Last Summer at Mars Hill (24 page)

“Paul!”

Paul turned and looked at Claude. “We could go when the rest are at dinner again,” the older boy said. He too gazed at Ira and Father Dorothy, but with loathing. “All right?”

“All right,” Paul agreed miserably, and lowered his head when Father Dorothy cast him a disapproving stare.

Trudging up the steps behind Claude, Paul looked back at the narrow plaza where the sculptures had been. They had passed three people on their way here, a man and two women; the women striding in that defiant way they had, almost swaggering, Paul thought. It was not until they turned the corner that he realized the man had been his mother, and she had not acknowledged him, had not seen him at all.

He sighed and looked down into the abandoned courtyard. Something glittered there, like a fleck of bright dust swimming across his vision. He paused, his hand sliding along the cool brass banister.

On the concrete floor he thought he saw something red, like a discarded blossom. But there were no flowers on Teichman. He felt again that rush of emotion that had come when he embraced the argala, a desire somehow tangled with the smell of brackish water and the sight of a tiny salamander squirming on a mossy bank. But when he leaned over the banister there was nothing there. It must have been a trick of the light, or perhaps a scrap of paper or other debris blow by the air filters. He straightened and started back up the stairs.

That was when he saw the argala. Framed on the open balcony in his father’s room, looking down upon the little courtyard. It looked strange from this distance and this angle: less like a woman and more like the somber figure that had illustrated the Stork in the natural history book. Its foot rested on the edge of the balcony, so it seemed that it had only one leg, and the way its head was tilted he saw only the narrow raised crown, nearly bald because its wispy hair had been pulled back. From here it looked too bony, hardly female at all. A small flood of nausea raced through him. For the first time it struck him that this really
was
an alien creature. Another of the Ascendants’ monstrous toys, like the mouthless hydrapithecenes that tended the Pacific hydrofarms, or the pallid bloated forms floating in vats on the research deck of Teichman Station, countless fetuses tethered to them by transparent umbilical cords. And now he had seen and touched one of those monsters. He shuddered and turned away, hurrying after Claude.

But once he stood in the hallway his nausea and anger faded. There was that scent again, lulling him into seeing calm blue water and myriad shapes, garnet salamanders and frogs like candied fruit drifting across the floor. He stumbled into Claude, the older boy swearing and drawing a hand across his face.

“Shit! What’s that smell?—” But the older boy’s tone was not unpleasant, only befuddled and slightly dreamy.

“The thing,” said Paul. They stood before the door to his father’s room. “The argala…”

Claude nodded, swaying a little, his dark hair hiding his face. Paul had an awful flash of his father opening the door and Claude seeing him as Paul had, naked and doped, with that idiot smile and a tooth missing. But then surely the argala would not have been out on the balcony by itself? He reached for the door and very gently pushed it.

“Here we go,” Claude announced as the door slid open. In a moment they stood safely inside.

“God, this is a mess.” Claude looked around admiringly. He flicked at a stack of files teetering on the edge of a table, grimaced at the puff of dust that rose around his finger. “Ugh. Doesn’t he have a server?”

“I guess not.” Paul stepped gingerly around heaps of clothes, clean and filthy piled separately, and eyed with distaste a clutter of empty morpha tubes and wine jellies in a corner. A monitor flickered on a table, rows of numerals and gravid shapes tracing the progress of the Breeders Project.

“Not,”
a voice trilled. On the balcony the argala did not turn, but its bright tone, the way its vestigial wings shivered, seemed to indicate some kind of greeting.

“All right. Let’s see it—”

Claude shoved past him, grinning. Paul looked over and for a second the argala’s expression was not so much idiotic as tranquil; as though instead of a gritty balcony overlooking shattered concrete, it saw what he had imagined before, water and wriggling live things.

“Unh.”

Claude’s tone abruptly changed. Paul couldn’t help but look: the tenor of the other boy’s lust was so intense it sounded like pain.

He had his arms around the argala and was thrusting at it, his trousers askew. In his embrace the creature stood with its head thrown back, its cries so rhapsodic that Paul groaned himself and turned away.

In a minute it was over. Claude staggered back, pulling at his clothes and looking around almost frantically for Paul.

“God, that was incredible, that was the
best
—”

Like what could you compare it to, you idiot?
Paul leaned against the table with the monitor and tapped a few keys angrily, hoping he’d screw up something; but the scroll continued uninterrupted. Claude walked, dazed, to a chair and slouched into it, scooped up a half-full wine jelly from the floor and sucked at it hungrily.

“Go on, Pathori, you don’t want to miss
that
!” Claude laughed delightedly, and looked at the argala. “God, it’s amazing, isn’t it? What a beauty.” His eyes were dewy as he shook his head. “What a fucking thing.”

Without answering Paul crossed the room to the balcony. The argala seemed to have forgotten all about them. It stood with one leg drawn up, staring down at the empty courtyard, its topaz eyes glittering. As he drew near to it its smell overwhelmed him, a muskier scent now, almost fetid, like water that had stood too long in an open storage vessel. He felt infuriated by its utter passivity, but somehow excited, too. Before he knew what he was doing he had grabbed it, just as Claude had, and pulled it to him so that its bland child’s face looked up at him rapturously.

Afterwards he wept, and beside him the argala crooned, mimicking his sobs. He could dimly hear Claude saying something about leaving, then his friend’s voice rising and finally the snick of the door sliding open and shut. He grit his teeth and willed his tears to stop. The argala nestled against him, silent now. His fingers drifted through its thin hair, ran down its back to feel its wings, the bones like metal struts beneath the breath of down. What could a bird possibly know about what he was feeling? he thought fiercely. Let alone a monster like this. A real woman would talk to you, afterwards.

To
complain,
he imagined his father saying.

…
never enjoyed it, ever,
his mother’s voice echoed back, and Father Dorothy’s intoned,
That’s what’s wrong with it, it’s like a machine.

He pulled the argala closer to him and shut his eyes, inhaling deeply. A wash of yellow that he knew must be sunlight: then he saw that ghostly image of a house again, heard faint cries of laughter. Because it was a woman, too, of course; otherwise how could it recall a house, and children? but then the house broke up into motes of light without color, and he felt the touch of that other, alien mind, delicate and keen as a bird’s long bill, probing at his own.

“Well! Good afternoon, good afternoon…”

He jumped. His father swayed in the doorway, grinning. “Found my little friend again. Well, come in, come in.”

Paul let go of the argala and took a few unsteady steps. “Dad—I’m sorry, I—”

“God, no. Stop.” His father waved, knocking a bottle to the floor. “Stay, why don’t you. A minute.”

But Paul had a horrible flash, saw the argala taken again, the third time in what, half an hour? He shook his head and hurried to the door, face down.

“I can’t, Dad. I’m sorry—I was just going by, that’s all—”

“Sure, sure.” His father beamed. Without looking he pulled a wine jelly from a shelf and squeezed it into his mouth. “Come by when you have more time, Paul. Glad to see you.”

He started to cross to where the argala gazed at him, its huge eyes glowing. Paul ran from the room, the door closing behind him with a muted sigh.

At breakfast the next morning he was surprised to find his mother and Father Dorothy sitting in the twins’ usual seats.

“We were talking about your going to school in Tangier,” his mother announced, her deep voice a little too loud for the cramped dining hall as she turned back to Father Dorothy “We could never meet the quotas, of course, but Mother pulled some strings, and—”

Paul sat next to her. Across the table, Claude and Ira and the twins were gulping down the rest of their breakfast. Claude mumbled a goodbye and stood to leave, Ira behind him.

“See you later, Father,” Ira said, smiling. Father Dorothy waved.

“When?” said Paul.

“In a few weeks. It’s nearly Athyr now”—that was what they called this cycle—“…which means it’s July down there. The next drop is on the Fortieth.”

He didn’t pay much attention to the rest of it. There was no point: his mother and Father Dorothy had already decided everything, as they always did. He wondered how his father had ever been able to get the argala here at all.

A hand clamped his shoulder and Paul looked up.

“—must go now,” Father Dorothy was saying as he motioned for a server to clean up. “Class starts in a few minutes. Walk with me, Paul?”

He shook his mother’s hand and left her nodding politely as the next shift of diners filed into the little room.

“You’ve been with it,” the tutor said after a few minutes. They took the long way to the classroom, past the cylinders where vats of nutriment were stored and wastewater recycled, past the spiral stairs that led to his father’s chamber. Where the hallway forked Father Dorothy hesitated, then went to the left, towards the women’s quarters. “I could tell, you know-—it has a—”

He inhaled, then made a delicate grimace. “It has a smell.”

They turned and entered the Solar Walk. Paul remained at his side, biting his lip and feeling an unexpected anger churning inside him.

“I like the way it smells,” he said, and waited for Father Dorothy to look grim. Instead his tutor paused in front of the window. “I love it.”

He thought Father Dorothy would retort sharply; but instead he only raised his hands and pressed them against the window. Outside two of the
HORUS
repair units floated past, on their interminable and futile rounds. When it seemed the silence would go on forever, his tutor said, “It can’t love you. You know that. It’s an abomination—an animal—”

“Not really,” Paul replied, but weakly.

Father Dorothy flexed his hands dismissively “It can’t love you. It’s a geneslave. How could it love anything?”

His tone was not angry but questioning, as though he really thought Paul might have an answer. And for a moment Paul thought of explaining to him: about how it felt, how it seemed like it was showing him things—the sky, the house, the little creatures crawling in the moss—things that perhaps it
did
feel something for. But before he could say anything Father Dorothy turned and began striding back in the direction they’d come. Paul hurried after him in silence.

As they turned down the last hallway, Father Dorothy said, “It’s an ethical matter, really. Like having intercourse with a child, or someone who’s mentally deficient. It can’t respond, it’s incapable of anything—”

“But I love it,” Paul repeated stubbornly.

“Aren’t you listening to me?” Father Dorothy did sound angry, now. “
It
can’t love
you
.” His voice rose shrilly. “How could something like
that
tell you that it
loved
you!? And
you
can’t love it—god, how could you love
anything,
you’re only a boy!” He stopped in the doorway and looked down at him, then shook his head, in pity or disgust Paul couldn’t tell. “Get in there,” Father Dorothy said at last, and gently pushed him through the door.

He waited until the others were asleep before slipping from his bunk and heading back to his father’s quarters. The lights had dimmed to simulate night; other than that there was no difference, in the way anything looked or smelled or sounded. He walked through the violet corridors with one hand on the cool metal wall, as though he was afraid of falling.

They were leaving just as he reached the top of the spiral stairs. He saw his father first, then two others, other researchers from the Breeders Project. They were laughing softly, and his father threw his arms around one man’s shoulders and murmured something that made the other man shake his head and grin. They wore loose robes open in the front and headed in the opposite direction, towards the neural sauna. They didn’t see the boy pressed against the wall, watching as they turned the corner and disappeared.

He waited for a long time. He wanted to cry, tried to make himself cry; but he couldn’t. Beneath his anger and shame and sadness there was still too much of that other feeling, the anticipation and arousal and inchoate tenderness that he only knew one word for, and Father Dorothy thought that was absurd. So he waited until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and went inside.

His father had made some feeble attempt to clean the place up. The clothing had been put away, and table tops and chairs cleared of papers. Fine white ash sifted across the floor, and there was a musty smell of tobacco beneath the stronger odors of semen and wine jelly. The argala’s scent ran through all of it like a fresh wind.

He left the door open behind him, no longer caring if someone found him there or not. He ran his hands across his eyes and looked around for the argala.

It was standing where it usually did, poised on the balcony with its back to him. He took a step, stopped. He thought he could hear something, a very faint sound like humming; but then it was gone. He craned his neck to see what it was the creature looked at but saw nothing; only that phantom flicker of red in the corner of his eye, like a mote of ruby dust. He began walking again, softly, when the argala turned to look at him.

Its eyes were wide and fervent as ever, its tangerine mouth spun into that same adoring smile; but even as he started for it, his arms reaching to embrace it, it turned from him and jumped.