Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2, May 2013 (26 page)

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Copyright 2004 (revised 2013) by Gregory Benford

www.PhoenixPick.com

PHOENIX PICK PRESENTS

This is where the publisher gets to showcase one of Phoenix Pick’s hidden gems.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s
The Left Hand of Darkness
inspired a whole sub-genre of SF related to gender issues. The following excerpt is from a work that continues that tradition with a finely constructed tale of a group of humans marooned on an alien planet.

Descendants of the long-stranded group struggle with mutations and infertility, and the small community faces certain extinction unless a cure can be found.

Anais is a community doctor desperately looking for a cure. She also has a secret—she suffers from a strange sexual deformity. Then her world is turned inside out when she discovers the same deformity on a preserved corpse of a long-extinct race.

What is the connection? And can she find the answer to this mystery that has reached back from time to haunt both her and the colony struggling to survive against impossible odds?

The story is told with a unique style, employing multiple voices, including those of the extinct race. But all the strands, modern and ancient, come together to form a beautiful, intricately crafted story that makes us question the meaning of identity, self and of life itself.

Shahid Mahmud, Publisher

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Please note the following is an excerpt, not a complete story

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*****

PART I: DISCOVERIES

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CONTEXT: Elena Koda-Schmidt

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The autumn day was as hot as any in recent memory. The temperature was nearly 10°C, and Elena paused to unbutton her sweater and wipe away the sweat that threatened to drip into her eyes. Near the tree line bordering the river a kilometer away, the dark waters of a pond glittered in the sun: Tlilipan, it was called, “the place of black water.” The peat-stained shallow lake was the last vestige of a much larger parent, now just a marshy wetland. Further down the peat bog, Elena could see Faika Koda-Shimmura and Aldhelm Martinez-Santos—they were kissing, a long, oblivious embrace that made Elena feel vaguely jealous, watching. Faika was ten and had reached her menarche.

Elena suspected that her brother Wan-Li was going to be disappointed when she told him. Wan-Li had spent the night in the Koda-Shimmura compound with Faika a few days before. It seemed he hadn’t quite made the impression he’d thought he had. Elena remembered her own menarche year, and how she’d experimented with her new sexual freedom.

The cart was nearly full of peat; Elena leaned her shovel against the wheel and rubbed her protruding stomach with callused hands. She loved the swelling, surprising curve of her belly, loved the weight of it, the feeling of being centered and rooted. Her roundness made her believe that, despite the odds,
her
baby would be perfect.
Her
baby would live and give her grandchildren to dandle on her knee when she was past childbearing herself. She stroked the hard sphere of her womb and the baby kicked in response. Elena laughed.

“Now you be still, little one. It’s bad enough without you stomping on my bladder. Mama’s still got a lot of work to do before we get home.”

With a sigh, Elena picked up the shovel and prepared to attack the peat once more. She was working an old face, several feet down in the bog where the peat was rich, thick and as dark as old Gerard’s face. She lifted the spade.

Stopped.

A flap of something leathery and brown like stained wood protruded from the earth, about a foot up on the wall of the ancient marsh. Elena crouched down, grunting with the unaccustomed bulk of her belly. She peered at the fold of leather, prodding it with the tip of her shovel to pull a little more out of the moss.

Elena gasped and dropped the shovel. Protruding from the appendage, squashed and compressed by the weight of centuries of peat, was a hand with four fingers, the tip of each finger a wide knob capped with a recessed claw. The shock sent Elena stepping backward. The shovel’s handle tangled between her legs, tripping her. She put her hands out instinctively to protect her stomach. She grunted with the impact, and the handle slammed against her knee. For a moment, she just lay there, taking inventory. The child jumped inside her, and she breathed again.

“Faika—” she began, but the shout came out entangled in the breath. She thought of how she must look, sprawled in the wet dirt and staring at the apparition in the peat, and laughed at herself.

“What a sight!” she told the child in her womb. “You’d think your mother was sure the boggin was going to get up and walk out of there,” she said. She stood, brushing uselessly at her stained trousers and grimacing with the bruised, protesting knee.

As she stood, she saw movement from the corner of her eye. A figure shifted in the small stand of globe-trees a hundred meters away. “Faika? Aldhelm?” Elena called, but the shadowy form—almost lost in tree-shadow—moved once more, and she knew it wasn’t either of the two. She could feel it, watching, staring at her.
A grumbler
? she thought, wondering if the rifle was still in the cart, but in the instant she glanced away to check the weapon, the shadow was gone.

There was no one there. The sense of being observed was gone.

Elena shivered, hugging herself. “Baby, your mother’s seeing ghosts now,” she said. She glanced back at the hand hanging from the peat. “I think I just saw your
kami
,” she told it. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything nasty to you. I’ll leave that to Anaïs. Knowing her, she’ll
enjoy
it.”

She took a deep breath, and looked again at the copse of trees. “Faika! Aldhelm!” Elena shouted. “If you two can stop fondling each other for a minute or so, I think you should come here and look at this.”

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VOICE: Anaïs Koda-Levin the Younger

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“So…are you pregnant yet, Anaïs?”

I hate that question. I always have the wrong answer.

No. I’m not.

“Give it a rest, Ghost.”

“Everything’s still the same, is it? You
are
still trying, aren’t you? If we could only get you up here so we could
see
.…”

I felt the old emotional garbage rising with Ghost’s questioning: the anger, the bitterness, the self-loathing. I forced the gorge down, packing the filth down behind that internal wall, but it was an effort. Our ancient steel surgical instruments, worn to a satin patina by over a century of use and constant sterilization, beat a raucous percussion on the tray I was holding. “Ghost—”

“Sorry, Anaïs. No need to get irritated. As the repository of Mictlan’s history…”

There are times when I wish I knew programming well enough to tone down Ghost’s assertiveness. “Shut up, Ghost.”

This time around, Ghost looked like an old blind man, hunched over an ornate glass cane that was as swirled and frosted as a Miccail stele. His sightless, ice-blue eyes stared somewhere past my right shoulder into the back corner of the coldroom lab. The outline of his body sparkled and flared disconcertingly, and his legs were implanted in the polished whitewood planking past his ankles.

“Ghost, Hui and I put a new floor in here since the last time. You look like you’re wading in wood, and it’s really disconcerting. Can you shift your image up about a dozen centimeters?”

“Oh, now that we’re on the subject of sex and reproduction, you want to change it? Anaïs, I know it’s no comfort to you, but if it were possible to reach the
Ibn Battuta
, a resonance scan or even an ultrasound would answer a lot of questions, and we could—”

“Drop it, Ghost. Drop it right now.”

This time, I made no effort to hide the anger. Ghost reminded me too much of the sympathy, the false reassurances given to me by my sibs, by my
mam
Maria. They look into my room and see my clothing draped carefully over the huge mirror (which had once belonged to Rebecca Koda-Levin herself), the shirts and pants arranged so that the mirror reflects nothing, and they don’t understand the significance of what they’re seeing.

The old man sighed. The image, sparking, raised up until the soles of his feet were almost even with the floor. “Better?”

“It’ll do.”

“You’re going to have to describe what you’re seeing,” Ghost said. “Since you’ve had the ill grace not to put a video feed in here.”

“Quit complaining.” My voice was muffled through the gauze mask I was tying behind my head, and my breath clouded in the cold air. “We put the feed in; the line was bad. No one’s had a chance to
fix
it yet—it’s not exactly high priority. Maybe next time.”

“But I’m curious
now
,” Ghost persisted. “I don’t have much time this orbit. Come on—you’re as slow as your Geema.”

I sniffed. A strand of hair had made an escape from the surgical cap; I brushed it out of my eyes. “Maybe that’s why they named me for her, huh?”

The retort was weak but it was the best I had at the moment. I turned back to the examination table and its strange contents. The bog body Elena had found lay there like a man-sized, crumpled bag of leather—which, in essence, it was. The acidic chemical stew of the peat had tanned and preserved the skin, but the skeletal structure and most of the interior organs had dissolved away. Over the last several days, in scraps of time between other, more pressing duties, I’d carefully cleaned away the worst of the peat clinging to the outside of the body, still hunched into its centuries-old fetal position. Now, like a gift, I was ready to unwrap the present given us by the bog.

Every time I’d looked at the body, I’d felt the same rush of adrenaline I felt now, a sense of standing in front of something…I don’t know…maybe
sacred
is the best word. Old and venerable, certainly. I was almost inclined to believe Elena’s tale about seeing a
kami
watching her when she’d found it.

After all, it was the bones of this race’s dead that had given rise to the name given to the planet: Mictlan, suggested by the lone Mexican crewmember of the
Ibn Battuta
. Mictlan was the Aztec land of the dead, where the god Quetzalcoatl found the bones of humankind—and now, where the bones of another dead culture had been found. The race itself were christened the Miccail—“the Dead,” in the Nahuatl language. In the years following, a few Miccailian burial sites had been explored. Not that the excavations told us much about the Miccail, since they cremated their dead before they buried the calcined and charred bones—a rite we’d borrowed from them for our own dead. The strange, whorled spires the Miccail had left behind on the northern continent, sticking out of Mictlan’s rocky soil like faerie cathedrals of dull glass and carved with images of themselves, had been photographed and documented; it was from these that we learned the most about the extinct race. More would have been done, probably, but the near destruction and crippling of the
Ibn Battuta
not six months after the colonists’ arrival and the resultant death of nearly all the crew members had suddenly, radically, and permanently shifted everyone’s priorities.

Basically, it was more important to scrape an existence from Mictlan than to try to decipher the mystery of our world’s previous inhabitants.

I suppose I could appreciate my ancestors’ sentiments. Priorities hadn’t changed much in the century since the accident. Survival was still far more important than any anthropological exploration. No one wanted Mictlan to harbor the scattered bones of
two
extinct, sentient races. I suppose we have the deliberate uncuriosity of the matriarchs and patriarchs to thank for our being here at all.