Grazing The Long Acre (27 page)

I thought I was hallucinating. Her locker should be
empty
. All our lockers were empty; we had no material baggage.

“
What
—?”

“I found this,” she said. “In my locker. There’s a green one and a blue one, as well.” She was holding up a nightdress, a jewel-bright nightdress, scarlet satin with lace at the bodice and hem. “I know it shouldn’t be there, you don’t have to tell me, I understand about the transit. Ruth, please help me. What’s going on?”

We’d all had strange experiences, but nothing so incongruous, and nothing ever that two people shared. I touched the stuff; I could feel the fabric, slippery and cool. “I don’t know,” I said. “Strange things happen. Better not think about it.”

“My parents used to buy me pretty night clothes. When I was a little girl I imagined I could go to parties in my dreams, like a princess in a fairytale.” She hugged the satin as if it were a favourite doll, her eyes fixed on mine. “If anyone had asked, when I was drugged, what I most wanted to take with me, I might have said, my nightdresses, like that little girl.
But why can I touch this?”

“It’s the torus. It’s messing with our minds.”

It flashed on me that the veil was getting thin, orientation was nearly over. Hilde knelt there with her arms full of satin and lace. “I’ve never even kissed anyone,” she said. “Except my mom and dad. But I’ve had a life in my mind…I know what I want, I know you want it too. There’s no time left. Why won’t you touch me?”

 “I’m thirty-seven, Hilde. You’re nineteen. You could be my daughter.”

“But I’m not.”

So there was no safe exit line, none at all. I kissed her. She kissed me back. The texture of her hair had been a torment. The touch of her mouth, the pressure of her breasts, drenched me, drowned me. I’d had men as lovers, and they’d satisfied my itch for sex. I’d hardly ever dared to expose myself to another woman, even in outlaw circles where forbidden love was accepted. But
nothing
compares to the swell of a woman’s breast against my own, like to like—

There were laws against homosexuality, and the so-called genetic trait was proscribed. But you could get away with being ‘metrosexual,’ as long as it was just a lifestyle choice; as long as you were just fooling around. As long as you were rich, or served the rich, and made ritual submission by lying about it, the USE would ignore most vices. I held her, and I knew she’d guessed my secret, the unforgivable crime behind my catalogue of civil disobedience. I can only love women. Only this love means anything to me, like to like. No ‘games’ of dominance and subordination that are not really games at all. No masters, no slaves, NO to all of that—

My sister, my daughter, put your red dress on. Let me find your breasts, let me suckle through the slippery satin. Undress me, take me with your mouth and with your hands, forget the past, forget who we were, why we are here. We are virgin to each other, virgins together. We can make a new heaven and a new earth, here at the last moment, on this narrow bed—

When I went back to my own cabin, I found a note on my room control message board. It was from Carpazian.

Dear Captain Ruth,

Something tells me our playtime is nearly over. When we dead awaken, if we awaken, may I respectfully request to be considered for the honour of fathering your first child.
 

Georgiou.

I laughed until I cried.

Hilde’s bunk became a paradise, a walled garden of delight. We danced there all the ways two women can dance together, and the jewel-coloured nightdresses figured prominently, absurdly important. I didn’t care where they had come from, and I didn’t understand what Hilde had been trying to tell me.

Everyone knew, at once: the team must have been keeping watch on whose cabin I visited. I was as absurdly important as those scraps of satin. Mike and Gee came to see me. I thought they wanted to talk about pregnancy. It was a genuine issue, with all this rush of pairing-up. We didn’t know if we were still getting our prison-issue contraception, which was traditionally delivered in the drinking water. None of us women had had a period, but that didn’t mean much. They wanted to deliver a protest, or a warning. They said ‘people’ felt I ought to be careful about Hilde.

I told them my private life was my own affair

“There’s a hex on us,” said Mike, darkly. “Who’s causing it?”

“You mean the strange phenomena? How could any of us be causing them? It’s the torus. Or the Panhandle system, keeping us off balance to keep us docile.”

Gee made more sense. “She’s not clear of the drugs yet, Captain. I can tell. There’s got to be a good reason she was kept under like that.”

The hairs rose on the back of my neck; I thought of lynch-mobs.

‘Yeah, sure. We’re all criminals, you two as well. But it’s over now.’

After that deputation I sent a note to Carpazian, accepting his honourable proposal, should such a time ever come, and made sure I sent it on the public channel. Maybe that was a mistake, but I was feeling a little crazy. If battle lines were drawn, the team better know that Hilde and I had allies, we didn’t stand alone.

We had a couple of very dark simulations after that, but we came out of them well. I felt that the system, my secret ally, was telling me that I could trust my girl.

The unresponsive woman woke up, and proved to be an ultra-traditional Japanese (we’d only known that she looked Japanese). She could barely speak English; but she immediately convinced us to surround ourselves with tiny rituals. Whatever we did had to be done
just so
. Sitting down in a chair in the dayroom was a whole tea-ceremony in itself. It was very reassuring.

 Angie said to me, strange isn’t
wrong
, Ruth.

Miqal, the Iranian, came to my cabin. Most of them had visited me, on the quiet, at one time or another. She confessed that she was terrified of the transit itself. She had heard that when you lay down in the Buonarotti capsule you had terrible, terrible dreams. All your sins returned to you, and all the people you had betrayed. The thrum of those subliminal engines filled my head, everything disappeared. I was walking along the curving corridor again, my doppelganger at vanishing point; but the corridor was suspended in a starry void. The cold was horrific, my lungs were bursting, my body was coming apart. I could see nothing but Miqal’s eyes, mirrors of my terror—

The hejabi woman clung to me, and I clung to her.

“Did it happen to you?” we babbled. “Did it happen to you—?”

“Don’t tell anyone,” I said, when we were brave enough to let go.

Carpazian was right, the stay of execution was over, and any haunting would have been better than this. We lived from moment to moment, under a sword.

H15750, N310, O6500, C2250, Ca63, P48, K15, S15, Na10, Cl6, Mg3, Fe1,

Trace differences, tiny differences, customising that chemical formula into human lives, secrets and dreams. The Buonarotti process, taking that essence and converting it into some inexplicable algorithm, pure information…

“We’ll have what we’ve managed to carry,” I said. “And no reason why we shouldn’t eat the meat and vegetables, since our bodies will be native to Landfall.”

“We could materialize thousands of miles apart,” said Hilde.

“Kitty says it doesn’t work like that.”

Kitty, the woman whose nickname had been ‘Flick,’ had come out of a closet of her own. She was, as I had always known but kept it to myself, a highly qualified neurochemist. Take a wild guess at her criminal activities. I’d had to fight a reflex of disgust against her, because I have a horror of what hard drugs can do. She and Achmed knew more than the rest of us put together about the actual Buonarotti process. Achmed had refused to talk about it, after his first pronouncement, but Kitty had told us things, in scraps. She said teams like ours would ‘land’ together, in the same physical area, because we’d become psychically linked.

We were in Hilde’s cabin. She was lying on top of me in the narrow bunk, one of the few comfortable arrangements. It was the sixth ‘night,’ or maybe the seventh. She stroked my nose, grinning.

“Oh yes, Captain. Very good for morale, Captain. You don’t know.”

“I don’t know anything, expect it’s cold outside and warm in here.”

I tipped her off so we were face to face, and made love to her with my eyes closed, in a world of touch and taste. My head was full of coloured stars, the sword was hanging over me, fears I hadn’t known I possessed blossomed in the dark. What’s wrong with her, what kind of terminal genetic error? Why was she condemned, she still has amnesia, what is it that she doesn’t dare to remember?
Oh they will turn you in my arms into a wolf or a snake
. The words of the old song came to me, because I was afraid of her, and my eyes were closed so I didn’t know what I was holding—

The texture of her skin changed. I was groping in rough, coarse hair, it was choking me. It changed again; it was scale, slithery and dry. I shot upright, shoving myself away from her. I hit the light. I stared.

My God.

“Am I dreaming?” I gasped. “Am I hallucinating?”

A grotesque, furred and scaly creature shook its head. It shook its head, then slipped and slithered back into the form of a human girl in a red nightdress.

“No,” said Hilde. “I became what you were thinking. I lost control—”

Hilde; something else, something entirely fluid, like water running.

“I told you I had a genetic disease. This is it.”

“Oh my God,” I breathed. “And you can read my mind?”

Her mouth took on a hard, tight smile. She was Hilde, but she was someone I’d never met: older, colder, still nineteen but far more bitter.

“Easily,
” she said. “Right now it’s no trick.”

I fought to speak calmly. “What are you? A…a shape-changer? My God, I can hardly say it, a
werewolf
?”

“I don’t know,” said older, colder Hilde, and I could still see that fluid weirdness in her. “My parents didn’t know either. But I’ve thought about it and I’ve read about the new science. I’ve guessed that it’s like Koffi said, do you remember? The Buonarotti Transit takes what Carpazian calls the soul apart: and it has unleashed monsters. Only they don’t “happen” near the torus—they get born on earth. The government’s trying to stamp them out, and that’s what I am. I didn’t mean to deceive you, Ruth. I woke up and I was here, knowing nothing and in love with you—”

I wanted to grab my clothes and leave. I had a violent urge to flee.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“
I didn’t know
! I found the nightdresses, I knew that was very strange, I tried to tell you, but even then I didn’t know. The memories only just came back.”

“Why did they send you out here? Why didn’t they
kill
you?”

“I expect they were afraid.” Hilde began to laugh, and cry. “They were afraid of what I’d do if they tried to kill me, so they just sent me away, a long, long way away. What does it matter? We are
dead
, Ruth. You are dead, I am dead, the rest is a fairytale. What does it matter if I’m something forbidden? Something that should never have breathed?”

Forbidden, forbidden…I held out my arms, I was crying too.

Embrace, close as you can. Everything’s falling apart, flesh and bone, the ceramic that yields like soft metal, the slippery touch of satin, all vanishing—

As if they never were.

Straight to orientation, then. There were no guards, only the Panhandle system’s bots, but we walked without protest along a drab greenish corridor to the Transit Chamber. We lay down, a hundred of us at least, in the capsules that looked like coffins, our gravegoods no more than neural patterns, speed-burned into our bewildered brains. I was fully conscious. What happened to
orientation
? The sleeve closed over me, and I suddenly realised there was no reprieve, this was it. The end.

I woke and lay perfectly still. I didn’t want to try and move because I didn’t want to know that I was paralysed, buried alive, conscious but dead.
Oh I could be bounded in a walnut shell and count myself the king of infinite space.
I had not asked for a dream, but a moment since I had been in Hilde’s arms. Maybe orientation hasn’t begun yet, I thought, cravenly. The surface I was lying on did not yield like the ceramic fibre of the capsule, there was cool air flowing over my face and light on my eyelids. I opened my eyes and saw the grass: something very like blades of bluish, pasture grass, about twenty centimetres high, stirred by a light breeze.

The resurrected sat up, all around me: like little figures in a religious picture from Mediaeval Europe. The team was mainly together, but we were surrounded by a sea of bodies, mostly women, some men. A whole shipload, newly arrived at Botany Bay. The romance of my dream of the crossing was still with me, every detail in my grasp; but already fading, as dreams do. I saw the captain’s armband on my sleeve. And Hilde was beside me. I remembered that Kitty had said teams like ours were linked. Teams like ours: identified by the system as the leaders in the consensus. I’d known what was going on, while I was in the dream, but I hadn’t believed it. I stared at the girl with the cinnamon braids, the shape-changer, the wild card, my lover.

If I’m the captain of this motley crew, I thought, I wonder who you are…

SAVING TIAMAAT

I had reached the station in the depth of Left Speranza’s night; I had not slept. Fogged in the confabulation of the transit, I groped through crushing aeons to my favourite breakfast kiosk: unsure if the soaring concourse outside Parliament was ceramic and carbon or a
metaphor
; a cloudy internal warning—

Now what was the message in the mirror? Something pitiless. Some blank-eyed, slow-thinking, long-grinned crocodile—

“Debra!”

It was my partner. “Don’t
do
that,” I moaned. The internal crocodile shattered, the concourse lost its freight of hyper-determined meaning, too suddenly for comfort. “Don’t you know you should never startle a sleepwalker?”

He grinned, he knew when I’d arrived, and the state I was likely to be in. I hadn’t met Pelé Leonidas Iza Quinatoa in the flesh before, but we’d worked together, we liked each other. “Ayayay, so good you can’t bear to lose it?”

“Of course not. Only innocent, beautiful souls have sweet dreams.”

He touched my cheek: collecting a teardrop. I hadn’t realised I was crying. “You should use the dreamtime, Debra. There must be
some
game you want to play.”

“I’ve tried, it’s worse. If I don’t take my punishment I’m sick for days.”

The intimacy of his gesture (skin on skin) was an invitation and a promise; it made me smile. We walked into the Parliament Building together, buoyant in the knocked-down gravity; that I love although I know it’s bad for you.

In the Foyer we met the rest of the company, identified by the Diaspora Parliament’s latest adventure in biometrics, the aura tag. To our vision the KiAn Working Party was striated orange/yellow, nice cheerful implications, nothing too deep. The pervasive systems were seeing a lot more, but that didn’t bother Pelé or me; we had no secrets from Speranza.

The KiAn problem had been a matter of concern since their world had been “discovered” by a Balas/Shet prospector, and joined the miniscule roster of populated planets linked by instantaneous transit. Questions had been raised then, over the grave social imbalance: the tiny international ruling caste, the exploited masses. But neither the Ki nor the An would accept arbitration (why the hell should they?). The non-interference lobby is the weakest faction in the Chamber, quarantine-until-they’re-civilised was not considered an option. Inevitably, around thirty local years after first contact, the Ki had risen against their overlords, as often in the past. Inevitably, this time they had modern weapons. They had not succeeded in wiping out the An, but they had pretty much rendered the shared planet uninhabitable.

We were here to negotiate a rescue package. We’d done the damage, we had to fix it, that was the DP’s line. The Ki and the An no doubt had their own ideas as to what was going on: they were new to the Interstellar Diaspora, not to politics.

But they were here, at least; so that seemed hopeful.

The Ki Federation delegates were unremarkable. There were five of them, they conformed to the “sentient biped” body plan that unites the diaspora. Three were wearing Balas business suits in shades of brown, two were in grey military uniform. The young co-leaders of the An were better dressed, and one of the two, in particular, was much better looking. Whatever you believe about the origins of the “diaspora” (Strong theory, Weak theory, something between) it’s strange how many measures of beauty are common to us all. He was tall, past two metres: he had large eyes, a mane of rich brown head-hair, an open, strong-boned face, poreless bronze skin, and a glorious smile. He would be my charge. His co-leader, the subordinate partner, slight and small, almost as dowdy as the Ki, would be Pelé’s.

 They were codenamed Baal and Tiamaat, the names I will use in this account. The designations Ki and An are also codenames.

We moved off to a briefing room. Joset Moricherri, one of the Blue Permanent Secretaries, made introductory remarks. A Green Belt Colonel, Shamaz Haa’agaan, gave a talk on station security. A slightly less high-ranking DP administrator got down to basics: standard time conventions, shopping allowances, access to the elevators, restricted areas, housekeeping…Those who hadn’t provided their own breakfast raided the culturally neutral trolley. I sipped my Mocha/Colombian, took my carbs in the form of a crisp cherry-jam tartine; and let the day’s agenda wash over me, as I reviewed what I knew about Baal and Tiamaat’s relationship.

They were not related by blood, except in the sense that the An gene pool was very restricted: showing signs of other population crashes in the past. They were not “married”, either. The Ki and the An seemed to be sexually dimorphic on the Blue model (thought they could yet surprise us!); and they liked opposite sex partnerships. But they did not marry. Tiamaat’s family had been swift to embrace the changes, she’d been educated on Balas/Shet. Baal had left KiAn for the first time when war broke out. They’d lost family members, and they’d certainly seen the horrific transmissions smuggled off KiAn before the end. Yet here they were, with the genocidal Ki: thrown together, suddenly appointed the rulers of their shattered nation, and bound to each other for life. Tiamaat looked as if she was feeling the strain. She sat with her eyes lowered, drawn in on herself, her body occupying the minimum of space. Beside her, Baal devoured a culturally-neutral doughnut, elbows sprawled, with a child’s calm greed. I wondered how much my alien perception of a timid young woman and a big bold young man was distorting my view. I wondered how all that fine physicality translated into mind.

Who are you, Baal? How will it feel to know you?

From the meeting we proceeded to a DP reception and lunch, from thence to a concert in the Nebula Immersion Chamber: a Blue Planet symphony orchestra on virtual tour, the Diaspora Chorus in the flesh, singing a famous masque; a solemn dance drama troupe bi-locating from Neuendan. Pelé and I, humble Social Support officers, were in the background for these events. But the An had grasped that we were their advocates: as was proved when they pounced on us, eagerly, after the concert. They wanted to meet “the nice quiet people with the pretty curly faces—”

They spoke English, language of diplomacy and displacement. They’d both taken the express, neuro-tech route to fluency: but we had trouble pinning this request down. It turned out they were asking to be introduced to a bowl of orchids.

Appearances can be deceptive, these two young people were neither calm nor cowed. They had been born in a mediaeval world, and swept away from home as to the safety of a rich neighbour’s house: all they knew of the interstellar age was the inside of a transit lounge. The Ki problem they knew only too well: Speranza was a thrilling bombardment. With much laughter (they laughed like Blue teenagers, to cover embarrassment), we explained that they would not be meeting any bizarre lifeforms. No tentacles, no petals, no intelligent gas clouds here; not yet!

“You have to look after us!” cried Baal. He grabbed my arm, softly but I felt the power. “Save us from making fools of ourselves, dear Debra and Pelé!”

Tiamaat stood back a pace, hiding her giggles behind her hand.

The last event scheduled on that first day was a live transmission walkabout from the Ki refugee camp, in the Customised Shelter Sector. In the planning stages, some of us had expressed doubts about this stunt. If anything went wrong it’d sour the whole negotiation. But the Ki and the An leaders were both keen, and the historic gesture was something the public back on the homeworlds would understand—which in the end had decided the question. The Diaspora Parliament had to struggle for planetside attention, we couldn’t pass up an opportunity.

At the gates of the CSS, deep in Speranza’s hollow heart, there was a delay. The Customised Shelter Police wanted us in armoured glass-tops, they felt that if we
needed
a walkabout we could fake it….Pelé chatted with Tiamaat, stooping from his lean black height to catch her soft voice. Baal stared at the banners on two display screens. The KiAn understood flags, we hadn’t taught them that concept. Green and gold quarters for the Ki, a centre section crosshatched with the emblems of all the nations. Purple tracery on vivid bronze for the An.

Poor kid, I thought, it’s not a magic gateway to your lost home. Don’t get your hopes up. That’s the door to a cage in a conservation zoo.

He noticed my attention, and showed his white teeth. “Are there other peoples living in exile on this floor?”

I nodded. “Yes. But mostly the people sheltered here are old spacers, who can’t return to full gravity. Or failed colonist communities, likewise: people who’ve tried to settle on empty moons and planets and been defeated by the conditions. There are no other populated planet exiles. It hasn’t been, er, necessary.”

“We are a first for you.”

I wondered if that was ironic; if he was capable of irony.

A compromise was reached. We entered on foot, with the glass-tops and CSP closed cars trailing behind. The Ki domain wasn’t bad, for a displaced persons camp wrapped in the bleak embrace of a giant space station. Between the living-space capsule towers the refugees could glimpse their own shade of sky; and a facsimile of their primary sun, with its partner, the blue-rayed daystar. They had sanitation, hygiene, regular meals; leisure facilities, even employment. We stopped at an adult retraining centre, we briefly inspected a hydroponic farm. We visited a kindergarten, where the teaching staff told us (and the flying cams!) how all the nations of the Ki were gathered here in harmony, learning to be good Diaspora citizens.

The children stared at Baal and Tiamaat. They’d probably been born in the camp, and never seen An in the flesh before. Baal fidgeted, seeming indignant under their scrutiny. Tiamaat stared back with equal curiosity. I saw her reach a tentative hand through the shielding, as if to touch a Ki child: but she thought better of it.

After the classroom tour there was a reception, with speeches, dance and choral singing. Ki community leaders and the An couple didn’t literally “shake hands”; but the gesture was accomplished. Here the live trans. ended, and most of our party stayed behind. The An leaders and the Ki delegates went on alone, with a police escort, for a private visit to “Hopes and Dreams Park”—a facsimile of one of the Sacred Groves (as near as the term translates), central to KiAn spirituality.

Pelé and I went with them.

The enclave of woodland was artfully designed. The “trees” were like self-supporting kelp, leathery succulents—lignin is only native to the Blue Planet—but they were tall, and planted close enough to block all sight of the packed towers. Their sheets of foliage made a honeyed shade, we seemed alone in a gently managed wilderness. The Ki and the An kept their distance from each other now that the cams weren’t in sight. The police moved outward to maintain a cordon around the group, and I began to feel uneasy. I should have been paying attention instead of savouring my breakfast, I had not grasped that “Hope and Dreams Park” would be like this. I kept hearing voices, seeing flitting shadows; although the park area was supposed to have been cleared. I’d mentioned the weak shielding; I hoped it had been fixed.

 “Are religious ceremonies held here?” I asked Tiamaat.

She drew back her head, the gesture for
no
. “Most KiAn have not followed religion for a long time. It’s just a place sacred to ourselves, to nature.”

“But it’s fine for the Shelter Police, and Pelé and I, to be with you?”

“You are advocates.”

We entered a clearing dotted with thickets. At our feet smaller plants had the character of woodland turf, starred with bronze and purple flowers. Above us the primary sun dipped towards its false horizon, lighting the blood red veins in the foliage. The blue daystar had set. Baal and Tiamaat were walking together: I heard him whisper, in the An language,
now it’s our time.

“And these are the lucky ones,” muttered one of the Ki delegates to me, her “English” mediated by a throat-mike processor that gave her a teddy-bear growl. “Anyone who reached Speranza had contacts, money. Many millions of our people are trying to survive on a flayed, poisoned bombsite—”

And whose fault is that?

I nodded, vaguely. It was NOT my place take sides.

Something flew by me, big and solid. Astonished, I realised it had been Baal. He had moved so fast, it was so totally unexpected. He had plunged right through the cordon of armed police, through the shield. He was gone, vanished. I leapt in pursuit at once, yelling: “Hold your fire!” I was flung back, thrown down into zinging stars and blackness. The shield
had
been strengthened, but not enough.

Shelter Police bending over me, cried:
what happened, Ma’am, are you hit?

My conviction that we had company in here fused into certainty.

“Oh, God! Get after him. After him!”

I ran with the police, Pelé stayed with Tiamaat and the Ki: on our shared frequency I heard him alerting Colonel Shamaz. We cast to and fro through the twilight wood, held together by the invisible strands and globules of our shield, taunted by rustles of movement, the CSP muttering to each other about refugee assassins, homemade weapons. But the young leader of the An was unharmed when we found him, having followed the sounds of a scuffle and a terrified cry. He crouched, in his sleek tailoring, over his prey. Dark blood trickled from the victim’s nostrils, high-placed in a narrow face. Dark eyes were open, fixed and wide.

I remembered the children in that school, staring up in disbelief at the ogres.

Baal rose, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “What are you looking at?,” he inquired, haughtily, in his neighbours’ language. The rest of our party had caught up: he was speaking to the Ki. “What did you expect? You know who I am.”

Tiamaat fell to her knees, with a wail of despair, pressing her hands to either side of her head. “He has a right! Ki territory is An territory, he has a right to behave as if we were at home. And the Others knew it, don’t you see? They
knew
!”

The CSP officer yelled something inexcusable and lunged at the killer. Pelé grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him back, talking urgent sense. The Ki said nothing, but I thought Tiamaat was right. They’d known what the Diaspora’s pet monster would do in here; and he hadn’t let them down.