I Am an Executioner (31 page)

Later that morning, in the basement workshop at my burrow, I began to remove the fragments of wood from the terrible hole in Eth’s abdomen. Palmena and I had had quite a job of removing the body from the tree and transferring her into my craft, as Barhoeven intermittently wept and called directions from the ground. The inspector had been sent here by the Government of Earth nearly fifteen years ago, as an adviser to our nascent police force. He fell in love with a local being—a brave thing to do, at that time—and together they adopted an orphan larva, who entered the Special Learning Academy just this year; a new kind of family, two parents of different species, both of whom live past mating. But Barhoeven’s female died of sugar fungus two years ago, leaving him increasingly strange, unpredictably emotional.

Through the mud ceiling above my workshop, I heard my child clattering out of her room. How good that she had woken before first noon. I rely on her help very much; she has a gift for the work, her efficiency and craftsmanship far exceeding mine. I crawled up to the kitchen to greet her. She was beginning to take her breakfast. From the glowing sheen of her face, I could see that she had slept—this relieved me. Last night, I’d been woken by her agitated footsteps clomping about at strange hours. She has only recently begun to manifest as female, and the change seems to have disrupted her sleep and darkened her moods.

“You are just in time, Nippima. We have a job today.”

Nippima bent down to sip nectar straight from the pot I had cooked and left on the hot plate; then she imbibed from a bowl of aphid porridge that I had masticated for her and placed in a
covered dish on the floor. She ate so quickly and thoughtlessly that I wondered: Does she realize that someone has prepared her breakfast and kept it specially; that someone has thought of her, that someone is always thinking of her?

She looked up at me. “Ka, I don’t have time to help you.”

“Why? You have big plans for the day?”

Now she twitched her feelers indifferently—an irritating gesture.

“Speak up.”

“I’m going to the river,” she mumbled over her porridge. Her abdomen full, she shoved the dirty dishes into the corner, stood upright, and walked toward the portal.

Nippima is a beautiful, fine-featured female, considerably taller than I am; her segmented abdomen swirls with the rich reds, oranges, and aquamarines of youth. Her wings are taut, iridescent, and her features remind me so much of my mate’s: her dark, straight proboscis, perfectly round eyes, and long feelers. Moreover, Nippima is a true artisan—unlike myself, whose clumsy feelers would have been better suited to a hundred professions less exacting than the one I was born into. But perhaps all this is parental pride speaking.

At the portal, she condescended at last to look at me, giving me just a hint of her beguiling smile. “I’ve got clients,” she said.

Of late, Nippima has begun to neglect her calling, taking it into her head to attempt a side business of her own, serving as a tour guide for the Earthlings. She hangs about the riverside resorts and cafés until she finds some gullible youth who will allow himself to be tied to her abdomen. Then she flies out over the river, into the jungle, down the vast purple gorge, until she and her passenger are both quite breathless. These “clients” pay Nippima with scraps of foil; they buy her a cheap meal and some nectar back at the resort. She talks about all this very seriously, as if she were the planet’s great business tycoon, burrowing away large piles of foil for future investments. But I see that it is all a pretext for consorting with males. I suspect
Nippima already has some particular friend she hasn’t told me about—isn’t it inevitable? Yet no prospect worries me more profoundly.

“I would appreciate your assistance today, Nippima. Poor Eth died this morning, struck by a craft. Do you recall: her son Orlip was behind you in academy?”

She paused near the portal, remembering.

“Orlip always used to admire you. You tutored him in English and he invited you to his molting ceremony, but you didn’t attend. You remember, right?”

She flipped one of her feelers up to indicate,
Yes. Of course, yes
.

“You might also recall, then, that the poor boy’s mother was enormous. My back has been giving me trouble, and you are much stronger than I am. Not to mention that the corpse is terrifically mangled; your skills may be required.”

She seemed to shudder and look away from me, feelers folded, eyes vibrating with disgust. Then she picked up her strapped sunglasses from the floor and slid them into the pocket of her absurd, Earth-style miniskirt, cut wide for her bottom six legs. She was wearing colored anklets above her feet; her right feeler was constricted by a tight, ornamental ring.

“Sorry, Ka. I said I can’t.”

“Of course you can. What are you going to do, wasting your time at the resorts?”

She shrugged her feelers again and began walking away.

“You lazy being. Stay!” I wrapped my feeler around one of her legs, my frustration getting the better of me, but she easily pulled free of my grip.

“Jesus, Ka!”

Jesus?

Then she stepped out of the portal, kicking it closed behind her with a snap. I heard her wings flapping as she floated off into the green.

•   •   •

I have taken a long time to learn to be a parent to Nippima, and I fear that she has not had the easiest time under my care. When she was young I spoiled her, and now I struggle to find the balance between softness and sternness. We beings don’t like to differentiate between male and female parents, but I sometimes wish for Nippima that my mate had lived, for she might have understood our child in ways that are foreclosed to me. But fate has taken its own route, and we must do our best with what we are given.

Late that afternoon, Eth’s child Orlip called on me to discuss arrangements. After squeezing his huge body through my portal, he clasped my feelers and awkwardly bowed.

I have found that some family members treat me with exaggerated respect in times of grief, as if I were a healer or a priest—and perhaps in a manner I am a little of both. I am in any case intimate witness to their last act of care for the loved one, and so they may feel compelled to convince me of their sorrow and rectitude.

“I am so sorry, Orlip. It was an unfortunate accident.”

Orlip unburdened his body to the floor and nodded abjectly, his proboscis dripping saline. I outlined to him his options for the arrangements. When he asked me, I explained the costs. When he heard the figures, he didn’t flinch or question me, but instead simply seemed to stop breathing for a moment, his feelers drooping to the ground.

“I know it seems a lot, Orlip. But unfortunately, in this case a great deal of work will be required if the display is to be a dignified one.” Orlip dabbed his saline from the floor with a feeler, then twined the feeler snugly around the end of his proboscis to stem the flow—a child’s gesture in a grown being’s body. I saw in his anxious countenance that he would like to pay, but was frightened of the expense.

Orlip works at the Heavenly Paradise, as his parent had. He, too, is a janitor there. It is hard work; I wonder if this is what Eth had hoped for her children when she brought them all those years ago from the jungle’s interior, as my parent once did. In the interior, life also would have been hard, but Orlip at least would have had elders nearby. They would have advised him in such tasks as arranging this funeral, calling on a preparer like myself only for the final touches. Those days are far in the past, for better or for worse, and Orlip is on his own, with only siblings to help him.

After we finished our discussion, I guided the youth to the portal and unsnapped it. As he made his way out and lofted his broad body into the air, I saw Nippima’s tall form approaching just below the tree line, returning from her day’s activities. The two young beings stopped in midair and hovered near to each other. I could not hear the words that passed between them, these childhood friends grown distant. Nippima has long stopped spending time with her classmates from academy, hardworking, sincere beings like Orlip. She is a willful creature, nothing like I was at her age. These days, Earthlings are the ones who seem to catch her eye.

After a brief moment, Orlip flapped slowly away, naked to the world. And Nippima, my child, alighted near the portal, shaking the dust and pollen from her wings.

“Did you offer your condolences to poor Orlip?” I asked.

Nippima looked at me with a hard glitter in her eyes—to indicate how stupidly condescending my question was? Or to show how little she thought of condolences, how poorly she rated the gravity of a young being’s losing a parent?

My suspicions regarding Nippima were confirmed, indeed, the very next day. I had flown my craft into town to transact for ice. More and more, I rely on my craft for such small errands. My
wings are not what they used to be, or perhaps I have simply grown lazy in late middle age, unwilling to endure the heat of the suns.

When I first moved here, the commercial center consisted of just a few treetop stalls along the river bend, but the Earthlings relocated these businesses to a cleared area along an inlet, now congested with translucent pods in which are hawked every variety of goods. The pods are thronged with Earthlings during high tourist season. The riverbank, meanwhile, has been reserved for a growing number of resorts, some dug into the soil in grand imitation of our own burrows, others rising up in undulating waves of latticework steel. Meanwhile, farther downstream, away from this picturesque bend in the river, the Earthlings have installed their mineral extraction operations.

I hovered my craft in the parking-sky over the commercial center and descended. By the time I finished transacting and had loaded the ice into my craft, I was exhausted and badly in need of a nectar. Unwilling to wait until I returned home, I resigned myself to visiting an overpriced café at one of the resorts.

I settled on the Lodge Grand Royale, a relatively modest glass-and-adobe structure. Leaving my craft with the valet, I descended to the human concierge, who walked me through the main building toward the café. I stepped carefully to avoid leaving sticky footmarks on the floor’s polished terra cotta. At the café, the female offered me a nice table on a balcony overlooking the river, pulling back a chair for me to sit in. A chair! I glanced about to see that the two or three other local beings were also sitting in chairs like Earthlings, so I, too, forced myself awkwardly backward into the angular wooden contraption.

From the balcony, I looked out at the wide, glassy river: the suns were at their fierce peak. Few swimmers had braved the heat, if even for a dip, and the river’s edge was quiet. As I sipped my nectar, I opened a book I had brought with me—I have been making a study of the classics of human-English literature:
Conrad; the Bible; Amy Tan. When I looked up from my reading, I saw walking through the café’s entrance a very striking couple: a young, broad-shouldered alien male in cloth pants and shirt, sunglasses. He had not bothered with a bubble helmet or bodysuit, which could have meant he had been here long enough to have developed resistances, or merely that he possessed the eager fearlessness of the young. The local female accompanying him wore a light flowing skirt. As poorly suited as clothes are for our bodies (I myself felt a buffoon in my six-legged pants, reserved exclusively for these outings into town), looking at this tall local female, for a moment, I understood their appeal. I admired the way the white skirt set off crisply the red-orange-blue of her abdomen, the captivating flutter of the soft fabric among her several limbs, how it veiled and revealed the form of her long legs. I admired her as any aging being enjoys an image of distant youth. The young female was staring away from me; she seemed to be laughing and chatting amiably with the handsome alien, the two of them thoroughly carefree.

I wondered, when I was young, why did I not take nectar with such females? Why was I never at my ease? Why didn’t I dress in a bold manner and enjoy life at expensive alien hotels? It would have been nearly unthinkable at that time, yet I regret it. Instead, I stayed dutifully in my burrow, helping my parent to prepare corpses, until I met my mate, who would be my first and only female.

It was several moments before the young being near the entrance turned three-quarters in my direction, and I realized that I was staring with longing at my own Nippima! How disconcerting for a parent, when he begins to see his child as a stranger. I observed the couple quietly for a moment, now with a parent’s pride and a parent’s panic, to see his beloved as she is seen by others, as just another being in the world. I was gratified to note at least that Nippima was comporting herself as a decent young being, standing her ground impressively among
the Earthlings. Still, I was anxious that she should not make any mistakes. I noted her every move almost as if it were myself there, my presence in her body.

Nippima and the Earthling were waiting to be seated. Now she turned in my direction; our eyes met; her smiling, happy face went slack, her feelers unfurled to the ground, her mouth fell open in utter dismay. Allow me to say, it is
not
a nice feeling to be greeted by one’s child with such a look. In any case, I raised my feeler in greeting, but she shook her head to discourage me from communicating further.

I realized that I had been mistaken: she was not charming and confident and at her ease. Instead, she was hanging on by the barest of threads, just maintaining the plausible appearance of comfortable dignity in front of the handsome Earthling. But now the human himself had also turned and detected the transaction of glances between my daughter and myself. Some whispered words passed between them, and then his own mouth fell open, widening to a grin. Meanwhile, Nippima’s behavior had altered so completely; she could not meet the eyes of the boy with whom she had just now been having free conversation.

“Mr. Thoren!” called the human.

I smiled, nodded in modest acknowledgment. He took Nippima’s feeler and guided her in my direction. I rose in welcome. When they drew close, I touched them both, effortfully maintaining a warm smile.