Edited by, p.26
Edited By, page 26
Without answering Paul crossed the room to the balcony. The argala seemed to have forgotten all about them. It stood with one leg drawn up, staring down at the empty courtyard, its topaz eyes glittering. As he drew near to it its smell overwhelmed him, a muskier scent now, almost fetid, like water that had stood too long in an open storage vessel. He felt infuriated by its utter passivity, but somehow excited, too. Before he knew what he was doing he had grabbed it, just as Claude had, and pulled it to him so that its bland child’s face looked up at him rapturously.
Afterwards he wept, and beside him the argala crooned, mimicking his sobs. He could dimly hear Claude saying something about leaving, then his friend’s voice rising and finally the snick of the door sliding open and shut. He grit his teeth and willed his tears to stop. The argala nestled against him, silent now. His fingers drifted through its thin hair, ran down its back to feel its wings, the bones like metal struts beneath the breath of down. What could a bird possibly know about what he was feeling? he thought fiercely. Let alone a monster like this. A real woman would talk to you, afterwards.
To complain, he imagined his father saying.
…never enjoyed it, ever, his mother’s voice echoed back, and Father Dorothy’s intoned, That’s what’s wrong with it, it’s like a machine.
He pulled the argala closer to him and shut his eyes, inhaling deeply. A wash of yellow that he knew must be sunlight: then he saw that ghostly image of a house again, heard faint cries of laughter. Because it was a woman, too, of course; otherwise how could it recall a house, and children? but then the house broke up into motes of light without color, and he felt the touch of that other, alien mind, delicate and keen as a bird’s long bill, probing at his own.
“Well! Good afternoon, good afternoon…”
He jumped. His father swayed in the doorway, grinning. “Found my little friend again. Well, come in, come in.”
Paul let go of the argala and took a few unsteady steps. “Dad—I’m sorry, I—”
“God, no. Stop.” His father waved, knocking a bottle to the floor. “Stay, why don’t you. A minute.”
But Paul had a horrible flash, saw the argala taken again, the third time in what, half an hour? He shook his head and hurried to the door, face down.
“I can’t, Dad. I’m sorry—I was just going by, that’s all—”
“Sure, Sure.” His father beamed. Without looking he pulled a wine jelly from a shelf and squeezed it into his mouth. “Come by when you have more time, Paul. Glad to see you.”
He started to cross to where the argala gazed at him, its huge eyes glowing. Paul ran from the room, the door closing behind him with a muted sigh.
At breakfast the next morning he was surprised to find his mother and Father Dorothy sitting in the twins’ usual seats.
“We were talking about your going to school in Tangier,” his mother announced, her deep voice a little too loud for the cramped dining hall as she turned back to Father Dorothy. “We could never meet the quotas, of course, but Mother pulled some strings, and—”
Paul sat next to her. Across the table, Claude and Ira and the twins were gulping down the rest of their breakfast. Claude mumbled a goodbye and stood to leave, Ira behind him.
“See you later, Father,” Ira said, smiling. Father Dorothy waved.
“When?” said Paul.
“In a few weeks. It’s nearly Athyr now”—that was what they called this cycle—”…which means it’s July down there. The next drop is on the Fortieth.”
He didn’t pay much attention to the rest of it. There was no point: his mother and Father Dorothy had already decided everything, as they always did. He wondered how his father had ever been able to get the argala here at all.
A hand clamped his shoulder and Paul looked up.
“—must go now,” Father Dorothy was saying as he motioned for a server to clean up. “Class starts in a few minutes. Walk with me, Paul?”
He shook his mother’s hand and left her nodding politely as the next shift of diners filed into the little room.
“You’ve been with it,” the tutor said after a few minutes. They took the long way to the classroom, past the cylinders where vats of nutriment were stored and wastewater recycled, past the spiral stairs that led to his father’s chamber. Where the hallway forked Father Dorothy hesitated, then went to the left, towards the women’s quarters. “I could tell, you know—it has a—”
He inhaled, then made a delicate grimace. “It has a smell.”
They turned and entered the Solar Walk. Paul remained at his side, biting his lip and feeling an unexpected anger churning inside him.
“I like the way it smells,” he said, and waited for Father Dorothy to look grim. Instead his tutor paused in front of the window. “I love it.”
He thought Father Dorothy would retort sharply; but instead he only raised his hands and pressed them against the window. Outside two of the HORUS repair units floated past, on their interminable and futile rounds. When it seemed the silence would go on forever, his tutor said, “It can’t love you. You know that. It’s an abomination—an animal—”
“Not really,” Paul replied, but weakly.
Father Dorothy flexed his hands dismissively. “It can’t love you. It’s a geneslave. How could it love anything?”
His tone was not angry but questioning, as though he really thought Paul might have an answer. And for a moment Paul thought of explaining to him: about how it felt, how it seemed like it was showing him things—the sky, the house, the little creatures crawling in the moss—things that perhaps it did feel something for. But before he could say anything Father Dorothy turned and began striding back in the direction they’d come. Paul hurried after him in silence.
As they turned down the last hallway, Father Dorothy said, “It’s an ethical matter, really. Like having intercourse with a child, or someone who’s mentally deficient. It can’t respond, it’s incapable of anything—”
“But I love it,” Paul repeated stubbornly.
“Aren’t you listening to me?” Father Dorothy did sound angry, now. “Itcan’t loveyou.” His voice rose shrilly. “How could something like that tell you that it loved you!? And you can’t love it—god, how could you love anything, you’re only a boy!” He stopped in the doorway and looked down at him, then shook his head, in pity or disgust Paul couldn’t tell. “Get in there,” Father Dorothy said at last, and gently pushed him through the door.
He waited until the others were asleep before slipping from his bunk and heading back to his father’s quarters. The lights had dimmed to simulate night; other than that there was no difference, in the way anything looked or smelled or sounded. He walked through the violet corridors with one hand on the cool metal wall, as though he was afraid of falling.
They were leaving just as he reached the top of the spiral stairs. He saw his father first, then two others, other researchers from the Breeders Project. They were laughing softly, and his father threw his arms around one man’s shoulders and murmured something that made the other man shake his head and grin. They wore loose robes open in the front and headed in the opposite direction, towards the neural sauna. They didn’t see the boy pressed against the wall, watching as they turned the corner and disappeared.
He waited for a long time. He wanted to cry, tried to make himself cry; but he couldn’t. Beneath his anger and shame and sadness there was still too much of that other feeling, the anticipation and arousal and inchoate tenderness that he only knew one word for, and Father Dorothy thought that was absurd. So he waited until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and went inside.
His father had made some feeble attempt to clean the place up. The clothing had been put away, and table tops and chairs cleared of papers. Fine white ash sifted across the floor, and there was a musty smell of tobacco beneath the stronger odors of semen and wine jelly. The argala’s scent ran through all of it like a fresh wind.
He left the door open behind him, no longer caring if someone found him there or not. He ran his hands across his eyes and looked around for the argala.
It was standing where it usually did, poised on the balcony with its back to him. He took a step, stopped. He thought he could hear something, a very faint sound like humming; but then it was gone. He craned his neck to see what it was the creature looked at but saw nothing; only that phantom flicker of red in the corner of his eye, like a mote of ruby dust. He began walking again, softly, when the argala turned to look at him.
Its eyes were wide and fervent as ever, its tangerine mouth spun into that same adoring smile; but even as he started for it, his arms reaching to embrace it, it turned from him and jumped.
For an instant it hung in the air and he could imagine it flying, could almost imagine that perhaps it thought its wings would carry it across the courtyard or safely to the ground. But in that instant he caught sight of its eyes, and they were not a bird’s eyes but a woman’s; and she was not flying but falling.
He must have cried out, screamed for help. Then he just hung over the balcony, staring down at where it lay motionless. He kept hoping that maybe it would move again but it did not, only lay there twisted and still.
But as he stared at it it changed. It had been a pale creature to begin with. Now what little color it had was leached away, as though it were bleeding into the concrete; but really there was hardly any blood. Its feathers grew limp, like fronds plucked from the water, their gold fading to a grey that was all but colorless. Its head was turned sideways, its great wide eye open and staring up. As he watched the golden orb slowly dulled to yellow and then a dirty white. When someone finally came to drag it away its feathers trailed behind it in the dust. Then nothing remained of it at all except for the faintest breath of ancient summers hanging in the stale air.
For several days he wouldn’t speak to anyone, not even responding to Claude’s cruelties or his father’s ineffectual attempts at kindness. His mother made a few calls to Tangier and, somehow, the drop was changed to an earlier date in Athyr. On the afternoon he was to leave they all gathered, awkwardly, in the dormitory. Father Dorothy seemed sad that he was going, but also relieved. The twins tried to get him to promise to write, and Ira cried. But, still without speaking, Paul left the room and walked down to the courtyard.
No one had even bothered to clean it. A tiny curl of blood stained the concrete a rusty color, and he found a feather, more like a furry yellowish thread than anything else, stuck to the wall. He took the feather and stared at it, brought it to his face and inhaled. There was nothing.
He turned to leave, then halted. At the corner of his eye something moved. He looked back and saw a spot on the ground directly beneath his father’s balcony. Shoving the feather into his pocket he walked slowly to investigate.
In the dust something tiny wriggled, a fluid arabesque as long as his finger. Crouching on his heels, he bent over and cupped it in his palm. A shape like an elongated tear of blood, only with two bright black dots that were its eyes and, beside each of those, two perfect flecks of gold.
An eft, he thought, recognizing it from the natural history book and from the argala’s vision. A juvenile salamander.
Giant Indian stork, feeding upon crustaceans and small amphibians.
He raised it to his face, feeling it like a drop of water slithering through his fingers. When he sniffed it it smelled, very faintly, of mud.
There was no way it could have gotten here. Animals never got through by-port customs, and besides, were there even things like this still alive, Below? He didn’t know.
But then how did it get here?
A miracle, he thought, and heard Father Dorothy’s derisive voice—How could something like that tell you that it loved you? For the first time since the argala’s death, the rage and despair that had clenched inside him uncoiled. He moved his hand, to see it better, and with one finger stroked its back. Beneath its skin, scarlet and translucent, its ribs moved rapidly in and out, in and out, so fine and frail they might have been drawn with a hair.
An eft.
He knew it would not live for very long—what could he feed it, how could he keep it?—but somehow the argala had survived, for a little while at least, and even then the manner of its dying had been a miracle of sorts. Paul stood, his hands folding over the tiny creature, and with his head bowed—though none of them would really see, or understand, what it was he carried—he walked up the stairs and through the hallway and back into the dormitory where his bags waited, past the other boys, past his mother and father and Father Dorothy, not saying anything, not even looking at them; holding close against his chest a secret, a miracle, a salamander.
Note by Elizabeth Hand about the story:
I wrote this amidst my first three novels and wanted to use their milieu as a backdrop. Connie Willis’s “All My Darling Daughters” has a nice space station setting, which also seemed like a good idea: I liked the notion of an insular culture giving birth to its own sexual depravities, which over time would come to be considered normal. The rest was just spun out of the fictional history of my novels’ Ascendants and their geneslaves.
Cavafy’s work has seen me through four novels, now, and innumerable stories; the title of this one was taken from his poem of the same name. In the ancient Egyptian calendar, Athyr is the month which corresponds roughly to our October, the traditional time to honor the dead.
In the Month of Athyr
Elizabeth Hand’s “In the Month of Athyr” has always been one of my favorite of her stories. Alien and sexual and disturbing, it’s not for nothing I drifted into editing horror, as even my science fiction choices are often downbeat. Liz’s story is one of those. The novelette was originally in Omni Best Science Fiction Two and was published in 1992. Check out her afterword for influences.
Precious
by Nalo Hopkinson
(From Silver Birch, Blood Moon, 1999)
I stopped singing in the shower. I kept having to call the plumber to remove flakes of gold and rotted lilies from the clogged drain. On the phone I would say that I was calling for my poor darling cousin, the one struck dumb by a stroke at an early age. As I spoke, I would hold a cup to my chin to catch the pennies that rolled off my tongue. I would give my own address. If the plumber thought it odd that anyone could manage to spill her jewelry box into the bathtub, and not just once, he was too embarrassed to try to speak to the mute lady. I’m not sure what he thought about the lilies. When he was done, I would scribble my thanks onto a scrap of paper and tip him with a gold nugget.
I used to talk to myself when I was alone, until the day I slipped on an opal that had tumbled from my lips and fractured my elbow in the fall. At the impact, my cry of pain spat a diamond the size of an egg across the room, where it rolled under the couch. I pulled myself to my feet and called an ambulance. My sobs fell as bitter milkweed blossoms. I hated to let the flowers die. Holding my injured arm close to my body, I clumsily filled a drinking glass with water from the kitchen and stuck the pink clusters into it.
The pain in my elbow made me whimper. Quartz crystals formed on my tongue with each sound, soft as pudding in the first instance, but gems always hardened before I could spit them out. The facets abraded my gums as they slipped past my teeth. By the time the ambulance arrived, I had collected hundreds of agonized whimpers into a bowl I had fetched from the kitchen. During the jolting ride to the hospital, I nearly bit through my lip with the effort of making no sound. The few grunts that escaped me rolled onto the pillow as silver coins. “Ma’am,” said a paramedic, “you’ve dropped your change. I’ll just put it into your purse for you.” The anesthetic in the emergency room was a greater mercy than the doctors could imagine. I went home as soon as they would allow.
My father often told me that a soft answer would turn away wrath. As a young woman I took his words to heart, tried to lull my stepmother with agreeableness, dull the edge of her taunts with a soft reply. I went cheerfully about my chores and smiled till my teeth ached when she had me do her daughter, Cass’s, work too. I pretended that it didn’t burn at my gut to see mother and daughter smirking as I scrubbed. I always tried to be pleasant, and so of course I was pleasant when Cass and I met the old woman while we were shopping that day. She was thirsty, she said, so I fetched her the drink of water, although she seemed spry enough to run her own errands. Cass told her as much, scorn in her voice as she derided my instant obedience.
Sometimes I wonder whether that old woman wasn’t having a cruel game with both of us, my sister and me. I got a blessing in return for a kind word, Cassie a curse as payment for a harsh one. That’s how it seemed then, but did the old lady know that I would come to fear attention almost as much as Cass feared slithering things? I believe I would rather taste the muscled length and cool scales of a snake in my mouth, sliding headfirst from my lips, than look once more into the greedy gaze of my banker when I bring him another shoebox crammed with jeweled phrases, silver sentences, and the rare pearl of laughter.
Jude used to make a game of surprising different sounds from me, to see what wealth would leap from my mouth. He was playful then, and kind, the husband who rescued me from my stepmother’s greed and wrath. My father’s eyes were sad when we drove away, but he only waved.
Jude could make me smile, but he preferred it when I laughed out loud, raining him with wealth. A game of tickle would summon strings of pearls that gleamed as they fell at our feet. Once, a pinch on my bottom rewarded him with a turquoise nugget. He had it strung on a leather thong, which he wore around his neck.
But it was the cries and groans of our lovemaking that he liked best. He would stroke and tongue me for hours, lick and kiss me where I enjoyed it most, thrust into me deeper with each wail of pleasure until, covered in the fragrance of crushed lily petals, we had no strength for more. Afterward he would collect sapphires and jade, silver love knots and gold doubloons, from the folds of the sheets. “I don’t even need to bring you flowers,” he would joke. “You speak better blossoms for yourself than I can ever buy.”
