“You thought you knew,” the alien said, “what an Antalou feels.”
The boy kept his eyes on the floor. “Yes.”
The alien did not speak for a moment, but when he did, it was to say:
“You were not wrong . . . Tuckey-Yatsen.”
The boy looked up, not understanding.
“Your sister will live,” the Antalou said.
The boy blinked, but did not believe it.
“What I say is true,” the alien said.
The alien watched as the boy’s body began to straighten, as energy, no longer suppressed in “despair,” moved through it.
“It was done,” the alien explained, “without the killing . . . which neither you nor I . . . could afford.”
“They will let her live?”
“Yes.”
“You are sure?”
“I do not lie . . . about the work I do.”
The boy was staring at the alien.
“I will give you the money,” he said.
“No,” the alien said. “That will not . . . be necessary.”
The boy stared for another moment, and then, strangely, began to move.
The alien watched, curious. The boy was making himself step toward him, though why he would do this the alien did not know. It was a human custom perhaps, a “sentimentality,” and the boy, though afraid, thought he must offer it.
When the boy reached the alien, he put out an unsteady hand, touched the Antalou’s shoulder lightly—once, twice—and then, remarkably, drew his hand down the alien’s damaged arm.
The alien was astonished. It was an Antalouan gesture, this touch.
This is no ordinary boy, the alien thought. It was not simply the boy’s intelligence—however one might measure it—or his understanding of the Antalou. It was something else—something the alien recognized.
Something any killer needs. . . .
The Antalouan gesture the boy had used meant “obligation to blood,” though it lacked the slow unsheathing of the demoor. The boy had chosen well.
“Thank you,” the boy was saying, and the alien knew he had rehearsed both the touch and the words. It had filled the boy with great fear, the thought of it, but he had rehearsed until fear no longer ruled him.
As the boy stepped back, shaking now and unable to stop it, he said, “Do you have a family-cluster still?”
“I do not,” the alien answered, not surprised by the question. The boy no longer surprised him. “It was a decision . . . made without regrets. Many Antalou have made it. My work . . . prevents it. You understand. . . .”
The boy nodded, a gesture which meant that he did.
And then the boy said it:
“What is it like to kill?”
It was, the alien knew, the question the boy had most wanted to ask. There was excitement in the voice, but still no fear.
When the alien answered, it was to say simply:
“It is both . . . more and less . . . than what one . . . imagines it will be.”
The boy named Kim Tuckey-Yatsen stood in the doorway of the small room where he slept and schooled, and listened as the man spoke to his mother and father. The man never looked at his mother’s swollen belly. He said simply, “You have been granted an exception, Family Tuckey-Yatsen. You have permission to proceed with the delivery of the unborn female. You will be receiving confirmation of a Four-Member Family Waiver within three workweeks. All questions should be referred to BuPopCon, Seventh District, at the netnumber on this card.”
When the man was gone, his mother cried in happiness and his father held her. When the boy stepped up to them, they embraced him, too. There were three of them now, hugging, and soon there would be four. That was what mattered. His parents were good people. They had taken a chance for him, and he loved them. That mattered, too, he knew.
That night he dreamed of her again. Her name would be Kiara. In the dream she looked a little like Siddo’s sister two floors down, but also like his mother. Daughters should look like their mothers, shouldn’t they? In his dream the four of them were hugging and there were more rooms, and the rooms were bigger.
When the boy was seventeen and his sister five, sharing a single room as well as siblings can, the trunk arrived from Romah, one of the war-scarred worlds of the Pleiades. Pressurized and dented, the small alloy container bore the customs stamps of four spacelocks, had been opened at least seven times in its passage, and smelled. It had been disinfected, the USPUS carrier who delivered it explained. It had been kept in quarantine for a year and had nearly not gotten through, given the circumstances.
The boy did not know what the carrier meant.
The trunk held many things, the woman explained. The small polished skull of a carnivore not from Earth. A piece of space metal fused like the blossom of a flower. Two rings of polished stone which tingled to the touch. An ancient device which the boy would later discover was a third-generation airless communicator used by the Gar-Betties. A coil made of animal hair and pitch, which he would learn was a rare musical instrument from Hoggun VI. And many smaller things, among them the postcard of the Pacific Fountain the boy had given the alien.
Only later did the family receive official word of the 300,000 inters deposited in the boy’s name in the neutral banking station of HiVerks; of the cache of specialized weapons few would understand that had been placed in perpetual care on Titan, also in his name; and of the offworld travel voucher purchased for the boy to use when he was old enough to use it.
Though it read like no will ever written on Earth, it was indeed a will, one that the Antalou called a “bequeathing cantation.” That it had been recorded in a spacelock lobby shortly before the alien’s violent death on a world called Glory did not diminish its legal authority.
Although the boy tried to explain it to them, his parents did not understand; and before long it did not matter. The money bought them five rooms in the northeast sector of the city, a better job for his mother, better care for his father’s autoimmunities, more technical education for the boy, and all the food and clothes they needed; and for the time being (though only that) these things mattered more to him than Saturn’s great moon and the marvelous weapons waiting patiently for him there.
Kin
Story Notes
I’d always been attracted, even as a young writer, to the question of what it would REALLY be like to be a human being in the universe of the Golden Age of Science Fiction—not perhaps to the extreme of Superman needing to use the restroom, but certainly of Batman’s angst in his aloneness—and it was through Harry Harrison’s Deathworld trilogy that I first got a glimpse. Heroes and their stories are one thing. We’ve got those hero-patterns wonderfully wired into us, powerfully—as Jung and Campbell (Joseph, not John) and Lord Raglan have all pointed out with awe—determining what we want and need in the stories we read; but we also live in an Age of Reason world of “realism” and of the behavioral sciences, and we want to know what Hercules is feeling when he’s cleaning those filthy stables, and after he embarrasses himself by laughing in the house of death. Harry’s trilogy had its heroes, sure, but its heroes also had their human flaws; and common sense and character-as-destiny ran through them and to such a degree that I was surprised that John Campbell had seen fit to publish them in Astounding. But John Campbell was always surprising me. He was a technocrat and rationalist, and yet accepted (for story purposes anyway) something as scientifically soft and woo-woo-ey (at least from a traditional Western scientific experimental-replicability model) as ESP. And when I wrote him a letter about a sleep-deprivation experiment I’d co-directed in high school with two friends (Joe Marciano and the still-interviewed “11 Nights without Sleep!” Randy Gardner), asking if he’d be interested in seeing an article about it, Campbell responded with a long letter raising questions infinitely more interesting and far-reaching than our internationally trumpeted experiment, though that experiment did indeed overturn, with the help of the famous Dr. William Dement of Stanfo
rd, a major theory in sleep deprivation at the time. “Kin” was, then, an attempt to evoke the Golden Age in fable-form but to do it as Harry Harrison had done in his trilogy: show that survival is simply that—human beings reaching into themselves to survive even if what they find that allows them to do so isn’t necessarily the most noble traits of human nature. In other words, the boy in this story, though he loved his family, will indeed become an assassin—because it is in him to become one. This story originally appeared in the February 2006 Asimov’s with a wonderful cover by Dominic Harman, and was reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-fourth Annual Collection.
World of the Wars
“Not even lichen,” Mr. Turner said to his wife, and Timmothy listened carefully. “All they found was a kind of rust—no lichen.”
Timmothy knew they were talking about Mars and the astronauts, but he didn’t understand it.
“What about the Martians?” he asked, his arms crossed on the dinner table in boyish imitation of his father’s. His blond head returned his parents’ stares.
“No Martians, Tim,” his father mumbled. “And no one ever thought there’d be.”
“But Jimmy says there are Martians.”
Neither his mother nor father answered.
“Jimmy has four books about Martians.”
His father smiled the kind of smile that always made Timmothy red-faced.
“Those books are made-up stories,” his mother said.
“Jimmy says there are Martians. They’re also called ‘aliens.’ ”
“No aliens in the solar system,” his father said, then paused, and laughed. “Just the black, brown, and yellow aliens moving in next door.”
His mother gave back a short laugh, and started to get up, with the dishes in hand.
“I want to see Mars,” Timmothy said quickly. “Can I see it at night?”
His mother sat back down. “No. We could at one time, about five years ago. It looked like an ordinary star—but it was reddish. You can’t see any stars these days, Timmothy, because of the smog.”
“Jimmy says you can see Mars at night.”
“Has he ever seen it?” His father asked the question, and his white face formed a frown.
“No, but it says in his books that you can see it in the sky.”
“Smog says you can’t,” his father mumbled, waiting for his wife to clear the table.
They were right. You couldn’t see any stars at all. Just a hazy yellowish light reflected back down from the smogbanks over Puente. The famous Los Angeles smog.
Timmothy stood in the bare backyard of the stucco house and looked up at the night, first toward the southern tract-housing hills, then west toward Los Angeles, then north toward the factory where his father worked.
We could see stars once, about five years ago, he remembered. Five years ago he had been three years old, and he hadn’t been interested in Mars then. He had never looked up at the night then.
Returning to the house, through the screen door, and into the living room, he found his father swearing.
“Who was it?” his mother was saying, standing over the stuffed chair occupied by his father.
“Cartwright, calling from the plant. Someone started a fire over there at about eight o’clock. It was arson, no doubt about it.”
“Have there been any demonstrations at the plant recently, Sam?”
“Around a shoe factory? No. But it’s the same kind of people. They wrote things on the walls with red paint, and then started the fire.”
“What did they say, those things?” asked the boy, remaining by the back door.
His father looked toward him—but not at him.
“What did the writing say?” his mother echoed.
“Two things. ‘Soon your cities will fall.’ And ‘Sabotage is love.’ ”
“Can you see the fire from here?” Timmothy asked quietly.
His father didn’t answer, and his mother said quickly, “I’m sure it’s been put out by now, Timmothy.”
Outside, Timmothy looked toward the factory again. No, there wasn’t any fire to be seen. Not even any smoke. No sirens of fire engines either.
He started to look away, and a tiny something flashed before his eye—out in the night sky.
He looked back, harder, and found it again. High above the factory, barely visible in the night-yellowed smog, was a red star blinking very red.
Jonathan wanted to be a member of the club. He had said so a dozen times, before Timmothy finally let him in.
“How many guys are in the club, do you think?” Timmothy asked, beginning Jonathan’s initiation.
“There’s you, and Jimmy, and Charlie.”
“And Billy.”
“And Billy . . .” Jonathan was shaking a little, as Timmothy could see under the streetlamp’s light. Jonathan stopped shaking only when they started walking toward Jimmy’s house.
“There has to be another guy around when I make you a member, Jonathan.”
Jonathan nodded and didn’t stop nodding until Jimmy left his house and joined them for the walk back to Timmothy’s yard.
“If there aren’t two guys with you,” Timmothy added, “you won’t be able to see it. It’s a secret, and no one knows about it.”
On the dying summer grass in the backyard, Timmothy stood by the new member and pointed up at the sky.
“There! Can you see it now? Over my dad’s factory.”
Jonathan couldn’t see it. Timmothy pointed again. “It’s not very bright, but you should be able to see it.”
Jonathan shook his head slowly.
He was younger, and in a moment was almost crying. Then he saw it.
To let the other two boys know that he really did see it, Jonathan said, “There it is! It kind of blinks and is very, very red.”
“Okay, now you’re a member,” Timmothy said, then added, “You can’t see them from here, but there are Martians on it—weird-looking aliens.”
Jimmy nodded now. He was the oldest, and he had the books, and he wanted to remind the other two of those facts. He said, “Yes, I’ve read a lot about those Martians.”
Timmothy knew he had chosen a bad night to show his father Mars. He had been out staring at the red star, and he realized now that he had missed most of the discussion his parents were having at the table, long after dinner was over.
“. . . underground newspapers said so,” his father was saying when Timmothy entered the dining room.
“Did you read them yourself, Sam?” his mother asked, sighing. She sighed again.
“I didn’t have to. The supervisor keeps track of them, and gets the word to the rest of us. Those kind of newspapers have been talking about today as the day—”
“Dad?” Timmothy asked it as quietly as he could.
“Well,” his mother ignored him, “maybe you should call the police and see what they think, Sam.”
“Don’t have to! Carlyle says the police are already ready for it. They think it’ll be tonight, too.”
“Dad?”
“What!” His father turned as if the boy had bitten him.
“I can see Mars, Dad.”
“Oh for God’s sake!” Turning back to Timmothy’s mother, his father said, “I’ll keep in phone contact with the plant tonight. Remember, we did get hit with arson last month. If anything happens there tonight, we’ll know for sure they weren’t kidding.”
“I really can see Mars.”
His father stared at the table, his lips in a rubberlike frown.
“Go ahead, Sam,” his mother said, sighing again. “Find out what it is he’s seeing.”
Like a big dog his father struggled up from the chair—sighing like his mother, but longer and deeper—and followed the boy toward the back door.
As they opened the screen and started out, his father stopped and looked down at him.
“I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but keep it in mind. If there’s ever any trouble—guns o
r fires started around here—go hide in a closet, please.”
Timmothy was already pointing happily up at the sky, above the factory.
His father squinted. “Where? What . . .”
The boy pointed harder, wanting and trying to make his finger so thin and sharp that his father couldn’t possibly miss the red star, the only star in the sky.
His father kept squinting, then started and grunted. “Oh for God’s sake!” He began, “That’s just the light on the tower for—”
He was interrupted by the lights going out in the house. The streetlights around in front of the house went out. The light reflected off the smog cloud over Puente went out. In the sudden darkness his father cried, “Oh God.”
Timmothy couldn’t see him, but could hear his father’s heavy footsteps pounding back to the house, now stumbling around the screen door.
“Tim! Get the hell in the house!”
His father’s voice was different now. It had the pitch of a woman’s voice. Timmothy started trembling.
As he ran to the house, he looked back once at the red star, and stopped.
Mars had gone out.
And then the factory blew up, and for a long minute there was too much light everywhere.
He was hiding in the living-room closet, in darkness that embraced the whole house. He could hear his parents running from room to room, stumbling.
“The blacks! Of course it’s them!” his father was shouting. “And they’ll have guns!”
“Please don’t shout, please don’t.” His mother was crying.
So the “blacks”—those “aliens” his father had always talked about, afraid that they would live nearby—were powerful enough to destroy the red star, the planet. It was unbelievable, the boy knew, but it was true. He was afraid of wetting his pants, it was so true.
Something crashed at the front door. In a minute he realized it was the sound of a bullet hitting wood. His mother screamed then, as if she had just realized it, too.
His father was bellowing now. His mother kept crying. Neither one said a single word Timmothy could understand.
The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories Page 7