She said, “I’ve done a little reading in human pet-keeping psychology. Maybe it’s a little like that. Males live in our extended clan households, live with the children, are companions to them, much the way dogs are for human children. And they’re sometimes used as hunting tools...”
A sudden shock of imagery, as if the Kkhruhhuft were somehow human. A hunting world of Amazon women, women and little girls and German shepherd dogs. Come to my bed, you sweet puppy. Make love to me...
“So do they have feelings?”
“Of course. And more like our feelings than a dog’s is like yours. I think we love them just the way humans love their pets. And we get pleasure when they mate with us.”
Impossible to drop that persistently silly male fantasy about women and dogs. Not appropriate here, but inevitably called up. “Can they talk at all?”
“No. They have nonverbal communication, about on a level with a dog’s. They understand voice tones, can learn to respond to a few simple words...”
Heel. Sit. Fetch. Fuck. Good doggy!
She said, “I can imagine loving a male, but not being friends with one.”
I’ve heard human women say something very much like that. “Some people imagine they’re friends with their pets.”
“Imagination is a dangerous tool—it can easily mislead you. Dogs are just responding to pack-culture behavioral cues. And it’s clear that cats are issuing signals of their own that trigger false responses in humans. They don’t really care who you are.”
Down at the foot of the dune, the man and boy were suddenly finished, man sighing aloud with pleasure, the two of them holding still, a brief, pornographic tableau, then falling apart, both of them toppling to the sand. Shrêhht shifted in her nest until she could bring both eyes to bear on me.
“That is more comprehensible,” she said. “Even though it’s male and male, even though the reality of a sentient male psyche is far from understandable to me. I have friends who I’ve loved, comrades with whom I’ve frolicked in the sun...”
Familiar imagery, seen from time to time, of giant gray Kkhruhhuft walking side by side, silent, yet so obviously aware of one another, a familiar tension. They don’t take the males out to the stars with them, because they don’t use them for recreational sex. So much for good doggy...
She said, “I think friendship can cross many boundaries.”
I took a long pull at the neck of my bottle, felt the scotch go down like so much raw gasoline. And couldn’t resist a slight snort of laughter. “You’re not propositioning me, are you Shrêhht?”
I was relieved to hear her own chuff of amusement. “I don’t think I could get into a human female’s presenting posture. Besides, you’d only smother.” We sat together for a long while, silent, watching hard, brilliant stars turn against the backdrop of the Masters’ sky.
o0o
The next day, we were back in New York, and I stood under a glary noonday sun, once again in the middle of that flat, black plain-of-names, now surrounded by a carefully disordered gaggle of men and women, all of us standing silent. Droplets of sweat made faint, itchy trails as they started up at my hairline, traveled dwindling down the back of my neck or across one cheek.
They call this the Gosudar’s Ceremony, pretend that we come to do them honor, but it’s more than that. I was pleased that Shrêhht had asked me to stand for her, especially with the memory of our night spent together out on the beach.
With the sun beating down, old Aëtius Nikolaev, gosudar of all the Spahi legions, white haired, frail-looking, though his shoulders were still broad, had given his little speech, “...we honor these brave dead, our comrades to come...” and now we stood together, waiting, the old man among us. He was, once upon a time, among the chiefs-of-staff of the forces that sought to defend Earth from these invaders.
There was a heavy, deep, hollow booming, metallic and hard, unmusical, as though someone were pounding the wall of a galvanized aluminum building with a sledgehammer. Kkhruhhuft drumming, one, two, three, not quite regular, subtly out-of-phase with human ideas of rhythm. A dark and sinuous screech, like a multitude of rusting, oilless hinges. The Kkhruhhuft sound of trumpets. The popping rumble of Kkhruhhuft voices, whisper raised to a throaty, gargling shout, Kkhruhhuft singing.
In human literature, they call this the Hymn of the Combat-Fallen. The words, though, translated to a human language, sound a little bit like “Amazing Grace.” Not about religion, no, nor about some God or gods responsible for the universe’s causality chains. Astonishment. Joy. That I have been permitted to die...
The disordered gaggle of men and women dispersed, each of us walking out across the black plain to where a single Kkhruhhuft was waiting. All of us lost friends, relatives, in the Invasion. Some of these people, though, are family members of humans who fell slaying these Kkhruhhuft. I think no one who ever killed a Kkhruhhuft lived to recount the moment. I’ve never met one, at any rate...
I came and stood by Shrêhht, who stood by her mother’s name, a small, neat pile of human combat armor by her feet, her voice raised in song. From close by, I could see her throat pouches filling with air, shuddering as she expelled the words, could feel deep subsonics beating against my chest. When we were all in place the singing stopped, and then the raucous music-analogue.
Moment of silence, Shrêhht looking down at me. Her vocoder was missing, putting us out of communication. No way to bridge the evolutionary gap between human and Kkhruhhuft without the universals of data processing logic. Had we met as creatures of the wild, we’d’ve been animals to each other.
The drum began its not-quite-irregular clangor again.
Shrêhht stooped and began handing me bits of combat armor, cuirass and greaves, boots, powergloves, helmet, watching as I snapped them into place, as I went through deeply-ingrained integrity-checking routines. Caution. Care. Habits of safety. These things rule a soldier’s life. Forgetting them brings about his death.
She helped me shrug into the armor’s backpack, helped me unspool and plug in the various power and data connectors, watched as I snapped down the visor, flooding my world with altered three-dee imagery. Handed me the collimated-beam weapon and stood back, stood looking down at me again.
What could I look like in her eyes? An armored black knight? Nonsense. No human image at all. This small, hard black thing at her side was an alien monster. A monster who’d killed six hundred thousand Kkhruhhuft soldiers.
She made a soft grunting sound, something I recognized to be a Kkhruhhuft military salute, turned and strode away. All the Kkhruhhuft were streaming away now, leaving us all alone together, armored and brave, standing by their mothers’ names.
The gosudar’s gravelly old voice whispered over the command circuit: “Power to guns.”
I thumbed the stock switch and watched the displays in my helmet. This was old-style armor and an old-style gun, military hardware from the days of the Invasion. I’d hate to wear it into combat—it’s no wonder so many of us died. Though the survival rate of humanity as a whole was around ten percent, they say fewer than one percent of the old soldiers lived to form the nucleus of the Spahi legions.
“Ready.”
Men like that old havildar-emeritus, who’d seen terror I might never know. Women like La Belle Dame, bitter and caring, who’d shown me how to survive while my comrades died. Women like tahsildar Mamie Glendower, who’d been a shavetail lieutenant on front-line duty the day the Masters returned.
“Aim.”
I lifted my gun, took aim at the face of the sun. The armor’s optics dimmed the sun down, while leaving the sky bright blue, so that I stared upward at a grainy orange ball, full of spicules and sunspots, surrounded by corona, prominences frozen into place by their scale, though childhood lessons made me expect them to twist and coil. My sighting reticle was a faint tracery of black lines against the heavens.
“Fire.”
Ten thousand lightning bolts leapt into the sky, thunder rolling and rolling across t
he world.
Eight. The Next Afternoon
Late the next afternoon I came by Alix’s house to pick her up for dinner with my parents. The door opened and she was ready to go, dressed in a smooth-pressed cotton dress, sleeveless pale green cloth printed with darker green leaves, brown woody stems, reddish-orange flowers.
She stood looking up at me, the room behind her in shadow, that half smile still on her face, waiting until I stepped forward and took her in my arms, then she collapsed forward against me. I squeezed her gently, kissed her on top of the head, ran my hand down one side and onto her hip.
She tipped her head back and, while we kissed, my hand slid around to her abdomen, then downward between her legs, feeling the little trough of her pubic symphysis, the softer flesh below, rubbing gently. She held still against me then, face pressed into my side, and I could feel the taut shape of her grin on my chest, could feel her legs drifting apart slightly, inviting me inward.
Voice soft, she said, “We don’t have to go...” Hips pushing forward now, a tiny sliding movement against the heel of my hand.
I took the hand away, moved it around to the small of her back, pulled her against me. “I think my parents might be upset.”
She looked up at me, smile turned halfway to a frown. “Would they? I haven’t talked to them much over the years. Just Lank, sometimes Oddny.”
When I’d told them I was bringing Alix for dinner, there’d been frowns and doubtful looks. My parents disapproved of her from the very beginning I think, but said nothing. So many of my playmates were gone, some dead, some just missing. They tried to talk about that with me, especially after I found Henry Leffler’s mummy-like corpse under a pile of rubble in our backyard. He was our next door neighbor, a year younger than me, and not one of my closest friends, but I’d played with him from time to time.
He was naked, all white and black and stiff, covered with dust, extremities swollen, fingers and toes, genitals and tongue, surrounded by fragments of old gypsum wallboard. They say the hydrophilic dust sucked all the moisture out of him, slowing the process of decay. By that time, what we mostly found were skeletons and it was hard to know who they were. Henry looked just like himself, only dead.
Let him play with the little girl, my father’d said. He must be lonely now, what with... But he’s got Davy and Marsh, still. It’ll be OK, Lana. What harm can it do? My mother, watching us play in the cleaned-up yard, frowning. Just kids at play, though we were of a certain age, or about to be.
The summer after we met, I started collecting fragments of old bicycles from the ruins around us, bits and pieces, straight frames, derailleurs and chains, brakes and cables and shift levers. There weren’t any straight wheels to be found, but Alix turned up one day with a little spoke wrench and we figured out how to make them straight, measuring off the hub with a piece of string. Finding tires turned out to be the really hard part, but, finally, we had two intact bicycles, freshly painted with a can of Teflon spraypaint she’d found in her father’s collapsed garage, “Federal Safety Sign Yellow” it was called, and went out for a ride.
We knew where we were going, though we didn’t tell anybody, just headed out into brilliant June sunshine, wind in our hair, pushing through the fabric of our lightweight clothing, riding north beyond the town’s boundary into the statutory green belt between Chapel Hill and Hillsborough. Up US 86, east on New Hope Church Road, past fallen houses, already overgrown, east on Old NC 10, east on the startlingly empty white concrete of I-85.
The old prefab housing tract across from the parking lot to this particular division of Eno River State Park, eight miles from the center of Chapel Hill, was simply gone. You could see where the little roads had been, the weedy green tangles of yards, big, brown squares where the foundations had been. We leaned our bikes against tattered and bark-scraped trees, trees damaged, perhaps, by whatever had taken the houses, and stood, holding hands, the way we always did in the face of something... well, scary, and Alix whispered, “Maybe they just blew away...” Blew away. On a wind of fire.
We hid the bikes, chained them to trees back a little ways in the woods, and walked down an overgrown path. Strange to see it like this, so abandoned. It’d been no more than two years since the last time someone had mowed this path, but the underbrush was closing in already. And you could tell no one had been walking here lately.
The path goes down to the Eno River, choked with boulders and weeds, and that’s where you’re supposed to stop, walk around, commune with nature. But if you take the old path up the bluffs, follow them back away from the river a little ways...
Hell, I half expected to find the old quarry pit full of screaming kids, teenagers, college students, the occasional arrested-development adult. It’s been here for centuries, rainwater-ecology long ago established, filled to the brim with clear, cold, faintly-green-tinged water.
I don’t know where the silvery little fish came from. They’re the same kind you see in the river, so maybe people caught them, brought them up and threw them in. I think they live on the algae and bugs. And, of course, all the popcorn that gets spilled in the water. Used to get spilled in the water.
Now, Alix and I stood holding hands, looking on our empty little lake, wondering if anyone would ever come here again. The survivors, just maybe, had something more important to do than come swimming in the old quarry. Or maybe all the people who used to come here are dead.
Alix was shivering against my side, though the day was already hot, promising the sort of roasting afternoon you expected from a North Carolina summer. You could hear bugs buzzing all around, bird noises, the soft, distant bubbling of water in the river.
But nothing human. In the old days, the soft roar of the I-85 traffic was always there.
Finally, we walked around the rim of the pit to the far side, to our favorite diving spot, a sheer mud cliff about six meters high, topped by gnarly, sap-stained pine trees, ground covered with a soft brown carpet of old needles. The knotted rope was still there, still hanging down from a tree on the cliff’s edge, dangling down to the water, the way back up after you’d made your dive.
Nothing to do then but pretend it was the old days, that everything was as it had been. So quiet here though...
We started to get undressed, I stripping down to the bathing trunks I’d worn under my jeans, turning to look out across the water. And I suddenly realized, like a small electric shock, that Alix was standing beside me in her white underclothes.
I turned to stare, eyes trying hard to shy away, and said, “Um. Where’s your bathing suit?” She was very pretty like this, slim, cotton briefs clinging to narrow, girlish hips, wearing an elastic brassiere that had, more or less, nothing to contain.
She grinned, eyes a little skittish as well, and said, “Don’t be silly, Athy. Bathing suits are for when grown-ups are around.” She gestured out at the empty quarry pond. It occurred to me to wonder how she’d known no one else would be here, but...
She put her hand behind her back and undid the bra, dropped it on the pile with the rest of her clothes, then skinned out of the briefs. “Well?”
Well. I pulled down my trunks and stepped out of them, suddenly feeling very heavy and clumsy indeed, unbalanced, not quite able to trip and fall, and my face felt like it was made out of cold clay.
Alix said, “You’re blushing, Athy.”
Yeah. “So are you...”
I don’t think I ever had another moment when I thought a woman was so beautiful, though Alix was hardly more than a girl. She turned then, laughing out loud, ran and dove over the cliff, and I stood, lead-footed, rooted in time and space, watching her white body fall toward the pale green water, watched her disappear with hardly a splash and surface a few meters away.
She whipped the hair away from her face and grinned up at me. “Come on! It’s great!”“
I ran and jumped, fell twisting through the air, and hit the water like a falling boulder. When I surfaced, sputtering, Alix had already swum up to me
, rubbing water out of her eyes, grinning. “You made a pretty big splash, Athy...”
“Sorry.”
She reached out and held onto my shoulders then, and I was almost afraid to move, afraid to breathe, to do anything that would spoil the moment, though I really had only a boy’s shallow idea of what was going on. We played away the afternoon, swimming, frolicking on the shore, diving again and again, sometimes just looking at each other, and went home at dusk, exhausted, to parents who frowned and shook their heads.
In the darkness, walking down the path beside Bolin Creek, I said, “You remember when we used to go swimming at the old quarry?”
Long silence, wind in the trees, faint trickling sound of water in the half-empty creek, buffering the soft, distant sound of our footfalls, Alix’s hand tightening on mine for just a moment. “Yes...”
Far away, Alix lost in memory.
o0o
Dinner came and went, of its own accord, as so many things do, Oddny and Lank greeting us at the door, Lank smiling, Oddny hugging Alix briefly, taking her by the hand and leading her into the parlor, where my family had some nice old furniture, none of it things I remembered from before the Invasion.
My father came out and sat with us while we talked, nodding, trying not to frown, failing, making us all feel uncomfortable and stiff. My mother stayed out in the kitchen, the clanking of utensils, pots and pans forming a backdrop as we talked. After a while, Oddny stood, put her hand briefly on Alix’s shoulder, then went in to help her set up.
While we waited and talked, Alix sat by my side on the sofa, her flank pressed against mine, seeming to grow closer, almost shrinking against me, as time passed.
Dinner. My mother, I think, outdoing herself. That fine, salt-spicy Italocreole chicken I remembered from my childhood, made from spices that must be hard to get. Candied carrots with pineapple and brown sugar. A sharp, savory bread stuffing, greasy with chicken fat. A bitter salad of chicory, watercress and, to my surprise, pale red raddicchio. No Brussels sprouts, though we’d always eaten them with this particular chicken dish.
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