Full Vessels (10 page)

“What are you doing?” His whisper came harsh
in her ears.

“I want to try sex.”

“This is wrong, Ressi. Your mother . . .
.”

“Is dead,” she said.

Kenja pulled away from her. “Why are you
acting this way?” She stretched out her hand and he seized it.
“Tell me why, Ressi. Why would you shame your mother's memory like
this?”

“I don't care about her memory. I want to try
sex.”

His fist connected without warning, hidden by
the darkness. Ressi blinked tears free of the battered eye. She
never anticipated his reaction would be so strong. “Your loins
still have fire. Do you lust for a memory?”

Whatever reaction she expected, it was not
what happened. Kenja leaped on top of her and rained down his
fists, growling in wordless fury. Ressi tried to block the strikes,
but he effortlessly pinned her arms beneath his knees. As she lay
gasping, heart racing, trying to flinch back into the ground to
avoid each blow, Ressi began to scream.

Stone hard fingers seized her throat,
squeezing hard enough to crumple her windpipe and make the blood
rush in her head. Ressi began to buck, trying to dislodge the beast
on top of her. She couldn't escape. She couldn't even free a hand
to claw at her throat.

Her heart thundered. Ressi thrashed wildly.
I'm going to die! No, I am the Creator's Observer! No! No!
Her vision faded from the outsides to the sound of hollow
ringing.

The Creator did not appear to save her. The
world faded from her perception. An Observer meant to outlast
entire worlds died on her first day of life. Bitterness faded into
nothingness.

Ressi woke with a start, finding herself
floating in the water. She got her footing in time to see her
father disappear into his hut. For a few moments, her hands traced
the lines of her unbruised throat, verifying she was unharmed. Then
she left the water as quietly as possible and walked away from the
huts of her tribe.

Of course I cannot die
, she thought.
The people get old and die. And they are always taking injuries.
If I am to live through whole worlds, then of course the Creator
made me to survive.

Her feet carried her around the bend and out
of sight of her tribe. Ressi collapsed onto a rock and stared out
at the quarter-moon rising over the crashing water. Despite
everything, she had to admit that the world was beautiful. And if
the experience with her father taught her nothing else, it taught
her that she did not have to fear death.

Now she could walk away from the tribe to
wander the world. Everyone would think her dead. Her father would
probably tell the others of the tribe some lie. They would believe
him because he had a reputation. Fiery pain shot up Ressi's jaw,
the first she realized she had clenched it.

The things Kenja had done to her . . . . No
one should be able to do those things to her. She was the Creator's
Observer. She represented the one who had brought this majestic
world into existence.

Her brow drew down. She could not die, but
her father could. Ressi wandered back towards the hut of her
father. She stopped outside to grasp at one of the spears he used
for fishing, sending the others crashing to the ground in her
haste.

“Who is that?”

Ressi began to back away as the flap to the
hut swung open. The figure before her startled. For a moment she
froze. Then the fiery rage within her flared. Ressi drove the spear
into her father's gut, pulled it free, and slammed it home
again.

Kenja stumbled back into his home and fell
onto his back.

The Creator's Observer approached, placed
both hands on the haft of the spear, and rocked it back and forth,
eliciting a moan from the man it impaled. “You wouldn't put your
stick in me, so I'll put my stick in you,” she growled, wishing
more hateful words existed to throw at him.

“Ressi, don't do this, I'm your father!”

“I am not Ressi!” She glared at him. “Do you
really think a woman could come back to life? Do you think your
daughter could shove a spear into your middle?”

She pulled the spear free and stabbed again.
The man who had seemed so powerful before wept as she claimed her
vengeance.

“Please,” Kenja moaned, “please.”

She sneered down at the pathetic creature
before her. “I can't believe I feared you. Never again. The
Creator's Observer fears nothing.”

Later that night, she departed the lands of
her tribe. As she left, her sole regret was that she hadn't caused
enough pain to the man who dared try to harm her, the Creator's
Observer.

Following Erik's presentation, they rented
horses and attached the travois Hess had constructed the previous
night. With their advert for overpriced wood prominently displayed,
they moved to their first target.

The house sat outside of town, its fenced
back yard holding a large coop packed with chickens. Outside the
fence sat a large silo spilling kernels of maize from its base, and
beyond that a shed with split logs aging at its rear and along one
side.

Hess led their horses a stone's throw into
the forest, checked that the two travois were properly seated, and
began liberating armfuls of aged oak. Erik matched his every move,
slinking through the woods without a sound, hauling loads of
ill-gotten boiler fuel.

Sweat soaked every inch of their bodies and
clothing by the time their travois were loaded to capacity. Hess
brushed away splinters of wood and peeled damp clothing off his
body. A sour musk emanated from him to assault his nose.

Ignoring his discomfort, he led his horse
along the road behind Erik. They passed through town and down the
harbor road. It took an hour and a half walking their beasts of
burden. They passed the piers, turned onto a windy private drive,
and deposited their cargo in the main room of the shack Erik had
procured for their use.

They reversed their trip and got a second
load from the same house. After unloading that, their next haul
came from a small cottage closer to their destination. A single
raid emptied out all the wood at that cottage.

Following a much needed break, they swung by
another of the targets Hess had identified. Due to the presence of
children in the yard, they had to give it a pass. They returned to
the first house and claimed the remainder of the wood there. It was
enough for half a load each.

As they stood breathing hard, Hess studied
the silo. Holding up a finger for silence, he snuck up to the
structure and took a handful of maize. The kernels felt dry. He
returned to Erik. “Better idea. Tomorrow we'll fill burlap sacks
with corn. It burns about the same as wood.”

“Sounds fan-fucking-tastic to me. I'm not a
fan of the logs.”

They unloaded the wood, hid the travois,
returned the horses, and entered the hotel. Hess bathed, went to
dinner, and passed out for the night seconds after his head touched
the pillow. The next morning he woke late and had to skip breakfast
to make it to the conference room on time.

Greg greeted each of them by name as they
took their seats. When the last of them, Drake, appeared and
slumped into a chair, Greg began his presentation. “Over the
worlds, each of us drifted into a specialty. Mine was academia. I
enjoy being around intelligent people and learning new things.
Especially I enjoy historical analysis. And to head off the
inevitable accusation, I also very much enjoy being safe and
comfortable.

“My understanding of our mission has evolved
over time. At first, anything was worthy of my attention. Later, I
came to the conclusion that diversity was the key feature. Thank
you for the dramatic eye rolls, everyone – those were right on cue.
Before you stop listening, allow me a few moments to put my
revelation into context.

“Piggy-backing off of Griff's ideas, I would
like you to imagine nothingness. Ignore for the moment the
impossibility of understanding non-existence, our limited
imaginations should more than suffice for this illustration. There
is a key defining feature of nothing. Have any of you pictured the
concept as containing any contrast? I doubt it. The typical
visualization is of blackness, which isn't quite right, but right
enough.

“There is no diversity in nothing. The
creation of something from nothing could be viewed as the
differentiation of the undifferentiated. Perhaps a misguided
analogy, but perhaps not. To offer a possible answer to the
question posed by Griff, what matters is not the origin, nor the
destination, nor the fundamental nature of existence. What matters
is the contrast between those things that do exist.

“I also agree with Mel's point. Most people
behave as faulty automatons. Not all of them, however. The subjects
worth studying are different from the people around them. That
fundamental diversity makes them interesting. It makes them
matter.

“While I disagree with the premise that fear
is the only emotion, Drake's presentation made me think. An
individual emotion would be impossible to distinguish. There is no
happiness without sadness. Diversity of feeling provides the
contrast to interpret emotion.

“Ingrid's fascinating idea that the entire
world is a stage to act out the conflict of ideas meshes with my
theory. There is no meaningful conflict between the identical.

“I think the wildly different interpretations
of reality provided yesterday by Elza and Erik represent a great
diversity within ourselves. To me, this is an excellent
demonstration of how the Observers exemplify the Creator's values.
Everything that can be said to exist gains this status by virtue of
differentiation. Diversity is everything and its absence is,
literally, nothing.”

Greg smiled around the table. “I prepared a
longer presentation, but I distilled it down to its essence when it
became obvious no one else planned on speaking longer than half an
hour. I'm ready for questions now.”

Kerzon grunted. “Can I take my turn now? I've
got other things than this conference going on.”

Greg's smile wilted. “
What?
”

“I'm running a gambling ring. And before
anyone asks, Observers aren't welcome. This is my own thing.”

The strangers sat across the fire from him at
the center of the village, unblinking gazes fixed on him as they
fielded questions from the elders. While dark-skinned people
occasionally found their way this far north, they seldom stayed for
long. Far odder than their coloration, the man and woman claimed to
travel the world collecting stories.

From the moment they entered the village, the
two of them had stared at him as if he were the only person at the
crowded evening feast. Somehow, they seemed to sense he was
different from the other people. Greg studied the press of bodies
around him, charting the quickest path to freedom. His eyes
completed their scan and froze on the spot across the fire. The
couple were no longer there.

“This man here is Greg,” warbled the voice of
elder Cane at his shoulder. “Smartest man of the village. Maybe
smartest man of the world. He knows the answer to most any question
you might ponder.”

The man and woman, now standing directly
beside him, exchanged a brief glance before turning bemused
expressions on him. The woman spoke first. “The smartest man of the
world? How quaint.”

“Greetings, friend. My name is Hess. This
beautiful woman is Elza.”

Elder Cane scratched his head. “I must have
misheard earlier. I thought your names were different.”

“We have a lot of names,” Elza said. “But for
the smartest man alive, we are Elza and Hess. I hope you like the
name Greg, friend, because it just became permanent.”

He blinked. “Uh, yes . . .”

“Tell us some words of wisdom.”

Greg glanced to Hess, who watched in silence.
“Well, I told the villagers just the other day that the flesh of
animals can be eaten.”

Elza's brows rose. “The flesh of animals, you
say. I suppose the corpse would need to be skinned and then hung to
drain the blood before roasting over a fire.”

He blinked at the dark-skinned woman. “That
would make sense.”

“Give us another brilliant observation,” she
said.

Observation? “As travelers, perhaps you are
aware there are lakes of water too great for a man to swim
across?”

“We are.”

“Then you will be shocked to learn that it is
possible to build wooden platforms to float across its
surface.”

“You mean a
boat
?”

Greg flinched. He hadn't realized that word
existed in this world. “That's right. You seem very
knowledgeable.”

She tilted her head in shallow agreement. “It
is only natural to expect the world's smartest woman to know more
than the world's smartest man.”

He forced a laugh. “You think much of
yourself.”

“An accurate opinion, in my experience.”

“Then you tell me some wise words.”

Elza lifted a finger. “People who pick all
the insects out of their food get the wasting disease.” She raised
a second finger. “If you store rotting fruit in clay jars, the
juice will make those who drink it happy.” Another finger. “Injured
backs can be repaired by pushing the bones back to their proper
places.” A fourth finger. “The villages resist violence even after
someone kills.” The thumb. “Elza, Hess, Mel, San, Drake, Erik,
Ingrid, Kerzon, and Greg.”

“What? None of that makes any sense.”

Hess smirked at him. “Just give up. She's
almost never wrong.”

“Really? Think about what she said. Not
eating insects causes the wasting disease? That's ridiculous.”