Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & (29 page)

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Authors: Anna Tambour

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Pearls

Oysters will never be fish
no matter how hard they try.

They'll never be able to
hold an umbrella
or wiggle their fins
in the sky

Oysters will never be fish
no matter how hard they try.

Fish will never be oysters
no matter how hard they try.

They'll never make pearls
from grit in their throats
Their small irritations
they just have to tote.
They can fly (some of them)
but they can't laze and gloat

No, fish can never be oysters.
No matter how hard they try.

And we can never be oysters
nor fish
though we shut ourselves up
and our thoughts often swish.
Though we often feel gritty
inside where it irks,
"I'll be nacred!"
will not be a possible perk.

We can never be oyster
nor fish
nor clam.
No matter how hard we try.
Our pearl is knowing
I am what I am
though I'll be buggered why.

Publishing history

"Klokwerk's Heart" copyright © Anna Tambour, was originally published in
Strange Horizons
, December, 2002.

"The Eel" copyright © Anna Tambour, was originally published in
Quadrant Magazine
, No. 375, Vol.45, Number 4, April 2001.

"Temptation of the Seven Scientists" copyright © Anna Tambour, was originally published in
Infinity Plus
, February 2003.

"Travels with Robert Louis Stevenson in the Cévennes" copyright © Anna Tambour, was originally published in
Infinity Plus
, February 2003.

"The Chosen" copyright © Anna Tambour, was originally published in
HMS Beagle: The BioMedNet Magazine
, Issue 102, May, 2001.

"Me-Too" copyright © Anna Tambour, was originally published in
HMS Beagle: The BioMedNet Magazine
, Issue 92, December, 2000.

"Chatechismic Chaos" copyright © Anna Tambour, was originally published in
HMS Beagle: The BioMedNet Magazine,
Issue 111, September, 2001.

"The Wages of Food-Play" copyright © Anna Tambour, was originally published in
Quantum Muse
, November 2001.

"Literary Titan, Asher E. (huh?) Treat" copyright © Anna Tambour, was originally published in
Public Scrutiny
, May 2002.

Roos at the beach

We've all gone down to the surf again,
the joeys with us too,
though humans wonder what we see
in this grassless saltsea stew.

We wonder too,
what humans see
in those balls they chase around.
For when we've finished bathing
we go to higher ground
to watch the silly golfers
while we laugh without a sound.

COMMENTS

Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
:

When the next dominant species excavates our remains, golf will be the single reason they will conclude we could not possibly have been the previous top species, let alone sentient.

Anna Tambour:

Ooh hoo! Perhaps I should report a conversation that I recently overheard during a journey to Planet X, some years in the future.
Xientist 2, an underling: "These balls are a life-form in a state of dormancy."
Xientist 1, the leader of the team: "Have you probed them?"
Underling: "That is the first thing I did. They expelled their digestive organs."
Leader grimaces. "They'll be sure to grow again, and the next time they try that trick—"
Xtudent: "Excuse me, Doctors. These balls are too widely distributed in dry strata and wet strata to be one life-form. They must be religious artifacts."
The lead Xientist's skin flashes on sides away from the xtudent. Then Lead Xientist says: "And of course you have a theory."
Xtudent: "Of course! The pits in the balls are the clue. They are images of the God of Mining."
Lead Xientist: Blinding burst.
Xtudent and Underling emit horrible smell as the pool of them sizzles.
Well, that's what I heard, and you know what half-seen scenes are like.
"It was the eggplant."
"No, the tourmaline."
"Thy.on....xy hybrid...pet...a."
"That!"
"Brute wh... qara.....

The Arms of Love and Death

A scream cut through the rainforest. A sweat-chilling, almost human cry—answered by a more frightening hush. The machete slid from Jack Lorimer's hand into a tangle of vines, but he didn't waste movement. That sound jerked him upright, poised. He was miles from camp, trapped by the Rio Tiputini on one side, and who knows what on the other—but he could imagine. Death by jaguar is a lovebite compared to death by some of the less photogenic things he'd seen, and as for those he hadn't ... He'd done the unthinkable: given his expedition colleagues the slip today. But he had to. They'd homed in on a few too many discoveries this trip.

This was no place to be alone. He fled back towards camp, travelling as fast as a man can who has to leap over knee-high roots and under liana nooses hanging ready everywhere. When he twisted his ankle in soft humus, he stopped. His adrenalin rush had subsided, leaving him sheepish at his fear. He was bent over, breathing in great gulps of steamy air, when something ripped the undergrowth just off the path.

It was almost on him.

A tapir bumbled into view. Lorimer laughed.
To be frightened by a tropical teddy bear!
He wondered what he should do about the day. He was angry at his fear, but a shred of terror clung to him.

Shake it off, Jack.
Hundreds of feet up, it was brilliant day—down here, the light dripped green. He'd come here for 15 years, knew everything there was to know about the place. The day held no surprises that could hurt him, and he'd be back to camp before dark, so no jag would get him either. His grin was lopsided.
What if anyone in the team saw me
freaking out like a tourist? I'd never live it down.

Two steps into striking out W-NW, he was hit with another scream.

He jumped for the nearest thing—the buttress root of a giant
pochota
—and scraped his shins clutching a hold on the iron-hard wood with his boots.
Most everything in this rainforest can climb, stupido!
He scrabbled up till he reached the great bole, ripping his hands and catching his clothes on spines long as skewers.

And the scream came on, its carrier smashing through the undergrowth.

The sound now changed, more piercing, more human. It rose straight up to surround him. He gripped the great spiked tree like a monkey does its mother. His hands dripped blood but he didn't feel them.
That I would end like this!

Pride forced him to unclench his eyelids and look, down into the eyes of his killer.

The screamer didn't try to climb. She just gazed up, imploring.

A shiver of intense relief washed over him. No one had seen him, and no one would ever tell of the time
Jack ...

She was just a small native woman, probably
loco
. Her right ear dripped blood. Her skin in the sieved light shone gold, green, and red from many deep scratches. She was naked as a frog.

Damn, he wished she'd shut up. But maybe that explained why she wasn't in her village, wherever that was. He was just going to detach his skin from the tree's knives, and climb down to commence his hunt again when he saw what she was screaming
about
. Her left cheek was swollen with something the size of a giant jawbreaker. From that erupted what could only be described as a purple sea anemone, waving its tentacles.

Jack's stomach muscles tightened. His throat trapped his breath. This was—-he could hardly believe his luck, the legendary
brazos del amor y de la muerte
, the "arms of love and death".

In a land filled with more legends than were believable to even the most gullible, this topped them all. Most entomologists scoffed, called it
brasso
. Jack had always
said
brasso, and laughed with every team he'd come out with—about a larva of something that was so metamorphically incredible, so swift and terrible that he had never allowed himself to believe let alone create a clear mental picture of the thing, at any stage of its development.

Seeing it now—only part of it—he realised that lust for it was the dark pull he had felt ever since his maiden, innocent collecting trip—
the brazos del amor y de la muerte
underlying every illegal solo foray he'd ever undertaken.

No native would speak of it, except when so drunk on
aguardiente
that he would never remember what he said. And no anthropologist could be trusted.

Now it was in his hands, almost. But this woman's scream was so god-awful, so primal-fear inducing, she distracted so much that Jack dismissed the idea of reasoning with her to get her to shut up, a distraction that could have cost him the
brazos
itself.

He pulled himself together.
Concentrate, dumbass!
The larva was emerging, definitely emerging.

Jack swore under his breath.
Isn't it always the peripherals that screw up results
?
What's the Spanish or Portugese for shut up
?
Hell, she probably's never heard either language.

The woman's eyes were huge. Her hands hovered near her face.

Lorimer got a jar out of his pocket, unscrewed the lid and showed it to her, smiling reassurance. To his amazement, she continued to scream as if her brain had been sucked out of its skull by an overactive larynx.

Lorimer didn't know what to do, but he had to do something fast. He'd been told that the reason so few
brazos
had ever been seen alive is that people they had dwelled in had killed them by doing silly things like trying to pull them out, or bashing themselves into trees or jumping into rivers and off precipices.

But it could be a more delicate problem than that. On closer inspection, the
brazos
was, Jack decided, agitated. He didn't blame it. That scream could rip the skin off a monkey, let alone traumatise one delicate grub. The woman's taut facial muscles were squeezing the grub to buggery, possibly crushing its grips in her skin.

Jack was a lateral thinker, so he knew he could solve this problem,
but dammit. Shut her up.
Then
you can fantasize taxonomies.
He had never believed the legends, but if they were true ...
What will I name it?
His strong back rippled in excitement. He lived somewhere else for a moment, but sound brought him back.

She screamed with her mouth so wide open that he could see that gigantic cheek bulge from the inside. Her eyes were wide open and focussed on his. If she only knew how impossible she was making it for him to think. He closed his eyes to concentrate.

And then,
aha!
He remembered his technique for hypnotising the larva of the
Dermatobia hominis
so that he could examine it alive in the act of suspended pupation. He climbed down from the tree and reached his hand out to her.

She flinched and turned without closing her mouth, without stopping that pure, maddening screech. She was going to run away! Lorimer grabbed her shoulder, and she was so slick with sweat, she almost slipped away. But just when he thought he might have to knock her out, she stopped struggling and hung her head, and now the scream changed pitch and steadied to a high-pitched steam-under-pressure. Unbearable. She was passive now, though, so he changed his grip on her shoulder and repositioned himself so that he could keep the larva in view, and still be just behind her, best positioned for his hypnotising treatment.

He ran his hand down her dorsal side to her waist, and back up again—then down, in long strokes. By the third long stroke in the slick wetness under that heavy fall of hair, the scream tapered off. He could see where he had stroked because of the streaks of blood that his hands left, his blood and hers. She was so slippery with sweat that there was no stickiness.

She lifted her head and looked back at him with huge eyes. They asked a question, but were not afraid. Jack sighed in satisfaction as the larva stopped waving. He removed his hand from her back—a bad idea. She screamed all the louder, and lifted a hand to her face. He slapped it away and grabbed her, then recommenced his treatment. She was clearly dangerous without his touch.

No insect had ever been this size, so he was thankful that he'd had difficult specimens who'd made him perfect his technique. He guided the woman down by his touch till they were both sitting, she in front and enough to the side so he had the larva in full-frontal view.

Even in her urge to flight and her giving in to him, she'd been strangely accepting, passive, stoic even—possibly explained by the mass of welts on her back. They reminded him of a night when the team had been playing 'Encyclopedia', tossing in the most ridiculous entries they could think of, and Hal threw in, " An interesting point of Xalcitoco culture is that women remove all their body hair. For this purpose first they rub ashes on their bodies in the area they don't want hair and then they pull the hair with no pain." Hal won the last bottle of
cerveza
for the
no pain
bit, though he almost got himself punched out by Prescott Selms when he insisted that this one was real. The only thing he'd made up was the tribe. "Look it up when you get back," he insisted, hurt.

Now as Lorimer's fingers travelled along her back, he wondered about pain. Did the
brazos
anaesthetize? He scooched himself forward to examine her face. She had closed her eyes, but he couldn't see any tightened muscles in the eye socket area, nor above her nose. Her mouth was slightly open, her breaths not only regular, but rather deep.
Yes
, he decided.
They do anaesthetize,
as he had thought they would.
Like leeches and vampire bats.

His free hand gripped the bottle in his lap.

The shadows deepened. No progress. The larva seemed, dammit, to have fallen into a state of stupor, no more ready to climb out than when Jack first saw it. He wondered how long he could keep his hand moving before his own muscles locked. Already, his biceps felt like hot knives were lightly slitting their fibres.

The pain and boredom were nothing compared to the prize. Lorimer's thoughts turned to people he despised, the ones who collect by spreading out canopies and gassing trees, sometimes the same ones for 25 years or more. He shuddered as he thought of being
that
kind of scientist, one step up from a computer modeller.

Still
no progress. For a while his eyes lost focus
. How can I keep tabs on the larva once night falls?

She might have been asleep, her muscles had gone so slack, but suddenly she twisted herself around and faced him, chattering something, making plucking movements with her fingers toward the larva.

No, no,
he said with his hands. Lorimer pointed overhead and then to her cheek, and then to his bottle. He smiled for all he was worth and then acted out himself pulling something from his own cheek, making his best
yeow!
face. He patted the air in what he hoped would be a universally understood
we've gotta be patient
. She clasped her hands, so she must have got the message.

Thank god
, he thought. He stood up, stretched his arms and sat down again at her side.
Then you have the curators
, he thought,
spending their days smelling like naptha, pulling out drawers of ants collected in the days when it was common to throw an elephant into a report about the Amazon to give it colour ...

He peered at her cheek. She wanted more of his treatment.
Possibly the brazos doesn't anaesthetize.

He wished the technique didn't demand such exacting touch ...

A hunk of meat.
He wished he had one with him now, as it would have quickened response
, if this larva acts like the human botfly
. You slap it over the larva's breathing hole, and it makes its way up through the meat to get to air. The most important thing with these grubs is that you don't try to pull them out, or they can break, as their hooks get such a great subdermal grip. As he gazed at her cheek without ceasing his touch, and couldn't help salivating at the hidden depths inside the flawless plumpness of her skin.
Patience!

Her eyes were closed. She was in such perfect stasis that his hand jerked when she turned her face toward him.

That threw the larva and its appendages into incomplete profile. Talk about spectacular! He gazed at the cheek bulge, imagining the size of the mouth hooks inside.
Eat that,
Dermatobia hominis
,
he chuckled. The human botfly is a gnat compared to this.He reached out his free hand, letting go of the bottle for a moment. Gently, he turned her face to the larva's full-frontal position.
Clutch that bottle!
The grub had been acting as if he'd hypnotized
it
. But after a period of inactivity, emergence might be fast.

But again she turned her face, and tried to turn her body, so he had to, ever so gently but firmly,
again
repeat her positioning. This time, the bottle almost slipped out of his lap.

Her breath had smelt disturbingly meaty, but facing correctly, the rest of her rising body smell didn't envelope him as much. He was now concerned and—he couldn't help it—a teensy bit exasperated. He'd smoothed her muscles to melted butter, but now they began to twitch under his fingertips.
Even the
Rothschildia jorulloides
, quite a willful little cuss, didn't put me through this.

He applied himself harder.

Night was coming. A night of gibbous moon, and cloud. Here on the forest floor—no protection, no comfort. He couldn't sit back, because of the tree's spikes. He couldn't get up to make a fire against jaguars. He thought about army ants, how he hadn't been smelling for them, listening for them. Hadn't been watching out for anything beyond signs of emergence.
Take the woman to camp?
No!
If the larva came out on the way, he'd never catch it.

She jerked. Her breathing quickened, and the
brazos
waved angrily. Lorimer cursed himself. He then took to those hypnotizing strokes as if his life depended on it. Maybe it did, but now he realized also—life without the
brazos
would never be a life. Most tales of this insect and its victims had to be bull. But one fact was indisputable. This woman had been beaten and stripped of even her waistcord, and driven out of her village. People said that once someone became a
cohuatixi
, no one ever saw her again,
saw her
as she had been.

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