I cannot breathe. I hold my sleeve to my nose and try, but I cannot.
I take the container I have brought with me and unscrew the lid. Do you know—do you know what I have brought with me?
It knows—because it sees what I see now—and before the great tail can reach me, to keep me from doing what I must do, I pour the ashes from the container into my hand, raise my hand, and blow them.
The ashes move as slow as a dream toward the creature—in the darkness here. The ashes mix with the dust.
I bring you your daughter and your wife. I would bring us all to you as dust if I could—
The jaws scream again, in harmony. The tail moves through the air—
Our mother and sister lay in the antiseptic plastic bubbles of their hospital room while the computers of the capitol’s Medical Center—linked by subspace lightcom to the great computers orbiting Tar and Rasi—ran the Changing machines, splicing genes with lasers, accelerating the growth of cells. It took four days, and when the asymptotic malignancies began to appear—when the computers began to scream in alarm—it was too late. The cells were cycling on. Growth without direction.
I did not see them, but I heard. Organs invading other organs, destroying all boundaries of function, Mapless bodies that could not be reclaimed because they were no longer human, no longer Mappable. Flesh as dark as night. Bone curling within the flesh like pale vines. Noses where there should be none. Tongues where eyes should be. Stomachs that had swallowed hearts. Intestines snaking from every orifice.
He had wanted to believe that we Hamusek were a perfect marriage of the genetic codons of Caucasian India and Asiatic North America. He had so loved the wilderness legends he had learned as a child and the euphony of our Dravidian names, that this is what he wanted.
For a year he had shown our mother and sister the faces and bodies they might have, calling them up on the screen of his university computer. He had asked them again and again: “What would you like? That proud nose, Ladah? Those high cheekbones to go with your blue-black hair? That smooth forehead, those rounded cheeks, Premila? The epicanthic eyes of one people and the narrow waist, wide hips of the other? Which?” He asked them so often that in the end he convinced them that it was indeed what they wanted. To be Changed. To be the first. Because they were our women. “Because,” as he said, “it is women that men love.”
Our mother would say: “What would you like us to be?”
And our sister would say only: “I want to look like Mother, Father.”
In the end he had chosen for them, without asking what we—his sons—might want.
In the investigation—which found no criminal negligence, because of course there had been none—our true history as a people appeared. In a cabinet of wood-pulp records so old that they had been forgotten, that they had been lost long before Hamusek’s capitol ever knew its first computer, we found what we were. In the extreme northeast corner of the nation of India, on the continent of Asia, on Earth, there had been a region called Arunchal Pradesh—in the language of its people, “the land of the rising sun.” A world of endless forests, rivers, and mountains, it had been the home of a people of Asiatic stock who believed in the power of animal souls, in nature both Dark and Light. When a neighboring nation took this land, making it Pakistani, the people of Arunchal Pradesh could not abide by it. Their land had been their “India,” and now it was not. After a decade, selling the resources of their wilderness—its oil, coal, and water—to clandestine brokers who cared nothing for national boundaries, the people of Arunchal Pradesh had their money, their corporation, and could leave to find their “new India.”
They had been the first in Hamusek; the sons and daughters of Asiatic North America, hearing of a wilderness world like Hamusek, had come too—with their legends. Later, the disaffected of a Terran India in constant turmoil had come as well, bringing their legends as well. Legend had been added to legend. At first the descendants of Arunchal Pradesh had not intermarried. As time passed, they had.
The genetic paradigm of Hamusek had not been a perfect marriage. It had been a Sino-Tibetan Map layered over time with the genes of two continents. It had been one face . . . slowly becoming two.
Like him. A single creature. Each face regarding the other.
A people’s legends, I understand now, are the stories they tell themselves in the darkness to make sense of a universe they do not understand. These stories may be a Light—
But they are never the true history of their flesh and bone.
He buried them both on the planet we call The Hand, because that way, he knew, there would at least be bones—clear white relics of death, of his shame, his self-hatred. He would be able to think of them lying there in the ground for years, and by thinking, feed the darkness.
I knew this. I knew this when I went there and dug the bones up.
When I found the grave outside Clay and dug them up, I was crying, but when I burned them to ash in a kiln in the nearest village, I was not—for I knew it needed to be done.
The tail strikes the floor near me. Bones leap, striking my face, my chest. I step aside. I blow into my palm once more. The room shakes. I blow and hear a cry.
The sound becomes something else: Rhythmic, a breathing that cannot find air, a muscle contracting in pain, a human heart on fire.
The tail rises again, moves, hits me—and I die.
When I wake, I am not dead, but my left arm is broken, and my left leg, too, perhaps. For a moment I do not know where I am. It is the ship, and yet it is not. I hear the massive breathing, and yet the room is quiet. I hear fluid trickle down walls, yet the tail does not move. A light is growing somewhere in the room and this makes no sense. I think: Fire? I think: Delirium?
The room fades. The light grows brighter, and I know this is what the creature wants—that we remember it together:
He is sitting on the porch at home, overlooking the pond. He is crying and I have never seen him this way. But I have been crying, too. It is noon. The sun is bright. My mother and my sister have died and it is the next day. I didn’t mean to, he is saying. I didn’t know, Rau. I thought—
I am sixteen, but I know what I know now. I want to say to him: You were impatient, Father. You wanted to Change them, to make them the very first, to give them “gifts” everyone could see—as if they were Maps, Father, not human beings, and you the Great Mapmaker. You were so sure. You were so certain that “North American Indian” was the genetic source, because you wanted it to be. You wanted those legends, and because you did, you didn’t wait . . . You wanted the universe to be what you wanted it to be, Father.
Impatience, I want to tell him, has never been a Hamusek trait. Nor was it one of their traits either, Father.
But I do not tell him these things. He is my father. I am his son.
I must leave, he says suddenly.
I do not understand, I say. I am frightened.
I cannot live here anymore. As he says it, I know what he expects: that because I am the eldest, I will tell the others. I must go, Rau. I must bury your mother and sister where they should be buried, and then . . . and then I—
Who will we stay with, Father? I can barely say it. My voice shakes, too.
Your aunt and your cousins. His voice is distant, like a death. You will all be fine, Rau.
I want to go with you, I say. Please. . . .
No, he says quietly, and then, I think, he whispers: I am going where no one else can go, Rau . . .
I think I hear him say: Stay right here, Rau . . . in the light.
I do. I sit on the porch—in the midday sun—because he has told me to. I sit there long after he has left.
I will go with you, Father, I tell him in the darkness, in this room. I will go with you now, if you want me to.
He says nothing, and then he says:
Why?
To show you that you are wrong.
The man on the porch looks up, tears covering his face like blood, fluids seeping from walls.
He is trying to understand.
You know what I mean, Father, I tell him. It is time for this to end. You’ve been waiting. You’ve known it would come to this. I am your son.
The man is shaking. The ship is shaking. I must kneel because I cannot stand. One of the children moves listlessly in the bones beside me, whimpering.
You would do this for me? he asks at last. The words are barely human, even skull to skull, like this. I barely recognize the voice, the face that has begun to change in the night, on this porch, by this pond.
Why? the jaws ask, opening and closing.
To show you a Light, Father.
The wallskins around me drip with something that smells hideous. The children in the darkness behind me do not like it either, and complain, making hoarse, little cries with vestigial throats. They want something else—something to fill their stomachs and end their hunger, not something like this.
There is no Light, the jaws say.
There is always, I tell it.
Not in Darkness.
There is no Darkness without Light to know it by—
You would die for me? the man asks suddenly. You would—despite what I am, what I have done—die for me?
Yes, Father.
It is the porch. The man I know as my father is singing. He is singing the entire song, the one he loved. Mother and Premila are in the house and it is the four men—father and three sons—on the porch, looking out at the woods. The father’s eyes twinkle, teasing us, as he sings the end of the song: how the woman, whose dead lover has returned to her for a night but now must go, stops him:
Oh when shall I see you again, my love?
When shall I see you again?
And the ghost of her dead lover answers:
When little fish they fly and the seas they do run dry
And the hard rocks do melt in the sun.
When little fish they fly and the seas they do run dry
And the hard rocks do melt in the sun. . . .
He is telling me why. He is telling me at last why he buried them there—on the planet we call The Hand—with its dead seas, its flying fish, its searing stone . . . so far from Hamusek, so far from home. He is telling me how songs, like legends, may make us do what we do.
I nod. His eyes twinkle. We get up, to go inside—
I get up on one leg, wondering how much blood I have lost, whether I will be able to walk. I pull up the sleeve of my broken arm. I unbutton my shirt, which is wet. I want him to see my wrist, my neck; I want him to see the scars, so that he will understand, if he does not already, why the Council sent me instead of my brothers.
There is one scar at my wrist. There is another at my throat. Both are deep and both were made with a blade of volcanic glass on a planet we call The Hand, a year after my father left. Both were made in the hope that Darkness would take me from the Light.
Fever, dehydration, and delirium lasted, I’m told, a week, and then the rescue team found me in the cave overlooking the dry lava beds and endless sand. I was, in the opinion of doctors, half a day from death. I had traveled so far in my dreams, and yet had never left the cave. I had discovered—on my long journey—that Darkness is not a single color, nor the absence of light, nor a true hunger for death, but only a desire for the end of pain.
It was a week later that I dug up their bones and burnt them to ash.
The Council knew all of this, and so I was the one they sent.
You understand don’t you? it says at last.
Yes. I do.
It is a remarkable thing when a ship and its flesh-and-bone body die. The tubes stop their pulsing. The hydroponics tanks shut down, leaving nothing for the tubes to carry. The body that has been engineered for this very day—by its own deepest knowing, deeper than a Map, as deep as light itself—begins to dry out. The bones protrude from the skin. The odors change from a living death to a true death, to a darkness that calls itself by its real name, and by doing so, becomes light. Children who should never have been born—because they were made in the image of a lie—begin to scream in the thin, shrill way they know, and then begin to die.
You do not know how long it all takes. You lie in your own blood, your protruding bone, seeing a porch and a man and a snarling reptile no longer than your arm. Then you are up and walking. You pass scaly children in endless corridors, you trip, you fall, they pass over you, crawling, looking for walls that can feed them one last time. They are thirsty. They are scared. They can hear their brothers and sisters dying, and you feel suddenly what it must be like for them: To be abandoned by the one you love—by the one who loves you.
The engines are dying, too. The wallskins no longer smell. The silence is broken by the twitch of a tail, a claw, a child jerking once beside you.
You get up again. It is difficult, but you do. You reach behind you with your good arm to find the transmitter. You push the button the Council has made large enough for you to find it easily in the dark.
The transmission is something you can almost see:
A spark heading out into the darkness . . . where someone is waiting to come for you.
Assassin
Story Notes
As the son of a feisty cultural anthropologist, Southwest Indian specialist, and Early Man archeologist, I’ve always been puzzled by how pat national, racial, and ethnic labels are, even when we use them proudly and in an equally pat consensus over what they “mean.” Myself, I happen to be a “big toe” Native American because my grandfather on my mother’s side was one-fourth Chickasaw. But to look at me you’d see only the Scottish red hair, blue eyes, and sun-intolerant skin stretching back, according to my father’s Virginia genealogy, to Robert the Bruce, that Scottish King who got such bad press deservedly or not in actor Mel Gibson’s passionate and tortured Braveheart. My mother shared her father’s Native American eyes—and that, I think, is what led her, with her doctorate from Stanford, to spend her life studying Native Americans, though she hid her great love for them—which our Whiteriver Apache friends (two shamans and their families) certainly felt—behind a behavioral scientist’s Mind and Reason.
What is a racial group, what is ethnicity, what is our national identity? A few years ago a dozen red-haired Celtic-looking mummies, three thousand years old, were found in China. What were they doing there? Trade, of course, but in the process had they born children with the Chinese? New dating evidence at the Calico Early Man site in the Mojave Desert, near Barstow, California, suggests (despite currently accepted DNA models for the arrival of modern human beings on the global scene and their migration out of Africa) that human beings came to Pleistocene Lake Manix there at least a hundred and fifty thousand years ago, and not once, but dozens of times. They crossed the Bering Strait, down the coast (where evidence of their migrations will probably always be lost to the sea), and inland—to the great lake system that ran from Barstow to Death Valley. Each wave of people died out or moved on, and probably none of them were related, except distantly, back in Asia perhaps, to one another; and yet they kept coming. It isn’t even clear what kind of human being they were. The textbooks, of course, still speak of a “wall” of 11-12K BP before which human beings “could not possibly” have arrived in the Americas—even though more and more sites in both Americas are raising questions about that wall, and even though I have sitting in my shed a small “modified zoomorphic” (read: made by a human being) effigy of a reclining Ice Age bison from Calico that I’m told by experts is at least 20K and possibly 30K BP. In other words, every time we try to figure out, using Mind and Reason, what human beings have been capable of—by speed and range of migration, by racial mixing, by trade, by almost anything—we always underestimate human will, ingenuity, and the possibilities of time, and feel like idiots later when the new evidence appears—which it always does. The facial features we associate with Asia (and with my grandfather’s and mother’s Chickasaw eyes) are, as it happens, not much more than ten thousand years old. As each “wall” of a
ssumption in archeology, anthropology, and evolutionary genetics collapses, as such walls always do in science, I feel the sense of wonder that good science fiction itself has always made me feel.
“Assassin,” which appeared in OMNI in 1994 and was my last story during the ’90s, is about that sense of wonder—looking backward in human time in order to look forward, and vice versa, as sf (and American literature and culture in general) so often does. It is also about what children are willing to do—and always will be willing to do if there is a shred of humanity in them—to know their parents, to find them and hold them, regardless of the forces in the universe that try to separate them from others and deny them their humanity.
The Boy in Zaquitos
THE RETIRED OPERATIVE SPEAKS TO A CLASS
You do what you can for your country. I’m sixty-eight years old, and even in high school—it’s 2015 now, so that was fifty years ago—I wanted to be an intelligence analyst . . . an analyst for an intelligence agency, or if I couldn’t do that, at least be a writer for the United States Information Agency, writing books for people of limited English vocabularies so they’d know about us, our freedoms, the way we live. But what I wanted most was to be an analyst—not a covert-action operative, just an analyst. For the CIA or NSA, one of the big civilian agencies. That’s what I wanted to do for my country.
I knew they looked at your high school record, not just college—and not just grades, but also the clubs you were in and any sports. And your family background, that was important, too. My father was an Annapolis graduate, a Pearl Harbor survivor, and a gentle Cold War warrior who’d worked for NATO in northern Italy, when we’d lived there. I knew that would look good to the Agency, and I knew that my dad had friends who’d put in a good word for me, too, friends in the Office of Naval Intelligence.
The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories Page 10