Jem

TWENTY

THE CORACLE first appeared between showers, far out over the water. In the pit beside Ana Dimitrova, Corporal Kristianides — no, Lieutenant Kristianides now, she corrected herself — stood up and turned the field glasses on it.

“Krinpit,” she said. “Son of a bitch. Lay your gun on it, Nan, but don’t fire unless I tell you to.”

Unnecessary order! Not for worlds would she have fired. Not until she saw for herself that there were only Krinpit in the boat, and not Ahmed Dulla. Perhaps not even then, for this insanity of guns and shooting was awful even to play at. She had not yet had to fire at a living being, was far from sure that she could, and had said as much; but no one wanted to hear. But the good thing about her machine gun was that it had a telescopic sight, and she was glad enough to aim it.

The coracle disappeared into a squall, but not before she had seen that there was no human being in it, though it was large enough for several.

When it appeared again it was larger and nearer, and she could see that the single Krinpit was working furiously to keep it bailed and the trapezoidal sail intact, and paddling to bring it straight into the camp. By then everyone had seen, and at least a dozen weapons were pointed at it. Over the PA system Guy Tree’s voice shrilled an order to hold fire. Down on the beach Marge Menninger stood, a GORR under her arm, oblivious of the rain that soaked her. Ana wiped the wet off her sight as carefully as she had been taught and looked again. She had no skill at recognizing individual Krinpit by sight, but this one did not look familiar.

Disappointment of a hope. But what a foolish hope, she scolded herself. How improbable that Ahmed would once again miraculously appear. And even if he had, who was this Ahmed who had taken her and used her and left her again? He was not the person of Sofia, she thought gloomily, and roused herself and tried to think more constructively.

It was a failure. There was so little to think constructively about! The world she had left was blowing itself up, and the world she had come to seemed determined to do the same. What went on in the secret conferences among Marge Menninger and her warrior knights in the headquarters shed she did not know, nor wish to. But it might well be the death of all of them.

The Krinpit was in the shallows now. It raised itself and splashed over the side, and the coracle bobbed away as it lurched ashore. It seemed to be in bad shape. It staggered in a half-circle on the shore and then fell to the ground with a painful crash as Colonel Menninger and half a dozen of her warriors formed a wary perimeter around it.

Perhaps they would kill it, she thought. Well, let them. Everyone else was standing and staring, but Ana’s attention wandered — until one of the riflemen came running toward her.

“Dimitrova, front and center!” he was calling. “It’s the one that speaks Pak! Colonel wants you to come translate!”

When Ana Dimitrova was nineteen years old, precocious senior at the University of Sofia, candidate for the callosectomy that would forever sunder the two halves of her brain and lead to a distinguished career in translation, she had watched a film on the subject. It was not her choice. They would not accept her application without it. The first part was quite tedious, though instructive, as it described the anatomy of that senseless and defenseless kilogram of pinky-gray jelly that mediated and transformed and commanded all the senses and defenses of the body. Before her very eyes a surgeon took a human brain in his hands and peeled away tissue to expose that great suety bridge that connected the two halves and that, in her, she would ask someone to sever. There was a long explanation, quite hard to follow, of how nerves crossed, so that the right half of the brain seemed to take responsibility for the left half of the body, and vice versa: strange quirk of anatomy! She saw how the nerves carrying visual impressions intersected at the optic chiasma, but not completely — as though prankish evolution had tired of the joke and decided not to finish it. All that part of the film was difficult to absorb, as well as unsettling to look at. But then there were some comic parts. Each half of the brain commanded its own network of afferent and efferent nerves. The efferent nerves, the ones that directed action, were spared in the resection or reconnected afterwards, which was why the split-brain people were able to walk without stumbling. Most of the time. The afferent nerves, the ones that accepted sensory impressions from the world, were kept apart. So each half of the brain could receive and process and store its own information, not shared with the other. That was why translation became easy.

But.

But some kinds of afferent input were not value-free. They produced glandular responses. They caused emotions. This was where the comic part came in. The film showed a woman, one of the earliest volunteers for the surgery. She had an earplug in one ear and was reading from a prepared text. The voice-over narration explained what she was doing: delivering a translated talk to a mathematical congress. But while one half of her brain was reading and translating and speaking, the other half was listening to the words coming in over the earplug; and those words were the filthiest of scatological jokes. The woman began to stammer and falter, and over her face spread the rosiest of blushes, though the operating half of her brain had not an idea in the world why. Blushes. Stammers. Headaches. Depression. They were the symptoms of leakage from one half to the other. The scar tissue that blocked the flow of impulses through the corpus callosum let each half of the brain work efficiently on its own. But feelings seeped through. All the time Ana Dimitrova was translating for Colonel Menninger she could feel them pounding at her — “He says that as the People’s Republics are no longer a force, he wishes to help us against the Fuel Bloc.”

“Fucking great. What’s he going to do, scratch them to death with his sharp little feet?”

— and the headache was the worst she had ever had: sickening, sandbag blows at the base of her skull. She felt nauseated and was not helped by the Krinpit.

Sharn-igon was repulsively ill. Even the dull, recurrent rasp of his name — Sharn-igon, Sharn-igon — was badly played, like a defective radio. His carapace was a sickly yellow instead of the rich mahogany it had been. It was cracked and seamed. At the edges of it, where undershell joined the massive armor of the top, seams did not quite join, and a thin, foul liquid oozed out.

“He has molted,” she explained to the colonel, “and feels he is about to molt again. Perhaps it is because of the chemicals the Fuel people used against them.”

“You don’t look so fucking great yourself, Dimitrova.”

“I am quite capable of continuing, Colonel Menninger.” All the same, she moved away from the Krinpit. The exudations of his shell had darkened the sand around him, and the smell was like rancid fat. Moving did not help. The headache, and the pain behind it, grew with every moment.

Marge Menninger ran her hands through her wet hair, pulling it back so that her ears were exposed. She looked almost like a little girl as she said, “What do you think, Guy? Have we got ourselves a real blood-hungry tiger?”

Colonel Tree said, “One does not refuse an ally, Marge. But the Greasies would eat these jokers up.”

“So what is he saying exactly, Dimitrova? That he’ll tell all his Crawly friends to attack the Greasy camp if we want them to?”

“Something like that, yes. What he says,” she added, “is not always easy to understand, Colonel Menninger. He speaks a little Urdu, but not much, and he speaks it very badly. Besides, his mind wanders. It is a personal matter with him, to kill. He does not care who. Sometimes he says he wants to kill me.”

Menninger looked appraisingly at the Krinpit. “I don’t think he’s in shape to do much killing.”

“Must one be well for that?” Ana flared. “I am sick in my heart from talk of killing, and from killing itself! It is a wicked insanity to kill when so few persons are still alive.”

“As to that,” said Margie mildly, raising her hand to stop Guy Tree from exploding, “we’ll talk another time. You look like shit, Dimitrova. Go get some sleep.”

“Thank you, Colonel Menninger,” Ana said stiffly, hating her, perhaps hating even more the look of compassion in Margie’s eyes. How dare the bloody trollop feel pity!

Ana stalked off to her tent. It was raining hard again, and lightning lashed over the water. She hardly felt it. At every step the throbbing in her head punished her, and she knew that behind the headache a greater pain was scratching to come out. Pity was the solvent that would melt the dam and let it through, and she wanted to be by herself when that happened. She stooped into the tent without a word to the woman who shared it with her, removed only her shoes and slacks, and buried herself under the covers.

Almost at once she began to weep.

Ana made no sound, did not shake, did not thrash about. It was only the ragged unevenness of her breathing that made the black girl in the other cot rise up on one elbow to look toward her; but Ana did not speak, and after a moment her roommate went back to sleep. Ana did not. Not for an hour and more. She wept silently for a long time, helpless to contain the pain any longer. Hopes gone, pleasures denied, dreams melted away. She had held off accepting the thing that the Krinpit had said almost in his first sentence, but now it could not be denied. There was no longer a reason for her to be on Jem. There was hardly even a reason to live. Ahmed was dead.

She woke to the loud, incongrous sound of dance music.

The storm of silent weeping had cleared her mind, and the deep and dreamless sleep that followed had begun the healing. Ana was quite composed as she bathed sparingly in the shower at the end of the tent line, brushed her hair dry, and dressed. The music was, of course, that other of Marge Menninger’s eccentricities, the Saturday night dance. How very strange she was! But her strangeness was not all unwelcome. One of the fruits of it had been the patterns and fabric that had come in the last ship. Ana chose to put on a simple blouse and skirt, not elaborate, but not purely utilitarian either. She was a very long way from dancing. But she would not spoil the pleasure of those who enjoyed it.

She cut past the generator, where the Krinpit was rumbling hollowly as it scratched through the clumps of burnable vegetation for something to eat, a guard with a GORR trailing its every step, and visited the fringe of the dance area long enough to get something to eat from the buffet. (Of course, she had slept through two meals.) When men asked her to dance she smiled and thanked them as she shook her head. The rain had stopped, and sullen Kung glowed redly overhead. She took a plate of cheese and biscuits and slipped away. Not that there was far to go. No one walked in the woods anymore these days. They lived and ate and slept in a space one could run across in three minutes. But all who could be there were at the dance, and down by the beach were only the perimeter guards. She sat down with her back against one of the machine-gun turrets and finished her meal. Then she put her plate down beside her, pulled her knees up to her chin, and sat staring at the purple-red waves.

Ahmed was dead.

It was not much comfort to tell herself that her dreams had been foolish to begin with, that Ahmed had never taken her as seriously as she had taken him. Nevertheless, it was true, and Ana Dimitrova was a practical person. She had learned the trick of dissecting pain into its parts. That she would never see him again, touch his strong and supple body, lie beside him while he slept — that was purest pain, and there was no help for it. But that she would never marry him and bear his children and grow old by his side — that was only a spoiled fantasy. It had never been real. That loss could not hurt her now, because it was of something she had never owned; and so her pain was diminished by half.

(But, oh, how that half still ached!)

She wept gently and openly for a moment, then sighed and rubbed the tears away. What she had lost, she told herself, she had lost long ago. From the moment Ahmed came to Jem, he had become a different person. In any event, it was over. She had a life to make for herself, and the materials to make it from were all in this camp; there was nothing else anywhere. You should dance, she scolded herself. You should go up where they are laughing and singing and drinking.

Plainly and simply, she did not want to. It was not merely that she didn’t want to dance, not yet. It was more deep and damaging than that. Ana, translating for the Krinpit, had heard enough of what was going on in the minds of Marge Menninger and Nguyen Tree and the other hawks who directed the fate of the camp. So much madness in so few minds! They were determined to carry on a war, even here, even after Earth had blown itself into misery! And yet there they all were, smiling and bobbing around the floor. Her own brain had been divided by a surgeon’s knife. What had divided theirs, so that they could plot genocide in an afternoon and drink and cavort and play their sexual games at night? How Ahmed would scowl at them!

But Ahmed was dead.

She took a deep breath and decided not to cry again.

She stood up and stretched her cramped limbs. The Krinpit was lurching slowly down toward the water for a drink after his unappetizing meal, the soldier wandering after. She did not particularly want to be near him, but she needed to rinse her plate — either that or carry it back to the cook tent, which was too near the dance floor. She kept her distance, paralleling his scuttling path, and then she heard someone call her name.

It was the Russian pilot, Kappelyushnikov, sitting cross-legged at a gun pit and talking to Danny Dalehouse, on duty inside it. Why not? Ana changed course to approach them and wished them a good evening.

“Is truly good, Anyushka? But Danny Dalehouse has told me of death of Ahmed Dulla. I am deeply sympathetic for you.”

There it was, the first time someone had spoken of it to her. She discovered that it was not impossible for her to respond.

“Thank you, Visha,” she said steadily. “What, have you become a monk that you do not dance tonight?”

“Is no one I care to dance with,” he said gloomily. “Also have been having most interesting discussion with Danny on subject of slavery.”

“And what have you concluded, then, Danny?” she asked brightly. “Are we all slaves to your mistress, the beautiful blond colonel?”

He did not answer directly, but chose to be placating. “I know you’re upset, Ana. I’m sorry, too.”

“Upset?” She nodded judiciously, looking down into the pit at him. “Yes, perhaps. I must assume that my home has been destroyed — yours, too, I suppose. But you are braver than I. I am not brave; I become upset. It upsets me that what has happened on Earth is now to happen again, here. It upsets me that my — that my friend is dead. It upsets me that the colonel intends to kill a great many more persons. Can you imagine? She proposes to tunnel under the Fuel camp and explode a nuclear bomb, and that upsets me.”

Why are you doing this? she asked herself; but she knew that she could not accept more sympathy without crying, and she was not ready to cry before these men. At least she had diverted them. Dalehouse was frowning.

“We don’t have any nuclear weapons,” he objected.

“Softheaded person!” she scoffed. “Your mistress has what she wants to have. I should not be astonished if she had a fleet of submarines or a division of tanks. She wears weapons as she wears that cheap perfume. The smell of them is always around her.”

“No,” he said doggedly, peering up at her, “you’re wrong about the nuclear weapons. She couldn’t conceal that from us. And she’s not my mistress.”

“Do not flatter yourself that I care. She may have her sexual excesses with whomever she likes, and so may you.”

Kappelyushnikov coughed. “I think,” he said, “dance has suddenly become more attractive.”

As he stood up, Ana put her hand on his arm. “I am driving you away. Please forgive me.”

“No, no, Anyushka. Are difficult times for all, nothing to forgive.” He patted her hand, then grinned and kissed it. “As to myself,” he said, “I see beautiful blond colonel roaming about alone, and perhaps she wishes to dance or otherwise relate to some new person, such as I. Also do not care for cheap perfume worn by big cockroach. You do not yourself desire to dance? Or otherwise relate? No. Then stay with friend Danny.”

They watched him walk steadily toward Marge Menninger, strolling past her checkpoints. They heard her laugh as Gappy spoke to her; then he shrugged and moved on toward the dance floor.

The Krinpit, in his random stagger around the beach, was coming closer. It was true that the stench of his exudations was strong. So was the sighing, droning sound of his presence. Ana listened, then said gloomily, “This one is muttering about his love now,” she said. “It was killed somehow, I cannot tell how. I think Ahmed had something to do with it, and it is for that that it is determined to kill human beings. But it had become Ahmed’s ally! Dan, is not that lunacy? It is as though killing has become an end in itself. It no longer matters who is killed or for what possible gain the killing is done. Only the killing itself matters.”

Dalehouse stood up in his shallow rifle pit, looking up the hill toward the dancers. “She’s coming this way,” he said. “Listen, before she gets here. About her being my mistress—”

“Please, Danny. I spoke without thinking and because I am, yes, upset. It is not a time to worry about personal matters.”

Clearly he was not satisfied and would have pursued the subject, but Margie was now too close. She paused to light a cigarette, studying the Krinpit and its guard, now a model of military deportment, his recoilless at port arms as the colonel approached. Then she came smiling over to Danny and Nan. “Getting it on, are you?” she said amiably. “When was the last time you checked your earphones, Danny?”

Guiltily Dalehouse clapped the phone to one ear. He had been neglecting the buried microphone probes, which were supposed to warn of burrowers digging toward him under the ground. There was no sound. “Sorry, Margie,” he said.

She shook her head. “When you’re on duty, that’s colonel. And when I say frog, you hop. Now that that’s understood,” she said, smiling sunnily, “would either of you folks like a hit before we talk some business?”

“I am not in the habit of using narcotics,” Ana said.

“Pity. Danny?” She watched while Dalehouse filled his lungs, and as she took the stick back from him, she said, “I want you to draft your gasbag friend. One hundred and—” She glanced at her wristwatch. “One hundred and eight hours from now, give or take a little, we’re going to hit the Greasy camp, and he’s going to be our air arm.”

Dalehouse coughed and spluttered. “He — he can’t—”

“Take your time, Danny,” she encouraged. “While you’re getting your breath, just listen for a moment. Storm’s over. Looks like we’ve got maybe five or six good days. I’m taking fifteen front-line effectives, plus you, Danny. We’ll mop up that camp without breathing hard. Only I don’t want to take a plane, and I don’t want you or Gappy floating around up there where they can see you, and that leaves Charlie.”

“Charlie can’t fight!”

“Well,” she said reasonably, “come to that, I don’t figure you for your real Geronimo trained killer, either. But I don’t expect it of you. You communicate. Charlie observes. The Greasies won’t pay any attention to one more fartbag hanging around—”

“Bullshit they won’t! They’ve been shooting balloonists down all along.”

“Danny,” she said, “I’m not asking your advice. I’m giving you an order.” She dragged on the joint, down to the last centimeter, and then carefully rubbed it out and pocketed it before exhaling. “You see,” she said, “the Greasies are going to come to the same conclusions I did, only it’ll take them a little longer. One of us has to run things. The only way to do that is to knock the other out. All Charlie has to do is hang in there with his radio and keep us posted if they send up a plane or put some people out in the woods. I’ll bring the company up overland. But we’re naked without air cover. We need to know when to get out of sight. That’s easy enough for him, right?”

“Well, sure. But — shit, Margie. He’s almost the last survivor. It’s a lot to ask—”

“But I’m not asking, Danny. You keep making that same mistake. I’m ordering. If he doesn’t, he’ll make a nice flame.” She scratched under her belt, regarding him amiably. “So after the dance I break the news to the camp, and tomorrow this time we’re on our way.”

“To atom-bomb the Fuel Bloc,” said Ana bitterly.

Marge Menninger’s face froze. After a moment she said, “I guess I’ll let that pass, Dimitrova. I didn’t specifically order you to keep your mouth shut. But I won’t let it pass again. What you hear when you’re translating is classified. ”

“Holy Christ,” Dalehouse said. “You really have a nuclear bomb?”

“Bet your ass, Danny. You’ve got a piece of it right there in your ground mikes.”

“Where? You mean the plutonium power-packs? That’s no good, Margie — colonel, I mean. There’s not enough of them. Even if there were, you couldn’t flange them together to make a bomb.”

“Wrong and wrong, Danny. Takes eighteen hundred grams and a bit to fission. I have a little over six thousand grams, all tidied away in the stores marked ‘fuel replacements.’ All this was planned a long time ago, and they’ll fit together because some pretty high-powered weapons people designed them to do that before the first ship took off. Oh, it’s not one of your hundred-megaton jobs. Maybe not even a kiloton, because I don’t have containment to keep the parts together very long. But I don’t want a big one. I don’t want to wipe out the Greasy camps, I want to own them. I want to take out their ammunition and their food stores, and I know just the place to put baby for that. Then they can beg.”

She looked serene and innocent as she said it, and Dalehouse responded with shocked disbelief. “That’s — that’s unprovoked aggression! A stab in the back!”

“Wrong, Dalehouse. That’s preemption. The Greasies don’t have a choice, either. They just haven’t figured it out yet.”

“Bullshit! It’s what the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor all over again!”

She opened her eyes wide. “Sure, why not? There was nothing wrong with Pearl Harbor, except they fucked it up. If they’d gone on to take out the carrier fleet and follow up with a landing, history would be a lot different. You’d be saying ‘Pearl Harbor’ the way you say ‘Normandy’ now, only you’d be saying it in Japanese.”

She seemed quite pleased with herself, but then she hesitated. She sought a dry place on the ground and sat down before adding, “But I will admit to you two dear old friends from Bulgaria that right now I’m scared and tired and not what you’d call real happy with the way things are going. I — what’s the matter with that thing?”

The Krinpit was staggering closer to them, moaning and stridulating. Ana listened. “He is quite hard to follow. He is speaking of Poison Ghosts and Ghosts Above — that is, of ourselves and of balloonists. He seems to have us confused in his mind.”

“All enemies look alike after awhile, I guess. Tell him to back away. I don’t like the way he smells.”

“Yes, Colonel Menninger.” But before Ana could summon up the commands in Krinpit-Urdu, Margie stopped her again.

“Wait a minute. What was that?” There had been a voice on the PA system along with the blare of dance music.

“I couldn’t make it out,” said Dalehouse, “but I do hear something. Out in the woods. Or in the air—”

Then the dance music abruptly died, and a scared voice replaced it. “Colonel Menninger! All personnel! Aircraft approaching!”

The sounds were clear now, two sets of them: the whickering putt-putt of a helicopter, and a quicker, higher sound. The dancers scattered.

Over the trees two shapes appeared. Neither was moving very fast, but they came without warning: the Fuel helicopter and a stub-winged STOL plane, one they had not seen in the air before. They did not come in peace. Soldiers strapped to the pods of the helicopter were firing incendiary rockets while wing-mounted machine guns on the STOL strafed the camp. The fixed-wing plane made a roaring run that took it out over the water; then it rose, turned, and dived in again. On its second pass the guns did not fire, but four tiny rockets leaped out from under the wing, streaked into the store shed, and set fire to a row of tents.

The Greasies had not been so slow after all.

Here and there, around the camp and inside it, perimeter guards and the more quick-witted of the dancers were beginning to return the fire. Margie jumped to her feet and began to run toward the nearest rocket launcher, and then, on its third pass, the stub-winged plane swerved toward her. It was using both machine guns and a flamethrower now. As the bullets stitched toward her, Margie dodged and fell, almost beside the Krinpit; and the creature rose up high above her. It launched itself, two hundred kilograms of half-molted body, on top of Marge Menninger.

Sharn-igon knew that this would be his last molt, terribly premature, agonizing, fruitless. He would never experience the satisfying itch of his new carapace as it hardened and stretched over the soft inner pulp, never feel the sexual stirring of the newly shelled and embark on the quick conquest of a female with a he-mate. As the Poison Ghosts Above zoomed in toward the camp, he tried to warn these new allies.

But they were deaf to the brilliant sounds from over the trees, deaf to his warnings.

The pain was too much.

It had been his intention to assist them in killing each other to the maximum extent possible, and then to kill the survivors himself. But perhaps he had done all the assisting he would ever do. The agony of his new shell, already beginning to crack again, tormented his thoughts. The blinding sounds of the aircraft and the explosions dazed him.

There was only one Poison Ghost left that he could kill. It would have to be enough. He raised himself on his pitifully soft-shelled limbs, leaned forward, and crashed down on top of her just as the soft, deadly tongue of the flamethrower licked at them both.

By then the whole camp was firing at the aircraft — or that much of it that was still able to fire. But the planes were out of reach. They hung out over the water, a kilometer and more away, the helicopter dancing lightly, the STOL turning in small circles, and did not return to the attack.

The next assault came from another place.

A scream from one of the machine-gun pits, and the two soldiers in it were down, ripped to shreds. Out of the pit came a long, limber, black shape wearing tiny goggles and racing on its dozen limbs to the nearest knot of humans; and another behind him, and another.

The burrowers managed to kill more than ten of the survivors. But that was all. Even with the sunglasses they were no match for trained human soldiers on the surface of the planet. If the planes had continued their attack — but they didn’t. The human defenders quickly rallied, and at the end there were fifty burrowers stretched out on the ground, soiling the sand with their watery black blood. No more came because there were no more in the nest to come. That burrow had been wiped out.

Dan Dalehouse stood peering out over the sea while one of Cheech Arkashvili’s assistants bandaged a deep gash on his arm. The planes were gone. In the middle of everything, they had quietly flown down the coastline and away.

“And why didn’t they finish us off?” he asked.

There was no answer.