Darkly Human Read online

  Darkly Human

  Laura Anne Gilman

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  November, 2016

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-650-9

  Copyright © 2016 Laura Anne Gilman

  Interior Design (eBook): April Steenburgh

  Cover Design: Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  Cover Art: Elizabeth Leggett

  Contents

  Apparent Horizon

  Turnings

  Dispossession

  Blow Job Red

  Catseye

  The Cost

  Clean Up Your Room!

  Apple

  Don't You Want to be Beautiful?

  Don't Toot Your Horn

  Talent

  Last Blood

  Mad Cats and Englishmen

  Exposure

  Harvey and Fifth

  Rodeo

  Sand in Blood

  Fire Rising in the Moon

  Copyrights and Credits

  About the Author

  About Book View Cafe

  Apparent Horizon

  There are nights, lying beside her, he can hear the wind whistling through her bones. A flute in the key of sadness, despair. It wasn’t always that way. He’s sure that it wasn’t.

  This morning he wakes early, instantly. The sheets are cool, delicate on the skin, and air circulates in lazy circles near the ceiling. It’s hot already, the sun sliding into the sky on a wash of clear, bright light. Every morning is the same. She blinks sleepy eyes, breathes deeply, emits a faint aroma of honeysuckle and fresh-baked bread. He just wants to roll her over and consume her until there’s nothing left of either one of them.

  It’s a quiet, sweet pain, being lonely when you’re not alone.

  Her stretch is sinuous, the arch of her back a haiku. The way one leg slides from under the sheet as she turns, burrows, pretends the day isn’t here.

  He gets out of bed, tightens his robe, goes for coffee. Real, not proto-beans. Bitter, even with milk. It never tastes quite the way it should. Roasting before transport makes them stale, but transport sours the taste of them still green.

  He holds the warm mug in his hands, inhales deeply nonetheless. It’s a ritual, a thing he has only recently learned to allow himself. Ritual is habit, and habit can get you killed. But not here. Here, ritual is sacrament.

  He sips, makes a face despite expecting it. After all this time he should know: the taste is never the memory. But there is nothing he can fit into its place. Space travel isn’t kind to caffeine. Few planets have been able to grow coffee plants except under the most careful—and expensive—of conditions. Everything else, mankind flings with abandon and finds fertile ground. But not the manna which makes their brains go.

  There’s irony in this that’s too obvious for him to honor.

  Tying the laces on his running shoes, he nods at the other early morning people; joggers, fast-walkers. The fad for mechanized exercise never caught on here. That was one of the reasons he requested this posting, when everything went down and he had to get out. If you can feel it under your hand, against your skin, it must be real. It should be real.

  It all goes back, he supposes, to that first day, when he fell over his own feet, too engrossed in his own miserable thoughts to notice the world around him. In other scenarios, that could have—would have—gotten him killed.

  Instead, he found himself face down on cool, dust-smoked plascrete. She had picked him up. Literally. A graceful hand extended led to coffee, led to dinner, led to breakfast.

  Her eyes were dark, black-rimmed, exotic, familiar. The playful determination of her gaze overwhelmed him from the start. He stopped planning on that day. Let the winds wash over him, move him the way they did the sands.

  Sweat begins to rise between his shoulder blades, trickle down his back. He brushes an arm across his forehead, picks up the pace.

  Ego aside, he wasn’t used to being the hunted. Not that way. And so what was academic, unthinkable, became inevitable. He fell into her the way he fell into her world, the way he had once fallen into everything else: completely, wholeheartedly, hopelessly. It’s been fifteen years, and he has no home anywhere else now but here.

  Now he breathes the dry air, tastes the mineral-heavy water, feels the cool winds as he jogs, mornings, along the edges of the city, stopping to stare out at the tree-dusty savannah where the wilderfolk, the nomads, live. It all feels exactly the way it should.

  Love blinds you, but it doesn’t always make you stop thinking. Not forever, anyway.

  Not even when you want it to.

  “None of you have a clue, do you?”

  A wave of laughter, rueful, self-directed, sweeps the class.

  They know he’s disappointed, they know he’s challenging them. He only gets the smartest, the quickest, the brightest. None of them ever expect to match him. Only a few make a serious effort. He watches them. Watches them carefully.

  Office hours are clearly posted, but he’s become a sucker for a late-dashing, breathless, high-fluting sob story. There are always a few, today’s no exception. He sorts them out, sends them on their way. Does what he can with the rest.

  When she arrived to gather him, a single determined sophomore remained perched in the chair across from his desk, gawky teenaged legs pulled to hollow chest, dark-rimmed eyes wide in intense study of his words. It’s a simple case file they’ve been studying, a history of long-gone societal mores. How does this relate to living interaction?

  But the dried facts give rise to questions; he phrased it once, thus: you say blue and he says blue and I say blue, but are we all speaking of the same shade of blue?

  He is supposed to know this, how to answer, how to explain. At the least, he knows that he doesn’t know. Or he knows that he knows that he doesn’t know. It’s a koan.

  There’s no place for Zen meditation on this planet. The native language has no word for contemplation. The closest they can come is “gazing at nothing while digesting in the coolness of the night.” In its own way, it’s inwardly obtuse, enough to pass muster on a surface glance.

  You can’t change what you are, Max had warned when he first came here. He hadn’t been trying to change. Only to be different. So he looks away, does what he must, locks the rest away into the quiet pauses of the desert nights. And never looks below the surface.

  “So, the first Arrivals didn’t know when it was nighttime?”

  The student is incredulous in his realization. They are always incredulous. The ones born here, the ones with dust and grass in their lungs. They don’t, can’t comprehend. It doesn’t seem to matter what the race; only the indoctrination. You try to break them out of it too early, and they’re easily spotted; too sophisticated, too aware. Leave them too late, their brains harden, and they can’t muddle worth a damn. Crystalline brains, brilliant and breakable.

  Muddle them, make them malleable. Make them aware there are more than many ways to look at a thing.

  He can feel her presence in the antechamber; her stillness is like movement. His groin tightens, his mind remains focused, undisturbed.

  “When is sunset?”

  This is a nonsensical question. He has asked it three times this season, once in class, once in essay, once now. They are no closer to the answer. Sun. Set. When the light falls below the apparent horizon. The instant of realization that the day has ended.

  There’s no such thing on Scehocet. Hot sun rules until dusk shades across the sky; the world is painted in stripes of cool and warm. Night creeps up on you the moment it fades. It all blurs. One becomes the next and you never know where the days have gone.

  “So they expected to see something definitive….”

  The boy tries so hard; it’s a conceptua
l exercise at best, but he wants to know. Needs to know, if he is to understand the words beyond his own. Fear and love, hunger and satiation, those connections were made so easily.

  Mathematics and literature … they took naturally to haikus, and taught humans their own forms in the opening years of contact. It’s the smaller things that take time.

  “Stand on the Promenade this afternoon.” A walkway, it wraps around one-third of the city, directly away from the spaceport. Two tiers, the lower is home to the packs of children who run wild in the afternoons, when wiser adults sleep. The upper level is for sightseers, visitors, students on crusade. “Don’t talk. Don’t eat. Just watch. Then come back and tell me when you became aware of the change.”

  He has given this assignment at least twice every semester for the past ten years. That’s the sum total of students out of all his classes who have realized that they didn’t know. Three, in all that time, have understood what he could not show them. Of those, two have been received off-planet assignments after graduation. He doesn’t know what happened to the third.

  “He’s crazy, but it’s crazy with a method,” she breaks in, tired of waiting. Her voice flutes humor, affection. Her timing is excellent; they were done here. The pattern thus broken, the student uncurls himself, stretches, claws flexing in polite discretion. The first time he saw that it was unnerving, the fourth and fifteenth a curiosity. Now his own fingers clench and relax in blunt-edged sympathy. A learned reaction.

  The student blinks once slowly at her and she returns the acknowledgement, adult to almost-adult child.

  “Professor.”

  He nods, releasing the boy. She is curled in his lap before the door closes, her head tucked under his chin. The students call him the old man, fondly. Lucky old man, by some.

  She has never seen a sunset. She humors him; has no idea what he means when he speaks of the sharpness of distinction, the elusive green flash, the break of dawn or the sudden dip of the setting sun. He opens his mouth to speak, feels her heart beats over his, half a step too fast, too anxious to hear its own song. They speak to each other, words and touches, but they never seem to talk. Perhaps they’ve run out of things to say.

  “You want to go out for dinner?” she asks, rubbing her cheek against his.

  At this point, it’s better than going home.

  “Are you sure?” She’s asking about an entrée, conferring with the waiter over the specialty of the day, a crab-like creature that lives in the seasonal lakes, hibernates in dust during the off-season. The words echo, disturb his thoughts.

  “Are you sure?”

  He didn’t dignify that with a response, looking out the window. Set to zoom, it showed a herd of ketch-cattle tearing up the turf. Heavy, slow-moving animals. They tasted like antelope.

  “Are you absolutely, completely sure?”

  Anyone else, he would have terminated the call. But this was Max. He owed the old man courtesy, if not complete attention.

  “Yes Max. I’m sure.”

  The spymaster sighed. “At least send us some good kids. I swear, the chaff we’re getting these days, it’s enough to make you cry. Idiots, the lot of them.”

  He wanted to do no such thing. But you never got out, not all the way. Just as far as they were willing to let the leash run.

  “Goodbye Max.”

  The connection cut to black. He looked at the glass in his hand, swirled it until the liquid sloshed gently like a mock- ocean, and smiled. She has never seen an ocean. He’d like to show her one, some day.

  “Sir?”

  The waiter presents the bottle; he starts out of his memories, glances, nods. She had chosen it, but is content to let him play host, take the lead. They sit near an open window, the warm breeze against their necks. Another couple sits with them; co-workers of hers they met in the foyer, joined up reservations, got a better table. The talk is light, playful. Everything here is playful. It’s in their nature, to be quick and merciless and tender, satisfied within their limits.

  Few realize there’s anything to break free of. Fewer want to. “The wilderfolk council was in town last week. They’re negotiating the water channel.”

  “Again?” A tone of good-humored dismay from their female companion. It’s a never-ending tug of war, city and savannah. Never erupting into anything more than well- thought out insults and japes on the Committee floor, never quite subsiding into acquiescence. They’ve never perfected the art of leadership or following: a pack randomly heading in mostly the same direction. He finds it soothing, amusing.

  Not very often, he meets up with others like himself: academics or political postings, bureaucrats and travel-savvy spouses. Scehocet isn’t a priority destination, but it has its level of importance. These meetings follow a script, one he knows as well as the back of her hand. Meet, drink in hand, stand, speak carefully chosen words. They trade gossip, doings and goings-ons back home, the results of day-old newsfeeds. Every word has a purpose. He’s the old-timer, the survivor; they look to him to have some sort of wisdom. He knows himself a disappointment. Sometimes he is alone, and there are only the sidelong looks. But sometimes she is there, and they look at him, and know. And nothing more is said.

  He’s gone native. They have no idea what that means.

  He raises his glass, lets the dark green liquid roll from curve to curve, lets the conversation drain out around him. There was a quote he had read, somewhere, in some other life: something about how being alone is where you learn to know yourself.

  He has never been as alone as he is right now. He is sinking below his surface.

  The air is still, warm. For a moment the usual sounds of traffic around the quad are suspended: the mid-meal lull. Scehocet has no moon, few visible stars. There isn’t anyone in sight, save the distant figure of a student moving slow, hunched over with books, into the library alcove. No redwings utter their usual cries overhead, no dogs bark, no tawny striped halfcats prowling in the underbrush growl when he walks by. It’s an astonishing clamor, the lack of noise.

  “We fill everything with sound.” His footsteps and hers make only the faintest taps on the pavement. “Music, or talk, or just noise. It’s as though we’ve forgotten what true silence is.”

  Except that isn’t true. Not entirely. They haven’t forgotten.

  They never knew it. True silence is the instant before dawn comes, before night falls, that impossible second of stillness, when the possibility of speech is equal to the probability of quiescence. Awareness destroys it; once realized it must be filled. A choice must be made, an action taken.

  Like a sunset, you can only pause so long, and the instant is over. The horizon has been broken, night has fallen.

  He wonders how long it had been dusk before he noticed. He wonders where he will be when the sun rises.

  Turnings

  Viv was a daughter of the soil, born to the changing of the seasons, raised with the steady beat of the land. Her hair was black and her eyes were brown, and when she smiled, as she often did, it was the gentle rain on fresh-turned dirt. And when she sang for her kin, as she often did, it was the warming sun on green-tipped leaves.

  “You will be Harvester one day,” Rory would tease her, and she would smile at her brother as he coaxed another calf from its dam, his arms in afterbirth to the elbow, and say nothing. What was there to say? He was right; she could feel it move under her skin, and in her bones.

  “Of course before you do you’ll have to take a spouse,” Rory added.

  Viv made a face: that was ages in the future. She was young, the years stretched out before her. And none of the boys or men in their village, or the villages nearby, made her pulse flutter, or her heart sing. The calf came through then, all in a rush, and they landed in a pile on the straw-strewn floor, Viv and Rory and the wobbling, struggling newborn.

  The cow turned her head and large brown eyes studied them curiously. What was so amusing about giving birth?

  Their village lay in the foothills of an old mount
ain range. The soil was rich and fertile, and traders, those born to the air, came often down the worn mountain slopes to trade.

  They were familiar wagons driven by familiar bodies. In spring caravans they came with seeds and livestock, to exchange and keep the bloodlines healthy. In autumn they brought larger wagons, filled with finished goods, sharp- edged metal and fine-stitched cloth. The villagers paid with strips of spiced, smoked meat, finely tanned hides, wool combed from their sheep, and grains dried and packed into stout wooden barrels.

  A grandfather could remember the way a trade fair was when he was a boy on his grandsire’s knee, and the scene was the same when Viv looked out on the fields twice a year. Trader knew villager, and villager knew trader, and stories and bargains were handed down along the dual bloodlines, Wind and Earth.

  But in the green-furling spring of Viv’s twenty-second year, a new voice was heard echoing in the pass when the Traders came down their path.

  His name was Than, and you could tell from the first look of him that he had been born to the waters, the wild river torrents and the wicked seas. His face was travel-battered, his hands rough and scarred in patterns unfamiliar to the villagers. No-one had seen his like before, the rootless, rolling pace he walked, the way his speech splashed from one topic to another.

  “He suits the traders,” Ani, Viv’s cousin said. “Flighty as air.”

  Bel, another cousin, disagreed. “The seas are as deep as earth,” she said. “There’s a thinking mind behind that grin.”