Year's Best Scifi 8 Part 24

"I see. Then...you don't like it at all?" Vita's eyestalks quivered. "The way it glints? The shades of green..."

"It's all right. You do like it, I take it?"

"I think it's wonderfully natural," Vita gushed. "Tseb work is so formal and mannered. I visit it every day, as soon as I come in. My parents brought me, the day it arrived."

"When was that...ten years ago, surely?"

"As your time is reckoned. The Nandi sold it to the museum after..." Vita shut up abruptly and Christopher didn't need Em for once to tell him the pause was an awkward one.

"Oh. The Lloyds of London thing?" He managed to keep his tone off-hand. The National Gallery had lent a Nandieve museum the Monet and a quartet of other paintings. The aliens had paid a ludicrous sum for the loan. A sweetheart deal, or so it must have seemed to the Gallery's perpetually underfunded curators.

Unfortunately, failure to check the fine print of cultural difference led to disaster in short order. To the Nandi, the word "loan" implied an indefinite term of visitation. They refused to return the paintings.

The Gallery spent fifteen years trying to get Waterlily Pond back. They were deep in negotiations when some bright bulb in Gallery management decided to put in an insurance claim, asking to be compensated for the value of the time the painting had spent offworld. Reasonable enough, perhaps-but when Lloyds cut the check to the museum, the Nandi claimed this made the painting theirs. The next thing anyone knew, they had auctioned it off to the Tsebsra.

Fumbling in his vest pocket, Christopher produced a case of small gelatinous tablets, selecting a marked placebo and pressing it under his tongue. He ma.s.saged his left armpit gently, pretending to work out a pain that wasn't there. "You only get two heart transplants these days before they list you as inoperable," he commented to Vita, figuring that the bunching of its many eyes indicated interest in his movements.

He'd guessed wrong. "Personal medical information is not discussed openly here," Em scolded, but before it could tell him how to apologize, Vita piped up, forcing it to translate instead.

"It's okay. We're not all as rigid as the protos are programmed to say we are." A previously invisible fissure opened under the eyes, revealing an immense empty s.p.a.ce bordered by sharp black ridges. "I'm not offended."

"Thanks," he said. "I forget I'm not home. Get to be my age, it's more or less a license to be rude."

"Really?"

"Absolutely. No family is complete without a cantankerous retired war-" His turn to stop short: he had almost said veteran, and soldiers were never allowed here.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Vita is alarmed," Em reported.

"Warhorse," he said. "It's a saying. It means I'm old meat, child. Unfit for dogs."

Its head expanded slightly and a grinding sound issued from its throat. "Noise equates to a laugh, tone denotes relief," reported Em.

It and me both, Christopher thought. What was wrong with him?

"I came to see the Spine," he said finally, getting to his feet. "Would you take me?" "Are you feeling better?"

"Well enough."

"This way, then." Tail swirling, it crooked a toe in the direction of the exit. Christopher got one last hurried glance at the water lilies and then they were gone.

Outside the authentic human museum with its authentic humidity-controlled air, he felt himself reviving.

They pa.s.sed into an ornately carved walkway, lined with windows and meant to communicate with the sensitive feet of the Tsebs, a lumpy obstacle course of k.n.o.bs and gaps. Christopher's ankles ached as he struggled to traverse it without falling. Just another hurdle, he told himself, like ducking the police or smuggling his false ident out of humans.p.a.ce. He'd been retired for twenty-four years when the boys approached him for this job. Until a minute ago, he would have sworn he remembered his business.

His cane twisted unexpectedly at the apex of the arch, causing him to wobble. He had braced it in what looked like a knothole, but the knot was mobile, rotating against the force of his weight. Vita caught his elbow with one foot, swung its tail around an upward-thrusting piece of walkway, and heaved in counter-balance. Its grip was weak, and Christopher could feel that the Tseb's strength would never hold his full weight.

Between them, though, they managed to keep him upright. Vita moved his cane to more solid ground. Christopher offered solemn, mumbled thanks. After that, the alien stood closer to him.

Coming off the bridge, Em instructed him to keep his eyes right, toward the ocean. Christopher looked left instead, to a ma.s.sive hill that rose like a bell-curve from the beach.

"That is one of our burial mounds," Vita said. "Look away."

"I thought you were a bohemian, Vita. Hard to offend?"

"Vita's expression has turned playful. It is receptive to this conversation," Em said. "However, the topic chosen is highly improper."

"You want to know about the mound?"

"Why not? I didn't come five thousand lightyears for Andy Warhol or the d.a.m.ned cuisine."

"There isn't much to tell. When we feel that our spirit is about to break with the physical plane..."

"Is that supposed to mean when you die?"

Its head contracted, the skin wrinkling momentarily before expansion somewhere else in its body took up the slack. "Die, yes. When we are dying, we go to a mound and climb as high as we can before weakness overcomes us. It is a last chance to measure the worth of our lives."

"What if you're too sick to get there?"

"Someone takes you to the base of the mound. If you are very respected, they may even carry you up."

"But not always?"

"n.o.body can return from a dying place."

"So you heft your troublesome old Uncle Pete up the hill-"

A loud rush of Vita's internal fluids startled him so badly he stopped speaking.

"Sound equates to a giggle," Em said.

"Carry someone up, watch them die...and then you stay until you starve?"

"Yes." Vita paused; Em reported it was afraid of being overheard. "In that case, the measure of worth is not by how high you climb, but by how long you survive."

"I suppose that makes as much sense as anything."

Light steps behind them made them turn simultaneously, continuing along the lumpy walkway like the well-behaved pair they weren't. He glanced Vita's way and offered a conspiratorial wink just as a trio of eye stalks swiveled his way in a gesture that, according to Em, meant almost exactly the same thing.

He kept his voice lowered. "Say, what if you're too sick to be moved?"

"The effort is always made."

"Even if it kills you?"

"Even then."

"How come?"

"We are sun people, Christopher. It is unconscionable to fail to die out of doors." They stepped out of the walkway and into a darkened gallery. "So what if I was to seize up in here?"

Another alarming giggle. "You're not a sun person."

"Good. I'd hate to-"

"Yes?"

"Do something unconscionable," he finished quietly. His eyes adjusted to the dimness and he saw he was in another three-dimensional nightmare-a door of k.n.o.bs, lumps and potholes. Little orifices covered the outer wall, soft and penetrable, intended for Tseb tails. The ceiling was low and the air smelled sickly sweet, laden with alien pollens. Dark s.h.a.ggy moss like the hide of a buffalo covered the nooks and crannies. A few cameras were tucked here and there in the corners, but overall security was lax. The Tsebs were a civilized people, after all. They had nothing to fear from their own. As for the few human terrorists who had made it through their security screens, they had been ordered-just like Christopher-to destroy the Monet.

Vita was still savoring their rebellion against decorum. "I promise you can die right here, Christopher, and n.o.body will hold it against you."

"Swear?"

Instructed by its proto, it awkwardly made a heart-crossing gesture with one upraised foot. "I swear."

"What if I was one of you?"

It was quiet for long enough that he wondered if he had gone too far, but at last the translation came.

"That depends."

"On what?"

"If it was instantaneous, unexpected, painless-you would be forgiven," it said. "If not...if you knew you were dying, if you tried to get to the sun and failed, or you didn't try..."

"Big time transgression, huh?"

Its gesture equated, Em said, to a vehement nod. "Every-thing a.s.sociated with your death would be shunned."

"Your culture only takes forgiveness to a point, then?"

"You have to draw the line somewhere."

"Indeed," he agreed. "Quite so."

He let Vita slide back into the proper tour, narrating the history of the Spine as they descended down through the treacherous footing of the gallery. They pa.s.sed shelves of fungus, tiny statues etched from eggsh.e.l.ls, ornately carved crystals and black scrolled wands made of a substance called sea root.

Everything was three-dimensional, tactile. Feigning awe, Christopher touched things that felt like peanut b.u.t.ter, dead flesh, adhesive tape, cold steel. He snapped the occasional historical treasure with his too-bulky camera and asked dozens of questions.

There wasn't a flat surface anywhere. The Tseb didn't do two-dimensional depiction. Probably that was why human painting fascinated them so.

Art you can't touch. Daft primitives.

Down and around, hobbled by the lumpy floor, he was genuinely winded by the time they arrived at the Spine.

It was a single glowing sculpture within a ma.s.sive subterranean chamber, a giant-sized, abstract depiction of the Tsebsra body. Indentations in its belly suggested femininity without insisting upon it; faded bands on its tail hinted at both maturity and youth. It was delicately curved, less k.n.o.bby than the grotesqueries that had preceded it in the upper galleries.

A pair of Tsebs were lounging at its base, running their feet over the structure, their sluglike pouches extended to lick the surface. They tucked back in when Vita appeared with Christopher, moving back through the exit without a backward glance.

They were alone.

Good. Fewer witnesses, less trouble. He detached the bottom cartridge of his camera and surrept.i.tiously affixed it to the wall beside the door. "Vita's sound equates to a contented sigh," Em reported.

Christopher hadn't heard anything.

Looking up to the bulging top of the statue, he realized he was disappointed. This was the Tsebs'

Mona Lisa. He had hoped to understand its beauty. He had come so far....

"Come on!" Vita gripped his arm, urging him closer. They worked their way to the edge of the sculpture and the alien's tail stretched out to roam over it lovingly.

Christopher touched the cool surface. Visually it was seamless, a single white structure made of unidentifiable material. But under his fingers the texture and temperature varied: parts of it were woody, others metallic, still others plastic. Towering above them, the statue's shadow was washed out by the steady golden light emitted from six light globes which encircled it like a wide halo.

This thing predates Columbus and Shakespeare, Christopher thought. It has been sitting here since before my kind invented the printing press.

Nothing. His old heart refused to be moved.

Vita hissed; Em chirped a translation. "When I was new-hatched my parents brought me here. I climbed all the way to the top. The holds look worn down from here at the bottom, but the effect is intentional. You'd be surprised how firm they are! When you are very young, Christopher, you can sit on the top, inflate your sacs, and leap down."

"That's a long way to fall," he said.

"Oh, it's perfectly safe. Inside the coiled tail is a soft moss, and as babies our bodies are very light.

Craket the Maker intended it this way. She felt it was important for the Spine to speak to us differently at the various stages of our lives."

He squinted at the bulb at the top of the sculpture. "It's a long way up. Weren't you scared?"

"Terrified. I had to be coaxed down. My parents were deeply shamed."

"Sorry to hear it."

"I am the better for it. Many of my kind only come to see the Spine once or twice. The embarra.s.sment brought me back again and again. It remade my soul."

"I see," Christopher said.

"Perhaps you should take a rest. I think it would be comfortable if you wanted to sit here."

He looked at it dubiously. It was about as high and thick as a park bench, even reasonably, flat, but streaks of dried saliva were flaking away where the other Tsebs had been licking it.

Gentle white toes closed on his scarred elbow.

"Are you all right? I know I said it was acceptable for you to die indoors but you would alert me if you were unwell, wouldn't you?"

"Old man's prerogative," he murmured. The grip on his arm tightened and he leaned against it experimentally. Vita gurgled.

"Sound denotes physical exertion," Em said.