Future perfect, p.5
Future Perfect, page 5
“Is that what you want, Uli Pek Bengarin? That I let you leave this house, not knowing what you will do, whom you will inform on? That I endanger everything we have done in order to convince you of its truth?”
“Or you can kill me and let me rejoin my ancestors. Which is what you think I will choose, isn’t it? That choice would let you keep faith with the reality you have decided is true, and still keep yourself secret from the criminals. Killing me would be easiest for you. But only if I consent to my murder. Otherwise, you will violate even the reality you have decided to perceive.”
He stares down at me, a muscular man with beautiful purple eyes. A healer who would kill. A patriot defying his government to prevent a violent war. A sinner who does all he can to minimize his sin and keep it from denying him the chance to rejoin his own ancestors. A believer in shared reality who is trying to bend the reality without breaking the belief.
I keep quiet. The silence stretches on. Finally it is Pek Brifjis that breaks it. “I wish Carryl Walters had never sent you to me.”
“But he did. And I choose to return to my village. Will you let me go, or keep me prisoner here, or murder me without my consent?”
“Damn you,” he says, and I recognize the word as one Carryl Walters used, about the unreal souls in Aulit Prison.
“Exactly,” I say. “What will you do, Pek? Which of your supposed multiple realities will you choose now?”
It is a hot night, and I cannot sleep.
I lie in my tent on the wide empty plain and listen to the night noises. Rude laughter from the pel tent, where a group of miners drinks far too late at night for men who must bore into hard rock at dawn. Snoring from the tent to my right. Muffled lovemaking from a tent farther down the row, I’m not sure whose. The woman giggles, high and sweet.
I have been a miner for half a year now. After I left the northern village of Gofkit Ramloe, Ori’s village, I just kept heading north. Here on the equator, where World harvests its tin and diamonds and pel berries and salt, life is both simpler and less organized. Papers are not necessary. Many of the miners are young, evading their government service for one reason or another. Reasons that must seem valid to them. Here government sections rule weakly, compared to the rule of the mining and farming companies. There are no messengers on Terran bicycles. There is no Terran science. There are no Terrans.
There are shrines, of course, and rituals and processions, and tributes to one’s ancestors. But these things actually receive less attention than in the cities, because they are more taken for granted. Do you pay attention to air?
The woman giggles again, and this time I recognize the sound. Awi Pek Crafmal, the young runaway from another island. She is a pretty thing, and a hard worker. Sometimes she reminds me of Ano.
I asked a great many questions in Gofkit Ramloe. Ori Malfisit, Pek Brifjis said her name was. An old and established family. But I asked and asked, and no such family had ever lived in Gofkit Ramloe. Wherever Ori came from, and however she had been made into that unreal and empty vessel shitting on a rich carpet, she had not started her poor little life in Gofkit Ramloe.
Did Maldon Brifjis know I would discover that, when he released me from the rich widow’s house overlooking the sea? He must have. Or maybe, despite knowing I was an informer, he didn’t understand that I would actually go to Gofkit Ramloe and check. You can’t understand everything.
Sometimes, in the darkest part of the night, I wish I had taken Pek Brifjis’s offer to return me to my ancestors.
I work on the rock piles of the mine during the day, among miners who lift sledges and shatter solid stone. They talk, and curse, and revile the Terrans, although few miners have as much as seen one. After work the miners sit in camp and drink pel, lifting huge mugs with dirty hands, and laugh at obscene jokes. They all share the same reality, and it binds them together, in simple and happy strength.
I have strength, too. I have the strength to swing my sledge with the other women, many of whom have the same rough plain looks as I, and who are happy to accept me as one of them. I had the strength to shatter Ano’s coffin, and to bury her even when I thought the price to me was perpetual death. I had the strength to follow Carryl Walters’s words about the brain experiments and seek Maldon Brifjis. I had the strength to twist Pek Brifjis’s divided mind to make him let me go.
But do I have the strength to go where all of that leads me? Do I have the strength to look at Frablit Pek Brimmidin’s reality, and Carryl Walters’s reality, and Ano’s, and Maldon Brifjis’s, and Ori’s—and try to find the places that match and the places that don’t? Do I have the strength to live on, never knowing if I killed my sister, or if I did not? Do I have the strength to doubt everything, and live with doubt, and sort through the millions of separate realities on World, searching for the true pieces of each—assuming that I can even recognize them?
Should anyone have to live like that? In uncertainty, in doubt, in loneliness. Alone in one’s mind, in an isolated and unshared reality.
I would like to return to the days when Ano was alive. Or even to the days when I was an informer. To the days when I shared in World’s reality, and knew it to be solid beneath me, like the ground itself. To the days when I knew what to think, and so did not have to.
To the days before I became—unwillingly—as terrifyingly real as I am now.
FIRST RITES
—1: Haihong—
She sat rigid on the narrow seat of the plane, as if her slightest movement might bring the Boeing 777 down over the Pacific. No one noticed. Pregnant women often sat still, and this one was very pregnant. Only the flight attendant, motherly and inquisitive, bent over the motionless figure.
“Can I bring you anything, ma’am?”
The girl’s head jerked up as if shot. “No…no.” And then, in nearly unaccented English, “Wait. Yes. A Scotch and soda.”
The flight attendant’s mouth narrowed, but she brought the drink. These girls today—you’d think this one would know better. Although maybe she came from some backward area of China without prenatal care. In her plain brown maternity smock and sandals, it was hard to tell. The girl wasn’t pretty and wore no wedding ring. Well, maybe that was why the poor thing was so nervous. An uneducated provincial going home to face the music. Still, she shouldn’t drink. In fact, at this late stage, she shouldn’t even be flying. What if she went into labor on the plane?
Deng Haihong, one chapter short of her Ph.D. thesis at U.C. San Diego, gulped the Scotch and closed her eyes, waiting for its warmth to reach her brain. Another three hours to Shanghai, two-and-a-half to Chengdu, and perhaps two hours on the bus to Auntie’s. If no one questioned her at the airports. If she wasn’t yet on any official radar. If she could find Auntie.
If…
Eyes still closed, Haihong laid both hands on her bulging belly, and shuddered.
Shuangliu Airport in Chengdu had changed in four years. When Haihong had left, it had been the glossy, bustling gateway to the prosperous southwest and then on to Tibet, and Chengdu had been China’s fifth largest city. Now, since half of Sichuan province had been under quarantine, only seven people deplaned from an aircraft so old that it had no live TV-feed. Five of the seven already wore pathogen masks. Haihong pulled on hers, not because she thought any deadly pathogens from the war still lingered here—she knew better—but because it made her more inconspicuous. Her stomach roiled as she approached Immigration.
Let it be just one more bored official…
It was not. “Passport and Declaration Card?”
Haihong handed them over, inserted her finger into the reader, and tried to smile. The woman took forever to scrutinize her papers and biological results. The screen at her elbow scrolled but Haihong couldn’t see what it said…For a long terrible moment she thought she might faint.
Then the woman smiled. “Welcome home. You have come home to have your child here, in the province of your ancestors?”
“Yes,” Haihong managed.
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you.” Emily’s curious American phrase jumped into her mind: I would give my soul for a drink right now.
Too bad Haihong had already sold her soul.
Chengdu had finished the Metro just before the quarantine, and it was still operating. Everyone wore the useless paper pathogen masks. In California, Emily had laughed at the idea that the flimsy things would protect against any pathogens that had mutated around their terminator genes, and she and Haihong had had their one and only fight. “The people are just trying to survive!” Haihong had yelled, and Emily had gone all round-eyed and as red as only those blonde Americans could, and said apologetically, “I suppose that whatever makes them feel better…” Haihong had stormed out of the crummy apartment she shared with Emily and Tess only because it saved money.
It had been Emily who told her about the clinic in the first place.
As Haihong pulled her rolling suitcase toward Customs, her belly lurched hard. She stopped, terror washing through her: Not here, not here! But after that one hard kick, the baby calmed down. Haihong made it though Customs, the pills intact in the lining of her dress. She made it onto the Metro, off at the bus station.
The terror abated. Not departed—it would never do that, she realized bleakly. But at least the chance of detection was over. In the bus station, crowded as Shuangliu had not been, she was just one more Chinese girl in inexpensive cotton clothing that had probably been made in Guangdong province before being exported to the U.S. Only the poorest Chinese remained in Sichuan; everyone who could afford to had gone through bio-decon and fled. Chengdu had been the place that North Korea chose to bio-attack to bring the huge Chinese dragon to its knees. Sichuan had been the sacrifice, and rather than have the attack continued on Guangdong’s export factories or Beijing’s government or Shanghai’s soaring foreign tourism, China had not retaliated toward its ancient enemy, at least not with weapons. Politics had been more effective, aided by the world’s outrage. Now North Korea was castrated, full of U.N. peace-keeping forces and bio-inspectors and very angry Chinese administrators. Both of Haihong’s parents had died in the brief war.
“Be careful, Little Sister.” An ancient man, gnarled as an old tree, took Haihong’s elbow to help her onto the bus. The small kindness nearly made her cry. Pregnant women cried so easily. The trip had been so long, so draining…she wanted a drink.
“Shie-shie,” she said, and watched his face to see if he frowned at her accent. She had spoken only English for so long. But his expression didn’t change.
The bus, nearly as ancient as the kind grandfather, smelled of unwashed bodies and urine. Haihong fell asleep, mercifully without dreams. When she woke, it was night in the mountains and the baby was kicking hard. Her stomach growled with hunger. A different passenger sat beside her, a boy of maybe six or seven, with his mother snoring across the aisle. He ducked his head and said shyly, “Do you wish for a boy or a girl?”
The baby was a boy. Ben, shaken, had analyzed with Haihong the entire genome from amnio tissue. Haihong knew the baby’s eye and hair color, prospective height, blood type, probable IQ, degree of far future baldness. She knew the father was Mexican. She knew the fetus’s polymorphic alleles.
She smiled at the boy and said softly, “Whatever Heaven sends.”
Haihong’s screams shattered the night. The midwife, back in prominence after the doctor left and the village clinic closed, murmured gently from her position beside the squatting Haihong. The smell of burning incense didn’t mask the earthy odor of her spilt waters. Auntie held a kerosene lamp above the midwife’s waiting hands. Auntie’s face had not unclenched, not once, since Haihong had finally found her living in a hut at the edge of a vast vineyard in which she, like everyone else, toiled endlessly. The workers’ huts had running water but no electricity. Outside, more women had gathered to wait.
Haihong cried, “I will die!”
“You will not die,” the midwife soothed. Through the haze of pain, Haihong realized that the woman thought she feared death. If only it were that simple…But Haihong had done all she could. Had explained to Auntie, who was not her aunt but her old amah and therefore much harder to trace directly to Haihong, about the pills. She had explained, but would the old woman understand? O, to have come this far and not succeed, not save her son…
Her body split in two, and the child was born. His wail filled the hut. Haihong, battered from within, gasped, “Give…me!”
They laid the bloody infant in her arms. Auntie remembered what had been rehearsed, drilled into her, for the past nine days. Her obedience had made her an ideal amah when Haihong had been young. Her obedience, and her instinctive love. Her eyes never left the crying baby, but wordlessly she held out to Haihong the prepared dish holding pulverized green powder.
With the last of her strength, Haihong transferred three grains of powder to her fingertip and touched the baby’s tongue. The grains dissolved. The baby went on wailing and all at once Haihong was sick of him, sick of the chance she had taken and the sacrifice she had made, sick of it all, necessary as it had been. She said, “Take him,” and Auntie greedily grabbed the baby from her arms. Haihong tried to shut her ears against his crying. She wanted nothing now but sleep. Sleep, and the drink that, surrounded as they were by vineyards, would be possible soon, today, tomorrow, all the days left in her utterly ruined life.
—2: Cixin—
Deng Cixin was in love with the mountains. Unlike anything else, they made him feel calm inside, like still water.
“Sit still, bow bei’r,” Auntie said many times each day. “Be calm!” But Cixin could not sit still. He raced out the door, scattering the chickens, through the neat rows of grapes tied to their stakes, into the village. He scooped up handfuls of pebbles and hurled them at the other children, provoking cries of, “Fen noon an hi!” Angry boy. He was always angry, never knowing at what, always running, always wanting to be someplace else. Except when he was in the mountains.
His mother took him there once every week. She put him into his seat on her bicycle, sometimes pedaling hard with sweat coming out in interesting little globes on the back of her neck, and sometimes walking the bicycle. They covered several miles. After he turned four, Cixin walked part of the way. He liked to run in circles around his mother until he got too tired and she scooped him back onto the bicycle seat. The ride back down was thrilling, too: a headlong dash like the wind. Cixin urged her on: Faster! Faster! If he could just go fast enough, they might leave the ground forever and he would never have to go back to the village.
The best part, however, was in the mountains. Mama brought a picnic—that was a word from the secret language, the one he and his mother always used when not even Auntie was around. Nobody else knew about the secret language. It was for the two of them alone. The picnic had all the things Cixin liked best: congee with chicken and sweetened bean curd and orange juice. Although the orange juice was only for him; Mama had wine or beer.
As they ascended higher and higher, Cixin would feel his shoulders and knees and stomach loosen. He didn’t run around up here; he didn’t have to run around. The air grew sharp and clean. The mountains stood, firm and tall and strong—and how long they stood there! Millions of years, Mama said. Cixin liked thinking about that. You couldn’t be angry at something so strong and old. You could rest in it.
“Tell me again,” Cixin would say, sitting on the edge of Mama’s blanket. “Where do the mountains go?”
“All the way to Tibet, bow bei’r.”
“And Tibet is the highest place in the world.”
“The very highest.”
After a while Mama would fall asleep, thin and pale on her blanket, her short dark hair flopping sideways. Even then Cixin didn’t feel the need to run around. He sat and looked at the mountains, and his mind seemed to drift among the clouds, until sometimes he couldn’t tell which was clouds and which was himself. Sometimes a small animal or bird would sit on the ground only meters away, and Cixin would let it rest, too.
When Mama awoke, it was time for the once-a-week. That was a word from the secret language, too.
The once-a-week was tiny little green specks that Mama counted carefully. They melted on Cixin’s tongue and tasted faintly sour. Mama always said the same words, every time, and he had to answer the same words, every time.
“You must swallow the once-a-week, Cixin.”
“I must swallow the once-a-week.”
“Every week.”
“Every week.”
“If you do not swallow it, you will die.”
“I will die.” Dead birds, dead rats, a mangy dog dead in the road. Cixin could picture himself like that. The picture terrified him.
“And you must not tell anyone except Auntie about the once-a-week. Ever.”
“I must not tell anyone except Auntie about the once-a-week ever.”
“Promise me, bow bei’r.”
“I promise.” And then, for the first time, “Where does the once-a-week come from?”
“Ah.” Mama looked sad. “From very far away.”
“From Tibet?”
“No. Not Tibet.”
“Where?” He had a sudden idea, fueled by the stories Auntie told him of dragons and ghost warriors. “From a land of magic?”
“There is no magic.” Mama’s voice sounded even sadder. “Only science.”
“Is science a kind of magic?”
She laughed, but it was not a happy sound. “Yes, I suppose it is. Black magic, sometimes. Now fold the blanket; we must go back.”
Cixin forgot about science and magic and the once-a-week at the exciting thought of the wild bicycle dash down the mountain.
Twice a year Mama took the bus to Chengdu, another far away land of black magic. For days before she left, Auntie spent extra time kneeling at the household shrine. Cixin, five, eight, nine years old, raced around even more than usual. Mama snapped at him.
