Grazing The Long Acre (29 page)

“Of course,” said I. “Speranza can defend herself, if she has to.”

I let us into a smaller hangar, through a lock on the cavern wall, and filled it with air and pressure; and lights. We were completely alone. Left Speranza is a natural object, a hollowed asteroid. Right is artificial, and it’s a dangerous place for sentient bipeds. The proximity of the torus can have unpredictable and bizarre effects, not to mention the tissue-frying radiation that washes through at random intervals. But we would be fine for a short while. We fixed tethers, opened our faceplates and hunkered down, gecko-padded boot soles clinging to the arbitrary “floor.”

“I thought you were angels,” he remarked, shyly. “The weapons, all of that, it seems beneath you. Doesn’t your codename, “Debra” mean an angel? Aren’t you all messengers, come to us from the Mighty Void?”

‘Mighty Void’ was a Balas/Shet term meaning something like God.

 “No…Deborah was a judge, in Israel. I’m just human Baal. I’m a person with numinal intelligence, the same kind of being as you are; like all the KiAn.”

I could see that the harsh environment of Right Speranza moved him, as it did me. There was a mysterious peace and truth in being here, in the cold dark, breathing borrowed air. He was pondering: open and serious.

“Debra…? Do you believe in the Diaspora?”

“I believe in the Weak Theory,” I said. “I don’t believe we’re all descended from the same Blue Planet hominid, the mysterious original starfarers, precursors of homo sapiens. I think we’re the same because we grew under the same constraints: time, gravity, hydrogen bonds; the nature of water, the nature of carbon—”

“But instantaneous transit was invented on the Blue Planet,” he protested, unwilling to lose his romantic vision.

“Only the prototype. It took hundreds of years, and a lot of outside help, before we had anything like viable interstellar travel—”

Baal had other people to understand the technology for him. He was building castles in the air, dreaming of his future. “Does everyone on the Blue speak English?”

“Not at all. They mostly speak a language called
putonghua
; which means ‘common speech,’ as if they were the only people in the galaxy. Blues are as insular as the KiAn, believe me, when they’re at home. When you work for the DP, you change your ideas; it happens to everyone. I’m still an Englishwoman, and
mi naño
Pelé is still a man of Ecuador.

“I know!,” he broke in, eagerly, “I felt that. I
like
that in you!”

“But we skip the middle term. The World Government of our single planet doesn’t mean the same as it did.” I grinned at him. “Hey, I didn’t bring you here for a lecture. This is what I wanted to show you. See the pods?”

He looked around us, slowly, with a connoisseur’s eye. He could see what the pods were. They were Aleutian-build, the revolutionary leap forward: vehicles that could pass through the mind/matter barrier. An end to those dreary transit lounges, true starflight, the whole grail: and only the Aleutians knew how it was done.

“Like to take one out for a spin?”

“You’re kidding!” cried Baal, his eyes alight.

“No I’m not. We’ll take a two man pod. How about it?”

He saw that I was serious, which gave him pause. “How can we? The systems won’t allow it. This hangar has to be under military security.”

“I
am
military security, Baal. So is Pelé. What did you think we were? Kindergarten teachers? Trust me, I have access, there’ll be no questions asked.”

He laughed. He knew there was something strange going on, but he didn’t care: he trusted me. I glimpsed myself as a substitute for Tiamaat, glimpsed the relationship he should have had with his partner. Not sexual, but predation-based: a playful tussle, sparring partners. But Tiamaat had not wanted to be his sidekick—

We took a pod. Once we were inside I sealed us off from Speranza, and we lay side by side in the couches, two narrow beds in a torpedo shell: an interstellar sports car, how right for this lordly boy. I checked his hook-ups, and secured my own..

“Where are we going?”

“Oh, just around the block.”

His vital signs were in my eyes, his whole being was quivering in excitement, and I was glad. The lids closed, we were translated into code, we and our pod were injected into the torus, in the form of a triple stream of pure information, divided and shooting around the ring to meet itself, and collide—

I sat up, in a lucent gloom. The other bed’s seal opened, and Baal sat up beside me. We were both still suited, with open faceplates. Our beds shaped themselves into pilot and co-pilot couches, and we faced what seemed an unmediated view of the deep space outside. Bulwarks and banks of glittering instruments carved up the panorama: I saw Baal’s glance flash over the panels greedily, longing to be piloting this little ship for real. Then he saw the yellow primary, a white hole in black absence; and its brilliant, distant partner. He saw the pinpricks of other formations that meant nothing much to me, and he knew where I had brought him. We could not see the planet, it was entirely dark from this view. But in our foreground the massive beams of space-to-space lasers were playing: shepherding plasma particles into a shell that would hold the recovering atmosphere in place.

To say that KiAn had been flayed alive was no metaphor. The people still living on the surface were in some kind of hell. But it could be saved.

“None of the machinery is strictly material,” I said, “in any normal sense. It was couriered here, as information, in the living minds of the people who are now on station. We can’t see them, but they’re around, in pods like this one. It will all disintegrate, when the repairs are done. But the skin of your world will be whole again, it won’t need to be held in place.”

The KiAn don’t cry, but I was so close to him, in the place where we were, that I felt his tears. “
Why
are you doing this?” he whispered. “You must be angels, or why are you saving us, what have we done to deserve this?”

“The usual reasons,” I said. “Market forces, political leverage, power play.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you, Baal. Except that the Ki and the An have numinal intelligence. You are like us, and we have so few brothers and sisters. Once we’d found you, we couldn’t bear to lose you.”

I let him gaze, for a long moment without duration.

“I wanted you to see this.”

I stepped out of my pilot’s couch and stood braced: one hand gecko-padded to the inner shell, while I used the instruments to set the pod to self-destruct. The eject beacon started up, direct cortical warning that my mind read as a screaming siren—

“Now I’m going back to Speranza. But you’re not.”

The fine young cannibal took a moment to react. The pupils in his tawny eyes widened amazingly when found that he was paralysed; and his capsule couldn’t close.

“Is this a dream?”

“Not quite. It’s a confabulation. It’s what happens when you stay conscious in transit. The mind invents a stream of environments, events. The restoration of KiAn is real, Baal. It will happen. We can see it ‘now’ because we’re in non-duration, we’re experiencing the simultaneity. In reality—if that makes any sense, language hates these situations—we’re still zipping around the torus. But when the confabulation breaks up you’ll still be in deep space and about to die.”

I did not need to tell him why I was doing this. He was no fool, he knew why he had to go. But his mind was still working, fighting—

“Speranza is a four-space mapped environment. You can’t do this and go back alone. The system knows you were with me, every moment. The record can’t be changed, no way, without the tampering leaving a trace.”

“True. But I am one of those rare people who can change the information. You’ve heard fairytales about us, the Blues who have super-powers? I’m not an angel, Baal. Actually it’s a capital crime to be what I am, where I come from. But Speranza understands me. Speranza uses me.”

“Ah!,” he cried. “I knew it, I felt it. We are the same!”

When I recovered self-consciousness I was in my room, alone. Earlier in the day Baal had claimed he needed a nap. After a couple of hours I’d become suspicious, checked for his signs and found him missing: gone from the SV Facility screen. I’d been trying to trace him when Right Speranza had detected a pod, with the An leader on board, firing up. The system had warned him to desist. Baal had carried on, and paid high price for his attempted joyride. The injection had failed, both Baal and one fabulous Aleutian-build pod had been annihilated.

Remembering this much gave me an appalling headache—the same aching awfulness I imagine shapeshifters (I know of one or two) feel in their muscle and bone. I couldn’t build the bridge at all: no notion how I’d connected between this reality and the former version. I could have stepped from the dying pod straight through the wall of this pleasant, modest living space. But it didn’t matter. I would find out, and Debra would have been behaving like Debra.

Pelé came knocking. I let him in and we commiserated, both of us in shock. We’re advocates, not enforcers, there’s very little we can do if a Sensitive Visitor is really determined to go AWOL. We’d done all the right things, short of using undue force, and so had Speranza. When we’d broken the privilege locks, Baal’s room record had shown that he’d been spying out how to get access to one of those Aleutian pods. It was just too bad that he’d succeeded, and that he’d had enough skill to get himself killed. Don’t feel responsible, said Pelé. It’s not your fault. Nobody thinks that. Don’t be so sad. Always so sad, Debra: it’s not good for the brain, you should take a break. Then he started telling me that frankly, nobody would regret Baal. By An law Tiamaat could now rule alone; and if she took a partner, we could trust her not to choose another bloodthirsty atavist…I soon stopped him. I huddled there in pain, my friend holding my hand: seeing only the beautiful one, his tawny eyes at the last, his challenge and his trust; mourning my victim.

I’m a melancholy assassin. 

I did not sleep. In the grey calm of Left Speranza’s early hours, before the breakfast kiosks were awake, I took the elevator to the Customised Shelter Sector, checked in with the CSP and made my way, between the silent capsule towers, to Hopes and Dreams Park. I was disappointed that there were no refugees about. It would have been nice to see Ki children, playing fearlessly. Ki oldsters picking herbs from their windowboxes, instead of being boiled down for soup themselves. The gates of the Sacred Grove were open, so I just walked in. There was a memorial service: strictly no outsiders, but I’d had a personal message from Tiamaat saying I would be welcome. I didn’t particularly want to meet her again. I’m a superstitious assassin, I felt that she would somehow know what I had done for her. I thought I would keep to the back of whatever gathering I found, while I made my own farewell.

 The daystar’s rays had cleared the false horizon, the sun was a rumour of gold between the trees. I heard laughter, and a cry. I walked into the clearing and saw Tiamaat. She’d just made the kill. I saw her toss the small body down, drop to her haunches and take a ritual bite of raw flesh; I saw the blood on her mouth. The Ki looked on, keeping their distance in a solemn little cluster. Tiamaat transformed, splendid in her power, proud of her deed, looked up; and straight at me. I don’t know what she expected. Did she think I would be glad for her? Did she want me to know how I’d been fooled? Certainly she knew she had nothing to fear. She was only doing the same as Baal had done, and the DP had made no protest over
his
kill. I shouted, like an idiot:
Hey, stop that
! , and the whole group scattered. They vanished into the foliage, taking the body with them.

I said nothing to anyone. I had not, in fact, foreseen that Tiamaat would become a killer. I’d seen a talented young woman, who would blossom if the unfairly favoured young man was removed. I hadn’t realised that a dominant An would behave like a dominant An, irrespective of biological sex. But I was sure my employers had grasped the situation; and it didn’t matter. The long gone, harsh symbiosis between the An and the Ki, which they preserved in their rites of kingship, was not the problem. It was the modern version, the mass market in Ki meat, the intensive farms and the factories. Tiamaat would help us to get rid of those. She would embrace the new in public, whatever she believed in private.

And the fate of the Ki would change.

The news of Baal’s death had been couriered to KiAn and to the homeworlds by the time I took my transit back to the Blue. We’d started getting reactions: all positive, so to speak. Of course there would be persistent rumours that the Ki had somehow arranged Baal’s demise, but there was no harm in that. In certain situations, assassination works—as long as it is secret, or at least misattributed. It’s a far more benign tool than most alternatives; and a lot faster. I had signed off at the Social Support Office, I’d managed to avoid goodbyes. Just before I went through to the lounge I realised I hadn’t had my aura tag taken off. I had to go back, and go through
another
blessed gate; and Pelé caught me.

“Take the dreamtime,” he insisted, holding me tight. “Play some silly game, go skydiving from Angel Falls.
Please
, Debra. Don’t be conscious. You worry me.”

I wondered if he suspected what I really did for a living.

Maybe so, but he couldn’t possibly understand.

“I’ll give it serious thought,” I assured him, and kissed him goodbye.

I gave the idea of the soft option serious thought for ten paces: passed into the lounge and found my narrow bed. I lay down there, beside my fine young cannibal, the boy who had known me for what I was. His innocent eyes…I lay down with them all, and with the searing terrors they bring; all my dead remembered.

I needed to launder my soul.

THE TOMB WIFE

“In Lar’sz’ traditional society,” said the alien, “a lady would often be buried with her husband. A rather beautiful custom, don’t you think?”

 The Active Complement of the interstellar freighter stared at him, slightly alarmed. Their companion, the illustrious “passenger” who had elected to share their vigil, liked to play games with their expectations. They never knew when he was joking. Humour glinted in Sigurt’s black eyes—sharply diamond-shaped as to the rims, a curious and attractive difference from the Blue Planet oval.

“No, no! Not
buried alive
. Not like that, not at all. She would live in the tomb: she would retire there of her own free will, to spend the rest of her days in peace and solitude.” He reached a claw-like fingernail to scratch his ear. “Lar’sz nobles and peasants continued the practice well into historical times. It’s the sons of the soil and the owners of the soil who preserve old cultural features, isn’t it? And the dispossessed, of course. Refugees.”

They were gathered in the mess: seven Blue Planet humans, vital components in the freighter’s wetware: plus one celebrated alien archaeologist. The hold was laden with precious ancient artefacts from “Sigurt’s World”, on their way to an exhibition. The Cultural Ambassadors and their staff were making the crossing in dreamtime, but this black-eyed, shadow-skinned, graceful creature preferred activity. They were not clear—they weren’t good at reading the small print—whether “Sigurt” was a generic name, or whether their archaeologist was also the actual “Sigurt” who had made first contact. None of them had yet dared to ask him.

It was a pleasant, low-ceilinged saloon, decorated in silver and green, the traditional colour scheme of the young culture of interstellar transport. Light gleamed from above like sunlight through leaves, the floor had the effects of grass and mosses. They sat around a blond wood table, actually extruded ceramic fibre, that faithfully recalled polished birch. The air was fresh and sweet, the whole impression was as if they were in a roomy tent, a pavilion pitched in sunny woodland, somewhere in the Blue Planet’s beautiful temperate zones. But outdoors the blizzard raged, pitiless, unimaginable. The hum of the torus was never-ending, they no longer heard it. And if it ever stopped, that deep subliminal murmur, they would not have time to notice it was gone.

The Active Complement had just found out—Panfilo Nube, Payload Officer, had discovered the small print of the manifest, in an idle moment—that one of the pieces in the hold was supposed to be haunted. It was a tomb, but the ghost was not the official owner, so to speak. It was something called a “Tomb Wife”, some kind of ghoul associated with tombs in Lar’sz culture. Nadeem, the moody, black-browed Homeostat Commissar, had asked Sigurt—half-joking—was this spook definitely dead? They didn’t know much, but they knew that the people of Sigurt’s World were very long-lived, with a propensity for long comas when times were hard. Sigurt had answered cheerfully that one could not be absolutely sure; and hence the explanation.

 “A Tomb Wife did not provide for herself, you see,” he continued. “She was a hermit, a
sadhu
.” He smiled at Nadeem, who did not smile back. “Her family or her servants would supply food and necessities, but they never saw her. Among the peasantry of course the widow simply went to live in the graveyard, in full view of her neighbours. Her exclusion from society was formal, ritual…”

Rafael, the young Assistant Navigator, frowned uneasily. “But how can you say you’re not absolutely sure she’s dead? The relics down there are thousands of years old, aren’t they? I don’t mind, I’d just like to know. A ghost is cool, but a thing that lives in a tomb and isn’t dead, well—”

In a starship’s psychological topography, the hold is always
down
. Nobody laughed. Rafe suffered from transit nightmares, an affliction as crippling as seasickness—but it didn’t affect his efficiency, or his passion for this strange ocean.

“I think we can
assume
she’s dead,” said the mischievous alien. “In the records of Tene’Lar’sznh, the royal house to which this princess belonged, it’s noted that the food-offerings first went untouched about fifteen hundred years ago, our time. That’s about four thousand of Blue years, I think?”

The Active Complement nodded hurriedly, in unison. Vast timescales made them nervous. A little less, thought Elen, the Navigator. She was intimately aware of the relation between a Blue Planet “year” and the same period for Sigurt’s planet; as she was aware of every detail of the impossible equations of this journey. She wanted to put Sigurt right, but how would she reach the end of that sentence? But
when
, in what relation, at what particular moment? She closed the floodgates with an effort.

“The food went untouched?” she repeated. “And that’s how they knew? So, what did they do, when a Tomb Wife’s food ‘went untouched’?”

“Nothing at all.” Sigurt’s pointed teeth flashed: the modified aggression of a grin, which seemed to be a constant of humanoid life. “How quick of you, Elen, you’re exactly right. A lady of rank did not allow herself to be seen, once she’d taken up residence. Her servants or family would continue to supply her needs, but they were forbidden, by the lady’s own will and testament, to go looking for her, and the tomb could be a large and complex building. Nobody would know
when, precisely
, the offerings became offerings to the dead.” He paused. “Isn’t that beautiful? After a year—or thereabouts, depending on the liturgical calendar—the undertakers were allowed inside. The lady’s remains would be found and there’d be a funeral. In the case of our princess, however, legend has it that no remains were ever recovered. And that is how this particular tomb became known as ‘haunted.’”

“She probably legged it one dark night,” decided Rafe, with relief: and then blushed. “Uh, sorry if that’s a poor taste idea, Sigurt, no offence.”

“None taken.”

“Aren’t
you
a Lar’sz’ian, Sigurt?” wondered Carter, the burly ship’s doctor; who wore the captain’s armband. “Larziote, Larzy-ite, however you say it?” Carter was one of those people who have to assert themselves, in the presence of celebrity or renown. He had a horror of showing deference to anything or anyone.

 For a moment the alien bristled, a startled double-take of affront, thought Elen (although she couldn’t be sure). The Lar’sz’ were now (when is
now
, where is
now
?) an impoverished, short-lived remnant. The famous tombs, temples, ruins, were scattered over scratch-dirt, subsistence farming desert country. Maybe it was like telling a Brazilian you’d thought he was Portugese.

 “My family has Tene’Lar’t ancestry, but it’s a long way back.”

Nadeem the Commissar shifted in his recollection of a birchwood chair: restless with thoughts he knew nobody shared. “Why do you say ‘Tomb
Wife
’ Sigurt? Why a
lady
? You beings don’t
have
our two biological sexes.”

 Nadeem was a Diaspora-denier. He would bore the socks off you explaining, interminably, how actually there was NO uncontroversial evidence that all planetary variants on the sentient biped model, all the possessors of “numinous intelligence”, capable of interstellar transit, were descended from a single species. He refused, passionately, to accept that the original species had been a hominid from the Blue Planet—a precursor of homo sapiens who had flourished and vanished, leaving only the faintest and most puzzling of traces.
It’s only a theory
, he’d insist.

And yet the man was a scientist.

You had to excuse him (they
did
excuse him, they were very tolerant of each other’s foibles. Sigurt shared this trait, or he could not have joined them). You had to remind yourself that believing that the earth was the centre of the cosmos had once been good science and sound common sense, and many eminent scientists had clung to the old model, long after the new facts arrived.

Diaspora-deniers favoured the term ‘beings’. They thought it made them sound rational and agnostic; which it did not. The rest of the Actives called their illustrious friend
an alien
, without embarrassment, because at home
alien
had become a term for the much-loved human practice of body-morphing, and they’d forgotten it might be offensive. Sigurt didn’t seem to mind. He called
them
“Blues”.

He was not just eminent, he was an original, a Blue Planetophile. His skill in ‘Blue’ languages had not been acquired for the sake of this trip, it was his hobby in real life. He had no trouble dealing with Nadeem.

“Ah, good point.” He pondered, raising his eyebrows, which were commas of black velvet, the same texture as the close mat of hair (or fur) that covered his skull and extended down his neck and across his shoulders, glimpsed at the throat of his ship-issue green jumper. “Let me think. No, I’m sure “wife” is correct. The
wife
is the one who remains, who cannot tear herself away. This is social gender, not biology.”

Nadeem was not satisfied. Ideally, he explained, all self-respecting other beings, when speaking human language, should call themselves
it
—

Elen imagined a dry landscape, a dustbowl sky: parched mounds with small stone markers (the graves she envisaged were Muslim, somehow). The burial ground was sown with sad hunched shapes outside little cardboard shacks; the villages were depopulated of grandmas. Did the tomb-wives really choose seclusion? Or were they compelled by the iron hand of custom? Which nobody inside the rules will ever admit is an oppression. The blizzard outside ought to be a sandstorm, she thought, to match their cargo. But it was whiteness she always imagined “out there”. A white darkness of quantum vacuum. She noticed that Sigurt had said wives, not widows, though his English was very good; and she wondered about that. They are not the widows of the dead but the wives of the tombs.

 “Stop kidding yourself, Batman,” Nadeem was getting agitated. “It’s not a one-off planetary evolution that we have in common, it’s time, gravity, hydrogen bonds. It’s an accident of convergent evolution that we look more or less alike. You’ve let yourself get sucked in to a cheap, tourist way of thinking, denying your own difference, fantasising that you can
understand us
—”

“You’re a racist arse, Nadeem,” responded Sigurt, amiably. “Anyway, you just did it yourself.”

“What
—?”

The alien raised his arms, spreading the webs between his slender fingers, hooking the air with his claws. “Anthropomorphising. You called me Batman.”

Elen suited up and visited the hold. The float tube delivered her to darkness, where she drifted from one handhold to the next, following track lights to the main cargo compartment. She flooded the great space with air and pressure, touched down as gravity embraced her: took off her helmet, passed through the lock and walked into a cavern at the roots of a sea-mount. The habitat a green, sunlit island far above—

The artefacts were crated in force-fields, but she couldn’t adjust the light above art-conservation level.
Pedants
, she murmured, marvelling at the dim, pixellated spectacle. The Lar’sz’ part of the collection was the most impressive: so damned impressive you could almost justify the mad expense of the shipping. The haunted tomb was huge, multi-storied. It caught her breath. She circled it slowly, calculating that their whole living quarters would easily fit into the Tomb Wife’s portico.

There was a single doorway, a black teardrop without a door: set about two metres above ground level, amid a coruscation of carved and inlaid stone. It would be a scramble to get inside. Perhaps the front steps had been left behind, or there was a secret mechanism, something like ancient Eygpt. She sat cross-legged, slightly awkward in her suit, gazing. Like most sailors of the strange ocean, she rarely got further than the dockside when she made landfall. Even if there’d been more time and less bureaucracy she wouldn’t have been tempted by a lightning tour of Sigurt’s planet. What for? You’d see so little. You’d learn hardly anything.

She’d been interested in the cargo as a professional challenge, a factor in her caculations. The science of transporting massive material objects was in its infancy, and artwork was a
nightmare
! But here in the gloom she felt the value of these things. A virtual Lar’sz’ tomb, freighted through the transit in a courier’s brain, downloaded into the digital inventories of a limited-release of premier museums, could never have had this presence. The Exhibition was going to be a revelation.

There was nothing to stop them from breaching the force-fields for a preview; without the fuzz. No areas were barred to Active Complement, except the fearsome threshold of the torus itself. She should come back with Sigurt, get him to give her a guided tour. But not the tomb, she thought.

If she went into the tomb, she’d like to do it alone.

The image of a dessicated heap of bones and skin, preserved intact, flitted through her mind. The Tomb Wife in a stone room, an old lady fallen down with a broken hip, too proud to cry for help when she heard her servants arriving and departing. But how old was she? Maybe she was still young when the food offerings “remained untouched”. Sigurt would know. She would ask him. Or better, she’d look it up herself, and impress him by knowing something. It was probably all in the background files the Complement didn’t bother to read.

If the practice had “survived into historical times” it could still be happening.
Suttee
had continued in India long after the Brits tried to stamp it out; had resurfaced even in the Space Age. But it was the haunting that fascinated Elen. Do ghosts travel? Did pharaohs and Inca sacrifices ever wake up, bewildered, in glass cases, half a world away from home? Did they wake up in modern times, to find themselves replicated in software? What about a journey so immense that it has no duration? What damage would the relativity storm of the blizzard do to something as fragile as spiritual remains? How embarrassing if the loaned archaeology arrived stripped of its patina and pedigree…How embarrassing for the fledgling enterprise of interstellar freight, if there should be a Missing Legend incident!