The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (11 page)

Assassin 

A man is not a woman. . . . 

—Apache saying 

They knew I did not want to be the one to kill it. They knew how difficult it would be for me to do it, and yet I was the one they sent, persuading me as only the Gongaware Council of the First Worlds could have. 

“You understand it better than anyone,” Prihoda Delp, Council Chair, insisted in chambers. “So much of what the creature is, is in you as well, Rau Goni. You know this and we know this and the creature knows it, too. We should never have let matters develop this far, but we did, and now you—more than any engineered mercenary or conscripted soldier or machine we might send—have the best chance to end it.” 

They knew I could not refuse. They did not bother to offer money or starships or livable moons. These I
could
have refused. They offered instead a question: Is it Light or Darkness you believe in, Rau Goni? Which is your destiny—to end it, or at least try—or, by refusing to go, to keep the Darkness alive? 

They knew about my family. They knew about my father, but then who did not? They knew about me—even the time, long ago, when I nearly died on the planet we call The Hand. They knew about my mother’s death and my sister’s, and the day my father left our world to become what he would become. A council like the Gongaware always learns what it needs to learn to do what it must do. 

They did not ask my brothers to go and I know why. 

They had left the creature alone for fifty years. There in its vast ship outside the trade lanes of the First Worlds it had kept its engines still—communicating with no one—and so they had left it alone. After all, it had not been a creature at first; it had been a
man
—a man intent on changing himself, but a man nevertheless. A man with the wealth to purchase such a ship and to outfit it, and the status to demand that he be left alone. He was, after all, Giman Goni—Master Mapper of Hamusek, the genius who had made Change itself possible, who had fathered, by his theoretical models and technological applications, the unique human designs of ten billion citizens on over three hundred worlds, who had become wealthy in the process, and who had, in the end, known tragedy. 

The creature rarely stirred in the bowels of the ship and there had been times when the Council wondered if it were even alive. Yet bioscanners had showed that it was, and now those scanners, passing as close to the ship’s hull as they dared, were reporting how the creature was moving again—moving through the endless corridors of the ship. At this point in time, given what the creature had become, its sanity could not be trusted. I knew this and the Council knew I knew. 

Like all humans today, I could change my body if I wished. Yet I do not. I am in the minority. Even Prihoda Delp has been Changed—a little taller, she confides, eyes both stronger and more compassionate than before, lungs now able to breathe successfully the atmospheres of the five worlds which she must, in her official duties, visit most frequently. 

Perhaps I have chosen to remain the way I am because I am Hamusek, because the Hamusek way of thinking values pride, the dignity of acceptance, and a willingness to work with what one has been given by birth, without complaint—though that same way of thinking, I know, produced my father, his Maps, and Change itself. But it was a vision of a human
community
vast as a galaxy that led him to these things. This is what I tell myself. 

I have told the Council that after I have finished—if I succeed—I wish to return to The Hand, to the graves of my mother and sister. That I wish to live on that odd planet for a year and that I wish only to have my expenses paid for. I do not wish any legacy from him. 

They have agreed. Sometimes I think they may even understand. “Why did he bury them
there,
Rau Goni?” Prihoda Delp has asked me more than once. Why did he bury them there, she means, by the dry seas with their endless sand, on a world where the fish must glide through the air to find water, where mud and molten rock seep through the thin crust, and earthquakes make new mountain ranges even in one’s lifetime. My mother had never visited that world. Why
there
instead of Hamusek? 

I am only seventy years old, while a Council member is two or three times that. I know what I wish, though I do not have the wisdom yet to know why I wish it. So I do what I do, trusting that there is wisdom. 

The clearest image they have—twenty years old, a lucky bioscan through the thinnest section of the hull—shows a creature with two heads, each facing the other, each with what we imagine is the ability to speak. One face is dark—like space itself. The other, white as a moon. The hair that grows from both skulls changes, at the waist, into scales—the long scales of a serpent from our oldest, deepest dreams. The blue-black hair is dark enough that we imagine it shines, as it does on so many Hamusek. The long tail, whose purpose eludes all who have studied it, is as thick around as the creature’s trunk; and living things that can only be the creature’s children (each no larger than my hand) cling to its tail, their legs limp, their hairy heads buried in the pores of its chitinous hide, perhaps feeding, perhaps asleep. 

The long, articulated fingers on the creature’s two hands end in talons made of metal—the same metal that shines on the two foreheads and leads, by wires, to the walls. 

The image is grainy, but experts have studied its shadows for years. Attempts to obtain other images have failed. The creature has not ventured so near the hull again, remaining instead deep within the ship, making the ship hum in ways only a living thing could, and now, at last, starting to move again through the endless corridors. 

No creature is simply an image.
There is another Light,
as our father used to say.
The Light within—without which no living thing has meaning.
 

Or the darkness within,
I would say to him now. 

The image is motionless on the Council’s screen. None of the Council members speak. I close my eyes and see a darkness. In the darkness I see a light moving like a moth in moonlight at Hanabata’s Pond when I was a child, my father’s voice beside me, sometimes speaking, sometimes singing, sometimes silent. The light moves fitfully through the darkness on a path only it understands as it seeks a greater Light, and, failing, accepts the Darkness. 

“No living thing,” my father says to me in the night—the northern winds quiet, his eyes on me as I stare toward the mountain ranges where even now few people live—“can look for the Light forever, not find it, and not be changed, Rau.” 

I keep my eyes closed. I see the moth begin to transform. I see its abdomen lengthen, become a tail snaking into the night—dark as night—and the head split slowly in two until the two faces turn to gaze at each other (because, after all, there is nothing in the darkness to see except ourselves). 

I open my eyes, but still see it. The moth gives birth to children who will never leave it, who will stay forever, sucking blood from its tail . . . because, after all, in the darkness there is nothing for us to eat except ourselves. And my father says: 

“If we look long enough and do not find it, it does not exist—or that is what we believe, and by believing it, make it so. . . .” 

He had made his discoveries by then, built his “changeable maps” of human genes and found his Light. My mother and sister were still alive and yet this was how he talked to me that night, as if he knew what might happen. 

I was thirteen. He was fifty. I did not have the words to argue with him, though I knew I should. 

The ship the creature inhabits—the ship now so much a part of it—is a third-generation, 300-kiloton lodeship, the kind used in the era of raw-ore mining five centuries ago when such ships needed armament and the starlock system did not exist. My father bought it in “deadspace mothballs,” as they say, just outside the orbit of The Singing, fifth planet of the star called Hallock. There he kept it, orbiting the red giant and soon forgotten by the human children of that system. But the Council did not forget. They knew what a man like Gon—that brain, that vision—might be capable of . . . especially if he were insane. They knew, too, what a ship like that would be capable of—if he kept it operable or somehow managed to improve it. 

The ship is three times its original size now and no longer looks like a ship. Like its lone inhabitant, it has been changing itself, adding to its mass, reconceiving its shape—all at the creature’s whim, all with metal it had obtained in the first decade by purchasing other mothballed ships, and, in later years, by mining with its motile machines the thin belt of asteroids just inside Hallock’s sixth world. The purchase of dead ships was easier for it, I am sure, but the corporations and private owners, at the request of the Council, stopped selling at last, and mining one’s own metal on free territory does offer privacy. Do the citizens of The Singing and The Dancing, I sometimes wonder, have any idea what that man has become? 

Two-kilometer-long alloy extrusions that make no sense to those who have studied them point toward Hallock itself, while a third extrusion, not unlike a tail, points toward the darkness of space—the space between stars—as if to say:
Do not be fooled; even a star is nothing.
 

I remember him saying more than once: 

The things we make, Rau . . . we become.
 

The ship’s engines were simple at first: sub-lock sequential tokomaks. But they too have changed. Those hired by the Council to study the sounds at a safe distance do not understand what they hear at the heart of the ship, and even now, in Council chambers, I can hear them argue. Is the creature
itself
now the engine? Is the creature’s organic heart now the heart of the ship, the rhythms we hear the rhythms any ship would make if it had such a heart? Has the creature built an organic analog for the ship—for its body and its brain? Has he been laughing at everyone, making of himself—and the ship—but a terrible joke? Is this the greatest
art
any human being has ever made? Or is this metal-and-flesh thing he has spent half a century shaping simply what he believes
he
is in the eyes of God? 

Even the weapons are different. The standard beams that a lodeship might need in more lawless times to defend itself are gone. In their place, on the hull that is no longer a hull—that glitters with a moving mosaic of alloy plates not unlike scales—there are photon weapons that appear powerful enough to annihilate entire ships, though the energy to do it would drain even a ship like this. There are weapons that appear to be neutron-casters only—weapons made to kill living things without destroying precious ships and cities. There are even weapons pointed inward, at the heart of the ship itself, unmovable. “What are these for?” the Council asks me and I do not answer. Do I tell them what I have dreamed—that the weapons are connected, that if one is fired, all will fire? 

“I do not think they are weapons,” I say at last. I do not say: “I believe they are voices waiting to scream.” I do not say: “They are a simple equation between life and death. To kill is to be killed. . . .” 

Only a Hamusek—and one who has seen a light extinguished in the night—would know what I mean. 

When he would sing to me, it would be the oldest songs on Hamusek, the ones our people brought with them to our world five hundred years ago, the ones we have sung even as we have changed to fit our world, even as we have remained the same, true to ourselves. We are, after all, tall and dark-skinned, with blue-black hair—descendants of the families of a small corporation called “New India” whose employees specialized in exploratory support for Terra-type or Terra-formed worlds—in other words, scouts, trackers, surveyors, clearers, outposters, and “wilderness sensitives.” Whether we came from the dark-skinned Caucasian people of the Terran state of India or from the Asiatic “Indians” of Terra’s North America, we could not be sure. There were legends—the kind father loved—but legends hide the truth. We could, of course—in the strange ways of history—have come from both. 

My father
knew
. In the end, after the tragedy, my father’s Maps certainly showed him. But in the daily lives of Hamusek’s children, the genetic truth has never mattered. We have characteristics of both peoples. They have served us well. The legends live on, and we sing the songs. 

Like all young children in the towns and cities, I had grown up hearing their melodies, their feelings, without understanding their strange words. As I got older I began to ask what the words meant, and as I learned, I explained them to my younger brothers, Toth and Gram. Our father would sing the song first in the old language, the way he would for my mother, who loved his voice, and then he would sing it again, in words
we
could understand. 

He would sing to us on the banks of Hanabata’s Pond, in the cool night, on the streets of Seventh City, in his office at the polytechnic university when we visited him. He would sing of things that did not feel like Hamusek, because indeed they had once belonged to another world. 

The song I remember best was his favorite. He would begin by saying solemnly: “This is a song about a love that even death could not extinguish. In this song a woman’s lover drowns and comes back to her as a ghost. When she sees him, she says to him—”