On Whetsday (5 page)

9

Denny took a careful sip of the water Loma had given him. “Is this from the lake?” he asked.

Loma gave a snort. “I hope not.” She leaned toward one of the room's small windows and pushed aside a curtain. For just a moment, Denny could see the skynx sliding across the inky water. “There are so many metals in that water, that a glass of it would likely be the last thing you ever drank.”

“Doesn't it bother the skynx?”

“Nah. They like it that way.” Loma let the curtain close and crossed the room to settle herself on a low pillow that seemed to be the closest thing in the room to a chair. She pushed a few of the things that Denny thought were small boxes out of her way, and he was surprised to see that the boxes weren't boxes at all. They had pages, like a picture book, though he didn't see any pictures. Loma stared up at Denny, her dark eyes shining from the deep folds of her face. “Now tell me. What made you take such a long hike?”

Denny had thought so much about finding his way to Loma, that he had forgotten to put much thought into what he might say when he found her. “I was dancing,” he began, “and there was a chug...” He fished into his pocket. “It gave me this.”

Loma leaned toward him, her attention fixed on Denny's hand as he pulled out the purple cube. Her eyes went wide and she let out a low sound. “Uhhhh.” She pushed down at his hand and looked up quickly at both the door and the window. She started to reach for the cube, then stopped.

Loma climbed up from her cushion and went back to the door. She tied a rope from the edge of the curtain to the wall, then tested the curtain with a tug. It didn't open. Loma nodded and rubbed her hands against her robe at her hips, as if she were wiping dirt from her hands. Or sweat.

“All right,” she said. “Give it here.”

Denny hadn't thought much about the cube at first, and had been willing to trade it to Poppa Jam for a picture book, but seeing how much Loma reacted to the little thing made him reluctant I hand it over.

Loma seemed almost as reluctant to take it, but after a moment her fingers darted to Denny's palm and she lifted the small, purplish object. She held it in front of her face. Then she walked closer to one of the pink lights and turned the cube back in forth in front of the glow. Once again, Denny could see how all the different colors came and went in the light. “You're not supposed to have this,” said Loma. “Where did you get it?”

Denny hesitated for a moment, trying to think of what to say, but if he was going to get in trouble for having this thing, he guessed he was already in trouble. He told Loma about going to the spaceport, and how the chug had watched him, and about singing Judy. “When I was done, chug gave it to me. Is it... dangerous?”

“Dangerous?” Loma gave a little snort, then did it again. It took Denny a moment to think she might actually be laughing. “Yah. It could be dangerous. For you...and for others.” She flipped the cube over in her fingers for a few seconds longer, then turned and held it up where Denny could see the color-slick sides. “It's a memory.”

A memory. Denny looked down at the shiny surface of the little box. He could remember playing with the other children in the street outside the food dispersal center. He could remember his father working with Auntie Talla to pound out the stove. He could remember the awful feeling as his father was dragged out of the gather room for consignment. “Memories are just in your head,” he said.

“Nah. This isn't that kind of memory,” said Loma. Again she looked toward the door, and she lowered her voice so that Denny had to strain to hear her. “It's for a maton. This cube that tells them how to work.”

Denny turned the idea over in his mind. He'd seen simple matons. Cithians sometimes carried them around, and he knew they used them for whatever it was they did in those buildings humans never entered. Even the buttons that talked for the dasiks were a kind of maton. But there were other kinds of matons, as well. Ones that were supposed to be seriously bad. If you saw anything that you thought might be a maton, you were supposed to tell someone, and humans were not supposed to touch them. Not ever.

“Matons are dangerous,” said Denny. “If you touch one...”

“If you touch one, what happens?”

“You can die. Or at least get really sick.”

The woman looked thoughtful. “Yah... Well, maybe. Maybe not.” She rolled the small cube between her fingers. “I don't have a maton—restricted technology, no humans allowed—but I have something else.” She turned away from Denny and went to one corner of the room where a stack of the little no-pictures books was heaped nearly waist high. From the top of the stack, she took an off-white something that was about the same size as one of the books, but had the hard gleam of metal or plastic. “I'm not really supposed to have even this,” she said, stroking one thing finger along the top of the little device. “But some of the skynx think it's funny to give me things.”

She touched the thing somewhere on its side, and a small opening appeared at the top. She tipped it slightly, and showed Denny that there was something inside. He stepped closer. It was another cube. As far as he could tell, it was the same size as the one the chug had given him, only this one was a pale blue instead of purple.

Loma touched another spot on the device, and at once a loud sound began. Denny jumped back, bumped against another stack of the books, and nearly fell, before he realized that the device was making music.

Sometimes, especially when they were having Restaurant, some of the people back in the quarter liked to make music. Cousin Kettle had an instrument, a string-jo, that had come from his father, or his father's father, or somebody before that, and he knew how to make the twangs and strums that went with several songs. Poppa Jam would beat his hands against the table in time to Kettle's playing, and if she was in a good mood, Auntie Talla would sing. Sometimes even Cousin Yulia would forget her fear long enough to sing along. Yulia could sing really well.

But even the best music Denny had ever heard in Restaurant was nothing like this. This was music made of every kind of sound, all playing at once, and it wasn't just noise. It was fire and light. It was metal and air. It was perfect.

Loma touched the little device again and the music stopped. “Tchaikovsky,” she said.

Denny realized that he had been holding his breath. He sucked in some air and tried to get his tongue around the word that Loma has said, but it was too complicated. “What's that?”

“It's...” Loma looked thoughtful for a moment, then gave another of her snorty laughs. “I don't know. Something from the skynx, I think.”

“Is that their kind of music?” Denny had been told that the skynx could dance. If this was what their music was like, he could only imagine what it would be like to see them dance.

“Maybe.” Loma tilted the device to the side and the pale blue cube spilled out. She caught it and put it with a small group of others that Denny hadn't noticed until that moment. Then she took the purple cube he had brought and put it inside. “I've only seen something like this once before, and the memory won't work here like it would in a maton, but there may be something.”

She pressed the side of the device. A light appeared in the center of the room

10

Smallpox

Smallpox was a disease. It was one of the most infectious diseases ever encountered. Sometimes it was called just “pox,” sometimes it was called “red plague.”

If you caught the disease, your body would be covered by horrible, painful blisters; blisters that crowded every inch of your skin from your feet to your head. Blisters on the palms of your hands and the tips of your fingers. Blisters on every inch of your face. Blisters on your lips. Blisters on your eyelids. Blisters in your ears. Blisters on your tongue.

If you lived through the disease, you would be covered with disfiguring scars for the rest of your life. You might also be blind. You might find that your hands and feet ached terribly all your life. You might be crippled. You might be crazy.

The people who were scarred, and blind, and crippled, and crazy were the lucky ones. Many people did not live through the disease. Smallpox killed about one third of all the people infected. It killed about two thirds of children. Year after year, for hundreds of years, smallpox killed people by the hundreds of thousands. In bad years it killed millions.

Finally, after smallpox had killed over half a billion people, it was discovered that there were ways to control the disease. All the people worked together to stop smallpox, and in an amazingly short time this disease that had killed people for centuries and millennia, was gone.

But it wasn't completely gone.

In a few places, people kept small containers with samples of the disease. They knew it was dangerous. Sometimes a little of the disease would get out, and sometimes people would die.

Still, they kept it because they were worried. They kept it because they thought that somewhere out there in the wild, in some place they hadn't looked, smallpox might still be around. They worried that if they destroyed their last samples, they might not understand the disease if they needed to fight smallpox again.

Slowly, first in one place and then the next, they destroyed what was left of smallpox. Finally, there was only a single tiny test tube left of this disease that had killed so many, scarred so many, left so many in misery. And when the people decided that it was too dangerous to keep that last little tube, they destroyed it too.

Then they celebrated, because the terrible pox, the red plague, the horror of so many lifetimes, was gone.

11

Tollsday

On Tollsday, Denny read a book. He could already read enough Xetosh to understand street signs and get by at the spaceport. Like everyone, he certainly knew the cluster of symbols that meant No Humans Allowed. Learning that much made life a lot less painful.

Really, he had never learned much more than was needed to find his way back to the quarter by ground transport, and what he needed to stay out of the cithians' way. Even the picture books he bought from Poppa Jam rarely had more than a few words, and if you paid attention, you could understand the story without even reading them. Denny could have learned more, but, well...it wasn't like teaching humans to read was illegal, not really. It was just pointless. Everybody knew that. After all, the cithians had done lots of tests to show that humans were inferior at math, at reasoning, at everything that really mattered. No one was ever going to hire a human as a technician, much less an engineer. Humans were good for doing what they were told. Or maybe for dancing. So for humans, reading just wasn't important.

Denny looked over to the corner of the room, where Loma was still sleeping on her cushion. The old woman had one of the no-picture books under her head for a pillow, and another one close to her hand.

On the floor next to her was the small metal device that still held Denny's cube. As soon as Loma had pressed the spot on the device that made it go, there had been a light, then a voice had started speaking, then pictures had appeared in the middle of the small room. The voice told the story of a horrible disease. The pictures showed humans so covered with blisters that it was hard to tell they were humans. If Denny had seen one of them when he was at the spaceport, he might have thought they were from some distant planet. More distant than poor old Earth.

Denny sort of wished he had never seen it.

He went to the nearest window and raised the curtain with one finger. Outside the sky had gone a hard gray and the tiny blue sun was raising eye-searing glints from the edges of the glassy houses. Denny didn't see any skynx, but back at the end of the little strip of land, road ferries were moving in slow procession. Tollsday was a workday for the cithians.

Denny let the curtain close and rubbed his eyes. He picked up one of the books from a heap and stared at it. There was no animation. No sound or music. There were only a handful of words on the cover. Denny could make out “The” and “Count” and “by.” The rest were words he didn't know. Even sounding out the letters didn’t help. He flipped through the pages. Just words, words, and more words. He put a finger to a page. “All human...” He began, speaking softly, but the next word was one that hadn't been in any of his picture books, or on a street sign. “All human wiss....”

“All human wisdom is contained in these two words—wait and hope,” Loma said from the floor. She rolled over and sat, rubbing at her flyaway hair.

Denny looked at the words. Yes, that was what it said, as best he could tell. “Do you know all these books?”

“Yah. Some better than others,” said Loma. She put her hands against the floor and slowly pressed herself to her feet. “There's a lot of things in that book you're holding about patience. About making plans over a long time, and about getting justice.” She took the book from Denny's hands. “I'd like to think there's some truth to those things, but I don't know anymore.”

Denny pointed to the device on the floor. “Why did it show us those things?” He asked. “About that disease?”

Loma put the book back on top of the nearest heap. “It only showed us what was in the memory,” she said, “and only part of that. A memory like this, it has more in it than all these books.” She waved a thin hand around the room. “And it can do more than just show you pictures and words.”

“Can we see the rest?” asked Denny.

“Nah. Not with this.” Loma picked up the little device from the floor and tipped it on its side. The little cube that was a memory fell out into her hand. “To see what's in here, you still need a maton.”

“But you don't have one.”

“I don't,” said Loma. She held the cube out to Denny. “I'm not even supposed to have the books and player.”

Denny took the memory, looked for a moment at its gleaming sides, and shoved it deep into his pocket. “I never saw books like this. Who made them?”

For the first time, Loma smiled. “Humans.” She lifted a thin volume from the floor and ran her hands over it. Denny could hear the soft noise of her dry palms moving over the cover. “Every one of them was written by humans, for humans, long ago.” She gave the book a look that had the same kind of affection Denny had sometimes seen Auntie Talla show toward Cousin Sirah. Then Loma's expression changed and she tossed the book away without even looking at where it landed. “So naturally, I got them from the skynx.” She went to the window again, lifting the curtain enough to let in the dazzling blue light of the new day. 'If you want to know what humans made, you have to ask some other people.”

Denny thought of asking why the skynx would have all these human books, but he guessed he wasn't really surprised. All his life he'd watched humans trading away the little that they had for a bit of food, a moment of comfort.

He put his hand in his pocket and fingered the sharp edges of the memory. “Does someone else have a maton?” he asked. “Would the skynx...”

“Nah,” Loma said sharply. “Don't say anything to the skynx about a maton. Or about a memory.” She looked around again, as if worried that a skynx might have come into the room while she wasn't looking. “And be sure you don't let the cithians find out. Don't say anything to anyone. If they found out a human has been handling a memory...” Loma gave a snort, but this time it sounded less like laughing. “We'd both be consigned by the end of the day.”

“Everyone is getting consigned soon anyway.”

Loma took a step toward him and looked hard into his face. “What?”

“Omi, I mean, one of the cithians, he said that all the rest of the humans were going to be consigned soon.” Denny shrugged. “Maybe I should just wait till then before we try to find a maton.”

The idea that they were going to be consigned had seemed half-frightening and half-hopeful to Denny. After all, they were bound to be taken somewhere with more people than the pitiful few left in Jukal. There would probably be reunions. He might not see his father, that was too much to hope for, but
someone
would find a lost parent, or child, or at least a friend.

Only Loma seemed to think the idea that the last humans in Jukal were about to be consigned was all bad. Denny could see it just looking at the tight expression on the old woman's face. At the deepening of the nest of lines around her eyes. Loma thought that this was a horrible idea.

“Don't,” she said. Her hand went again to the fine tufts of her hair. “Don't wait for anything. If you’re–”

Before she could finish, there was a drumming sound from the door. Loma stepped quickly to loose the cord that held the curtain closed. She had barely moved the curtain itself when a skynx paddled its way into the room.

Denny had seen many skynx at the spaceport, and of course he'd seen the swimmers in the lake, but for all that he might as well have seen only one. He thought that some were larger than others, but there no markings that he could see. No difference in the color, or in the large slit-pupiled eyes. There was not even any clothing or jewelry that might have helped in telling them apart. Skynx were just skynx.

But Loma seemed to have no trouble recognizing the skynx that came surging into her room on rapid steps of its paddles. “Good Tollsday, Seephaa,” she said, bobbing her head.

The skynx raised the front half of its body, elevating its broad arrow-shaped head. “Good Tollsday,” said Seephaa in the same piping sing-song voice of every other skynx. “To you and to your...” it paused a long moment, tilting its head as the big eyes looked at Denny. “Friend.”

“His name is Denning Carrelson,” Loma said.

“Denning Carrelson.” The skynx pronounced the name carefully. The big eyes studied Denny again. “I have seen you. You are the one who dances.”

Denny nodded. “That's me,” he said. He thought about doing a little dance step, but somehow, it felt wrong. Foolish. “You've seen me at the spaceport?”

“That is where I've see you,” the skynx agreed. A thin, translucent pink tongue slid from the skynx' mouth and moved quickly across its scarlet lips before sliding back. “And now I see you are here.”

“He is just visiting me,” said Loma.

The skynx' head bobbed up and down. The eyes turned toward the old woman. “Yes, I see that. However, he has not visited you before.”

Denny was surprised to see a flicker of what might have been fear slip across Loma's face. He had always thought that maybe she lived here among the skynx because she liked them better than humans, but watching her talk to this skynx, this Seephaa, it seemed that things between them were not like Denny would have expected. They did not seem to be friends.

Loma's expression hardened. “Denny has come to tell me something.”

“Has he?”

“Yah.” She looked into the big eyes of the skynx and nodded. “He's come to tell me all humans are to be consigned soon.”

The raised head tilted a bit back and forth, the focus of the eyes slipping from Loma to Denny and back again. “And now that he has told you,” said Seephaa, “I'm sure that he would like to return to the human area.”

Denny started to say that he would like to stay longer. There were things he still wanted to ask Loma, but before he could do more than open his mouth, the skynx dropped to the floor, turned, and moved smoothly back through the curtain.

Loma looked at the still swaying curtain. “Whatever you're going to do,” she said, “do it soon.”