Morning Child and Other Stories (22 page)

The ambassador’s race was an ancient and intensely civilized one. Long eons ago, even before contact with the communities of the stars, they had put aside their predatory origins, overridden them with a thousand culturally programmed safeguards. They no more felt the age-old archaic urges than a human felt the need to brachiate.

The urges were still there though, whispering in the blood, at the very bottom of the brain, as they must be in every corporeal creature who has evolved from a lower—or at least a more basic—form of life.

One by one, it lost reason, memory, personality; it knew the horror of losing everything that made it itself, and
knowing
it was losing it, and being unable to stop the process. At last, it would lose even the knowledge that something had been
lost,
except for a vague trickle of unease at the back of its consciousness. It would be reduced to survival programming, the underlying atavistic ancestral memory whose human equivalent would be the reptilian hindstem.

From the depths of pain, it had a last fleeting moment of clarity in which to mourn its own passing, and then most of its brain went down.

Glowing like Lucifer falling, it tumbled from the sky, down to the Earth below.

The car battery shorted out. There was a puff of acrid black smoke, and then it was free. Instantly, it reacted. Instinct hurled it
away
from there, away from the trap that had almost killed it, though the window, out into the night.

Outside, alone in the darkness and the swirling snow, with the Northern Lights still a vaguely troubling presence on the horizon, an uneasy prickling sensation that it could now control, it came to the full realization of what it had done.

When she got over the initial shock of hearing the creature speak, Alma Kingsley quickly picked up the ax, bringing it awkwardly around in front of her body so that she could get a better, two-handed grip on it, resting it on her shoulder, ready to swing. She backed away two steps, felt her rear foot bump into the wall, and started to edge sideways again, moving away from the wall a bit (even if it did mean moving a step or two toward the monster) so that she’d have room to swing the ax overhand at the creature if it rushed her, a woodchopper’s stroke. Couldn’t let it pin her against the wall...

Kill me
, it said again.

She hesitated. She had been figuring out how to do just that, or the best way to try to do it, anyway, deciding that she’d better rush it and try to get a good swing in at it before the big ax grew too heavy for her tired old arms to hold up effectively, do it right
now
, before she lost her nerve.... But it kept putting her off her stride by
speaking
to her; she hadn’t known that it could talk.

It wasn’t “talking” at all, actually—the words seemed to print themselves in her brain somehow, faintly superimposed on reality, like the afterimage of an object you can sometimes see after you close your eyes. But she had no doubt that it was really happening, or that it was the creature who was “speaking” to her.

Go ahead,
it said.
Do it now. I won’t try to stop you.

She came forward a couple of steps, and then stopped, hesitating, wary. This was some kind of trick. It was trying to lure her closer so that it could strike at her, maybe counting on being fast enough to be able to dodge any blow of the ax she might get off at it. When she got close enough, it would attack....

It will not be difficult,
it said persuasively.
My physical component is really quite fragile. If you strike at the center of my being hard enough, with something sharp or heavy, that will kill me. That tool you have in your hand will do nicely. I perceive that the handle is made
of wood; that will insulate you from any shock. You’ll be perfectly safe.

“You weren’t so concerned with my safety a few minutes ago,” Alma Kingsley said harshly. “When you were trying to kill me!”

I was insane then,
it said.
I have been insane for a long time. But I am insane no longer. The shock that you administered to me has re-integrated my functions. I am sane now.

“How nice for you!” Rage pulsed through her, and she tightened her grip on the ax. “You unspeakable bastard!”

It shivered convulsively, and she jumped back a step, thinking it was about to attack. But it didn’t move forward.
I know what I did,
it said.
I am ready to atone.

“Atone?” She found herself laughing, harsh, cawing, jagged, ugly laughter that tore her throat. “You killed Jennifer! And Desmond! And...and that poor girl!” To her shame, she found she couldn’t summon up the young woman’s name, although she got a flash of her vapid, cheaply pretty face. “Damn you, you even killed my
dog!”
Tears sprang into her eyes and she blinked them fiercely away. She couldn’t allow it to distract her, let it put her off her guard. As soon as she did, it would strike.

I know what I did,
it repeated.
That’s why you have to kill me.
It was swaying slightly from side to side now, as if in agitation.
Kill me! Strike now! Get it over with. I won’t fight you. I know I deserve to die.

She tried to say something but the words tangled themselves in her throat and wouldn’t come out. Her head felt as if it was going to explode, and she was shaking all over. “You’re right about that!” she managed to rasp, panting with rage. “You deserve to die a hundred times over!”

It was shaking too, as though stirred by the same inner wind.
I know that,
it said.
I can’t live with the guilt and the shame. I was sent here on a mission of peace, to bring you the gifts that would allow you to live as civilized creatures, without war, without want and poverty and hatred. Instead, I killed everyone I met!
It swayed violently.
There could be no worse failure! No worse betrayal of everything that I believe in! Kill me!

She raised the ax. Images flashed through her mind: Jennifer, her face gray and blistered and burned...Iago collapsing in a pathetic jumble of furry limbs...the girl, the roadhouse pickup, smiling vapidly although amiably as she dug a fork into her eggs...Desmond waving his hands and talking expansively, self-importantly.... She was crying openly now, tears running down her face, breathing in harsh gasps through her mouth, but she didn’t lose sight of the monster, in spite of the tears. She squeezed the wood of the ax-handle until her hands ached. Abruptly, fiercely, she rushed forward, swinging the ax as far back as she could, ready to bring it crashing down.

A step or two away, she stopped, hesitating, the ax swung high in the air.

It hadn’t moved, although she was in easy attack distance by now.

DO IT!
it shrieked.

There was a long frozen moment, as though time itself had stopped. For some reason, she found herself thinking about something she hadn’t allowed herself to consciously think about for decades: her husband’s coffin, shipped by air back from Vietnam, being lowered into a hole dug into the raw red earth on a blustery wet spring morning, a flag draped over it, while people in uniform stood stiffly next to the grave and saluted and little Stephanie fidgeted impatiently by her side, too young to understand...the incongruously cheerful sound of birds singing somewhere off in the trees (and she realizing how incongruous it was even at the time, and hating herself for noticing something like that at a time like this, no matter how ironic it was)...her thinking how much Steve would have hated having his coffin wrapped in a flag, how he would have disliked the solemnity of this whole ceremony, the priest droning pious platitudes about somebody he’d never met and how Steve was now going to walk with Jesus in A Better World...looking at her own mother beside her, leaning heavily on Uncle Henry’s arm, noticing with a shock how old and frail and tired she looked.... The photo that had stood on the mantelpiece in the living room as long as she could remember, her father in a World War II Army uniform, the father she’d never met, a black star on the glass frame, the photo gathering dust for years, never touched, never moved.... Her own daughter Stephanie, laughing and hugging her at the airport gate, kissing her husband and her baby goodbye, telling them that she’d send them all postcards and maybe some souvenirs if she could find a moment to steal from the sales conference, only minutes before her airplane was blown to pieces in midair by a terrorist’s bomb.... The military jets screaming by outside, mean and black and predatory, on the way to the buildup for the
next
war, that would kill somebody
else’s
children....

As though it were reading her mind—and who knew, perhaps it was—it said,
The Mission will succeed, even though I failed. Eventually. They will send someone else. It may take another hundred years for them to get here, but eventually they will, and we’ll help you heal this world of yours. I have to believe that. Eventually, my failure won’t matter. The Mission will succeed.

Another hundred years. How many children dead in that time, in how many wars?

She heard the sound of a siren, a thin wail still far away, on the edge of hearing. The ambulance coming.

Kill me,
it said
You have the right. I owe you that. I have nothing to pay with but my life.

Suddenly, she was very, very tired, unutterably weary, as though the marrow in her bones had turned to lead.

Hurry. They’re coming. Soon it will be too late. Kill me now. Don’t hesitate. I want you to do it. I don’t want to live. I can’t live with what I’ve done. It hurts too much.

A kind of weary revulsion seized her then, a nauseated rejection of everything and everyone. She stared at the alien for another long moment. “Then
live,
God damn you,” she cried bitterly. “Live and be damned!”

She flung the ax aside.

Her legs gave out, and she sat down abruptly on the cold floor. If this was a trick, then it had won. She no longer even cared. Let it kill her if it wanted to.

The wailing siren came closer and closer, the sound cutting sharply through the cold winter air.

One year later, on the anniversary of First Contact at Maple Hill Farm (as the scroll on the screen would say whenever they came back from the commercials), Alma Kingsley sat alone before the television set, listening to herself being praised on CNN. The commentators prattled on and on about the terrible tragedy of the Ambassador’s arrival, and of the even greater tragedy that would have occurred had it not been allowed to complete its Mission; one commentator, face radiating sincerity the way a potbellied stove radiates heat, spoke of Alma Kingsley as a secular saint for forgoing personal revenge for the Sake Of All Mankind.

The Ambassador had tried to attend Jennifer and Desmond’s funerals (Candy was buried elsewhere), but she had refused to allow it to attend, to the disappointment of the newsmen, although they were there filming everything in sight anyway, keeping tight close-ups on her face as the last remnants of her family were lowered into the ground, not wanting to miss the slightest nuance of expression. Later, at the UN, the Ambassador had insisted on giving an emotional eulogy for the people he had inadvertently killed, going on to say that Alma Kingsley’s greatness of spirit, in being willing to forgive even the very creature who had killed her own granddaughter, all by itself was enough to prove that humanity was worthy of inclusion among the great interstellar Community of Races, and would insure their admission.

Sometimes she wondered if the creature, who was certainly many times smarter than she or any other human being, had
manipulated
her psychologically into deciding not to kill it, using a sly variant of Br’er Rabbit’s “Don’t Throw Me In the Briar Patch!” routine to get her to act the way it wanted her to act. Certainly it had been easier for it to explain itself to the ambulance crew and the police with her there alive on the scene to vouch for it than it would have been if she were dead, and it was there alone to greet them with a houseful of murdered people at its back. And the forgiveness angle made for great press, just the spin to neutralize the unfortunate fact that the Ambassador had started its career on Earth by killing as many humans as possible. Or maybe it
had
been sincere. Certainly its people
did
seem to be highly ethical, concerned with Justice and Right Actions in a fussy, legalistic, rabbinical way that seemed almost prim. She would never know, one way or the other.

CNN was now running through a quick inventory of all that humanity’s new friends had given the Earth so far. Once the Ambassador had used the living fabric of its body to form and trigger an interstellar Gate, new technologies had poured through in a seemingly endless stream: Defensive weapons that really
were
defensive, for they couldn’t be used offensively...an end to disease...medicines to expand the human lifespan a hundred years or more...safe and plentiful energy...the transmutation of elements...gold from lead...lilacs from mud...silk purses from sows’ ears...a partridge in a pear tree...blah, blah, blah.

They were like children on Christmas morning, with bright wrappings strewn about and nothing but presents as far as the eye could see. To listen to them go on, it seemed that the entire human race was going straight to Heaven. Everybody was going to be healthy and beautiful and tall. They were all going to be transformed into gods.

Except Jennifer. She didn’t get to be immortal and go to the stars. She got to lie at the bottom of a grave in Brattleboro, rotting in the cold unforgiving ground, while worms ate her.

Alma Kingsley sat staring at the screen and listening as voices far older than any god spoke within her. Their words were dark and poisonous. They ate at her heart like acid.

She got up and fixed herself another Manhattan. Bitterly, she drank it down, wishing—as she would wish every day for the remaining two hundred years of her life—that she’d killed the damn thing when she had the chance.

FAIRY TALE

I
t wasn’t a village, as is sometimes said these days, when we’ve forgotten just how small the old world was. In those days, long ago in a world now vanished with barely a trace left behind, a village was four or five houses and their outbuildings. A
large
village was maybe ten or fifteen houses at a crossroad, and perhaps an inn or
gasthaus.

No, it was a town, even a moderately large one, on the banks of a sluggish brown river, the capital of a small province in a small country, lost and nearly forgotten—even then—in the immensity of the Central European steppes that stretch endlessly from the Barents Sea to the Black, and from the Urals to France. The nearest electric light was in Prague, hundreds of miles away. Even gaslighting was newfangled and marvelous here, although there were a few rich homes on the High Street that had it. Only the King and the Mayor and a few of the most prosperous merchants had indoor toilets.

The Romans had been here once, and as you followed the only road across the empty steppe toward town, you would pass the broken white marble pillars they had left behind them, as well as a vine-overgrown fane where, in another story, you might have ventured forth at night to view for yourself the strange lights that local legends say haunt the spot, and perhaps, your heart in your throat, glimpsed the misty shapes of ancient pagan gods as they flitted among the ruined columns...but this isn’t that kind of story.

Further in, the road would cut across wide fields of wheat being worked by stooped-over peasants, bent double with their butts in the air, moving forward a step at a time with a sort of swaying, shuffling motion as they weeded, sweeping their arms back and forth over the ground like searching trunks, making them look like some strange herd of small double-trunked elephants, or those men who wear their heads below their navels. The bushes are decorated with crucified rabbits, tarry black blood matting their fur, teeth bared in death agony, a warning to their still-living brethren to stay away from the crops.

As the road fell down out of the fields and turned into the High Street of the town, you would see old peasant women, dressed all in black from head to foot, spilling buckets of water over the stone steps of the tall narrow houses on either side of the narrow street, and then scrubbing the steps with stiff-bristled brooms. Occasionally, as you passed, one or another of the old peasant women would straighten up and stare unwinkingly at you with opaque agate eyes, like a black and ancient bird.

At the foot of the High Street, you would see a castle looming above the river, small by the standards of more prosperous countries elsewhere in Europe, but large enough to have dominated the tactical landscape in the days before gunpowder and cannon made all such places obsolete. It’s a grim enough pile, and, in another story, cruel vampire lords would live there—but this isn’t that kind of story either. Instead of vampires, the King lived there, or lived there for a few months each year, anyway, as he graciously moved his court from province to province, spreading the considerable financial burden of supporting it around.

He was what was called “a good King,” which meant that he didn’t oppress the peasants any more than he was traditionally allowed to, and occasionally even distributed some small largess to them when he was able, on the ancient principle—sound husbandry—that you get more work out of your animals when they’re moderately well-fed and therefore reasonably healthy. So he was a good King, or a good-enough King, at any rate. But in many a dimly-lit kitchen or bistro or backroom bar, the old men of the town huddled around their potbellied stoves at night and warmed their hands, or tried to, and muttered fearfully about what might happen when the Old King died, and his son and heir took over.

But as this isn’t really a story of palace intrigue, either, or only partially so, you must move on to a large but somewhat shabby-genteel house on the very outskirts of town, the kind of neighborhood that will be swallowed by the expanding town and replaced by rows of worker’s flats in thirty years or so. That girl there, sullenly and rather uselessly scrubbing down the flagstones in the small courtyard, is the one we’re interested in.

For the kind of story this
is,
is a fairy-tale. Sort of.

There are some things they don’t tell you, of course, even in the Grimm’s version, let alone the Disney.

For one thing, no one ever called her “Cinderella,” although occasionally they called her much worse. Her name was Eleanor, an easy-enough name to use, and no one ever really paid enough attention to her to bother to come up with a nickname for her, even a cruel and taunting one. Most of the time, no one paid enough attention to even taunt her.

There
was
a step-mother, although whether she was evil or not depended on your point of view. These were hard times in a hard age, when even the relatively well-to-do lived not far from hunger and privation, and if she chose to take care of her own children first in preference to her dead husband’s child, well, there were many who would not blame her for that. In fact, many would instead compliment her on her generosity in giving her husband’s by-blow a place in her home and at her hearth when no law of Man or God required her to do so, or to lift a finger to insure the child’s survival. Many
did
so compliment her, and the step-mother would lift her eyes piously to Heaven, and throw her hands in the air, and mutter modest demurrals.

For one of the things that they never tell you, a missing piece that helps make sense of the whole situation, is that Cinderella was a bastard. Yes, her father had doted on her, lavishing love and affection on her, had taken her into his house and raised her from a babe, but he had never married Eleanor’s mother, who had died in childbirth, and he himself had died after marrying the Evil Step-Mother but
before
making a will that would have legally enforced some kind of legacy or endowment for his bastard daughter.

Today, of course, she would sue, and there’d be court-battles and DNA-testing, and appearances with lots of shouting on daytime talk-shows, and probably she would eventually win a slice of the pie. In those days, in that part of the world, she had no recourse under the law—or anywhere else, since the Church shunned those born in sin.

So the step-mother really
was
being quite generous in continuing to supply Eleanor’s room and board rather than throwing her out of the house to freeze and starve in the street. That she didn’t as well provide much in the way of warmth of familial affection, being icy and remote to Eleanor—the visible and undeniable evidence of her late husband’s love for another woman—on those rare occasions when she deigned to notice her at all, is probably not surprising, and to really expect her to feel otherwise is perhaps more than could be asked. She had problems of her own, after all, and had already gone a long mile further than she needed to just by continuing to feed the child in the first place.

There were step-sisters too, children of a previous marriage (a marriage where the husband had
also
died young...but before you’re tempted to cast the stepmother in a Black Widow scenario, keep in mind that in those days, in that place, dying young was not an especially rare phenomenon), but they were not particularly evil either—although they didn’t much like Eleanor, and let it show. However, they were no more cruel and vindictive—but no less, either—than most young girls forced into the company of someone they didn’t much like, someone of fallen status whom their mother didn’t much like either and made no particular effort to protect. Someone who, truth be told, had probably lorded it over
them,
just a little bit, when she was her father’s favorite and they were the new girls in the household.

Neither were the step-sisters particularly ugly; this is something that came in with Disney, who always equates ugliness with evil. They were, in fact, quite acceptably attractive by the standards of their day.

Although it is true that when Eleanor was around, they tended to dim in her presence, in male eyes at least, as bright bulbs can be dimmed by a brighter one.

Eleanor
was
beautiful, of course. We have to give her that much if the rest of the story is going to make any sense. Like her step-sisters, she had been brought up as a child of the relatively prosperous merchant class, which ensured that she had been well-enough nourished as a babe to have grown up with good teeth and glossy hair and strong, straight bones—unlike the peasants, who were often afflicted with rickets and other vitamin-deficiency diseases.

No doubt she had breasts and legs, like other young women, but whether her breasts were large or small, whether her legs were long or squat, is impossible to tell at this distant point in time.

We can tell from the story, though, that she was considered to be striking, and perhaps a bit unusual; so, since no-one knows what she really looked like, let’s cater to the tastes of our own time and say that she was tall and coltish, with long lovely legs and small—but not
too
small—breasts, a contrast to many around her upon whom a diet consisting largely of potatoes and coarse black bread had imposed a dumpier sort of physique.

Since this tale is set in that part of Central Europe that had changed hands dozens of times in the past few hundred years and was destined to change hands again a few times more before the century was out, with every wave of raping-and-pillaging Romans, Celts, Goths, Huns, Russians, Mongols, and Turks scrambling the gene-pool a bit further, let’s also say that she had red hair and green eyes and a pale complexion, a rare but possible combination, given the presence of Russian and Celtic DNA in the genetic stew. That should make her sufficiently distinctive. (It’s possible, of course, that she
really
looked like a female Russian weight-lifter, complete with faint mustache, or like a walking potato, and you’re welcome to picture her that way instead if you’d like—but if so, you must grant at least that she was a striking and
charismatic
weight-lifter or potato, one who had had men sniffing around her from the time she started to grow hair in places other than her head.)

In truth, like most “beautiful” women, who often are not really even pretty if you can catch them on those rare occasions when their faces are in repose, her allure was based in large part on her charisma and
elan,
and a personality that remained vital and intense in spite of a life that increasingly tried to grind her down.

Eleanor didn’t wait on the others to the degree shown in the Disney version, of course—this was a hard society, and everyone had to work, including the step-mother and the two step-sisters. Much of the cost of maintaining the house (which was not a working farm, regardless of what the stories tell you, too close to the center of town, although they may have kept a few chickens) was defrayed by revenues from land that Eleanor’s father had owned elsewhere, but those revenues had slowly declined since the father’s death, and in order to keep a tenuous foot-hold on the middle-class, they had been forced to take in seamstress work, which occupied all of them for several hours a day.

It’s true, though, that since her father died, two years before, and since revenues had declined enough to preclude keeping servants, that much of the rest of the work of maintaining the household had fallen on Eleanor’s shoulders, in addition to her seamstress chores.

She found it bitterly hard, as would you; in fact, spoiled by modernity, we’d find it even more onerous than she did, and suffer even more keenly. Housework was hard physical labor in those days, especially in the backward hinterlands of Central Europe, where even the (from our perspective) minimal household conveniences that might be available to a rich family in London would not arrive for a long lifetime, or maybe two. Housework was brutal and unrelenting labor, stretching from dawn until well after dusk, the equivalent in its demands on someone’s reserves of strength and endurance of working on a road-gang or in a coal mine; it was the main reason, along with the rigors and hazards of childbirth, why women wore out so fast and died so young. Not for nothing did the phrase “Slaving over a hot stove” come into existence; doing laundry was even worse, a task so grueling—pounding the clothes, twisting them dry, starting over again—that it was rarely tackled more than once a week even in households where there were several women to divide the work up amongst them; and scrubbing, inside or out, was done on your knees in any and all weathers, with a stiff-bristled brush and raw potash soap that stung your nostrils and blistered your hands.

Of course, every other woman in this society, except for the very richest, had to deal with these kind of labors as well, so there was nothing unique about Eleanor’s lot, or any reason to feel sorry for her
in particular,
as the stories sometimes seem to invite us to do...the subtext pretty obviously being that she is an aristocrat-in-hiding, or at least a member of the prosperous upper class, being forced to do the work of a
peasant.
Think of that! Being made to work just like a common, ordinary girl! As if she wasn’t any better than anyone else! (Oddly enough, this reaction of indignation usually comes from people who have to work for a living every day
themselves,
not from whatever millionaires or members of the peerage might be lurking in the audience.)

In fact, though, Eleanor had also been spoiled, not by modernity but by her father, sheltered by his money from most of the chores even a child of the merchant class would usually have had to become inured to...so perhaps she did feel it more keenly than most women of her day would have. Her father had also spoiled her in other, more significant ways, teaching her to read (something still frowned upon, if no longer actively forbidden by law), teaching her to love books and learning, teaching her to dream. Teaching her to be ambitious for what purpose? She had a good mind, and her father had given her the beginnings of a decent education, but what was she supposed to
ambitious—
but
do
with it? Further formal schooling was out of the question, even if there had been money for it—that was for men. All the professions were for men as well. There was nothing she could do, no way her life could change. She was doomed to stay here in this once-loved house she had come to hate, working like a slave day and night for people she didn’t even like, much less consider to be family, until her youth and strength and beauty drained away like water spilled in the street, and she woke up one day to find herself spavined and old.