The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (14 page)

I will go with you, Father,
I tell him in the darkness, in this room.
I will go with you now, if you want me to.
 

He says nothing, and then he says: 

Why? 

To show you that you are wrong. 

The man on the porch looks up, tears covering his face like blood, fluids seeping from walls. 

He is trying to understand. 

You know what I mean, Father,
I tell him.
It is time for this to end. You’ve been waiting. You’ve known it would come to this. I am your son.
 

The man is shaking. The ship is shaking. I must kneel because I cannot stand. One of the children moves listlessly in the bones beside me, whimpering. 

You would do this for me?
he asks at last. The words are barely human, even skull to skull, like this. I barely recognize the voice, the face that has begun to change in the night, on this porch, by this pond. 

Why?
the jaws ask, opening and closing. 

To show you a Light, Father. 

The wallskins around me drip with something that smells hideous. The children in the darkness behind me do not like it either, and complain, making hoarse, little cries with vestigial throats. They want something else—something to fill their stomachs and end their hunger, not something like this. 

There is no Light,
the jaws say. 

There is always,
I tell it. 

Not in Darkness. 

There is no Darkness without Light to know it by
— 

You would die for me?
the man asks suddenly.
You would—despite what I am, what I have done—die for me?
 

Yes, Father. 

It is the porch. The man I know as my father is singing. He is singing the entire song, the one he loved. Mother and Premila are in the house and it is the four men—father and three sons—on the porch, looking out at the woods. The father’s eyes twinkle, teasing us, as he sings the end of the song: how the woman, whose dead lover has returned to her for a night but now must go, stops him: 

Oh when shall I see you again, my love? 

When shall I see you again? 

And the ghost of her dead lover answers: 

When little fish they fly and the seas they do run dry 

And the hard rocks do melt in the sun. 

When little fish they fly and the seas they do run dry 

And the hard rocks do melt in the sun. . . . 

He is telling me why. He is telling me at last why he buried them there—on the planet we call The Hand—with its dead seas, its flying fish, its searing stone . . . so far from Hamusek, so far from
home
. He is telling me how songs, like legends, may make us do what we do. 

I nod. His eyes twinkle. We get up, to go inside— 

I get up on one leg, wondering how much blood I have lost, whether I will be able to walk. I pull up the sleeve of my broken arm. I unbutton my shirt, which is wet. I want him to
see
my wrist, my neck; I want him to see the scars, so that he will understand, if he does not already, why the Council sent me instead of my brothers. 

There is one scar at my wrist. There is another at my throat. Both are deep and both were made with a blade of volcanic glass on a planet we call The Hand, a year after my father left. Both were made in the hope that Darkness would take me from the Light. 

Fever, dehydration, and delirium lasted, I’m told, a week, and then the rescue team found me in the cave overlooking the dry lava beds and endless sand. I was, in the opinion of doctors, half a day from death. I had traveled so far in my dreams, and yet had never left the cave. I had discovered—on my long journey—that Darkness is not a single color, nor the absence of light, nor a
true
hunger for death, but only a desire for the end of pain. 

It was a week later that I dug up their bones and burnt them to ash. 

The Council knew all of this, and so I was the one they sent. 

You understand don’t you?
it says at last. 

Yes. I do. 

It is a remarkable thing when a ship and its flesh-and-bone body die. The tubes stop their pulsing. The hydroponics tanks shut down, leaving nothing for the tubes to carry. The body that has been engineered for this very day—by its own deepest knowing, deeper than a Map, as deep as light itself—begins to dry out. The bones protrude from the skin. The odors change from a living death to a true death, to a darkness that calls itself by its real name, and by doing so, becomes light. Children who should never have been born—because they were made in the image of a lie—begin to scream in the thin, shrill way they know, and then begin to die. 

You do not know how long it all takes. You lie in your own blood, your protruding bone, seeing a porch and a man and a snarling reptile no longer than your arm. Then you are up and walking. You pass scaly children in endless corridors, you trip, you fall, they pass over you, crawling, looking for walls that can feed them one last time. They are thirsty. They are scared. They can hear their brothers and sisters dying, and you feel suddenly what it must be like for them:
To be abandoned by the one you love—by the one who loves you.
 

The engines are dying, too. The wallskins no longer smell. The silence is broken by the twitch of a tail, a claw, a child jerking once beside you. 

You get up again. It is difficult, but you do. You reach behind you with your good arm to find the transmitter. You push the button the Council has made large enough for you to find it easily in the dark. 

The transmission is something you can almost see: 

A spark heading out into the darkness . . . where someone is waiting to come for you. 

Assassin 

Story Notes 

As the son of a feisty cultural anthropologist, Southwest Indian specialist, and Early Man archeologist, I’ve always been puzzled by how pat national, racial, and ethnic labels are, even when we use them proudly and in an equally pat consensus over what they “mean.” Myself, I happen to be a “big toe” Native American because my grandfather on my mother’s side was one-fourth Chickasaw. But to look at me you’d see only the Scottish red hair, blue eyes, and sun-intolerant skin stretching back, according to my father’s Virginia genealogy, to Robert the Bruce, that Scottish King who got such bad press deservedly or not in actor Mel Gibson’s passionate and tortured
Braveheart.
My mother shared her father’s Native American eyes—and that, I think, is what led her, with her doctorate from Stanford, to spend her life studying Native Americans, though she hid her great love for them—which our Whiteriver Apache friends (two shamans and their families) certainly felt—behind a behavioral scientist’s Mind and Reason.
 

What is a racial group, what is ethnicity, what is our national identity? A few years ago a dozen red-haired Celtic-looking mummies, three thousand years old, were found in China. What were they doing there? Trade, of course, but in the process had they born children with the Chinese? New dating evidence at the Calico Early Man site in the Mojave Desert, near Barstow, California, suggests (despite currently accepted DNA models for the arrival of modern human beings on the global scene and their migration out of Africa) that human beings came to Pleistocene Lake Manix there at least a hundred and fifty thousand years ago, and not once, but dozens of times. They crossed the Bering Strait, down the coast (where evidence of their migrations will probably always be lost to the sea), and inland—to the great lake system that ran from Barstow to Death Valley. Each wave of people died out or moved on, and probably none of them were related, except distantly, back in Asia perhaps, to one another; and yet they kept coming. It isn’t even clear what kind of human being they were. The textbooks, of course, still speak of a “wall” of 11-12K BP before which human beings “could not possibly” have arrived in the Americas—even though more and more sites in both Americas are raising questions about that wall, and even though I have sitting in my shed a small “modified zoomorphic” (read: made by a human being) effigy of a reclining Ice Age bison from Calico that I’m told by experts is at least 20K and possibly 30K BP. In other words, every time we try to figure out, using Mind and Reason, what human beings have been capable of—by speed and range of migration, by racial mixing, by trade, by almost anything—we always underestimate human will, ingenuity, and the possibilities of time, and feel like idiots later when the new evidence appears—which it always does. The facial features we associate with Asia (and with my grandfather’s and mother’s Chickasaw eyes) are, as it happens, not much more than ten thousand years old. As each “wall” of assumption in archeology, anthropology, and evolutionary genetics collapses, as such walls always do in science, I feel the sense of wonder that good science fiction itself has always made me feel. 

“Assassin,” which appeared in
OMNI
in 1994 and was my last story during the ’90s, is about that sense of wonder—looking backward in human time in order to look forward, and vice versa, as sf (and American literature and culture in general) so often does. It is also about what children are willing to do—and always will be willing to do if there is a shred of humanity in them—to know their parents, to find them and hold them, regardless of the forces in the universe that try to separate them from others and deny them their humanity.
 

The Boy in Zaquitos 

THE RETIRED OPERATIVE SPEAKS TO A CLASS 

You do what you can for your country. I’m sixty-eight years old, and even in high school—it’s 2015 now, so that was fifty years ago—I wanted to be an intelligence analyst . . . an analyst for an intelligence agency, or if I couldn’t do that, at least be a writer for the United States Information Agency, writing books for people of limited English vocabularies so they’d know about us, our freedoms, the way we live. But what I wanted most was to be an analyst—not a covert-action operative, just an analyst. For the CIA or NSA, one of the big civilian agencies. That’s what I wanted to do for my country. 

I knew they looked at your high school record, not just college—and not just grades, but also the clubs you were in and any sports. And your family background, that was important, too. My father was an Annapolis graduate, a Pearl Harbor survivor, and a gentle Cold War warrior who’d worked for NATO in northern Italy, when we’d lived there. I knew that would look good to the Agency, and I knew that my dad had friends who’d put in a good word for me, too, friends in the Office of Naval Intelligence. 

But I also knew I had to do something for my high school record; and I wasn’t an athlete, so I joined the Anti-Communist Club. I thought it was going to be a group of kids who’d discuss Marxist economics and our free-market system, maybe the misconceptions Marx had about human nature, and maybe even mistakes we were making in developing countries, both propaganda-wise and in the kind of help we were giving them. I didn’t know it was just a front for Barry Goldwater and that all we were going to do was make election signs, but at least I had it on my record. 

Because a lot of Agency recruiting happens at private colleges, I went to one in Southern California—not far from where my parents lived. My high school grades were good enough for a state scholarship, and my dad covered the rest. It was the ’60s, but the administration was conservative; and I was expecting the typical Cold War Agency recruitment to happen to me the way it had happened to people I’d heard about—the sons of some of my dad’s friends. But it didn’t. I went through five majors without doing well in any of them; and it wasn’t until my senior year, when I was taking an IR course with a popular prof named Booth—a guy who’d been a POW in WWII—that I mentioned what I wanted to do. He worked, everyone said, in germ warfare policy—classified stuff—at Stanford; and I figured that if I was about to graduate I’d better tell someone, anyone, what I really wanted to do in life: not sell insurance or be a middle manager or a government bureaucrat, but work for a civilian intelligence agency—get a graduate degree on their tab maybe—and be an analyst. 

I could tell he wanted to laugh, but he didn’t. He was a good guy. The administration didn’t like him because he never went to faculty meetings; and he didn’t act like a scholar, even though he had his doctorate, and he wasn’t on campus much. But when they tried to fire him, the students protested—carried signs, wrote letters, and caused enough of a scene that they kept him. This was back in the ’60s when you did this kind of thing. 

He was smiling at me and I could see those teeth—the ones he hadn’t taken good enough care of in the POW camp, the ones that had rotted and were gone now, replaced years ago with dentures. 

He looked at me for a long time, very serious, and said, “I could put in a good word for you at the USIA. You’re a good writer, Matt.” 

“I’d rather be an analyst.”