Vanishing acts, p.7
Vanishing Acts, page 7
They had been allowed to join the expedition because they had wangled money from a pop star to look for new tribes of Indians. There were still plenty to be found in the Amazonian basin, even at this late stage in its exploitation. The forests really were very extensive and very close grown. A hundred people, the size of most Indian tribes, living off the land in a small area, could stay hidden until some prospector or logger stumbled into them by accident. Just a couple of years ago, a jaguar hunter had been murdered, shot with an arrow, when he had encountered a hunting party of a previously unknown tribe, and a subsequent aerial survey had spotted the tribe’s huts, almost invisible beneath the close-knit forest canopy. Like all recently discovered tribes, it had been left alone; the late twentieth century was as toxic to these Stone Age indigens as poison gas. The whole area had been declared off-limits.
That was what the Danes hoped for here, and they were pretty certain now that this was a very special tribe indeed.
They met at the standing stone. Sky was naked again, as were his mother and father. Sky had smeared the green juice of berries on his face and bare chest. He had knotted a black T-shirt around his head to hide his blond hair. He told his parents what had happened, and Ken nodded and asked what the botanist woman had seen.
“They didn’t come into the open until she was halfway up the cliff,” Sky said. “I reckon she didn’t see too much. But one of the climbers got away too, and I don’t know what he saw.”
Ken scratched at the pelt on his chest. He was a stocky man, with a broad nose and a shock of wiry hair. “Well, it’s a risk,” he said, “but not a bad one. The others will be too scared to look around much.”
Sky thought about how Amy had found him, and her questions, but kept silent. He trusted her; she had been the only one who had tried to understand this place.
“They’ll think it’s just Indians,” his wife said. “They don’t have the imagination for anything else.”
“We’ll wait here a while I reckon,” Ken said. “When the fuss has died down we’ll see what’s left of the supplies, and then we can begin.”
They sat in green shadow a little way from the standing stone. “They ran from everyone,” Kerry said dreamily, leaning against her husband.
“It was the first great extinction,” Ken said. “They were killed just like my people were killed when the Europeans came to Australia. They were hunted for sport because it was easier to think of them as animals than accept that people come in many different forms. Homo sapiens has done a lot of harm in its time, but that was the beginning of it all.”
“Some got away,” Kerry said. “Think how far they came! They were pushed further and further from Africa.”
“Or Java,” Ken said.
“They must have been the first to cross from Asia to Alaska,” Kerry said, “but the modern humans followed and pushed them farther. Until they ended up here, with the other relic species.”
“Something’s coming,” Sky said, and at the same moment the first of them stepped out of the darkness between the cycads.
“Steady,” Ken said. “Remember we’re not like the others.”
The figure which confronted them was small and stooped yet muscularly broad, and covered in a reddish pelt. Its feet clutched the earth; one leathery hand clutched a sapling whittled into a spear. Little eyes glinted under the shelf of its brow; its nose was broad and bridgeless; there was no chin beneath its wide mouth. It made no signal, but suddenly there were others behind it.
Sky and Ken and Kerry slowly got to their feet. Naked, they held out their hands to show that they had no weapons, that they were no threat, and waited for judgment.
Paul McAuley is the author of more than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella, and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. His fiction has won several prizes, including Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. After working as a research biologist and university lecturer, he is now a full-time writer, and lives in North London. His latest novel, a post-anthropocene First Contact fable, is Beyond the Burn Line.
THE GIRL WHO LOVED ANIMALS
BRUCE MCALLISTER
They had her on the seventeenth floor in their new hi-security unit on Figueroa and weren’t going to let me up. Captain Mendoza, the one who thinks I’m the ugliest woman he’s ever laid eyes on and somehow manages to take it personally, was up there with her, and no one else was allowed. Or so this young lieutenant with a fresh academy tattoo on his left thumb tries to tell me. I get up real close so the kid can hear me over the screaming media crowd in the lobby and see this infamous face of mine, and I tell him I don’t think Chief Stracher will like getting a call at 0200 hours just because some desk cadet can’t tell a privileged soc worker from a media rep, and how good friends really shouldn’t bother each other at that time of the day anyway, am I right? It’s a lie, sure, but he looks worried, and I remember why I haven’t had anything done about the face I was born with. He gives me two escorts—a sleek young swatter with an infrared Ruger, and a lady in fatigues who’s almost as tall as I am—and up we go. They’re efficient kids. They frisk me in the elevator.
Mendoza wasn’t with her. Two P.D. medics with sidearms were. The girl was sitting on a sensor cot in the middle of their new glass observation room—closed-air, antiballistic Plexi, and the rest—and was a mess. The video footage, which four million people had seen at ten, hadn’t been pixeled at all.
Their hi-sec floor cost them thirty-three million dollars, I told myself, took them three years of legislation to get, and had everything you’d ever want to keep your witness or assassin or jihad dignitary alive—CCTV, microwave eyes, pressure mats, blast doors, laser blinds, eight different kinds of gas, and, of course, Vulcan minicannons from the helipad three floors up.
I knew that Mendoza would have preferred someone more exciting than a twenty-year-old girl with a V Rating of nine point six and something strange growing inside her, but he was going to have to settle for this christening.
I asked the medics to let me in. They told me to talk into their wall grid so the new computer could hear me. The computer said something like, “Yeah, she’s okay,” and they opened the door and frisked me again.
I asked them to leave, citing Welfare & Institutions Statute Thirty-eight. They wouldn’t, citing hi-sec orders under Penal Code Seven-A. I told them to go find Mendoza and tell him I wanted privacy for the official interview.
Very nicely they said that neither of them could leave and that if I kept asking I could be held for obstruction, despite the same statute’s cooperation clause. That sounded right to me. I smiled and got to work.
Her name was Lissy Tomer. She was twenty-one, not twenty. According to Records, she’d been born in the East Valley, been abused as a child by both sets of parents, and, as the old story goes, hooked up with a man who would oblige her the same way. What had kept County out of her life, I knew, was the fact that early on, someone in W&I had set her up with an easy spousal-abuse complaint and felony restraining-order option that needed only a phone call to trigger. But she’d never exercised it, though the older bruises said she should have.
She was pale and underweight and wouldn’t have looked very good even without the contusions, the bloody nose and lip, the belly, and the shivering. The bloody clothes didn’t help either. Neither did the wires and contact gel they had all over her for their beautiful new cot.
But there was a fragility to her—princess-in-the-fairy-tale kind—that almost made her pretty.
She flinched when I said hello, just as if I’d hit her. I wondered which had been worse—the beating or the media. He’d done it in a park and had been screaming at her when Mendoza’s finest arrived, and two uniforms had picked up a couple of C’s by calling it in to the networks.
She was going to get hit with a beautiful post-traumatic stress disorder sometime down the road even if things didn’t get worse for her—which they would. The press wanted her badly. She was bloody, showing, and very visual.
“Has the fetus been checked?” I asked the sidearms. If they were going to listen, they could help.
The shorter one said yes, a portable sonogram from County, and the baby looked okay.
I turned back to the girl. She was looking up at me from the cot, looking hopeful, and I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what she thought I could do for her.
“I’m your new V.R. advocate, Lissy.”
She nodded, keeping her hands in her lap like a good girl.
“I’m going to ask you some questions, if that’s all right. The more I know, the more help I can be, Lissy. But you know that, don’t you.” I grinned.
She nodded again and smiled, but the lip hurt.
I identified myself, badge and department and appellation, then read her her rights under Protective Services provisions, as amended—what we in the trade call the Nhat Hanh Act. What you get and what you don’t.
“First question, Lissy: Why’d you do it?”
I asked it as gently as I could, flicking the hand recorder on. It was the law.
I wondered if she knew what a law was.
Her I.Q. was eighty-four, congenital, and she was a Collins psychotype, class three dependent. She’d had six years of school and had once worked for five months for a custodial service in Monterey Park. Her Vulnerability Rating, all factors factored, was a whopping nine point six. It was the rating that had gotten her a felony restraint complaint option on the marital bond, and County had assumed that was enough to protect her … from him.
As far as the provisions on low-I.Q. cases went, the husband had been fixed, she had a second-degree dependency on him, and an abortion in event of rape by another was standard. As far as County was concerned, she was protected, and society had exercised proper conscience. I really couldn’t blame her last V.R. advocate. I’d have assumed the same.
And missed one thing.
“I like animals a lot,” she said, and it made her smile. In the middle of a glass room, two armed medics beside her, the media screaming downstairs to get at her, her husband somewhere wishing he’d killed her, it was the one thing that could make her smile.
She told me about a kitten she’d once had at the housing project on Crenshaw. She’d named it Lissy and had kept it alive “all by herself.” It was her job, she said, like her mother and fathers had jobs. Her second stepfather—or was it her mother’s brother? I couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter—had taken it away one day, but she’d had it for a month or two.
When she started, living with the man who’d eventually beat her up in a park for the ten o’clock news, he let her have a little dog. He would have killed it out of jealousy in the end, but it died because she didn’t know about shots. He wouldn’t have paid for them anyway, and she seemed to know that. He hadn’t been like that when they first met. It sounded like neurotransmitter blocks, MPHG metabolism. The new bromaine that was on the streets would do it; all the fentanyl analogs would, too. There were a dozen substances on the street that would. You saw it all the time.
She told me how she’d slept with the kitten and the little dog and, when she didn’t have them anymore, with the two or three toys she’d had so long that most of their fur was worn off. How she could smell the kitten for months in her room just as if it were still there. How the dog had died in the shower. How her husband had gotten mad, hit her, and taken the thing away. But you could tell she was glad when the body wasn’t there in the shower anymore.
“This man was watching me in the park,” she said. “He always watched me.”
“Why were you in the park, Lissy?”
She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and gave me a smile, the conspiratorial kind. “There’s more than one squirrel in those trees. Maybe a whole family. I like to watch them.”
I was surprised there were any animals at all in the park, You don’t see them anymore, except for the domesticates.
“Did you talk to this man?”
She seemed to know what I was asking. She said, “I wasn’t scared of him. He smiled a lot.” She laughed at something, and we all jumped. “I knew he wanted to talk to me, so I pretended there was a squirrel over by him, and I fed it. He said, Did I like animals and how I could make a lot of money and help the animals of the world.”
It wasn’t important. A dollar. A thousand. But I had to ask.
“How much money did he tell you?”
“Nine thousand dollars. That’s how much I’m going to get, and I’ll be able to see it when it’s born, and visit it.”
She told me how they entered her, how they did it gently while she watched, the instrument clean and bright.
The fertilized egg would affix to the wall of her uterus, they’d told her, and together they would make a placenta. What the fetus needed nutritionally would pass through the placental barrier, and her body wouldn’t reject it.
Her eyes looked worried now. She was remembering things—a beating, men in uniforms with guns, a man with a microphone pushed against her belly. Had her husband hit her there? If so, how many times? I wondered.
“Will the baby be okay?” she asked, and I realized I’d never seen eyes so colorless, a face so trusting.
“That’s what the doctors say,” I said, looking up at the side arms, putting it on them.
Nine thousand. More than a man like her husband would ever see stacked in his life, but he’d beaten her anyway, furious that she could get it in her own way when he’d failed again and again, furious that she’d managed to get it with the one thing he thought he owned—her body.
Paranoid somatopaths are that way.
I ought to know. I married one.
I’m thinking of the mess we’ve made of it, Lissy. I’m thinking of the three hundred thousand grown children of the walking wounded of an old war in Asia who walk the same way.
I’m thinking of the four hundred thousand walljackers, our living dead. I’m thinking of the zoos, the ones we don’t have anymore, and what they must have been like, what little girls like Lissy Tomer must have done there on summer days.
I’m thinking of a father who went to war, came back, but was never the same again, of a mother who somehow carried us all, of how cars and smog and cement can make a childhood and leave you thinking you can change it all.
I wasn’t sure, but I could guess. The man in the park was a body broker for pharmaceuticals and nonprofits, and behind him somewhere was a species resurrection group that somehow had the money. He’d gotten a hefty three hundred percent, which meant the investment was already thirty-six grand. He’d spent some of his twenty-seven paying off a few W&I people in the biggest counties, gotten a couple dozen names on high-V.R. searches, watched the best bets himself, and finally made his selection.
The group behind him didn’t know how such things worked or didn’t particularly care; they simply wanted consenting women of childbearing age, good health, no substance abuse, no walljackers, no suicidal inclinations; and the broker’s reputation was good, and he did his job.
Somehow he’d missed the husband.
As I found out later, she was one of ten. Surrogates for human babies were a dime a dozen, had been for years. This was something else.
In a nation of two hundred eighty million, Lissy Tomer was one of ten—but in her heart of hearts she was the only one. Because a man who said he loved animals had talked to her in a park once. Because he’d said she would get a lot of money—money that ought to make a husband who was never happy, happy. Because she would get to see it when it was born and get to visit it wherever it was kept.
The odd thing was, I could understand how she felt.
I called Antalou at three A.M., got her mad but at least awake, and got her to agree we should try to get the girl out that same night—out of that room, away from the press, and into a County unit for a complete fetal check. Antalou is the kind of boss you only get in heaven. She tried, but Mendoza stonewalled her under P.C. Twenty-two, the Jorgenson clause—he was getting all the publicity he and his new unit needed with the press screaming downstairs—and we gave up at five, and I went home for a couple hours of sleep before the paperwork began.
I knew that sitting there in the middle of all that glass with two armed medics was almost as bad as the press, but what could I do, Lissy, what could I do?
I should have gone to the hotel room that night, but the apartment was closer. I slept on the sofa. I didn’t look at the bedroom door, which is always locked from the outside. The nurse has a key. Some days it’s easier not to think about what’s in there. Some days it’s harder.
I thought about daughters.
We got her checked again, this time at County Medical, and the word came back okay. Echomytic bruises with some placental bleeding, but the fetal signs were fine. I went ahead and asked whether the fetus was a threat to the mother in any case, and they laughed. No more than any human child would be, they said. All you’re doing is borrowing the womb, they said. “Sure,” this cocky young resident says to me, “it’s low-tech all the way.” I had a lot of homework to do, I realized.
Security at the hospital reported a visit by a man who was not her husband, and they didn’t let him through. The same man called me an hour later. He was all smiles and wore a suit.
I told him we’d have to abort if County, under the Victims’ Rights Act, decided it was best or the girl wanted it. He pointed out with a smile that the thing she was carrying was worth a lot of money to the people he represented, and they could make her life more comfortable, and we ought to protect the girl’s interests.
