Tony Daniel Read online

  The doe senses that I’ve killed her outrider, and now she’s more desperate.

  This is all there is for you. This is oblivion and ruin and time to stop the scurry.

  This is where you’ll die.

  She strikes at me again, but I dodge and—before she can round on me—I snatch a baby rat. It’s dead before it can squeal. I spit out its mangle of bones and meat.

  But mamma’s not a dumb rat, no, not dumb at all, and does not fly into a rage over this. I know she regards me with all the hate a rat can hate, though. If there were any light, I’d see her eyes glowing rancid yellow.

  Come on, mamma, before I get another baby.

  She goes for a foot, and again I dodge, but she catches me in the chest. She raises up, up.

  The packed dirt of the ceiling, wham, wham, and her incisors are hooked around my breastbone, damn her, and it holds me to her mouth as fast as a barbed arrow point.

  Shake and tear, and I’ve never known such pain, such delicious . . .

  I rake at her eyes with a front claw, dig into her belly with my feet. Dig, dig, and I can feel the skin parting, and the fatty underneath parting, and my feet dig deep, deep.

  Shakes me again and I can only smell my own blood and her spit and then sharp, small pains at my back.

  The baby rats. The baby rats are latching on to me, trying to help their mother.

  Nothing I can do. Nothing I can do but dig with my rear paws. Dig, dig. I am swimming in her guts. I can feel the give. I can feel the tear. Oh, yes!

  Then my breastbone snaps, and I fly loose of the doe’s teeth. I land in the babies, and I’m stunned and they crawl over me and nip at my eyes and one of them shreds an ear, but the pain brings me to and I snap the one that bit my ear in half. I go for another. Across the warren cavern, the big doe shuffles. I pull myself up, try to stand on all fours. Can’t.

  Baby nips my hind leg. I turn and kill it. Turn back. My front legs collapse. I cannot stand to face the doe, and I hear her coming.

  Will I die here?

  Oh this is how I want it! Took the biggest rat in the history of the Met to kill me. Ate a whole bag of money, she did.

  She’s coming for me. I can hear her coming for me. She’s so big. I can smell how big she is.

  I gather my hind legs beneath me, find a purchase.

  This is how I die. I will bite you.

  But there’s no answer from her, only the doe’s harsh breathing. The dirt smells of our blood. Dead baby rats all around me.

  I am very, very happy.

  With a scream, the doe charges me. I wait a moment. Wait.

  I pounce, shoot low like an arrow.

  I’m through, between her legs. I’m under her. I rise up. I rise up into her shredded belly. I bite! I bite! I bite!

  Her whole weight keeps her down on me. I chew. I claw. I smell her heart. I smell the new blood of her heart! I can hear it! I can smell it! I chew and claw my way to it.

  I bite.

  Oh yes.

  The doe begins to kick and scream, to kick and scream, and as she does the blood of heart pumps from her and over me, smears over me until my coat is soaked with it, until all the dark world is blood.

  After a long time, the doe rat dies. I send out the grist, feebly, but there are no outriders to face, no tries at escape now. She put all that she had into fighting me. She put everything into our battle.

  I pull myself out from under the rat. In the corner, I hear the scuffles of the babies. Now that the mamma is dead, they are confused.

  I have to bite them. I have to kill them all.

  I cannot use my front legs, but I can use my back. I push myself toward them, my belly on the dirt like a snake. I find them all huddled in the farthest corner, piling on one another in their fright. Nowhere to go.

  I do what I told the doe I would do. I kill them each with one bite, counting as I go. Three and ten makes thirteen.

  And then it’s done, and they’re all dead. I’ve killed them all.

  So.

  There’s only one way out: the way I came. That’s where I go, slinking, crawling, turning this way and that to keep my exposed bone from catching on pebbles and roots. After a while, I start to feel the pain that was staying away while I fought. It’s never been this bad.

  I crawl and crawl, I don’t know for how long. If I were to meet another rat, that rat would kill me. But either they’re dead or they’re scared, and I don’t hear or smell any. I crawl to what I think is up, what I hope is up.

  And after forever, after so long that all the blood on my coat is dried and starting to flake off like tiny brown leaves, I poke my head out into the air.

  TB is there. He’s waited for me.

  Gently, gently he pulls me out of the rathole. Careful, careful he puts me in my sack.

  “Jill, I will fix you,” he says.

  I know.

  “That must have been the Great Mother of rats.”

  She was big, so big and mean. She was brave and smart and strong. It was wonderful.

  “What did you do?”

  I bit her.

  “I’ll never see your like again, Jill.”

  I killed her, and then I killed all her children.

  “Let’s go home, Jill.”

  Yes. Back home.

  Already in the dim burlap of the sack, and I hear the call of TB’s grist to go to sleep, to get better and I sigh and curl as best I can into a ball and I am falling away, falling away to dreams where I run along a trail of spattered blood, and the spoor is fresh and I’m chasing rats, and TB is with me close by, and I will bite a rat soon, soon, soon—

  A Simple Room with Good Light

  Come back, Andre Sud. Your mind is wandering and now you have to concentrate. Faster now. Fast as you can go. Space-time. Clumps of galaxy clusters. Average cluster. Two-armed spiral.

  Yellow star the locals call Sol.

  Here’s a network of hawsers cabling the inner planets together. Artifact of sentience, some say. Others might dispute that. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars hung with a shining webwork across blank space and spreading even into the asteroids. Kilometer-thick cables bending down from the heavens, coming in at the poles to fit into enormous universal joints lubricated by the living magma of the planets’ viscera. Torque and undulation. Faster. Somewhere on a flagellating curve between Earth and Mars, the Diaphany, you will find yourself. Closer in. Spinning spherules like beads on a five-hundred-sixty-three-million-mile-long necklace. Come as close as you can.

  Into the pithway transport you now travel upon. Into your one and only mind, now going on its second body. Into the fleeting human present.

  All along the Mars-Earth Diaphany, Andre saw the preparations for a war like none before. It seemed the entire Met—all the interplanetary cables—had been transformed into a dense fortress that people just happened to live inside. His travel bead was repeatedly delayed in the pithway as troops went about their movements, and military grist swarmed hither and yon about some task or another.

  We live in this all-night along the strong-bound carbon of the cables, Andre thought. Within the dark glistening of the corridors, where surface speaks to surface in tiny whispers like fingers, and the larger codes, the extirpated skeletons of a billion minds, clack together in a cemetery of logic, shaking hands, continually shaking bony, algorithmic hands and observing strict and necessary protocol for the purposes of destruction.

  Amés—he only went by the one name, as if it were a title—was a great one for martial appearances. Napoléon come again, the merci reporters said as a friendly joke. Oh, the reporters were eating this up. There hadn’t been a good war in centuries. People got tired of unremitting democracy, didn’t they? He’d actually heard somebody say that on the merci.

  How fun it will be to watch billions die for a little e
xcitement on the merci, Andre thought.

  He arrived in Connacht Bolsa in a foul mood, but when he stepped out of his pod, there was the smell of new rain. He had walked a ways from the pod station before he realized what the smell was. There were puddles of water on the ground from the old-fashioned street-cleaning mechanism Connacht employed. It was still raining in spots—a small rain that fell only an inch or so from the ground. Little clouds scudded along the street like a miniature storm front, washing it clean of the night’s leavings.

  Connacht was on a suburb radial off Phobos City, the most densely populated segment on the Met. A hundred years ago, in the Phobos boom time, Connacht had been the weekend escape for intellectuals, artists, moneyed drug addicts—and the often indistinguishable variety of con men, mountebanks, and psychic quacksalvers who were their hangers-on. The place was run-down now, and Andre’s pellicle encountered various swarms of nostalgia that passed through the streets like rat packs—only these were bred and fed by the merchants to attract the steady trickle of tourists with pellicular receptors for a lost bohemia.

  All they did for Andre was made him think about Molly.

  Andre’s convert—the algorithmic portion of himself—obliged him by dredging up various scenes from his days at seminary. Today, his convert was unusually silent, preferring to communicate in suggestive patterns of data—like a conscience gifted with irreducible logic and an infallible memory.

  Andre walked along looking at the clouds under his feet, and as he walked his convert projected images into the shape of these clouds, and into the shift and sparkle of the puddled water they left behind.

  I have a very sneaky conscience, Andre thought, but he let the images continue.

  —Molly Index, Ben Kaye, and Andre at the Westway, in one of their long arguments over aesthetics when they were collaborating on their preliminary thesis. Knowing, Watching, and Doing: The Triune Aspect of Enlightenment.

  “I want to be ‘Doing’!” Molly mock-yelled and threw a wadded-up piece of paper at Ben.

  He caught it, spread it out, and folded it into a paper airplane. “This is the way things have to be,” he said. “I’m ‘Doing.’ You’re ‘Watching.’ And we both know who ‘Knowing’ must be.” They turned to Andre and smiled vulture smiles.

  “I don’t know what you think I know, but I don’t know it,” he said, then nearly got an airplane in the eye.

  —Molly’s twenty-four-year-old body covered with red Martian sand under the Tharsis beach boardwalk. Her blue eyes open to the sky pink sky. Her nipples like dark stones. Ben a hundred feet away, rising from the gray-green lake water, shaking the spume from his body. The poet in the midst of gathering his raw materials. Of course Ben had run and jumped into the lake as soon as they got there. Ben wouldn’t wait for anything.

  But Molly chose me! I can’t believe she chose me.

  Because I waited for her and dragged her under the boardwalk and kissed her before I could talk myself out of it.

  Because I waited for the right moment.

  How’s that for Doing.

  —Living together as grad students while Molly studied art and he entered into the stations of advanced meditation at seminary. Ben dropping by occasionally to read them one of his new poems.

  —Molly leaving him because she would not marry a priest.

  You’re going to kill yourself on the moon.

  Only this body. I’ll get a new one. It’s being grown right now.

  It isn’t right.

  This is the Greentree Way. That’s what makes a priest into a true shaman. He knows what it’s like to die and come back.

  If you Walk on the Moon, you will know what it’s like to lose a lover.

  Molly, the Walk is what I’ve been preparing for these last seven years. You know that.

  I can’t bear it. I won’t.

  Maybe he could have changed her mind. Maybe he could have convinced her. But Alethea Nightshade had come along and that was that. When he’d come back from the moon reinstantiated in his cloned body, Molly had taken a new lover.

  —His peace offering returned with the words of the old folk song, turned inside out: “Useless the flowers that you give, after the soul is gone.” As if the death of his biological aspect meant the same thing as the death of himself. For Molly, it had meant just that.

  —Sitting at a bare table under a bare light, listening to those words, over and over, and deciding never to see her again. Fifteen years ago, as they measure time on Earth.

  [Thank you, that will be enough,] he told the convert.

  An image of a stately butler, bowing, flashed through Andre’s mind. Then doves rising from brush into sunset. The water puddles were just water puddles once again, and the tiny clouds were only clouds of a storm whose only purpose was to make the world a little cleaner.

  Molly was painting a Jackson Pollock when Andre arrived at her studio. His heavy boots, good for keeping him in place in Triton’s gravity, noisily clumped on the wooden stairs to Molly’s second-floor loft. Connacht was spun to Earth-normal. He would have knocked, but the studio door was already open.

  “I couldn’t believe it until I’d seen it with my own eyes,” Molly said. She did not stop the work at her easel. “My seminary lover come back to haunt me.”

  “Boo,” Andre said. He entered the space. Connacht, like many of the old rotating simple cylinders on the Diaphany, had a fusion lamp running down its pith that was sheathed on an Earth-day schedule. Now it was day, and Molly’s skylights let in the white light and its clean shadows. Huge picture windows looked out on the village. The light reminded Andre of light on the moon. The unyielding, stark, redeeming light just before his old body joined the others in the shaman-priests’ Valley of the Bones.

  “Saw a man walking a dog the other day with the legs cut off,” said Molly. She dipped the tip of her brush in a blue smear on her palette.

  “The man or the dog?”

  “Maybe the day.” Molly touched the blue to the canvas before her. It was like old times.

  “What are you painting?”

  “Something very old.”

  “That looks like a Pollock.”

  “It is. It’s been out of circulation for a while, and somebody used it for a tablecloth. Maybe a kitchen table, I’m thinking.”

  Andre looked over the canvas. It was clamped down on a big board as long as he was tall. Sections of it were fine, but others looked like a baby had spilled its mashed peas all over it. Then again, maybe that was Pollock’s work after all.

  “How can you possibly know how to put back all that spatter?”

  “There’re pictures.” Molly pointed the wooden tip of her brush to the left-hand corner of the canvas. Her movements were precise. They had always been definite and precise. “Also you can kind of see the tracery of where this section was before it got . . . whatever that is that got spilled on it there. Also, I use grist for the small stuff. Did you want to talk about Ben?”

  “I do.”

  “Figured you didn’t come back to relive old times.”

  “They were good. Do you still do that thing with the mirror?”

  “Oh, yes. Are you a celibate priest these days?”

  “No, I’m not that kind of priest.”

  “I’m afraid I forgot most of what I knew about religion.”

  “So did I.”

  “Andre, what do you want to know about Ben?” Molly set the handle of her brush against her color palette and tapped it twice. Something in the two surfaces recognized one another, and the brush stuck there. A telltale glimmer of grist swarmed over the brush, keeping it moist and ready for use. Molly sat in a chair by her picture window, and Andre sat in a chair across from her. There was a small table between them. “Zen tea?” she said.

  “Sure,” Andre replied.

  The table
pulsed, and two cups began forming on its surface. As the outsides hardened, a gel at their center thinned down to liquid. This was an expensive use of grist.

  “Nice table. I guess you’re doing all right for yourself, Molly.”

  “I like to make being in the studio as simple as possible so I can concentrate on my work. I indulge in a few luxuries.”

  “You ever paint for yourself anymore? Your own work, I mean?”

  Molly reached for her tea, took a sip, and motioned with her cup at the Pollock.

  “I paint those for myself,” she said. “It’s my little secret. I make them mine. Or they make me theirs.”

  “That’s a fine secret.”

  “Now you’re in on it. So was Ben. Or Thaddeus, I should say.”

  “You were on the team that made him, weren’t you?”

  “Aesthetic consultant. Ben convinced them to bring me on. He told me to think of it as a grant for the arts.”

  “I kind of lost track of you both after I . . . graduated.”

  “You were busy with your new duties. I was busy. Everybody was busy.”

  “I wasn’t that busy.”

  “Ben kept up with your work. It was part of what made him decide to . . . do it.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Now you do. He read that paper you wrote on temporal propagation. The one that was such a big deal.”

  “It was the last thing I ever wrote.”

  “Developed a queer fascination with rocks?”

  “You heard about that?”

  “Who do you think sent those merci reporters after you?”

  “Molly, you didn’t?”

  “I waited until I thought you were doing your best work.”

  “How did you see me . . .” He looked into her eyes, and he saw it. The telltale expression. Far and away. “You’re a LAP.”

  Molly placed the cup to her lips and sipped a precise amount of tea. “I guess you’d classify me as a manifold by now. I keep replicating and replicating. It’s an art project I started several years ago. Alethea convinced me to do it when we were together.”