Tanith lee blood stone.., p.14
Tanith Lee - Blood Stone 02, page 14
He was lying over me, big golden animal, looking at me with his black, black-lashed eyes half-closed, lazy, amused, tolerant, in control. My fingers ached from grasping him so hard. I dropped the stone, sometime.
I said rather stupidly, with a very human attempt at wit, ”Nobody ever gave me a present like that before.”
”Relax,” he said, ”it’s Christmas.”
He made love to me twice more, before he told me what was in the last museum block. Partly because he wanted me, partly to have that symbol of sexual command clear and definite between us.
In the last block was the other string of bones from the tomb. It had been a double burial, a woman and a man.
The Easterly news archive, like the bars, stayed open all night. It was fully automated, and, because Easterly hadn’t yet gained the city sophistry of Ares, there were no human attendants. Jace put me in a booth and dialed the year he wanted. The sheet came up on the screen and it read. TRAGEDY IN COPPER: One man dead, twenty injured as ore-drill sparks on fire. It’s the year I was—Sabella was—two, the year and the day my father—Sabella’s father—died a hundred feet underground in the New Mine, here, at Easterly.
Dressed in our black clothes, as if in mourning, Jace and I were framed
by the large white screen. I shifted, disturbed, my body soothed, my
mind staring, at odds with each other. ”What—”
”Just read down the column.”
I read. I read about Sabella’s father’s death, which left a widow and a two-year old daughter. I read about other injured men and company insurance. Then, at the column’s end I read, Luckier than some, Daniel Vincent, who should also have been at work on the ill-fated drill, had quit work that morning following an altercation with the drill ganger. Vincent, an off-planeter, who has lived in Easterly for five years, also found his luck holding good elsewhere. His twelve-year old son, missing for two days, came home yesterday, alive and well. The Vincents have another son, just one year old today.
Jace touched the button and the screen went blank. My mind seemed to go blank with it, so when he began to talk to me, I saw what he said in pictures on the that blank brain-screen.
Daniel Vincent brought his family to Novo Mars in the hope of striking rich with the ore boom. But the ore boom, which benefited many, failed Daniel, and in the end, he had to work for the company in Easterly, in order to make up losses. Five years was a long time to Daniel, who was at heart a drifter. A rough, tough hell-raiser of a man, his first son, Jason, bore much of the brunt of Daniel’s frustration. The head slaps, the off-hand beatings, were well outside the legal limits of assault, yet, they were brutal enough. They served to convey, more than physical hurt, the unlove that Daniel had for his first son. Then, the second son arrived, and on this second son, belatedly and bizarrely, Daniel fastened a savage possessive affection. If Jason’s life was bad before, it got worse in the year which followed. The second son, named Sand for some romantic maybe drunken whim, was the blessing, Jason retained his position as the curse on the Vincent home. Jason ran with a pack of boys, caught in those bouts of hooliganism that plague all colonies once they become townships. Finally, trouble behind and the usual beating ahead, Jason, one sundown, didn’t go home. Instead he went climbing in the dry canals outside of town. In an abandoned quarry, his foot kicked through a pile of loosened rocks, eroded by exposure, by time and the moistening of a revitalized atmosphere, and a black pit gaped at him. To Jason, it was a cave to spend the night, a place of shelter. He crawled inside, and when the rock slab blocked his way, he climbed over it to the far side. It was black in the hole, but it seemed like sanctuary.
He stayed in the tunnel, the far side of the tomb slab, one whole night, and the next day he tried to go to Ares, but someone spotted him eventually and brought him home, and Daniel Vincent beat the hell out of him.
A month after the drill fire, Vincent moved off planet. He took his family to Gall Vulcan, and here he periodically deserted his woman and his boys, returning at uneven intervals, like a chronic illness, to pet Sand, and to curse and to beat Jason. He went on spasmodically beating Jason until Jason was fifteen, and then Jason broke Daniel’s nose and two of his own fingers. After that, Jace got free, becoming a drifter between the planets, enough of his father in him for that. Sand remained and let the father’s petting warp and smear him out of shape in a way Jason had never been warped or smeared by those blunt crusted hands and the belt between them. It had been the father who had rescued Sand, in the beginning, from the blunders he made in his own world of twilight morality and confusion. Later, when Daniel vanished into death, Sand turned incredibly to Jason, and perhaps more incredibly, Jason answered.
Jace had stopped talking and the mind pictures flowed away.
”Sand—” I said.
”No,” he said. ”Ask me about the tunnel.”
I paused, because even in my bewilderment I saw he was asking to be spared any more of Daniel and of Sand. At last I said, ”You made the tunnel.”
”I kicked it open again. It was already made.”
”And you never noticed the stone? But all this was ten years before I—”
”We haven’t finished with this, yet,” he said, and he spun the dial again.
The blank screen lights, and it’s last year’s newsout, styled quite unlike the earlier crisper bulletin, with capitals that curl, the modern penchant for harking further and further back to the modish past of Earth.
Another skeleton retrieved from the relic tomb cavity. Last night, robot diggers clearing the farther debris from the quarry tunnel where last year the unique New Martian tomb slab was discovered, unearthed another mystery find of human bones. These latest ossa, believed to be those of a male around thirteen years of age, are registering as having lain in the tunnel behind the area of the tomb for twenty-odd years or more. Readers will recall the rather uncanny previous disinterment of a prepubescent female skeleton some months ago, identified by dental records as a former Easterly child, still supposed living. There is a possibility no identification, accurate or false, can be made with the latest find, since all teeth are present and perfect and conceivably no dental record exists.
The screen goes out. I can’t move. My brain, the blank screen, empty, frozen.
”The Calliope man could have told you about that other parcel of bones,” Jace said, ”if you’d given him a chance. He likes the buildup gradual.” I didn’t move. ”Come on, Sabella,” he said. His voice was slurred, playful, unafraid. ”We’re in this shit together.”
”You’re telling me that you’re—That you and I—No. You eat and drink
and walk in the sun—”
”Sabella, you’re missing the sign.”
He walked me out of the archive, and across the street into a bar. And then we sat at a table, he with a long glass of golden beer, the very color his soul must be, I thought, I with a glass of strawberry juke, the sort I used to drink in Easterly long ago, pale satin pink, the color the bloodstone goes just before all color fades from it.
If you looked at us, we looked quite normal, and very splendid, very beautiful. You couldn’t see my hands shake from where you’re sitting, or my heart shake, or my mind.
I didn’t believe him, or the newsout, because he was so calm, so uninterested: So, I’m dead. So.
”If you believe this,” I said, ”I just wish to God I could be like you.”
”You don’t have to be like me,” he said. ”I’ll be like me for both of us.” He took my hand lightly and looked at it, as if my mask of a face with the two distraught eyes in it, might distract him from his purpose. ”You’re scared,” he said, ”because you think you’re dead. You’re not dead any more than I am. We came out of the tunnel, but we didn’t go in. Nor did we, you or I, kill those kids that we thought we were all of these years.”
”What then? Something killed them.”
”Maybe not. Maybe just bits of them got discarded. Or if not, just the shock of being copied. They walked up to a mirror and the mirror came alive. I’d say it was an impulse, a psychic trigger of some kind.”
Somehow, words like ”psychic” didn’t fit in Jace’s mouth. He had no gothic approach to any of this, no spiritual anguish. That was what was keeping him on the rails, and me too.
”You mean like a fly-trap plant,” I said, ”waiting for the first two flies.”
He grinned at me. ”We’re alive. Even you’re alive now, Sabella, You can’t shoulder the guilt for a crime you don’t even remember committing.”
”We’re Martians, then. Why don’t we remember back when the place was all
bloody lily pillars and damned urns—”
”I don’t think it works that way. I think we got made on a blueprint, like two tin cans.”
But I imagined the pink indigenous wolves on the hills, their voices, their running to me, and to my kill. They remember, if I don’t, what fashioned me, and what I am.
A Martian. An old new reborn Martian. Do I laugh, now?
”Come on,” he said, ”you’ve got to live with it. Vampires resurrect, don’t they?”
I clenched my hand hi his, ”But you’re not—”
”Come on, baby. You know what I’m supposed to be.”
Before I considered it, I’d snatched my hand away, and half got out of my chair. But he took my hand back and I sat down again.
I said feverishly, ”There are too many coincidences. It’s absurd. Even to Cassi spotting Sand’s name in an ad, and recalling it from Easterly small-town gossip, which I guess is what happened. Or am I to assume the coincidences are deliberate. This planet dragging its survivors together again.” Jace said, ”If my goddam bastard of a father had stayed on in Easterly, you might not have had to make such a ballsup of your life till now.” ”Stop patronizing me,” I said. ”All right, you know how to lay me. It doesn’t give you the right to treat me like a child.” ”That’s the way I have to treat you,” he said. ”At least for now. And you sure as hell know why.” ”No,” I said.
But he stood up, drained the gold beer with swift gold undulations of the throat muscle that fascinated me, because I was reducing everything to detail, minutiae. Then he led me out of the bar.
On the street, he said to me, ”For Christ’s sake, Bella, I’m not afraid of you.”
”I am. I am. You don’t know—”
”I can turn you out like a light,” he said. ”Any time at all. And that’s all you need tell yourself.”
In the lift I started to shiver convulsively while the tinny music played. By the time we got to my room, I could hardly walk.
He sat on the bed and took me on his lap, and for all I’d cried I wasn’t a child, I was glad enough to rest there in his arms. And I thought of Sand’s descriptions—Jace the defender, the rock, Jace the comforter. And I wondered if these stories of Sand’s were true, and still I didn’t know just what love there had been between them, or hate, or if love could cancel all hatred, hatred all love.
Presently, Jace showed me the stone, which I’d left lying, and which he’d picked up.
”See,” he said gently. ”Meant for you, not for me. The infallible meter.
You’re almost out of gas.”
”I can’t.”
But be moved my head until my mouth was against his throat, and easily he lay back and pulled me with him.
”Do it,” he said.
So I did.
Instinct. And then, more than instinct. It isn’t the same. Not the old thing, the sense of breathing, it’s more than that, it’s—but I can’t say, I don’t have the words to say. It isn’t performed during love, that’s a snare for enemies, the robber’s way, the fool’s way. But it’s an act of love, nevertheless. And for the first time, I could kill a man only by excess of this, the drawing from the vein, the milking of life, and I would kill him out of love, not need. I could kill him then, but he said to me quietly, ”That’s it, Sabella,” and I heard, and I wanted to leave him, but oh, I couldn’t leave him, couldn’t—and then he put his hands on my shoulders, and with his strength which was always greater than mine, just as he was generally a fraction swifter, he lifted me from him and held me away, and when the film of the great silence of the well I had been drinking at seeped off me, and my eyes unglazed, he put me down beside him, and for a while, we were quiet, as if after the other act of love.
”What,” I said to him at last, ”did you feel?”
”You kissing me,” he said. ”Very nice.”
”But you can control it. You can stop me.”
”Anytime.”
”Even if I took when we were making love?”
”You won’t.”
”But if I did?”
”Try it,” he said. ”You won’t sit on your ass for a month.”
The stone was a drop of ruby in his hand, and he gave it back to me.
I was not afraid any more.
I believe in God. I think I believe in Jesus Christ. That night in Ares, I knelt, and I begged someone who was above bargaining to help me. And see, I was helped.
I’ve thought about it, and I have a conclusion to offer, though Jace doesn’t care about it. It’s a fact for him, insane but self-demonstrating. I am a woman he wants, and I want him, and he’ll haul me with him to other worlds, or stay awhile here on this world which I perceive is ours, and which he takes as a stop-over point or a returning point, but which emotionally he views as just another hotel in space. Which makes me wonder if we are, in a way, still those two children who wandered into the grave-tunnel, not just exact copies of their bodies and their memories and their names. Certainly, we have no recollection of a past to set archaeologists and spiritualists squalling and turn the Revivalist Church on its ear. The last impulse of two lovers in a last lost tomb, that’s what formed us, and what pins us together, beyond sex and trauma and loneliness and need. We’re utterly unlike, opposed, embattled. We can fight all we want, and we do fight. But this nail passes through both of us, a bolt of light as in a picture of Mars, piercing, but not breaking, the vessels of glass we are. Which to Jace is an idea to laugh at, the same as to liken him to earth, and fire.
And for the conclusion? It’s all unround.
Before the Earth ships landed, started up their colonies, pumped oxygen into the air and water over the ground and planted things, acting like God in Eden, this planet was four-fifths dead. But before death came, what changes had occurred among a people who raised lily pillars and sealed death in an urn, a people whose technology was either so incredible or so obsolete that men can find no trace of it? I think when all but half the stores of the world were gone, they happened on, or evolved deliberately, a method of sharing. Of the little water and the little food there was, one would eat and drink, and when he was strong, the other would take from him the vital element which food and drink had made—his blood. So there were those who lived by feeding on the things of the earth, and those who lived by feeding upon them. It’s a situation that admits no intolerance. A system that requires a careful pairing, a creation of partners, who could permit in love what could never be permitted in hate or greed. Except that some were greedy or reluctant, forcing, taking, pillage and robbery, and so the process of seduction followed, the murderous snare I had practiced, not knowing, (or could it be remembering?) another way. That destroyed them, or else, ultimately the planet had nothing left to give, even in half-shares. So the lovers had their tomb, and after them dust again filled all the urns.
It doesn’t frighten me anymore about the tomb, the possession Cassi set out to destroy, the possession which is me. And Jace, if she had known. As for guilt, I still feel it, I’m still culpable, but it’s become a familiar thing, a piece of me, no more. Because guilt is purposeless. I can undo nothing. Yet in the future, I can live without destruction. And more than that, simply, I can live.
We went to Hammerhead and tidied the house, heard the occasional cicadas and walked on the hills. Once three wolves came out in the dusk and briefly followed us, gilded by stars and blazoned with eyes. Jace whistled them and they came to him. To him they’re dogs. He would have thrown them a stick, I think, but they loped away before it occurred to him.
And yet, by that hole of a grave he dug for Sand, I’ve seen him stand in the sunlight, while I linger in the shade. I’ve seen his face, closed;
I’ve seen him recall his life as a human man, knowing he is no longer that.
We won’t stay here forever, or even very long. I’ve never seen another planet. This is all I know. I tell him we’re the last New Martians, and he says sure, baby, forgetting graves, his light to my dark, his wide outward gaze to my introspection.
But we’re not human. No humans are as we are.
The last Martians.
He has to dominate me, that’s essential; for I take his life’s blood. The victim must be stronger than the oppressor—or he dies. He has to tell me when and how, and where to walk, and if I may, and I obey him, but that’s not for always. I’ve been anchorless for years. I’ve wanted a discipline beyond myself, and needed it to show me how to master myself, and I’m learning this too, he’s teaching me. In the end, maybe I shall be the one to say that this planet is where we return to and where we remain.
And maybe the planet is a vampire too, taking from the life that moves over it, waiting for its resurrection from the deadness of a desert before it whispered to its inner dead in their obscure burial places. Come, rise up, taste of the oxygen in the skies, and the poured out waters, and the spilled dreams of men.
