The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (9 page)

Yes,
the alien thought. 

“I ran across others things, too,” the boy went on, and the alien heard the energy die again, heard in the boy’s voice the suppressive feeling his kind called “despair.” The boy believed that the man named Ortega-Mambay would still kill his sister, and so the boy “despaired.” 

Again the boy hit the keyboard. A new diagram appeared. It was familiar, though the alien had not seen one like it—so clinical, detailed, and ornate—in half a lifetime. 

It was the Antalouan family cluster, and though the alien could not read them, he knew what the labels described: The “kinship obligation bonds” and their respective “motivational weights,” the “defense-need parameters” and “bond-loss consequences” for identity and group membership. There was an inset, too, which gave—in animated three-dimensional display—the survival model human exopsychologists believed could explain all Antalouan behavior. 

The boy hit the keyboard and an iconographic list of the “totemic bequeaths” and “kinships inheritances” from ancient burial sites near Toloa and Mantok appeared. 

“You thought you knew,” the alien said, “what an Antalou feels.” 

The boy kept his eyes on the floor. “Yes.” 

The alien did not speak for a moment, but when he did, it was to say: 

“You were not wrong . . . Tuckey-Yatsen.” 

The boy looked up, not understanding. 

“Your sister will live,” the Antalou said. 

The boy blinked, but did not believe it. 

“What I say is true,” the alien said. 

The alien watched as the boy’s body began to straighten, as energy, no longer suppressed in “despair,” moved through it. 

“It was done,” the alien explained, “without the killing . . . which neither you nor I . . . could afford.” 

“They will let her live?” 

“Yes.” 

“You are sure?” 

“I do not lie . . . about the work I do.” 

The boy was staring at the alien. 

“I will give you the money,” he said. 

“No,” the alien said. “That will not . . . be necessary.” 

The boy stared for another moment, and then, strangely, began to move. 

The alien watched, curious. The boy was making himself step toward him, though why he would do this the alien did not know. It was a human custom perhaps, a “sentimentality,” and the boy, though afraid, thought he must offer it. 

When the boy reached the alien, he put out an unsteady hand, touched the Antalou’s shoulder lightly—once, twice—and then, remarkably, drew his hand down the alien’s damaged arm. 

The alien was astonished. It was an Antalouan gesture, this touch. 

This is no ordinary boy,
the alien thought. It was not simply the boy’s intelligence—however one might measure it—or his understanding of the Antalou. It was something else—something the alien recognized. 

Something any killer needs
. . . . 

The Antalouan gesture the boy had used meant “obligation to blood,” though it lacked the slow unsheathing of the
demoor
. The boy had chosen well. 

“Thank you,” the boy was saying, and the alien knew he had rehearsed both the touch and the words. It had filled the boy with great fear, the thought of it, but he had rehearsed until fear no longer ruled him. 

As the boy stepped back, shaking now and unable to stop it, he said, “Do you have a family-cluster still?” 

“I do not,” the alien answered, not surprised by the question. The boy no longer surprised him. “It was a decision . . . made without regrets. Many Antalou have made it. My work . . . prevents it. You understand. . . .” 

The boy nodded, a gesture which meant that he did. 

And then the boy said it: 

“What is it like to kill?” 

It was, the alien knew, the question the boy had most wanted to ask. There was excitement in the voice, but still no fear. 

When the alien answered, it was to say simply: 

“It is both . . . more and less . . . than what one . . . imagines it will be.” 

The boy named Kim Tuckey-Yatsen stood in the doorway of the small room where he slept and schooled, and listened as the man spoke to his mother and father. The man never looked at his mother’s swollen belly. He said simply, “You have been granted an exception, Family Tuckey-Yatsen. You have permission to proceed with the delivery of the unborn female. You will be receiving confirmation of a Four-Member Family Waiver within three workweeks. All questions should be referred to BuPopCon, Seventh District, at the netnumber on this card.” 

When the man was gone, his mother cried in happiness and his father held her. When the boy stepped up to them, they embraced him, too. There were three of them now, hugging, and soon there would be four. That was what mattered. His parents were good people. They had taken a chance for him, and he loved them. That mattered, too, he knew. 

That night he dreamed of her again. Her name would be Kiara. In the dream she looked a little like Siddo’s sister two floors down, but also like his mother. Daughters should look like their mothers, shouldn’t they? In his dream the four of them were hugging and there were more rooms, and the rooms were bigger. 

When the boy was seventeen and his sister five, sharing a single room as well as siblings can, the trunk arrived from Romah, one of the war-scarred worlds of the Pleiades. Pressurized and dented, the small alloy container bore the customs stamps of four spacelocks, had been opened at least seven times in its passage, and smelled. It had been disinfected, the USPUS carrier who delivered it explained. It had been kept in quarantine for a year and had nearly not gotten through, given the circumstances. 

The boy did not know what the carrier meant. 

The trunk held many things, the woman explained. The small polished skull of a carnivore not from Earth. A piece of space metal fused like the blossom of a flower. Two rings of polished stone which tingled to the touch. An ancient device which the boy would later discover was a third-generation airless communicator used by the Gar-Betties. A coil made of animal hair and pitch, which he would learn was a rare musical instrument from Hoggun VI. And many smaller things, among them the postcard of the Pacific Fountain the boy had given the alien. 

Only later did the family receive official word of the 300,000 inters deposited in the boy’s name in the neutral banking station of HiVerks; of the cache of specialized weapons few would understand that had been placed in perpetual care on Titan, also in his name; and of the offworld travel voucher purchased for the boy to use when he was old enough to use it. 

Though it read like no will ever written on Earth, it was indeed a will, one that the Antalou called a “bequeathing cantation.” That it had been recorded in a spacelock lobby shortly before the alien’s violent death on a world called Glory did not diminish its legal authority. 

Although the boy tried to explain it to them, his parents did not understand; and before long it did not matter. The money bought them five rooms in the northeast sector of the city, a better job for his mother, better care for his father’s autoimmunities, more technical education for the boy, and all the food and clothes they needed; and for the time being (though only that) these things mattered more to him than Saturn’s great moon and the marvelous weapons waiting patiently for him there. 

Kin 

Story Notes 

I’d always been attracted, even as a young writer, to the question of what it would REALLY be like to be a human being in the universe of the Golden Age of Science Fiction—not perhaps to the extreme of Superman needing to use the restroom, but certainly of Batman’s angst in his aloneness—and it was through Harry Harrison’s
Deathworld
trilogy that I first got a glimpse. Heroes and their stories are one thing. We’ve got those hero-patterns wonderfully wired into us, powerfully—as Jung and Campbell (Joseph, not John) and Lord Raglan have all pointed out with awe—determining what we want and need in the stories we read; but we also live in an Age of Reason world of “realism” and of the behavioral sciences, and we want to know what Hercules is feeling when he’s cleaning those filthy stables, and after he embarrasses himself by laughing in the house of death. Harry’s trilogy had its heroes, sure, but its heroes also had their human flaws; and common sense and character-as-destiny ran through them and to such a degree that I was surprised that John Campbell had seen fit to publish them in
Astounding.
But John Campbell was always surprising me. He was a technocrat and rationalist, and yet accepted (for story purposes anyway) something as scientifically soft and woo-woo-ey (at least from a traditional Western scientific experimental-replicability model) as ESP. And when I wrote him a letter about a sleep-deprivation experiment I’d co-directed in high school with two friends (Joe Marciano and the still-interviewed “11 Nights without Sleep!” Randy Gardner), asking if he’d be interested in seeing an article about it, Campbell responded with a long letter raising questions infinitely more interesting and far-reaching than our internationally trumpeted experiment, though that experiment did indeed overturn, with the help of the famous Dr. William Dement of Stanford, a major theory in sleep deprivation at the time. “Kin” was, then, an attempt to evoke the Golden Age in fable-form but to do it as Harry Harrison had done in his trilogy: show that survival is simply that—human beings reaching into themselves to survive even if what they find that allows them to do so isn’t necessarily the most noble traits of human nature. In other words, the boy in this story, though he loved his family, will indeed become an assassin—because it is
in him
to become one. This story originally appeared in the February 2006
Asimov’s
with a wonderful cover by Dominic Harman, and was reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-fourth Annual Collection. 

World of the Wars 

“Not even lichen,” Mr. Turner said to his wife, and Timmothy listened carefully. “All they found was a kind of rust—no lichen.” 

Timmothy knew they were talking about Mars and the astronauts, but he didn’t understand it. 

“What about the Martians?” he asked, his arms crossed on the dinner table in boyish imitation of his father’s. His blond head returned his parents’ stares. 

“No Martians, Tim,” his father mumbled. “And no one ever thought there’d be.” 

“But Jimmy says there are Martians.” 

Neither his mother nor father answered. 

“Jimmy has four books about Martians.” 

His father smiled the kind of smile that always made Timmothy red-faced. 

“Those books are made-up stories,” his mother said. 

“Jimmy says there are Martians. They’re also called ‘aliens.’ ” 

“No aliens in the solar system,” his father said, then paused, and laughed. “Just the black, brown, and yellow aliens moving in next door.” 

His mother gave back a short laugh, and started to get up, with the dishes in hand. 

“I want to see Mars,” Timmothy said quickly. “Can I see it at night?” 

His mother sat back down. “No. We could at one time, about five years ago. It looked like an ordinary star—but it was reddish. You can’t see any stars these days, Timmothy, because of the smog.” 

“Jimmy says you can see Mars at night.” 

“Has he ever seen it?” His father asked the question, and his white face formed a frown. 

“No, but it says in his books that you can see it in the sky.” 

“Smog says you can’t,” his father mumbled, waiting for his wife to clear the table. 

They were right. You couldn’t see any stars at all. Just a hazy yellowish light reflected back down from the smogbanks over Puente. The famous Los Angeles smog. 

Timmothy stood in the bare backyard of the stucco house and looked up at the night, first toward the southern tract-housing hills, then west toward Los Angeles, then north toward the factory where his father worked. 

We could see stars once, about five years ago,
he remembered. Five years ago he had been three years old, and he hadn’t been interested in Mars then. He had never looked up at the night then. 

Returning to the house, through the screen door, and into the living room, he found his father swearing. 

“Who was it?” his mother was saying, standing over the stuffed chair occupied by his father. 

“Cartwright, calling from the plant. Someone started a fire over there at about eight o’clock. It was arson, no doubt about it.” 

“Have there been any demonstrations at the plant recently, Sam?” 

“Around a
shoe
factory? No. But it’s the same kind of people. They wrote things on the walls with red paint, and then started the fire.” 

“What did they say, those things?” asked the boy, remaining by the back door. 

His father looked toward him—but not at him. 

“What did the writing say?” his mother echoed.