The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (13 page)

It has not left this room in years, I know. The scanners were wrong: They saw his children, his immense children, and thought they were the father. It
cannot
leave the room. It fills it so completely that the electronic interfaces it once built between itself and the ship are embedded in its flesh now, have become its very neural wiring, the walls but another skin, the ship’s body inseparable from its own. I smell its breath, which reeks of ancient air, ancient tubing, nutrients that would kill me if I drank them, blood that has been changed by fifty years of Mapping into something no longer blood. 

I do not use the devices. I do not need to. I see him clearly, a reptile with the jaws of a
demeer,
that small, snarling demon of Hamusek no longer than a man’s arm, that nightmare of children scared of the dark:
Don’t let the demeer night-bite!
But this one is huge, a
demeer
-God, feeding on the Darkness. 

Father?
. . . I say. I say it silently, eyes closed, my legs deep in the bones and skin of his children. He can hear me. I can feel his thoughts pass across my own, pass again, curious: 

Who? 

You know me, Father. 

He has taken our “sensitivity”—our “wilderness gifts”—and with the Maps made of them something greater, as I knew he would.
I will talk to him,
I told the Council.
How?
they said, incredulous.
He is no longer human.
 

He was the Master of Maps,
I told them.
I am his son. That is enough
. . . . 

The body shifts. The floors creak. The secretions at the pores dry for an instant. The walls sigh. 

It has, it realizes now, wanted this moment for years, though it has not known why. It has wanted
one
of us to come—one of
the man’s three sons
—to come, to see what the
man
has made, to behold what he believes he is and, by believing, has made of himself. 

Father
. . . I say. 

It does not answer. 

You are not,
I tell him,
what you imagine.
I show it—what it imagines: 

A spark darker than any night burning in a body so inhuman that the gods who made it weep, turn away, deny their creation. 

A father who lets his children feed on his blood, only to consume them himself, in his hunger and hatred. 

A reptile who imagines itself a moth, imagining a moon that just isn’t there. 

Then I show it something else. I show it: 

Three sons and a daughter asleep on their cots in a quiet house, the four lights of their souls, their father in another room, unaware. I show the mother and the daughter dying, the two lights fading—while the three other lights live on. I show him the father again—in another room, larger and darker—unaware of these lights. I show it a man who imagines himself to be a reptile—to be the darkness made by the two lights that have gone out, because he has forgotten his own, and the living three. . . . 

No!
the creature says and the room, the ship, the bones under me shake. I know that if I go on showing it what it
must
not see, it will kill me. 

I show it a pond. I let it hear a singing—
a father’s
— 

The floor buckles, metal pops, the hideous tail moves swiftly through a cloud of bones and scales toward me— 

Is this what you really want?
I ask it. 

I hold up the bone I have brought so that it may see it. It sees what I see in the eye of my mind. 

Bones explode before me in the darkness, the great tail thrashing as it tries to reach me. Splinters rain on my face. Dust fills my lungs. I cry out, dropping the bone, protecting eyes with hands as light explodes inside my skull, goes dark, black bones taking their place, pulling me toward them, toward darkness. 

I am down on my knees in the bones, skin, and scales of his children. I show it a picture of
the man’s daughter
— 

And the jaws—those two reptile yet human heads—scream at me. The tail rushes and I fall again among the bones, hug them to me, feel myself lifted in the air, dropped. I lie coughing in the dust, and in wetter things. 

Tubing has pulled from the walls. The air stinks of nutrients. I hear trickling—down walls, across floors. I am afraid I will touch it—the fluid—that it will burn. 

I cannot breathe. I hold my sleeve to my nose and try, but I cannot. 

I take the container I have brought with me and unscrew the lid.
Do you know—do you know what I have brought with me?
 

It knows—because it sees what I see now—and before the great tail can reach me, to keep me from doing what I must do, I pour the ashes from the container into my hand, raise my hand, and blow them. 

The ashes move as slow as a dream toward the creature—in the darkness here. The ashes mix with the dust. 

I bring you your daughter and your wife. I would bring us
all
to you as dust if I could
— 

The jaws scream again, in harmony. The tail moves through the air— 

Our mother and sister lay in the antiseptic plastic bubbles of their hospital room while the computers of the capitol’s Medical Center—linked by subspace lightcom to the great computers orbiting Tar and Rasi—ran the Changing machines, splicing genes with lasers, accelerating the growth of cells. It took four days, and when the asymptotic malignancies began to appear—when the computers began to scream in alarm—it was too late. The cells were cycling on. Growth without direction. 

I did not see them, but I heard. Organs invading other organs, destroying all boundaries of function, Mapless bodies that could not be reclaimed because they were no longer human, no longer Mappable. Flesh as dark as night. Bone curling within the flesh like pale vines. Noses where there should be none. Tongues where eyes should be. Stomachs that had swallowed hearts. Intestines snaking from every orifice. 

He had wanted to believe that we Hamusek were a perfect marriage of the genetic codons of Caucasian India and Asiatic North America. He had so loved the wilderness legends he had learned as a child
and
the euphony of our Dravidian names, that this is what he wanted. 

For a year he had shown our mother and sister the faces and bodies they might have, calling them up on the screen of his university computer. He had asked them again and again: “What would you like? That proud nose, Ladah? Those high cheekbones to go with your blue-black hair? That smooth forehead, those rounded cheeks, Premila? The epicanthic eyes of one people and the narrow waist, wide hips of the other?
Which?”
He asked them so often that in the end he convinced them that it was indeed what they wanted. To be Changed. To be the first. Because they were our women. “Because,” as he said, “it is
women
that men love.” 

Our mother would say: “What would you like us to be?” 

And our sister would say only: “I want to look like Mother, Father.” 

In the end he had chosen for them, without asking what we—his sons—might want. 

In the investigation—which found no criminal negligence, because of course there had been none—our
true
history as a people appeared. In a cabinet of wood-pulp records so old that they had been forgotten, that they had been lost long before Hamusek’s capitol ever knew its first computer, we found what we were. In the extreme northeast corner of the nation of India, on the continent of Asia, on Earth, there had been a region called Arunchal Pradesh—in the language of its people, “the land of the rising sun.” A world of endless forests, rivers, and mountains, it had been the home of a people of Asiatic stock who believed in the power of animal souls, in nature both Dark and Light. When a neighboring nation took this land, making it Pakistani, the people of Arunchal Pradesh could not abide by it. Their land had been their “India,” and now it was not. After a decade, selling the resources of their wilderness—its oil, coal, and water—to clandestine brokers who cared nothing for national boundaries, the people of Arunchal Pradesh had their money, their corporation, and could leave to find their “new India.” 

They had been the first in Hamusek; the sons and daughters of Asiatic North America, hearing of a wilderness world like Hamusek, had come too—with their legends. Later, the disaffected of a Terran India in constant turmoil had come as well, bringing their legends as well. Legend had been added to legend. At first the descendants of Arunchal Pradesh had not intermarried. As time passed, they had. 

The genetic paradigm of Hamusek had not been a perfect marriage. It had been a Sino-Tibetan Map layered over time with the genes of two continents. It had been one face . . . slowly becoming
two
. 

Like
him
. A single creature. Each face regarding the other. 

A people’s legends, I understand now, are the stories they tell themselves in the darkness to make sense of a universe they do not understand. These stories may be a Light— 

But they are never the true history of their flesh and bone. 

He buried them both on the planet we call The Hand, because that way, he knew, there would at least be
bones
—clear white relics of death, of his shame, his self-hatred. He would be able to think of them lying there in the ground for years, and by thinking, feed the darkness. 

I knew this. I knew this when I went there and dug the bones up. 

When I found the grave outside Clay and dug them up, I was crying, but when I burned them to ash in a kiln in the nearest village, I was not—for I knew it needed to be done. 

The tail strikes the floor near me. Bones leap, striking my face, my chest. I step aside. I blow into my palm once more. The room shakes. I blow and hear a cry. 

The sound becomes something else: Rhythmic, a breathing that cannot find air, a muscle contracting in pain, a human heart on fire. 

The tail rises again, moves, hits me—and I die. 

When I wake, I am not dead, but my left arm is broken, and my left leg, too, perhaps. For a moment I do not know where I am. It is the ship, and yet it is not. I hear the massive breathing, and yet the room is quiet. I hear fluid trickle down walls, yet the tail does not move. A light is growing somewhere in the room and this makes no sense. I think:
Fire?
I think:
Delirium?
 

The room fades. The light grows brighter, and I know this is what the creature wants—that we remember it together: 

He is sitting on the porch at home, overlooking the pond. He is crying and I have never seen him this way. But I have been crying, too. It is noon. The sun is bright. My mother and my sister have died and it is the next day.
I didn’t mean to,
he is saying.
I didn’t know, Rau. I thought
— 

I am sixteen, but I know what I know now. I want to say to him:
You were impatient, Father. You wanted to Change them, to make them the very first, to give them “gifts” everyone could see—as if they were Maps, Father, not human beings, and you the Great Mapmaker. You were so sure. You were so certain that “North American Indian” was the genetic source, because you
wanted
it to be. You
wanted
those legends, and because you did, you didn’t wait . . . You wanted the universe to be what you wanted it to be, Father.
 

Impatience,
I want to tell him,
has never been a Hamusek trait. Nor was it one of
their
traits either, Father.
 

But I do not tell him these things. He is my father. I am his son. 

I must leave,
he says suddenly. 

I do not understand
, I say. I am frightened. 

I cannot live here anymore.
As he says it, I know what he expects: that because I am the eldest, I will tell the others.
I must go, Rau. I must bury your mother and sister where they should be buried, and then . . . and then I
— 

Who will we stay with, Father?
I can barely say it. My voice shakes, too. 

Your aunt and your cousins.
His voice is distant, like a death.
You will all be fine, Rau.
 

I want to go with you,
I say.
Please
. . . . 

No,
he says quietly, and then, I think, he whispers:
I am going where no one else can go, Rau
. . . 

I think I hear him say:
Stay right here, Rau . . . in the light.
 

I do. I sit on the porch—in the midday sun—because he has told me to. I sit there long after he has left.