Rift (47 page)

“Get over your babe?”

The question bored into her.
Anar
. Nerys’ eyes blurred to the green and gold of the outfold, seeing only washes of colors, like the love and grief within her. What could she answer? “I got through it,” she said. “Not over it.” As the pup wriggled in her arms, she decided to climb down and deliver it safely to the orthong before returning for Pila. Carefully finding her footholds, she made her way down. Pila’s lord met her, snatching the bundle from her arms. Then, to her alarm, he passed the pup to another orthong and started scaling the rock with a ferocious burst of speed.

Before she had time to think, Nerys was scrambling after him. Her fingers were raw from clawing at the rock, but she pulled herself at last to the top. In front of her, the orthong lord was standing over Pila. Blood streamed from her neck.

“No! Pila!” Nerys rushed to her side, oblivious to the orthong towering above. Blood spurted from the severed artery, and from her windpipe; her last lungful of air frothed out in a red foam. A convulsion rocked her body. With equanimity, the lord swept past Nerys and descended, having dealt out his punishment to Pila.

“Salidifor!” Nerys shouted, hearing her wail rush into the outfold. Though she pressed her hand against Pila’s wound, blood surged between her fingers. “Pila,” she whispered, “Pila …” But Pila had lost consciousness. From below came the scraping noises of Salidifor’s ascent, and then he was standing atop the outcropping, watching as she pleaded with her eyes. Moving forward at last, he crouched at her side. Then he did something rare: He touched Pila. His large paw covered her entire neck, and he held it firmly.

Nerys said to him, but he was intent on Pila’s wound. The three of them remained motionless for a long while, Nerys wondering if Salidifor’s touch might bring a miraculous healing. But even orthong
healing had limits. When Salidifor finally stood, Nerys knew Pila was gone. The savagery of her death, and its loneliness here on this rock, caused Nerys to shiver. She looked up at Salidifor. She couldn’t read his expression, but she wouldn’t have been greatly surprised if it had been indifference. His eyes, with their deep green, might have been glass marbles, for all that the creature saw.

One thing especially he didn’t see, and that was Nerys’ new advantage. If having content women was important, how content would the women be to learn that the orthong had had no mercy on Pila? How content would they be to learn that the orthong had slit her throat like a sacrificial goat?

As Salidifor turned to go, Nerys said something, and he stopped to face her. She did not bother with sign. “You understand our speech, don’t you?”

He towered over her, watching her impassively, his right hand painted in blood.

“You heard me call out, and you heard your name. You understand our speech.” Rolling past Salidifor’s silence, she said: “But it’s beneath you to allow human speech, so you require us to sign, as a show of submission. At the berm, they’ll be interested in that. And your murder of Pila here today.” She kneeled down and covered Pila’s face and chest with her jacket. “Among my people, it’s customary to cover the face of one who has died.” She gazed up at him. “But it is not our custom to take a life for such a small crime. So you can see the trouble you’re in.”

Salidifor signed, He was not bothering to deny that he understood her speech—a small victory, Nerys thought, but not enough. Not by a long shot.

“You’re damn right this shouldn’t have happened.” Then she jumped to the core of it. “
I am not content, Salidifor
. And maybe a bunch of us aren’t going to be anymore.” As they faced each other in silence, it occurred
to her that she might be the next one to be slaughtered. She threatened the orthong charade with their breeders. Salidifor, or one of the others, could easily kill her for that.

But he merely signed, He looked at her with what might have been worry, and at that moment Nerys decided that perhaps, after all, she might someday witness Salidifor
coming around
. “I won’t tell them,” she said. “But I want something in return.

“I want you to teach me your language—your real language, not this baby talk we use with each other. I want to learn. I want to learn about you, Salidifor—what you do, what you think about. What the outfold is, and how it makes clothes. What your women do, and where you come from. You can decide for yourself if you want to treat the others like barnyard animals, seeing to their health and
contentment
so you get your pups. But you don’t treat me that way anymore, not when we’re alone. That stuff’s over now.”

His claws were out, all of them.

But this was her moment; she had to finish. “It’s a trade, Salidifor. You don’t have much to lose by it. And then I would be content.” She hoped her
contentment
still mattered to him. Out of the corner of her eyes she watched his hands, where the stilettos rose from the white flesh.

He signed,

Why indeed? She gave the only answer she knew. “I’m curious.”

They stood looking at one another. Then he said, Curious,>
sign-spelling the new word as best he could.

“Yes, as a start,” Nerys said. “Then you agree?”

His chin rose in a surly
Yes
.

Nodding, she said: “I’ll tell the women that Pila took her own life. And how upset her lord is that she died.” She fixed him with a damning stare. “Make sure
he tells the women he’s sorry about Pila.” With elaborate patience, she added: “Among my people, we say
I’m sorry
when someone dies.”

Maybe they could start their lessons with some basics on manners.

12
 

1

Day fifty
. An otter cut a V through the glassy water, a silent arrow heading for the middle of the lake. Reeve watched the simulation as he sat, arms around knees, in Brecca’s special room. Behind him, on the opposite wall, the sunset was lingering on the tops of the snow-laden mountain peaks.

Except for the otter and a blue heron, folded into flight mode and skimming near the far shore, Reeve was alone. Spar and Loon were somewhere else in this underworld place, sequestered for the further uses of the Somafools, as Spar called them. As spiders collected and stored food, the Somaformers collected and stored genetic material, and the bearers of such: people. It was not enough, Brecca had said, to have the genes; one must look at what they wrought. But when she and her Labs had studied Loon for a year or a decade or a lifetime, Reeve mused, they still wouldn’t know the real Loon, the Loon who swam in the cold Inland Sea like a seal, or scaled the distilling towers in the Jupiter Dome, or searched the cliffs from the deck of the
Cleopatra
, wild-eyed upon hearing her name.

He would have cried if he could remember how.
But he had forgotten, except for the body memory of tears swelling his throat like a water balloon, and swallowing them back. He hadn’t cried for the Station, that blooming flower of light, fueled by plutonium and flesh. He hadn’t cried for Cyrus, unsure if he had the right to cry for a man who’d wished for a different son. Or for Marie, alone now in an alien land. But he wished he could let the tears come for Loon.

Dry-eyed, he picked at the food they’d left for him as dusk settled over the mountain escarpment and the pine forest below it hardened into night.

“This is my escape room,” Brecca had told him. She’d smirked at Gregor, who had stood nearby, holding Loon in his grip. “Gregor tells me this is as far as I’m ever going to get from the Labs. So, if you hunger for the open air—and I
do
—this is the consolation prize.” Her face had looked haggard as she’d inhaled her cigarette. “I’ve spent twenty-five years embellishing the place. What do you think?”

“It stinks,” Reeve had answered.

She’d shrugged. “It’s
so
lonely at the top. You see, Gregor, why we have to stick together. We’re the only ones who can stand us.” Then Brecca had turned back. “Spar begins his transformation tomorrow, Reeve. I expect you to be nice to him while he adjusts to his new self. And as a token of my goodwill, we’ll give you and Loon some private time.” At Gregor’s frown, she’d responded. “You really have no clue how to win friends and influence people, do you, Greggy?” And they’d slammed the door, with a series of daunting locks.

In the ceiling of the room, in the last of the daylight, a hawk fell like a stone, colliding with a hapless bird. Feathers and bits of bloodied flesh erupted in the moment of contact, a detailed display on which Brecca must have lavished great attention. Perhaps Brecca saw in herself this hawk stooping daily to shatter Gregor the Successor. Or vice versa.

Dead tired, but dreading to sleep, Reeve stared at the walls as the forest sank into jade shadows and the lake became onyx.

The door opened. Loon stood there with her escort, one of Gregor’s buffalo. He touched her softly on the back, urging her forward, as though she were a Ming vase and not just another miserable gene sequence. But, of course, she
was
a priceless vase to them. They would keep her, no doubt, in exquisite storage.

He went to her, and they held each other, fiercely, until she suddenly ducked away. Above, a squadron of bats swooped over the lake.

“It’s pictures,” Reeve said.

Loon was at the wall, touching it. Her fingertips glowed when she made contact.

“Like home,” she said, looking up at the mountain peaks behind Reeve.

“The Stoneroots,” he said.

Loon moved along the wall, probing, as though there might be a door into this visual world, this vision that gave and took away at the same time. Reeve watched her, glad simply to be with her. When she finally turned to face him, they were enveloped in deep evening dusk.

He held out his hand, and she came to him. The room had Brecca-sized chairs, and they sat together in one. As a fog moved in across the lake, it brought an impression of chill with it, impelling them into each other’s arms for warmth. The soft splash of a fish joined a substrata of cricket noises. It was illusion that they sat beside this lake, illusion that they were safe, but they were battered enough that it made no difference. Eventually, Loon slept, her head against his shoulder.

He didn’t want to think about how she was … different. But Brecca’s words came back to him:
She’s altered … rather grandly
. Tightening his arm around her shoulder, he felt regular bone and muscle
—muscle that let her pole a raft and climb every available vertical object despite the fact that her only nourishment came from the soil. There were no secret binges with human food. She was altered. Altered.

And yet … in the fog engulfing the room’s walls, he saw her as she was that day, drenched from the swim, flipping herself effortlessly onto the raft, the sun firing her hair and bronzing her body, proving she was no child.…
No creative morphology on the outside
. Water dripped from her body unto the raft. For a split second he told himself to look away, but then his ruder instincts took over, and he stared.