The leisurely narrative resolved with its closing meditation on the dawntime of a young world—
Someone grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him back.
He lost balance, went down on one knee. His other struck the carton, which overturned, spilling cubes. The cube in his hand fell among the scatter. His buttock hit the plastic flooring and his gloved hand skidded behind him.
He looked up at baggy beige suits and at official beige masks.
One of them said: “And get that thing off his hand, will you?”
That’s when he saw the canvas bag with the lizard on its flap hanging over the small one’s shoulder. His first thought was: How odd to find such a carrier this many kilometers across the sand from the polar station. Then he realized there was no bag lying beside the carton. The two thoughts interlocked to become recognition of how they’d come looking for it.
The first man in beige, who had bent down while he was thinking all this, jerked his forearm up, hooked a forefinger under the wrist of the glove, and yanked: cloth and small metal links tore—
And his world and all thought about it tore from his great hand.
Qualitatively, the feeling was somewhat like being in the midst of an involuted argument with a particularly complex point to make, only to open your mouth and forget what you were about to say. Quantitatively, it was so much more intense than simple forgetting that anyone who’d undergone the experience would probably question the qualitative as a metaphor to convey the quantity of that shattering erasure. For what had been stripped, wrenched, excised from him at that tug was all in him that could have understood the very description of it. Left was only a tingling that worked through every cell of him, more completely than her plate (whose name he could not remember) when she’d cleaned him.
Breath came out, slowly and continuously, as though hands, huger than his, had taken him up and wrung him. For moments air caught in his vocal cords. For moments it slipped through them, unvoiced. Sometimes it stuttered between the two: “… gggggkkkkkgghh … aggggghhh … k-k-k-kggggg …”
“There,” the man said. He looked at the black rag with the bits of metal in it, turned his fingers down through the ribbons, and jerked his elbows apart.
More ribbons and wires ripped.
One asked: “Where do they get these things anyway?”
The short one with the bag said: “I wonder what she did to him.” From the voice, it was probably a woman.
The tall one said: “You’ll never know. I mean, a damned bitch. That’s what gets me. With a man, it doesn’t seem so weird. But I can’t stand it when a damned bitch does something like that with a damned—”
“Hey, watch your language, man!” the one holding the ripped glove said. “You don’t have to talk that way in front of the kid.”
“Oh, yeah, man,” the other one said; and to the young woman, “I’m sorry, man.”
“That’s all right, man,” she said. “I just wish I knew what she did to him.” She reached down, got a hand under his arm, and tugged. “Come on, Rat. Time to get up.”
He slipped, so that one knee went down to the floor on a cube’s corner. Pain shot from knee to thigh, as the woman said:
“Oh, jeeze, look at those cuts on his back, will you? Maybe it’s just as well we don’t know …”
Leg throbbing, he stood.
The tall one said: “Can’t we find anything to put over his face?”
The one with the ruined glove said: “You don’t need to do that. He’s just a rat.”
“I know,” the other said. “But a guy with a face like that—those scars on it. I got some of them myself. It ain’t right.”
“The cuts. On his back,” the woman said. “Do you think she beat him …?”
“With perverts like that,” the one with the glove said, “they’ll do anything. You just be happy it’s against the law to ask.”
“A damned bitch—”
“Come on now, I said! Watch it.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” the woman said.
“Can’t we get something to put over his face—?”
“Let’s just get going.”
They led him outside, into the rubble-strewn yard. Now the square was almost filled with people in beige, some standing, some strolling in pairs. They led him (“No, this way, you stupid rat!”) to the entrance and out among the lush, gray vegetation, where a smaller transport waited.
In the back, through the grilled window, he saw her. The woman’s arms were strapped to her sides. There was a large bruise down her cheek. Blood had run from her hair.
A rag had been tied decently, if haphazardly, across her face; but there were no eyeholes.
“Come on. Get in.”
“Shall I strap him up?”
“Naw. He won’t do anything.”
They put him in the front seat, then slid in beside him. One began to maneuver the controls.
One said: “Hey, that thing you took off him? Does that really make you know more stuff?”
“Naw. It just makes you think you do. It can make you real sick, too—you see the way he was when I took it off him, moanin’ like that?”
“I didn’t hear him moaning,” one said. “What do you mean?”
One said: “Can’t we get something to put over his … face?”
“They told me back at headquarters,” the one who still held the ragged glove said. “If it was a normal man or woman, you couldn’t just take it off him like that. It would probably kill him. Something in the head. That’s how bad it is for you. But with a damned rat, it don’t do that much.”
“I don’t know,” the other said. “I’m not from around here, like you guys. I just can’t stand it.” He’d found a piece of blue, oily cloth under the transport’s seat. “Let me get this on him, huh?”
After that, he couldn’t see where he was going at all.
“You understand, a woman like that could’ve been dangerous,” the man in charge said with a harshness that had grown each time he’d told the story of the way he’d tricked her into taking the carrier bag with its signal generator—three times now.
He picked up bits of foam, torn paper, crumpled lengths of red packing tape, handfuls of orange sand, discarded cubes, blue shreds fallen from the peeling walls and ceiling, putting them all in the triangular carton, while they went on talking and he paid almost as little attention to them as they did to him.
“Still, I couldn’t just let her take him off like that without doing something.”
“You had to do something,” one man said.
“He’s been back three days, huh?” said another. “I wonder what she did to him? Well, I guess we’ll never know. That one’s too dumb to tell us, even if asking was legal.”
“… dangerous,” the man in charge repeated. “You never know in a case like that.”
“Well, she must have done something,” a newer man said. He had taken his mask off of his clean, young cheeks. “It’s like he’s just not the same rat anymore.”
“What do you mean he’s not the same rat?” another asked. “He looks the same to me, man.”
“I worked with this one before she stole him, and I’ve been working with him since we got him back.” The new man (six months) was short, brown, and smoothfaced as some bitch, and oversaw the worst jobs at the station—always going around without his face like a damned rat himself. “He’s doing all sorts of dumb things.”
“If it’s the rat I think it is,” another said, “he ain’t never been too smart, you know? You mean this one here, now—”
“I don’t mean dumb-stupid,” the unmasked man said. (Many of the other men didn’t like him.) “I mean dumb crazy.”
“Like what?” the man in charge said.
“Well, you know where they have the work equipment all racked up along the inside of hangar doors—they got the work gloves sitting up on a rack of pegs so you can just take ’em down when you need them? Anyway, I was
reading over my packing orders while about six rats were unloading supply drums. But I had to go get a replacement string from the vestibule console because the computer had messed up the printing on one. I guess they must have finished up the first tier of loading. When I got back, he had them rats all standing together in the hangar doorway; and he’d put one work glove on each one of them, on himself too. Just one, you see? And they were staring across the sand like they were waiting for something to come over the horizon.”
“Man, I think you better put your mask back on.” One man laughed. “You been getting too much sun.”
“No, I mean it. You should’ve seen ’em. And he was right there, at the head of them, in his one glove, with this funny expression on his face; if he was a man and not a rat, you would have thought he was going to cry—”
“I’ve worked places where they don’t let the rats run around with their faces all naked like that. Why don’t we—”
“How’d you know he was the one who did it?”
“I asked. A rat don’t lie, man—least if he understands the question.”
“Look, I been here a lot of years, now—and when I got here, I used to do the same job you’re doing. Back when we were studying q-plague. First of all, I never seen a rat, dumb or smart, pay attention to no other rat, much less give ’em a … work glove! Second, that rat—and I worked with him back before the station got closed down and opened up again—that rat is the last one who’d do something like that.”
“Like I say, man, it’s as if he wasn’t the same. When he got taken off, something happened. He come back different. I don’t mean he’s turned into an ordinary man or anything. But I mean it, he’s different. If you used to work with him, you could see it too, I bet.”
“Aw, come on …”
But he was finished cleaning now and dragged the three-quarters full carton behind him out into the station’s low-ceilinged hall.
Over the next few months, he did a number of things equally stupid. One afternoon the rat-keeper went to kick up a shift from the cage and found him missing—he was already at his station, working. Once, instead of getting his carrying orders from the console, he pressed some other buttons and got some other random cubes and was found standing before the station computer, turning them over in his great, fouled hands, with a puzzled look on his long, pitted face.
The other things he did, however, were all just as harmless; and as they occurred less and less frequently, they elicited less and less comment.
Things happened at the station.
During the election the station’s men cast their votes through the station computer; but he never learned who won, Yellows or Grays. Shortly the station changed over its function once more; new equipment was shipped in and set up. New staff came; some old staff left; they got two new rats. For a time the cage feedings were dropped to once every two days. And the new man, who was actually pretty bright, was promoted to second-in-charge and wore his mask more.
But these things did not noticeably affect the rat.
For the next seven years he worked at the station, doing much the same as he had always done.
One evening during a dark, red sunset, one of the women at the station (there were three on the staff now) told him to take the lift down to the sub-basement refrigerated storage crypt and bring up one of the new machines, a model 184. He didn’t know what model 184 was used for, but it had a lot of mechanical claws dangling from it, and many little lights flashing about it. It weighed some twenty-six kilos, but though you had to carry it up steps and over the ice-clotted thresholds, it would follow you along any smooth surface if you threw the toggle under the red flange circling it.
Behind him 184’s treads had just gone thump again on another doorsill.
As he turned to free it, there was a huge roar. The striplights along the ceiling went out. Suddenly he was thrown to the chill, steel-mesh flooring, scraping elbow and hip.
Metal grated on rock above him.
The temperature rose twenty degrees in ten seconds. In the dark something fell over on him, pinning one leg, something bigger and heavier than 184. And in a conflagration that lasted some seventeen hours, all life on the surface of his world—a world whose name in all his forty-one years he’d had less than a dozen opportunities to speak, a world he’d known only from the most impoverished perspective, a world whose coordinates in the Web’s encyclopedia of habitable worlds he had never even heard—was destroyed.
MONOLOGUES
Visible and Invisible Persons Distributed in Space
ONE
From Nepiy to Free-Kantor
1.
THE FIRST I HEARD of Rat Korga or the world Rhyonon? (Look. Listen.) Large and blue, a woman who tended to come apart into jellylike pieces only to flow together about the translator pole, my current employer1 said: “Thank you. Thank you, Industrial Diplomat Marq Dyeth, thank you for delivering these heteromer sheathing samples.” Heteromers are very big, very broad, very flat, and in places very active molecules; but it had taken me the first three days of the journey with all my delivery ship’s GI resources hard by to get even that far; they’re also very difficult to put together from just a recipe, unless you actually have some of them against which to check off the million-odd atoms that comprise them. “Thank you for delivering them to this beleaguered geosector of this wide world, this world of Nepiy.” She went from pale sky to indigo.
Within many-layered transparent gold gloves and something filmy that seemed like a parody of the alien bubbling about the pole, the other woman (this one human) stood off beneath the dripping roof-stones and looked on with intense approval.
My employer1 said: “May I ask, ask you a favor?”
“Well, I—”
“Please, Marq Dyeth. Please. Your shuttle flight does not leave for some time yet, not for a while. I want to explain, explain something to you; then I want you to explain something to me—”
“Well …” Feeling uncomfortable, I smiled my most diplomatic smile, fairly sure what was coming. “You must understand that an industrial diplomat often finds herself—”
“I want to show you this, this most recent atrocity in this atrocious fugue.” (I was right.) “Because you’re not from around here, not from our world, not from our geosector, I merely thought you might take a certain understanding, a certain knowledge, certain information away with you …?”
The assumption is that because you’re not “from around here” on such a cosmic scale, you couldn’t possibly know what “here” is like. Always true; but it means that after a while an ID has seen more of this sort of thing than anyone could care to.
“My friend will take you in the skimkar.” She indicated the other (human) woman. “He’s a careful driver and can answer any questions you might want to put.” The “he” made me flex an imaginary lip bone—which, a human myself, I do not have. But I’ve known lots who did.
“Very well.” I nodded, wondering what a nod meant on this world, at this spot on it.
The human stepped forward, and we started through damp veils, streaked pink and blotched brown, along the entrance, while my employer1 came apart and collected herself behind us.
As we came out under the loud, dark sky, she said: “He’s quite something, isn’t he?” (The second “he” made that imaginary lipbone of mine unflex.) “If you knew even a tenth of the work he’s been putting into our emergency situation here, you’d be awed. We’ve had to go to the stars when we can’t even get help from geosectors five or five-hundred kilometers away!”
“Oh, in just the day I’ve been here, I’ve been able to get a rough idea.” (I think she looked questioningly at me on the word “day,” but I’m not sure.) “Yes,” I said, “she’s quite a woman. And you’ve got quite a situation to deal with here, all of you.”
The dark sky crackled with red lightning, and a moment later thunder, which had punctuated my stay almost every twenty minutes, trundled across the low, ragged peaks. “Is it always like this
?” I asked, loudly.
Trailing gauzes around her, she glanced at me, her face glimmering as through washes of (human) blood. “Oh, we have whole fifty-and sixty-hour periods when the lightning is blue.”
“I mean over all of Nepiy.”
“Oh, no,” she answered. “You only get lightning here in the western equatorial band. A thousand kilometers toward the poles in either direction, and you don’t get any lightning at all. Just black.”
We climbed into the kar.
Strung into the pilot’s net, the woman pressed and pulled and pushed.
The kar broke through the power shield into the hot, dark, ululating silt.
“Do you have anything like this at home?” Now she wore lots of layers of lensing plastic over her face.
“No,” I said, thinking of our southern hotwind season, which comes close. “Not really.”
“There—” she said suddenly, pointing through the grillwork over the window plate. “Can you see it—?”
I couldn’t, which is pretty usual in such situations.
“Over there …?”
After a few minutes I thought I could. Which is also usual. General Information got me through, though: apparently those dark, fuzzy slashes were where kilometer after kilometer was acrawl with a rugged, rotting vine that decayed into polluting vapor, whipping about the strong wind in yellow blades—like my home world’s -wrs gone wild. The vines had been intended as high-yield bean bushes that would bear seven distinct types of bean, each with a distinct and different flavor. But as the genetic designs had been shipped from world to world, star to star, somewhere along the way a few triplets had fallen into the DNA specifications that, in conjunction with a high-sodium environment, upped the possibility of viable mutation: and this particular bit of Nepiy desert had been all salt marsh sometime before its very superficial piano-forming. The triplets hadn’t been detected, or rather hadn’t been recognized for what they were. At about the fifth generation, the bushes had suddenly metamorphosed into this lethal and virulent sport.