The Best of Nancy Kress

  “I’ll do it,” I tell Pek Brimmidin. And then, formally, “I stand ready to serve our shared reality.”

  “One more thing, before you agree, Pek Bengarin.” Pek Brimmidin is figeting again. “The suspect is a Terran.”

  I have never before informed on a Terran. Aulit Prison, of course, holds those aliens who have been judged unreal: Terrans, Fallers, the weird little Huhuhubs. The problem is that even after thirty years of ships coming to World, there is still considerable debate about whether any aliens are real at all. Clearly their bodies exist; after all, here they are. But their thinking is so disordered they might almost qualify as all being unable to recognize shared social reality, and so just as unreal as those poor empty children who never attain reason and must be destroyed.

  Usually we on World just leave the aliens alone, except of course for trading with them. The Terrans in particular offer interesting objects, such as bicycles, and ask in return worthless items, mostly perfectly obvious information. But do any of the aliens have souls, capable of recognizing and honoring a shared reality with the souls of others? At the universities, the argument goes on. Also in market squares and pel shops, which is where I hear it. Personally, I think aliens may well be real. I try not to be a bigot.

  I say to Pek Brimmidin, “I am willing to inform on a Terran.”

  He wiggles his hand in pleasure. “Good, good. You will enter Aulit Prison a Capmonth before the suspect is brought there. You will use your primary cover, please.”

  I nod, although Pek Brimmidin knows this is not easy for me. My primary cover is the truth: I killed my sister Ano Pek Bengarin two years and eighty-two days ago and was judged unreal enough for perpetual death, never able to join my ancestors. The only untrue part of the cover is that I escaped and have been hiding from the Section police ever since.

  “You have just been captured,” Pek Brimmidin continues, “and assigned to the first part of your death in Aulit. The Section records will show this.”

  Again I nod, not looking at him. The first part of my death in Aulit; the second, when the time came, in the kind of chemical bondage that holds Ano. And never ever to be freed—ever. What if it were true? I should go mad. Many do.

  “The suspect is named ‘Carryl Walters.’ He is a Terran healer. He murdered a World child, in an experiment to discover how real people’s brains function. His sentence is perpetual death. But the Section believes that Carryl Walters was working with a group of World people in these experiments. That somewhere on World there is a group that’s so lost its hold on reality that it would murder children to investigate science.”

  For a moment the room wavers, including the exaggerated swooping curves of Pek Brimmidin’s ugly sculptures. But then I get hold of myself. I am an informer, and a good one. I can do this. I am redeeming myself, and releasing Ano. I am an informer.

  “I’ll find out who this group is,” I say. “And what they’re doing, and where they are.”

  Pek Brimmidin smiles at me. “Good.” His trust is a dose of shared reality: two people acknowledging their common perceptions together, without lies or violence. I need this dose. It is probably the last one I will have for a long time.

  How do people manage in perpetual death, fed on only solitary illusion?

  Aulit Prison must be full of the mad.

  Traveling to Aulit takes two days of hard riding. Somewhere my bicycle loses a bolt and I wheel it to the next village. The woman who runs the bicycle shop is competent but mean, the sort who gazes at shared reality mostly to pick out the ugly parts.

  “At least it’s not a Terran bicycle.”

  “At least,” I say, but she is incapable of recognizing sarcasm.

  “Sneaky soulless criminals, taking us over bit by bit. We should never have allowed them in. And the government is supposed to protect us from unreal slime, ha, what a joke. Your bolt is a nonstandard size.”

  “Is it?” I say.

  “Yes. Costs you extra.”

  I nod. Behind the open rear door of the shop, two little girls play in a thick stand of moonweed.

  “We should kill all the aliens,” the repairer says. “No shame in destroying them before they corrupt us.”

  “Eurummmn,” I say. Informers are not supposed to make themselves conspicuous with political debate. Above the two children’s heads, the moonweed bends gracefully in the wind. One of the little girls has long brown neck fur, very pretty. The other does not.

  “There, that bolt will hold fine. Where you from?”

  “Rakfit Sarloe.” Informers never name their villages.

  She gives an exaggerated shudder. “I would never visit the capital. Too many aliens. They destroy our participation in shared reality without a moment’s thought! Three and eight, please.”

  I want to say No one but you can destroy your own participation in shared reality, but I don’t. Silently I pay her the money.

  She glares at me, at the world. “You don’t believe me about the Terrans. But I know what I know!”

  I ride away, through the flowered countryside. In the sky, only Cap is visible, rising on the horizon opposite the sun. Cap glows with a clear white smoothness, like Ano’s skin.

  The Terrans, I am told, have only one moon. Shared reality on their world is, perhaps, skimpier than ours: less curved, less rich, less warm.

  Are they ever jealous?

  Aulit prison sits on a flat plain inland from the South Coast. I know that other islands on World have their own prisons, just as they have their own governments, but only Aulit is used for the alien unreal, as well as our own. A special agreement among the governments of World makes this possible. The alien governments protest, but of course it does them no good. The unreal is the unreal, and far too painful and dangerous to have running around loose. Besides, the alien governments are far away on other stars.

  Aulit is huge and ugly, a straight-lined monolith of dull red stone, with no curves anywhere. An official from R&A meets me and turns me over to two prison guards. We enter through a barred gate, my bicycle chained to the guards’, and I to my bicycle. I am led across a wide dusty yard toward a stone wall. The guards of course don’t speak to me; I am unreal.

  My cell is square, twice my length on a side. There is a bed, a piss pot, a table, and a single chair. The door is without a window, and all the other doors in the row of cells are closed.

  “When will the prisoners be allowed to be all together?” I ask, but of course the guard doesn’t answer me. I am not real.

  I sit in my chair and wait. Without a clock, it’s difficult to judge time, but I think a few hours pass totally without event. Then a gong sounds and my door slides up into the ceiling. Ropes and pulleys, controlled from above, inaccessible from inside the cell.

  The corridor fills with illusionary people. Men and women, some with yellowed neck fur and sunken eyes, walking with the shuffle of old age. Some young, striding along with that dangerous mixture of anger and desperation. And the aliens.

  I have seen aliens before, but not so many together. Fallers, about our size but very dark, as if burned crisp by their distant star. They wear their neck fur very long and dye it strange bright colors, although not in prison. Terrans, who don’t even have neck fur but instead fur on their heads, which they sometimes cut into fanciful curves—rather pretty. Terrans are a little intimidating because of their size. They move slowly. Ano, who had one year at the university before I killed her, once told me that the Terran’s world makes them feel lighter than ours does. I don’t understand this, but Ano was very intelligent and so it’s probably true. She also explained that Fallers, Terrans, and World people are somehow related far back in time, but this is harder to believe. Perhaps Ano was mistaken.

  Nobody ever thinks Huhuhubs could be related to us. Tiny, scuttling, ugly, dangerous, they walk on all fours. They’re covered with warts. They smell bad. I was glad to see only a few of them, sticking close together, in the corridor at Aulit.

  We all move toward a large r
oom filled with rough tables and chairs and, in the corner, a trough for the Huhuhubs. The food is already on the tables. Cereal, flatbread, elindel fruit—very basic, but nutritious. What surprises me most is the total absence of guards. Apparently prisoners are allowed to do whatever they wish to the food, the room, or each other, without interference. Well, why not? We aren’t real.

  I need protection, quickly.

  I choose a group of two women and three men. They sit at a table with their backs to the wall, and others have left a respectful distance around them. From the way they group themselves, the oldest woman is the leader. I plant myself in front of her and look directly into her face. A long scar ridges her left cheek to disappear into grizzled neck fur.

  “I am Uli Pek Bengarin,” I say, my voice even but too low to be heard beyond this group. “In Aulit for the murder of my sister. I can be useful to you.”

  She doesn’t speak, and her flat dark eyes don’t waver, but I have her attention. Other prisoners watch furtively.

  “I know an informer among the guards. He knows I know. He brings things into Aulit for me, in return for not sharing his name.”

  Still her eyes don’t waver. But I see she believes me; the sheer outrage of my statement has convinced her. A guard who had already forfeited reality by informing—by violating shared reality—might easily turn it to less pernicious material advantage. Once reality is torn, the rents grow. For the same reason, she easily believes that I might violate my supposed agreement with the guard.

  “What sort of things?” she says, carelessly. Her voice is raspy and thick, like some hairy root.

  “Letters. Candy. Pel.” Intoxicants are forbidden in prison; they promote shared conviviality, to which the unreal have no right.

  “Weapons?”

  “Perhaps,” I say.

  “And why shouldn’t I beat this guard’s name out of you and set up my own arrangement with him?”

  “He will not. He is my cousin.” This is the trickiest part of the cover provided to me by R&A Section; it requires that my would-be protector believe in a person who has kept enough sense of reality to honor family ties but will nonetheless violate a larger shared reality. I told Pek Brimmidin that I doubted that such a twisted state of mind would be very stable, and so a seasoned prisoner would not believe in it. But Pek Brimmidin was right and I was wrong. The woman nods.

  “All right. Sit down.”

  She does not ask what I wish in return for the favors of my supposed cousin. She knows. I sit beside her, and from now on I am physically safe in Aulit Prison from all but her.

  Next, I must somehow befriend a Terran.

  This proves harder than I expect. The Terrans keep to themselves, and so do we. They are just as violent toward their own as all the mad doomed souls in Aulit; the place is every horror whispered by children trying to shock each other. Within a tenday I see two World men hold down and rape a woman. No one interferes. I see a Terran gang beat a Faller. I see a World woman knife another woman, who bleeds to death on the stone floor. This is the only time guards appear, heavily armored. A priest is with them. He wheels in a coffin of chemicals and immediately immerses the body so that it cannot decay to release the prisoner from her sentence of perpetual death.

  At night, isolated in my cell, I dream that Frablit Pek Brimmidin appears and rescinds my provisional reality. The knifed, doomed corpse becomes Ano; her attacker becomes me. I wake from the dream moaning and weeping. The tears are not grief but terror. My life, and Ano’s, hang from the splintery branch of a criminal alien I have not yet even met.

  I know who he is, though. I skulk as close as I dare to the Terran groups, listening. I don’t speak their language, of course, but Pek Brimmidin taught me to recognize the cadences of “Carryl Walters” in several of their dialects. Carryl Walters is an old Terran, with gray head fur cut in boring straight lines, wrinkled brownish skin, and sunken eyes. But his ten fingers—how do they keep the extra ones from tangling them up?—are long and quick.

  It takes me only a day to realize that Carryl Walters’s own people leave him alone, surrounding him with the same nonviolent respect that my protector gets. It takes me much longer to figure out why. Carryl Walters is not dangerous, neither a protector nor a punisher. I don’t think he has any private shared realities with the guards. I don’t understand until the World woman is knifed.

  It happens in the courtyard, on a cool day in which I am gazing hungrily at the one patch of bright sky overhead. The knifed woman screams. The murderer pulls the knife from her belly and blood shoots out. In seconds the ground is drenched. The woman doubles over. Everyone looks the other way except me. And Carryl Walters runs over with his old-man stagger and kneels over the body, trying uselessly to save the life of a woman already dead anyway.

  Of course. He is a healer. The Terrans don’t bother him because they know that, next time, it might be they who have need of him.

  I feel stupid for not realizing this right away. I am supposed to be good at informing. Now I’ll have to make it up by immediate action. The problem, of course, is that no one will attack me while I’m under Afa Pek Fakar’s protection, and provoking Pek Fakar herself is far too dangerous.

  I can see only one way to do this.

  I wait a few days. Outside in the courtyard, I sit quietly against the prison wall and breathe shallowly. After a few minutes I leap up. The dizziness takes me; I worsen it by holding my breath. Then I ram as hard as I can into the rough stone wall and slide down it. Pain tears through my arm and forehead. One of Pek Fakar’s men shouts something.

  Pek Fakar is there in a minute. I hear her—hear all of them—through a curtain of dizziness and pain.

  “—just ran into the wall, I saw it—”

  “—told me she gets these dizzy attacks—”

  “—head broken in—”

  I gasp, through sudden real nausea, “The healer. The Terran—”

  “The Terran?” Pek Fakar’s voice, hard with sudden suspicion. But I gasp out more words, “…disease…a Terran told me…since childhood…without help I…” My vomit, unplanned but useful, spews over her boots.

  “Get the Terran,” Pek Fakar rasps to somebody. “And a towel!”

  Then Carryl Walters bends over me. I clutch his arm, try to smile, and pass out.

  When I come to, I am lying inside, on the floor of the eating hall, the Terran cross-legged beside me. A few World people hover near the far wall, scowling. Carryl Walters says, “How many fingers you see?”

  “Four. Aren’t you supposed to have five?”

  He unbends the fifth from behind his palm and says, “You fine.”

  “No, I’m not,” I say. He speaks childishly, and with an odd accent, but he’s understandable. “I have a disease. Another Terran healer told me so.”

  “Who?”

  “Her name was Anna Pek Rakov.”

  “What disease?”

  “I don’t remember. Something in the head. I get spells.”

  “What spells? You fall, flop on floor?”

  “No. Yes. Sometimes. Sometimes it takes me differently.” I look directly into his eyes. Strange eyes, smaller than mine, and that improbable blue. “Pek Rakov told me I could die during a spell, without help.”

  He does not react to the lie. Or maybe he does, and I don’t know how to read it. I have never informed on a Terran before. Instead he says something grossly obscene, even for Aulit Prison: “Why you unreal? What you do?”

  I move my gaze from his. “I murdered my sister.” If he asks for details, I will cry. My head aches too hard.

  He says, “I sorry.”

  Is he sorry that he asked, or that I killed Ano? Pek Rakov was not like this; she had some manners. I say, “The other Terran healer said I should be watched carefully by someone who knows what to do if I get a spell. Do you know what to do, Pek Walters?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you watch me?”

  “Yes.” He is, in fact, watching me closely now.
I touch my head; there is a cloth tied around it where I bashed myself. The headache is worse. My hand comes away sticky with blood.

  I say, “In return for what?”

  “What you give Pek Fakar for protection?”

  He is smarter than I thought. “Nothing I can also share with you.” She would punish me hard.

  “Then I watch you, you give me information about World.”

  I nod; this is what Terrans usually request. And where information is given, it can also be extracted. “I will explain your presence to Pek Fakar,” I say, before the pain in my head swamps me without warning, and everything in the dining hall blurs and sears together.

  Pek Fakar doesn’t like it. But I have just given her a gun, smuggled in by my “cousin.” I leave notes for the prison administration in my cell, under my bed. While the prisoners are in the courtyard—which we are every day, no matter what the weather—the notes are replaced by whatever I ask for. Pek Fakar had demanded a “weapon;” neither of us expected a Terran gun. She is the only person in the prison to have such a thing. It is to me a stark reminder that no one would care if all we unreal killed each other off completely. There is no one else to shoot; we never see anyone not already in perpetual death.

  “Without Pek Walters, I might have another spell and die,” I say to the scowling Pek Fakar. “He knows a special Terran method of flexing the brain to bring me out of a spell.”

  “He can teach this special method to me.”

  “So far, no World person has been able to learn it. Their brains are different from ours.”

  She glares at me. But no one, even those lost to reality, can deny that alien brains are weird. And my injuries are certainly real: bloody head cloth, left eye closed from swelling, skin scraped raw the length of my left cheek, bruised arm. She strokes the Terran gun, a boringly straight-lined cylinder of dull metal. “All right. You may keep the Terran near you—if he agrees. Why should he?”