Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 68

"You are beautiful," she answered, startled.

You underlined the word with a single black stroke, careful not to make the gesture too broad. Everything at the table was so fragile: the paper, the wine gla.s.s, the china. The queen.

"But you are," she insisted. "You are so strong, so white. Your eyes are soft and brown. If I were as strong as you-"

She sighed, and looked away. While she was blinking, heavily, you brought up your second p.a.w.n.

She must have seen from her peripheral vision, because she turned back to the board. She gulped and swallowed, accepted the gambit, did not flinch when you brought up the knight. She said, "I need to be strong like you."

You reached inside your robe and found the pocket watch, drew it forth and laid it on the table. You opened its wings and set it upright on them so the light shone through it, and you could both see the click and whir of the perfect, tiny mechanism. The pad of your thumb could obscure the entire face.

You wrote, You are strong.

She shook her head. "Not strong enough."

You wrote, I can make you stronger. I can give you children. You pointed to her, to you. To her again.

And the queen's pale face went still. She licked her lips, and touched the collar of your yoke. "This is impossible. How do you lift it?"

You gestured about you, at the palace, the labyrinth. The careless pen spattered ink upon the tablecloth, your hide. You wrote, How do you lift this?

"I lift it because I must," she answered. "But you lift that because it is easy."

You could have told her about the centuries alone, about the mossy stones. About how a yoke is a small thing to bear for company, for willing women, for a game of chess. You could have told her that you were a queen's son, who would never be a prince. But it would have taken too long to scribble down, and so you shrugged under your yoke and wrote, We all have burdens. It is easier to bear the ones we choose, Your Majesty.

Her hand slipped down from your yoke. She said, "If I said yes, would you still come and visit me?"

If you had a human mouth, you would have smiled. And play, you wrote.

She nodded.

You leaned forward over the table and kissed her mouth with your beast's mouth, sharing the flavor of sugar and wine. And when you sat back, you straightened her dress over your shoulders, and reached out to tip over the black queen. "Let's do something else today," you said. "Let's go for a walk in the gardens."

Across from you, Asterion nodded. He capped the pen carefully and held it up, asking permission. "Keep it," you said. "You shall need it to sign the papers when we break your indenture."

White eyebrows rose on his bone-white head. Pollen and gold dust glistened on the wrinkled skin of his brow. You had never appreciated how expressive his face could be.

"Well, of course," you said. "Somebody is going to have to translate written English for me. And I know I need better advisors."

He uncapped the pen and in awkward letters wrote, What will become of me? What will become of you?

"You are of royal blood. Your mother was a queen," you said. "Would you consent-in friends.h.i.+p-to marry another?"

Bulls don't smile. But as you rose and pushed your chair back, across the table, he stood up under your collar.

When You Visit the Magoebaskloof Hotel Be Certain Not to Miss The Samango Monkeys In the place where I was born, stones had been used to mark boundaries for four hundred years. We harrowed stones up in fields, turned them up in roadcuts. We built the foundations of houses from stones, dug around and between them. We made stone walls, and our greatest poet wrote poems about those walls and their lichen-speckled granite. The gift of glaciers, and the wry joke of farmers. "She'll grow a ton and a half an acre, between the stones." The people who lived there before mine made tools of them, made weights and currency.

This is an alien landscape. Another world. A cold, empty desert on the other side of a long, cold sleep, light-years away from the place I grew up in and can never go home to. A place that lies across a gulf of cannibalized colony s.h.i.+ps and unfeeling stars.

But stones are a boundary here too. They mark the line between life and death, between our pitiful attempts to terraform and the natives' land with its stark stone cities and empty plains. And this stone, wound about with a windblown veil dark blue as the autumn sky of my homeworld, so much brighter than the dusty firmament of this one-This stone marks other things.

A body was buried here. Not long ago. And not a human one.

I'm the xen.o.biologist. There's a sonic shovel buried in my pack beside the sample kits, and an overwhelming sense thumping in me that what I'm about to do is irrevocably wrong.

I scan the horizon for alien aircraft, ears tuned for the hum of engines. When I see and hear nothing, I begin digging through my pack.

Samango monkeys were listed as a rare species under CITES Appendix II because they were confined to an ecosystem covering less than 1 % of the land area of Southern Africa, the evergreen Afromontane forests. Unlike their ubiquitous relatives, the vervet monkeys, the samango monkeys were rarely seen by outsiders.

The sonic shovel looks like an entrenching tool; it folds, and the narrow blade screws onto the handle. It weighs less than a kilogram, but the rigid parts are monomolecular carbon laminate: it's exceedingly strong, much lighter than the spades and posthole diggers I used on Mother's hundred and fifteen acres in Vermont. That's a thought that comes with a sting; that land isn't there anymore, and neither are the s.h.a.ggy-coated ponies and the long-haired goats that were my childhood companions and ch.o.r.es. Or, more precisely, the land is still there. But since the s.h.i.+ft, it's not much of a farm. Even a ragged New England farm, clawed from a mountainside.

It amuses me to realize that when the ice goes back-if the ice goes back-four hundred years of plow and pick, of Morgan horses and oxen pulling at their collars, will be undone and the settlers-if there are any settlers-will have to start all over again on a fresh crop of rocks to turn it back into a farm.

I bite the valve and gulp oxygen to ease the straining pressure in my chest. I flip the switch on the shovel's handle before I set it against dirt and stones. The packed soil would be challenging to s.h.i.+ft by hand, but technology makes short work of many obstacles. Alas, the ones I need solutions for prove obdurate in the face of technology, and ingenuity too.

I could almost wish that the work were harder. Manual labor is good for stopping thought, but the sonic shovel makes this little more strenuous than walking, even in the thin icy air. And walking is an excellent way to s.h.i.+ft one's brain to overdrive.

The samango monkey was larger and darker than the vervet monkey. Its diet consisted largely of fruit and leaves, supplemented by flowers and insects. The Magoebaskloof Hotel in the Limpopo District of South Africa-an eco-tourism destination-was famous for its samango monkey feeding program, which allowed tourists the chance to see the rare animals up close.

We never understood what a garden was Earth until we got out here where it's cold and strange and nothing wholesome grows. We're going to run out of preserved food sooner rather than later. And the babies have all been stillborn so far, and it's my job to know why, and I just do not.

We fired all but blind; it's only luck that the world we aimed for is habitable at all. And it's my job as xen.o.biologist to keep it that way. To find a way to bend the biochemistry of this planet to our bodies, to remedy the lack of digestible proteins in the native flora, and the prevalence of ever-so-slightly toxic-to-Earth-life alkaloids. To understand how native intelligence developed, when they're the only animal we've found on this planet where even plant life is so spa.r.s.e.

We have so many lovely theories. The fragmentary fossil record we've uncovered shows a complete ecology until only eye blinks ago, on a geologic scale. The natives could be the sole survivors of some ecological catastrophe. They could even be the cause of it. Or-the most intriguing possibility-like us, they could come from Somewhere Else. And no matter where they came from, what happened to everything else?

I wish we knew how to talk to them. Wish we knew if they even have language, when near as I can tell they might communicate by pheromones, or kinetically, via posturing too subtle for us to even notice. It might help us understand why they treated us as long-lost brethren from day one. Until Veronica Chambers-we reconstruct-exhumed one of the veil-marked graves, probably not even knowing what she was digging up, and the natives sliced her very tidily and very thoroughly into bits.

I helped retrieve the corpse. I remember very clearly what her remains looked like. Blood, everywhere. Grey with dust.

But even after that, nothing changed about the friendly una.s.suming way they treated us. We haven't moved beyond the grunt-and-point-and-occasionally-dismember level of conversation we've achieved. You'd think at least math would transfer, one rock plus one rock equals two rocks. You would think.

There was never any question that the brightly clad natives were intelligent. They came in strange mechanical craft and greeted us with wonderful gifts from the first day we landed: gracious hosts, utterly without fear, for all we had not found a way to speak with them. It took me some time to understand the simple logic of it; they had no compet.i.tion on their harsh dry world except the world itself. There were no predators, no other animals, no prey. They dined by poking lichen-covered rocks into the puckered orifices below their nominal chins. The rocks emerged some hours later, polished s.h.i.+ny as agates. The young were born alive, fed from flat dugs in the crevices between their double-joined arms and their tripart.i.te carapaces.

Their only enemy was the planet, and their supreme allies were each other. It was their biology to make us at home. Or so I thought-a.s.sumed, bad scientist-until Veronica.

We have so many lovely theories about how the aliens evolved, where they came from, why they are as oddly peaceable as Emperor penguins, as Galapagos tortoises that have never seen a threat. And I can't explore or disprove any of them unless I can dissect a dead one, and sample whatever it is that they use for genetic material.

I lean on my sonic shovel, considering the mound of dirt between my boots. I'm lucky to have been chosen. Lucky to have gotten a colony s.h.i.+p, at my age. Lucky to be here, brus.h.i.+ng soil from the triskelion carapace of some alien mother's child with my fingertips so I don't damage the cadaver with my shovel.

The baby's body is almost half my size and wrapped in more blue cloth, layers of it, spun of the fibers and dyed bright with the sap of those same alien plants that we cannot eat. I edge fingers under the carapace, make sure that the soft and oddly human three-fingered hands stay tucked tight inside the funeral pall, protected when I lift. I have to jump down beside it, like Hamlet with Ophelia, to get enough purchase to haul it up.

I use the shovel as a lever.

When I raise my head to half-roll, half-drag the alien's body out of the grave, I am looking into a dozen triads of eyes.

I guess I picked a bad day to start robbing graves.

I was eleven when I saw my first samango monkey. My mother had brought me to South Africa for an ecology conference. It was not a "done thing" to bring children to professional conferences in those days-in some ways we did become more enlightened, and more aware that a separation between family and profession can be an artificial stress-but the scientists were very kind. Dr. Martens from UCLA, I remember in particular, introduced me to all the exotic fruits and spices and laughed at the faces I made.

I, in turn, laughed at the faces the monkeys made.

Especially the babies.

The monkeys were rust and silver, ticked with black. Their coats were long, not silky but... kinky, like soft, nappy human hair brushed out. They smelled like animals: acrid, musky, unpleasant. The males were almost twice as big as the females, their rough-and-tumble muzzles elongated over enlarged canines. The females had faces as sweet as Barbie dolls and radiant carnelian-colored eyes.

One particular monkey who came to the Magoebasklooffor the feedings had two babies that did not look like each other. While twins were not unheard of, these were not twins. Rather, female samango monkeys-Dr. Martens explained-were extremely maternal; they would even adopt orphaned infants from other troops.

This particular female had adopted an orphaned vervet monkey. I don't know where she found it; I know now that the vervet was more common to the savanna than the Afromontaine. But find it she did, and take it for her own.

I rest the dead alien child carefully on the edge of the grave and look directly at the native standing in front of me. It reaches out with one soft-skinned grey hand. I flinch back, but the touch is gentle. The native, the tallest and broadest of the group, is wrapped in veils of vermilion and cinnamon. No other in the group wears those colors. Or blue, I realize, because that deep, true azure is the color of death to them as surely as red (or black, or white) is the color of death on Earth.

The native hands me out of the grave, lifting me past the body of the child. I leave the shovel behind. It's not heavy enough to make a weapon, and grabbing for it would be obvious.

The biggest native towers over me. It hasn't let go of my hand. I crane back to look up at its elephant-grey head; my level gaze would rest at the v-shaped "collar" of its carapace. Soft crunching emanates from inside its body; the sounds of its crop, or gizzard, or whatever these creatures stuff full of rocks and then crank like a churn to get their dinners.

"I'm sorry," I say, exactly as if the thing could understand me. One of its three enormous jewel-blue eyes blinks, and I wonder if there's a connection between the blue of the veil and the blue of their eyes. Some symbolism about seeing into the otherworld, perhaps? I don't even know if they believe in an otherworld. I wish I had an anthropologist. h.e.l.l, I wish I were an anthropologist. But I'm not, and the native is squeezing, tugging my hand-gently, still, but for how long?-so I keep talking. "I didn't mean any disrespect. But I need a cadaver. To see how your bodies work. If we're going to survive here."

Another eye blinks and reopens, unhurried. They operate on a cycle: two open, one being cleansed. Or resting. Or something. We've never seen a native sleeping. I wonder if they have tripart.i.te brains-tritospheres? What would you call that?-the same way they seem to have three of everything else. Maybe they sleep like dolphins did on Earth, part of the brain active while the rest dozes- -I just don't know. There's so much I don't know, that I'm going to die not knowing.

Still holding my right wrist, the native lifts another arm. Wetness spills from the nipple in its underarm, was.h.i.+ng dust from the carapace. The sh.e.l.l isn't grey after all; the cloudy fluid looks like whey, but cleans a swath of tortoisesh.e.l.l amber and black before it soaks into the native's veils.

The native pulls me close. Thin air burns my throat as I struggle, air reeking acrid with the native's stench. I crave oxygen. There's no time to grab my mask.

A clicking grunt, a noise like boulders knocked together. The first non-gas-tric noise I've heard one make. The others close in around me. I wonder what Veronica did, if this is what she saw before they killed her; the wall of bodies, granite stones wrapped in rainbow gauze. The acrid smell of the native's-milk? The slow meticulous blinking of the third blue eye.

I wonder how much it's going to hurt when they kill me.

It yanks, two hands now. The second one presses my face into the foul-smell-ing mess dripping down its side. I strain back, but the grip is unbreakable, and the fluid burns my skin when the native shoves me into it.

I whimper like a puppy; the hands are encompa.s.sing, one on my wrist, one holding, controlling my head. The milk tastes like ammonia. My eyes tear. The teat is hot and hard against my cheek, like the udders on my mother's goats when they needed milking- When they needed milking.

Like an orphaned vervet monkey, I understand what the ma.s.sive creature wants. The fluid filling my mouth is rank and sharp. It burns going down; it might be poison.

Like everything on this planet.

But the natives are smart. Smart enough for hovercraft and holograms. Smart enough for biochemistry. And there is always the possibility, bizarre and remote as it is, that the microscopic flora in mother's milk might work for me as it works for them.

I wonder if they dissected Veronica to learn that.

Whether it works or not, I'll be sick. Really, really sick.

I hope they know what to do with me. I hope they know what they're doing, because sure as h.e.l.l, I don't. But I'm learning.

You have to adapt to the place you live in, if you're going to survive outside your environment. Because your environment will not adapt to you. We have to give up one home to live in another, so it's just as well we can't go back. We wouldn't recognize the place.

I always did wonder what became of that vervet monkey, growing up in a place G.o.d never intended him for.

I saw my first samango monkey in 1999. By the time I left Earth, they were extinct, another victim of the s.h.i.+ft. I don't remember when the species was lost, but I do remember where I was on January 12th, 2004, when my mother handed me a small article on the Magoebaskloof Hotel in Limpopo District, South Africa.

It had burned to the stones the day before. But everybody inside had gotten out alive.

The House of the Rising Sun Sycorax smiled at me through the mantilla shadowing her eyes: eyes untouched by that smile. She lolled against a wrought-iron railing, one narrow hip thrust out, dyed red hair tumbling out of the black spiderweb of her shawl, looking like a Mac Rebennack song come to life.

The dead quickly grow thin.

She licked her lips with a long pale tongue and even the semblance of amus.e.m.e.nt fell away. "You're pale, Tribute. No coup tonight?"

"Nothing appealed." Tribute wasn't my real name any more than Sycorax was hers.

She leaned into me, pressed a hand to my throat. Her flesh lay like ice against the chill of my skin. "I told you to hunt."

"I hunted." Backing away, red nails trailing down my chest. I hunted. Hunted and returned empty-handed. It's as much how you hear the orders as how they're given.

She followed close on my steps, driving me before her. Ragged black chiffon clung and drifted around her calves; she reached up to lace china fingers in the fine hairs at the nape of my neck. Her face against my throat was waxen: too long unfed. "You weaken me on purpose, Tribute. Give me what you have."

She needed me, needed me to feed. Old as she was, she had to have the blood more often and she couldn't take it straight from a human anymore. She needed someone like me to purge the little taints and poisons from it first-and even then, I had to be careful what I brought home. So sensitive, the old.

She caught at my collar, pulled it open with fumbling hands. I leaned down to her-chattel, blood of her blood, no more able to resist her will than her own right hand, commanded to protect and feed her. At least this time, I knew what sort of predator I served, although I had less choice about it.

I figured things out too late, again.

Sycorax curled cold lips back from fangs like a row of perfect icicles, sank her teeth into my flaccid vein and tried to drink. All that pain and desire spiked through me-every time like the first time-and on its heels a hollowness. Sycorax hissed, drew back. She turned her head and spat transparent fluid on the cobbles. I smiled as she turned on me, spreading my hands like Jesus on a hilltop, still backing slowly away. I had made very sure that I had nothing to feed her on.

Petty, I know. And she'd make me pay for it before dawn.

Down the narrow lane, a club's red door swung open and I turned with a predator's eye, attracted to the movement. Spill of light cut like a slice of cake, booted feet crunching on glittering gla.s.s. Girls. Laughing, young, drunk. I remembered what that felt like.

I raked a hand through my forelock and looked away, making the mistake of catching Sycorax's china-blue eye.

"Those," she said, jerking her chin.

I shook my head. "Too easy, baby. Let me get you something more challenging." I used to have an accent-down-home Mississippi. Faded by the years, just like everything else. I suspected I sounded pan-European now, like Sycorax; I've put some effort into changing my speech patterns. Her lips, painted pale to match china-white skin, curled into a sulk.

"Tribute. After a quarter of a century, you ought to know I mean what I say."

I tugged my collar, glancing down.

"Them." Sycorax twisted a stiletto-heeled boot, crus.h.i.+ng the litter of cracked gla.s.s against the bricks.

She enjoyed the hunt a little too much. But who but a madwoman would have drained my living body and made me hers? Just fetching my corpse from the grave would have taken insane effort.

"I'm hungry," she complained while I sharpened my teeth on my lip to stop a malicious smile.

If I could buy a little time, the girls might make it to the street and I could lose them in the crowds and tangled shadows of the gaslamp district. Footsteps receded down the alley; I spread my hands in protest, c.o.c.king my head to one side and giving her the little half-smile that used to work so well on my wife. "Something with a little more fight in it, sweetie."

My wife was a h.e.l.l of a lot younger than Sycorax. "Those two girls. Bring me their blood, Tribute. That's an order."

And that was the end of the argument. I turned to obey.