I Am an Executioner (34 page)

“That case has been closed,” replied Barhoeven, his tan, wrinkled face blushing red. “I wondered, actually, if I might talk to Nippima.”

“But she is still asleep. What is it regarding?”

He began pacing about the burrow, examining the dirt walls—unfortunately, I have no chairs at hand for human callers. He said: “It seems a visiting student went missing from the Higher Academy three days ago.”

“But what should Nippima know about that?”

He parsed his words carefully. “Apparently she took him for a flight a number of times. I just wanted to ask if she knew anything.”

“She takes many people for flights, Barhoeven. They are her clients.”

Of course, I feared I knew to whom he was referring—there are not very many visiting students, and my Nippima knows fewer. I thought of her unpleasant state three days ago, the dried blood from climbing, when I discovered her along the via. It was an unhappy coincidence. The bug of anxiety entered my abdomen. Immediately, my parental instincts told me that Barhoeven had better not know about it, at least not until I had talked it over with Nippima.

“She’s still asleep, I’m afraid.”

He finally ceased meandering about the burrow and stood in front of me. “Thoren, I wouldn’t bother you if I didn’t have to. Probably he just went camping in the gorge and didn’t tell his roommates, but he was here on a Government of Earth scholarship. His parents said he usually calls twice a day. A lot of people are already breathing down my neck about it.”

But Nippima was just a child, no less vulnerable than the missing human, and I must protect her.

“I’m so sorry, Barhoeven. Please come back another time.”

Now I saw Barhoeven’s pearly eyes flicker with frustration. He could have chosen to be more forceful with me, could have threatened to invoke the compulsion of law. But he considered my unperturbed face and decided not to press forward at the present moment.

Instead he changed direction.

“Why don’t
you
talk to me, then, Thoren? I understand the three of you enjoyed a meal together at the Grand Royale?”

Now
my
feelers were the ones to twitch—it is disconcerting to realize the extent to which one is observed in the course of a seemingly private day—but I quickly regained my composure.

“
That
boy is the one who went missing? Oh, dear. But it was just a nectar, not a whole meal,” I said, for I did not see any purpose in denying it. Barhoeven had begun walking again, and was bending now toward the entrance to my basement, inhaling the air from there. “A perfectly civil cup of nectar. It was nothing dastardly. Do you think I am keeping him bound in my workshop, Barhoeven?”

Inspector Barhoeven turned to face me and started to laugh, and so I laughed, too. For a long moment, we stood there laughing.

I found it hard to appraise Barhoeven’s mood. He had become emotionally unsteady since the death of his mate, whose body Nippima herself prepared for funeral. That is a trauma that we local beings are thankfully spared—to lose a mate after many years of matrimony. I believe Nippima did a good job for Barhoeven, that he was comforted by the ceremony. Her craftsmanship was beyond surpass: she smoothed away Sroot’s fungal scars, filled up and painted the abdomen in vibrant, youthful hues, made a garland of the organs. And yet one is always concerned about aliens. Will they understand our rituals? Will they find them grotesque? Will they feel included? Sroot was Barhoeven’s mate, after all, and he could have chosen to conduct the leave-taking in Earthling style. But he has shown little interest in clinging to the ways of his home planet. I asked him at the funeral—because I had always wondered—“Barhoeven, do you miss Earth?” He answered: “I have nobody there anymore.”
But here he stood having lost his closest local relation. Who was left for him here? He had not convinced me that his journey had been worthwhile.

At any rate, I described to Barhoeven my meeting with the Earthling; he explained to me the circumstances under which the boy had gone missing; and then he left, promising to come back for a visit with Nippima.

When my child finally emerged from her room, I confronted her. “What exactly happened between you and the Earthling?” She stood at the edge of the kitchen, abjectly dabbing at the porridge I had cooked for her. “Inspector Barhoeven came here. He said the boy had gone missing.”

Her mouth opened, and she let out a short moan.

“Do you know anything about it? Have you been in touch? They are searching all over. They may start scanning the riverbed. The Earthlings have even requested permission to send a vehicle to the bottom of the gorge. Do you know anything that could help them to find him?”

“I don’t know anything, Ka,” she told me—to my enormous relief. Of course, I did not suspect her of anything; but one does not want to become even peripherally entangled in such situations involving Earthlings. “We decided not to see each other, and that’s the last I spoke to him.”

Having eaten a bit of the porridge, she was sliding her sunglasses into her pocket again. She was in a hurry to leave. “Where are you going now?” I asked.

“Out.”

“Out?”

And with that, she opened the portal.

A child does not tell a parent everything. It has never happened and it never will. And even if they were to tell us, would we understand what they had to say? Nippima is a being of uncommon
intelligence and talent, beyond even my ability to comprehend. That much is clear. I sometimes feel that I myself had only the slightest involvement in the process. I impregnated my mate and out came a small white egg, who grew into this remarkable creature. I created something bound to exceed me—I have known her from birth, yet I have no idea of what she is capable—and something bound to frustrate me, for no other being is capable of causing me so much worry and pain.

I thought, All that has happened is that a youth has gone missing. Either he would return, or he would be transformed—those were the options, as I saw them. It has never been different. We can only try to take good care of them, help them become wise and strong enough to understand their world—or what lies beyond their world, as the case may be.

“They have retrieved his wallet, his clothes,” I called to Nippima. “Several humans have told the Inspector they’d seen you together.”

I don’t know if she heard me. She rose into the trees, her purple iridescence flickering softly against the dark calthus leaves of the jungle, disappearing.

The next day would be Eth’s leave-taking, and so I had work to do. I descended to my workshop. It was very cool there, but I had placed the body on ice for good measure. It was therefore still well preserved. I had cleaned Eth and minimally composed her, but she was sadly the same mangled corpse that was found at the side of the via five days ago.

It took me most of the afternoon to assemble the coffin. I left off the lid and postponed transferring the body inside it until I could ask Nippima’s assistance, later in the day or the next morning.

But Nippima did not come home that afternoon. I sat in the kitchen, reading and waiting for her. At some point in the evening, I fell asleep on the floor of the kitchen. In the earliest predawn, I suddenly woke to the sound of some being clattering
about downstairs in my workshop. It must have been Nippima. What could she be doing down there on her own? It was most curious. I listened through the floor for some time, wondering if I should go to check on her. But I was nervous to intrude, and decided finally not to disturb her, to go to my room and take a few hours’ sleep.

I woke the next morning, the morning of Eth’s leave-taking, to silence. Crawling down to my workshop to complete my preparations, I cautiously peered inside. Nippima was not there. I was surprised to see that Eth’s body was not there either, but that the coffin was completely built, its cover closed.

How strange. It was a lot of work for Nippima to have done by herself. I approached the box, ran my feeler along the joints and seams; it was beautifully constructed. I pried my feeler beneath the edge; I supposed I could open it and see inside, appraise the condition of Eth’s body, how Nippima had managed to place her. But may I confess a foolish thing? I felt frightened to look. Possibly because of my poor sleep, some strange thoughts passed through my head.

I decided to wait for Nippima to wake and come out from her room. I ascended to the kitchen to find that Orlip and his two siblings had already arrived and were waiting patiently outside my burrow. I invited them inside. Now there was no more time—the ceremony should soon begin. I went to the portal of Nippima’s room; from inside, I heard the sounds of her hoarse slumber. But I could not wait for her to wake and prepare herself. I asked Orlip and his siblings to help me load the coffin into the craft.

It was enormously heavy; I had not recalled Eth being so massive. But we managed to move it, sliding it snugly into the back of my hearse. And together we drove off, the four of us, toward the gorge’s edge.

•   •   •

I am not a religious being. The last time I visited a temple was when my parent still lived. I don’t know what happens after a person dies; I suppose I don’t really care. But I know the body. The body does everything wisely: growth, healing from injury. Even decay is a sort of intelligence. Even disease; even death.

Die that you may live:
I know that Jesus taught this. When we look at a corpse, we see all that the person was; but there is no person anymore. It is a mystery inside of a fact. We see what it was: an elaborate and subtle mechanism; something entirely contingent and slight, part of some wider logic which it can no longer even glimpse; a manifestation and a dupe of nature. We see nothing.

Bodies do not disappear; they are only transformed. I was here in this city when a being was known to beat his children, to beat them mercilessly. Why does a creature do that to those whom he loves most? I abhor violence. I have tried to teach this to Nippima. And one of those poor children bought a concentrated gun from the Earthlings and shot his parent dead. How can a child gather the will to do that to the being who gave him life? And then that child turned the weapon on his sibling, and then on himself. When it was all done, they brought the bodies to me. Did I understand better what had happened; did those bodies explain a thing to me? The living beings had been unhappy, confused, hurt, rageful, entirely unfulfilled. These silent bodies were content. They were complete. That is what I understood.

I thought of my own mate’s body, at the end of three weeks: a crumbling hull of abdomen, a rustle of cartilage beneath loose felt, a sightless face. Parts of her must still be there, beneath the floor of our burrow. Perhaps there are other ways of living; perhaps there is love without such pain—the humans would like to teach us this. Or perhaps we should accept the strange wisdom of the body.

We arrived at the lip of the gorge; I hovered my craft the merest inch above a grassy clearing. I saw that Orlip had grown emotional during the ride here, and as we slid out the coffin, his feelers were shaking. We set the box on the grass, and the poor child shook his head and beat one of his feelers upon the wood. He was most upset.

“I want to see her,” he said. “Uncover her.”

“Orlip, that would not be a very good idea.”

It appeared a group of humans had wandered out from the whispering trees a few yards from where we stood. They wore bubble helmets and bright orange bodysuits. They held a basket with bottles of vine rum, and a blanket. They saw us; they saw the casket. They were terribly intrigued. They settled down in the grass and pretended not to watch us.

Now Orlip was prying up the lid of the coffin with his strong feelers. I was horrified.

“It was a bad accident, Orlip. It would not be well for you to see her.”

But he ignored me. I tried to physically restrain him—his siblings staring in dismay—but Orlip was too strong. I looked at his twisted face: he had none of his parent’s orderliness, her finesse. Children are monsters, strange versions of ourselves, and we love them as fiercely as they grieve us with fear. The plank finally broke open with a resounding snap. And we both stared inside:

Eth had been restored. The hole in her torso was no longer there. Her abdomen was full, enormous as it had been in life, more so. And brighter, all its faded color returned. Her proboscis was as if healed, her face clean and beautiful, covered with thick felt, the glorious round golden eyes open, staring at us, each cell individually lacquered as if lit from within. All her teeth were somehow intact, and she was smiling enigmatically—a trick of imperceptible threads.

In her left feeler, she grasped her own blue heart. In her right feeler, she held the necklace of her intestine: a body that had triumphed
over the body, a being beyond fear and death. Nippima had done this, using her own resources.

Orlip looked at me, his mouth hanging open.

“Thank you. You gave her a display.”

We are just a small planet, and we must all look out for one another, beings and aliens, parents and children, and the children for the parents no less.

“So it appears, Orlip.”

We agreed now to do away with the excess of the coffin, and even of the craft. We slid her out onto the grass, and conducted the simplest of ceremonies. Orlip poured a drop of nectar into his parent’s mouth, and I sang a brief elegy, something generic in the old tongue, which Orlip and his siblings perhaps didn’t even understand. Looking at their rapt, youthful faces, I considered that while change is inevitable, the old ways still have some logic, and we do well to pass them on, in some degree, to our children. It gratified me that Nippima seemed to have understood this. And then the three of us put our shoulders up into her and hoisted her up. Her weight was incredible; thank goodness Orlip and his siblings were nearly as big as Eth was. We flapped as hard as we were able, until we took flight.

Think of life as a story. Each one must come to an end, for it to have form and meaning. What gives life to the stories are the bodies at the end of them.

Together, we lurched out over the wide purple gash, farther than we should have dared, and let her drop. Our bodies flew up with the loss of that weight, and we stayed there hovering. I thought of Nippima, in her room, sleeping. Let her enjoy her sleep. She had done fine work, for Eth looked content as she floated softly toward the flowering vines and thickets of the purple valley below.