She’ll cry again, after all this time, and, perhaps, so will I.
Do I want that?
More important: does she?
Her hand was on my stomach now, thumb tucked inside my belt, making it a little difficult for us to walk. Around us, the woods were filled with small sounds, the faint rush of wind in the treetops, an insect’s chirr, a metallic-sounding birdsong, the gurgle of water in the stream, faraway human voices, a distant barking dog.
When I was a little boy, you couldn’t walk through these woods without hearing the sound of road traffic close at hand, the distant rumble of aircraft, the occasional sharp crackle of a starship’s lighter climbing from RDU Space Center.
Alix bumped against my side, seemed to stumble for a moment, then stopped, putting her hand on the outside of my pocket. Where the little gun had rested all night, uninvoked. Her eyes looked up at me, questioning. I said, “I’m required to carry a sidearm.”
Eyes thoughtful. “Why didn’t you use it last night?”
Black shadows flailing in the moonlight, unknown men dying. “It wasn’t necessary. Somebody might’ve gotten hurt.”
“Hurt...” I knew she was seeing the image of those men on the ground.
We walked on, holding hands again, quiet, being with each other, together, I suppose, in our thoughts.
In the area behind the high school, Bolin Creek narrowed and turned westward, through swampy ground, while the path climbed up through the woods, entering an area of low, clayey hills. Unexpectly, we came out of the woods. When I lived here last, the woods didn’t end until right before the first set of athletic fields. Now they’d been cut down, the trees pushed aside, lying in one vast windrow, old gray trunks, with long-dead brown needles clinging to them in patches, deciduous trees long denuded of their leaves, the stumps pulled from the raw earth and thrown upon the heap.
There was a hole in the red ground, cut down into a deposit of clay, ground churned to mud by tramping feet. At the rim of the pit, a Saanaa stood watch, impassive, looking down at his charges. Down in the hole, there were men and women standing around as well, a handful of them, bearing whips, wearing sturdy canvass clothing.
Men with shovels. Men and women with buckets, treading a long line in and out of the pit. Naked men and women, fine, muscular bodies gleaming in the morning sunlight, gleaming with sweat, gleaming with the earth’s moisture upon them. Standing to have their buckets filled, staggering away under the load.
Some of the women were lovely indeed, breasts high and firm, hair tied back, waists narrow and banded with muscle, shoulders broad and strong. The men looked like fantasy heroes, strong and brave.
One of the women slipped in the wet clay and fell, spilling her load. A heavyset woman with a whip stepped forward and slashed at her, braided whip making a thin, high sound, drawing a red line diagonally across the slave’s back, shouting, “Up, bitch! Work!” The fallen woman struggled to her feet, no one stopping to help her, and went back for another load.
Alix tugged at my hand and whispered, “Let’s get out of here.”
The Saanaa policeman turned to watch us, green eyes unreadable, watched us walk on. The school buildings were visible now through a last strand of old timber, buildings as clean and white as the day I left. There were some boys and girls playing touch football on the gridiron. Practicing, probably, for the fall season that would start in only a few weeks, with the onset of school.
We stood and watched, arm in arm. while they played, while the sun rose in the sky. Finally, I turned to Alix, holding her, looking down into her earnest face. I said, “I have to go away for a couple of days. Spahi business.”
A fretful look, a yearning look. Oh, God, I have done it to her, whether I wanted to or not...
Through the shadow, she said, “Will I see you again soon?”
The thrill of that wish took hold of me, puncturing some last defense or another. I smiled into her face, took her head between my hands, kissed her softly. “Soon enough.”
Seven. Flooded with Feeling
My new memories of Alix, flooded with unaccustomed feeling, stayed with me all the way back to New York, keeping me within myself as the monorail slid above once-again familiar, blasted terrain, this new land of young green forests and vast, eroding craters. The ruins themselves, cities leveled, homesites crushed, were beginning to look like natural parts of the landscape, beginning to look old, beginning to disappear.
All I could think about, for at least that little while, was how she’d felt, clutched within the circle of my hands.
East of New York, out on Long Island, near the sea, not far from where the resort town of St. James used to be, there lies a field of black marble bearing the sigils of six hundred thousand dead. These are the Kkhruhhuft soldiers who died during the conquest of Earth. The Kkhruhhuft burst with pride when they speak of how well we fought.
There are no statues here, just flat black marble covered with names. The mother of my friend and comrade Shrêhht lies interred here, the little slab above the urn of her ashes inscribed with just a few complex, rune-like ideograms:
Marôhh
Daughter of Yrûkkth
Died in Battle
17721.591027.181705
Shrêhht traced the symbols with the silver-painted talon of one toe as she translated the words for me, and we stood silently together, surrounded by all those thousands of names on a flat and polished black plain that reflected the distant sky, held the outlines of a few faraway clouds.
There’s a memorial much like this in the ruins of Washington, DC, the only monument that survived the destruction of the city, bearing the collected names of forgotten men and women who died in some forgotten nineteenth- or twentieth-century war. Maybe those people were proud to die. Maybe not.
Across the river from it, there’s a vast cemetery, row on ranked row of dead soldiers. The gravestones are mostly fallen now, knocked over by the shockwave from the explosion, but I imagine the dead soldiers are still there, lying in their eternal darkness, imagining themselves to be ghosts.
A wind from the sea sprang up, making me shiver though the day was quite warm. Visiting graveyards preys on the imagination, making one silly and superstitious in short order. These Kkhruhhuft died because the Masters sent them here to die. Nothing to be proud of. And, to be fair, the Kkhruhhuft only claim to be proud of us.
It’s not easy for a soldier of the Master Race to die in combat. Usually, we have an insurmountable edge. Usually, it’s only the natives who die in vain. There’s no monument to the eight billion and more human beings who died along with these Kkhruhhuft. No one speaks of them. Not anymore.
Shrêhht keyed her vocoder, and said, “She came home on furlough and bred for me, just as she bred for my sisters. I was born, and she raised me from hatchling to child, and turned me over to the clan, then returned to her comrades and wars. In time I followed her.” Long moment of silence, then she turned her eyes on me, unreadable balls of mottled yellow. “I was in the battle when she died, though I didn’t see it happen. I wish I had. They say she was superb.”
Nothing for me to say. I knew she wasn’t waiting for me to say how sorry I was. They’re not us, whatever else they may be.
I stood and waited until she was finished communing with her dead, then we went for a long, silent walk, down by the seashore, listening as the gentle Atlantic waves hissed up the beach. There is apparently some commonality there as well. Things organic sophonts have in common. We all come from real worlds, worlds of sounds and sights and silences.
Who knows? Maybe even poppits love the sea.
o0o
The next day, Shrêhht and I went off together to a small resort out on Cape Cod, not far from the old beach town of Cahoon Hollow. It was, she said, a place favored by mercenaries visiting Earth. A place where a traveler from the stars could feel just a little more at home.
I never went to Cape Cod before the Invasion. We always had better beaches to go to, Emerald Isle, Topsail,
North Myrtle, lovely, soft, brown sand beaches sloping down to warm green seas. Here, the sand is sharper and grainier, though not like the pebbled beaches farther north. Cape Cod is, after all, the last of the great barrier islands that line much of the coast north from Florida.
A resort area for centuries, it’s all changing back now. Though the Massachusetts Bay shore is choked with the stumps of tall glass buildings, the seaward shore is empty, a long stretch of sand and scruffy beach vegetation, grass holding down the low, rolling dunes from the ruins of Provincetown all the way to Nauset Beach.
It was cooler here than in New York, the sand still warm from a day’s sunshine, but the wind off the Atlantic already had the power to raise gooseflesh as the sun sank in the west. Beyond the sun, beyond the bay, I knew I’d find the great shantytown of Boston, whose people had stayed behind, refusing to leave even when the power failed. No bombs fell, so the city was taking decades to die. One more “unregulated native habitat,” destined for closure.
There were other people here, people of every sort you could imagine. And very few of them were human. Green Saanaae everywhere, whole families of them, sitting around open campfires, roasting skewered food, hissing laughter at each other. Whole families, because the Saanaae were here to stay.
Out in the ocean, you could see scores of swimming Kkhruhhuft, rolling in the surf like giant gray logs, like enormous alligators. Like the dinosaurs they really were, floating barely submerged, eyes and nostrils protruding, moving lazily about by flicking their long, heavy tails.
I wonder what the sharks thought of them? Probably, the sharks were afraid to come here now. Nothing in Earth’s ocean short of a big old Orca could menace a Kkhruhhuft. And there hadn’t been Orcas in any of the Earth’s seas in a long damned time.
There were human people here as well, some of them recognizable as vacationing Spahis, men and women frolicking carefully together in the absence of their burdars, knowing what was expected of them. And other people, locals, moving among the aliens, including the human aliens.
Shrêhht was lying quietly beside me, inhabiting a warm hollow she’d carved out along a dune ridge, staring out to sea while we talked. There were clouds out there, drifting low above the horizon, making the edge of the world seem quite far away, and there was a sailing ship of some strange design, with high, angular bow and stern and two sets of oddly-shaped, dark red sails. The green flecks moving about the deck were, I supposed, Saanaae.
If you were sent away to an alien world, exiled forever, would you bring your sailboat along?
The woman came walking up the line of the dunes, moving in a long-legged, muscular stride, long blonde hair blowing in the sea breeze, blue eyes sharp, smiling confidently. Large breasts, held in by a white bandeau, further covered by a diaphanous halter top. Broad hips, bound by the narrow strands of an old-fashioned bikini bottom. Narrow waist, skin well tanned.
She looked at me, one hand on her hip, and waited for just a moment, then said, “Well, how about it?”
Talk about blunt. I thought of the coy little prostitute on the train, straining to remember her name and failing. “How about what?” I could hear the faint chuff of Shrêhht’s breathing behind me, knew that, from a Kkhruhhuft, audible breathing constituted something like a bemused chuckle.
The girl shook her head slightly and then patted her abdomen. “Come on, soldier boy. Forty bucks Standard.”
Well. I was suddenly almost embarrassed to have Shrêhht witnessing this, even though I knew she understood, was not judging me by this... behavior. “For what?”
A snort of laughter. The girl took the strings of her bikini bottom and gave them a quick tug, undoing slipknots, letting a little scrap of thin white cloth fall to the sand. I could see that her pubic thatch was the same shade as the hair on her head, that she’d shaved around the edges to keep it from showing around her bikini.
She said, “Forty Standard for as many times as you can manage between now and tomorrow morning.”
“Is that a good deal?”
She laughed. “You haven’t been here long, have you soldier boy?”
“No.” In the background, I could still hear the sound of Shrêhht’s breathing. Maybe a little louder now.
“Well. Let me show you what you’ll be getting...” She turned away from me, bending over until she could look back between her legs, still grinning, holding her buttocks spread apart with her hands. “See? What d’you think?”
Pretty much indistinguishable from any other woman’s standard hardware, is what I was thinking. Like Hani, like every other burdar I’d ever had. Even like Alix. And tempting, too. Little hormone-elementals looking out through my eyes, opening up their floodgates, little voices muttering, Well? Well?
I reached over and patted her on one rounded, slightly sand-gritty buttock, maybe let my hand linger there just a little too long, and said, “Very nice. But you’re right, I haven’t been here very long. Maybe later.”
She straightened up and shrugged, leaning down to pick up her bikini bottom. “OK, pal. Maybe later.”
She walked down the face of the dune, that little bit of cloth dangling from one hand, headed for where another group of Spahis was playing. I watched her go, tempted to call her back, and listened to the gentle whisper of Shrêhht’s laughter.
Night fell, darkness coming up out of the east and covering the world, stars appearing in order of magnitude overhead, already wheeling about the pole, and the sea turned black, darkness reaching out until it touched the edge of the sky. It seemed to magnify the sounds around me, rushing of the surf against the shore a deep background whisper, easily heard over all the lesser sounds of the beach, the crackle of campfires, the laughter of men and women, the animal-like coughing of the Kkhruhhuft, softer Saanaae sounds. The high cackle of some shiny little silver bipeds of a sort I’d never run across before.
Shrêhht and I made our meal together, cooking over the same campfire, and opened our bottles and drank. I was glad I’d chosen a single-malt scotch then, its raw flavor covering up the burning, acrid fusel-oil smell of an amyl alcohol-based Kkhruhhuft beverage.
Down the hill, rendered not quite invisible by the darkness, I could see a large Spahi soldier kneeling in the sand, kissing a slender young man, running his hands delicately over the boy’s soft, naked back. Somewhere out there, the girl would be busy by now as well, bent over in front of some stony-eyed man, perhaps, or crouching between the legs of a muscular, hard-faced woman.
Thinking about it, watching the men at the foot of the dune, I had another moment of regretting I’d sent her away. But then, she’d only made me think of Alix.
Shrêhht stirred in her sandy nest, and her vocoder whispered to me. “Always so strange, watching human mating rituals.” Her eyes were on the couple before us, the boy’s face now up against the man’s middle, rubbing softly, gently, spreading moisture, getting ready.
Difficult to imagine what she was thinking. Or what she’d really thought about this afternoon’s whore. No more than whispers of laughter.
She said, “I’ve seen some human anthropological studies, films of several extinct species of large primate. You wouldn’t have been worth much as soldiers, if you’d taken after your Bonobo chimpanzee cousins.”
No, I suppose not. Imagine a human culture in which sex is everything, available to everyone, men, women, children. No exclusions. No jealousies. No hormonally-driven male aggression. No female economic territoriality.
It’s been suggested that the prevalence of child molestation in most human societies is driven by an ancestral memory of the path we almost took. Bonobo children didn’t seem to mind. Maybe we would have been better off that way. Then again, Bonobos didn’t build starships.
In any case, they’re extinct now. I could see by the motion of the boy’s head that he was fellating his soldier now, the man clutching him by the neck, guiding him, regulating his movements. It looked, from what little I could see, like they were both enjoying themselves.
I waited out the silence, suddenly alert.
She gestured at the couple at the foot of the dune. “Or maybe it is, I don’t know. That woman who propositioned you this afternoon made chimpanzee sense, presenting, just like the creatures in the old films.”
I laughed. “I guess it did look a little like that, didn’t it?”
“Why didn’t you accept her offer?”
Good question. I had an image of Shrêhht watching as I dropped my trunks, erection popping out, maybe making scientific observations as I stepped up to the bent over woman, fumbling around, sliding into her, pumping steadfastly away until I was finished. Forty Standard’s not much money. But I had no idea what her living expenses might be. Maybe it was a whole week’s worth, and easily justified the expenditure of one night’s energy.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was thinking about my friend Alix. And about my burdars, I guess.”
“You humans have made an interesting tangle out of sex and friendship, out of reproduction and recreation as well.”
I nodded. “It’s certainly made for a lot of cultural oddness. The burdar system’s a lot simpler, I guess.” Is it? Is it really true I don’t care about Hani’s feelings, that I fuck her when I want because that’s what she’s paid for? Nothing’s that simple.
Shrêhht said, “It’s hard for me to imagine worrying about the feelings of a male.”
Um. Hard for me to know why she was saying this. They’re not known to talk about their personal lives much. “Do they even have feelings...” I bit that off, realizing I was a little drunk, could easily go too far.
Shrêhht made a little chuff of laughter. “Have you ever owned a dog or a cat?”
“Both. A cocker spaniel when I was a little boy, ‘til it got killed somehow. An alley cat that hung around our house after the Invasion, cadging meals...” I hadn’t thought about either one of them for a long time, but I’d loved the dog, Lucky, and tolerated the fat, nameless gray tomcat.
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