Brutal Women (3 page)

The vessel was housed inside the
cell of one of the dormitory mothers.

“She cannot sleep with the others,”
they told me. “She cries out at night and wakes them. It is because of the
dreams.” Their desert sculpted faces tilted up to look at me, and I pretended
not to see the red dust crusted in the wrinkles of their dark faces.

There was no door to the cell. I
saw the vessel squeezed up into one corner of the room, one sun-browned arm
flung across her face; her skinny, scabby legs pulled up close to her chest.
The brown sheet was rumpled. Her hair was black, straight, unwashed. I wondered
if they had deloused her before I arrived.

“Leave me with the vessel,” I said,
and the dormitory mothers nodded and scurried back out to attend the vessels
working in the starch fields and irrigation ditches.

The dormitory floor was hard and
smooth. I stepped into the cell, stood only a few inches from the bed. A base
creature, I thought. But she can dream, they told me.

“Vessel?” I said. “What do they
call you?”

She lifted her skinny head. I
wondered if the dormitory mothers were feeding her. She looked close to
breeding age. The Kell would come for her soon.

“Daeva Four,” she said, and her
voice was soft, afraid, childish. “I am told that you dream.”

Her eyes were not brown; they were
black, black like the bottom of a deep well. Tears flowed out from the edges of
her black eyes, made lazy lines in the fine coat of red dust on her brown face.

“What do you dream?” I said.

More tears. More wet. More base
emotion.

“I dream of the ocean,” she said.

Of course you do, I thought. That
is where all your kind will end. But this vessel had never seen the ocean. The
ocean was on the other side of the world, and none but the Kell and androgynies
had ever seen the ocean. I had only read of it.

“And what does the ocean look
like?” I said.

“It’s all water,” she said, “ditch
water that’s blue, not red, not brown, not muddy. All blue. And things live
there, inside it.”

“If you can dream, Daeva Four, then
you can lie.” The ocean was not so impossible a thing for her to believe she
had seen. The Kell could have discussed it among themselves the last time they
came to pick out the breeders from the ripened vessels.

But a vessel that could dream could
do more than just dream. She could tell her own stories. She could lie.

I told her to tell me a story that
wasn’t true.

Her big black eyes stared up at me,
and the tears ceased, and I watched as the watery trails began to dry on her
cheeks. I wondered again if she had been deloused.

“You want me to lie?” she said, and
there was awe in her voice.

“If you can,” I said.

“Any lie?” she said.

“Any lie.”

Her gaze met mine, that wet, onyx
black gaze that was so repulsive, so other, and she said, “I’m a woman.”

Some part of me recoiled at that
word. “Who told you that word?” I said, and my voice came out loud, far louder
than I expected, and I was overwhelmed by a feeling of apprehension. I did not
allow myself to recognize why, not then.

This was not just a vessel that
could lie. She was a vessel who remembered a dead past.

“It’s a word I dreamed,” she said,
and she pushed herself up against the wall, clasped her arms around her knees,
hugged them closer to her chest. I saw the tears begin to return to her eyes.
Not again, I thought. No more wet weakness.

“Fine,” I said, and talked in a
soft, even voice now, as I would talk to any other fearful creature. “Fine, it
is a word you dreamed.”

She dreams of oceans and -- I could
not even think the other word without shuddering. Daeva Four could dream. Daeva
Four could remember, and she could probably lie as well.

I knew I had to take her to the
Kell.

The vessel had not been deloused. I
learned this from the dormitory mothers when I asked that they wash her and
prepare her for transport. I went back to my vehicle and sprayed myself in
anti-parasitic spray as I called the androgynies at the city center and told
them Daeva Four could dream. They arranged a meeting with the Kell city leader
Ro Bhavesh.

The dormitory mothers presented the
washed vessel to me. I put her in the vehicle. I had to sit across from her. My
skin crawled.

The vehicle closed, the steely
compound gate opened, and I entered our destination into the navigation
console. All this time the vessel stared at me. She began to cry. I ignored
her.

I would need a bath and
disinfectant rinse, and with that I would wash away the last trace of this
encounter with the vessels and the desert and the dusty, wrinkled faces of the
dormitory mothers. Ro Bhavesh would deal with this vessel. Daeva Four was a
Kell complication, not a man’s.

The Kell, however, still did not
appear to understand that I was better utilized elsewhere. When our vehicle
arrived, two tall androgynies met me on the landing space and said, “You’re to
take the vessel to Ro Bhavesh.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but
androgynies never meet the protestings of a man with anything more than stoic
androgynous silence. I have much experience with this. I closed my mouth.

The sky in Sapan that day was
lavender, the leaves of the slender trees lining the sidewalks an
orange-peppered yellow. Tomorrow I hoped they would be green. The orange made
me think of the sun in the desert. Here in Sapan the streets were white, the
buildings blue and gray and deep green, and the vessel and I were the only
things here that carried dirt and contagion with us. The city air ate away at
that contamination as I entered. I felt the conditioning system pump air out
around me and the vessel, the microscopic machinated nits devouring the dust
and decay on my face and arms and clothing. The vessel scratched absently at
her skin, as if she sensed the cleansing of her body’s filth.

Clerks and officials and
smooth-faced boys selling sealed containers of starches stared as the vessel
and I passed. I almost hoped no one would guess that she traveled with me, but
she stayed so close behind that she could belong to no one else.

I came to Ro Bhavesh’s spherical
white tower and was admitted without trouble. The vessel and I were ushered
into the Kell’s meeting room by two androgynies. We stood in front of Ro
Bhavesh. All this time the vessel had said nothing, but when she saw Ro Bhavesh
seated in the tall white sculpted chair her black eyes grew wide and she cried
out, “I saw you in my dream!”

Ro Bhavesh smiled. I had seen few
Kell smile, and when this one did, it struck me that seeing this Kell smile was
very pleasing to the eye. The Kell are not so different from men in appearance,
and all that separates them from us is their lack of fluid and excretion. No
sweat, no blood, certainly no tears. The Kell are the ascendant; they are all
that the base vessels are not and never will be.

Standing before this tall, slender
Kell, its face so smooth and impassive, the eyes without moist sheen, the hair
orange and wrapped about the scalp with impeccable precision, I remembered that
I stood now somewhere between Kell and vessel, between ascendance and baseness,
and I hated this vessel again for her presence, and her dreams, and her lies.

“You say you saw me in a dream,
vessel?” Ro Bhavesh said.

“I dreamed you, and you told me
stories,” the vessel said.

“And what stories did I tell?” Ro
Bhavesh said.

“You told me stories of women,” the
vessel said.

I watched the smile fade from Ro
Bhavesh’s clean, ageless face. For a moment, I wondered if I should not have
brought the vessel here. I wondered if I should have destroyed her in the
desert.

“I apologize,” I said. “I have
heard no vessel utter such a word. I believed it would be -”

The Kell held up its hand. “Enough,
Kadru. Am I correct in saying that you are intimately familiar with cases such
as this?”

I thought of the desert, and of my
youth - and again, my skin crawled. “I have. I excelled at the selection of
breeders, laborers, and genetic flaws. I did my work well, and was rewarded for
it. I enjoy my place in the city.”

And if you send me out into the
desert again, I will perish, I thought, but I did not alter my expression.

“What do you make of this vessel,
then?” Ro Bhavesh said, and its gaze stayed on the vessel who stared back at
it.

“From what she says it appears she
is not a teller of lies or stories so much as she is a teller of past truth.
Most vessels are incapable of lies -- past or present -- unless they are
persuaded to believe them as truth, but I have known genetic anomalies who
carry the past within them, passed down from one casting to the next. She is a
fourth casting. Someone felt it necessary to continue the breeding and growth
of this mix beyond one casting. Perhaps they hoped this genetic storage of
racial memory would manifest itself.” I hesitated. “She dreamed also of the
ocean.”

Ro Bhavesh looked at me. I saw only
cold Kell calculation in its face, the efficient rational thought of a
mechanized ascendant. “Perhaps, then, we should take her there, and discover
how much truth of the past she knows.”

My first thought was to question
its use of the term “we.” My second thought was to wonder why Ro Bhavesh felt
it necessary to question a vessel at the ocean. Did it expect to receive
different answers in Sapan than it would receive at the ocean?

“Ro Bhavesh,” I said, “do you think
it is necessary to -”

“You question too much,” Ro Bhavesh
said.

The voice was without emotion,
without inflection, but I was chilled by it. Ro Bhavesh nodded. It was decided.
I was to travel to the ocean.

Ro Bhavesh led me to its private
vehicle. It told the vessel to sit beside me and brought three androgynies to
assist in our descent. We plunged away from Sapan and spiraled downward to the
red-blue world below.

This place they call the ocean I
had never seen before. Yes, I had read that it was a vast expanse of water
colored by the photosynthetic vegetation that existed within it, but I did not
expect that it made noise. I did not expect it to move. This colored water
rippled and thrashed and moaned as if it were a living creature, condemned for
all eternity to lap at the sand and feed upon itself.

In truth, I had never wanted to see
the ocean. It was here the Kell brought the ripened vessels, and here the
vessels produced, bled, and died. It was here Ro Bhavesh told the androgynies
to land the vehicle. I stepped out last. We stood somewhere on the coast along
a paved walk. In the distance, sitting low and gray along the earth, were the
breeding compounds. They stretched out all along the coastline and behind us in
precise grid-like patterns. The only place one could look and not see these
monstrous blemishes was the ocean. So I gazed out at the ocean, the vast
roiling wetness that I knew did not end at the horizon.

“Have you dreamed of this place?”
Ro Bhavesh asked the vessel.

The vessel stood beside me, and
she, too, gazed not at the compounds but at the ocean. “Oh yes,” the vessel
said. “I see this place.” She hesitated. “But when I see it I scream.”

I still could not look at the
compounds. I could not look at Ro Bhavesh. In the desert, it is the sun you
notice most, that huge orange orb that blankets the world in orange light, but
here it is the feel of the wind you come away with; it is the stink of the
ocean you remember, the salty wetness that clings to your skin and clothing, a
wetness you cannot wash away until you ascend to Sapan.

“And why do you scream?” Ro Bhavesh
asked.

The vessel now turned to gaze over
at me with eyes so deep and black, like staring into a hole in the sky. I
turned to her then, to this thing that had brought me to the desert and the
ocean in the same day. I had to look at her now because she knew the truth, and
was not afraid to speak it. She was not afraid of the truth because she had
nothing to forfeit by its telling.

“I dream that the Kell take me
here,” she said. “I dream that they put things inside me, and these things
grow, and the Kell rip them out and put in more. And it happens every day. I
can smell the ocean but I can’t see it.”

“She has most certainly heard the
Kell say something of this place,” I said, but the wind took away the words,
and the wind caught at my hair and pulled it loose from the tight, efficient
style I had carefully maintained. It is not Kell hair I have, nor Kell hair I
ever will have. Ro Bhavesh said, “But you said you dream of women, a base
collective term for those of the female sex.”

“That’s a filthy word,” I said, and
turned to look at Ro Bhavesh. “Why take her here? Why show her this place? This
is an unnecessary measure, and dangerous. If it’s the genetically passed memory
the Kell want to replicate, initiate another casting. There is no purpose to
bringing her -”

“Do you question the Kell?” Ro
Bhavesh said, and I saw more cold Kell calculation behind its blank stare.

“I have never questioned the Kell,”
I said.

“You have not yet over-questioned,”
Ro Bhavesh said. “That is why you are still living in Sapan. That is why you do
not reside here.”

I could offer no reply to those
words but silence. To speak more would be to admit truth.

“These are not dreams you tell,” Ro
Bhavesh said to the vessel. “These are the memories of a dead casting. How much
do you remember?”

The vessel gazed up at Ro Bhavesh,
and I saw the wetness in her eyes. “I dream about women and men and things that
weren’t people. Things like you that killed all the men. Made women into
vessels. The smart women you find, the ones who can lie and dream, you don’t
call them women. You can’t call them women because they aren’t, really. They
can’t carry anything anymore. You fix that. You use them for cities. And you
call them men.”