The Best of Nancy Kress

  I say none of this aloud. The guards at Aulit Prison knew immediately when Pek Walters died, inside a closed and windowless room. They could be watching me here, now. World has no devices to do this, but how did Pek Walters know so much about a World man working with a Terran science experiment? Somewhere there are World people and Terrans in partnership. Terrans, as everyone knows, have all sorts of listening devices we do not.

  I kiss Ano’s coffin. I don’t say it aloud, but I hope desperately that Reality & Atonement releases us. I want to return to shared reality, to the daily warmth and sweetness of belonging, now and forever, to the living and dead of World. I do not want to be an informer any more.

  Not for anyone, even myself.

  The message comes three days later. The afternoon is warm and I sit outside on my stone bench, watching my neighbor’s milkbeasts eye her sturdily fenced flowerbeds. She has new flowers that I don’t recognize, with blooms that are entrancing but somehow foreign—could they be Terran? It doesn’t seem likely. During my time in Aulit Prison, more people seem to have made up their minds that the Terrans are unreal. I have heard more mutterings, more anger against those who buy from alien traders.

  Frablit Pek Brimmidin himself brings the letter from Reality and Atonement, laboring up the road on his ancient bicycle. He has removed his uniform, so as not to embarrass me in front of my neighbors. I watch him ride up, his neck fur damp with unaccustomed exertion, his gray eyes abashed, and I know already what the sealed message must say. Pek Brimmidin is too kind for his job. That is why he is only a low-level messenger boy all the time, not just today.

  These are things I never saw before.

  You are too trusting for be informer, Pek Bengarin.

  “Thank you, Pek Brimmidin,” I say. “Would you like a glass of water? Or pel?”

  “No, thank you, Pek,” he says. He does not meet my eyes. He waves to my other neighbor, fetching water from the village well, and fumbles meaninglessly with the handle of his bicycle. “I can’t stay.”

  “Then ride safely,” I say, and go back in my house. I stand beside Ano and break the seal on the government letter. After I read it, I gaze at her a long time. So beautiful, so sweet-natured. So loved.

  Then I start to clean. I scrub every inch of my house, for hours and hours, climbing on a ladder to wash the ceiling, sloshing thick soapsuds in the cracks, scrubbing every surface of every object and carrying the more intricately-shaped outside into the sun to dry. Despite my most intense scrutiny, I find nothing that I can imagine being a listening device. Nothing that looks alien, nothing unreal.

  But I no longer know what is real.

  Only Bata is up; the other moons have not risen. The sky is clear and starry, the air cool. I wheel my bicycle inside and try to remember everything I need.

  Whatever kind of glass Ano’s coffin is made of, it is very tough. I have to swing my garden shovel three times, each time with all my strength, before I can break it. On the third blow the glass cracks, then falls leisurely apart into large pieces that bounce slightly when they hit the floor. Chemicals cascade off the bed, a waterfall of clear liquid that smells only slightly acrid.

  In my high boots I wade close to the bed and throw containers of water over Ano to wash off chemical residue. The containers are waiting in a neat row by the wall, everything from my largest wash basin to the kitchen bowls. Ano smiles sweetly.

  I reach onto the soggy bed and lift her clear.

  In the kitchen, I lay her body—limp, soft-limbed—on the floor and strip off her chemical-soaked clothing. I dry her, move her to the waiting blanket, take a last look, and wrap her tightly. The bundle of her and the shovel balances across the handles of my bicycle. I pull off my boots and open the door.

  The night smells of my neighbor’s foreign flowers. Ano seems weightless. I feel as if I can ride for hours. And I do.

  I bury her, weighted with stones, in marshy ground well off a deserted road. The wet dirt will speed the decay, and it is easy to cover the grave with reeds and toglif branches. When I’ve finished, I bury my clothes and dress in clean ones in my pack. Another few hours of riding and I can find an inn to sleep in. Or a field, if need be.

  The morning dawns pearly, with three moons in the sky. Everywhere I ride are flowers, first wild and then cultivated. Although exhausted, I sing softly to the curving blooms, to the sky, to the pale moonlit road. Ano is real, and free.

  Go sweetly, sweet sister, to our waiting ancestors.

  Two days later I reach Rafkit Haddon.

  It is an old city, sloping down the side of a mountain to the sea. The homes of the rich either stand on the shore or perch on the mountain, looking in both cases like rounded great white birds. In between lie a jumble of houses, market squares, government buildings, inns, pel shops, slums and parks, the latter with magnificent old trees and shabby old shrines. The manufacturing shops and warehouses lie to the north, with the docks.

  I have experience in finding people. I start with Rituals & Processions. The clerk behind the counter, a pre-initiate of the priesthood, is young and eager to help. “Yes?”

  “I am Ajma Pek Goranalit, attached to the household of Menanlin. I have been sent to inquire about the ritual activity of a citizen, Maldon Pek Brifjis. Can you help me?”

  “Of course,” she beams. An inquiry about ritual activity is never written; discretion is necessary when a great house is considering honoring a citizen by allowing him to honor their ancestors. A person so chosen gains great prestige—and considerable material wealth. I picked the name “Menanlin” after an hour’s judicious listening in a crowded pel shop. The family is old, numerous, and discreet.

  “Let me see,” she says, browsing among her public records. “Brifjis…Brifjis…it’s a common name, of course…which citizen, Pek?”

  “Maldon.”

  “Oh, yes…here. He paid for two musical tributes to his ancestors last year, made a donation to the Rafkit Haddon Priest House…Oh! And he was chosen to honor the ancestors of the house of Choulalait!”

  She sounds awe-struck. I nod. “We know about that, of course. But is there anything else?”

  “No, I don’t think so…wait. He paid for a charity tribute for the ancestors of his clu merchant, Lam Pek Flanoe, a poor man. Quite a lavish tribute, too. Music, and three priests.”

  “Kind,” I said.

  “Very! Three priests!” Her young eyes shine. “Isn’t it wonderful how many truly kind people share reality?”

  “Yes,” I say. “It is.”

  I find the clu merchant by the simple method of asking for him in several market squares. Sales of all fuels are of course slow in the summer; the young relatives left in charge of the clu stalls are happy to chat with strangers. Lam Pek Flanoe lives in a run-down neighborhood just behind the great houses by the sea. The neighborhood is home to servants and merchants who provide for the rich. Four more glasses of pel in three more pel shops, and I know that Maldon Pek Brifjis is currently a guest in the home of a rich widow. I know the widow’s address. I know that Pek Brifjis is a healer.

  A healer.

  Sick brain talks to itself. You not kill your sister.

  I am dizzy from four glasses of pel. Enough. I find an inn, the kind where no one asks questions, and sleep without the shared reality of dreams.

  It takes me a day, disguised as a street cleaner, to decide which of the men coming and going from the rich widow’s house is Pek Brifjis. Then I spend three days following him, in various guises. He goes a lot of places and talks to a lot of people, but none of them seems unusual for a rich healer with a personal pleasure in collecting antique water carafes. On the fourth day I look for a good opportunity to approach him, but this turns out to be unnecessary.

  “Pek,” a man says to me as I loiter, dressed as a vendor of sweet flatbreads, outside the baths on Elindel Street. I have stolen the sweets before dawn from the open kitchen of a bake shop. I know at once that the man approaching me is a bodyguard, and that he is very go
od. It’s in the way he walks, looks at me, places his hand on my arm. He is also very handsome, but that thought barely registers. Handsome men are never for such as me. They are for Ano.

  Were for Ano.

  “Come with me, please,” the bodyguard says, and I don’t argue. He leads me to the back of the baths, through a private entrance, to a small room apparently used for private grooming of some sort. The only furniture is two small stone tables. He checks me, expertly but gently, for weapons, looking even in my mouth. Satisfied, he indicates where I am to stand, and opens a second door.

  Maldon Pek Brifjis enters, wrapped in a bathing robe of rich imported cloth. He is younger than Carryl Walters, a vigorous man in vigorous prime. His eyes are striking, a deep purple with long gold lines radiating from their centers. He says immediately, “Why have you been following me for three days?”

  “Someone told me to,” I say. I have nothing to lose by an honest shared reality, although I still don’t fully believe I have anything to gain.

  “Who? You may say anything in front of my guard.”

  “Carryl Pek Walters.”

  The purple eyes deepen even more. “Pek Walters is dead.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Perpetually. I was with him when he entered the second stage of death.”

  “And where was that?” He is testing me.

  “In Aulit Prison. His last words instructed me to find you. To…ask you something.”

  “What do you wish to ask me?”

  “Not what I thought I would ask,” I say, and realize that I have made the decision to tell him everything. Until I saw him up close, I wasn’t completely sure what I would do. I can no longer share reality with World, not even if I went to Frablit Pek Brimmidin with exactly the knowledge he wants about the scientific experiments on children. That would not atone for releasing Ano before the Section agreed. And Pek Brimmidin is only a messenger, anyway. No, less than a messenger: a tool, like a garden shovel, or a bicycle. He does not share the reality of his users. He only thinks he does.

  As I had thought I did.

  I say, “I want to know if I killed my sister. Pek Walters said I did not. He said ‘sick brain talks to itself,’ and that I had not killed Ano. And to ask you. Did I kill my sister?”

  Pek Brifjis sits down on one of the stone tables. “I don’t know,” he says, and I see his neck fur quiver. “Perhaps you did. Perhaps you did not.”

  “How can I discover which?”

  “You cannot.”

  “Ever?”

  “Ever.” And then, “I am sorry.”

  Dizziness takes me. The “low blood pressure.” The next thing I know, I lie on the floor of the small room, with Pek Brifjis’s fingers on my elbow pulse. I struggle to sit up.

  “No, wait,” he says. “Wait a moment. Have you eaten today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, wait a moment anyway. I need to think.”

  He does, the purple eyes turning inward, his fingers absently pressing the inside of my elbow. Finally he says, “You are an informer. That’s why you were released from Aulit Prison after Pek Walters died. You inform for the government.”

  I don’t answer. It no longer matters.

  “But you have left informing. Because of what Pek Walters told you. Because he told you that the skits-oh-free-nia experiments might have…No. It can’t be.”

  He too has used a word I don’t know. It sounds Terran. Again I struggle to sit up, to leave. There is no hope for me here. This healer can tell me nothing.

  He pushes me back down on the floor and says swiftly, “When did your sister die?” His eyes have changed once again; the long golden flecks are brighter, radiating from the center like glowing spokes. “Please, Pek, this is immensely important. To both of us.”

  “Two years ago, and 152 days.”

  “Where? In what city?”

  “Village. Our village. Gofkit Ilo.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Yes. Tell me everything you remember of her death. Everything.”

  This time I push him aside and sit up. Blood rushes from my head, but anger overcomes the dizziness. “I will tell you nothing. Who do you people think you are, ancestors? To tell me I killed Ano, then tell me I didn’t, then say you don’t know—to destroy the hope of atonement I had as an informer, then to tell me there is no other hope—no, there might be hope—no, there’s not—how can you live with yourself? How can you twist people’s brains away from shared reality and offer nothing to replace it!” I am screaming. The bodyguard glances at the door. I don’t care; I go on screaming.

  “You are doing experiments on children, wrecking their reality as you have wrecked mine! You are a murderer—” But I don’t get to scream all that. Maybe I don’t get to scream any of it. For a needle slides into my elbow, at the inner pulse where Maldon Brifjis has been holding it, and the room slides away as easily as Ano into her grave.

  A bed, soft and silky, beneath me. Rich wall hangings. The room is very warm. A scented breeze whispers across my bare stomach. Bare? I sit up and discover I am dressed in the gauzy skirt, skimpy bandeau, and flirting veil of a prostitute.

  At my first movement, Pek Brifjis crosses from the fireplace to my bed. “Pek. This room does not allow sound to escape. Do not resume screaming. Do you understand?”

  I nod. His bodyguard stands across the room. I pull the flirting veil from my face.

  “I am sorry about that,” Pek Brifjis says. “It was necessary to dress you in a way that accounts for a bodyguard carrying a drugged woman into a private home without raising questions.”

  A private home. I guess that this is the rich widow’s house by the sea. A room that does not allow sound to escape. A needle unlike ours: sharp and sure. Brain experiments. “Skits-oh-fren-ia.”

  I say, “You work with the Terrans.”

  “No,” he says. “I do not.”

  “But Pek Walters…” It doesn’t matter. “What are you going to do with me?”

  He says, “I am going to offer you a trade.”

  “What sort of trade?”

  “Information in return for your freedom.”

  And he says he does not work with Terrans. I say, “What use is freedom to me?” although of course I don’t expect him to understand that. I can never be free.

  “Not that kind of freedom,” he says. “I won’t just let you go from this room. I will let you rejoin your ancestors, and Ano.”

  I gape at him.

  “Yes, Pek. I will kill you and bury you myself, where your body can decay.”

  “You would violate shared reality like that? For me?”

  His purple eyes deepen again. For a moment, something in those eyes looks almost like Pek Walters’s blue ones. “Please understand. I think there is a strong chance you did not kill Ano. Your village was one where…subjects were used for experimentation. I think that is the true shared reality here.”

  I say nothing. A little of his assurance disappears. “Or so I believe. Will you agree to the trade?”

  “Perhaps,” I say. Will he actually do what he promises? I can’t be sure. But there is no other way for me. I cannot hide from the government all the years until I die. I am too young. And when they find me, they will send me back to Aulit, and when I die there they will put me in a coffin of preservative chemicals…

  I would never see Ano again.

  The healer watches me closely. Again I see the Pek Walters look in his eyes: sadness and pity.

  “Perhaps I will agree to the trade,” I say, and wait for him to speak again about the night Ano died. But instead he says, “I want to show you something.”

  He nods at the bodyguard who leaves the room, returning a few moments later. By the hand he leads a child, a little girl, clean and well-dressed. One look makes my neck fur bristle. The girl’s eyes are flat and unseeing. She mutters to herself. I offer a quick appeal for protection to my ancestors. The girl is unreal, without the capacity to perceive shared reality, even though she is well over the age of r
eason. She is not human. She should have been destroyed.

  “This is Ori,” Pek Brifjis says. The girl suddenly laughs, a wild demented laugh, and peers at something only she can see.

  “Why is it here?” I listen to the harshness in my own voice.

  “Ori was born real. She was made this way by the scientific brain experiments of the government.”

  “Of the government! That is a lie!”

  “Is it? Do you still, Pek, have such trust in your government?”

  “No, but…” To make me continue to earn Ano’s freedom, even after I had met their terms…to lie to Pek Brimmidin…those offenses against shared reality are one thing. The destruction of a real person’s physical body, as I had done with Ano’s (had I?) is another, far far worse. To destroy a mind, the instrument of perceiving shared reality…Pek Brifjis lies.

  He says, “Pek, tell me about the night Ano died.”

  “Tell me about this…thing!”

  “All right.” He sits down in a chair beside my luxurious bed. The thing wanders around the room, muttering. It seems unable to stay still.

  “She was born Ori Malfisit, in a small village in the far north—”

  “What village?” I need desperately to see if he falters on details.

  He does not. “Gofkit Ramloe. Of real parents, simple people, an old and established family. At six years old, Ori was playing in the forest with some other children when she disappeared. The other children said they heard something thrashing toward the marshes. The family decided she had been carried off by a wild kilfreit—there are still some left, you know, that far north—and held a procession in honor of Ori’s joining their ancestors.

  “But that’s not what happened to Ori. She was stolen by two men, unreal prisoners promised atonement and restoration to full reality, just as you were. Ori was carried off to Rafkit Sarloe, with eight other children from all over World. There they were given to the Terrans, who were told that they were orphans who could be used for experiment. The experiments were ones that would not hurt or damage the children in any way.”