In hard times, you have to do what you have to do in order to survive – but you don’t have to like it.
Maureen F. McHugh made her first sale in 1989 and has since made a powerful impression on the SF world with a relatively small body of work, becoming one of today’s most respected writers. In 1992, she published one of the year’s most widely acclaimed and talked-about first novels, China Mountain Zhang, which won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the Lambda Literary Award, and the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award, and which was named a New York Times notable book as well as being a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards. Her story “The Lincoln Train” won her a Nebula Award. Her other books, including the novels Half the Day is Night, Mission Child, and Nekropolis, have been greeted with similar enthusiasm. Her powerful short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Starlight, Alternate Warriors, Aladdin, Killing Me Softly, and other markets, and has been collected in Mothers and Other Monsters. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, her son, and a golden retriever named Hudson.
JIELING SET UP her boombox in a plague-trash market in the part where people sold parts for cars. She had been in the city of Shenzhen for a little over two hours but she figured she would worry about a job tomorrow. Everybody knew you could get a job in no time in Shenzhen. Jobs everywhere.
“What are you doing?” a guy asked her.
“I am divorced,” she said. She had always thought of herself as a person who would one day be divorced so it didn’t seem like a big stretch to claim it. Staying married to one person was boring. She figured she was too complicated for that. Interesting people had complicated lives. “I’m looking for a job. But I do hip-hop, too,” she explained.
“Hip-hop?” He was a middle-aged man with stubble on his chin who looked as if he wasn’t looking for a job but should be.
“Not like Shanghai,” she said, “Not like Hi-Bomb. They do gangsta stuff which I don’t like. Old fashioned. Like M.I.A.,” she said. “Except not political, of course.” She gave a big smile. This was all way beyond the guy. Jieling started the boombox. M.I.A. was Maya Arulpragasam, a Sri Lankan hip-hop artist who had started all on her own years ago. She had sung, she had danced, she had done her own videos. Of course M.I.A. lived in London, which made it easier to do hip-hop and become famous.
Jieling had no illusions about being a hip-hop singer, but it had been a good way to make some cash up north in Baoding where she came from. Set up in a plague-trash market and dance for yuan.
Jieling did her opening, her own hip-hop moves, a little like Maya and a little like some things she had seen on MTV, but not too sexy because Chinese people did not throw you money if you were too sexy. Only April and it was already hot and humid.
Ge down, ge down,
lang-a-lang-a-lang-a.
Ge down, ge down
lang-a-lang-a-lang-a
She had borrowed the English. It sounded very fresh. Very criminal.
The guy said, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-two,” she said, adding three years to her age, still dancing and singing.
Maybe she should have told him she was a widow? Or an orphan? But there were too many orphans and widows after so many people died in the bird flu plague. There was no margin in that. Better to be divorced. He didn’t throw any money at her, just flicked open his cell phone to check listings from the market for plague-trash. This plague-trash market was so big it was easier to check on-line, even if you were standing right in the middle of it. She needed a new cell phone. Hers had finally fallen apart right before she headed south.
Shenzhen people were apparently too jaded for hip-hop. She made 52 yuan, which would pay for one night in a bad hotel where country people washed cabbage in the communal sink.
The market was full of second-hand stuff. When over a quarter of a billion people died in four years, there was a lot of second-hand stuff. But there was still a part of the market for new stuff and street food and that’s where Jieling found the cell phone seller. He had a cart with stacks of flat plastic cell phone kits printed with circuits and scored. She flipped through; tiger-striped, peonies (old lady phones), metallics (old man phones), anime characters, moon phones, expensive lantern phones. “Where is your printer?” she asked.
“At home,” he said. “I print them up at home, bring them here. No electricity here.” Up north in Baoding she’d always bought them in a store where they let you pick your pattern on-line and then printed them there. More to pick from.
On the other hand, he had a whole box full of ones that hadn’t sold that he would let go for cheap. In the stack she found a purple one with kittens that wasn’t too bad. Very Japanese, which was also very fresh this year. And only 100 yuan for phone and 300 minutes.
He took the flat plastic sheet from her and dropped it in a pot of boiling water big enough to make dumplings. The hinges embedded in the sheet were made of plastic with molecular memory and when they got hot they bent and the plastic folded into a rough cell phone shape. He fished the phone out of the water with tongs, let it sit for a moment and then pushed all the seams together so they snapped. “Wait about an hour for it to dry before you use it,” he said and handed her the warm phone.
“An hour,” she said. “I need it now. I need a job.”
He shrugged. “Probably okay in half an hour,” he said.
She bought a newspaper and scallion pancake from a street food vendor, sat on a curb and ate while her phone dried. The paper had some job listings, but it also had a lot of listings from recruiters. ONE MONTH BONUS PAY! BEST JOBS! and NUMBER ONE JOBS! START BONUS! People scowled at her for sitting on the curb. She looked like a farmer but what else was she supposed to do? She checked listings on her new cell phone. On-line there were a lot more listings than in the paper. It was a good sign. She picked one at random and called.
The woman at the recruiting office was a flat-faced southerner with buckteeth. Watermelon picking teeth. But she had a manicure and a very nice red suit. The office was not so nice. It was small and the furniture was old. Jieling was groggy from a night spent at a hotel on the edge of the city. It had been cheap but very loud.
The woman was very sharp in the way she talked and had a strong accent that made it hard to understand her. Maybe Fujian, but Jieling wasn’t sure. The recruiter had Jieling fill out an application.
“Why did you leave home?” the recruiter asked.
“To get a good job,” Jieling said.
“What about your family? Are they alive?”
“My mother is alive. She is remarried,” Jieling said. “I wrote it down.”
The recruiter pursed her lips. “I can get you an interview on Friday,” she said.
“Friday!” Jieling said. It was Tuesday. She had only 300 yuan left out of the money she had brought. “But I need a job!”
The recruiter looked sideways at her. “You have made a big gamble to come to Shenzhen.”
“I can go to another recruiter,” Jieling said.
The recruiter tapped her lacquered nails. “They will tell you the same thing,” she said.
Jieling reached down to pick up her bag.
“Wait,” the recruiter said. “I do know of a job. But they only want girls of very good character.”
Jieling put her bag down and looked at the floor. Her character was fine. She was not a loose girl, whatever this woman with her big front teeth thought.
“Your Mandarin is very good. You say you graduated with high marks from high school,” the recruiter said.
“I liked school,” Jieling said, which was only partly not true. Everybody here had terrible Mandarin. They all had thick southern accents. Lots of people spoke Cantonese in the street.
“Okay. I will send you to ShinChi for an interview. I cannot get you an interview before tomorrow. But you come here at 8:00 am and I will take you over there.”
ShinChi. New Life. It sounded very promising. “Thank you,” Jieling said. “Thank you very much.”
But outside in the heat, she counted her money and felt a creeping fear. She called her mother.
Her stepfather answered, “Wei.”
“Is ma there?” she asked.
“Jieling!” he said. “Where are you!”
“I’m in Shenzhen,” she said, instantly impatient with him. “I have a job here.”
“A job! When are you coming home?”
He was always nice to her. He meant well. But he drove her nuts. “Let me talk to ma,” she said.
“She’s not here,” her stepfather said. “I have her phone at work. But she’s not home, either. She went to Beijing last weekend and she’s shopping for fabric now.”
Her mother had a little tailoring business. She went to Beijing every few months and looked at clothes in all the good stores. She didn’t buy in Beijing, she just remembered. Then she came home, bought fabric and sewed copies. Her stepfather had been born in Beijing and Jieling thought that was part of the reason her mother had married him. He was more like her mother than her father had been. There was nothing in particular wrong with him. He just set her teeth on edge.
“I’ll call back later,” Jieling said.
“Wait, your number is blocked,” her stepfather said. “Give me your number.”
“I don’t even know it yet,” Jieling said and hung up.
The New Life company was a huge, modern looking building with a lot of windows. Inside it was full of reflective surfaces and very clean. Sounds echoed in the lobby. A man in a very smart grey suit met Jieling and the recruiter and the recruiter’s red suit looked cheaper, her glossy fingernails too red, her buckteeth exceedingly large. The man in the smart grey suit was short and slim and very southern looking. Very city.
Jieling took some tests on her math and her written characters and got good scores.
To the recruiter, the Human Resources man said, “Thank you, we will send you your fee.” To Jieling he said, “We can start you on Monday.”
“Monday?” Jieling said. “But I need a job now!” He looked grave. “I . . . I came from Baoding, in Hebei,” Jieling explained. “I’m staying in a hotel, but I don’t have much money.”
The Human Resources man nodded. “We can put you up in our guesthouse,” he said. “We can deduct the money from your wages when you start. It’s very nice. It has television and air conditioning, and you can eat in the restaurant.”
It was very nice. There were two beds. Jieling put her backpack on the one nearest the door. There was carpeting, and the windows were covered in gold drapes with a pattern of cranes flying across them. The television got stations from Hong Kong. Jieling didn’t understand the Cantonese, but there was a button on the remote for subtitles. The movies had lots of violence and more sex than mainland movies did – like the bootleg American movies for sale in the market. She wondered how much this room was. 200 yuan? 300 yuan?
Jieling watched movies the whole first day, one right after another.
On Monday she began orientation. She was given two pale green uniforms, smocks and pants like medical people wore and little caps and two pairs of white shoes. In the uniform she looked a little like a model worker – which is to say that the clothes were not sexy and made her look fat. There were two other girls in their green uniforms. They all watched a DVD about the company.
New Life did biotechnology. At other plants they made influenza vaccine (on the screen were banks and banks of chicken eggs) but at this plant they were developing breakthrough technologies in tissue culture. It showed many men in suits. Then it showed a big American store and explained how they were forging new exportation ties with the biggest American corporation for selling goods, Wal-Mart. It also showed a little bit of an American movie about Wal-Mart. Subtitles explained how Wal-Mart was working with companies around the world to improve living standards, decrease CO2 emissions, and give people low prices. The voice narrating the DVD never really explained the breakthrough technologies.
One of the girls was from way up north, she had a strong northern way of talking.
“How long are you going to work here?” the northern girl asked. She looked as if she might even have some Russian in her.
“How long?” Jieling said.
“I’m getting married,” the northern girl confided. “As soon as I make enough money, I’m going home. If I haven’t made enough money in a year,” the northern girl explained, “I’m going home anyway.”
Jieling hadn’t really thought she would work here long. She didn’t know exactly what she would do, but she figured that a big city like Shenzhen was a good place to find out. This girl’s plans seemed very . . . country. No wonder southern Chinese thought northerners had to wipe the pig shit off their feet before they got on the train.
“Are you Russian?” Jieling asked.
“No,” said the girl. “I’m Manchu.”
“Ah,” Jieling said. Manchu like Manchurian. Ethnic Minority. Jieling had gone to school with a boy who was classified as Manchu, which meant that he was allowed to have two children when he got married. But he had looked Han Chinese like everyone else. This girl had the hook nose and the dark skin of a Manchu. Manchu used to rule China until the Communist Revolution (there was something in-between with Sun Yat-sen but Jieling’s history teachers had bored her to tears). Imperial and countrified.
Then a man came in from Human Resources.
“There are many kinds of stealing,” he began. “There is stealing of money or food. And there is stealing of ideas. Here at New Life, our ideas are like gold, and we guard against having them stolen. But you will learn many secrets, about what we are doing, about how we do things. This is necessary as you do your work. If you tell our secrets, that is theft. And we will find out.” He paused here and looked at them in what was clearly intended to be a very frightening way.
Jieling looked down at the ground because it was like watching someone overact. It was embarrassing. Her new shoes were very white and clean.
Then he outlined the prison terms for industrial espionage. Ten, twenty years in prison. “China must take its place as an innovator on the world stage and so must respect the laws of intellectual property,” he intoned. It was part of the modernization of China, where technology was a new future – Jieling put on her “I am a good girl” face. It was like politics class. Four modernizations. Six goals. Sometimes when she was a little girl, and she was riding behind her father on his bike to school, he would pass a billboard with a saying about traffic safety and begin to recite quotes from Mao. The force at the core of the revolution is the people! He would tuck his chin in when he did this and use a very serious voice, like a movie or like opera. Western experience for Chinese uses. Some of them she had learned from him. All reactionaries are paper tigers! she would chant with him, trying to make her voice deep. Be resolute, fear no sacrifice and surmount every difficulty to win victory! And then she would start giggling and he would glance over his shoulder and grin at her. He had been a Red Guard when he was young, but other than this, he never talked about it.
After the lecture, they were taken to be paired with workers who would train them. At least she didn’t have to go with the Manchu girl who was led off to shipping.
She was paired with a very small girl in one of the culture rooms. “I am Baiyue,” the girl said. Baiyue was so tiny, only up to Jieling’s shoulder, that her green scrubs swamped her. She had pigtails. The room where they worked was filled with rows and rows of what looked like wide drawers. Down the centre of the room was a long table with petri dishes and trays and lab equipment. Jieling didn’t know what some of it was and that was a little nerve-wracking. All up and down the room, pairs of girls in green worked at either the drawers or the table.
“We’re going to start cultures,” Baiyue said. “Take a tray and fill it with those.” She pointed to a stack of petri dishes. The bottom of each dish was filled with gelatin. Jieling took a tray and did what Baiyue did. Baiyue was serious but not at all sharp or superior. She explained that what they were doing was seeding the petri dishes with cells.
“Cells?” Jieling asked.
“Nerve cells from the electric ray. It’s a fish.”
They took swabs and Baiyue showed her how to put the cells on in a zigzag motion so that most of the gel was covered. They did six trays full of petri dishes. They didn’t smell fishy. Then they used pipettes to put in feeding solution. It was all pleasantly scientific without being very difficult.
At one point everybody left for lunch but Baiyue said they couldn’t go until they got the cultures finished or the batch would be ruined. Women shuffled by them and Jieling’s stomach growled. But when the lab was empty Baiyue smiled and said, “Where are you from?”
Baiyue was from Fujian. “If you ruin a batch,” she explained, “you have to pay out of your paycheck. I’m almost out of debt and when I get clear” – she glanced around and dropped her voice a little – “I can quit.”
“Why are you in debt?” Jieling asked. Maybe this was harder than she thought, maybe Baiyue had screwed up in the past.
“Everyone is in debt,” Baiyue said. “It’s just the way they run things. Let’s get the trays in the warmers.”
The drawers along the walls opened out and inside the temperature was kept blood warm. They loaded the trays into the drawers, one back and one front, going down the row until they had the morning’s trays all in.
“Okay,” Baiyue said, “that’s good. We’ll check trays this afternoon. I’ve got a set for transfer to the tissue room but we’ll have time after we eat.”
Jieling had never eaten in the employee cafeteria, only in the Guest House restaurant, and only the first night because it was expensive. Since then she had been living on ramen noodles and she was starved for a good meal. She smelled garlic and pork. First thing on the food line was a pan of steamed pork buns, fluffy white. But Baiyue headed off to a place at the back where there was a huge pot of congee – rice porridge – kept hot. “It’s the cheapest thing in the cafeteria,” Baiyue explained, “and you can eat all you want.” She dished up a big bowl of it – a lot of congee for a girl her size – and added some salt vegetables and boiled peanuts. “It’s pretty good, although usually by lunch it’s been sitting a little while. It gets a little gluey.”
Jieling hesitated. Baiyue had said she was in debt. Maybe she had to eat this stuff. But Jieling wasn’t going to have old rice porridge for lunch. “I’m going to get some rice and vegetables,” she said.
Baiyue nodded. “Sometimes I get that. It isn’t too bad. But stay away from anything with shrimp in it. Soooo expensive.”
Jieling got rice and vegetables and a big pork bun. There were two fish dishes and a pork dish with monkeybrain mushrooms but she decided she could maybe have the pork for dinner. There was no cost written on anything. She gave her danwei card to the woman at the end of the line who swiped it and handed it back.
“How much?” Jieling asked.
The woman shrugged. “It comes out of your food allowance.”
Jieling started to argue but across the cafeteria, Baiyue was waving her arm in the sea of green scrubs to get Jieling’s attention. Baiyue called from a table. “Jieling! Over here!
Baiyue’s eyes got very big when Jieling sat down. “A pork bun.”
“Are they really expensive?” Jieling asked.
Baiyue nodded. “Like gold. And so good.”
Jieling looked around at other tables. Other people were eating the pork and steamed buns and everything else.
“Why are you in debt?” Jieling asked.
Baiyue shrugged. “Everyone is in debt,” she said. “Just most people have given up. Everything costs here. Your food, your dormitory, your uniforms. They always make sure that you never earn anything.”
“They can’t do that!” Jieling said.
Baiyue said, “My granddad says it’s like the old days, when you weren’t allowed to quit your job. He says I should shut up and be happy. That they take good care of me. Iron rice bowl.”
“But, but but,” Jieling dredged the word up from some long forgotten class, “that’s feudal!”
Baiyue nodded. “Well, that’s my granddad. He used to make my brother and me kowtow to him and my grandmother at Spring Festival.” She frowned and wrinkled her nose. Country customs. Nobody in the city made their children kowtow at New Years. “But you’re lucky,” Baiyue said to Jieling. “You’ll have your uniform debt and dormitory fees, but you haven’t started on food debt or anything.”
Jieling felt sick. “I stayed in the guesthouse for four days,” she said. “They said they would charge it against my wages.”
“Oh.” Baiyue covered her mouth with her hand. After a moment, she said, “Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.” Jieling felt more frightened by that than anything else.
Instead of going back to the lab they went upstairs and across a connecting bridge to the dormitories. Naps? Did they get naps?
“Do you know what room you’re in?” Baiyue asked.
Jieling didn’t. Baiyue took her to ask the floor auntie who looked up Jieling’s name and gave her a key and some sheets and a blanket. Back down the hall and around the corner. The room was spare but really nice. Two bunk beds and two chests of drawers, a concrete floor. It had a window. All of the beds were taken except one of the top ones. By the window under the desk were three black boxes hooked to the wall. They were a little bigger than a shoebox. Baiyue flipped open the front of each one. They had names written on them. “Here’s a space where we can put your battery.” She pointed to an electrical extension.
“What are they?” Jieling said.
“They’re the battery boxes. It’s what we make. I’ll get you one that failed inspection. A lot of them work fine,” Baiyue said. “Inside there are electric ray cells to make electricity and symbiotic bacteria. The bacteria breaks down garbage to feed the ray cells. Garbage turned into electricity. Anti-global warming. No greenhouse gas. You have to feed scraps from the cafeteria a couple of times a week or it will die, but it does best if you feed it a little bit every day.”
“It’s alive?!” Jieling said.
Baiyue shrugged. “Yeah. Sort of. Supposedly if it does really well, you get credits for the electricity it generates. They charge us for our electricity use, so this helps hold down debt.”
The three boxes just sat there looking less alive than a boombox.
“Can you see the cells?” Jieling asked.
Baiyue shook her head. “No, the feed mechanism doesn’t let you. They’re just like the ones we grow, though, only they’ve been worked on in the tissue room. They added bacteria.”
“Can it make you sick?”
“No, the bacteria can’t live in people,” Baiyue said. “Can’t live anywhere except in the box.”
“And it makes electricity.”
Baiyue nodded.
“And people can buy it?”
She nodded again. “We’ve just started selling them. They say they’re going to sell them in China but really, they’re too expensive. Americans like them, you know, because of the no global warming. Of course, Americans buy anything.”
The boxes were on the wall between the beds, under the window, pretty near where the pillows were on the bottom bunks. She hadn’t minded the cells in the lab, but this whole thing was too creepy.
Jieling’s first paycheck was startling. She owed 1,974 R.M.B. Almost four months salary if she never ate or bought anything and if she didn’t have a dorm room. She went back to her room and climbed into her bunk and looked at the figures. Money deducted for uniforms and shoes, food, her time in the guesthouse.
Her roommates came chattering in a group. Jieling’s roommates all worked in packaging. They were nice enough, but they had been friends before Jieling moved in.
“Hey,” called Taohua. Then seeing what Jieling had. “Oh, first paycheck.”
Jieling nodded. It was like getting a jail sentence.
“Let’s see. Oh, not so bad. I owe three times that,” Taohua said. She passed the statement on to the other girls. All the girls owed huge amounts. More than a year.
“Don’t you care?” Jieling said.
“You mean like little Miss Lei Feng?” Taohua asked. Everyone laughed and Jieling laughed, too, although her face heated up. Miss Lei Feng was what they called Baiyue. Little Miss Goody-goody. Lei Feng, the famous do-gooder soldier who darned his friend’s socks on the Long March. He was nobody when he was alive, but when he died, his diary listed all the anonymous good deeds he had done and then he became a Hero. Lei Feng posters hung in elementary schools. He wanted to be “a revolutionary screw that never rusts.” It was the kind of thing everybody’s grandparents had believed in.
“Does Baiyue have a boyfriend?” Taohua asked, suddenly serious.
“No, no!” Jieling said. It was against the rules to have a boyfriend and Baiyue was always getting in trouble for breaking rules. Things like not having her trays stacked by 5:00 pm although nobody else got in trouble for that.
“If she had a boyfriend,” Taohua said, “I could see why she would want to quit. You can’t get married if you’re in debt. It would be too hard.”
“Aren’t you worried about your debt?” Jieling asked.
Taohua laughed. “I don’t have a boyfriend. And besides, I just got a promotion so soon I’ll pay off my debt.”
“You’ll have to stop buying clothes,” one of the other girls said. The company store did have a nice catalogue you could order clothes from, but they were expensive. There was debt limit, based on your salary. If you were promoted, your debt limit would go up.
“Or I’ll go to special projects,” Taohua said. Everyone knew what special projects was, even though it was supposed to be a big company secret. They were computers made of bacteria. They looked a lot like the boxes in the dormitory rooms. “I’ve been studying computers,” Taohua explained. “Bacterial computers are special. They do many things. They can detect chemicals. They are massively parallel.”
“What does that mean?” Jieling asked.
“It is hard to explain,” Taohua said evasively.
Taohua opened her battery and poured in scraps. It was interesting that Taohua claimed not to care about her debt but kept feeding her battery. Jieling had a battery now, too. It was a reject – the back had broken so that the metal things that sent the electricity back out were exposed and if you touched it wrong, it could give you a shock. No problem, since Jieling had plugged it into the wall and didn’t plan to touch it again.
“Besides,” Taohua said, “I like it here a lot better than at home.”
Better than home. In some ways yes, in some ways no. What would it be like to just give up and belong to the company. Nice things, nice food. Never rich. But never poor, either. Medical care. Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing. Maybe Baiyue was a little . . . obsessive.
“I don’t care about my debt,” Taohua said, serene. “With one more promotion, I’ll move to cadres housing.”
Jieling reported the conversation to Baiyue. They were getting incubated cells ready to move to the tissue room. In the tissue room they’d be transferred to protein and collagen grid that would guide their growth – line up the cells to approximate an electricity generating system. The tissue room had a weird, yeasty smell.
“She’s fooling herself,” Baiyue said. “Line girls never get to be cadres. She might get onto special projects, but that’s even worse than regular line work because you’re never allowed to leave the compound.” Baiyue picked up a dish, stuck a little volt reader into the gel and rapped the dish smartly against the lab table.
The needle on the volt gauge swung to indicate the cells had discharged electricity. That was the way they tested to see the cells were generating electricity. A shock made them discharge and the easiest way was to knock them against the table.
Baiyue could sound very bitter about New Life. Jieling didn’t like the debt, it scared her a little. But really, Baiyue saw only one side of everything. “I thought you got a pay raise to go to special projects,” Jieling said.
Baiyue rolled her eyes. “And more reasons to go in debt, I’ll bet.”
“How much is your debt?” Jieling asked.
“Still 700,” Baiyue said. “Because they told me I had to have new uniforms.” She sighed.
“I am so sick of congee,” Jieling said. “They’re never going to let us get out of debt.” Baiyue’s way was doomed. She was trying to play by the company’s rules and still win. That wasn’t Jieling’s way. “We have to make money somewhere else,” Jieling said.
“Right,” Baiyue said. “We work six days a week.” And Baiyue often stayed after shift to try to make sure she didn’t lose wages on failed cultures. “Out of spec,” she said and put it aside. She had taught Jieling to keep the out of specs for a day. Sometimes they improved and could be shipped on. It wasn’t the way the supervisor, Ms Wang, explained the job to Jieling, but it cut down on the number of rejects, and that, in turn, cut down on paycheck deductions
“That leaves us Sundays,” Jieling said.
“I can’t leave the compound this Sunday.”
“And if you do, what are they going to do, fire you?” Jieling said.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to earn money outside of the compound,” Baiyue said.
“You are too much of a good girl,” Jieling said. “Remember, it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
“Is that Mao?” Baiyue asked, frowning.
“No,” Jieling said, “Deng Xiaoping, the one after Mao.”
“Well, he’s dead, too,” Baiyue said. She rapped a dish against the counter and the needle on the voltmeter jumped.
Jieling had been working just over four weeks when they were all called to the cafeteria for a meeting. Mr Cao from Human Resources was there. He was wearing a dark suit and standing at the white screen. Other cadres sat in chairs along the back of the stage, looking very stern.
“We are here to discuss a very serious matter,” he said. “Many of you know this girl.”
There was a laptop hooked up and a very nervous looking boy running it. Jieling looked carefully at the laptop but it didn’t appear to be a special projects computer. In fact, it was made in Korea. He did something and an ID picture of a girl flashed on the screen.
Jieling didn’t know her. But around her she heard noises of shock, someone sucking air through their teeth, someone else breathed softly, “Ai-yah.”
“This girl ran away, leaving her debt with New Life. She ate our food, wore our clothes, slept in our beds. And then, like a thief, she ran away.” The Human Resources man nodded his head. The boy at the computer changed the image on the big projector screen.
Now it was a picture of the same girl with her head bowed, and two policemen holding her arms.
“She was picked up in Guangdong,” the Human Resources man said. “She is in jail there.”
The cafeteria was very quiet.
The Human Resources man said, “Her life is ruined, which is what should happen to all thieves.”
Then he dismissed them. That afternoon, the picture of the girl with the two policemen appeared on the bulletin boards of every floor of the dormitory.
On Sunday, Baiyue announced, “I’m not going.”
She was not supposed to leave the compound, but one of her roommates had female problems – bad cramps – and planned to spend the day in bed drinking tea and reading magazines. Baiyue was going to use her ID to leave.
“You have to,” Jieling said. “You want to grow old here? Die a serf to New Life?”
“It’s crazy. We can’t make money dancing in the plague-trash market.”
“I’ve done it before,” Jieling said. “You’re scared.”
“It’s just not a good idea,” Baiyue said.
“Because of the girl they caught in Guangdong. We’re not skipping out on our debt. We’re paying it off.”
“We’re not supposed to work for someone else when we work here,” Baiyue said.
“Oh come on,” Jieling said. “You are always making things sound worse than they are. I think you like staying here being little Miss Lei Feng.”
“Don’t call me that,” Baiyue snapped.
“Well, don’t act like it. New Life is not being fair. We don’t have to be fair. What are they going to do to you if they catch you?”
“Fine me,” Baiyue said. “Add to my debt!”
“So what? They’re going to find a way to add to your debt no matter what. You are a serf. They are the landlord.”
“But if —”
“No but if,” Jieling said. “You like being a martyr. I don’t.”
“What do you care,” Baiyue said. “You like it here. If you stay you can eat pork buns every night.”
“And you can eat congee for the rest of your life. I’m going to try to do something.” Jieling slammed out of the dorm room. She had never said harsh things to Baiyue before. Yes, she had thought about staying here. But was that so bad? Better than being like Baiyue, who would stay here and have a miserable life. Jieling was not going to have a miserable life, no matter where she stayed or what she did. That was why she had come to Shenzhen in the first place.
She heard the door open behind her and Baiyue ran down the hall. “Okay,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll try it. Just this once.”
The streets of Shanghai were incredibly loud after weeks in the compound. In a shop window, she and Baiyue stopped and watched a news segment on how the fashion in Shanghai was for sarongs. Jieling would have to tell her mother. Of course her mother had a TV and probably already knew. Jieling thought about calling, but not now. Not now. She didn’t want to explain about New Life. The next news segment was about the success of the People’s Army in Tajikistan. Jieling pulled Baiyue to come on.
They took one bus, and then had to transfer. On Sundays, unless you were lucky, it took forever to transfer because fewer busses ran. They waited almost an hour for the second bus. That bus was almost empty when they got on. They sat down a few seats back from the driver. Baiyue rolled her eyes. “Did you see the guy in the back?” she asked. “Party functionary.”
Jieling glanced over her shoulder and saw him. She couldn’t miss him, in his careful polo shirt. He had that stiff party-member look.
Baiyue sighed. “My uncle is just like that. So boring.”
Jieling thought that to be honest, Baiyue would have made a good revolutionary, back in the day. Baiyue liked that kind of revolutionary purity. But she nodded.
The plague-trash market was full on a Sunday. There was a toy seller making tiny little clay figures on sticks. He waved a stick at the girls as they passed. “Cute things!” he called. “I’ll make whatever you want!” The stick had a little Donald Duck on it.
“I can’t do this,” Baiyue said. “There’s too many people.”
“It’s not so bad,” Jieling said. She found a place for the boombox. Jieling had brought them to where all the food vendors were. “Stay here and watch this,” she said. She hunted through the food stalls and bought a bottle of local beer, counting out from her little horde of money she had left from when she came. She took the beer back to Baiyue. “Drink this,” she said. “It will help you be brave.”
“I hate beer,” Baiyue said.
“Beer or debt,” Jieling said.
While Baiyue drank the beer, Jieling started the boombox and did her routine. People smiled at her but no one put any money in her cash box. Shenzhen people were so cheap. Baiyue sat on the curb, nursing her beer, not looking at Jieling or at anyone until finally Jieling couldn’t stand it any longer.
“C’mon, meimei,” she said.
Baiyue seemed a bit surprised to be called little sister but she put the beer down and got up. They had practiced a routine to an M.I.A. song, singing and dancing. It would be a hit, Jieling was sure.
“I can’t,” Baiyue whispered.
“Yes you can,” Jieling said. “You do good.”
A couple of people stopped to watch them arguing, so Jieling started the music.
“I feel sick,” Baiyue whimpered.
But the beat started and there was nothing to do but dance and sing. Baiyue was so nervous, she forgot at first, but then she got the hang of it. She kept her head down and her face was bright red.
Jieling started making up a rap. She’d never done it before and she hadn’t gotten very far before she was laughing and then Baiyue was laughing, too.
Wode meimei hen haixiude
Mei ta shi xuli
Tai hen xiuqi –
My little sister is so shy
But she’s pretty
Far too delicate –
They almost stopped because they were giggling but they kept dancing and Jieling went back to the lyrics from the song they had practiced.
When they had finished, people clapped and they’d made thirty-two yuan.
They didn’t make as much for any single song after that, but in a few hours they had collected 187 yuan. It was early evening and night entertainers were showing up – a couple of people who sang opera, acrobats, and a clown with a wig of hair so red it looked on fire, stepping stork-legged on stilts waving a rubber Kalashnikov in his hand. He was all dressed in white. Uncle Death, from cartoons during the plague. Some of the day vendors had shut down, and new people were showing up who put out a board and some chairs and served sorghum liquor; clear, white and 150 proof. The crowd was starting to change, too. It was rowdier. Packs of young men dressed in weird combinations of clothes from plague markets – vintage Mao suit jackets and suit pants and peasant shoes. And others, veterans from the Tajikistan conflict, one with an empty trouser leg.
Jieling picked up the boombox and Baiyue took the cash box. Outside of the market it wasn’t yet dark.
“You are amazing,” Baiyue kept saying. “You are such a special girl!”
“You did great,” Jieling said. “When I was by myself, I didn’t make anything! Everyone likes you because you are little and cute!”
“Look at this! I’ll be out of debt before autumn!”
Maybe it was just the feeling that she was responsible for Baiyue, but Jieling said, “You keep it all.”
“I can’t! I can’t! We split it!” Baiyue said.
“Sure,” Jieling said. “Then after you get away, you can help me. Just think, if we do this for three more Sundays, you’ll pay off your debt.”
“Oh, Jieling,” Baiyue said. “You really are like my big sister!”
Jieling was sorry she had ever called Baiyue “little sister.” It was such a country thing to do. She had always suspected that Baiyue wasn’t a city girl. Jieling hated the countryside. Grain spread to dry in the road and mother’s-elder-sister and father’s-younger-brother bringing all the cousins over on the day off. Jieling didn’t even know all those country ways to say aunt and uncle. It wasn’t Baiyue’s fault. And Baiyue had been good to her. She was rotten to be thinking this way.
“Excuse me,” said a man. He wasn’t like the packs of young men with their long hair and plague clothes. Jieling couldn’t place him but he seemed familiar. “I saw you in the market. You were very fun. Very lively.”
Baiyue took hold of Jieling’s arm. For a moment Jieling wondered if maybe he was from New Life, but she told herself that was crazy. “Thank you,” she said. She thought she remembered him putting ten yuan in the box. No, she thought, he was on the bus. The party functionary. The party was checking up on them. Now that was funny. She wondered if he would lecture them on Western ways.
“Are you in the music business?” Baiyue asked. She glanced at Jieling, who couldn’t help laughing, snorting through her nose.
The man took them very seriously though. “No,” he said. “I can’t help you there. But I like your act. You seem like girls of good character.”
“Thank you,” Baiyue said. She didn’t look at Jieling again, which was good because Jieling knew she wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face.
“I am Wei Rongyi. Maybe I can buy you some dinner?” the man asked. He held up his hands, “Nothing romantic. You are so young, it is like you could be daughters.”
“You have a daughter?” Jieling asked.
He shook his head. “Not anymore,” he said.
Jieling understood. His daughter had died of the bird flu. She felt embarrassed for having laughed at him. Her soft heart saw instantly that he was treating them like the daughter he had lost.
He took them to a dumpling place on the edge of the market and ordered half a kilo of crescent-shaped pork dumplings and a kilo of square beef dumplings. He was a cadre, a middle manager. His wife had lived in Changsha for a couple of years now, where her family was from. He was from the older generation, people who did not get divorced. All around them, the restaurant was filling up mostly with men stopping after work for dumplings and drinks. They were a little island surrounded by truck drivers and men who worked in the factories in the outer city – tough grimy places.
“What do you do? Are you secretaries?” Wei Rongyi asked.
Baiyue laughed. “As if!” she said.
“We are factory girls,” Jieling said. She dunked a dumpling in vinegar. They were so good! Not congee!
“Factory girls!” he said. “I am so surprised!”
Baiyue nodded. “We work for New Life,” she explained. “This is our day off, so we wanted to earn a little extra money.”
He rubbed his head, looking off into the distance. “New Life,” he said, trying to place the name. “New Life . . .”
“Out past the zoo,” Baiyue said.
Jieling thought they shouldn’t say so much.
“Ah, in the city. A good place? What do they make?” he asked. He had a way of blinking very quickly that was disconcerting.
“Batteries,” Jieling said. She didn’t say bio-batteries.
“I thought they made computers,” he said.
“Oh yes,” Baiyue said. “Special projects.”
Jieling glared at Baiyue. If this guy gave them trouble at New Life, they’d have a huge problem getting out of the compound.
Baiyue blushed.
Wei laughed. “You are special project girls, then. Well, see, I knew you were not just average factory girls.”
He didn’t press the issue. Jieling kept waiting for him to make some sort of move on them. Offer to buy them beer. But he didn’t, and when they had finished their dumplings, he gave them the leftovers to take back to their dormitories and then stood at the bus stop until they were safely on their bus.
“Are you sure you will be all right?” he asked them when the bus came.
“You can see my window from the bus stop,” Jieling promised. “We will be fine.”
“Shenzhen can be a dangerous city. You be careful!”
Out the window, they could see him in the glow of the streetlight, waving as the bus pulled away.
“He was so nice,” Baiyue sighed. “Poor man.”
“Didn’t you think he was a little strange?” Jieling asked.
“Everybody is strange anymore,” Baiyue said. “After the plague. Not like when we were growing up.”
It was true. Her mother was strange. Lots of people were crazy from so many people dying. Jieling held up the leftover dumplings. “Well, anyway. I am not feeding this to my battery,” she said. They both tried to smile.
“Our whole generation is crazy,” Baiyue said.
“We know everybody dies,” Jieling said. Outside the bus window, the streets were full of young people, out trying to live while they could.
They made all their bus connections as smooth as silk. So quick, they were home in forty-five minutes. Sunday night was movie night, and all of Jieling’s roommates were at the movie so she and Baiyue could sort the money in Jieling’s room. She used her key card and the door clicked open.
Mr Wei was kneeling by the battery boxes in their room. He started and hissed, “Close the door!”
Jieling was so surprised she did.
“Mr Wei!” Baiyue said.
He was dressed like an army man on a secret mission, all in black. He showed them a little black gun. Jieling blinked in surprise. “Mr Wei!” she said. It was hard to take him seriously. Even all in black, he was still weird Mr Wei, blinking rapidly behind his glasses.
“Lock the door,” he said. “And be quiet.”
“The door locks by itself,” Jieling explained. “And my roommates will be back soon.”
“Put a chair in front of the door,” he said and shoved the desk chair towards them. Baiyue pushed it under the door handle. The window was open and Jieling could see where he had climbed on the desk and left a footprint on Taohua’s fashion magazine. Taohua was going to be pissed. And what was Jieling going to say? If anyone found out there was a man in her room, she was going to be in very big trouble.
“How did you get in?” she asked. “What about the cameras?” There were security cameras.
He showed them a little spray can. “Special paint. It just makes things look foggy and dim. Security guards are so lazy anymore no one ever checks things out.” He paused a moment, clearly disgusted with the lax morality of the day. “Miss Jieling,” he said. “Take that screwdriver and finish unscrewing that computer from the wall.”
Computer? She realized he meant the battery boxes.
Baiyue’s eyes got very big. “Mr Wei! You’re a thief!”
Jieling shook her head. “A corporate spy.”
“I am a patriot,” he said. “But you young people wouldn’t understand that. Sit on the bed.” He waved the gun at Baiyue.
The gun was so little it looked like a toy and it was difficult to be afraid, but still Jieling thought it was good that Baiyue sat.
Jieling knelt. It was her box that Mr Wei had been disconnecting. It was all the way to the right, so he had started with it. She had come to feel a little bit attached to it, thinking of it sitting there, occasionally zapping electricity back into the grid, reducing her electricity costs and her debt. She sighed and unscrewed it. Mr Wei watched.
She jimmied it off the wall, careful not to touch the contacts. The cells built up a charge, and when they were ready, a switch tapped a membrane and they discharged. It was all automatic and there was no knowing when it was going to happen. Mr Wei was going to be very upset when he realized that this wasn’t a computer.
“Put it on the desk,” he said.
She did.
“Now sit with your friend.”
Jieling sat down next to Baiyue. Keeping a wary eye on them, he sidled over to the bio-battery. He opened the hatch where they dumped garbage in them, and tried to look in as well as look at them. “Where are the controls?” he asked. He picked it up, his palm flat against the broken back end where the contacts were exposed.
“Tap it against the desk,” Jieling said. “Sometimes the door sticks.” There wasn’t actually a door. But it had just come into her head. She hoped that the cells hadn’t discharged in a while.
Mr Wei frowned and tapped the box smartly against the desktop.
Torpedinidae, the electric ray, can generate a current of 200 volts for approximately a minute. The power output is close to 1 kilowatt over the course of the discharge and while this won’t kill the average person, it is a powerful shock. Mr Wei stiffened and fell, clutching the box and spasming wildly. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . Mr Wei was still spasming. Jieling and Baiyue looked at each other. Gingerly, Jieling stepped around Mr Wei. He had dropped the little gun. Jieling picked it up. Mr Wei was still spasming. Jieling wondered if he was going to die. Or if he was already dead and the electricity was just making him jump. She didn’t want him to die. She looked at the little gun and it made her feel even sicker so she threw it out the window.
Finally Mr Wei dropped the box.
Baiyue said, “Is he dead?”
Jieling was afraid to touch him. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing. Then he groaned and both girls jumped.
“He’s not dead,” Jieling said.
“What should we do?” Baiyue asked.
“Tie him up,” Jieling said. Although she wasn’t sure what they’d do with him then.
Jieling used the cord to her boombox to tie his wrists. When she grabbed his hands he gasped and struggled feebly. Then she took her pillowcase and cut along the blind end, a space just wide enough that his head would fit through.
“Sit him up,” she said to Baiyue.
“You sit him up,” Baiyue said. Baiyue didn’t want to touch him.
Jieling pulled Mr Wei into a sitting position. “Put the pillowcase over his head,” she said. The pillowcase was like a shirt with no armholes, so when Baiyue pulled it over his head and shoulders, it pinned his arms against his sides and worked something like a straitjacket.
Jieling took his wallet and his identification papers out of his pocket. “Why would someone carry their wallet to a break-in?” she asked. “He has six ID papers. One says he is Mr Wei.”
“Wow,” Baiyue said. “Let me see. Also Mr Ma. Mr Zhang. Two Mr Liu’s and a Mr Cui.”
Mr Wei blinked, his eyes watering.
“Do you think he has a weak heart?” Baiyue asked.
“I don’t know,” Jieling said. “Wouldn’t he be dead if he did?”
Baiyue considered this.
“Baiyue! Look at all this yuan!” Jieling emptied the wallet, counting. Almost eight thousand yuan!
“Let me go,” Mr Wei said weakly.
Jieling was glad he was talking. She was glad he seemed like he might be all right. She didn’t know what they would do if he died. They would never be able to explain a dead person. They would end up in deep debt. And probably go to jail for something. “Should we call the floor auntie and tell him that he broke in?” Jieling asked.
“We could,” Baiyue said.
“Do not!” Mr Wei said, sounding stronger. “You don’t understand! I’m from Beijing!”
“So is my stepfather,” Jieling said. “Me, I’m from Baoding. It’s about an hour south of Beijing.”
Mr Wei said, “I’m from the government! That money is government money!”
“I don’t believe you,” Jieling said. “Why did you come in through the window?” Jieling asked.
“Secret agents always come in through the window?” Baiyue said and started to giggle.
“Because this place is counter-revolutionary!” Mr Wei said.
Baiyue covered her mouth with her hand. Jieling felt embarrassed, too. No one said things like “counter-revolutionary” anymore.
“This place! It is making things that could make China strong!” he said.
“Isn’t that good?” Baiyue asked.
“But they don’t care about China! Only about money. Instead of using it for China, they sell it to America!” he said. Spittle was gathering at the corner of his mouth. He was starting to look deranged. “Look at this place! Officials are all concerned about guanxi!” Connections. Kickbacks. Guanxi ran China, everybody knew that.
“So, maybe you have an anti-corruption investigation?” Jieling said. There were lots of anti-corruption investigations. Jieling’s stepfather said that they usually meant someone powerful was mad at their brother-in-law or something, so they accused them of corruption.
Mr Wei groaned. “There is no one to investigate them.”
Baiyue and Jieling looked at each other.
Mr Wei explained, “In my office, the Guangdong office, there used to be twenty people. Special operatives. Now there is only me and Ms Yang.”
Jieling said, “Did they all die of bird flu?”
Mr Wei shook his head. “No, they all went to work on contract for Saudi Arabia. You can make a lot of money in the Middle East. A lot more than in China.”
“Why don’t you and Ms Yang go work in Saudi Arabia?” Baiyue asked.
Jieling thought Mr Wei would give some revolutionary speech. But he just hung his head. “She is the secretary. I am the bookkeeper.” And then in a smaller voice, “She is going to Kuwait to work for Mr Liu.”
They probably did not need bookkeepers in the Middle East. Poor Mr Wei. No wonder he was such a terrible secret agent.
“The spirit of the revolution is gone,” he said, and there were real, honest to goodness tears in his eyes. “Did you know that Tiananmen Square was built by volunteers? People would come after their regular job and lay the paving of the square. Today people look to Hong Kong.”
“Nobody cares about a bunch of old men in Beijing,” Baiyue said.
“Exactly! We used to have a strong military! But now the military is too worried about their own factories and farms! They want us to pull out of Tajikistan because it is ruining their profits!”
This sounded like a good idea to Jieling, but she had to admit, she hated the news so she wasn’t sure why they were fighting in Tajikistan anyway. Something about Muslim terrorists. All she knew about Muslims was that they made great street food.
“Don’t you want to be patriots?” Mr Wei said.
“You broke into my room and tried to steal my – you know that’s not a computer, don’t you?” Jieling said. “It’s a bio-battery. They’re selling them to the Americans. Wal-Mart.”
Mr Wei groaned.
“We don’t work in special projects,” Baiyue said.
“You said you did,” he protested.
“We did not,” Jieling said. “You just thought that. How did you know this was my room?”
“The company lists all its workers in a directory,” he said wearily. “And it’s movie night, everyone is either out or goes to the movies. I’ve had the building under surveillance for weeks. I followed you to the market today. Last week it was a girl named Pingli, who blabbed about everything, but she wasn’t in special projects.
“I put you on the bus, I’ve timed the route three times. I should have had an hour and fifteen minutes to drive over here and get the box and get out.”
“We made all our connections,” Baiyue explained.
Mr Wei was so dispirited he didn’t even respond.
Jieling said, “I thought the government was supposed to help workers. If we get caught, we’ll be fined and we’ll be deeper in debt.” She was just talking. Talking, talking, talking too much. This was too strange. Like when someone was dying. Something extraordinary was happening, like your father dying in the next room, and yet the ordinary things went on, too. You made tea, your mother opened the shop the next day and sewed clothes while she cried. People came in and pretended not to notice. This was like that. Mr Wei had a gun and they were explaining about New Life.
“Debt?” Mr Wei said.
“To the company,” she said. “We are all in debt. The company hires us and says they are going to pay us, but then they charge us for our food and our clothes and our dorm and it always costs more than we earn. That’s why we were doing rap today. To make money to be able to quit.” Mr Wei’s glasses had tape holding the arm on. Why hadn’t she noticed that in the restaurant? Maybe because when you are afraid you notice things. When your father is dying of the plague, you notice the way the covers on your mother’s chairs need to be washed. You wonder if you will have to do it or if you will die before you have to do chores.
“The Pingli girl,” he said, “she said the same thing. That’s illegal.”
“Sure,” Baiyue said. “Like anybody cares.”
“Could you expose corruption?” Jieling asked.
Mr Wei shrugged, at least as much as he could in the pillowcase. “Maybe. But they would just pay bribes to locals and it would all go away.”
All three of them sighed.
“Except,” Mr Wei said, sitting up a little straighter. “The Americans. They are always getting upset about that sort of thing. Last year there was a corporation, the Shanghai Six. The Americans did a documentary on them and then western companies would not do business. If they got information from us about what New Life is doing . . .”
“Who else is going to buy bio-batteries?” Baiyue said. “The company would be in big trouble!”
“Beijing can threaten a big exposé, tell the New York Times newspaper!” Mr Wei said, getting excited. “My Beijing supervisor will love that! He loves media!”
“Then you can have a big show trial,” Jieling said.
Mr Wei was nodding.
“But what is in it for us?” Baiyue said.
“When there’s a trial, they’ll have to cancel your debt!” Mr Wei said. “Even pay you a big fine!”
“If I call the floor auntie and say I caught a corporate spy, they’ll give me a big bonus,” Baiyue said.
“Don’t you care about the other workers?” Mr Wei asked.
Jieling and Baiyue looked at each other and shrugged. Did they? “What are they going to do to you anyway?” Jieling said. “You can still do big expose. But that way we don’t have to wait.”
“Look,” he said, “you let me go, and I’ll let you keep my money.”
Someone rattled the door handle.
“Please,” Mr Wei whispered. “You can be heroes for your fellow workers, even though they’ll never know it.”
Jieling stuck the money in her pocket. Then she took the papers, too.
“You can’t take those,” he said.
“Yes I can,” she said. “If after six months, there is no big corruption scandal? We can let everyone know how a government secret agent was outsmarted by two factory girls.”
“Six months!” he said. “That’s not long enough!”
“It better be,” Jieling said.
Outside the door, Taohua called, “Jieling? Are you in there? Something is wrong with the door!”
“Just a minute,” Jieling called. “I had trouble with it when I came home.” To Mr Wei she whispered sternly, “Don’t you try anything. If you do, we’ll scream our heads off and everybody will come running.” She and Baiyue shimmied the pillowcase off of Mr Wei’s head. He started to stand up and jerked the boombox, which clattered across the floor. “Wait!” she hissed and untied him.
Taohua called through the door, “What’s that?”
“Hold on!” Jieling called.
Baiyue helped Mr Wei stand up. Mr Wei climbed onto the desk and then grabbed a line hanging outside. He stopped a moment as if trying to think of something to say.
“‘A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery,’’ Jieling said. It had been her father’s favorite quote from Chairman Mao. “‘. . . it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.’”
Mr Wei looked as if he might cry and not because he was moved by patriotism. He stepped back and disappeared. Jieling and Baiyue looked out the window. He did go down the wall just like a secret agent from a movie, but it was only two stories. There was still the big footprint in the middle of Taohua’s magazine and the room looked as if it had been hit by a storm.
“They’re going to think you had a boyfriend,” Baiyue whispered to Jieling.
“Yeah,” Jieling said, pulling the chair out from under the door handle. “And they’re going to think he’s rich.”
It was Sunday, and Jieling and Baiyue were sitting on the beach. Jieling’s cell phone rang, a little chime of M.I.A. hip-hop. Even though it was Sunday, it was one of the girls from New Life. Sunday should be a day off, but she took the call anyway.
“Jieling? This is Xia Meili? From packaging. Taohua told me about your business? Maybe you could help me?”
Jieling said, “Sure. What is your debt, Meili?”
“3,800 R.M.B.,” Meili said. “I know it’s a lot.”
Jieling said, “Not so bad. We have a lot of people who already have loans, though, and it will probably be a few weeks before I can make you a loan.”
With Mr Wei’s capital, Jieling and Baiyue had opened a bank account. They had bought themselves out, and then started a little loan business where they bought people out of New Life. Then people had to pay them back with a little extra. They had each had jobs – Jieling worked for a company that made toys. She sat each day at a table where she put a piece of specially shaped plastic over the body of a little doll, an action figure. The plastic fit right over the figure and had cut-outs. Jieling sprayed the whole thing with red paint and when the piece of plastic was lifted, the action figure had a red shirt. It was boring, but at the end of the week, she got paid instead of owing the company money.
She and Baiyue used all their extra money on loans to get girls out of New Life. More and more loans, and more and more payments. Now New Life had sent them a threatening letter saying that what they were doing was illegal. But Mr Wei said not to worry. Two officials had come and talked to them and had showed them legal documents and had them explain everything about what had happened. Soon, the officials promised, they would take New Life to court.
Jieling wasn’t so sure about the officials. After all, Mr Wei was an official. But a foreign newspaperman had called them. He was from a newspaper called The Wall Street Journal and he said that he was writing a story about labor shortages in China after the bird flu. He said that in some places in the west there were reports of slavery. His Chinese was very good. His story was going to come out in the United States tomorrow. Then she figured officials would have to do something or lose face.
Jieling told Meili to call her back in two weeks – although hopefully in two weeks no one would need help to get away from New Life – and wrote a note to herself in her little notebook.
Baiyue was sitting looking at the water. “This is the first time I’ve been to the beach,” she said.
“The ocean is so big, isn’t it?”
Baiyue nodded, scuffing at the white sand. “People always say that, but you don’t know until you see it.”
Jieling said, “Yeah.” Funny, she had lived here for months. Baiyue had lived here more than a year. And they had never come to the beach. The beach was beautiful.
“I feel sorry for Mr Wei,” Baiyue said.
“You do?” Jieling said. “Do you think he really had a daughter who died?”
“Maybe,” Baiyue said. “A lot of people died.”
“My father died,” Jieling said.
Baiyue looked at her, a quick little sideways look, then back out at the ocean. “My mother died,” she said.
Jieling was surprised. She had never known that Baiyue’s mother was dead. They had talked about so much but never about that. She put her arm around Baiyue’s waist and they sat for a while.
“I feel bad in a way,” Baiyue said.
“How come?” Jieling said.
“Because we had to steal capital to fight New Life. That makes us capitalists.”
Jieling shrugged.
“I wish it was like when they fought the revolution,” Baiyue said. “Things were a lot more simple.”
“Yeah,” Jieling said, “and they were poor and a lot of them died.”
“I know,” Baiyue sighed.
Jieling knew what she meant. It would be nice to . . . to be sure what was right and what was wrong. Although not if it made you like Mr Wei.
Poor Mr Wei. Had his daughter really died?
“Hey,” Jieling said, “I’ve got to make a call. Wait right here.” She walked a little down the beach. It was windy and she turned her back to guard protect the cell phone, like someone lighting a match. “Hello,” she said, “hello, mama, it’s me. Jieling.”
Born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, to New Worlds, but it was not until 1984, when he made his first appearance in Interzone – the magazine where much of his published short fiction has appeared – with his brilliant novella The Unconquered Country that he first attracted any serious attention. The Unconquered Country, one of the best novellas of the decade, had a stunning impact on the science fiction scene of the day, and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version, The Unconquered Country: A Life History. His output has been sparse since then by the high-production standards of the genre, but extremely distinguished, with his novel The Child Garden: A Low Comedy, which won both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award; his later novel Air also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His other novels include The Warrior Who Carried Life; the critically acclaimed mainstream novel Was; Coming of Enkidu; The King’s Last Song; Lust; and the underground cult classic 253, the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel” that in its original form ran online on Ryman’s home page, ryman.com, and which in its print form won the Philip K. Dick Award. Four of his novellas have been collected in Unconquered Countries. His most recent book is a new novel, When It Changed.
In the eloquent story that follows, he takes us to the far future, long after humans have become extinct, to show us one individual’s quest to piece together some of the Old Knowledge in the face of desperate odds and at the cost of everything she loves.
LEVEZA WAS THE wrong name for her; she was big and strong, not light. Her bulk made her seem both male and female; her shoulders were broad but so were her hips and breasts.
She had beautiful eyes, round and black, and she was thoughtful; her heavy jaws would grind round and round as if imitating the continual motion of her mind. She always looked as if she were listening to something distant, faraway.
Like many large people, Leveza was easily embarrassed. Her mane would bristle up across the top of her head and down her spine. She was strong and soft all at once, and kind. I liked talking to her; her voice was so high and gentle, though her every gesture was blurting and forlorn.
But that voice when it went social! If Leveza saw a Cat crouching in the grass, her whinnying was sudden, fierce and irresistible. All of us would pirouette into a panic at once. Her cry was infallible.
So she was an afrirador, one of our sharpshooters, always reared up onto hindquarters to keep watch, always carrying a rifle, always herself a target. My big brave friend. Her rear buttocks grew ever more heavy from constant standing. She could walk upright like an Ancestor for a whole day. Her pelt was beautiful, her best feature, a glossy deep chestnut, no errant Ancestor reds. As rich and deep as the soil under the endless savannah.
We were groom-mates in our days of wonder.
I would brush her, and her hide would twitch with pleasure. She would stretch with it, as if it were taffy to be pulled. We tried on earrings, or tied bows into manes, or corn-rowed them into long braids. But Leveza never rested long with simple pleasures or things easily understood.
Even young, before bearing age, she was serious and adult. I remember her as a filly, slumped at the feet of the stallions as they smoked their pipes, played checkers, and talked about what they would do if they knew how to make electricity.
Leveza would say that we could make turning blades to circulate air; we could pump water to irrigate grass. We could boil water, or make heat to dry and store cud-cakes. The old men would chuckle to hear her dreaming.
thought it was a pointless game, but Leveza could play it better than anyone, seeing further and deeper into her own inherited head. Her groom-sister Ventoo always teased her, “Leveza, what are you fabricating now?”
We all knew that stuff. I knew oh so clearly, how to wrap thin metal round and round a pivot and with electricity, make it spin. But who could be bothered? I loved to run. All of us foals would suddenly sprint through long grass to make the ground thunder, to raise up the sweet smells of herbs, and to test our strength. We had fire in our loins and we wanted to gallop all the way to the sun. Leveza pondered.
She didn’t like it when her first heat came. The immature bucks would hee-haw at her and pull back their feeling lips to display their great white plates of teeth. When older men bumped her buttocks with their heads, she would give a little backward kick, and if they tried to mount her, she walked out from under them. And woe betide any low-grade drifter who presumed that Leveza’s lack of status meant she was grateful for attention. She would send the poor bag of bones rattling through the long grass. The babysquirrels clutched their sides and laughed. “Young NeverLove wins again.”
But I knew. It was not a lack of love that made my groom-mate so careful and reserved. It was an abundance of love, a surfeit of it, more than our kind is meant to have, can afford to have, for we live on the pampas and our cousins eat us.
Love came upon Leveza on some warm night, the moon like bedtime milk. She would not have settled for a quick bump with a reeking male just because the air wavered with hot hormones. I think it would have been the reflection of milklight in black eyes, a gentle ruffling of upper lip, perhaps a long and puzzled chat about the nature of this life and its consequences.
We are not meant to love. We are meant to mate, stand side by side for warmth for a short time afterward, and then forget. I wonder who fathered this one?
Leveza knew and would never forget. She never said his name, but most of us knew who he was. I sometimes caught her looking toward the circle of the Great Men, her eyes full of gentleness. They would gallop about at headball, or talk seriously about axle grease. None of them looked her way, but she would be smiling with a gentle glowing love, her eyes fixed on one of them as steadily as the moon.
One night, she tugged at my mane. “Akwa, I am going to sprog,” she said, with a wrench of a smile at the absurdity of such a thing.
“Oh! Oh Leveza, that’s wonderful. Why didn’t you tell me, how did this happen?”
She ronfled in amusement, a long ruffling snort. “In the usual way, my friend.”
“No, but . . . oh you know! I have seen you with no one.”
She went still. “Of course not.”
“Do you know which one?”
Her whole face was in milklight. “Yes. Oh yes.”
Leveza was both further back toward an Ancestor than anyone I ever met, and furthest forward toward the beasts. Even then it was as if she was pulled in two directions, Earth and stars. The night around us would sigh with multiple couplings. I was caught up in the season. Sex was like a river, washing all around us. I was a young mare then, I can tell you, wide of haunch, slim of ankle. I plucked my way through the grass as if it were the strings of a harp. All the highest-rankers would come and snuffle me, and I surprised myself. Oh! I was a pushover. One after another after another.
I would come back feeling like a pasture grazed flat; and she would be lumped out on the ground, content and ready to welcome me. I nuzzled her ear, which flicked me like I was a fly, and I would lay my head on her buttock to sleep.
“You are a strange one,” I would murmur. “But you will be kind to my babes. We will have a lovely house.” I knew she would love my babies as her own.
That year the dry season did not come.
It did go cooler, the afternoon downpours were fewer, but the grass did not go gray. There was dew when we got up, sparkling and cold with our morning mouthfuls. Some rain came at nighttime in short, soft caresses rather than pummeling on our pavilion roofs. I remember screens pulled down, the smell of grass, and warm breath of a groom-mate against my haunches.
“I’m preggers too,” I said some weeks later and giggled, thrilled and full of butterflies. I was young, eh? In my fourth year. I could feel my baby nudge. Leveza and I giggled together under our shawls.
It did not go sharply cold. No grass-frost made our teeth ache. We waited for the triggering, but it did not come.
“Strangest year I can remember,” said the old women. They were grateful, for migrations were when they were eaten.
That year! We made porridge for the toothless. We groomed and groomed, beads and bows and necklaces and shawls and beautiful grass hats. Leveza loved it when I made up songs; the first, middle and last word of every line would rhyme. She’d snort and shake her mane and say, “How did you do that; that’s so clever!”
We would stroke each other’s stomachs as our nipples swelled. Leveza hated hers; they were particularly large like aubergines. “Uh. They’re gross. Nobody told me they wobble in the way of everything.” They ached to give milk; early in her pregnancy they started to seep. There was a scrum of babysquirrels around her every morning. Businesslike, she sniffed and let them suckle. “When my baby comes, you’ll have to wait your turn.” The days and nights came and went like the beating of birdlike wings. She got a bit bigger, but never too big to stand guard.
Leveza gave birth early, after only nine months.
It was midwinter, in dark Fehveroo when no one was ready. Leveza pushed her neck up against my mouth for comfort. When I woke she said, “Get Grama for me.” Grama was a high-ranking midwife.
I was stunned. She could not be due yet. The midwives had stored no oils or bark-water. I ran to Grama, woke her, worried her. I hoofed the air in panic. “Why is this happening now? What’s wrong?”
By the time we got back, Leveza had delivered. Just one push and the babe had arrived, a little bundle of water and skin and grease on the ground behind her rear quarters.
The babe was tiny, as long as a shin, palomino, and covered in soft orange down so light that he looked hairless. No jaw at all. How would he grind grass? Limbs all in soft folds like clouds. Grama said nothing, but held up his feet for me to see. The forelegs had no hoof-buds at all, just fingers; and his hind feet were great soft mitts. Not quite a freak, streamlined and beautiful in a way. But fragile, defenceless, and nothing that would help Leveza climb the hierarchy. It was the most Ancestral child I had ever seen.
Grama set to licking him clean. I looked at the poor babe’s face. I could see his hide through the sparse hair on his cheeks. “Hello,” I said. “I’m your groom-mummy. Your name is Kaway. Yes it is. You are Kaway.”
A blank. He couldn’t talk. He could hardly move.
I had to pick him up with my hands. There was no question of using my mouth; there was no pelt to grip. I settled the babe next to Leveza. Her face shone love down on him. “He’s beautiful as he is.”
Grama jerked her head toward the partition; we went outside to talk. “I’ve heard of such births; they happen sometimes. The inheritances come together like cards shuffling. He won’t learn to talk until he’s two. He won’t walk until then, either. He won’t really be mobile until three or four.”
“Four!” I thought of all those migrations.
Grama shrugged. “They can live long, if they make it past infancy. Maybe fifty years.”
I was going to ask where they were now, and then I realized. They don’t linger in this world, these soft sweet angelic things.
They get eaten.
My little Choova was born two months later. I hated childbirth. I thought I would be good at it, but I thrashed and stomped and hee-hawed like a male in season. I will never do this again! I promised. I didn’t think then that the promise would come true.
“Come on, babe, come on, my darling,” Leveza said, butting me with her nose as if herding a filly. “It will be over soon, just keep pushing.”
Grama had become a friend; I think she saw value in Leveza’s mindful way of doing things. “Listen to your family,” she told me.
My firstborn finally bedraggled her way out, tawny, knobbly, shivering and thin, pulled by Grama. Leveza scooped my baby up, licked her clean, breathed into her, and then dandled her in front of my face. “This is your beautiful mother.” Choova looked at me with intelligent love and grinned.
Grama whinnied the cry that triggers Happy Birth! Some of our friends trotted up to see my beautiful babe, stuck their heads through the curtains. They tossed their heads, chortled and nibbled the back of her neck.
“Come on, little one. Stand! Stand!” This is what the ladies had come to see. Leveza propped Choova up on her frail, awkward, heartbreaking legs, and walked her toward me. My baby stumbled forward and collapsed like a pile of sticks, into the sheltering bay of my stomach.
Leveza lowered Kaway in front of Choova’s nostrils. “And this is your little groom-brother Kaway.”
“Kaway,” Choova said.
Our family numbered four.
We did not migrate for one whole year. The colts and fillies would skitter unsteadily across the grass, safe from predators. The old folk sunned themselves on the grass and gossiped. High summer came back with sweeping curtains of rain. Then the days shortened; things cooled and dried.
Water started to come out of the wells muddy; we filtered it. The grass started to go crisp. There was perhaps a month or two of moisture left in the ground. Our children neared the end of their first year, worthy of the name foal.
Except for Leveza’s. Kaway lay there like an egg after all these months. He could just about move his eyes. Almost absurdly, Leveza loved him as if he were whole and well.
“You are a miracle,” she said to Kaway. People called him the Lump. She would look at him, her face all dim with love, and she would say her fabricated things. She would look at me rapt with wonder.
“What if he knows what the Ancestors knew? We know about cogs and gears and motors and circuits. What if Kaway is born knowing about electricity? About medicine and machines? What he might tell us!”
She told him stories and the stories went like this.
The Ancestors so loved the animals that when the world was dying, they took them into themselves. They made extra seeds for them, hidden away in their own to carry us safely inside themselves, all the animals they most loved.
The sickness came, and the only way for them to escape was to let the seeds grow. And so we flowered out of them; the sickness was strong, and they disappeared.
Leveza looked down at her little ancestral lump. Some of us would have left such a burden out on the plain for the Cats or the Dogs or the scavenging oroobos. But not Leveza. She could carry anything.
I think Leveza loved everyone. Everyone, in this devouring world. And that’s why what happened, happened.
The pampas near the camp went bald in patches, where the old and weak had overgrazed it. Without realizing, we began to prepare.
The babysquirrels gathered metal nuts. The bugs in their tummies made them from rust in the ground. The old uncles would smelt them for knives, rifle barrels, and bullets. Leveza asked them to make some rods.
She heated them and bent them backward and Grama looked at them and asked, “What kind of rifle is that going to make, one that shoots backward?”
“It’s for Kaway,” Leveza replied. She cut off her mane for fabric. I cut mine as well, and to our surprise, so did Grama.
Leveza wove a saddle for her back, so the baby could ride.
Once Grama had always played the superior high-ranker, bossy and full of herself. “Oh, Leveza, how clever. What a good idea.” And then, “I’m sorry what I said, earlier.” She slipped Leveza’s inert mushroom of a boy into the saddle.
Grama had become kind.
Grama being respectful about Leveza and Kaway set a fashion for appreciating who my groom-mate was. Nobody asked me anymore why on Earth I was with her. When the Head Man Fortchee began talking regularly to her about migration defenses, a wave of gossip convulsed the herd. Could Leveza become the Head Mare? Was the Lump really Fortchee’s son?
“She’s always been so smart, so brave,” said Ventoo.
“More like a man,” said Lindalfa, with a wrench of a smile.
One morning, the Head Man whinnied over and over and trod the air with his forelegs.
Triggered.
Migration.
We took down the pavilions and the windbreaks and stacked the grass-leaf panels in carts. We loaded all our tools and pipes and balls and blankets, and most precious of all, the caked and blackened foundries. The camp’s babysquirrels lined up, and chattered goodbye to us, as if they really cared. Everyone nurtured the squirrels, and used them as they use us; even Cats will never eat them.
It started out a fine migration. Oats lined the length of the trail. As we ate, we scattered oat seed behind us, to replace it. Shit, oat seed, and inside the shit, flakes of plastic our bellies made, but there were no squirrels to gather it.
It did not rain, but the watering holes and rivers stayed full. It was sunny but not so hot that flies tormented us.
In bad years your hide never stops twitching because you can’t escape the stench of Cat piss left to dry on the ground. That year the ground had been washed and the air was calm and sweet.
We saw no Cats. Dogs, we saw Dogs, but fat and jolly Dogs stuffed to the brim with quail and partridge which Cats don’t eat. “Lovely weather!” the Dogs called to us, tongues hanging out, grins wide, and we whinnied back, partly in relief. We can see off Dogs, except when they come in packs.
Leveza walked upright the whole time, gun at the ready, Kaway strapped to her back.
“Leveza,” I said, “you’ll break your back! Use your palmhoofs!”
She grunted. “Any Cat comes near our babies, and it will be one sorry Cat!”
“What Cats? We’ve seen none.”
“They depend on the migrations. We’ve missed one. They will be very, very hungry.”
Our first attack came the next day. I thought it had started to rain; there was just a hissing in the grass, and I turned and I saw old Alez; I saw her eyes rimmed with white, the terror stare. I didn’t even see the four Cats that gripped her legs.
Fortchee brayed a squealing sound of panic. Whoosh, we all took off. I jumped into a gallop, I can tell you, no control or thought; I was away; all I wanted was the rush of grass under my hands.
Then I heard a shot and I turned back and I saw Leveza, all alone, standing up, rifle leveled. A Cat was spinning away from Alez, as if it were a spring-pasture caper. The other Cats stared. Leveza fired again once more and they flickered like fire and were gone. Leveza flung herself flat onto the grass just before a crackling like tindersticks come out of the long grass.
The Cats had guns too.
Running battle.
“Down down!” I shouted to the foals. I galloped toward them. “Just! Get! Flat!” I jumped on top them, ramming them down into the dirt. They wailed in panic and fear. “Get off me! Get off me!” My little Choova started to cry. “I didn’t do anything wrong!”
I was all teeth. “What did we tell you about an attack? You run and when the gunfire starts you flatten. What did I say! What did I say?”
Gunsmoke drifted; the dry grass sparkled with shot, our nostrils shivered from the smell of burning.
Cats prefer to pounce first, get one of us down, and have the rest of us gallop away. They know if they fire first, they’re more likely to be shot themselves.
The fire from our women was fierce, determined, and constant. We soon realized that the only gunfire we heard was our own and that the Cats had slunk away.
The children still wailed, faces crumpled, tears streaming. Their crying just made us grumpy. Well, we all thought, it’s time they learned. “You stupid children. What did you think this was, a game?”
Grama was as hard as any granny. “Do you want to be torn to pieces and me have to watch it happen? Do you think you can say to a Cat very nicely, ‘Please don’t eat me,’ and that will stop them?”
Leveza was helping Alez to stand. Her old groom-mother’s legs kept giving way, and she was grinning a wide rictus grin. She looked idiotic.
“Come on, love, that’s it.” Leveza eased Alez toward Pronto’s cart.
“What are you doing?” Pronto said, glaring at her.
“She’s in no fit state to walk.”
“You mean, I’m supposed to haul her?”
“I know you’d much rather leave her to be eaten, but no thanks, not just this once.”
Somehow, more like a goat than a Horse, Alez nipped up into the wagon. Leveza strode back toward us, still on her hind legs.
The children shivered and sobbed. Leveza strode up to us. And then did something new.
“Aw, babies,” she said, in a stricken tone I had never heard before. She dropped down on four haunches next to them. “Oh, darlings!” She caressed their backs, laying her jaw on the napes of their necks. “It shouldn’t be like this, I know. It is terrible, I know. But we are the only thing they have to eat.”
“Mummy shouted at me! She was mean.”
“That’s because Mummy was so worried and so frightened for you. She was scared because you didn’t know what it was and didn’t know what to do. Mummy was so frightened that she would lose you.”
“The Cats eat us!”
“And the crocodiles in the river. And there are wolves, a kind of Dog. We don’t get many here, they are on the edge of the snows in the forests. Here, we get the Cats.”
Leveza pulled back their manes and breathed into their nostrils. “It shouldn’t be like this.”
Should or shouldn’t, we thought, that’s how it is. Why waste energy wishing it wasn’t?
We’d forgotten, you see, that it was a choice, a choice that in the end was ours. Not my Leveza.
The Head Man came up, and his voice was also gentle with the colts and fillies. “Come on, kids. The Cats will be back. We need to move away from here.”
He had to whinny to get us moving; he even back-kicked the reluctant Pronto. Alez sat up in the cart looking cross-eyed and beside herself with delight at being carried.
“Store and dry cud,” Fortchee told us.
Cudcakes. How I hate cudcakes. You chew them and spit them out on the carts to dry and you always think you’ll remember where yours are and you always end up eating someone else’s mash of grass and spit.
Leveza walked next to the Head Man, looking at maps, murmuring and tossing her mane toward the east. I saw them make up their minds about something.
I even felt a little tail-flick of jealousy. When she came back, I said a bit sharply, “What was that all about?”
Leveza sounded almost pleased. “Don’t tell the others. We’re being stalked.”
“What?”
“Must be slim pickings. The Cats have left their camp. They’ve got their cubs with them. They’re following us.” She sighed, her eyes on the horizon. “It’s a nuisance. They think they can herd us. There’ll be some kind of trap set ahead, so we’ve decided to change our route.”
We turned directly east. The ground started to rise, toward the hills, where an age-old trail goes through a pass. Rocks began to break through a mat of thick grasses. The slope steepened, and each of the carts needed two big men to haul it up.
The trail followed valleys between high rough humps of ground, dove-tailing with small streams cut deeply into the grass. We could hear the water, like thousands of tongues lapping on stone. The most important thing on a migration is to get enough to drink. The water in the streams was delicious, cold and tasting of rocks, not mud.
My name means water, but I think I must taste of mud.
We found ourselves in a new world, looking out on waves of earth, rising and falling and going blue in the distance. On the top of a distant ridge a huge rock stuck out, with a rounded dome like a skull.
Fortchee announced, “We need to make that rock by evening.” It was already early afternoon, and everyone groaned.
“Or you face the Cats out here on open ground,” he said.
“Come on, you’re wasting breath,” said Leveza and strode on.
The ground was strange; a deep rich black smelling deliciously of grass and leaves, and it thunked underfoot with a hollow sound like a drum. We grazed as we marched, tearing up the grass, and pulling up with it mouthfuls of soil, good to eat but harsh, hard to digest. It made us fart, pungently, and in each other’s faces as we marched. “No need for firelighters!” the old women giggled
In places the trail had washed away, leaving tumbles of boulders that the carts would creak up and over, dropping down on the other side with a worrying crash. Leveza stomped on, still on two legs, gun ready. She would spring up rocks, heel-hooves clattering and skittering on stone. Sure-footed she wasn’t. She did not hop nimbly, but she was relentless.
“They’re still here,” she muttered to me. All of us wanted our afternoon kip, but Fortchee wouldn’t let us. The sun dropped, the shadows lengthened. Everything glowed orange. This triggered fear – low light means you must find safe camping. We snorted, and grew anxious.
Down one hill and up the other: it was sunset, the worst time for us, when we arrived at the skull rock. We don’t like stone either.
“We sleep up there,” Fortchee said. He had a fight on his hands. We had never heard of such a thing.
“What, climb up that? We’ll split our hooves. Or tear our fingers,” said Ventoo.
“And leave everything behind in the wagons?” yelped one of the men.
“It’ll be windy and cold.”
Fortchee tossed his head. “We’ll keep each other warm.”
“We’ll fall off. . . .”
“Don’t be a load of squirrels,” said Leveza. She went to a cart, picked up a bag of tools, and started to climb
Fortchee amplified, “Take ammo, all the guns.”
“What about the foundries?”
He sighed. “We’ll need to leave those.”
By some miracle, the dome had a worn hole in the top full of rainwater and we drank. We had our kip, but the Head Man wouldn’t let us go down to graze. It got dark and we had another sleep, two hours or more. But you can’t sleep all night.
I was woken up by a stench of Cat that seemed to shriek in my nostrils. I heard Leveza sounding annoyed. “Tuh!” she said. “Dear oh dear!” Louder than a danger call – bam! – a gun blast, followed by the yelp of a Cat. Then the other afriradors opened fire. The children whinnied in terror. Peering down into milklight I could see a heaving tide of Cat pulling back from the rock. They even made a sound like water, the scratching of claws on stone.
“What fun,” said Leveza.
I heard Grama trying not to giggle. Safety and strength came off Leveza’s hide like a scent.
She turned to Fortchee. “Do you think we should go now or wait here?”
“Well, we can’t wait until after sunrise, that’ll slow us down too much. Now.”
Leveza really was acting like Head Mare, and there had not been one of those in a while. She was climbing into the highest status. Not altogether hindered by having, if I may say so, a high-class groom-mate.
The afriradors sent out continual shots to drive back the last of the Cats. Then we skittered down the face of the rock back toward the wagons.
At the base of the cliff, a Cat lay in a pool of blood, purring, eyes closed as if asleep. Lindalfa scream-whinnied in horror and clattered backward. The Cat rumbled but did not stir.
Muttering, fearful, we were all pushed back by Cat-stench; we twitched and began to circle just before panic.
Leveza leaned in close to stare.
“Love, come away,” I said. I picked my way forward, ready to grab her neck and pull her back if the thing lunged. I saw its face in milklight.
I’d never seen a Cat up close before.
The thing that struck me was that she was handsome. It was a finely formed face, despite the short muzzle, with a divided upper lip which seemed almost to smile, the mouthful of fangs sheathed. The Cat’s expression looked simply sad, as if she were asking Life itself one last question.
Leveza sighed and said, “Poor heart.”
The beast moaned, a low miserable sound that shook the earth. “You . . . need . . . predators.”
“Like cat-shit we do,” said Leveza, and stood up and back. “Come on!” she called to the rest of us, as if we were the ones who had been laggard.
The Cats were clever. They had pulled out far ahead of us so we had no idea when they would attack again. Our hooves slipped on the rocks. Leveza went all hearty on us. “Goats do this sort of thing. They have hooves too.”
“They’re cloven,” said one of the bucks.
“Nearly cousins,” sniffed Leveza. I think the light, the air, and the view so far above the plain exhilarated her. It depressed me. I wanted to be down there where it was flat and you could run and it was full of grass. The men hauling the wagons never stopped frothing, eyes edged white. They were trapped in yokes and that made them easy prey.
We hated being strung out along the narrow trail, and kept hanging back so we could gather together in clumps. She would stomp on ahead and stomp on back. “Come on, everyone, while it’s still dark.”
“We’re just waiting for the others,” quailed Lindalfa.
“No room for the others, love, not on this path.”
Lindalfa sounded harassed. “Well, I don’t like being exposed like this.”
“No, you’d far rather have all your friends around you to be eaten first.” It was a terrible thing to say, but absolutely true. Some of us laughed.
Sunrise came, the huge white sky contrasting too much with the silhouetted earth so that we could see nothing. We waited it out in a defensive group, carts around us. As soon as the sun rose high enough, Leveza triggered us to march. Not Fortchee. She urged us on and got us moving, and went ahead to scout. I learned something new about my groom-mate: the most loyal and loving of us was also the one who could most stand being alone.
She stalked on ahead, and I remember seeing the Lump sitting placidly on her back, about as intelligent as a cudcake.
A high wind stroked the grass in waves. Beautiful clouds were piled up overhead, full of wheeling birds, scavengers who were neither hunters nor victims. They knew nothing of ancestors or even speech.
Then we heard over the brow of a hill the snarl of Cats who have gone for the kill and no longer need stealth.
Leveza. Ahead. Alone.
“Gotcha!” they roared in thunder-voices.
We heard gunfire, just a snapping like a twig, and a Cat yelp, and then more gunfire and after that a heartfelt wail that could not have come from a Cat, a long hideous keening, more like that of a bird.
Fortchee broke into a lurching, struggling gallop. He triggered me and I jumped forward into a gallop too, slipping on rocks, heaving my way up the slope. It was like a nightmare where something keeps pulling you back. I heaved myself up onto the summit and saw Leveza, sitting on the ground, Fortchee stretching down to breathe into her ears.
She was staring ahead. Fortchee looked up at me with such sadness.
Before he could speak, Leveza turned her heavy jaws, her great snout, toward the sky and mourned, whinnying now a note for the dead.
“They got the Lump,” said the Head Man, and turned and rubbed her shoulders. Her saddle-pack was torn. The baby was gone. Leveza keened, rocking from side to side, her lips forming a circle, the sound coming from far back and down her throat.
“Leveza,” said Fortchee, looking forlornly at me.
“Leveza,” I agreed, for we knew that she would not forget Kaway soon.
The rest of us, we lose a child, we have another next year; we don’t think about it; we can’t afford to. We’re not strong enough. They die, child after child, and the old beloved aunties, or the wise old men who can no longer leap away. We can hear them being eaten. “Remember me! I love you!” they call to us, heartbroken to be leaving life and leaving us. But we have to forget them.
So we go brittle and shallow, sweet and frightened, smart but dishonest.
Not Leveza. She suddenly snarled, snatched up her rife, rocked to her feet, and galloped off, after the Cats.
“She can’t think that she can get him back!” I said.
“I don’t know what she can think,” said Fortchee.
The others joined us and we all stood haunches pressed together. None of us went to help, not even me, her beloved groom-mate. You do not chase prides of Cats to rescue anyone. You accept that they have been taken.
We heard distant shots, and the yelping of Cats. We heard hooves.
“She’s coming back,” whispered Grama and glanced at me. It was as if the hills themselves had stood up to stretch to see if things looked any different. A Horse had been hunting Cats.
Leveza appeared again at the top of the hill and for a moment I thought she had wrought a miracle, for her child dangled from her mouth.
Then I saw the way she swayed when she walked, the dragging of her hooves. She baby-carried a tiny torn head and red bones hanging together by tendons and scraps of skin. Suddenly she just sat on the ground and renewed her wailing. She arched her head round and looked down at herself in despair. Her breasts were seeping milk.
She tried to make the bones drink. She pushed the fragments of child onto her dugs. I cantered to her, lost my footing, and collapsed next to her. “Leveza. Love. Let him be.”
She shouted up into my face with unseeing eyes. “What am I supposed to do with him?”
“Oh Leveza,” I started to weep for her. “You feel things too much.”
“I’m not leaving him!”
You’re supposed to walk away. You’re supposed to leave them to the birds and then to the sun and then to the rains until they wash back into the earth.
To come again as grass. We eat our grandmothers, in the grass. It shows acceptance, good will toward the world to forget quickly.
Leveza began to tear at the thin pelt of ground that covered the rocks. She gouged at it, skinning her forefingers, broke open the sod, and peeled it back. She laid the scraps on the bare rock, and gently covered what was left of him as if with a blanket. She tucked him in and began to sing a soft milklight song to him.
It simply was not bearable. If a child dies through sickness you take it away from camp, and let the birds and insects get to it. Then later you dance on the bones, to break them up into dust to show scorn for the body and the heart to accept fate.
The Head Man came back, and bumped her with his snout. “Up, Leveza. We must keep moving.”
Leveza stroked the ground. “Good night, Kaway. Sleep, Kaway. Grow like a seed. Become beautiful Kaway grass.”
We muttered and murmured. We’d all lost people we love like that. Why should she keen and carry on, why should she be different?
“I know it’s hard,” said Lindalfa. Unspoken was the “but.”
Love can’t be that special. Love must not cost that much. You’ll learn, Leveza, I thought, like all the others. You’ll finally learn.
I was looking down at her in some kind of triumph, proved right, when Leveza stood up, and turned everything upside down again.
She shook the tears out of her eyes and then walked away from me, shouldering past Fortchee as if he were an encumbrance. Tamely we trooped after her. She went to a wagon and reloaded her gun. She started to troop back down the hill in the direction of the rock.
“That’s the wrong way, isn’t it?”
“What’s she doing?”
Fortchee called after her, and when she didn’t answer, he looked deeply at me and said, “Follow her.”
I whinnied for her to wait and started to trot down the hill.
Her determined stomp became a canter, then, explosively a kind of leaping, runaway gallop, thundering slipshod over stones and grass, threatening to break a leg. I chortled the slow-down cry but that checked her only for a moment. At the foot of the Rock she slid to a halt, raising dust.
She levelled her gun at the head of the wounded Cat. A light breeze seemed to blow her words to me up the slope. “Why do we need predators?”
The Cat groaned, her eyes still shut. “The Ancestors destroyed the world.”
I reached them. “Leveza, come away,” I nickered.
The Cat swallowed heavily. “They killed predators.” All her words seemed to start with a growl.
Leveza went very still, I flanked her, and kept saying, leave her, come away. Suddenly she pushed the gun at me. “Shoot her if she moves.”
I hated guns. I thought they would explode in my hands, or knock me backward. I knew carrying a gun made you a target. I didn’t want the gun; I wanted to get us back to safety. I whinnied in fear.
She pushed on back up the hill, “I’m coming back,” she said over her shoulder. I was alone with a Cat.
“Just kill me,” said the Cat. The air was black with her blood; everything in me buzzed and went numb. Overhead the scavengers spiralled and I was sure at any moment other Cats would come. Climb the Rock! I told myself, but I couldn’t move. I looked up at the trail.
Finally, finally Leveza came back with another gun and a coil of rope.
“Don’t you ever do that to me again!” I sobbed.
She looked ferocious, her mane bristling, teeth smiling to bite out flesh. “You want to live, you put up with this,” she said. I thought she said it to me.
“What are you fabricating now?” I hated her then, always having to surprise.
She bound the Cat’s front paws together, and then the back, and then tied all four limbs to the animal’s trunk. Leveza seized the mouth; I squealed and she began to wrap the snout round and round with rope. Blood seeped in woven patterns through the cord. The Cat groaned and rolled her eyes.
Then, oh then, Leveza sat on the ground and rolled the Cat onto her own back. She reached round and turned it so that it was folded sideways over her. Then she turned to me. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you giving me a hand?”
I said nothing. All of this was so unheard of that it triggered nothing, not even fear.
Slowly, forelegs first, Leveza stood up under the weight of the Cat. The Cat growled and dug in those great claws, but that just served to hold her in place. Burdened, Leveza began to climb the hill, her back beginning to streak with blood. I looked up. Everyone was bunched together on the brow of the ridge. I had no words, I forgot all words. I just climbed.
As we drew near, the entire herd, every last one of them including her groom-mother Alez, formed a wall of lowered heads. Go back, get away. I think it was for the Cat, but it felt as if it were for us. Leveza kept coming. Hides started to twitch from the smell of Cat blood carried on the wind. Leveza ignored them and plodded on. The men had also come back with the carts. Old Pronto in harness tried to move sideways in panic and couldn’t.
“Think,” she told him. “For a change.”
He whinnied and danced in place on the verge of bolting with one of our main wagons.
“Oh for heaven’s sake!” She plucked out the pin of his yoke with her teeth and he darted away, the yoke still on his shoulders. He trotted to a halt, and then stood there looking sheepish.
Leveza rolled the Cat onto the wagon, tools clanking under the body. Brisk and businesslike, she picked up pliers, and began to pull out, one by one, all of the Cat’s claws.
The poor beast groaned, roared, and shivered, rocking her head and trying to bite despite her jaws being tied shut. The Cat flexed her bloodied hands and feet but she no longer had claws. It seemed to take forever as the air whispered about us.
Undirected, all of us just stared.
When it was over, the Cat lay flat, panting. Leveza then took more rope, tied it tight round the predator’s neck, lashing the other end to the yoke fittings. She then unwound the rope from her jaws. The Cat roared and rocked in place, her huge green fangs smelling of blood. Leveza took a hammer and chisel, and began to break all the Cat’s teeth.
Fortchee stepped forward. “Leveza. Stop. This is cruel.”
“But necessary or she’ll eat us.”
“Why are you doing this? It won’t bring Kaway back.”
She turned and looked at him, the half wheel of her lower jaw swollen. “To learn from her.”
“Learn what?”
“What she knows.”
“We have to get moving,” said the Head Man.
“Exactly,” she said, with flat certainty. “That’s why she’s in the cart.”
“You’re taking her with us?” Everything on Fortchee bristled, from his mane to his handsome goatee.
She stood there, and I think I remember her smiling. “You won’t be able to stop me.”
The entire herd made a noise in unison, a kind of horrified, wondering sigh.
She turned to me with airy unconcern and asked, “Do you think you could get me the yoke?”
Pronto tossed it at her with his head. “Here, have it, demented woman!”
I started to weep. “Leveza, this won’t bring him back. Come, love, let it be, leave her alone and let’s go.”
She looked at me with pity. “Poor Akwa.”
Leveza pulled the wagon herself. Women are supposed to carry guns; men haul the wagon, two of them together if it is uphill.
I tried to walk with her. No one else could bear to go near the prickling stench of Cat. It made me weep and cough. “I can’t stay.”
“It’s all right, love,” she said. “Go to the others, you’ll feel safer.”
“You’ll be alone with that thing.”
“She’s preoccupied.”
Unable to imagine what else to do, I left.
We migrated on. All through that long day, Fortchee did not let us sleep, and we could sometimes hear Leveza behind us, tormenting the poor animal with questions.
“No,” we heard her shout. “It’s not instinct. You can choose not to eat other people!”
The Cat roared and groaned. “Sometimes there is nothing else to eat! Do you want us to let our children die?”
Leveza roared back. “Why take my baby then? There was no . . .” She whinnied loud in horror, and snorted in fury. “There was no meat on him!”
The Cat groaned. She was talking, but we couldn’t hear what she said. Leveza went silent, plodding on alone, listening to the Cat. She fell far behind even the rear guard of afriradors who were supposed to protect stragglers. Already it was slightly as though she did not exist.
The light settled low and orange, the shadows grew long. I kept craning behind us but by then I could neither see nor hear Leveza.
“They’ll attack her! She’ll be taken!” I nickered constantly to Grama.
She laid her head on my neck as we walked. “If anyone can stand alone against Cats, it’s her.”
We found no outcropping. On top of a hill with a good view all around, Fortchee lifted himself up and trod the air, whinnying. The men in the carts turned left and circled. “Windbreaks!” called the Head Man. We all began to unload windbreak timbers, to slot down the sides of the carts, to make a fortress. I kept looking back for Leveza.
Finally she appeared in the smoky dusk hauling the Cat. Froth had dried on her neck. She looked exhausted; her head dipped as if chastened.
Fortchee stepped in front of her. “You can’t come into the circle with that cart.”
She halted. Burrs and bracken had got tangled in her mane. She stared at the ground. “She’s tied up. She’s very weak.”
Fortchee snorted in anger and pawed the dirt. “Do you think anybody could sleep with a Cat stinking up the inside of the circle?”
She paused, blinked. “She says the other Cats will kill her.”
“Let them!” said Fortchee.
Without answering, Leveza turned and hauled the cart away from the camp. Fortchee froze, looked at her, and then said, “Akwa, see to your groom-mate.”
Something in that made Grama snort, and she came with me. As we walked toward the carts, we pressed together the whole length of our bodies from shoulder to haunch for comfort.
Grama said, “She’s reliving what happened to Grassa.”
“Grassa?”
“Her mother. She saw her eaten, remember?”
“Oh yes, sorry.” I did the giggle, the giggle you give to excuse forgetting, the forgetting of the dead out of embarrassment and the need to keep things light “Anyway,” I said, “you made things hard enough for her when she was young.”
Grama hung her head. “I know.” Grama had tried to bully Leveza until she’d head-butted her, though two years younger.
It’s not good to remember.
Leveza had already climbed up into the cart, without having watered or grazed. Her eyes flicked back and forth between me and Grama. “Grama, of course, how sensible. Here.” She threw something at me and without thinking I caught it in my mouth. It was a bullet, thick with Cat blood and I spat it out.
“Fortchee wouldn’t thank you for that. He’s always telling us to save metal. Grama, love, do you think you could bring us bark-water, painkillers, thread?”
Grama’s hide twitched, but she said, “Yes, of course.”
Leveza reached around and tossed her a gun. “Watch yourself. I’ll keep my gun ready too.”
Grama picked up the bullet, then trotted back through the dusk. I felt undefended but I could not get up into the wagon with that thing. Leveza stood on hindquarters, scanning the camp, her gun leveled. As Grama came back with a pack, Leveza’s nostrils moved as if about to speak.
“They’re here,” she said.
Grama clambered up into the cart. I couldn’t see the Cat behind the sideboards, but I could see Grama’s eyes flare open, her mane bristle. Even so, she settled on her rear haunches and began to work, dabbing the wounds. I could hear the Cat groan, deep enough to shake the timber of the cart.
Leveza’s tail began to flick. I could smell it now: Cat all around us, scent blowing up the hillside like ribbons. The sunset was full of fire, clouds the colour of flowers. Calmly Grama sewed the wound. Leveza eased herself down, eyes still on the pasture, to feel if Grama’s gun was loaded.
“Her name’s Mai, by the way,” said Leveza. Mai meant Mother in both tongues.
The Cat made a noise like Rergurduh, Rigadoo. Thanks.
Leveza nickered a gentle safety call to me. I jumped forward, and then stopped. The smell of Cat was a wall.
“Get up into the cart,” said Leveza in a slow mothering voice.
It was the Terrible Time, when we can’t see. Milklight fills the night, but when the sky blazes and the earth is black, the contrast means we can see nothing. Leveza reached down, bit my neck to help haul me up.
I was only halfway into the cart when out of that darkness a deep rumble formed words. “We will make the Horses eat you first.”
Leveza let me go to shriek out the danger call, to tell the others. I tried to kick my way into the cart.
“Then while you cry we will take their delicious legs.”
I felt claws rake the back of my calves. I screamed and scrambled. A blast right by my ears deafened me; I pulled myself in; I smelt dust in the air.
Leveza. How could she see? How could she walk upright all day?
She touched a tar lamp, opened its vent, and it gave light. “Aim for eyes,” she said.
We saw yellow eyes, narrow and glowing, pure evil, hypnotizing. Ten, fifteen, how many were there, trying to scramble into the wagon?
Grama shot. Leveza shot. I had no gun and yearned to run so stamped my feet and cried for help. Some of the eyes closed and spun away. I looked at Mother Cat. She had folded up, eyes closed, but I was maddened and began to kick her as if she threatened my child. The sun sank.
Finally we heard a battle cry and a thundering of hooves from the circle. Leveza bit my neck and threw me to the floor of the cart. My nostrils were pushed into a pool of Cat juices. I heard shots and metal singing through the air. Our mares were firing wildly at anything. Why couldn’t they see?
“Put that lamp out!” shouted Fortchee. Leveza stretched forward and flicked it shut. Then in milklight, our afriradors took more careful aim. I felt rather than heard a kind of thumping rustle, bullets in flesh, feet through grass. I peered out over the sides of the wagon and in milklight, I saw the Cats pulling back, slipping up and over rocks, crouching behind them. I lay back down and looked at Mother Cat. She shivered, her eyes screwed shut. A Cat felt fear?
We could still smell them, we could still hear them.
Fortchee said, “All of you, back into the circle. You too, Leveza.”
She snuffled from weariness. “Can’t!”
I cried, “Leveza! Those are real Cats, they will come back! What you care about her?”
“I did this to her,” Leveza said.
Fortchee asked, “Why do other Cats want to kill her?”
A deep voice next to me purred through broken teeth. “Dissh-honour.”
Chilled, everyone fell silent.
“Alsho, I talk too much,” said Mother Cat. Did she chuckle?
I pleaded. “Choova misses you; she wants her groom-mummy; I miss you; please, Leveza, come back!” Fortchee ordered the men to give her a third gun and some ammo.
Grama looked at me with a question in her eyes I didn’t want to see. As far as I was concerned, Fortchee had told us to pull back. I was shaking inside. Grama wasn’t the one who had felt claws on her haunches.
All the way back, Grama bit the back of my neck as if carrying me like a mother.
We nestled down under a wagon behind the windbreak walls. Choova worked her way between us. None of us could sleep even the two hours. We paced and pawed. I stood up and looked out, and saw Leveza standing on watch, unfaltering.
At dawnsky when she would have most difficulty seeing, I heard shots, repeated. I fought my way out from under the wagon, and jerked my head over the windbreak between the carts where there are only timbers.
Blank whiteness, blank darkness, and in the middle a lamp glowing like a second sunrise. I could see nothing except swirling smoke and yellow dust and Leveza hunching behind the sides of the wagon, suddenly nipping up to shoot. Someone else glowed orange in that light, firing from the other side.
Leveza had given a gun to the Cat.
I saw leaping arms fanning what looked like knives. Everything spiraled in complete silence. The Cats made no sound at all. I was still rearing up my head over the windbreak to look, when suddenly, in complete silence, a Cat’s head launched itself at my face. All I saw was snout, yellow eyes, fangs in a blur jammed up close to me. I leapt back behind the windbreak; the thing roared, a paralyzing sound that froze me. I could feel it make me go numb. The numbness takes away the pain as they eat you.
I couldn’t think for a long time after that. I stood there shaking, gradually becoming aware of my pounding heart. Others were up, had begun to work; the sun was high; dawnsky was over. I heard Choova call me, but I couldn’t answer. She galloped out to me, crying and weeping. Grama followed, looked concerned, and then began to trot.
It showed in my face. “Did one of them get in here?” she asked.
I couldn’t answer, just shook my head, no. Choova cried, frightened for me. “It climbed the wall,” I said and realized I’d been holding my breath.
“Leveza’s not in the wagon,” said Grama. We reared up to look over the wall. The slope was grassy, wide, the day bright. The wagon stood alone, with nothing visible in it. Grama looked at me.
Maybe she’d gone to graze? I scanned the fields, and caught motion from the slopes behind me, turned and my heart shivered with relief. There was Leveza slowly climbing toward us.
“What’s she doing down there, that’s where the Cats are!”
She held something in her mouth. For a moment I thought she’d gone back again for Kaway. Then I saw feathers. Birds? As she lowered herself, they swayed limply.
“She’s been hunting,” said Grama.
“She’s gone mad,” I said.
“I fear so.”
We told Choova to stay where she was and Grama and I trotted out to meet her. “Is that what I think it is? Is it?” I shouted at her. I was weepier than I would normally be, shaken.
Leveza reared up and took the dead quail out of her mouth. “She needs to eat something,” said Leveza. She was in one of her hearty, blustering moods, cheerful about everything and unstoppable. She strode on two legs. She’d braided her mane and then held it on top of her head with plastic combs, out of her eyes.
Grama sighed. “We don’t take life, Leveza. We value it.”
She looked merry. She shook the quail. “I value thought. These things can’t think.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say!”
She swept past us. “You’d rather she ate us, I suppose. Or maybe you want her to die. How does that show you value life?”
She trooped on toward the cart.
Grama had an answer. “I’d rather the Cat hunted for herself.”
“Good. I’ll give her a gun then.”
I was furious. “She had a gun last night!”
“Oh. Yes. Well. She was a welcome addition to our resources.” Leveza smiled. “Since I was otherwise on my own.” She looked at me dead in the eye and her meaning was plain enough.
“If they value life so much, why did they take Kaway then?” I was sorry the instant I said it. I meant that I’d heard her ask the Cat that and I wanted to know the answer too, just like she did.
“Because I broke the bargain,” she said, so calmly that I was almost frightened.
I wanted to show her that I was outraged at what they’d done. “What bargain?”
She lost some kind of patience. “Oh come on, Akwa, you’re not a child. The bargain! The one where they don’t take children so they grow up nice and fat for them to eat later and we let them take our old and sick. They get to eat, and we get rid of people whose only use is that they are experienced and wise, something Horses can’t use, because of course we know everything already. So we don’t shoot Cats except to scare them off, and they don’t shoot us.” Her eyes looked like the Cats’ reflecting our lamps. “That bargain.”
“I . . . I’m sorry.”
“I shot them when they took the old. They saw I was the leader so I was the target.”
Grama and I looked at each other. Grama said, with just a hint of a smile, “You . . . ?”
“Yes me. The Cats can see it even if you can’t.”
Grama pulled back her lips as if to say, oops, pushed her too far that time. As we followed her Grama butted me gently with her head. It’s just Leveza fabricating.
Leveza strode ahead of us, as if she didn’t need us, and it was uncomfortably like she didn’t.
Once at the cart, Leveza took out a knife and began to butcher the quail. I cried and turned away. She pushed the meat toward the Cat, who opened her eyes but did not move. The creature had had to relieve herself in the cart so the stink was worse than ever.
Leveza dropped onto all fours and trotted to the neck of the cart. “Help me into the yoke?”
“You’ve not asked me about Choova.”
“How is she?” She picked up the yoke by herself.
“Terrified and miserable. She saw the empty cart and thought you were dead.”
Grama helped settle the yoke, slipping in the pin. At once Leveza started to drag the cart forward
“You’re going now?” The camp was not even being dismantled.
“Stragglers get taken. Today I intend to be in front. We start going downhill.”
“Let’s go!” I said to Grama, furious, but she shook her head and walked on beside the cart. “I’ve got a gun,” she said. “We should guard her.”
I should have gone back to take care of Choova, but it felt wrong somehow to leave someone else guarding my groom-mate. I shouted to Choova as we passed the camp. “Groom-mummy is fine, darling; we’re just going with her to make sure she’s safe.”
So all of us walked together, the cart jostling and thunking over rocks.
“So tell them, Mai. Why does the world need predators?”
I looked into the wagon, and saw that the Cat had clenched about herself like fingers curled up inside a hoof. I could sense waves of illness coming off her. I saw the horrible meat. She hadn’t touched it. She looked at me with dead eyes.
“Go on, Mai; explain!”
The Cat forced herself to talk, and rolled onto her back, submissively.
“’ere wasssh a ribber . . . ,” she said, toothlessly. “There was a river and there were many goats and many wolves to eat them.” Her voice sounded comic. Everything came out sssh wvuh and boub, like the voices we adopt when we tell jokes. “Verh whuh whvolbss . . . there were wolves, and the Ancestors killed all the wolves because they were predators.”
It was exactly as though she were telling a funny story. I was triggered. I started to laugh.
“And then the rivers started to die. With nothing to eat them, there were too many goats and they ate all the new trees that held the banks together.”
I shook my head to get rid of the laughter. I trembled inside from fear. I wanted to wee.
The Cat groaned. “Issh nop a zhope!” It’s not a joke.
Leveza craned her neck back, looking as though she was teaching me a lesson, her eyes glinting at me in a strange look of triumph and wonder. “What Memory Sticks do Cats have?”
“We know about the seeds, the seeds inside us.”
Grama’s ears stood straight up.
Leveza’s words kept pace with her heavy feet, as if nothing could ever frighten her or hurry her. “Cats know how Ancestors and beasts mingled. They understand how life is made. We could split us up again, Horse and Ancestor. We could give them something else to eat.”
It was all too much for me, as if the Earth were turning in the wind. I was giddy.
Grama marched head bowed, looking thoughtful. “So . . . you know what the other peoples know?”
Leveza actually laughed aloud too. “She does! She does!”
“What do Dogs know?” Grama asked.
The Cat kept telling what sounded like jokes. “Things that are not alive are made of seeds too. Rocks and air and water are all made of tiny things. Dogs know all about those.”
“And goats?”
“Ah! Goats know how the universe began.”
“And electricity?” Grama actually stepped closer to the Cat. “Everything we know is useless without electricity.”
“Bovines,” said the Cat. “I’ve never seen one. But I’ve heard. You go south and you know you are there because they have lights that glow with electricity!”
“We could make a new kind of herd,” Leveza said. “A herd of all the peoples that joins together. We could piece it all together, all that knowledge.”
The Cat rolled on her belly and covered her eyes. Grama looked at her and at me, and we thought the same thing. Wounded, no food, no water – I felt nausea, the Cat’s sickness in my own belly. Why didn’t Leveza?
Grama said, almost as if defending the Cat, “We’d have to all stay together though, all the time. All of us mixed. Or we’d forget it all.”
The Cat rumbled. “The Bears have something called writing. It records. But only the big white ones in the south.”
“Really!” Leveza said. “If we could do that, we could send knowledge everywhere.”
“I’ve thought that,” the Cat said quietly. “Calling all of us together. But my people would eat them all.”
It was one of those too-bright days that cloud over, but for now, the sun dazzled.
“The dolphins in the sea,” murmured the Cat as if dreaming. “They know how stars are made and stay in the sky. They use them to navigate.”
Sun and wind.
“Sea turtles understand all the different elements, how to mix them.”
Grama said, “She needs water.”
Leveza sniffed. “We’ve crossed a watershed. We’re going downhill; there’ll be a stream soon.” We marched on, toward cauliflower clouds.
Grama and I took over pulling the wagon for a time. I don’t know what hauling it uphill is like, but going downhill, the whole weight of it pushes into your shoulders and your legs go rubbery pushing back to stop it rolling out of control.
It’s worrying being yoked: you can’t run as fast; you’re trapped with the cart. I looked back round and saw Leveza in the cart fast asleep, side by side with a Cat.
I found myself thinking like Leveza, and said to Grama, “I can’t aim a gun. You better keep watch.”
So I ended up pulling the cart alone, while Grama stood in the wagon with a gun, and I didn’t know which one of us was the biggest target.
The slope steepened, and we entered a gully, a dry wash between crags. The wind changed direction constantly, buffeting us with the scent of Cat.
“They’re back,” I said to Grama.
The scent woke up Leveza. “Thank you,” she said. “The two of you should go join the others.” She dropped heavily down out of the cart. She searched me with her eyes, some kind of apology in them. “Choova’s alone.”
Grama’s chin tapped me twice. Leveza was right. As we climbed together uphill toward the herd, I said, “Cats don’t go out of their territory.”
“They’re following Leveza. They want Mai, they want her.” In other words, Leveza was pulling the Cats with her.
“Don’t tell the others,” I said.
The wall of faces above us on the hill opened up to admit us, and then closed again behind. We found Choova, who had been having fun with playmates. She’d forgotten Cats, Leveza, everything, and was full of giggles and teasing, pulling my mane. As we walked, the herd gradually caught up with Leveza, and we could hear her and the Cat murmuring to each other.
“What on earth do they find to talk about?” said Raio, my cousin.
“How delicious horseflesh is,” said Ventoo.
Choova scowled. “Everybody says that Leveza is bad.” I stroked her and tried to explain it and found that I could not. All I could say was, “Leveza wants to learn.”
The trail crossed a stream and Fortchee signaled a break. Leveza’s cart was already there with Leveza still in harness reaching down to drink. The trickling sound of safe, shallow water triggered a rush. We crowded round the creek, leaning down and thrusting each other’s head out of the way. Grama trotted up the hill to make room and found herself the farthest one out, the most exposed. I was about to say, Grama, get back.
Three Cats pounced on her. The entire herd pulled back and away from her, swiftly, like smoke blown by wind. Two Cats gripped her hind legs; one was trying to tear out her throat. She was dead, Grama was dead, I was sure of it. I kept leaping forward and back in some kind of impulse to help. Then came a crackle of gunfire. The two Cats on her hindquarters yowled and were thrown back. One spun away and ran; one flipped over backward and was still.
Then one miraculous shot: it sliced through the Cat in front without touching Grama. I looked back in the cart and saw that Leveza had been held down in harness, unable to stand up or reach for her gun.
In the back of the wagon, head and rifle over the sides, was Mother Cat.
Grama shook and shivered, her whole hide twitching independently from the muscles underneath, her eyes ringed round with white. She wasn’t even breathing, she was so panicked. I knew exactly how awful that felt. I ronfled the comfort sound over and over as I picked my way to her, touched her. She heaved a huge, painful-sounding breath. I got hold of the back of her neck. “Come on, darling, come on, baby,” I said through clenched teeth. I coaxed her back downstream toward the others. Her rattling breath came in sobs.
There were no sympathy nitters. The other Horses actually pulled back from us as if we carried live flame. Grama nodded that she was all right and I let her go. She still shivered, but she stepped gently back and forth to test her torn rear legs. I lifted the healer’s pack from her shoulders and took out the bark water to wash her.
I was angry at the others and shouted at them. “It’s all right, all of you, leave her be. Just leave her alone. She’s nursed you often enough.”
Fortchee stepped toward us, breathed in her scent to see how badly hurt she was.
Then he looked over in the direction of the Cat, who still held the gun. He calmly turned and walked toward the cart. Leveza had finally succeeded in slipping out of the yoke and begun to climb the hill back toward him.
I tried to coax Grama back to our wagons, but she firmly shook her head. She wanted to listen to what Fortchee said.
I couldn’t quite hear him, but I certainly could hear Leveza. “She has just as much reason to escape them as you do!”
Fortchee’s voice went harsher, giving an order.
“No,” said Leveza. He said something else, and Leveza replied, “It seems she’s done a good job of protecting us.”
His voice was loud. “Out, now! You or her or both of you.”
“I’m already out. Haven’t you noticed?”
She stepped back toward the long neck of the cart and slammed back on the yoke. “I don’t need you, and I don’t have you!”
She wrenched herself round, almost dragging the cart sideways, turning it down to follow the stream itself. Fortchee shouted for a break. “Afriradors, guard everyone while they drink.” To my surprise, Grama began to limp as fast as she could after Leveza’s wagon.
I couldn’t let her go alone, so I followed, taking Choova with me. As we trooped down the hill, we passed Fortchee trudging up the slope, his head hanging. He ignored us. A Head Man cannot afford to be defied to his face too often.
I caught up to Grama. We hobbled over rocks, or splashed through shallow pools. Choova rubbed her chin against my flank for comfort. Leveza saw us behind her and stopped.
“Hello, darling,” Leveza called back to Choova, who clattered forward, glad to see her. They interlaced their heads, breathed each other’s breath. I pressed in close, and felt my eyes sting. We were still a family.
Grama stuck her head over the sides of the wagon. “Thank you,” she told Mai.
“You nursed me,” said the Cat.
“Mai?” said Leveza. “This is my groom-daughter Choova.”
“Choova,” said the Cat and smiled, and crawled up the wagon to be nearer. “I have a boy, Choova, a little boy.” Choova looked uncertain and edged back.
“Is he back . . . with the pride?” Leveza asked.
“Yesh. But he won’t want to know me now.” Mai slumped back down in the wagon. “Everything with us is the hunt. Nobody thinks about anything else.” She shrugged. “He’s getting mature now, he would have been driven off soon anyway.”
Leveza stopped pulling. “You should drink some water.”
As slow as molten metal, the Cat poured herself out of the cart, halting on tender paws. She drank, but not enough, looked weary, and then wove her unsteady way back toward the wagon. She started to laugh. “I can’t get back in.”
Leveza slipped out of harness and we all helped roll Mai onto Leveza’s back. Grama sprang back up into the cart, and helped pull up the Cat.
“Good to be among friends,” Mai whispered.
Leveza stroked her head. “Neither one of us can go back home,” she said, staring at Mai with a sad smile. Then she looked at me, with an expression that seemed to say, I think she’s going to die.
I wanted to say, I’m supposed to care about a Cat?
“Don’t you get pushed out too,” she said to me, and jerked her head in the direction of the herd. She asked us to bring her lots of lamp fuel, and Grama promised that she would. As we walked toward the others, I couldn’t stop myself saying in front of Choova, “She’s in love with that bloody Cat!”
That night, Choova, me and Grama slept together again beneath a wagon, behind the windbreak wall.
In the middle of the night, we heard burrowing and saw claws, digging underneath the timbers, trying to get in. We jammed little stakes into the tender places between their toes. I cradled Choova next to me as we heard shots from overhead and Cat cries. We saw flickering light through the boards and smelled smoke. Fortchee stuck his head underneath the wagon. “Leveza’s set the hillside on fire! We have to beat it back.” He looked wild. “Come on! There’s no more Cats but the camp’s catching fire!” He headbutted Ventoo. “We need everyone!”
Light on the opposite hillside left dim blue and grey shadows across our eyes. Fire rained slowly down, embers from the grass, drifting sparks. Ash tickled our nostrils; we couldn’t quite see. We had fuel and firestarters on the wagons; if those caught alight we’d lose everything.
“That bloody woman!” shouted Ventoo. Blindly, we got out blankets and started to beat back the grass fire, aiming for any blur of light. The men stumbled down the stream with buckets to fill, stepping blindly into dark, wondering if Cats awaited them. The ground sizzled, steamed, and trailed smoke. We slapped wet blankets onto the gnawing red lines in the wood.
It was still milklight, and the fire had not burnt out, when Fortchee called for us to pack up and march. Blearily, we hoisted up the windbreak walls, only too happy to move. The smell of ash was making us ill. I glanced up and saw that Leveza had already gone.
Butt her! I thought. My own milk had given out on the trek, and Choova was hungry. What do you have a groom-mate for if not to help nurse your child? “You’ll have to graze, baby,” I told her.
We churned up clouds of ash. I wandered though something crisp and tangled and realized I had trodden in the burnt carcass of a Cat. Later in the grass we saw the quail that Leveza had shot, thrown away, the meat gone dark and dry. The Cat still had not eaten.
“I want to see if Mai’s all right,” said Grama.
In full milklight, we trotted ahead to the wagon to find the Cat asleep and Leveza hauling the wagon on two legs only, keeping watch with the rifle ready. She passed us the gun and settled down onto all fours and started to haul again. Her face and voice were stern. “She says it would be possible to bring Horses back, full-blooded Horses. Can you imagine? They could have something else to eat, all of this could stop!”
“What? How?” said Grama.
“The Ancestors wanted to be able to bring both back. We have the complete information for Horses and Ancestors too. We still carry them inside us!”
“So . . . what do we do?” Grama asked.
“Bee-sh,” said a voice from the cart. The Cat sat up, with a clown’s expression on her face. She chuckled. “You could carry them forever, and they wouldn’t come out. They need something from bees.”
For some reason, Leveza chuckled too. She was always so serious and weighty that I could never make her laugh.
“It’s called . . .” The Cat paused and then wiggled her eyebrows. “Ek-die-ssshone.” She paused. “That-ssh a word. I don’t know what it mean-sh either. It’s just in my head.”
That Cat knew her toothless voice was funny. She was playing up to it. I saw then how clever she was, how clever she had been. She knew just what to say to get Leveza on her side.
“Bee-sh make honey, and bee-sh make Horshes.”
“So you give the seed something from bees, and we give birth to full-bloods?” Everything about Grama stood up alert and turned toward the Cat.
“Not you too,” I moaned.
Finally I made Leveza laugh. “Oh Akwa, you old chestnut!”
“No,” said the Cat. “What gets born is much, much closer to Horses. It’s a mix of you and a full-blooded Horse, but then we can . . .”
“Breed back!” said Grama. “Just pair off the right ones.”
“Yup,” said the Cat. “I’ve alsway-sssh thought I could do it. I jussht needed lotsh of Horshes. My pridemates had sschtrong tendenshee to eat them.”
There was something deadly in Leveza’s calm. “We could bring back the Ancestors. Imagine what they could tell us! Maybe they have all the Memory Sticks, all together.”
The Cat leaned back, her work done. “They knew nothing. They had no memory. Everything they knew, they had to learn. How to walk. How to talk. All over again each time. So they could forget. But they could learn.”
Overhead the stars looked like a giant spider’s web, all glistening with dew.
“They wanted to travel to the stars. So they thought they would carry the animals and plants inside them. And they were worried that all their knowledge would be lost. ‘How,’ they asked, ‘can we make the information safe?’ So they made it like the knowledge every spider has: how to weave a web.”
“Kaway,” said Leveza, in a mourning voice.
I felt as thought I had gone to sleep on the ground all alone instead of sleeping on my feet to watch. This was madness, just the kind of madness to capture Leveza. I will keep watch now, I promised myself.
“Maybe one day the Ancestors will sail back.” Leveza arched her neck and looked up at the stars.
All the next day, as we headed east, they talked their nonsense. Nowadays, I wish that I had listened and could remember it, but all I heard then was that the Cat was subverting my Leveza. I knew it was no good pleading with her to let all of this madness alone, to come home, to be as we were. How I wanted that Cat to die. I’ve never felt so alone and useless.
“Don’t worry, love,” said Grama. “It’s Leveza’s way.”
I was too angry to answer.
The stream dipped down through green hills which suddenly fell away. We stopped at the top of a slope, looking out over a turquoise and grey plain. We had made it to the eastern slopes facing the sea. The grass was long and soft and rich, so we grazed as we walked, and I hoped my milk would come back. The foals, Choova included, began to run up and down through the meadows as if already home. We’d made it; we would be fine.
Fortchee kept pushing us, getting us well out of the Cats’ range. Still, it was strange; this was flatlands, full of tall grass. Why were there no other Cats? I kept sniffing the wind, we all did, but all we smelled was the pure fresh smell of grazing.
It was not until near sunset that Fortchee brayed for camp. Grama and I went back, and I kicked the grass as I walked. Grama chewed my mane and called me poor love. “She’s always loved ideas. The Cat is full of them.”
“Yes, she wants us to make new children to feed to her!” I pulled Choova closer to me and nuzzled her.
We camped, grazed, and watered, but I couldn’t settle. I paced round and round. I went back to our wagon, slumped down, and tried to feed Choova again. I couldn’t. I wept. I was dry like old grass, and I had no one to help me and felt alone, abandoned. I heard Leveza start to sing! Sing, while sleeping with a Cat. She was blank, unfeeling, something restraining had been left out of her. She didn’t love me, she didn’t love anything. Just her fabrications. And she’d pulled me and used me up and left me alone.
Choova was restless too. For a while, getting her to sleep occupied me. Finally her breathing fell regular, soft and smelling of hay, sweet and young and trusting, her long slim face resting on my haunches.
I lay there and heard Leveza sing the songs about sunrise, pasture, running through fields, the kinds of songs you sing when you are excited, young.
In love.
Sleep wouldn’t come, peace wouldn’t come. I turned over and Choova stirred, Grama groaned. I was keeping them awake. Suddenly I was determined to bring all of this to a stop. I was going to go out there and get my groom-mate back. So I rolled quietly out from under the wagon. Everything was still; even birds and insects – no stars, no moon. Yet I thought I heard . . . something.
I reared up to look over the windbreaks and saw light over the horizon, and drifting white smoke. I thought it was the last of the fire, then realized it was in the wrong direction. Did I hear shots? And mewling?
I was about to give the danger call when Fortchee stepped up to me. “Fuhfuhfoom,” he said, the quiet call. “That’s Cat fighting Cat. The ones chasing us have strayed into another pride’s territory.”
I felt ice on our shoulders. We stood and watched and listened and our focusing ears seemed to pull the sound closer to us.
A battle between Cats.
“We can sleep on a little longer in safety,” he said. “I had to tell Leveza to stop singing.”
I started to walk. “I need to talk sense to that woman.”
“Good luck.” He pulled a cart aside, to make a gap for me. “Be careful anyway.”
As I walked toward the wagon the sound grew, a growling, roaring, crying, a sound like a creeping wildfire. It was as if all the world had gone mad along with me.
I slipped down the track, silently, rehearsing what I would say to her. I would tell her to come back to Choova and the herd and let the Cat do what she could to survive. I would tell her: You choose. Me or that Cat. I would force her to come back, force her to be sensible.
I got halfway down the track, and clouds moved away from the moon, and I saw.
At first I thought Leveza was just grooming her. That would have been enough to make me sick, the thought of grooming something that smelt of death, of blood.
But it wasn’t grooming. The Cat had not eaten for days, was wounded and hungry, and Leveza had leaking tits.
I saw her suckling a Cat.
The Earth spun. I had never known that such perversion existed; I’d never heard of normal groom-mates doing such a thing. But what a fearful confounding was this, of species, of mother, of child? While my Choova starved, that Cat, that monster, was being fed, given horsemilk as if by a loving mother.
I gagged and made a little cry and stumbled and coughed and I think those two in the wagon turned and saw me. I spun around and galloped, hooves pounding, and I was calling over and over, “Foul, foul, foul!”
I wailed and I heard answering shouts from inside the camp. Ventoo and Lindalfa came hobbling out to me.
“Akwa, darling!”
“Akwa, what’s wrong?”
They were mean-eyed. “What’s she done now?” They were yearning for bad news about Leveza
I wept and wailed and tried to pull myself away. “She won’t feed Choova but she’s feeding that Cat.”
“What do you mean, feed?”
I couldn’t answer.
“Hunting! Yes we saw! Killing for that thing!”
“Foul, yes, poor Akwa!”
I hauled in a breath that pushed my voice box the wrong way.
“It’s not hunting!” I was frothing at the mouth, the spittle and foam splayed over my lips and chin. “Uhhhhh!”
I wished the grass would slash her like a thousand needles. I wanted hot embers poured down her throat, I wanted her consumed, I wanted the Cats to come and make good all their terrible threats. Yes, yes, eat your Cat lover and then be eaten too. Call for me and I will call back to you: you deserve this!
Grama was there. “Akwa, calm down. Down, Akwa.” She ronfled the soothing noise. I blew out spittle at her, rejecting the trigger from my belly outward. I shriek-whinnied in a mixture of fear, horror, and something like the sickness call.
“She’s suckling the Cat!”
Silence.
Someone giggled.
I head-butted the person I thought had laughed. “Suckling. An adult. Cat!”
Grama fell silent. I shouted at her. “Heard of that before, Midwife?” My eyes were round; my teeth were shovels for flesh; I was enraged at everything and everyone.
Grama stepped back. Fortchee stepped forward. “What is all this noise?”
I told him. I told him good, I told him long. Ventoo bit my tail to keep me in place; the others rubbed me with their snouts.
“Poor thing! Her groom-mate.”
“Enough,” said Fortchee. He turned and started to walk toward their wagon.
“Too true there!” said Ventoo. Old Pronto grabbed a gun.
We all followed, making a sound like a slow small rockslide, down toward the cart.
Leveza stood up in the wagon, waiting. So did the Cat.
“Give us your guns,” said Fortchee.
“We can’t. . . .”
“I’m not asking, I’m ordering.”
Leveza looked at him, as if moonlight still shone on his face. She sighed, and looked up at the stars, and handed him her gun.
“The Cat’s too.”
Silently Leveza held it out to him.
“Now get down out of that cart and rejoin the herd.”
“And Mai?” Such regret, such fondness, such concern for blood-breathed Cat.
The spittle curdled; the heart shriveled; I tasted gall, and I said, “She’s taken a Cat for a groom-mate. I don’t want her! I don’t want her back!”
Her head jerked up at me in wonder.
“All her fabricating!”
I felt myself rear up in the air, and I bucked. I bucked to get away from my own heart, from the things I’d seen, for the way I’d been stretched. I was tired, I was frightened, I wanted her to be as we had been. Our girlhoods when we galloped beribboned over the hill.
“She’d feed my child to that bloody Cat!”
Reared up, wrenching, I made a noise I had never heard before, never knew could be made.
It was like giving birth through the throat, some ghastly wriggling thing made of sound that needed to be born, and it came out of me, headless and blind. A relentless, howling pushing-back that flecked everything with foam as if I were the sea.
Triggered.
Even Fortchee.
All.
We all moved together, closing like a gate. Our shoulders touched and our haunches. We lowered our heads. We advanced. I saw Leveza look into my eyes and then crumple. She knew what this was, even if I did not, and she knew it had come from me.
We advanced and butted the cart. We pushed all our heads under it and turned the cart over. Leveza and the Cat had to jump out, clumsy, stumbling to find their feet.
The Cat snarled, toothless. Leveza shook her head. “Friends. . . .”
We were deaf. We were upon them. We head-butted them. Leveza slipped backward, onto her knees. Fortchee reared up and clubbed her on the head with his hooves. She stood up, turned. Fortchee, Ventoo, Raio, Pronto, all bared their teeth and bit her buttocks hard. Feet splaying sideways, she began to run.
The Cat bounded, faster in bursts than Leveza was, and leapt up onto her back. Leveza trotted away, carrying her. Her tail waved, defiant. Then milklight closed over them as if they had sunk. We heard light scattering sounds of stones for a while, then even her hoofbeats faded into the whispering sound of spaces between mountains.
Without a word, Grama sprang after them. I saw her go too. There were no Cats on the plain to seize them as the horizon burned.
The herd swung to the left in absolute unison, wheeling around, and then trotted back to the camp. We felt satisfied, strangely nourished, safe and content. I looked back under the cart. Choova raised her head. “What was that, Mummy?”
“Nothing, love, nothing,” I said.
Fortchee told us quietly that we should get moving now while the Cats were occupied. We dismantled the windbreaks and packed the tools. Some of the men turned Leveza’s cart upright and old Pronto went back to his post in harness. Never did we pack with so little noise, so swiftly, calmly. Nothing was said at all, no mention of it. The horizon burned with someone else’s passion.
Choova ran out to graze, her mane bobbing. She never asked about Leveza or Grama, not once, ever. A soft glowing light spread wide across the pampas.
We followed the stream to the sea and then migrated along the sand. It got between our fingers. We did see the turtles. I would have asked them about acids, especially the acids in batteries, but they were laying eggs, and would have been fearful.
Fortchee led us to a wonderful pasture, far to the south, on a lake next to sea, salt and fresh water so close, beside tall sudden cliffs that kept Cats at bay. Oats grew there year round; the rains never left. By digging we found rust shoals, thick layers of it, enough to make metal for several lifetimes. There was no reason to leave. We waited for the trigger to leave, but year in, year out, none came.
Fortchee had us build a stone wall across the small peninsula of land that connected our islet to the mainland, and we were safe from Cats. When he died, we called him our greatest innovator.
On top of a high hill we found the fallen statue of an Ancestor, his face melted, his arms outstretched. As if to welcome Ancestors back from the stars.
No one came to me in the night to comfort me or bite my neck and call me love. I suppose I’d been touched by something strange and so was strange myself. I would have taken a low-rank drifter, only they did not get past the wall. Still, I had my Choova. She brought me her children to bless, and then her grandchildren, though they never really recognized what I was to them. Their children had no idea that I still lived. My loneliness creaked worse than my joints and I yearned for a migration, to sweep me numbly away.
Not once did anyone speak of Leveza, or even once remember her. Our exiled groom-brothers would drift by, to temporarily gladsome cries, and they told us, before moving on, of new wonders on the prairie. But we blanked that too.
Until one dusk, I saw the strangest thing picking its way down toward our lagoon.
It looked like a fine and handsome young girl, beautifully formed though very very long in the trunk. She raised her head from drinking and her mane fell back. The top of her face was missing, from right above the eyes. It was terrible to see, someone so young but so deformed. She whinnied in hope and fear, and I ronfled back comfort to her, and then asked her name. But she couldn’t talk.
A horse. I was looking at a full-blooded horse. I felt a chill on my legs and wondered: did they bring the Ancestors back, too?
“Leveza?” I asked it, and it raised and lowered its head, and I thought the creature knew the name. It suddenly took fright, started, and trotted away into the night, as someone else once had.
Then there was a sound like thousands of cards being shuffled, and a score of the creatures emerged from the trees. They bent their long necks down to drink. Their legs worked backward.
A voice said softly, “Is that Akwa?” Against a contrast sky, I saw the silhouette of a monster, two headed, tall. Then I recognized the gun.
She had trained one of the things to carry her, so she would always sit tall and have her hands free. I couldn’t speak. Somewhere beyond the trees carts rumbled.
“Hello, my love,” she said. I was hemorrhaging memory, a continual stream; and all of it about her – how she spoke, how she smelled, how she always went too far, and how I wished that I’d gone with her too all those years ago.
“We’re going south, to find the Bears, get us some of that writing. Want to come?” I still could not speak. “It’s perfectly safe. We’ve bought along something else for them to eat.”
I think that word “safe” was the trigger. I did the giggle of embarrassment and fear. I drank sweet water and then followed. We found writing, and here it is.
Here’s another story by Paul McAuley, whose “Incomers” appears elsewhere in this anthology. In this one he takes us to a distant world that’s littered with the ruins of vanished civilizations to unravel an enigmatic – and deadly – biological mystery.
How MARILYN CARTER first met Ana Datlovskaya, the Queen of the Hive Rats: late one afternoon she was driving through the endless tracts of alien tombs in the City of the Dead, to the west of the little desert town of Joe’s Corner, when she saw a pickup canted on the shoulder of the rough track, its hood up. She pulled over and asked the woman working elbow-deep in the engine of the pickup if she needed any help; the woman said that she believed that she needed a tow truck, this bloody excuse for a pickup she should have sold for scrap long ago had thrown a rod.
“I am Ana Datlovskaya,” she added, and stuck out an oily hand.
“Marilyn Carter,” Marilyn said, and shook Ana Datlovskaya’s hand.
“Our new town constable. That incorrigible gossip Joel Jumonville told me about you,” the woman said. She was somewhere in her sixties, short and broadhipped, dressed in a khaki shirt and blue jeans and hiking boots. Her white hair, roughly cropped, stuck up like ruffled feathers; her shrewd gaze didn’t seem to miss much. “Although he didn’t mention that you have a dog. He is a police dog? I met one once, in Port of Plenty. At the train station. It told me to stand still while its handler searched me for I don’t know what.”
The black Labrador, Jet, was standing in the loadbed of Marilyn’s Bronco, watching them with keen interest.
“He’s just a dog,” Marilyn said. “He doesn’t talk or anything. We can give you a lift into town, if you need one.”
“No doubt Joel told you that I am the crazy old woman who lives with hive rats,” Ana Datlovskaya said to Marilyn, as they drove off towards Joe’s Corner. “It is true I am old, as you can plainly see. And it’s true also that I study hive rats. But I am not crazy. In fact, I am the only sane person in this desert. Everyone else hopes to make fortune by finding treasure, or by swindling people looking for treasure. That is craziness, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“I don’t mind in the least, because that’s not why I’m here,” Marilyn said.
She’d become town constable by accident. She’d stopped for the night in Joe’s Corner and had been sitting in its roadhouse, minding her own business, nursing a beer and half-listening to the house band blast out some twentieth-century industrial blues, when a big man a few stools down took exception to something the bartender said and tried to haul him over the counter by his beard. Marilyn intervened and put the big guy on the floor, and the owner of the roadhouse, Joel Jumonville, had given her a steak dinner on the house. Joel was an ex-astronaut who like Marilyn had fought in World War Three. He also owned two of the little town’s motels, ran its radio station and its web site, and was, more by default than democracy, its mayor. He and Marilyn got drunk together and told war stories, and by the end of the evening she’d shaken hands on a contract to serve as town constable for one year, replacing a guy who’d quit when a scrap of plastic he’d dug up in one of the tombs had turned out to be a room temperature superconductor.
It wasn’t exactly how she’d imagined her life would turn out when she’d won a lottery place on one of the arks.
This was in the heady years immediately after the Jackaroo had arrived in the aftermath of World War Three, and had given the survivors a basic fusion drive and access to a wormhole network linking fifteen M-class red dwarf stars in exchange for rights to the rest of the Solar System; a brief, anarchic age of temporary kingdoms, squabbling emirates, and gloriously foolish attempts at building every kind of Utopia; an age of exploration, heroic ambition, and low farce. Like every other lottery winner, Marilyn had imagined a fresh start, every kind of exotic adventure, but after she’d arrived in Port of Plenty, on the planet of first Foot, short of cash and knowing no one, she’d ended up working for a security firm, which is what she’d been doing before she left Earth. She guarded the mansions and compounds of the city’s rich, rode as bodyguard for their wives and children. Some had earned vast fortunes founded on novel principles of physics or mathematics wrested from discarded alien machineries; others were gangsters feeding on the underbelly of Port of Plenty’s fast and loose economy. Marilyn’s last job had been with an Albanian involved in all kinds of dubious property deals; after he’d been killed by a car bomb, she’d had to get out of Port of Plenty in a hurry because his family suspected that the assassination had been an inside job. She’d drifted west along the coast of first Foot’s single continent and ended up in Joe’s Corner, but, as she told Ana Datlovskaya, she didn’t plan to stay.
“When the year’s up I’m moving on. I have a whole new world to explore. And plenty more besides.”
“Ha. If I had a euro for every time I’d heard that from people who thought they were passing through but couldn’t find a reason to leave,” Ana Datlovskaya said, “I’d be riding around the desert in style, instead of nursing that broken-down donkey of a pickup.”
Ana was a biologist who’d moved out to the western desert to study hive rats, supporting her research with her savings and the sale of odd little figurines. Like Marilyn, she was originally from London, England, but their sex and nationality were about all they had in common – Marilyn had been born and raised in Streatham, her mother a nurse and her father a driver on the Underground, while Ana’s parents had been Russian exiles, poets who’d escaped Stalin’s postwar purges and had set up residence in Hampstead. Still, the two women quickly became friends. Ana was a prominent member of Joe’s Corner’s extensive cast of eccentrics, but she was also an exemplar of the legion of stout-hearted, sensible, and completely fearless women who before World War Three had explored and done every kind of good work in every corner of the globe. Marilyn had met several of these doughty heroines during her service in the army and had admired them all. The evening she gave Ana a lift into town they had a fine time in the roadhouse, swapping war stories and reminiscing about London and how they’d survived World War Three, and on her next free day Marilyn was more than happy to make a fifty kilometre trip beyond the northern edge of the City of the Dead to visit Ana’s desert camp.
By then, Joel Jumonville had told Marilyn a fair number of tall tales about the Queen of the Hive Rats. According to him, the old woman had once shot a bandit who’d tried to rob her, and cut up his body and fed it to her hive rats. Also, that the little figurines she sold to support herself, found nowhere else in the City of the Dead, were rumoured to come from the hold of an ancient spaceship she’d uncovered, she kept a tame tigon she’d raised from a kitten, and she’d learned how to enter hive rat gardens without being immediately attacked and killed. Joel was an inveterate gossip and an accomplished fabulist, so Marilyn also took his stories with large pinches of salt, but when she pulled up by Ana’s shack, on a bench terrace cut into a stony ridge that overlooked a broad arroyo, she was amazed to see the old woman pottering about the edge of a hive rat garden. The garden stretched away down the arroyo, crowded with the tall yellow blades of century plants. Columns of hardened mud that Marilyn later learned were ventilation chambers stood here and there, hive rat sentries perched on their hind legs at intervals along the perimeter, and there was a big mound with a hole in its flat top that no doubt led to the heart of the nest.
Jet went crazy over the scent of the hive rats. By the time Marilyn had calmed him down, Ana was climbing the path to her shack, cheerfully helloing them. “How nice to see you, my dear. And your lovely dog. Did you by any chance bring any tea? I ran out two days ago.”
Sitting on plastic chairs under a canvas awning that cracked and boomed in the hot breeze, they made do with stale instant coffee and flat biscuits, tasting exactly like burnt toast, that Ana had baked using flour ground from cactus tree bark. There wasn’t any trick to walking amongst the hive rats, the old woman told Marilyn. She had worked out the system of pheromonal signals that governed much of their cooperative behaviour, and wore a dab of scent that suppressed secretion of alarm and aggression pheromones by sentries and soldiers, so that the hive rats accepted her as one of their own.
Ana talked a long streak about hive rat biology, explaining how their nests were organised in different castes like ants or bees, how they made their gardens. This garden was the largest known, Ana said, and it was unique not only because it was a monoculture of century plants, but because there was an elaborate system of irrigation ditches and dykes scratched across the arroyo floor. She showed Marilyn views from camera feeds she’d installed in the kilometres of tunnels and shafts and chambers of the nest beneath the garden: workers gnawing at the car-sized tuber of a century plant; endless processions of workers toiling up from the deep aquifer, their bellies swollen with water; one of the fungal gardens that processed the hive rats’ waste; a chamber in which a hive rat queen, fed and groomed by workers one-tenth her size, extruded blind, squirming pups with machine-like regularity. Unlike other nests, this one housed many queens, Ana said; it had never split into daughter colonies.
“When I know you better, perhaps I’ll tell you why. But enough of my work. Tell me about the world.”
Marilyn gave Ana the latest local gossip, and ended up promising to do a supply run for the old woman, who said that she would be grateful not to have to bother with dealing with other people: she was far too busy with her research, which was at a very interesting stage. So Marilyn took a dozen little figurines back to Joe’s Corner, smoothly knotted shapes fashioned from some kind of resin that when handled induced a pleasant, dreamy sensation that reminded her of her habit, when she’d been eleven or twelve, of standing at the bathroom sink with her hands up to the wrists in warm water, staring into the fogged mirror, wondering what she would become when she grew up. She sold them to the Nigerian assayer in Joe’s Corner, bought supplies and picked up several packages from an electronics supplier along with the rest of Ana’s mail, and on her next free day took everything out to the old woman’s camp.
After a couple of supply runs, Ana gave Marilyn a tiny brown bottle containing a couple of millilitres of oily suppressor scent, telling her that she could use it to check out tombs that happened to be in the middle of hive rat gardens. “Foolish people try to poison or smoke them out. And they usually get bitten badly because the rats are smarter than most people think. They know how to avoid poison, and their nests are extremely well-ventilated. But if you wear just a dab of suppressor, my dear, you can walk right into those tombs, all of them untouched by looters, and pick up any treasures you might find.”
Marilyn promised she’d give it a try, but the bottle ended up unopened in the junk-filled glove compartment of her Bronco. For one thing, she wasn’t convinced that it would work, and she knew that you could die from infection with flesh-eating bacteria after a single hive rat bite. For another, she didn’t really need to supplement her income from sale of scraps looted from tombs. Her salary as town constable was about a quarter of what she’d received for guarding the late unlamented Albanian businessman, but she had a rent-free room in the Westward Ho! motel and ate for free in Joel’s roadhouse most nights, and for the first time in her life she was able to put a little money by for a rainy day.
It occurred to her around this time that she was happy. She had a job she liked, and she liked most of the people in Joe’s Corner and could tolerate the rest, and she liked the desert, too. When she wasn’t visiting Ana Datlovskaya, she spent most of her free time pottering around the tombs of the City of the Dead, exploring the salt-flats and arroyos and low, gullied hills, learning about the patchwork desert ecology, plants and animals native to first Foot and alien species imported from other worlds by previous tenant races. Camping out in the desert at night, she’d lie in her sleeping bag and look up at the rigid pattens of alien constellations, the two swift moons, the luminous milk of the Phoenix nebula sprawled across the eastern horizon. Earth was about two thousand light years beyond the nebula: the wormhole network linked only fifteen stars, but it spanned the Sagittarius arm of the Galaxy. How strange and wonderful that she should be here, so far from Earth. On an alien world twice the size of Earth, where things weighed half as much again, and the day was a shade over twenty hours long. In a desert full of the tombs of a long-vanished alien race . . .
One day, Marilyn was out at the northern edge of the City of the Dead, sitting on a flat boulder on a low ridge and eating her lunch, when Jet raised up and trotted smartly to the edge of the ridge and began to bark. A few moments later, Marilyn heard the noise of a vehicle off in the distance. She finished what was left of her banana in two quick bites, walked over to where her dog stood, and looked out across the dry playa towards distant hills hazed by dusty air and shimmering heat. The hummocks of ancient tombs in ragged lines amongst drifts of sand and rocks; silvery clouds of saltbush and tall clumps of cactus trees; the green oases of hive rat gardens. The nearest garden was only a kilometre away; Marilyn could see the cat-sized, pinkly naked sentries perched upright amongst its piecework plantings. Beyond it, a thin line of dust boiled up, dragged by a black Range Rover. As it drew nearer, the hive rat sentries started drumming with their feet, a faint pattering that started Jet barking. Soldiers popped up from the mound in the centre of the garden, two or three times the size of the sentries, armoured with scales and armed with recurved claws and strong jaws that could bite through a man’s wrist, running towards the Range Rover as it drove straight across the garden. It ploughed through them, leaving some dead and dying and the rest chasing its dusty wake all the way to the garden’s boundary, where they tumbled to a halt and stared after it as it headed up a bare apron of rock towards the ridge.
Marilyn walked over to her Bronco and took her pistol from her day bag and stuck it in the waistband of her shorts and walked back to Jet, who was bristling and barking. The Range Rover had stopped at the bottom of the short steep slope. A blond, burly man stood in the angle of the open door on the far side, staring up at Marilyn as a second man climbed out. He had a deep tan and black hair shaved close to his skull, was dressed in black jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt. Black tattoos on his forearms, black sunglasses that heliographed twin discs of sunlight at Marilyn as he said, “How are you doing, Marilyn? It’s been a while.”
It was one of the men who’d worked for the security firm back in Port of Plenty. Frank something. Frank Parker.
“I’m wondering why you came all the way out here to find me, Frank. I’m also wondering how you found me.”
Marilyn was pretty sure that this wasn’t anything do with the Albanians, who liked to do their own dirty work, but she was also pretty sure that Frank Parker and his blond bodybuilder friend were some kind of trouble, and a smooth coolness was filling her up inside, something she hadn’t felt for a long time.
“I guess you don’t feel like coming down here, so I’ll come up,” Frank Parker said, and began to pick his way up the stony slope, ignoring Marilyn’s sharp request to stay where he was, going down on one knee when his black town shoes slipped on the frangible dirt and pushing up and coming on, stopping only when Jet started to bark at him, knuckling sweat from his forehead and saying, “Feisty fellow, ain’t he?”
“He’s a pretty good judge of people.” Marilyn told Jet to sit, said to Frank Parker, “I’m waiting to hear what you want. Maybe you can start by telling me what you’re doing out here. It’s a long way from Port of Plenty.”
“I wouldn’t mind a drink of water,” Frank Parker said, and took a couple of steps forward. Jet rose up and started barking again and the man held up his hands, palms out, in a gesture of surrender.
“I’m sure you have a bottle or two in that expensive car of yours,” Marilyn said. She was watching him and trying to watch his friend down by the Range Rover at the same time. Her Glock was a hard flat weight against the small of her back and she stepped hard on the impulse to show it to Frank Parker. If she did, it would take things up to the next level and there’d be no going back.
“I bring greetings from another old friend,” Frank Parker said. “Tom Archibold. He’d like to invite you over for a chat.”
“What’s Tom doing out here?”
Like Frank Parker, Tom Archibold had been working for the same security firm that had been employing Marilyn when her client had been blown to bloody confetti. She was trying her best to keep the surprise she felt from her face, but Frank Parker must have seen something of it because his smile broadened into a grin. “Tom told me to tell you that he has a little job for you.”
“You can thank Tom for me, and tell him that I already have a job.”
“He needs your advice on something is all.”
“If he wants my advice, he’s welcome to visit me when I get back to town tomorrow. My office is right in the middle of our little commercial strip. You can’t miss it. It has a sign with “Town Constable” printed on it hung right above the door.”
“He kind of needs you on site,” Frank Parker said.
“I don’t think so.”
“We really would like for you to come right away. It’s about your friend Ana Datlovskaya,” Frank Parker said, and took a step towards Marilyn.
Jet barked and lunged forward, and Frank Parker reached behind himself and jerked a pistol from his belt, Marilyn shouting no!, and shot Jet in the chest. Jet dropped flat and slid down the slope, and Frank Parker turned to Marilyn, his eyes widening behind his sunglasses when she put her Glock on him and told him to put his weapon down.
“Do it right now!” she said, and shot him in the leg when he didn’t.
He fell on his ass and dropped his pistol. Marilyn stepped forwards and kicked it away, saw movement at the bottom of the slope, the man behind the Range Rover raising a machine pistol, and threw herself flat as a short burst walked along the edge of the ridge, whining off stones, smacking into dirt, kicking up dust. Marilyn raised up and took aim, and the man ducked out of sight as the round spanged off the window post beside him. She got off two more shots, aiming for the tyres, but the damned things must have been puncture-proof. The Range Rover started with a roar and reversed at speed, its open door flapping. Marilyn braced and took aim and put a shot through the tinted windshield, and the Range Rover spun in a handbrake turn and took off into the playa, leaving only dust in the air.
Frank Parker was holding his thigh with both hands, blood seeping through laced fingers, face pale and tight with pain. “You fucking shot me, you bitch.”
“You shot my dog. But don’t think that makes us even.”
Marilyn picked up his pistol and told him to roll over on his stomach, patted him down and found a gravity knife in an ankle scabbard. She told him to stay absolutely still if he didn’t want to get shot again, and crabbed down the slope to where Jet lay, dusty and limp and dead. She carried him up the slope to her Bronco, set him in the well under the shotgun seat. Frank Parker had sat up again and was clutching his thigh and making threats. She told him to shut up and pulled the q-phone from its holster under the dashboard, but although she tried three times she could raise only a faint conversation between two people who seemed to be shouting at each other in a howling gale in a language she didn’t recognise. She tried the shortwave radio, too, but every channel was full of static; that wasn’t unexpected, as radio reception ran from patchy to non-existent in the City of the Dead, but she’d never before had a problem with the q-phone. A little miracle that fused alien and human technology, it was worth more than the Bronco and shared a bound pair of electrons with the hub station in Joe’s Corner, and should have given her an instant connection even if she was standing on other side of the universe.
Well, she didn’t know why the damn thing had decided to throw a glitch, but she was a long way from town, and Ana was in trouble. She found her handcuffs in the glove compartment and walked over to Frank Parker and tossed them into his lap and told him to put them on. As he fumbled with them, she asked him why Tom wanted to talk with her, and what it had to do with Ana Datlovskaya.
Frank Parker told her to go fuck herself, closed his eyes when Marilyn cocked her pistol.
“I can knock off plenty of pieces of you before you die,” she said. She was angry and out of patience, and anxious too. “Or maybe give you to the hive rats down there. I bet they’re still pissed off after you drove straight through their garden.”
After a moment, Frank Parker said, “We’ve taken over Ana Datlovskaya’s claim.”
“Taken it over? What does that mean? Have you bastards killed her?”
“No. No, no. It’s not like that.”
“She’s alive.”
“We think so.”
“She is or she isn’t.”
“We think she’s alive,” Frank Parker said. “She got out into the damn garden and ducked into a hole. We haven’t been able to get near it.”
“Because of the hive rats. Did anyone get eaten?”
“One of us got bitten.”
“Tom wants me to persuade her to come out.”
The man nodded sullenly. “Word is, you’re her good friend. Tom thought you could talk some sense into her.”
Marilyn thought about this. “How did you know where to find me? This is my day off, I driving around the desert, no one in town knows where I am. Yet you drive straight towards me. Were you following me?”
“You have a q-phone. We have a magic gizmo that tracks them.”
“Does this magic gizmo also stop q-phones working?”
“I don’t know. Really, I don’t,” Frank Parker said. “I was told where to find you, and there you were. Look, the old woman is sitting on something valuable. You can have a share of it. All you have to do is talk to her, persuade her to give herself up. Is that so hard?”
“We walk away afterwards, me and Ana.”
“Sure. We’ll even cut you in for a share. Why not? Help me up, we can drive straight there — ”
“What is it you want from her? Those figurines?”
“It’s something to do with those rats. Don’t ask me what. I wasn’t privy to the deal Tom made.”
“I bet. Think you can walk over to my pickup?”
“You shot me in the fucking leg. You’re going to have to give me a hand.”
“Wrong answer,” Marilyn said.
Frank Parker flinched and started to raise his cuffed hands, but she was quicker, and rapped him smartly above his ear with the grip of her pistol and laid him flat.
He started to come round when she dumped him in the loadbed of the Bronco, feebly trying to resist as she tied off the nylon cord she’d wrapped around his calves. “You’re fucked,” he said. “Well and truly fucked.”
Marilyn ignored him and went around to the cab and took out the q-phone and tried it again – still no signal – then put it in the plastic box in which she’d packed her lunch, and piled a little cairn of stones over the box. She didn’t really believe that Frank Parker had tracked her with some kind of magic gizmo, but better safe than sorry.
Marilyn drove west along the gravel flats of the playa and then north, into a low range of hills. She parked in the shade of a stand of cactus trees and at gunpoint forced her prisoner to climb down and limp inside one of the tombs that stood like a row of bad teeth along the crest of the hill. She told him to stay right where he was, and pulled a shovel from the space behind the Bronco’s seats and dug a grave and lined the grave with flat stones and wrapped Jet in plastic sheeting and laid him at the bottom.
She’d found him six months ago, chained to a wrecked car behind a service station on the coast highway, half-starved, sores everywhere under his matted and filthy coat. When the service station owner had tried to stop her taking him, she’d knocked the man on his ass and dragged him back to the wreck and chained him up and left him there. She’d spent two weeks in a motel farther on down the road, nursing Jet back to health. He’d been a good companion ever since, loyal and affectionate and alert, foolishly brave when it came to standing up to dire cats, hydras, and hive rat soldiers. He’d died defending her, and she wasn’t ever going to forget that.
Although she’d attended a couple of dozen funerals during her stint in the army, she could remember only a few of the words of the Service for the Dead, so recited the Lord’s Prayer instead. “I’ll come back and give you a proper headstone later,” she said, and filled in the grave, tiled more stones over the mound, and went to see to her prisoner.
Frank Parker was squashed into a corner of the tomb, staring at the eidolons that drifted out of the shadows: monkey-sized semi-transparent stick figures that whispered in clicks and whistles, gesturing in abrupt jerks like overwound clockwork toys. They haunted about one in a hundred of the tombs. Perhaps they were intended to be representations of the dead, or their household gods, or perhaps they were some sort of eternal ceremony of mourning or celebration or remembrance: no one knew. And no one knew how they had been created, either; they were not affected by the removal of every bit of rotten “circuitry” from the tomb they haunted, by scouring its interior clean, or even by destroying it. According to Ana Datlovskaya, they were manifestations of twists in the quantum foam that underpinned space/time, which as far as Marilyn was concerned was like saying that they’d been created by some old wizard out of dragon’s blood and dwarfs’ teeth.
Marilyn had grown used to the eidolons; they reminded her of old men at bus stops in London before the war, rubbing their hands in the cold, grumbling about the weather and the price of cat meat. Talking to themselves if no one else was about. But they definitely spooked Frank Parker, who watched them closely as they drifted through the dim air like corpses caught in an underwater current, and flinched when Marilyn’s shadow fell over him.
“I’m going to fix up your wound,” she said. “I don’t want you dying on me. Not yet, at least.”
She cut off the leg of the man’s jeans and salted the wound – a neat through-and-through in the big muscle on the outside of his thigh – with antiseptic powder and fixed a pad of gauze in place with a bandage. Then they had a little talk. Marilyn learned that Tom Archibold had been working for a street banker who’d bought out the gambling debts of a mathematician in Port of Plenty’s university. When the mathematician had come up short on his repayments, Tom had had a little talk with him, and had discovered that he’d been corresponding with Ana Datlovskaya about exotic logic systems, and had been helping her write some kind of translation programme.
“This is the bit you’re going to have trouble believing,” Frank Parker said. “But I swear it’s true.”
“You’d better spit it out,” Marilyn said, “or I’ll leave you here without any water.”
“Tom believes that the old woman found the wreck of a spaceship,” Frank Parker said. “And she’s trying to talk to the part of it that’s still alive.”
Just two hours later, Marilyn Carter was lying on her belly under a patch of the thorny scrub that grew amongst Boxbuilder ruins on top of the ridge that overlooked the arroyo and the giant hive rat garden. Ana Datlovskaya’s tarpaper shack was a couple of hundred metres to the left and somewhat below Marilyn’s position. Three Range Rovers were parked beside it. A burly man with a shaven head stood close to one of the Range Rovers and the blond bodybuilder Marilyn had chased off was scanning the hive rat garden with binoculars, a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. Seeing them together now, Marilyn realized that she’d seen them before. In town a couple of weeks ago, sitting at the counter in the diner. She’d paid them little attention then, thinking that they were just a couple of travellers passing through; now she realized that they must have been on a scouting mission.
The blond man fitted the stock of his rifle to his shoulder and took aim. Marilyn tracked his line of fire, saw a sentry standing chest-high in a hole. Then dust kicked up in front of it and it vanished as the sound of the shot whanged back from the bluffs beyond.
Well, she already knew they were mean. She hoped they were dumb, too.
The swollen sun was about an hour away from setting. Ana had once told Marilyn that because it huddled close to its cool red dwarf sun, first Foot should have been tidally locked, always showing one side to its sun, just as the moon always showed one side to Earth. The fact that there were sunrises and sunsets on first Foot was evidence of some stupendous feat of engineering that had otherwise left no trace, Ana had said: some forgotten race must have spun the planet up like a child’s top, giving it a rotational period of ten hours that over millennia had slowed to almost twice that.
The old woman loved to talk about the alien tenants – Boxbuilders, Fisher Kings, Ghostkeepers and all the rest – who had once inhabited the planets and moons and reefs of the fifteen stars linked by the wormhole network. Speculating on why they had come here and what they had done, whether they’d simply died out, or had been wiped out by war, or if they had moved on to somewhere else. To other stars, or to other universes. She’d told Marilyn that some people believed that the Jackaroo collected races as people collected pets, and disposed of them when they lost the lustre of novelty; others that the previous tenants had all been absorbed into the Jackaroo, to become part of a collective, symbiotic consciousness. Anything was possible. No one had ever been aboard one of the Jackaroo’s floppy ships, and no one knew what the Jackaroo looked like because they visited Earth only in the form of avatars shaped roughly like people. No one had much idea about the physical appearance of any of the previous tenant races of the wormhole network, either. None of them, not even the Ghostkeepers, who had built the City of the Dead and many other necropolises, had left behind any physical remains or sculptures or pictorial representations. Academics argued endlessly over the carved murals in the so-called Vaults of the Fisher Kings, but no one knew what the murals really represented, or even if the patterns and images discerned by human eyes weren’t simply optical illusions. All we really know, Ana liked to say, is that we know nothing at all. At least eight alien races lived here before we came, and each one died out or vanished or moved on, and left behind only empty ruins, odd scraps, and a few enigmatic monuments. But if we can find out the answers to those questions, we might be able to begin to understand why the Jackaroo gave us the keys to the wormhole network; we might even be able to take control of our fate.
Ana was full of strange notions, but she was also a tough desert bird who knew how to look after herself. Marilyn had had no trouble believing Frank Parker’s story that the old woman had taken off into the garden and climbed down into the nest to escape Tom Archibold and his men, and it certainly looked like they were hunkered down, waiting for her to come out and surrender. They couldn’t go after Ana because they’d be taken down by the hive rats, and as far as Marilyn knew the hole on top of the mound was the only way Ana could get in and out. It was a standoff, and Marilyn was going to have to go in and try to save Ana before things escalated. It was her job, for one thing. And then there was the small matter of doing right by poor Jet.
Marilyn crawled backwards on elbows and knees until she was certain that she wouldn’t be skylighted when she stood up. The Boxbuilder ruins ran along the top of the ridge like random strings of giant building blocks, their thin walls and roofs spun from polymer and rock dust by a species that had left hundreds of thousands of similar strings and clusters on every planet and reef and moon linked by the wormholes. Marilyn picked her way through the thorny scrub that grew everywhere amongst the ruins, and walked down the reverse side of the ridge to her Bronco, which she’d parked on a stony apron three kilometres south of the arroyo. She checked the shortwave again – still nothing but static – and lifted out her spare can of petrol and took rags from her toolbox and set off to the east.
She twisted strips torn from the rags around catchclaw and cloudbush plants, soaked them in petrol, and set them alight. Fire bloomed quick and bright and the hot wind blew flames flat amongst the dry scrub and it caught with a crackling roar. Marilyn walked along the track towards Ana’s shack with huge reefs of white smoke boiling up into the darkening sky behind her. A harsh smell of burning in the air, and flecks and curls of ash fluttering down. There was a stir of movement amongst the Range Rovers, someone shouted a challenge, a spotlight flared. Marilyn raised her hands as three men walked towards her, two circling left and right, the third, Tom Archibold, saying, “I was wondering when you’d turn up.”
“Hello, Tom.”
“You set a fire as a diversion, and then you walk right in. What are you up to?”
“The fire isn’t a diversion, Tom. It’s a signal. In about two hours, people from Joe’s Corner will be turning up, wondering who set it.”
Tom grinned. “You think a bunch of hicks can make any kind of trouble for us? I’m disappointed, Marilyn. You used to be a lot sharper than that.”
“Frank Parker said you needed my help. Here I am. Just remember that I came here voluntarily. And remember that you have about two hours. Maybe less.”
“Where is Frank?”
“I shot him, not seriously, after he shot my dog. He’ll be okay. I’ll tell you where to find him when this is over.”
“He won’t make any kind of hostage, Marilyn. He fucked up, I could care less if he lives or dies, much less about exchanging the old woman for him.”
“How about if I help you get whatever it is you came here for?”
Tom Archibold studied her for a few moments. He was a slim man dressed in a brown turtleneck sweater and blue jeans. Black hair swept back from his keen, handsome face, a Bluetooth earpiece plugged into his left ear. At last, he said, “What do you expect in return?”
“To walk away from this with Ana.”
“Why not? I might even throw in a few points from the money I’m going to make.”
He said it so quickly and casually that Marilyn knew at once he intended to kill her as soon as she was no longer useful to him. She’d guessed it anyhow, but now that she was in his power she felt a strong chill pass through her.
She said, “Is Ana still inside the nest?”
“Yeah. She ran off into the garden – into the hole atop that mound,” Tom said, pointing across the dusky arroyo. “We couldn’t follow her because of the damn rats. We’ve been picking off any that show themselves, but there are any number of them, we can’t get close.”
“You want me to talk her out of there.”
“If she’s still alive. We kind of winged her.”
“You shot her?”
“We shot at her, when she ran. To try to make her stop. One of the shots might have gotten a little too close.”
“Where do you think you hit her?”
“The right leg, it looked like. It can’t have been serious. It knocked her down, but she managed to crawl into the hole.”
“You were supposed to take her prisoner, but she got away, you wounded her . . . It’s all gone bad, hasn’t it?”
“We have you.”
“Only because I wanted to come here. Don’t you forget that. I’m curious, by the way. Why involve me at all?”
Tom smiled. “Either you’re bluffing, pretending to be ignorant to see if I’ll let something slip, or you aren’t really the old woman’s friend. Let’s sit down and talk.”
After the blond bodybuilder had quickly and thoroughly patted Marilyn down, she and Tom sat on Ana’s plastic chairs and Tom asked her every kind of question about Ana’s research. She answered as truthfully as she could, but it quickly became clear that Tom knew a lot more about most of it than she did. He knew that Ana and the mathematician in Port of Plenty had been working up computer models of the hive rats’ behaviour, and that they had been developing some kind of artificial intelligence programme. He also knew that Ana had discovered that the behaviour of the hive rats was strongly influenced by pheromones, but he didn’t seem to know that Ana had synthesised pheromone analogs.
When he had run out of questions, Marilyn said, “I can help you, but I think I need to talk to your client first.”
“What makes you think I have a client?”
“You wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to chase a rumour about a crashed spaceship. It isn’t your style, and I doubt that you have the kind of cash to pay for an operation like this. After all, you stumbled on Ana’s research when you were working as a debt collector. So you’re working for someone. That’s the kind of people we are, Tom. We put our lives on the line for other people. I believe that he’s sitting in one of those Range Rovers,” Marilyn said. “The guy guarding them hasn’t budged since I turned up, and you have a Bluetooth connection in your ear. That will only work over a very short range here, and my guess is he’d been using it to listen in to us, and feed you questions. How am I doing?”
Tom didn’t answer at once. Marilyn wondered if he was listening to his client, or if she’d pushed him too far, if he was reconsidering his options. At last, he said, “How can you help us?”
“I know the trick Ana used to get inside the nest without being killed and eaten.”
Another pause. Tom said, “All right. If you go in there and bring her out, you can speak to my client. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“You’re in for a surprise,” Tom said. “But right now, you had better tell me how you’re going to walk in there.”
“I need something from Ana’s shack.”
The hot air inside the shack smelled strongly of Ana Datlovskaya and the smoking oil lamp that was the only illumination. A woman lay on Ana’s camp bed. Julie Bell, another of Marilyn’s former colleagues. She was unconscious. Her jeans had been cut off at the knees and bandages around her calves were spotted with blood and the flesh above and below the bandages was swollen red and shiny.
“You should get her to a hospital right now,” Marilyn told Tom. “Otherwise she’s going to die of blood poisoning.”
“The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get out of here. What’s that?”
Marilyn had opened the little chemical icebox and taken out a rack of little brown bottles. She explained that they contained artificial pheromones that Ana had synthesised. She held up the largest, the only one with a screw cap, and said that a dab of this would allow her to follow Ana down into the nest.
“I don’t think so,” Tom said. “If that shit really works, we can do it ourselves.”
“It won’t work on men. Only women. Something to do with hormones.”
“Bullshit,” Tom said, but Marilyn could see that he was thinking as he stared at her. Trying to figure out if she was telling the truth or making a move.
“Why don’t you try it out?” she said, and handed it to him.
Tom volunteered the blond bodybuilder. The man didn’t look very happy as, in the glare of the spotlights on top of two of the Range Rovers, he edged down the path towards the edge of the hive rats’ garden. The sun had set now and stars were popping out across the darkening sky, obscured in the east by smoke of the fire Marilyn had set. When the blond man reached the bottom of the path, sentries popped up from holes here and there amongst the tall century plants, and he turned and looked up at his boss and said that he didn’t think that this was a good idea.
“Just get on with it,” Tom said.
Standing beside him, Marilyn felt a sick eagerness. She knew what was going to happen, and she knew that it was necessary.
The man cocked his pistol and stepped forward, as if onto thin ice. Sentries near and far began to slap their feet, and the ground in front of the bodybuilder collapsed as soldiers heaved out of the gravelly sand, snapping long jaws filled with pointed teeth. The man tried to run, and one of the soldiers sprang forward and seized his ankle. He crashed down full-length and then two more soldiers were on him. He kicked and punched at them, screamed when one bit off his hand. More soldiers were running through the shadows cast by the century plants and Tom pulled his pistol and aimed and shot the bodybuilder in the head, shot at the soldiers as they tore at the body. Dust boiled up around it as it slowly sank.
The surviving goon, the one who’d been guarding the Range Rovers, invoked Jesus Christ, and Tom turned to Marilyn and hit her hard in the face with the back of his hand, knocking her down. She sat looking up at him, not moving, feeling a worm of blood run down her cheek where his signet ring had torn her skin.
“You’re going down there,” Tom said.
“I need the pheromone first,” Marilyn said.
“Right now,” Tom said. “Let’s see how fast you can run.”
Marilyn had rubbed the suppressor scent that Ana had given her over her arms and face before she’d walked up to the shack and surrendered; the stuff she’d told Tom was a pheromone that would guarantee safe passage, but only for women, had been nothing more than the base solution of neutral oil, and gave as much protection from the hive rats’ aggression towards trespassers as a sheet of paper against a bullet. She wasn’t at all certain that it would keep her safe now that the hive rats had been stirred up, but she reckoned she had a better chance with the rats than with the two men silhouetted above her in the glare of the spotlights as she walked down the path.
The spotlights lit up a wide swathe of the garden like a theatrical set, stark and hyperreal against the darkness of the rest of the arroyo. The blades of century plants that towered above Marilyn, growing in sinuous lines and clumps between irrigation ditches, glowed banana yellow. The churned patch of dirt that had swallowed the blond bodybuilder was directly ahead. Marilyn stepped past it, feeling that her skin was about a size too small, remembering how she’d felt moving from position to position in the ruins of the outskirts of Paris, trying to pinpoint a sniper that had shot three of her squad. A hive rat sentry was watching her from its perch on a flat slab of rock, pink skin glistening, an arc of small black eyes glittering above its tiny undershot mouth. She took a wide detour around it and spotted others standing under the century plants as she made her way towards the mound.
The mound was ten metres high, shaped like a small volcano or the entrance to the lair of monster-movie ants, smooth and unmarked apart from a trail of human footprints. She trod carefully up the slope, aware of the hive rats scattered across the garden and the two men watching her from the bench terrace. At the top, a flat rim circled a hole or vent a couple of metres across. Marilyn stepped up to the lip, saw spikes hammered into the hard crust, a rope ladder dropping into darkness. Hot air blew past her face. It stank of ammonia and a rotten musk. She called Ana’s name, and when nothing came back shouted across to Tom Archibold and told him that she was going in.
He shouted back, said that she had thirty minutes. He sounded angry and on edge. The death of his goon had definitely spooked him, and Marilyn hoped that he was beginning to worry that a posse from Joe’s Corner might soon turn up.
“I’ll take as long as it needs,” she said, and with a penlight in her teeth like a pirate’s cutlass started to climb down the rope ladder into the hot stinking dark.
The shaft went down a long way, flaring out into a vault whose walls were ribbed with long vertical plates. Marilyn shone the penlight around and saw something jutting out of the wall a few metres below, a wooden platform little bigger than a bed, hung from a web of ropes. Ana Datlovskya sat there with her back to the wall, her face pale in the beam of the penlight and one arm raised straight up, aiming a pistol at Marilyn.
“Tell me you have arrested those fools.”
“Not yet,” Marilyn said, and explained how she had taken one man prisoner, how another had been badly bitten and a third had been killed by the hive rats after she had tricked him into wearing only the base solvent. “There are only two left. Three, if their client is hiding inside one of those Range Rovers. I managed to convince them that your suppressor only works for women. Can I come down? I feel very vulnerable, hanging here.”
Ana told her to be careful, the platform was meant for only one person. When Marilyn reached her, she saw that the old woman had cut away one leg of her jeans and tied a bandage around her thigh. Rusty vines of dry blood wrapped her skinny bare leg. She refused to let Marilyn look at her wound, saying that it was a flesh wound, nothing serious, and she refused the various painkillers Marilyn had brought, too.
“I have a first-aid kit here. I have already treated myself to a Syrette of morphine, and need no more because I must keep a clear head. I climbed down powered by adrenaline, but I don’t think I can climb back up.”
“Is there any other way out of here?”
“Unless you are very good at digging, no.”
Ana sat on a big cushion with her injured leg stretched out straight. Her face was taut with pain and beaded with sweat. There was a laptop beside her – not the notebook she kept in her shack but a cutting-edge q-bit machine that used the same technology as Marilyn’s q-phone, phenomenally fast and with a memory so capacious it could swallow the contents of the British Library in a single gulp. Ledges cut into the wall held boxes of canned food and bottled water, a bank of car batteries, a camping stove: a regular little encampment or den.
“I think you had better tell me why Tom Archibold and his client are so interested in you,” Marilyn said.
She was planning to climb back out and talk to Tom and his client, stretch things out by pretending to negotiate with them until help arrived. Although she couldn’t be sure that anyone in town would have noticed the smoke from the fire before night had fallen, or that they’d link it to the fact that she hadn’t returned from her day-trip to the desert, that she might be in trouble . . .
Ana said, “They did not tell you?”
“They told me you found a spaceship.”
“And you thought they were lying. Well, it’s true. Don’t look so surprised. We have spaceships, yes? So did the other tenants. The ones who lived here before us. And one of them crashed here, long, long ago. It was not very big, smaller than a car in fact, and all that’s left of it are scraps of hull material, worth nothing. I send a piece to be analysed. Someone has already found something identical on some lonely rock around another star, took a patent out on its composition.”
“So it’s worthless. That’s good. Or it will be, if we can convince the bad guys that you don’t have anything worth stealing.”
Ana shook her head. “I should not have trusted Zui Lin.”
“This is your mathematician friend.”
“I needed help to construct the logic of the interface, and the AI programme, but I confided too much to him. You see the goggles, on the shelf? Put them on and take a look below us. They do not like ordinary light, it disrupts their behaviour. But they show up very well in infra-red.”
Marilyn fitted the goggles over her eyes. The platform creaked as she leaned over the side, holding onto the rope ladder for support. Directly below, grainy white clouds were flowing past each other. Hive rats. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Moving over the floor and lower parts of the wall of the chamber in clusters that merged and broke apart and turned as one like flocks of birds on the wing . . .
Behind her, Ana said, “There was a war. A thousand years ago, ten thousand . . . My friend does not think of time as we do, in days or in seasons, as something with a linear flow. So it is not clear how long ago. But there was a war, and during the war a spaceship crashed here.”
“The hive rats were on it? Is that where they came from?”
“No. If there were living things on the spaceship, they died. You remember, we talked about where the former tenants of this shabby little empire went to?”
“They died out. Or they went somewhere else.”
“This species, they transformed. They made a very large and very rapid change. At least, some of them did. And those that changed and those that did not change fought . . . The spaceship was a casualty of that war. It was badly damaged and it crashed. What survived was its mind. It was something like a computer, but also something like a kind of bacterial colony. Or a virus culture. I have tried to understand it, but it is hard. It was in any case self-aware. It was damaged and it was dying, so it created a copy of itself and found a platform where the copy could establish itself – a hive rat colony. It infected the hive rats with a logic kernel and a compressed version of the memory files that had survived the crash, and over many years the seed of the logic kernel unpacked and grew as the colony grew. It needs to be very big because it must support many individuals that do nothing but act as hosts for the ship-mind. The dance you see down there, that is the mind at work.”
“There must be hundreds of them,” Marilyn said.
It was oddly hypnotic, like watching schools of fish endlessly ribboning back and forth across a reef.
“Many thousands,” Ana said. “You can see only part of it from here. Each group processes a number of sub-routines. The members of each group move endless around each other to exchange information, and the different groups merge or flow past each other to share information too. The processing is massively parallel and the mathematics underlying it is fractally compact, but even so, the clock speed is quite slow. Still, I have learnt much.”
Marilyn sat back and pulled off the goggles. “Ana, are you trying to say that you can talk to it?”
“At first it tried to talk to me. It made the figurines, but they were not successful. They are supposed to convey information, but only arouse emotions, moods. But they inspired me to work hard on establishing a viable method of communication, and at last, with the help of Zui Lin, I succeeded.”
Ana explained that her laptop was connected to a light display set in the heart of the nest. When she typed a question, it was translated into a display that certain groups of rats understood, and other groups formed shapes which a programme written by Zui Lin translated back into English.
“It takes a long time to complete the simplest conversation, but time is what I have, out here. I should have showed you this before. It would make things easier now.”
“You didn’t trust me. It’s all right. I understand.”
“I did not think you would believe me. But now you must.”
Ana looked about a hundred years old in the beam of the penlight.
“I think you had better give me your gun,” Marilyn said. “Maybe I can get the drop on Tom Archibold and his goon. If it comes to it, I’ll kill them.”
“And his client, too.”
“Yes. If it comes to it.”
“You may find that hard,” Ana said.
“You know who he is, don’t you?”
“I have a good idea . . .” Ana took Marilyn’s hand. Her grip was feeble and feverish but her gaze was steady. “I also have a way of dealing with those men, and their client. I have everything you need, down here. I would have used it myself if I hadn’t been hurt.”
“Show me.”
After Marilyn had climbed out into the glare of the spotlights, the smell of smoke, and the gentle rain of ash from the fire to the east, she held up the q-bit laptop and said loudly, “This is what you came for.”
“Come straight here,” Tom Archibold shouted back. “No tricks.”
“I’ve done my part. I expect your client to stick to the agreement. I want him to tell me himself that he’ll take this laptop and let me and Ana go free. That you’ll all go back to Port of Plenty and you won’t ever come after us. Otherwise, I’ll sit out here and wait for my friends to come investigate the fire. They can’t be far away, now.”
There was a long silence. At last, Tom said, “My client says that he has to look at the evidence before he decides what to do.”
“Good. He can see that it’s exactly as advertised.”
Marilyn crabbed down the side of the mound and walked out across the garden. Sentries stood everywhere, making a low drumming sound that raised the hairs on the back of her neck, and crevices were opening all around, full of squirming motion. It occurred to her that Ana’s suppressor might not protect her once the entire colony was aroused, but she steeled herself and stopped a dozen metres from the edge of the garden. On the bench terrace above, Tom told her come straight up the path, and she said that he had to be kidding.
“I can talk to your client from here.”
“Easier all round if you come up,” Tom said. “If I wanted to shoot you, Marilyn, I would have already done it.”
“Bullshit,” Marilyn said. “You haven’t shot me because you know there’s no way you could try to retrieve this laptop without being eaten alive.”
She had to wait while Tom disappeared from view, presumably to confer directly with his client. Tom’s surviving goon stood above, watching her impassively; she stared back at him, trying not to flinch at the stealthy scrabbling noises behind her. And then two figures joined him. One was Tom Archibold; the other was a tall mannequin that moved with stiff little steps.
Tom’s client was a Jackaroo avatar.
Marilyn had seen them on TV back on Earth, but had never before faced one. It was two metres tall, dressed in a nondescript black suit, its pale face vaguely male and vaguely handsome. A showroom dummy brought to life; a shell woven from a single molecule of complex plastic doped with metals, linked by a version of q-bit tech to its Jackaroo operator, who could be in orbit around first Foot, or Earth, or a star at the far end of the universe.
In a rich baritone, it questioned Marilyn about the copy of the ship-mind lodged in the hive rat colony, and watched a slide-show of random photographs on the laptop.
“The ship-mind has migrated to that device,” it said, at last.
“Ana made a copy of the kernel from which it grew, and found a way of running it in the laptop,” Marilyn said. Her arms ached from holding it up.
“There is a copy in the device and a copy in the hive rat colony. Are there any others?”
“Not that I know of,” Marilyn said, hoping that neither the Jackaroo nor Tom Archibold would spot the lie.
“You will give us the laptop in exchange for your life.”
“My life, and Ana’s. You don’t have much time,” Marilyn said. “People will be here any minute, drawn by the fire. And they’ll be wondering why I haven’t called in, too.”
“How do I know you won’t come after me?” Tom said.
“You have my word,” Marilyn said.
“You will let the two women live,” the avatar told him. “I want only the copy of the ship-mind, and you want only your fee.”
Tom didn’t look happy about this, but told Marilyn to walk on up the path.
“Tell your man to put up his gun,” she said.
Tom gave a brusque order and the goon stepped back. Marilyn pressed the space bar of the laptop and closed it up and started up the path, walking slowly and deliberately, trying to ignore the scratching stir across the garden at her back. Trying to keep count in her head.
When she reached the top of the path, Tom stepped forward and snatched the laptop from her, and the goon grabbed her arms and held her.
“There’s a lot more to it than the stuff on the laptop,” Marilyn said. “I can tell you what the old woman told me. Everything she told me during our long conversations.”
“The ship-mind is all I want,” the avatar said.
“They went somewhere else,” Marilyn said. She was still counting inside her head. “Is that why you’re interested in them? Or are you frightened that we’ll learn something you don’t want us to know?”
The avatar swung its whole body around so that it could look at her. “Do not presume,” it said.
She knew she had hit a nerve and it made her bolder. And the count was almost done. “I was just wondering why you broke your agreement with the UN. This world and the other places – they’re where we can make a new start. You aren’t ever supposed to come here. You’re supposed to leave us alone.”
“In ten years or a hundred years or a thousand years it will come to you as it came to the others,” the avatar said.
“We’ll change,” Marilyn said. “We’ll become something new.”
“From what we have seen so far, it is likely that you will destroy yourselves. As others have done. As others will do, when you are less than a memory. It is inevitable, and it should not be hurried.”
Marilyn’s countdown reached zero. She said, “Is that why you’re here? Are you scared we’ll learn something we shouldn’t?”
The avatar stiffly turned and looked at the laptop Tom held. “Why is that making a noise?”
“I can’t hear anything,” Tom said.
“It is at the frequency of twenty-four point two megahertz,” the avatar said. “Beyond the range of your auditory system, but not mine.”
Tom stepped towards Marilyn, asking her what she’d done, and there was a vast stir of movement in the garden below. In the glare of the spotlights and in the shadows beyond, all around the stalks of the stiff sails of the century plants, the ground was moving.
Ana had once told Marilyn that the hive rat nest contained more than a hundred thousand individuals, a biomass of between two point five and three hundred metric tons. Most of that seemed to be flooding towards the bench terrace: a vast and implacable wave of hive rats clambering over each other, six or seven deep. A flesh-coloured tide that flowed fast and strong between the century plants and smashed into the slope and started to climb. A great hissing high-pitched scream like a vast steam engine about to explode. A wave of ammoniacal stench.
Tom Archibold raised his pistol and aimed it at Marilyn, and the avatar stepped in front of him and in its booming baritone said that it wanted the woman alive, and snatched the laptop from him and wheeled around and began to march towards the Range Rovers. The goon pushed Marilyn forward, but a living carpet of hive rats was already rippling across the ground in front of them and when they stopped and turned there were hive rats behind them too, two waves meeting and climbing over each other and merging in a great stream that chased after the avatar as it stepped stiffly along. The goon let go of Marilyn and ran, and hive rats swarmed up him and he batted at them and went down, screaming. Tom raised his pistol and got off a single round that whooped past Marilyn, and then he was down too, covered in a seething press, jerking and crawling, and then he lay still and the hive rats moved on, chasing after the laptop that the avatar carried.
Ana had released a pheromone into the nest that made the hive rats believe that they were being attacked by another nest, and painted the laptop with a scent that mimicked that of a hive rat queen. This had drawn most of the hive rats in nest to the surface, and they had begun their attack when the laptop had started to play the sound file Marilyn had activated: a recording of a hive rat queen distress call. The nest believed that one of its queens had been captured, and was rushing to her defense.
Marilyn stood still as rats scurried past on either side of her, scared that she’d be bitten if she stepped on one. The avatar wrenched open the door of the nearest Range Rover and bent inside, and a muscular stream of hive rats flowed over it. The avatar was strong and its shell was tough. It managed to start the Range Rover and the big vehicle shot forward, packed with furious movement and pursued by the army of hive rats. It ploughed through the plastic chairs and the awning, swerved snakewise past the shack, and drove straight off the edge of the bench terrace and slammed down nose first into the garden below.
The flood of hive rats washed over it and receeded, streaming away, sinking into holes and burrows. Marilyn stepped carefully amongst the hundreds of hive rats that were still moving about the bench terrace, collecting up the injured and dying. Tom Archibold and his goon were messily dead. So was Julie Bell, inside the shack. In the Range Rover, the avatar was half-crushed between the steering wheel and the broken seat. Its suit had been ripped to shreds and its shell had been torn open by the strong teeth and claws of soldier hive rats, and it did not move when Marilyn dared to lean into the Range Rover, searching for and failing to find the laptop – the hive rats must have carried it off to their nest.
The avatar wouldn’t or couldn’t answer her questions, began to leak acrid white smoke from the broken parts of its shell. Marilyn snatched up a briefcase and beat a hasty retreat when the avatar suddenly burst into flame, burning in a fierce flare that set the Range Rover on fire, too, a funeral pyre that sent hot light and dark smoke beating out across the garden as the last of the hive rats scurried home.
When the posse from Joe’s Corner arrived, late and loud and half-drunk, Marilyn was setting up a scaffold tripod over the hole in the top of the mound. She gave Joel Jumonville and the three men he’d brought with him the last of her suppressor, and they reluctantly followed her across the garden and helped her rig up a harness; then she climbed down the rope ladder and helped Ana Datlovskya into the harness and Joel and his men hauled the old woman out by main force. Ana passed out as soon as she reached the top. The men carried her across the garden and drove her off to the clinic in Joe’s Corner, and Marilyn drove Joel to the tomb where she had stashed her prisoner, Frank Parker.
Frank Parker lawyered up and parlayed a deal. Marilyn had to agree to drop most of the charges against him in exchange for a lead that pointed the UN police in Port of Plenty to a room in a hotbed motel near the city’s docks, where Tom Archibold had stashed Zui Lin. The mathematician had been interrogated by the avatar, and confirmed most of Marilyn’s story. The UN provisional authority on first Foot made a formal protest about the avatar’s presence, and in due course received apologies from the Jackaroo, who blamed a rogue element and made bland assurances that it would not happen again.
Ana Datlovskaya was in a coma for two weeks, and nearly died from blood loss and infection. Reporters set up camp outside the clinic; Marilyn arrested two who tried to sneak into her room, and deputised townspeople to set up an around-the-clock watch.
When Ana recovered consciousness, she told Marilyn her last little secret. Marilyn and Joel Jumonville drove out to the arroyo and paced off distances from Ana’s shack and dug down carefully and retrieved the plastic-wrapped box with Ana’s papers and a q-bit hard drive that contained not only a copy of all her work on the hive rats, but also a back-up of the hard drive of the laptop lost somewhere under the hive rat garden.
Marilyn and Joel drank from ice-cold bottles of beer from the cooler they’d brought along, standing side by side at the edge of the bench terrace and looking out at the simmering garden down in the arroyo. It was noon, hot and peaceful. Every blade of century plant stood above its shrunken shadow. Hive rat sentries stood guard on flat stones in front of their pop holes.
“I can almost see why she wants to come back,” Joel said.
Ana had told Marilyn that she still had a lot of work to do. “I had only just begun a proper conversation with the ship-mind before I was so rudely interrupted. Now I will have to have to start over again. Things may go more quickly if Zui Lin sticks to his promise and comes out here to help me, but it will be a long time before we know whether or not the Jackaroo avatar told you anything like the truth.”
Marilyn warned the old woman that people were already talking about her work with the hive rats and the ship-mind, showed her a fat fan of newspapers that had made it their headline story. “You’re famous, Ana. You’re going to have to become used to that.”
“I will be beleaguered by fools looking for the secret of the universe,” the old woman said. She looked frail and shrunken against the clean linen of the clinic bed, but her gaze was still as fierce as a desert owl’s.
“The Jackaroo thought that the ship-mind knew something important,” Marilyn said. “Something that might help us understand what happened to the other tenant races. What might happen to us.”
“As if we can learn from the fate of other species, when we have learnt so little from our own history,” Ana said. “Whatever the ship-mind knows, and I do not yet know it knows anything important, we must make our own future.”
Marilyn thought about that now, when Joel Jumonville asked her what she was going to do next.
“Why I ask, you’re going to be rich,” Joel said. “And the last constable, he ran out when he struck it rich with that room-temperature superconductor.”
The briefcase Marilyn had pulled out of the avatar’s Range Rover had contained a little gizmo that not only tracked and disrupted q-phones, but could also eavesdrop on them – a violation of quantum mechanics that was like catnip to physicists. Marilyn had a patent lawyer, a cousin of the town’s assayer, working full time in Port of Plenty to establish her rights to a share of profits from any new technology derived from reverse engineering the gizmo. Marilyn planned to give half of anything she earned to Ana; so far all she had was a bunch of unpaid legal bills.
She took a slug of beer and studied the shimmering hive rat garden, the sentries standing upright and alert beneath the great sails of the century plants. “Oh, I think I’ll stick around for a little while,” she said. “Someone has to make sure that Ana will be able to get on with her work without being disturbed by tourists and charlatans. And besides, my contract has six months to run.”
“And after that?”
“Hell, Joel, who knows what the future holds?”