Brutal Women (17 page)

She says, “This is the way the
world ends.”

And the room is filled with
dragonflies.

I wake from sleep as one would wake
from death. I am aware of being awake, but I am not aware of heat or color or
feeling. I cannot recognize any of my limbs.

And then I remember how to open my
eyes.

An alien face stares back at me.
She lies as she fell, an arm’s length from me. Our hands are still twined. I
pull mine away. Her skin is the color of burnt ginger, like mine, and her hair
is long and black and unruly. It spills across narrow shoulders, down a narrow
body whose skinniness makes it seem all the more awkward and angular. She wears
a body suit that is dying. Patches of gray mar the exterior.

I cannot say how she looks so
different from a Woman. There are ways one learns to tell. The sharpness of the
body, perhaps, the severe lines of the face, and the length of the hair - too
long to be practical, too short to be masculine. Her brows make one clean line
above her eyes, and her nose looks too small for the broad, flat planes of her
face; a human face, yes, but Other, apart.

She watches me with eyes the color
of dust and gold. She is very still, as am I. We wait.

Then she says in the common
language of the old Consortium, “The Androgynies broke through our lines. They
will be coming this way, filling the district to the Amber Ridge.”

She’s a Neuter, then. Not an
Androgyny.

I stir off the last veil of the
death-sleep and try to sit up. The pain in my leg awakens. I grit my teeth and
take hold of my thigh and try to yank my twisted lower leg up out of the animal
hole. The leg jounces unnaturally. Yields. Pain roils up my torso, and I fall back
down onto the grass. Sweat beads my upper lip. I want to vomit. I fumble at my
belt for the med rations.

The Neuter is moving now, too. I am
aware of her out of the corner of my eye. I put both hands over the med
rations, knowing it’s a futile gesture, knowing she can simply kick me and take
everything I have. But as she sits up, I notice little thorns sticking out of
the unprotected flesh at the back of her neck.

Seeing my gaze, she reaches a hand
back and tugs out a thornbug. She holds the little dead bug in her hand.

“I don’t have antibodies for
thornbug bursts,” I say. I look at her waist, but her belt of med rations is
nearly empty. I see antibodies for dysentery and yellow ague and the little
blue-white pinch for respiratory haze that she gave me several hours ago, but
nothing resembling the cure for a thornbug burst.

She stares back at the thornbug.

I pull out the rapid-mending gel
from my belt. I look back behind me and remember what she said about the
Androgynies. I am supposed to be back in my own trenches tonight.

I empty one of my pinch canisters
and bite on it. I lean over and stare at the mess of flesh and jagged bone that
is my lower leg. It looks like it should belong to someone else. I use my other
leg to hold down the broken one. I close my eyes, push back with my arms, and
try to jerk the loose tibia back into place. I make an unrecognizable noise.
Black flashes across my vision. I fall back again. I stare up at the sky,
watching black haze move across the lavender wash of the brightening morning.

Then the Neuter takes hold of my
gel. I don’t want to part with it, but I cannot move, and she is stronger than
me now, even if she is skinny and Neuter.

She leans over me, tube of gel in
one hand, and says, “My name is Verj.” She yanks on my leg. I bite the pinch
canister in two.

The Neuter is still kneeling over
my leg. It throbs. I try to sit up, and I see her smearing gel inside the
ragged gash, then fingering it on the tatters of external flesh. She does not
look at me.

She finishes, sits back on her
heels, and nods. She says something in Neuter, then to me, in Consortium,
“You’ll walk.” She stands and begins to walk toward the ridge.

“Wait!” I say, and I sit up. The
pain has turned into a burning fissure of fire crawling all up and down my leg.

She turns.

I cannot carry forty kilos. “Your
position has been overrun, you said. Who are you going back to?”

She quirks her head at me, like a
nod, only it isn’t. “No one. I ran,” she says, and she looks away from me. “I
wanted to be free. I cannot live in trenches any longer, you understand?”

I understand. “You’re dying,” I
say. “The thornbugs. If you help me, I can get you the antibodies for it.” I am
lying through my teeth.

She knows it. Neuters are not
stupid. But she walks back to me anyway, looks at the pack that’s still
strapped to my back.

“I have to get… this pack back to
the Women’s trenches on the other side of the ridge. To push back the
Androgynies,” I say. “You understand? You can help kill the Androgynies, the
people who took your position, the people who are killing you. Please.”

The “please” comes out more
desperate than I want it to. How long will it take for the Androgynies to get
their filter back up? How long until their supply carrier gets to them? I
imagine Gian peeling the flesh away from her own bones.

“Please,” I say again, because I
have run out of things to say.

The Neuter regards me. “There is
not much time before the Androgynies find us here,” she says.

“I can walk,” I say, “but not by
myself, and not with this pack.”

“You talk like you are talking to a
Woman,” the Neuter says, and I realize I said the last thing in our language. I
repeat it in Consortium.

“What are you called?” the Neuter
asks, and I wonder why it could make any difference what I am called. As she
stares at me with her big dust-gold eyes, I wonder, however irrationally, how
Elan could have preferred one of these alien things to me. The memory hurts
worse than my leg. I push the thought away.

“I am called Nadav,” I say.

“Nadav,” she says, and nods. She
walks over to me, leans over, and holds out her hand. I stare at the slender
fingers, dirty fingernails.

I take her hand. She pulls me up,
and I have to take hold of both her wrists to keep my balance.

“You have to take off the pack,”
she says. “We’ll carry it between us.”

And we do.

My leg still burns, and I cannot
put much weight on it. The Neuter is shorter than I am, thinner and weaker, so
even with my injury, her side of the pack is still the side that slopes closer
to the ground. The pace is agonizing. We have to stop after barely a hundred
yards. It occurs to me that we’ll need water, and I haven’t eaten since the day
before.

She can still move faster than I
can. She leaves me with the pack so she can find food and water. She has a
deflatable container, empty.

I sit on top of the pack and wait
for her.

I do not think she will come back.

She does.

The water tastes good going down,
but it has a rusty aftertaste, like old blood. The Neuter squats opposite me,
watching me drink.

I hand back the water. “Don’t look
at me like that,” I say.

She quirks her head again, that
nod-that-is-not. “You think I should look for Androgynies instead?”

“Would be more useful,” I say.

“The Androgynies I know would cook
us alive before we heard the grass twist,” she says, and I think “twist” is the
wrong word, but I do not correct her.

“This is the most Consortium I have
spoken in years,” I say.

“It is good to stay in practice,”
the Neuter says, and I wonder if she is joking or not. I try to remember how
different Neuter humor was from ours.

“Maybe,” I say.

“Those were nice days, were they
not?” she says. “Those days when we all met and talked?”

“Until the day you talked away our
birthing tech,” I spit, and the aftertaste of the water still sits in my
throat. I want to spit blood at her.

She grimaces. “The same argument.
You Women, you have wombs, what need do you have for tech? You could have made
a truce with the Men or Androgynies. And the Androgynies, they have all they
need.”

“Truce? With
them?
” I cannot
keep the disgust from my voice. Neuters do not understand what it is, to have a
womb with which to breed a parasite. “Nine months of servitude, pushing out
half-formed flesh? Tell me, Neuter, what person consents to slavery? Getting
that tech is the only way we’ll be free.”

The Neuter’s lips make a hard line.
Not a frown, but an attempt at non-expression. “Slavery. What did the members
of the Consortium force upon my people but slavery? Breeding your babies in
jars. We were restoring balance. And then the Men got angry.”

“And then the Men got angry,” I
agree, and we are both silent, brooding.

“We should walk,” I say. I have
never been much afraid of Men, not even when they blew through the Divide and
tried to tear the world apart. They were doomed from the start. The Androgynies
can still reproduce.

The Men can’t.

Nor can we.

The Neuter takes her side of the
pack, and I take mine.

“At least now,” I say, “the Women
are free.”

“Free,” the Neuter says, “and
dying.”

We start to walk again toward the
Amber Ridge. The Neuter remains quiet, though she looks over her shoulder
often, the fearful look of the followed. I wonder if she looks for the
Androgynies, or for the Neuters who could murder her for desertion.

As I walk, the world begins to blur
at the edges. From pain, disorientation, lack of sleep, hunger, all of those
things. I pretend the world is different. I pretend I am somewhere else. I
pretend Elan is alive and she and I are carrying a picnic basket between us,
and the far-off pop of bacterial shells is just the sound of fireworks. I pretend
that Elan loves me.

It is a common daydream of mine,
and it keeps me walking.

We stop three more times before
dark. By the time the hazy blanket of dusk begins to cloud the world, we stand
a hundred yards from the face of the Amber Ridge.

The Neuter helps me drag the pack
into a clump of thorn trees, and we sit down with the pack behind us. Her skin
is flush. There’s sweat on her brow, her upper lip, and the gray patches of her
suit are beginning to peel off.

Night comes more quickly this close
to the Ridge, and it is always colder next to the remains of the Divide. We
drink the last of the water.

“Did you ever duel?” I ask the
Neuter.

She looks over at me. She is
hugging her knees to her chest. She, too, is shivering. “Yes,” she says. “I
dueled a friend, once.” I hear a smile in her voice, and she uses a word I do
not know, “--ruined my shield.”

“What’s that word?”

“The pronoun for us.”

“Oh,” I say, and wonder how I could
have forgotten it. Then, “I just think of you as `she’.”

“Most people think of us as `it’,”
she says. “We find both offensive.

“Sorry,” I say.

“It’s all right,” she says, “I
can’t hear the way you think.”

I try to open my eyes again, but
the stars are too bright. I wonder if the thornbugs got me too, or if another
bacterial shell burst over me that I did not notice. I feel so very cold.

“I once loved a Woman who loved
Neuters,” I say, and after I say it, I feel sick, like I have told someone I
like to slit the skins from children.

“Oh,” is all the Neuter says.

“You know what that means?” I say.
“I loved someone who was queer. You know what that is?”

“You’re speaking Woman again.”

I repeat, in Consortium.

Verj says, “I am cold.”

I scoot closer to her, until our
bodies touch. She feels warm, too warm. I am afraid now, really afraid that the
thornbugs are killing both of us.

“I have to tell you,” Verj says. “I
ran away from the Neuters long ago. I have been fighting with the Androgynies.”

I am too cold to pull away, and my
mind feels fuzzy now. The night feels too loud, and sounds too dark. “You’re a
queer too, aren’t you?” I say.

“Only with Androgynies,” she says.
“Women are just not so desirable to me, that’s all. About as desirable as
another Neuter. No personal dislike of you, of course.”

I laugh. I laugh so hard that my
chest begins to hurt. “Oh no,” I say, and my laugh has turned into hiccups.
“Oh, no, it’s all right, I’m used to it.”

“I once heard it said that queers
could have saved the world,” Verj says. “They could have helped everyone see
that we are still a Consortium. That we are still the same. But I think it’s
gone too far now.”

“Yes,” I say, thinking; Elan, my
love, you could have saved the world.

And suddenly I am afraid. The world
is spinning, but I know this much. “If you fight for the Androgynies, why are
you helping me? Verj, I’m killing Androgynies. I mean, they’re killing us, and
I’m taking this to -”

“They threw me out.”

“What?”

“How do you think they broke the
Neuter lines?” I hear sorrow there, but it is not the sorrow I think it is. She
says, “I turned off the Neuters’ filter. When the Androgynies broke the lines,
my lover no longer wanted me.”

I know this kind of sorrow. I curl
my body around hers, and we shiver in the cold together.

“I am free, now,” she says.

“Dying,” I say.

She laughs, and it sounds absurd
between us, a little bubble of laughter in all this dark. “I suppose we all
are,” she says.

The long night passes.

I do not dream.

I wake with Verj’s body curled
around mine. Her skin is hot to the touch. I see little black threads running
beneath her skin from the thornbug punctures on the back of her neck.

“Verj,” I say, and shake her
gently. “Verj, we have to go.”

The dawn is cold and gray. Clouds
hang low over the Ridge.

Verj moans and mumbles something in
Neuter. I pull her to her feet. My leg is not so shaky or inflamed as the day
before, but it still snaps a bloom of pain up through my leg and torso when I
put my weight on it. I grab my strap of the pack.