I squeezed the book off and put it away. Sat staring. I must have remembered why the Sirkar police might be called sagoths. And remembrance, however deeply buried, had guided my hand to that particular book.
The mind works in... not mysterious ways, no, merely hidden ways, our brains a collection of quasi-independent hardware devices, working together, communicating down the long chains of the white-matter data bus, our consciousness only aggregate illusion, the vector sum of all that the little mind-entities do.
We are not real.
No more real than the poppits who made the Masters, who came to rule over us all. No more real than the Masters themselves.
Hard for people to believe, when the truth came out. Master Race made inadvertently by, what? Bugs? Not quite, these little carnivorous froglets, but close enough. Evolution acting on them across a billion years. As the bugs build nests and the nests call forth tools and the tools call forth bigger tools, until the tools themselves need intelligence to guide their own way.
Hard to imagine.
It was easier for us to want to believe that, some time in the far past, an intelligent species just like ourselves had built that Masters as slaves, that the slaves had rebelled and killed their own masters. Saberhagen called them Berserkers. Shelley called them, it, merely the Monster.
But the universe itself called forth the Master Race, made a tool to rule over the toolmakers. A fitting God to judge our sins.
After a while I got undressed and turned out the light, lay down on my little bed and lay looking up at the pale, luminous flesh of my goddess. She was in her modest pose now, one knee drawn up and over, hiding the space between her legs with a smooth expanse of haunch, hands cupped under her breasts, lifting them slightly.
I think the boy who sold me the poster didn’t even know what she could do. He’d’ve asked a higher price if he’d known. I reached out and touched the image with one extended toe, telling her to dance.
And fire sparkled in her eyes, demure smile widening into a lascivious grin, leg sweeping away to show her vulva, one knee lifting up, inviting, hands reaching downward...
Even now, after ten thousand burdar nights, it had the power to arouse me.
Five. Brilliant Yellow Sunshine
In the morning, brilliant yellow sunshine flooded the tangled vegetation outside my window, splashing over the trees, not quite coming inside, leaving the room in shadow. The goddess, long ago finished with her tawdry little masturbation show, was back in her demure pose, one knee crossed over, smiling down from the wall like some kind of innocent angel.
I got up, fishing my robe out of the suitcase, and wondered how to proceed. Still that reluctance in me, connectivity with that long dead past trying to reestablish itself. No shower attached to my room, or even a lavatory, like the one I’d had when I was a boy. I remember when the water supply failed, how much I mourned that old toilet’s loss, especially as I walked through night to the outhouse my father and I had dug, putting on boots so I could walk through shallow North Carolina snow.
There was a shower room down the hall, tepid, mineral-tasting water that gushed briefly at the pull of a chain. Rainwater, I thought. From a solar cistern. It had the mark of my father’s cleverness. And I remembered the toy maglev train sets we’d put together when I was a child, spiraling and looping around the living room, driven by that same cleverness, a cleverness threatening to make me no more than a spectator with my own toys.
Downstairs, my mother, suddenly shy, fed us breakfast, cooking eggy french toast over a propane stove, serving it with sweet, soft butter and a thick, pale, reddish concoction that tasted like cane syrup. If I were remembering right. The burdars always had maple for my breakfast, container stamped with the glyph of a New Hampshire estate. Another memory: my mother angry as she cooked over a wood stove my father made for her. Angry, muttering, When did this become woman’s work?
I cannot, I think, remember the career she had before the Invasion. Lawyer? I’ll have to remember to ask sometime.
Afterward, my father led me outside, reminding me I’d have to register with the local police. I nodded, looking into his face, at his serious expression. Nodded and said, “Of course. The Master will be wanting to see me as well.” That brought a small doubtful look, quickly faded. Or suppressed.
We walked together in hot morning sunshine, light casting our shadows on the rutted, muddy lane, mud dried to a hard crust by the late summer drought. About now, Jordan Lake, if it still existed, would be rimmed by a wide beach of hard mud and sand, places to picnic, to sit with binoculars and watch the herons and egrets, try to spy one of the rare eagles, a hawk or two, or merely lie back and watch the shallow vee-shapes of vultures drifting on the wind. I’d heard an eagle’s cry once when I was a boy, an ugly gargle of rage, hardly the noble scream of myth.
My father looked up at me as we walked, and, finally, said, “You seem changed, Athy.” I looked down at him, and he laughed uneasily. “Oh, I know, twenty years, but...” He shrugged. “Hell, you’re even taller than you were. I thought you’d gotten your full growth.”
I nodded. “Stress, I think, during the early phases of training. Stimulation to bone ends maybe.”
Overhead, sunlight was streaming through the taller trees, slender, scaly pines of some sort, their tops bending, swaying slowly back and forth in the wind, little nodding circles against the backdrop of the sky. I could feel the black hair on my head heating up as it stored energy from the light’s infrared component. On the habitable planets of some low-K stars where I’d been, that effect is more pronounced. Planets where you can lie naked in the sun, baking the tarnish off your soul, and not have to worry about ultraviolet burn.
“It’s not just that, Athy...” He stopped, turning to look up at me, eyes searching. “Something in the stillness of your face. The depths of your eyes...”
Or maybe depthlessness, that silver mirror turned out to the world, eyes of one-way glass, always looking out, never in. When you kill a being, man or beast, you don’t want them looking in through your eyes. Each one that does takes a little bit of your soul away, wherever he goes. Silly nonsense, of course. Just the way it feels. Eyes, looking up at you, pleading, full of sorrow, then the knife goes in and the eyes go away.
I said, “I’ve been away for twenty years, Dad. We can hardly know one another now. In time...”
I think it made him feel better, being called Dad, an afterecho of the boy who’d gone away. He said, “How long will you be staying? You didn’t say in the telegram.”
“Six weeks.”
A sigh of pleasure, and we resumed walking, up the rutted road between the small, wooden houses of the bustee. Villagers were up and about now, looking incongruous in their bright, almost-indestructible technofabrics, in a setting that seemed to call for peasants in burlap. Men and women nodded to him as we passed, people touching their caps, or looking down at the ground. Many more of them stealing furtive glances at me. Man in a dull green uniform, gun on his hip. Not a sagoth, though. Unfamiliar. Different.
I said, “What do you do these days?” When I was a boy he’d been some kind of engineer, working for a University think-tank. Designing weapons of war. I remember being excited by that. Proud.
He stopped again, looking up at me. An odd look on his face. Diffidence, compounded by something a little like reluctant embarrassment. “Ah. I’m the, uh, Sirkar’s Agent for Chapel Hill. The, uh, mayor, I guess you’d call it.”
A little way beyond the bustee, covering what had been flat, marshy ground on the north side of Bolin Creek, we passed by the local bluehouse. It was a broad, low, streamlined structure of maybe fifty hectares extent, with windowless, black-enameled walls, roofed over by faceted panels of upward stepglass, glinting hard blue-violet in the sun.
We crossed a little footbridge there, obviously intending to make our way along the far bank of the creek. That’s where the police station had been before the Invasion. No reason to move it, I guess.
&n
bsp; My father nodded at the bluehouse’s main airlock door, where there was a small booth, a couple of sagoths in attendance, and said, “We had a hard time getting that built, started on it just a year or so after you left. The Saanaae, um, executed my predecessor when he couldn’t get it done on time. You remember Mr. Itakë?”
“Davy’s dad?”
A nod.
I’d played football with Davy in late high school, one of a few post-Invasion teams that managed to get together hereabouts, playing in the day, on weekends, because we couldn’t run the field lights any longer. I tried to summon a memory of his father, couldn’t quite manage it. A smallish, pale Oriental man, balding perhaps, with just a little gray in his hair.
My father said, “I didn’t really want the job after that, but... Mike’d asked me to do the engineering for him at the outset. I refused and... I felt a little responsible. For his death, I mean. You know?” Almost a pleading look.
I nodded.
We were stopped now, almost in the shadow of those featureless walls, and he said, “I don’t like going in there.”
I’ve been in bluehouses on a hundred worlds. They’re all the same. I walked up the path toward the airlock and stopped by the sagoth kiosk. The high ranker, a beefy, red-headed man with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, stepped out into the sun, squinting. “Morning, Mayor,” he said, then looked at me with a mixture of interest and suspicion. Like, I thought, a policeman. And keenly, yet unobtrusively conscious of my sidearm.
I read the nametag on his blouse. “You Marsh Donovan?”
The suspicion deepened and his attention focused sharply. Someone, at least, was doing a good job training the local thugs. He’d been a good ballplayer though. Maybe it was all his own doing. Talent.
I held out my hand and smiled. “You remember me? Athol Morrison.”
A shock of recognition crossed his face, followed by delight. “Son of a bitch!” He was holding my hand in both of his, pumping, grinning. “Hell, I heard you were coming home. How the hell have you been?” The other two men in the kiosk were coming forward, looking at me. They were younger men, had probably been small children when I went away.
There was a sudden, sharp scraping sound from the building and a blue light over the airlock door flickered in a quick pattern. Marsh and his sagoths turned away, reaching into their breast pockets and putting on pairs of red-lensed, cardboard-framed sunglasses. My father tapped my shoulder and looked away.
I squinted and kept looking.
When the door opened, hard, glary light flooded out, along with a gust of methane-enriched air. I suppose they have to be careful with bluehouses, what with the danger of explosion, but then the technology may have had a hundred million years to evolve. Men in the doorway, all of them dark, some of them naturally so, others tanned almost black under Caucasian body hair. Men covered with sweat, bent under burdens, mostly big plastic sacks. All of them naked, hair matted and wet, muscles bulging, showing how well-fed they were. Well-fueled.
They stood still, waiting, until another man, sleeker, but still well-muscled, dressed in shorts, carrying a metal rod, stepped through their ranks. Sleeker? No. Not a man after all, but a woman with the physique of a body builder, her breasts small, hard-looking knobs of tissue tucked against a wall of solid muscle. She had a whistle on a chain around her neck, a pair of red glasses perched on her nose, and a poppit on top of her head, sprawled, gripping with its eight legs, circle of eyes and little red mouth facing forward. You could see it was panting lazily, almost asleep.
She stepped up to the kiosk, sweat beading on her nipples, trickling down across the ridged muscle of her stomach, soaking into the wet waistband of her shorts. “Hey, Marsh. My shirt out here somewhere?”
He grinned and fished a white halter-top, barely a scrap of cloth, out from under the kiosk’s counter. “Hey, Sadie. Still here.”
She shook it out, holding it at arm’s length, making no move to put it on, mopping at her sweaty neck with one hand. “Fuck, it’s hot in there today!” In the airlock door, the dark men were standing still, swaying a little bit as their muscles shifted under the weight of their burdens, eyes squeezed almost shut. Waiting.
Sadie looked at me, at my father, and said, “Hey, Mayor.” A slight nod, then she turned away, dismissing us as irrelevant to her world. She blew twice on the whistle, two shrill blasts, and the men in the airlock started tramping forward, bare feet thudding on the walkway as she led them across the bridge and back through the bustee.
Marsh and my father watched her go, both of them obviously interested in what they saw. Finally, Marsh said, “You remember Sadie Miller?”
I did. She must have been about ten years old when I left, a thin, violent little girl. But for the Invasion, she probably would’ve been in hypertherapy.
My father said, “That’s a tough job. We do have some trouble getting people to stick with it.”
I said, “I’d like to see your bailiwick, Marsh,” gesturing at the open bluehouse door.
He glanced at my father, face impassive, then said, “Sure, Athy.” He fished a couple of pairs of red cardboard glasses from a kiosk drawer and handed them over. “Take as long as you want. Maybe we’ll have a beer sometime, huh?”
“Sure, whenever you want. I’ll be here for a few weeks.”
Glasses on and through the airlock, we went to another world, standing beside the inner airlock door, waiting for our eyes to adapt. Even with the red glasses it was a little hard, ultraviolet light falling from the stepglass, tingling on our skins, leaking around the edges of the cardboard. Whenever I looked up at the ceiling, I could feel a little stab of pain as my irises tried to adjust and failed. Internal conflict. Dim light, powerful glare.
It was like a swamp in here, shallow, scummy water on the mud floor, mud presumably contaminated with alien microorganisms. Black vegetation, looping black vines, little blue bugs everywhere. Poppits crawling in the undergrowth, slopping in the water, hanging from the vines...
Right at home.
My skin had really started to prickle now, surficial flora and fauna being eradicated by the heavy UV. Whatever was living here wouldn’t move in though. I was too alien an environment.
There were people all over the place, most of them heavily built men, but women too, here and there, grubbing in the muck, dragging bundles of vegetation here and there. All of them sturdy looking, healthy, sweating uselessly against a dank heat that made the air seem hazy, haze exacerbated by the ultraviolet light.
Humans make better bluehouse slaves than the Boromilithi ever did, poor little bastards regarding it as a death sentence.
There was a soft lowing in the distance, as of cows, and I heard my father whisper something under his breath. All right, I knew that sound too. I shaded my eyes with my hand, squinting into the haze, walking forward, feet splashing in the watery mud, little sucking sounds whenever I stepped on a particularly thick patch.
The general human slang term for them is aphids. Human-sized bipeds with fat, stumpy tails, covered all over with iridescent blue scales, dog-muzzle faces dominated by small, brilliant, featureless red eyes. Humanoid bipeds that moo like cows.
There was a small herd of them here, a couple of dozen individuals, probably a lot more on the other side of the haze, little clusters dotted around this low cavern of a building. There were humans with them, humans carrying little wooden rods, poking them, prodding. The aphids were walking through knee-deep black grassy stuff, plucking shiny, iron-colored flowers, eating them, munching contentedly, burping, farting. They are, I think, responsible for the air’s high methane content.
Off to one side, some people had two of the aphids caught between them, holding them tight, though they didn’t struggle. A fertile female, her belly-cloaca bulging, gleaming metallic blue in the light, a fertile male, his own cloaca everted like fat, pouting lips. The humans held them by the arms and pressed them together, face to face, belly to belly. The human supervisor, rod of steel tucked under o
ne arm, was watching the operation, laughing.
The female’s eyes suddenly bugged out, her mouth working in a gaping grimace, and the male let out a low bellow of a moo. A little silvery goo started oozing away from the joined cloacas.
Scrape, grind-CHUG.
A signal from the bluehouse’s PA system. The main herd of aphids suddenly stood up straight, alert, forage forgotten, suddenly huddling closer together. The mating pair clutched at each other, struggling, and pulled apart with an ugly sucking noise.
I heard my father whisper, “Jesus.” He was trying to edge away, back toward the airlock door.
Since they already had him, the humans grabbed the fat bull, who bucked hard, trying to pull away. Useless. A long, hopeless-sounding moo. Reading too much into that, I know, but that was how it sounded. How it always sounds.
They dragged him to a clear space and pushed him face down in the muddy water, right down on his still-gaping cloaca, silvery stuff mixing with the silt, one man sitting on his shoulders, others holding down arms, pulling legs apart, leaving the thick tail stretched out on the ground.
You’re lucky this time, aphid.
There were other cow-screams from beyond the mist, marking where other aphids were being held down. Some of them would not be so lucky. Feeding time at the bluehouse.
Poppits coming down out of the trees now, rustling through the underbrush, crawling out into the wet clear spaces, gathering at their aphids. Red eyes gleaming. Toothy little mouths agape. They wouldn’t eat much.
When the first poppit snapped a tiny mouthful from its tail, the bull aphid bucked hard, screaming, almost tossing the man from his shoulders. Another bite, another. Another. A dozen bites, a hundred. The aphid screamed. Struggled. Moaned. Only shivered. Lay still, crying softly. In a few minutes its tail was gone.
You’d think, over time, evolution would do away with the tail nerves. It hasn’t.
You’d think maybe the Masters would breed a numb-tailed species of aphid. They haven’t.
When Heaven Fell Page 6