The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (23 page)

She squints at the lat-long tracker on her belt, and soft blue characters glow 12.5N, 58.3W, which has got to be too far east and not near enough south, way up at the northern wind of the Maja (the terraforms promised a river here, flowing down to the Chryse wide; there’s another failure). She shakes it once, a tad hard to read with the sun shining down, shakes it to see whether the box is reading wrong, because humanity will never be shed of the notion that violence convinces tech to get its shit together. It doesn’t change, and so Alieka accepts the reading. She accepts she’s strayed, and she’ll never have the time, the strength, the will to change course now. There was meager water and food before dawn. She came across a poor excuse for a cienega in the hour before dawn. There wasn’t a savior pool, but there were cacti, and she pierced her hands all over good sawing off the top of a prickle pear with her knife, and now her palms and fingers sting and ache. They’ll be infected soon enough, sure, but at least there were damp and bites of that green meat. Her throat’s and stomach’s forgotten about that by now, and she can’t have any idea why she didn’t cram a few of the cladodes into her bulging knap. Junk in there she could have tossed away to make room for so precious a commodity, but rarely do the dying bother to think straight.

Alieka Ferenczi mulls over 12.5N, 58.3W, and wonders if it doesn’t matter, because maybe the datswap had no damn idea of what he spoke. Maybe he only made something up there and on the spot to get her wad. Then she starts waltzing again, onwards south, even if there’s no meaning in the movement, in the one foot in front of the other. It’s something to do, and she’s not yet (though she does not fathom why) ready to knock, knock, knock’a death’s front door.

She could have kept up with the time by the arc of the sun across the sky, or by the lat-long, but where’s the point, she was thinking when one is walking from nowhere to nowhere else and it can only end one way. Where’s the minding clocks?

And it is while thinking this thought she sees the high mustard walls of the Yellow House, and stares a long time, because maybe it’s only a mirage, cruel in its persuasiveness. This means she has to decide to follow this which might be nothing but a lie, or sit down now and pass over tricks of heat shimmer and exhaustion and sun-shuttered eyes. Moment of truth, she dy jarroo, now or not ever, fold or raise, sure. But here’s the bright memory of Muirgheal, too luxe by far to ever even give the likes of oily handed Alieka two shits and a howdy you do. Here is she. Teener wants and formative urges to lift up those heavy boots and set them back again. 

Maybe there’s not a pork’s whit of honor it what I do
, thinks Alieka.
Maybe
only my cunny leadin’ my head, but what of it, sure. If the out’s the same, then why the why. Ain’t that in the gospel somewheres?

And she thought of the canister of hyped hexanitro riding on her shoulders, and she tries to reckon the distance between her and the mustard adobe.
Can’t be more than a mile
, she assures herself, though it turns out to be more like four. But she stumbles, often falling, often on her knees, through poison scrub and wadi, once almost steps on a rattler might have been as big around as her arms, coiled and rat-tat-tat, and why it didn’t strike she’s never going to know. But she makes it, and the walls are higher than anyone she’s ever heard hold forth of subject have ever claimed. There are char-skinned, forever burned black, brown, gold-skinned men and women perched atop the caliche, armed with spears and crossbows and sonics and punch guns. There are iron gates half as tall as the enceinte, so rusty Alieka wonders how the wind hasn’t whisked them away to palus. The Maafa guards don’t do anything she expected. They don’t open fire. They call out profanities and warnings in their glottal creole, which she only just, and just barely, understands every thirdish word. 

Why am I not dead?
she thinks, as an auto clicks loud enough to make her stumble back a step or two, and the gates swing inwards.
Might be, hell takes them what come looking after it, might be, sure, and why had nobody thought of this? Because. We had our expects, didn’t we. We thought we knew the beasts, all on what they raid snatch, but maybe that’s bein’ picky in the market stalls after so much risk and troubles.

The men and women on the wall shout some more, and something whizzes loudly, then there’s a bolt,
thunk
, protruding from the ground at her feet. She shades her eyes and stares up at them. She points at herself, and they shout again, all in harmony it seems to her addled brain. So, knowing not else what they could mean (plus, all those only third words to help), or if they’ve understood her, Alieka steps through the gates that lead to the Yellow House itself, and they bang closed behind her.
When children dream of Sheol, the gates sound like that. Just like,
she thinks, then wishes that she hadn’t.

There are more guards, dressed more raggedy than her by far, to escort her to tall lancet doors as rusty as the gate. None of them touch her, and this surprises Alieka as much as anything yet has. The house is not the shade of yellow that she always imagined it would be. Whenever she chanced to think on the color of the house, she saw it so bright it almost hurt to see, a bright shade of yellow that stood out stark against the brick-red plain. Maybe it
was
that color, to start with, the yellow of fields of sunflowers or rapa. Maybe the dust and sand have scoured it
this
color, over the many decades since it was built. Or maybe whatever transpires on inside, maybe
that’s
what took away the bright. She goes along, because what else would she do? She lets them drive to and then through that gigantic doorway. And if the gate closing was the sound of the gates of Sheol banging shut, the clanging of those doors are simply beyond the terrors dreamt up by dull women of Alieka’s sorry sort.

Inside, the Yellow House is not yellow. It might be no color at all, or it might be those walls, archways, ceilings, and stairwells are all black. She tries not the think on it overly much. In all directions – not so unlike the palus – it seems to go on forever. Why had she not expected that? Why had she underestimated its vastness? Well, why had she seen it the yellow of a rippling field of rapa flowers?
If we have not seen, we do not know, ’cept rumors, what the mind may conjure, and pictures, and nobody’s got no pics of the Yellow House.
But, sure, on goes the halls forever, or so seems, and she is led without ever once their hands upon shoulders, arms, back, and without the prodding of spears or gun muzzles. Perhaps this is of her compliance, and perhaps it’s not.

Somewhere in this place is Muirgheal, or whatever they’ve left of her, or made of her. Alieka does her best not to dwell on that. She wonders what’s to be done with her instead, as that’s far less disturbing a set of possibilities. She silently chortles to herself for ever having reckoned the one kilo canister of HNB would be enough to bring down this sprawling rack. Maybe twenty kilos might have turned the trick. Maybe all the trumpets of the army of Joshua on that day he felled Jericho. But the one is enough for a suicide, and enough to take a few of these shits with her.

They lead her to a round room with a fire pit at its center, and above the fire pit is a hole, a chimney drawing the smoke, which must lead up to the sky, the world outside. There’s something turning on a spit above the fire, and to her starved self it looks as good as any pig or chicken ever yet has. But it was human once, a man or a woman, though now it’s impossible to be sure which. Her mouth waters, and she curses herself to already have sunk half so low as a Maafa cannibal.

In the round room, across the fire and its grisly, broiling fare, is a dais of basalt, and on the dais is a basalt throne. A man sits there, all skin and bones and raggedy as the rest and as raggedy muff as Alieka.

“What did you come here to find?” the man asks, and it shocks her that he speaks Anglo as well as any school teacher or party member, after hearing only the creole from his pack. “Someone lost, and perhaps you have a mind we stole them away? Or are you here for something else, hoping we might take you in? Or just to satisfy a deadly curiousity that’s haunted you so, so long.” The man’s head is shaved, or he’s bald. His skin is a maze of tattoos, and maybe they mean something, something she could puzzle if she had the lux. 

“Why am I not dead?” she asks him. Her voice is raw, and it hurts to speak.

“Someone bring her water,” the man says, and someone does. She is careful to drink slowly, lest she vomits it all right back up again, shi, shi. She wipes her wet lips on the back of her hand, and her hand comes back bloody. She also glances down at the lat-long tracker: 21.3N, 79.1W, and that doesn’t seem right at all, not after the last time she checked.

“Are you hungry, Alieka Ferenczi?” the man on the dais asks, not unkindly. She doesn’t ask how he knows her name, because black witches, the lot.

She glances at the thing on the spit, fat dripping to sizzle in the coals, crispy skin, and split open here and there to reveal…

“No,” she says. “I had a snake this morning.”

“A snake?” he asks, skeptically.

“A rattler,” she replies.

“Resourceful of you. So, I ask my questions the second time, and know my patience is not unendlich, as your people would say.”

My people. My people. His people.

It’s almost impossible not to drool at the odor rising from the spit above the fire pit, so, now, now, whose people has she become? Does the desert work magic, and transform Annapolis words into Maafa.

“May I sit down?” she asks.

“You may do ever as you wish.”

She very near thanks him, but thinks better just in time. It’s too perverse a gesture to consider. He spies at her with orange eyes, and she can’t recall if the others had orange eyes, but – having sat on the hard-packed dirt floor – Alieka doesn’t look up to spy back at.

“I am here to find a girl,” she says, hardly above a whisper. “Her name be Muirgheal Hemingtrust, and she lived in Annapolis, and once wore blue ribbons in her hair.”

“¿Es usted su madre?” the orange-eyed man asks.

Is he making fun? No. That’s not the timbre of his wringer.

“No.”

“So, your sister?”

“No.” Alicka raises her head.

“Then, she
must
be your sheba, shi?”

Only in your wettest, caboodled dreams, factory.

“No,” Alieka tells the man. “Even though I wish that were so.”

He smiles, revealing teeth filed to razor-sharp triangles. “Good answer, Alieka Ferenczi. I dislikes to the clatter of falsehoods upon my ears. So, you came so far to…take her home, yes?”

“Yes.”

 The man frowns, and Alieka lowers her gaze, so she only has to see the glow of the fire on the dirt playing across her filthy rags.

“You must know, no one comes into the Halls of the Maafa, who is not themselves Maafa, and goes back out again, yes?”

“Those are the yarns,” she answers him.

“But you came, anyway. Though no one ever does this.”

She only nods.

“A gallant, yonggan slit, are you. For that, a ward, it may come. For such a yonggan kite, a gift. This is what I think. Though you may not leave, and though you may not have what you came to retrieve, I
will
grant you view to her, eh? So long as you wish to see, at that.” There’s a surprised rumble of voices from the guards surrounding her.

“If that’s the best,” she says, wanting a mouth of that roasting thing.

The man is silent a while, then he says, “That’s the best, plus.”

“Shi,” says she, knowing not what else to say. “No fair, then, my askin’ more.”

“And when you’ve wearied of my gift, Alieka Ferenczi, praps be you think again on whether to be of the Maafa and learn the Elegy of Pain, shi? Now, with my blesses, yonggan. Go.”

She doesn’t see him wave his left hand at her guards, but they haul Alieka to her feet, first time their hands upon her. They lift her from the floor and lead her away from the sweet en’fast turning on the spit. Down more black (or colorless) walls and stairs, and then another door creaks open, and inside there is light that is not firelight. Inside the chamber beyond the creaking doors is genny light, fluoro maybe, but sure electrics of one sort of another. She steps inside, a ring of glass tubes, each set into the wall. The chamber is very big, and there might be thirty tubes, all told. At the center, an inner ring of what might be control panels, not so unalike those the bosses run, switches, dials, toggles, pads, and such. She does not yet look directly at the tubes, no more than glance. They are tall, though, and big round as the boles of the sobba trees growing in the middle park back homecity. One of the guards is talking, and she can understand the woman just enough to know she is being told Alicka is to stay here as long as she wishes, and that the door will not be locked, so she may leave when she is ready. And, she thinks, not to dare lay hands on the make-and-breaks. Then they leave her, and the door shuts, and she is alone with the tubes.

Stray lines clattering through her head.
Isn’t that some old Earth song?
she thinks. Some folk ballad old when her grandmother’s mother was born.

She walks the circuit of the room, does Alieka Ferenczi, and seeing the contents of each tube, those trapped within and unable to die, she is driven on towards the next. And, at finally, she arrives before that tube imprisoning the woman who was once, the now of then, a girl with sky-blue modal ribbons tied in her steel-grey hair. The woman, and what is inside the tube with her. Alieka knows those bugs, and knows what they do to a body, and that the death they bring will take many, many years. But already they’ve done with Muirgheal’s eyes and ears, which might be a mercy and might be worse than all damnations. Alieka sits on the floor (plastic, instead of dirt or stone), and she watches the remnants of the stolen, the one whom she loves who’s never loved her back again. It occurs to her that the Maafa didn’t take her knap, and the HNB might not drop down the Yellow House, but it would, she guesses, be plenty more than needed to vapor this circle of Hell, she dy jarroo. Alieka takes out the canister and hugs it to her chest. She says prayers to St. Anthony of Padua, as would, maybe, her ma. Her ma says St. Anthony of Padua is patron of the lost and forsaken. Alieka prays, and she thinks of the HNB, and she thinks, too, of that thing on the spit, and the offer that the man with the orange eyes made.