and looked at it, as if my mask of a face with the two distraught eyes in it might distract him from his purpose. “You’re scared,” he said, “because you think you’re dead. You’re not dead any more than I am. We came out of the tunnel, but we didn’t go in. Nor did we, you or I, kill those kids that we thought we were all of these years.”
“What then? Something killed them.”
“Maybe not. Maybe just bits of them got discarded. Or if not, just the shock of being copied. They walked up to a mirror and the mirror came alive. I’d say it was an impulse, a psychic trigger of some kind.”
Somehow, words like “psychic” didn’t fit in Jace’s mouth. He had no gothic approach to any of this, no spiritual anguish. That was what was keeping him on the rails, and me too.
“You mean like a fly-trap plant,” I said, “waiting for the first two flies.”
He grinned at me. “We’re alive. Even you’re alive now, Sabella. You can’t shoulder the guilt for a crime you don’t even remember committing.”
“We’re Martians, then. Why don’t we remember back when the place was all bloody lily pillars and damned urns—”
“I don’t think it works that way. I think we got made on a blueprint, like two tin cans.”
But I imagined the pink indigenous wolves on the hills, their voices, their running to me, and to my kill. They remember, if I don’t, what fashioned me, and what I am.
A Martian. An old new reborn Martian. Do I laugh, now?
“Come on,” he said, “you’ve got to live with it. Vampires resurrect, don’t they?”
I clenched my hand in his, “But you’re not—”