The good new stuff, p.32
The Good New Stuff, page 32
“Are we an Enlightened race, or are we not?” The Incarnation’s voice was stern.
“You are Bodhisattva.” Grudgingly. “All know this.”
“We are Enlightened. The Buddha commands us not to take life. If these are not facts, our existence has no purpose, and our civilization is a mockery.” O’Neill’s screams provided eerie counterpoint to his voice. The Incarnation’s many arms pointed at the members of the Cabinet. “You may arm in order to deter attack. But if the Sang begin a war, you must promise me to surrender without condition.”
“Yes!” Taisuke, still facedown, wailed from her obeisance. “I promise, Omniscient.”
“The Diamond Mountain will be the greatest prize the Sang can hope for. And the Library is the Buddha. When the time is right, the Library will incarnate itself as a Sang, and the Sang will be sent on their path to Enlightenment.”
“Save yourself, Omniscient!” Taisuke wailed. The roar of flames had drowned O’Neill’s screams. Jigme felt sparks falling on his shaven head.
“Your plan, sir!” Daddy Carbajal’s voice was desperate. “It might not work! The Sang may thwart the incarnation in some way!”
“Are we Enlightened?” The Incarnation’s voice was mild. “Or are we not? Is the Buddha’s truth eternal, or is it not? Do you not support the Doctrine?”
Daddy Carbajal threw himself down beside Jigme. “I believe, Omniscient! I will do as you ask!”
“Leave us, then. Kyetsang and I wish to be alone.”
Certainty seized Jigme. He could feel tears stinging his eyes. “Let me stay, Omniscient!” he cried. “Let me die with you!”
“Carry these people away,” said the Incarnation. Hands seized Jigme. He fought them off, weeping, but they were too powerful: he was carried from the burning pavilion. His last sight of the Incarnation was of the Gyalpo Rinpoche and Kunlegs embracing one another, silhouetted against flame, and then everything dissolved in fire and tears.
And in the morning nothing was left, nothing but ashes and the keening cries of the traitor O’Neill, whom the Bodhisattva in his wisdom had sent forever to Hell.
Jigme found !urq there, standing alone before O’Neill, staring at the figure caught in a webwork of life support and nerve stimulators. The sound of the traitor’s endless agony continued to issue from her torn throat.
“There will be no war,” Jigme said.
!urq looked at him. Her stance was uncertain.
“After all this,” Jigme said, “a war would be indecent. You understand?”
!urq just stared.
“You must not unleash this madness in us!” Jigme cried. Tears rolled down his face. “Never, Ambassador! Never!”
!urq’s antennae twitched. She looked at O’Neill again, rotating slowly in the huge wheel. “I will do what I can, Rinpoche,” she said.
!urq made her lone way down Burning Hill. Jigme stared at the traitor for a long time.
Then he sat in the full lotus. Ashes drifted around him, some clinging to his zen, as he sat before the image of the tormented doctor and recited his prayers.
Maureen F. McHugh
THE MISSIONARY’S CHILD
Born in Ohio, Maureen F. McHugh spent some years living in Shijiazhuang in the People’s Republic of China, an experience that has been one of the major shaping forces on her fiction to date. Upon returning to the United States, she made her first sale in 1989, and has since made a powerful impression on the SF world of the nineties with a relatively small body of work, becoming a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as selling to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Alternate Warriors, Aladdin, and other markets.
Not prolific by the high-production sausage-factory standards of the field, McHugh has nevertheless enjoyed the distinction of publishing some of the very best stories of the late eighties and nineties, especially such profound and disturbing stories as “Protection,” “Nekropolis,” and “The Lincoln Train,” which won her a Hugo Award in 1996, although even her “second-string” stories such as “Baffin Island,” “The Queen of Marincite,” “Whispers” (with David B. Kisor), “In the Air,” “The Beast,” and “A Coney Island of the Mind” would be the envy of many another writer. Many of these stories take her into territories far beyond the range of the Planetary Adventure, but she can write those too when she sets her mind to it, as well or better than it’s ever been done by anybody, as shown by stories such as “Strings,” the recent Nebula finalist “The Cost to Be Wise,” and the suspenseful, sly, and sardonic adventure that follows, “The Missionary’s Child,” a story with strong echoes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr., and others, but one which demonstrates a voice and vision that are McHugh’s alone. A story that shows us that sometimes even when you are determinedly minding your own business, it’s hard to stay out of trouble … and that sometimes it’s when you’re not looking for anything that you find something that’s the most worth finding … .
Although she’s expert at shorter lengths, much of McHugh’s reputation has been made with her novels. In 1992 she published one of the year’s most widely acclaimed and talked-about first novels, China Mountain Zhang, which won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the Lambda Literary Award, and the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award, and which was named a New York Times Notable Book as well as being a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards. Her most recent book, the novel Half the Day Is Night, received similar critical acclaim. Upcoming is a new novel, Mission Child, set on the same world as “The Missionary’s Child” and “The Cost to Be Wise.” She lives in Twinsburg, Ohio, with her husband, her son, and a golden retriever named Smith.
“Are you blind?” the woman asks.
I’m looking right at her. “No,” I say, “I’m foreign.”
Affronted, the woman straightens up in a swirl of rose-colored robe and chouli scent, clutching her veil. Here in the islands, they don’t see very many blond-haired, blue-eyed barbarians; people have asked me if I can see normally, if all northerners are blue-eyed. But this is the first time someone has ever asked me that. Maybe she thinks that my eyes are filmed, like the milky-white of old people.
She thought I was begging—I must look pretty tattered. I should have said yes, then I could go get something to drink, get out of the sun. I’m sitting down by the water. I’m broke, and I’ve been hungry for awhile, and I’m listless and a little stupid from the heat and lack of food. I feel fifty instead of thirty-one.
I should go back to the hiring area, wait around with a couple of other thugs for some sort of nasty work. I should oil my sword. It’s a waste of time; no one needs a mercenary here, the Celestial Prince doesn’t hire foreigners in his army.
But I don’t want to go back. Up in the market, some yammerhead had been rattling on about our Cousins from the stars. The Cousins haven’t come to the islands in any numbers yet, and I’ll wager he’s never met any. Listening to this stonker gave me a headache. Wouldn’t he be surprised if he knew that the Cousins think of us all about the way the woman who asked me if I was blind thinks of me. They think that we’re barbarians. They think that we’re stupid because we call what they do magic instead of science. Or they feel sorry for us.
I know better than thinking bitter; time to head back to the market, see if anybody will hire a tokking foreigner to dig ditches or something.
But I sit, my head aching with hunger and heat, too stupid to do anything about it. And I’m still sitting there a dine later, the sun is still high in the sky baked the color of celedon. Not awake, not asleep.
I’m going to have to start selling my gear, the slow road to starvation.
I open my eyes and watch a ship come in on the deep green sea. It has red eyes rimmed in violet and violet sails; from far away, I can see a person wearing dark clothes that are all of one piece. A Cousin, standing at the prow. On the boathouse there is a light, star-magic, like a third eye, blind and white. Here in the islands, when you see Cousins, they are with the rich and the powerful.
What would the Cousin think if I spoke a little of his/her language? I only remember a few phrases. “Hello,” “My name is,” and a phrase from my lessons, “Husband and wife Larkin have three children, a boy and two girls.” Would the Cousin be curious enough to take me aboard? Recognize the debt for what the Cousins did to my kin, help me get back to the mainland?
The ship docks, three guildmen and a Cousin disembark, and come down the quay. Southerners will stare at any foreigner, but they stare double at a Cousin, and who can blame them? The Cousin is a woman, with her hair uncovered, dressed like a man, but not looking like a man, no. That amuses me. Southern women pull their veils around their mouths and stop to watch.
She comes down the quay with studied indifference. I can understand that; what does one do when people stare day after day? Pretend not to notice.
She is tall, taller than me, but Cousins are usually tall, and I’m shorter than many men. She looks up directly at me while I am smiling, by chance. The length of a man between us. I can see that she has light eyes.
“Hello,” I say in the trade language of the Cousins. The word just pops out.
It stops her, though, like a roped stabros calf. “Hello,” she says, in the same tongue. Consternation among the guildmen; two in dark red and one in green, all with shaven heads dull with the graphite sheen of stubble. “You speak lingua?” she says.
“A little,” I say.
Then she rattles on, asking me something, “where da-da da-da da.”
I shrug. Search my memory. My lessons in lingua were a lifetime ago; I remember almost nothing. Something comes to me that I often said in class: “I don’t understand,” I say, “I speak little.”
“Where did you learn?” she says in Suhkhra, the language of the southerners. “Starport?”
“Up north.” No real answer. Already I’m sorry I spoke. Bad enough to be a tokking foreigner; worse to be a spectacle. And my head aches, and I am tired from three days’ lack of food.
“Did you work at the port?” she asks, probing.
“No,” I say. Flat.
She frowns. Then, like a boat before bad winds, she comes across in another direction. She speaks in my own language, the language of home. “What is your name?” She is careful and stilted in that one phrase.
“Jahn,” I say, probably the commonest name among northern men. “What is yours?” I ask, without regard for courtesy.
“Sulia,” she says. “Jahn, what kin-kind?”
“My kin are all dead,” I say, “Jahn no-kin-kind.”
But she shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she says in Suhkhra, “I don’t understand. I speak very little Krerjian. What did you say your name was?”
“Jahn Sckarline,” I say. And then, in my own tongue, “Go away.” Because I am tired of her, tired of everything, tired of starving.
She isn’t listening, and probably doesn’t understand anyway. “Sckarline,” she says. “I thought everyone from Sckarline—”
“Is dead,” I say. “Thank you, Cousin. I am pleased you keep my kinname.” It’s awkward to say in Suhkra. The Suhkra aren’t good at irony anyway.
“Sulia Cousin,” one of the guildmen says deferentially, “they are waiting for us.”
She shakes him off. “I know about the settlement at Sckarline,” she says to me. “You’re a mission boy. You have an education. Why don’t you work at a port?”
“And live in a ghetto?” The word comes back to me in her trade lingua. “With the other natives?”
“Isn’t it better to get a tech job than to live like this?” she asks.
Better than a shantytown, I think, huddled together while the starships come screaming overhead, making one’s teeth ache and one’s goods rattle?
I look at her, she looks at me. I search my memory for the words in lingua, but my mind isn’t sharp and it was too long ago. “Go away,” I finally say in Suhkhra, “people are waiting.”
She stands there hesitant, but the guildman does not. He strides forward and smacks me hard in the side of my head for my disrespect. I know better than to defend myself. Oh, Heth, my poor head! Southerners are a bad lot, they have no concept of a freeman.
So, having been knocked over, I stay still, with my nose near the stones, waiting to see if he’ll hit me again, smelling dust, and sea, and the smell of myself, which is probably very distasteful to everyone else.
He crouches down, and I wait to be smacked again, empty-headed. But it isn’t him, it’s her. “What are you doing here?” she asks. She probably means how did you come here, but I find myself wondering, what am I doing here? Looking for work. Trying to get passage home. But home is gone, should never have existed in the first place.
What does any person do in a lifetime? I give her an answer out of the Proverbs. “Putting off death,” I say. “Go away, before you complicate my task—you people have done enough to me.”
She looks unhappy. Cousins are like that, a sentimental people. “If I could help you, I would,” she says.
“I know,” I say, “but your help would make me need you. And then I would be just one more local on one more backward world.” Everywhere the Cousins go across the sky, it’s the same. Wanji used to tell us about her people, about the Cousins. About other worlds like ours. Where two cultures meet, she said, one of them usually gives way.
The Cousin searches through her pockets, puts a coin, a rectangular silver piece, in the dust. I wait, not moving, until they go on.
I pick up the coin. A proud person would throw it after her. I’m not proud, I’m hungry. I take it.
In the market, it’s rabbit and duck day—kids herding ducks with long switches, cages of rabbits for sale, hanging next to that cheap old staple, thekla lizard drying in strips. I dodge past tallgrass poles with craken-dyed cloth hanging startling yellow, and cut through between two vegetable stands. Next to the hiring area, they’re grilling stabos jerky on sticks, and selling pineapple slices dipped in saltwater to make them sweeter.
I use the Cousin’s silver to buy noodles and red peanut paste, spicy with proyakapiti, and I eat slowly. I’m three days empty of food, and if I eat too fast, I’ll be sick. I learned about going without food during a campaign, when I first started soldiering. On the long walk to Bashtoy. I know all about the different kinds of hunger; the first sharp stabs of appetite, then the strong hunger, how your stomach hurts after awhile, and then how you forget, and then how hunger comes back, like swollen joints in an old woman. And how it wears you down, how you become tired and stupid, and how then finally it leaves you altogether, and your jaw bone softens until your teeth rock in their sockets, and you have been hungry so long you don’t know what it means anymore.
The yammerhead is on the other side of the hiring area, still going on about how the guilds monopolize the Cousins. How the guilds were nothing until ten years ago, when the Cousins came and brought magic, and then no one could trade without permission of the guild. I close my eyes, feeling sleepy after food, and I can see the place where I grew up. I was born in Sckarline, a magic town. I remember the white houses, the power station where Ayuedesh taught boys to cook stabos manure and get swamp air from it, then turned that into power that sang through copper and made light. At night, we had light for three or four dine after sunset. Phrases in the lingua the Cousins speak, Appropriate Technology.
I am lost in Sckarline, looking for my mother, for kin. I see Trevin, and I follow him. He’s way ahead, in leggings, in dark blue with fur on his shoulders. But the way he leads me is wrong, the buildings are burned, just blackened crossbeams jutting up, he is leading me toward—
“I’m looking for a musician.” I jerk awake.
A flat-faced southerner waiting for hire says, “Musicians are over there.” People who wait here are like me, looking for anything.
A portly man with a wine-colored robe says, “I’m looking for a musician who knows a little about swords.”
“What kind of musician?” I ask. I always talk quietly, it’s a failing, and the portly man doesn’t hear me. He cocks his head.
“What kind of musician?” the flat-faced southerner repeats.
“Doesn’t matter.” The portly man shrugs, hawks so loudly it sounds as if he’s clearing his tokking head, and spits.
Tokking southerners. They spit all the time, it drives me crazy. I hear them clear their throat, and I cringe and start looking to step out of the way. Heth knows I’m not squeamish, but they all do it, men, women, children.
“Sikha,” the portly man offers. A sikha is a kind of southern lute, only they pick the strings on the neck as well as the ones on the body.
“How about flute?” I offer.
“Flute?” the portly man says. His robe is of good quality, but stained, and he has a negligent air. The robe gapes open to the belted waist, showing his smooth chest and the soft flab like breasts. “You play the flute, northerner?”
No, I want to say, I just wanted to help us think of some instruments. Patience. “Yes,” I say, “I play the flute.”
“Let’s hear you.”
So I dig out my wooden flute and make pretty sounds. He waves his hands and says, “How good are you with a sword?”
I dig into my pack and pull my cloak out of the bottom. It’s crushed and wrinkled, people don’t wear cloaks much in the south, but I spread it out so that he can see the badge on the breast: a white mountain against a red background. The survivors of the March to Bashtoy got them—that, and sixty gold coins. The sixty gold coins have been gone for a couple of years, but the badge is still on the cloak.
People murmur. The portly man doesn’t know badges, he’s not a fighter, but the flat-faced southerner does, and it shows in the sudden respect in his face, and that ends any question of my swordplay—which is fine because, badge or no badge, I’m only mediocre at swordplay. I’m just not tall enough or big enough.
Surviving a campaign is as much a matter of luck and cleverness as skill with a sword, anyway.
But that’s why Barok hires me to play flute at his party.
