Science Fiction Originals Vol 3 Part 19

He kept it casual, made it seem that he was just-what was Howie's saying?-shooting the breeze.

"Ever meet anyone who claims to have seen someone?"

"Sure. Bancroft, but he's always claiming one thing or another about the lagan. Sally Joule's neighbor, Corben, had a stroke, but she won't buy it. Reckons the lagan did it to him because he discovered something."

"Would he mind if I visited?" "Probably not. I know Corben. He's two counties over, an hour's drive or more. But I go sit with him sometimes. Talk's ninety-eight per cent one-sided these days, but that's okay. And you've got things in common. He wildcatted his field too, just as you've done. I can take you out."

Ben Corben seemed pleased to see them. At least he tracked their approach from his easy chair on the front porch and gave a lopsided smile when Howie greeted him and introduced Sam. He couldn't speak well anymore, and took ages to answer the same question Sam had put to Howie: had he ever heard of anything found alive in the lagan.

"Sum-thin," Corben managed. "Stor-ees."

And that was it for a time. The live-in nurse served afternoon tea, helped Corben with his teacup and scones.

Which was fine, Sam found. It gave him time to look out over Corben's lapsed domain, let him see what his own bloom would one day become.

Finally Howard brought them back to the question as if it hadn't been asked.

"Ever find anything out there, Corb? Anything alive?" He gestured at what remained of Corben's hedges, stripped and wasted now, the towers and barricades fallen, the bas.e.m.e.nts collapsed in on themselves, just so many spike-fields, kite-frames and screens of wind-torn filigree, rattling and creaking and slowly falling to dust.

"No," Corben said, so so slowly, and his skewed face seemed curiously serene, alive with something known.

"It's important, Ben," Sam said. "It's just-it's really important. I've got hedges now. Never expected it.

Never did. But I think something's out there. Calling at night." He didn't want to give too much away. And Howie had gone with it, bless him, hadn't swung about and said: hey, what's this? Good friend.

Corben blinked, looked out across the ruin of his own lagan field, now two years gone, so Howie had said.

Again Sam noticed the peace in the man, what may have been a result of the stroke or even some medication stupor, but seemed for all the world like uncaring serenity, as if he'd seen sufficient wonders and was content, as if-well, as if- And there it was. Of course. Like Kyrie. Corben was like Kyrie. Slow and careful. Minimalist. Just like Kyrie. Of course.

It was all so obvious once Sam saw it like that. Back home, he removed the photos, sims and mirrors, left Kyrie to be what she-what "it" had tried to be all along. He saw what he thought to be relief in the maquette's suffering eyes as he removed the last of the distractions, then brought a chair and sat in front of it.

Finish your job, he thought, but didn't speak it. Finish being what you already are.

And Sam found it such a relief to sit there and let it happen. Kyrie had never tried to be Jeanie, had never been a gift from the lagan to ease a broken heart.

Not Kyrie. Cadrey.

Sam saw how he'd been: thinking of Jeanie by day, not thinking of her-blessedly forgetting her-at night when he slept. Escaping in dreams, his only true time of self. Swaying Kyrie this way and that in its Becoming-by day towards Jeanie, by night back towards its intended form all along.

Poor agonized thing. Here from somewhere else, now beautified by Jeanie-thought, now showing the ruin of his own MF tiger mask, coping, copying. Poor ugly, beautiful, languishing thing. Trying all the while.

Then, like looking through doors opened and aligned, he saw the rest. Its message, its purpose. I will be you to free you so you can have your turn. Moving on. Taking it with you.

What a clumsy, awkward method, Sam decided. What a flawed-no! What a natural and fitting way to do it, more like a plant in a garden, some wild and willful, wayward garden, some natural, blundering, questing thing, trying again and again to push through. St.i.tching it up. Linking the worlds.

What it was, never the issue. Only that it was.

He had to help. Do sittings. Leave photos of his red-demon, tiger-faced self (how the others would smile!), try not to think of Jeanie for now, just for now.

For Kyrie. Oh, the irony. So many times he stood before the mirrors and laughed, recalling that old story of desperate choice: the Lady or the Tiger. Well, now he played both parts-showing the Tiger but being like Jeanie for Kyrie.

Giving of himself. Giving self. Generous. The Lady and the Tiger.

Two weeks later, at brightest, deepest midnight, he stood before the notre dame, bathed in the honey-balm and the spindrift, letting the croisie take him, tune him, bring him in. They were all part of it-transition vectors, carrier modes. Kyrie was in place back in the house, maimed, shaped, pathetic and wonderful both. Sam Cadrey enough. Would seem to have had a stroke when they found him. That would cover the slips, the gaffes and desperate gracelessness. His friends would find, would impose, the bits of Sam Cadrey no time or training could provide. Friendship allowing, they would find him in what was left, never knowing it was all there was.

Sam looked around at his world, at the fullness of it, the last of it, then stepped into the narrow chamber.

The cathedral did what it had to do, blindly or knowing, who could say, but naturally.

Sam felt himself changing, becoming-why, whatever it needed him to be this time, using what was in the worlds. And as he rose, he had the words, unchanged in all that changing. Nor life I know, nor liberty. Had his self, his memories to be enough of self around. For Love is lord of all.

Sam held Jeanie to him, as firm and clear as he could make her, and rose from the troubled seabed to the swelling, different light of someone else's day.

M. Shayne Bell

REFUGEES FROM NULONGWE.

Donna Pendrick walked unafraid through the refugees at Kitale Border Crossing. She wore a translator around her neck, but it could not make sense of the babble. It picked up words out of context, sentences from different conversations, one greeting from an old male who recognized her. Mostly the translator just hissed.

Donna turned it down.

Elizabeth had asked her to come. As Donna expected, Elizabeth stood next to the flimsy bridge on the Kenyan side of the border-despite the danger of bullets-consoling refugees as they crossed over. Donna walked up to her. "If those people over there knew who you were, they'd shoot you down and d.a.m.n world opinion," Donna said.

Elizabeth wrapped her trunk around Donna's old shoulders, pulled her close, and hugged her hard. "At least matriarch/old-female-elephant/I blend in with the refugees," she said through her translator. "If those people knew/guessed/had-any-idea who matriarch/old-female-human/you were, they'd shoot/murder/kill you, too."

Donna realized that was probably true. Her negotiations on behalf of the elephants had, in some quarters, won only enemies. Donna could hear shooting not far off in Uganda. It came in unexpected spurts-first from one place, then quiet for a moment, then from a different part of the horizon, then back at the first spot all at once. Elizabeth held her tightly. Donna felt the tension-the fear, even-in her trunk. It made Donna remember how Elizabeth had needed to hang onto her after she had been orphaned so many years before.

This was more, then, than another refugee crisis.

It was a moment before Elizabeth could speak again. Elephant refugees kept streaming across the border, some on the bridge, some fording the stream, all rushing to what they hoped would be safety.

"Sam ran/musth-like anger/charged over there," Elizabeth said finally. "He's back/returned/here now, but hurt/wounded/down."

Donna turned up her translator to make sure she was hearing right. Sam was Elizabeth's youngest son, tending toward old himself now. "Will he be all right?" Donna asked.

"Shot/hole/bullet in his leg, and shot/hole/bullet in his stomach," Elizabeth said. "That's less than council/us/me-his-mother expected. He ran/musth-like anger/charged over there with tusks worth/esteemed/valued more than their weight in gold and hurt/took/received just two bullets. I call him lucky/blessed/prayers-for-protection-maybe-answered."

The tears in Elizabeth's eyes belied her tough words. Elizabeth and Sam had argued about Sam's tusks for years. Technically it should have been no problem for an elephant to wear its tusks. Technically all trade in ivory was banned. But Donna believed, like Elizabeth, that no practical person, human or elephant, should walk around poor human countries wearing a quarter of a million dollars' worth of jewelry. "Will he be all right?" Donna repeated.

"I don't know," Elizabeth said. "He lost/spurted/poured a lot of blood, and he's hurt/bleeding/flowing internally. I've spent every minute with him I could. He's a brave/courageous/upstart fool, I'll grant him that. He freed three juveniles and brought/freed/protected them out, hurt as he was. He found something interesting recorded/ human-speech/words on their translators. That's why I asked/hoped/needed you to come/rush/be-with-me here."

Shooting broke out upriver. Elizabeth took charge of moving all elephant refugees farther back from the border. She had no time to explain about the recordings. One of the nervous human guards told Donna that she could wait with them in the border post. Instead she went looking for Sam.

She found him, his skin a pale gray, lying in one corner of an enormous Red Cross tent. Another elephant male was standing just outside. Transfusion tubes ran from him under the tent flaps to Sam. Sam was laboring to breathe. Donna stroked Sam's trunk and rubbed his gums, something he found rea.s.suring. "You're in fine shape to be heading off on adventures," she told him. "Why didn't you send the younger bulls?"

Sam just snorted. "Did Mother tell/whisper/explain what I found?"

"Recordings," she said. "She didn't have time to explain what was on them."

Sam struggled to breathe. "Turn our translator ranges down/low/close," Sam said.

Donna turned hers down, then leaned over Sam and pulled the translator around his neck so she couldwork the controls. Translators pick up the subsonic vocalizations of elephants-sounds humans could never hear-amplify them into audible sound, and translate them into a growing list of human languages. They work in the opposite direction, too, but they have problems taking human language into subsonic range. The subsonics they transmit travel far and wide, like real elephant subsonics, except harsher. They interrupt elephant conversations in a six-mile radius. Sam evidently did not want anyone else hearing what he was going to tell Donna or her response.

"The three juvenile/terrified/young elephants I went after were equipped/using/wearing translators concealed/ screened/hidden behind ears," Sam said. "They had write programs running/operating/recording during and after the murders/slaughter/hacking-apart of their families."

Sam struggled for breath again. "A few loose-lipped humans said words/secrets/facts in front of them that will interest the International Court of Justice in the Hague."

"You have all these refugees with all their stories-you have satellite images of the ma.s.sacre sites-and you had to go after recordings?"

"I went after the juvenile/terrified/young. I did not know/surprise/guess about the recordings then. But the humans they recorded were members/in/part of the Ugandan government."

Donna sat for a moment, then reached over to touch Sam.

He did not need to explain any further.

The CDs would be proof of genocide.

This had not been long in coming, Donna thought. The Nairobi Accord was barely six years old. It had been just ten years since Joyce Lake had used amplified elephant subsonics to crack the code of elephant language. How foolish we all were, Donna thought, to imagine the killing would stop when we learned how to say h.e.l.lo to the elephants.

Yet the killing had stopped for a time. No one had known what to do at first-except empty the zoos, circuses, temples, and farms of all captive elephants. Kenya and Tanzania had enlarged their national parks and created new ones, and money from around the world had paid for that land. Boatload after boatload of once captive elephants had come "home" to Africa, a place most of them had never seen. The Asian countries had been slower to react, so hundreds of Asian elephants from zoos and circuses in Europe and the Americas had ended up in East Africa-temporarily, everyone had thought.

There had been so many unanswered questions. Were the elephants citizens of the human countries?

Should they be allowed to vote? Could they own property?

The advent of cheap translators intensified the debates. Tens of thousands of humans traveled to Africa to talk to the elephants and, with translators around their necks, they could do so easily. All that talk made people realize something more had to be done.

And they enacted the Nairobi Accord.

Donna had helped negotiate it, and the beauty of it still moved her. The elephants were not to be citizens of any human country. They were to have their own, Nulongwe, a territory superimposed over the top of the human countries that signed the accord. The elephant nation and the human nations would coexist in the same territory, use the same resources, manage the land together.

Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the elephants (Elizabeth the head of their delegation and the first president of Nulongwe) were the initial signatories. Other human countries in Africa were expected to join later. None did. South Asia was expected to create a similar accord, but it hadn't.

Now the accord was unraveling. Many humans believed that G.o.d had created the Earth for people.

Elephants had come along too late to claim any of it as their own. Seeing elephants gain water rights, park fees, and valuable agricultural land-when people needed those same resources-only increased their anger.

Some people doubted that elephants were sentient at all and thought the whole thing a vast joke or, worse, a conspiracy of Western environmental groups.

Though Donna never said this to Elizabeth, she was afraid there were too few people like her to stop humans from killing elephants. Humans had always killed each other, after all, and they had often been able to say h.e.l.lo before committing murder. Why should anyone have expected humanity to treat elephants differently?

Later in the day, Donna found Elizabeth with the three juveniles Sam had rescued. The juveniles, two females and a little male, were in bad shape. They'd seen their families butchered in front of them. They themselves had been destined for a zoo in Kampala. But unlike Elizabeth in a similar circ.u.mstance, they wanted nothing to do with Donna.

"Please hold/take/protect these," Elizabeth said. She carried a small package wrapped in brown paper in her trunk, and held it out to Donna. It was the CDs. "We/council/I have uploaded the information/data/words on these CDs," Elizabeth said. "But such information/data/bytes might not be admissible/ accepted/allowed in court. It could be manufactured/ made-up/lies. We/council/Nulongwe need these originals." Donna held the package for a moment, then, for want of a better place, tucked it into her sweater pocket.

"Where do you want me to take them?" she asked.

"The Dutch amba.s.sador has agreed/decided/offered to overnight them to the Hague," Elizabeth said. "Will you carry/protect/take them to the emba.s.sy?"

Donna agreed.

"I have one more favor/request/need," Elizabeth said. "Will you escort/protect/take these juveniles to your center/home/park in Nairobi? They will be called/ needed/brought as witnesses in the Hague. We/council/I feel they will be guarded/protected/safer with you for now."

Donna was taken aback. It had been years since her Center for Orphaned Animals in Nairobi National Park had cared for elephant orphans. The government of Nulongwe had a.s.sumed that responsibility, of course. But there was nothing else to do. "Certainly," Donna said, and she sat down.

Elizabeth turned back to the juveniles. She put her trunk around each one in turn, trying to calm them.

Donna listened to her words of comfort through the translator. But the juveniles' would have none of it. Their eyes kept watering.

Donna watched them and waited. Seeing the juveniles cry made Donna remember the day she had first been able to talk to young elephants in her care. It had been years after she had successfully reintroduced Elizabeth into the wild, but Donna still had elephant orphans at her center-eleven of them, all hard work, and a lame rhinoceros two-year-old into the mix, and ten Thompson's gazelles, and three giraffes, and on and on.

It was just after Joyce Lake had cracked the code of elephant language and the news had flashed around the world. Of course she and Joyce had talked and e-mailed each other about it, and one afternoon Joyce had found time to drive to Donna's compound with her Land Rover full of equipment, all flushed and excited and ready for Donna to talk to eleven of her babies.

The press had discovered what they were doing, and nearly a hundred reporters had crowded into the park with their cameras, microphones, and laptops. Joyce had already held eight press conferences in Tsavo National Park, allowing reporters from around the world to interview the elephants there. Elizabeth, by this time matriarch over the herds in that park, was becoming quite a celebrity-she'd proved herself to be loquacious, intelligent, even funny. Her photograph and words had appeared in newspapers, magazines, and netzines all over the world. But this day was different. People knew about Donna's work with orphaned animals, and this would be the first time she would be able to talk to any of them-and them to her. It was a story with a different kind of appeal. There was no point, Donna realized, in trying to keep the reporters away, in trying to keep them out, in trying to keep this moment a private one.

It was in the heat of an early spring afternoon. A slight breeze blew from the east. Joyce arranged her equipment on tables near the verandah, and they set a chair in the shade of the lilacs for Donna, but she could not sit in it. She kept walking around, looking at the reporters, looking at the tables full of equipment, looking down the lane for her elephants.

She heard them before she saw them, and then there they were, with the boys trained to watch over them.

They were all nervous, of course. The crowd made them nervous. The elephants knew something was up.

You can't imagine what's going to happen, Donna had thought to herself, you can't imagine it. There had been no way to prepare them. They stopped in a bunch down by the gate, maybe eight car lengths from the reporters and Donna. All the reporters grew quiet, listening for whatever they would say. The day was suddenly still. Even the breeze calmed for a time.

Donna had bought a bunch of bananas at the market the day before, and they were still just a little green the way elephants like them. She had picked them off the stem and arranged them in her white mixing bowl.

Joyce pinned a microphone to Donna's lapel for Donna to talk into, and after a moment had signaled that the equipment was turned on, properly adjusted, ready. It was their time now. Donna had thought of so many wonderful things to say at first, but looking at her elephants she could not say one of them. None of them fit the moment. She took a breath and held out the bowlful of bananas. "h.e.l.lo, my dears," she'd said simply.

"h.e.l.lo. Here are some bananas for you."

She'd thought later it was such a stupid thing to say, but how did you start after so long without talking?

What could you say, after all? The equipment had translated her words quickly, though none of the humans could hear it-but the elephants heard. They heard and jumped back. They b.u.mped into each other. They turned around and then turned back. "Come here," Donna had said. "We can talk now. We've learned how to talk to you. Come say something to me."

But they would not come. They just stood there, far off-shocked, Donna knew. She started toward them.

"Don't go too far," Joyce had said. "The equipment won't pick up your words."

So Donna had stopped walking. She'd put down the bowl of bananas in the gra.s.s. She'd smoothed out the front of her dress. She'd looked up at the elephants again. "We've tried to love you," she'd said, and then she paused before going on. "I love you. I'm so sorry for everything you could not understand here, for everything we could not explain to you."