The Best of Nancy Kress (33 page)

“Pro-teenz for heal.”

Again that word for very small bits of food. I make use of it. “Tell me about the pro-teenz in the science experiments.”

“I tell you everything about experiments. But only if you answer questions first.”

He will ask about my sister. For no reason other than rudeness and cruelty. I feel my face turn to stone.

He says, “Tell me why steal baby not so bad for make person unreal always.”

I blink. Isn’t this obvious? “To steal a baby doesn’t damage the baby’s reality. It just grows up somewhere else, with some other people. But all real people of World share the same reality, and anyway after the transition, the child will rejoin its blood ancestors. Baby stealing is wrong, of course, but it isn’t a really serious crime.”

“And make false coins?”

“The same. False, true—coins are still shared.”

He coughs again, this time much harder. I wait. Finally he says, “So when I steal your bicycle, I not violate shared reality too much, because bicycle still somewhere with people of World.”

“Of course.”

“But when I steal bicycle, I violate shared reality a little?”

“Yes.” After a minute I add, “Because the bicycle is, after all, mine. You…made my reality shift a little without sharing the decision with me.” I peer at him; how can all this not be obvious to such an intelligent man?

He says, “You are too trusting for be informer, Pek Bengarin.”

I feel my throat swell with indignation. I am a very good informer. Haven’t I just bound this Terran to me with a private shared reality in order to create an exchange of information? I am about to demand his share of the bargain when he says abruptly, “So why you kill your sister?”

Two of Pek Fakar’s people swagger past. They carry the new guns. Across the courtyard a Faller turns slowly to look at them, and even I can read fear on that alien face.

I say, as evenly as I can manage, “I fell prey to an illusion. I thought that Ano was copulating with my lover. She was younger, more intelligent, prettier. I am not very pretty, as you can see. I didn’t share the reality with her, or him, and my illusion grew. Finally it exploded in my head, and I…did it.” I am breathing hard, and Pek Fakar’s people look blurry.

“You remember clear Ano’s murder?”

I turn to him in astonishment. “How could I forget it?”

“You cannot. You cannot because memory-building pro-teenz. Memory is strong in your brain. Memory-building pro-teenz are strong in your brain. Scientific research on World children for discover what is structure of pro-teenz, where is pro-teenz, how pro-teenz work. But we discover different thing instead.”

“What different thing?” I say, but Pek Walters only shakes his head and begins coughing again. I wonder if the coughing spell is an excuse to violate our bargain. He is, after all, unreal.

Pek Fakar’s people have gone inside the prison. The Faller slumps against the far wall. They have not shot him. For this moment, at least, he is not entering the second stage of his perpetual death.

But beside me, Pek Walters coughs blood.

He is dying. I am sure of it, although of course no World healer comes to him. He is dead anyway. Also, his fellow Terrans keep away, looking fearful, which makes me wonder if his disease is catching. This leaves only me. I walk him to his cell, and then wonder why I can’t just stay when the door closes. No one will check. Or, if they do, will care. And this may be my last chance to gain the needed information, before either Pek Walters is coffined or Pek Fakar orders me away from him because he is too weak to watch over my supposed blood sickness.

His body has become very hot. During the long night he tosses on his bunk, muttering in his own language, and sometimes those strange alien eyes roll in their sockets. But other times he is clearer, and he looks at me as if he recognizes who I am. Those times, I question him. But the lucid times and unlucid ones blur together. His mind is no longer his own.

“Pek Walters. Where are the memory experiments being conducted? In what place?”

“Memory…memories…” More in his own language. It has the cadences of poetry.

“Pek Walters. In what place are the memory experiments being done?”

“At Rafkit Sarloe,” he says, which makes no sense. Rafkit Sarloe is the government center, where no one lives. It is not large. People flow in every day, running the Sections, and out to their villages again at night. There is no square measure of Rafkit Sarloe that is not constantly shared physical reality.

He coughs, more bloody spume, and his eyes roll in his head. I make him sip some water. “Pek Walters. In what place are the memory experiments being done?”

“At Rafkit Sarloe. In the Cloud. At Aulit Prison.”

It goes on and on like that. And in the early morning, Pek Walters dies.

There is one moment of greater clarity, somewhere near the end. He looks at me, out of his old, ravaged face gone gaunt with his transition. The disturbing look is back in his eyes, sad and kind, not a look for the unreal to wear. It is too much sharing. He says, so low I must bend over him to hear, “Sick brain talks to itself. You not kill your sister.”

“Hush, don’t try to talk…”

“Find…Brifjis. Maldon Pek Brifjis, in Rafkit Haddon. Find…” He relapses again into fever.

A few moments after he dies, the armored guards enter the cell, wheeling the coffin full of bondage chemicals. With them is the priest. I want to say: Wait, he is a good man, he doesn’t deserve perpetual death—but of course I do not. I am astonished at myself for even thinking it. A guard edges me into the corridor and the door closes.

That same day, I am sent away from Aulit Prison.

“Tell me again. Everything,” Pek Brimmidin says.

Pek Brimmidin is just the same: stocky, yellowing, slightly stooped. His cluttered office is just the same. Food dishes, papers, overelaborated sculptures. I stare hungrily at the ugly things. I hadn’t realized how much I’d longed, in prison, for the natural sight of curves. I keep my eyes on the sculptures, partly to hold back my question until the proper time to ask it.

“Pek Walters said he would tell me everything about the experiments that are, yes, going on with World children. In the name of science. But all he had time to tell me was that the experiments involve ‘memory-building pro-teenz,’ which are tiny pieces of food from which the brain constructs memory. He also said the experiments were going on in Rafkit Sarloe and Aulit Prison.”

“And that is all, Pek Bengarin?”

“That is all.”

Pek Brimmidin nods curtly. He is trying to appear dangerous, to scare out of me any piece of information I might have forgotten. But Frablit Pek Brimmidin can’t appear dangerous to me. I have seen the real thing.

Pek Brimmidin has not changed. But I have.

I ask my question. “I have brought to you all the information I could obtain before the Terran died. Is it sufficient to release me and Ano?”

He runs a hand through his neck fur. “I’m sorry I can’t answer that, Pek. I will need to consult my superiors. But I promise to send you word as soon as I can.”

“Thank you,” I say, and lower my eyes.
You are too trusting for be informer, Pek Bengarin.

Why didn’t I tell Frablit Pek Brimmidin the rest of it, about ‘Maldon Pek Brifjis’ and ‘Rafkit Haddon’ and not really killing my sister? Because it is most likely nonsense, the ravings of a fevered brain. Because this ‘Maldon Pek Brifjis’ might be an innocent World man, who does not deserve trouble brought to him by an unreal alien. Because Pek Walters’s words were personal, addressed to me alone, on his deathbed. Because I do not want to discuss Ano with Pek Brimmidin’s superiors one more useless painful time.

Because, despite myself, I trust Carryl Pek Walters.

“You may go,” Pek Brimmidin says, and I ride my bicycle along the dusty road home.

I make a bargain with Ano’s corpse, still lying in curled-finger grace on the bed across from mine. Her beautiful brown hair floats in the chemicals of the coffin. I used to covet that hair desperately, when we were very young. Once I even cut it all off while she slept. But other times I would weave it for her, or braid it with flowers. She was so pretty. At one point, when she was still a child, she wore eight bid rings, one on each finger. Two of the bids were in negotiation between the boys’ fathers and ours. Although older, I have never had a single bid.

Did I murder her?

My bargain with her corpse is this: If the Reality & Atonement Section releases me and Ano because of my work in Aulit Prison, I will seek no further. Ano will be free to join our ancestors; I will be fully real. It will no longer matter whether or not I killed my sister, because both of us will again be sharing in the same reality as if I had not. But if Reality & Atonement holds me unreal still longer, after all I have given them, I will try to find this ‘Maldon Pek Brifjis.’

I say none of this aloud. The guards at Aulit Prison knew immediately when Pek Walters died, inside a closed and windowless room. They could be watching me here, now. World has no devices to do this, but how did Pek Walters know so much about a World man working with a Terran science experiment? Somewhere there are World people and Terrans in partnership. Terrans, as everyone knows, have all sorts of listening devices we do not.

I kiss Ano’s coffin. I don’t say it aloud, but I hope desperately that Reality & Atonement releases us. I want to return to shared reality, to the daily warmth and sweetness of belonging, now and forever, to the living and dead of World. I do not want to be an informer any more.

Not for anyone, even myself.

The message comes three days later. The afternoon is warm and I sit outside on my stone bench, watching my neighbor’s milkbeasts eye her sturdily fenced flowerbeds. She has new flowers that I don’t recognize, with blooms that are entrancing but somehow foreign—could they be Terran? It doesn’t seem likely. During my time in Aulit Prison, more people seem to have made up their minds that the Terrans are unreal. I have heard more mutterings, more anger against those who buy from alien traders.

Frablit Pek Brimmidin himself brings the letter from Reality and Atonement, laboring up the road on his ancient bicycle. He has removed his uniform, so as not to embarrass me in front of my neighbors. I watch him ride up, his neck fur damp with unaccustomed exertion, his gray eyes abashed, and I know already what the sealed message must say. Pek Brimmidin is too kind for his job. That is why he is only a low-level messenger boy all the time, not just today.