A Separate War and Other Stories (10 page)

He found peace among the wallabies and dingoes. A kangaroo began to follow him around, and he accepted it as a pet, sharing his rehydrated KFC and fish and chips with it.

Life was a pleasantly sterile and objectless quest. Custer and his kangaroo quartered the outback, turning over rocks just to bother the things underneath. The kangaroo was loyal, which was a liability; but at least it couldn't talk, and its attachment to Custer was transparently selfish, so they got along. He taught it how to beg, and, by not rewarding it, taught it how to whimper.

One day, like Robinson Crusoe, he found footprints. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, he hastened in the opposite direction.

But the footprinter had been watching him for some time, and outsmarted him. Knowing he would be gone all day, she had started miles away, walking backwards by his camp, and knew that his instinct for hermitage would lead him directly, perversely, back into her cave.

Parky Gumma had decided to become a hermit, too, after she read about Custer's audacious gesture. But after about a year she wanted a bath, and someone to love her so she wouldn't die, in that order. So under the wheeling Milky Way, on the eve of the thirty-first century, she stalked backwards to her cave and squandered a month's worth of water sluicing her body, which was unremarkable except for the fact that it was clean and the only female one in two hundred thousand square miles.

Parky left herself unclothed and squeaky clean, carefully perched on a camp stool, waiting for Custer's curiosity and misanthropy to lead him back to her keep. He crept in a couple of hours after sunrise.

She stood up and spread her arms, and his pet kangaroo boinged away in terror. Custer himself was paralyzed by a mixture of conflicting impulses. He had seen pictures of naked women, but never one actually in the flesh, and honestly didn't know what to do.

Parky showed him.

The rest is the unmaking of history. That Parky had admired him and followed him into the desert was even more endearing than the slip and slide that she demonstrated for him after she washed him up. But that was revolutionary, too. Custer had to admit that a year or a century or a millennium of that would be better than keeling over and having dingos tear up your corpse and spread your bones over the uncaring sands.

So this is Custer's story, and ours. He never did get around to liking baths, so you couldn't say that love conquers all. But it could still conquer death.

(1998)

I am writing this memoir in the language of England, an ancient land of Earth, whose tales and songs White Hill valued. She was fascinated by human culture in the days before machines—not just thinking machines, but working ones; when things got done by the straining muscles of humans and animals.

Neither of us was born on Earth. Not many people were, in those days. It was a desert planet then, ravaged in the twelfth year of what they would call the Last War. When we met, that war had been going for over four hundred years, and had moved out of Sol Space altogether, or so we thought.

Some cultures had other names for the conflict. My parent, who fought the century before I did, always called it the Extermination, and their name for the enemy was “roach,” or at least that's as close as English allows. We called the enemy an approximation of their own word for themselves, Fwndyri, which was uglier to us. I still have no love for them, but have no reason to make the effort. It would be easier to love a roach. At least we have a common ancestor. And we accompanied one another into space.

One mixed blessing we got from the war was a loose form of interstellar government, the Council of Worlds. There had been individual treaties before, but an overall organization had always seemed unlikely, since no two inhabited systems are less than three light-years apart, and several of them are over fifty. You can't defeat Einstein; that makes more than a century between “How are you?” and “Fine.”

The Council of Worlds was headquartered on Earth, an unlikely and unlovely place, if centrally located. There were fewer than ten thousand people living on the blighted planet then, an odd mix of politicians, religious extremists, and academics, mostly. Almost all of them under glass. Tourists flowed through the domed-over ruins, but not many stayed long. The planet was still very dangerous over all of its unprotected surface, since the Fwndyri had thoroughly seeded it with nanophages. Those were submicroscopic constructs that sought out concentrations of human DNA. Once under the skin, they would reproduce at a geometric rate, deconstructing the body, cell by cell, building new nanophages. A person might complain of a headache and lie down, and a few hours later there would be nothing but a dry skeleton, lying in dust. When the humans were all dead, they mutated and went after DNA in general, and sterilized the world.

White Hill and I were “bred” for immunity to the nanophages. Our DNA winds backwards, as was the case with many people born or created after that stage of the war. So we could actually go through the elaborate airlocks and step out onto the blasted surface unprotected.

I didn't like her at first. We were competitors, and aliens to one another.

When I worked through the final airlock cycle, for my first moment on the actual surface of Earth, she was waiting outside, sitting in meditation on a large flat rock that shimmered in the heat. One had to admit she was beautiful in a startling way, clad only in a glistening pattern of blue and green body paint. Everything else around was grey and black, including the hard-packed talcum that had once been a mighty jungle, Brazil. The dome behind me was a mirror of grey and black and cobalt sky.

“Welcome home,” she said. “You're Water Man.”

She inflected it properly, which surprised me. “You're from Petros?”

“Of course not.” She spread her arms and looked down at her body. Our women always cover at least one of their breasts, let alone their genitals. “Galan, an island on Seldene. I've studied your cultures, a little language.”

“You don't dress like that on Seldene, either.” Not anywhere I'd been on the planet.

“Only at the beach. It's so warm here.” I had to agree. Before I came out, they'd told me it was the hottest autumn on record. I took off my robe and folded it and left it by the door, with the sealed food box they had given me. I joined her on the rock, which was tilted away from the sun and reasonably cool.

She had a slight fragrance of lavender, perhaps from the body paint. We touched hands. “My name is White Hill. Zephyr-meadow-torrent.”

“Where are the others?” I asked. Twenty-nine artists had been invited; one from each inhabited world. The people who had met me inside said I was the nineteenth to show up.

“Most of them traveling. Going from dome to dome for inspiration.”

“You've already been around?”

“No.” She reached down with her toe and scraped a curved line on the hard-baked ground. “All the story's here, anywhere. It isn't really about history or culture.”

Her open posture would have been shockingly sexual at home, but this was not home. “Did you visit my world when you were studying it?”

“No, no money, at the time. I did get there a few years ago.” She smiled at me. “It was almost as beautiful as I'd imagined it.” She said three words in Petrosian. You couldn't say it precisely in English, which doesn't have a palindromic mood:
Dreams feed art and art feeds dreams.

“When you came to Seldene I was young, too young to study with you. I've learned a lot from your sculpture, though.”

“How young can you be?” To earn this honor, I did not say.

“In Earth years, about seventy awake. More than one-forty-five in time-squeeze.”

I struggled with the arithmetic. Petros and Seldene were 22 light-years apart; that's about 45 years' squeeze. Earth is, what, a little less than 40 light-years from her planet. That leaves enough gone time for someplace about 25 light-years from Petros, and back.

She tapped me on the knee, and I flinched. “Don't overheat your brain. I made a triangle; went to ThetaKent after your world.”

“Really? When I was there?”

“No, I missed you by less than a year. I was disappointed. You were why I went.” She made a palindrome in my language:
Predator becomes prey becomes predator?
“So here we are. Perhaps I can still learn from you.”

I didn't much care for her tone of voice, but I said the obvious: “I'm more likely to learn from you.”

“Oh, I don't think so.” She smiled in a measured way. “You don't have much to learn.”

Or much I could, or would, learn. “Have you been down to the water?”

“Once.” She slid off the rock and dusted herself, spanking. “It's interesting. Doesn't look real.” I picked up the food box and followed her down a sort of path that led us into low ruins. She drank some of my water, apologetic; hers was hot enough to brew tea.

“First body?” I asked.

“I'm not tired of it yet.” She gave me a sideways look, amused. “You must be on your fourth or fifth.”

“I go through a dozen a year.” She laughed. “Actually, it's still my second. I hung on to the first too long.”

“I read about that, the accident. That must have been horrible.”

“Comes with the medium. I should take up the flute.” I had been making a “controlled” fracture in a large boulder and set off the charges prematurely, by dropping the detonator. Part of the huge rock rolled over onto me, crushing my body from the hips down. It was a remote area, and by the time help arrived I had been dead for several minutes, from pain as much as anything else. “It affected all of my work, of course. I can't even look at some of the things I did the first few years I had this body.”

“They are hard to look at,” she said. “Not to say they aren't well-done, and beautiful, in their way.”

“As what is not? In its way.” We came to the first building ruins and stopped. “Not all of this is weathering. Even in four hundred years.” If you studied the rubble, you could reconstruct part of the design. Primitive but sturdy, concrete reinforced with composite rods. “Somebody came in here with heavy equipment or explosives. They never actually fought on Earth, I thought.”

“They say not.” She picked up an irregular brick with a rod through it. “Rage, I suppose. Once people knew that no one was going to live.”

“It's hard to imagine.” The records are chaotic. Evidently the first people died two or three days after the nanophages were introduced, and no one on Earth was alive a week later. “Not hard to understand, though. The need to break something.” I remembered the inchoate anger I felt as I squirmed there helpless, dying from
sculpture
, of all things. Anger at the rock, the fates. Not at my own inattention and clumsiness.

“They had a poem about that,” she said. “‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'”

“Somebody actually wrote something during the nanoplague?”

“Oh, no. A thousand years before. Twelve hundred.” She squatted suddenly and brushed at a fragment that had two letters on it. “I wonder if this was some sort of official building. Or a shrine or church.” She pointed along the curved row of shattered bricks that spilled into the street. “That looks like it was some kind of decoration, a gable over the entrance.” She tiptoed through the rubble toward the far end of the arc, studying what was written on the faceup pieces. The posture, standing on the balls of her feet, made her slim body even more attractive, as she must have known. My own body began to respond in a way inappropriate for a man more than three times her age. Foolish, even though that particular part is not so old. I willed it down before she could see.

“It's a language I don't know,” she said. “Not Portuguese; looks like Latin. A Christian church, probably, Catholic.”

“They used water in their religion,” I remembered. “Is that why it's close to the sea?”

“They were everywhere: sea, mountains, orbit. They got to Petros?”

“We still have some. I've never met one, but they have a church in New Haven.”

“As who doesn't?” She pointed up a road. “Come on. The beach is just over the rise here.”

I could smell it before I saw it. It wasn't an ocean smell; it was dry, slightly choking.

We turned a corner and I stood staring. “It's a deep blue farther out,” she said, “and so clear you can see hundreds of metras down.” Here the water was thick and brown, the surf foaming heavily like a giant's chocolate drink, mud piled in baked windrows along the beach. “This used to be soil?”

She nodded. “There's a huge river that cuts this continent in half, the Amazon. When the plants died, there was nothing to hold the soil in place.” She tugged me forward. “Do you swim? Come on.”

“Swim in
that
? It's filthy.”

“No, it's perfectly sterile. Besides, I have to pee.” Well, I couldn't argue with that. I left the box on a high fragment of fallen wall and followed her. When we got to the beach, she broke into a run. I walked slowly and watched her gracile body, instead, and waded into the slippery heavy surf. When it was deep enough to swim, I plowed my way out to where she was bobbing. The water was too hot to be pleasant, and breathing was somewhat difficult. Carbon dioxide, I supposed, with a tang of halogen.

We floated together for a while, comparing this soup to bodies of water on our planets and ThetaKent. It was tiring, more from the water's heat and bad air than exertion, so we swam back in.

We dried in the blistering sun for a few minutes and then took the food box and moved to the shade of a beachside ruin. Two walls had fallen in together, to make a sort of concrete tent.