Walk Among Us, page 23
Central housing is a quick fab apartment building, LEED certified by the barest margin, just across a central plaza from the admin building. I hate it, but we needed a high-density building to start with. I’ll replace it down the line. Bill and Jason both live up on the third floor, and there are other community members milling about the halls, looking distressed. Ethan must have been visiting one of them. Better than it spilling outside, I guess.
I can hear raised voices. Jason’s apartment door stands open, and I knock only once before stepping inside. Another resident, a woman named Genna, is sitting next to Jason, who’s nursing a swelling jaw. Bill is sitting at the kitchen table, head in his hands, the image of contrition.
This is worse than I expected. Bill and Jason both joined the commune about half a year ago, and neither had a history of violence. They lived next door to each other without issue at first. But over the past month or two, they’ve started clashing. Just verbal fights, and they always sort it out after. But I should have put a stop to it then, not just tried to help. I made resources available, offered to move them to separate buildings, but they didn’t want that. Jason is always the target of Bill’s aggression, but he said they’d work it out, that it was just an adjustment issue to not needing to work anymore, and I believed him.
See, Bill quit his job, but has never gotten involved in community upkeep, which is objectively fine, but it pisses off Jason. And it isn’t good for Bill, either. The removal of responsibility has uncovered something in him, something nasty, and he fixated on Jason. His only saving grace was that it never became physical, which is why I’ve let it go on for so long.
This? This is Bill’s last strike. I have to fight down the urge to rip Bill apart for crossing this last line into violence. It may have been just one punch, but it’s proof he is no longer a sheep in the fold; he’s become the fox, biting at heels, trying to drag a lamb into the woods.
I could have stopped it. Should have kicked Bill out weeks ago, before it got to this point. It’s long past culling time, and if it was just me and Bill in the room, I might have put him down right here, damn the consequences.
But summary justice doesn’t work among this many humans.
So instead I sit and talk with them both for half an hour before Robin arrives. She lingers like a ghost by the door, almost a legal observer to the goings-on. Bill’s anger surges a few more times, coming out in overblown apologies meant to manipulate, and with Genna and Robin here, I can only use mortal means to corral him. But I do.
In a perfect world (playing by human rules), I would just kick Bill out. But now that he’s lashed out physically, I can’t be sure he won’t return to get back at Jason, or Ethan for reporting the fight, or Genna for intervening. And if he does it during the day, I won’t be there to protect them. Which means the best answer is to let Bill stay where he is and give Jason the ultimatum: switch buildings or leave.
That pleases Bill greatly, of course. It’ll keep him docile, happy in his freedom from consequences. Once he’s had a day to accept it and cool off, I’ll tell him he, too, has to move houses. Make it seem like an upgrade. Hopefully it’ll take him a while to ramp back up to aggression, the way he did the first time.
Because Bill won’t stay long. Bill will disappear into the night sometime in the next week or two. Whatever bullshit he decides to pull to get his way next, it won’t matter, because he’ll be dead and processed and gone before he can act on it.
Jason decides to leave the commune, sick of dealing with Bill’s shit, but I can see it hurts him. When Bill is gone, I’ll reach out to Jason and invite him back. After all, it’s not his fault I fucked up.
Management
“I don’t think you fucked up, letting him join the group,” Robin says later that night. We’re out by the quail enclosure. The long night has left me frustrated, and making sure the run is secure and the shelters are keeping the birds dry helps me focus. Some of the quail rouse and begin cooing their soothing, frog-like songs.
“I try to pick our members to avoid this sort of thing.”
“Some people are abusive shitheads. It happens. They’re really good at hiding it.”
That’s not the problem, though. The problem is that our system encouraged it somehow. I’ll need to take another look at the lack of work requirements. How do I balance that better? Some people need structure and won’t create it for themselves. It’s like animal enrichment, such as the scratching areas we provide for the quail to encourage natural self-care behavior. They’ll never brood their own eggs—humans bred that out of them centuries ago—but at least they’ll bathe.
I can’t explain it to Robin that way, of course. I set about repairing a section of chicken wire instead.
“I do think you fucked up tonight, though,” she ventures. “Letting Bill stay here, running Jason off?”
I can’t justify that to her, either. Doing that would mean explaining just how I know Bill will be exiting with no chance of return. I want to; I want her approval and her understanding. And I still feel violent. Destructive. I want to go and tear Bill’s throat out right this minute, to prove to her I have it under control. (Irony, I know.)
“It’s not permanent,” I say instead, twisting two sections of wire back together with needle-nose pliers. “I just want to keep everybody safe. Keeping him where I can monitor him is safer.”
“Bill assaulted Jason,” she says. “Word’s going to spread, and now he knows he can get away with that sort of thing. It’s going to scare the others. I know you don’t want cops here, and I understand that, but . . .”
“But they won’t do anything for ‘just’ a dispute between guys,” I remind her. “Not when it’s only one punch. Not when he’s that good at pretending to be apologetic. He’ll normalize it, people will give him a little space, they’ll forget.”
“Genna and Ethan won’t understand, you know.”
The others, they’ll probably buy Bill’s minimizations. Society has them primed to do that, especially since his target was another guy, especially since Jason left. They’ll assume Jason was in the wrong—or else why would he go, and not Bill? But Robin is right. It will just be for a week at most, this tense cohabitation, but it’ll rock the boat, and I won’t be there during daylight hours to keep the peace.
“This is going to ask a lot of you, and I apologize for that, but would you be willing to talk to them? I don’t think they’ll want to hear it from me.”
“I don’t exactly have any authority beyond my picture on the website. And I can’t say I understand, either.”
“No, and that’s why they’ll listen. Tell them that I’m handling Bill, and that I hear their concerns. And in the meantime, I’ll start making Bill pull his weight. Move him into his own place, so he’s farther from the others. I’ll drive him off. I’ll be the bad guy.” Another vicious twist of the wire. “And I’ll make sure he forgets all about Jason.”
Contract Negotiation
Jolene Ladzka is here for her scheduled feeding. She takes her blood awake and willing, and she has developed a fondness for Ethan. He never remembers her after, but he always sleeps better the night after she’s fed on him. Something about her method soothes his inner demons.
After, she tends to linger. Tonight is no different, except that she asks to talk to me privately. And because Robin is on shift, I suggest we go back to my cottage.
She doesn’t care a single bit for its ornamentation, the corbels I had made by a local woodworker or the painstakingly restored mullioned windows. Not a moment’s attention paid to the entry hall runner, made by an old man in Nepal whose work was coveted by kings, or the perfectly oiled and balanced spinning wheel by the chairs we sit in.
“I want to buy a life,” Jolene says after she’s made herself comfortable.
“I can put your name in for the lottery the next time a whole stake comes available.”
I immediately think about Bill. But though I am primarily an artist and not a businesswoman, I can smell the opportunity on her. The desperation. Money has little meaning to me now; I have most of my needs met, and the ones left to strangle on the vine are there by choice. But the community needs money, and there are other things I could ask of her. Even so, that doesn’t mean I need to capitulate eagerly.
She doesn’t like my answer, of course. but says nothing, drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair. I try to find a pattern there in reflexive self-protection; she’s a thaumaturge, a blood sorceress, and I trust her less than most of our kind, on principle.
“Leigh, please reconsider,” is all she says.
I smile my public-facing, fundraising smile. “Jolene, I understand we make a good product, but I can’t just give you somebody else’s contract.” Not only is it unprofessional, it risks severe consequences. Almost everybody on that list is as dangerous—or more so—than she is.
“I’m not asking for somebody else’s. I want somebody untapped. This isn’t a gourmand asking for her next feast. I need a research subject.”
“And I don’t provide lab animals.”
It used to be that the Pyramid handled this sort of thing internally, never desiring involvement from the outside. Even with how their Blood failed spectacularly last decade, Jolene should still be able to manage her affairs on her own.
“I need a particular profile,” she says as if she didn’t hear me. “I’m sure you either have it in stock or know where I can get it. I’m willing to pay whatever cost you require.”
It doesn’t make sense. Why indebt herself for a body she can surely pluck out of an in-patient facility somewhere, or off the streets, or from the Greyhound stop at Union Station? She’s fully capable of doing her own research.
So, again I say, “No.” I wait for her response. We’ve entered contested territory now, and I ready myself to feel the push of her will upon mine. She’s more formidable than I am, particularly when she’s just fed, but this is my home territory, and she knows very well the support I have.
Still.
A minute passes, and she doesn’t push in the slightest beyond the steel in her gaze. Yet. That I can tell. But she is older than I am and practiced at subtleties I can only dream of (and the horrors to match). She finally leans forward and says, as guilelessly as she can pretend, “Please hear me out?”
I make a production of giving in, because now I’m curious on top of eager for a way to make Bill’s culling useful. “And what is the profile?”
If Bill doesn’t match, no loss; I can honestly tell her I have nothing available and can simply log her for a future life when one appears that matches her desires—if I’m still interested once she’s off my land. But if he does match . . .
Two birds, one stone, et cetera.
She grins wolfishly, delighted at successfully piquing my curiosity. “Lurking danger,” she says.
Those two words.
Those two words are so precise that I immediately hate her. Those two words suggest she knows, and she locks eyes with me, sizing me up. Then I feel the push. The swirl and tug upon my mind, so crude that I know she wants me to notice.
And then it’s gone. A warning shot. She can take what she wants from me, so it’s better if I cooperate.
Maybe I should say I have no such person, to prove I am indomitable. Perhaps I should just laugh. But instead, I say, “What will you give me?” Maybe, maybe, her influence snuck inside within the Trojan horse of her obvious attack, but I don’t think so.
I think it’s a longer game than that. A test of some kind. A warning. But this transaction? Simple.
She gives me a figure and the name of a contact of hers who would be more than happy to invest in the ecovillage. And a promise. Her aid in refining the process of preserving blood to give me a few more decades of gentle subsistence. It’s likely useless—if a method was possible, some young Duskblood street alchemist would have cracked it—but Jo Ladzka is no mere street alchemist. It’s worth taking a shot, especially with the amount of funding she’s offering.
And I know my time will run out. I have only to look to Lucille.
We sign the deal for Bill’s life, and she even drinks a draught of my Blood. There is no point in drinking hers in exchange to seal the bargain, and she doesn’t argue the inequality. She suborns herself to me, just a little, just to prove she’s somehow still in charge.
I wonder what she knows.
Sylvia
Tonight Robin and I check on last year’s lambs.
They’re almost slaughtering weight now, and I aim to have them dead by January. But until then, we need to keep them fat and healthy. Most of the work is done during the day, but it’s always good to have eyes on them at night, too. Robin has never even touched a sheep, so I spend most of the visit orienting her to the barn where I have the nearly yearlings. I’ve wintered everybody outside until now because barns trap disease, but it’s wet, wetter than usual (and Portland is wet this time of year), so I need more land per animal as it all gets chewed to mud. The lambs are separated off anyway, since they need fattening, and the ewes are hardy, so into the barn the lambs go.
It’s dry and warm in here, a close press of fuzzy bodies. The air is filled with the stink of fresh manure, the aroma of lanolin, the sweetness of hay. The lambs are docile, raised up close to me and the humans, and they mouth gently at Robin’s outstretched hands as she reaches into the pen.
“Are all of these sold already?” she asks.
I think back to the spreadsheets and e-mails waiting for me in my office. “About half. I’m hoping for three quarters of them to sell; the rest we’ll keep here.”
“For breeding?”
“For eating.”
Her expression sours and she goes very still, staring at the lamb that lathes her palm with its tongue. “All of them? They’re all going to be killed?”
“Not all. There are a couple ewes we’re going to keep.” I point to a young Bluefaced Leicester, with her tawny curls and silvery head dotted with black splotches. To Robin, she probably looks like all the rest, except for the number on the tag, but I have high hopes for her. Her mother is one of the stronger ewes, in her fourth year of lambing with no troubles yet, and her lambs grow up well for Bluefaces, meaty but still with good fleece. “For the wool herd, or for breeding. That one is both, she’s good stock.”
“How do you know?”
“Watching them. Careful record keeping.”
“Did you grow up doing this? Get an ag degree?”
I shake my head and am about to tell her something about my childhood when I catch myself. It’s been just long enough now that my real age and my apparent age are diverging noticeably. “No,” I settle on. “Just a hobby.”
“Just a hobby.”
“Well, not anymore.” I smile. “A little past that, now. I hope you’re still here in spring.”
“To see these lambs die?”
“To meet the bees,” I say. “But that, too, if you want. Or not, if you don’t. That’ll happen next month, not in spring, though.” Robin eats vegan a lot of the time, though not exclusively. I thought about asking why during her interview, but I’ve found it’s best to be matter-of-fact around the realities of meat eating, of animal raising, of slaughter. Either people have clear opinions on it already and don’t need your input, or they’re coming to their own decisions actively and it’s not my place to sway them by anything other than doing.
“They live good lives, right?” Robin asks after a few minutes of silence, while she wanders over to my special Blueface and gives her a pat on the head. “For as long as they live?”
“That’s the idea,” I say. “It’s a millennia-old arrangement. We keep them safe from predators, from disease, from the weather, and in return, we take sustenance from them.”
I swear I’m not trying to smell her while I speak. But I can. I definitely can. Warm blood, right here, and I’m thinking about lambs and humans and this new arrangement, this years-old arrangement. Come, live here, live free, and give freely of your blood. A human can consent, as much as anything can, whereas the young ram I’m fussing with can’t. I want to tell her, so badly, so suddenly. I want her to share in my pride.
But even though I can see her turning over the concepts in her head, getting comfortable with them, I know it’s way too soon. It may always be too soon.
“So,” Robin asks finally. “What’s her name?”
“She doesn’t have one,” I say.
“Why not?”
“Farmers don’t tend to name their animals.”
“Even the ones who will live?”
“Even then. You have to keep a kind of distance. You never know what will happen, and there are a lot of lives depending on you.”
“I’ve lost pets. It’s gutting. I don’t think I could manage losing—how many lambs are there?”
“Forty-three this year.”
“Jesus, I don’t think I could take twenty deaths a year.”
“And that doesn’t count illness. Slaughter we plan for, we hope for, so it has a sort of dignity. Sickness . . . just feels like failing. As if you failed them.” Not just sheep and chickens, either; humans, too.
It’s nice to talk to somebody about this, to watch them consider, weigh, evaluate. She crouches down, eye level with the sleepy animal. “All the same, I think she should have a name.”
“Why?”
She shrugs. “Call me superstitious, but maybe it’ll ward off death.”
Or paint a target on her. I don’t say that. But I think it. Still, the lamb is already my favorite, and I’ll mourn her anyway, when the time comes.
“Sure,” I say. “Have something in mind?”
“What about Sylvia?”
I consider. The lamb’s head is mostly silver, with only a few dark spots, and the land she lives on is lightly wooded. It seems appropriate. But I’m curious. “Why Sylvia?”
“After Sylvia Plath.”
I stare. “Is this some additional naming her for the dead will keep death away type of thing?” I don’t understand.
