Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 43
“This vodka tastes lovely. It really is like the real thing.”
“I blend a good synthetic.”
“I suppose you know I have to bring you in, then. For murdering my colleague.”
“Of course. It’s the civilized thing to do. I wonder, did anyone ever reprimand you for what you did, to the people with me?”
“Animals. And no, of course not. Lovely drink. Are you ready?”
“A moment.”
“You don’t need to leave that here, morbid as it is. You can take your little trophy with you. What? I don’t want it.”
“Hold out your hand.”
“There, certainly.”
“Here is the eye. And as I close your fingers over it I want you to remember what you did. Who you murdered. The people who cared for me. Who nursed me when my own mothers threw me out to save the weight in our transport. I was a bit of petty cargo. An inconvenience. They could grow another one.”
“No need for so much pressure. Give me that.”
“But I was community property, wasn’t I? So they hired you, the community did, and it took many years, but you did as you were bid. I understand that. That part wasn’t your fault. What you did next, though….”
“It was quite civilized.”
“…murdering everyone I loved.”
“Animals.”
“Human beings. Human beings who taught me many things, and imparted many gifts. I can see you sweating now, you know. Is your heart beating a little faster?”
“What’s this… what’s….”
“I remember the blood on your hands. I remember you roasting their flesh, after, and proffering it to me. I remember swearing my revenge, then, with their blood smeared all over my body. This revenge. Your irises are growing very large, now. I can see you swaying. Why don’t you sit down and drink some more?”
“The drink… you wild witch… uncivilized…”
“What does that mean, now? I was quite civilized until this very instant, until I chose to act as they would not. Today I am you. Today I take your little bit of jewelry, and I make it my own.”
“….you…there are….”
“Full of light, that’s what my mother said. My real mother, the one you murdered because they could live on a planet you couldn’t. Those were her last words and I didn’t know what they meant, then. Maybe you do, now. Their gift to me was a lovely parasite, did you know it? One that made it easy for me to ingest the synthetic compounds I now use to mix my strongest drinks. Compounds that make the blood boil and the heart seize in particular sorts of humans, as they are doing to you now. If only you had listened.”
“…..light.”
“Yes, maybe. For a time. Maybe there is light, somewhere, in that dark heart of yours. But mine is dead, now. Too dead to see it. You took all the light, that day. With your body, I intend to bring it back.”
“….ug….uhg….”
“Hush now. It will be over soon. I will plant your body here, on my little scrap of land, and next to you I will plant my real mother’s heart. From your body they will grow again, all of her people, stronger and better than before. I will breathe my memories into them, and they will feed on your memories of them, and from all this darkness, we will grow a new beginning. You are quiet now, so quiet, but soon I will host a family of glorious obsidian stars.”
THE MADNESS OF MEMORY
ASHONDA DID NOT RECALL anything unrelated to estate matters and patterned databases, because those memories had been taken from her, by brother or father or mother, she knew not. Memory, they said, could only hinder her ability to objectively run the estate. She trusted their judgment. She could not miss what she did not remember. There was comfort and certainly in that. When she observed how others of her own kind moved around her, anxious and worried and covetous of all they did not have, she felt nothing but relief.
Yet when she heard a cry from her study, memory tugged at her, and it was uncomfortable and oddly stirring. She halted her review of the southern terraforming reports, tapping at the blooming amber petals in the air. They contracted. A knock sounded on the door, followed by another cry. The cry was garbled; words, certainly, but she could not make them out.
Ashonda flipped through her internal linking matrix, searching for an overly agitated link among those under her care, and found a tiny blip of tense emotion. She located the sal’s name by its linking number. Konaa, the link read. Konaa was the sal overseer for the field sals on the eastern property line.
Ashonda unlocked the door. The brilliant white glow of early light poured across her face, made her wince. Konaa stood outlined in the mahogany colored lintel, her face awash in agitation. Konaa’s black hair was cut short, framing her plump face. Like the other sals, she lacked a tail, and her ears were round and set close to her face. The lack of general body hair on most sals made them look like they were naked, to Ashonda’s eyes. Most Kell covered sal bodies and faces in long robes and headscarves to mask their lack.
“Pardon, Honorable Kell,” Konaa said, “your honorable brother Nashota FiSondra has returned. I saw him as I came in from the fields.”
Ashonda hadn’t seen Nashota in thirty years, not since the physicians repaired her memory. She smoothed her amber colored tunic. “I’ll greet him.”
“But, the Patron –”
Ashonda sent Konaa a heavy dose of calm through the overseer matrix. When the sals tried to enlighten or argue, she found the matrix especially useful. Konaa shuffled away.
Ashonda stepped down the walkway and into the gardens. The light of the great white sun warmed her face, washing the garden in a bright milky glow. Gravel crunched beneath her feet as she walked past red-leaved willowren trees and tall stands of sticky clover that clung to her trousers. Yellow-green water bubbled in the fountain. Dead thornbugs floated on the pool’s surface.
A tiny chime in her secondary House matrix let her know her father was accessing her emotional state. Ashonda’s House-public matrix was unique among the Kell Houses, a product of her father’s concern over the physician’s handiwork. The only part of Ashonda’s consciousness unavailable to the rest of the House was the sals’ linking matrix, and even that could be denied her and taken over by her father in the event of an emergency or some terrible mental catastrophe. That idea, like so much in her life, was deeply comfortable. Pleasurable, even. She did not want to have total control of anything. With control came responsibility.
Ashonda came to the edge of the garden and approached the spherical gate that spiraled open at her approach. The courtyard spread before her.
A half-dozen house sals worked in the dark tiled yard. Two swept up the thornbugs that collected beneath the bamboo overhangs above the entrances, and four more unloaded big metal containers of red grass seeds from a couple of carts hovering silently in the yard. While her people were native to the planet, the sals had come later, burning down from the sky. They arrived sickly and stupid, and the Kell had nursed them back to health. In return, their descendants now, these many thousands of years on, toiled for their Kell overseers. They had many thousands of years left to pay off their collective debt.
The steely spherical main gate was open, as was customary during daylight hours. On the other side of the gate, looking out toward the dark blue smudge of the river, was a tall figure dressed in a long brown city robe. She knew him – or her matrix knew him: he was her brother, Nashota. All of the Kell shared the same genetic fingerprint. His face was not substantially different from hers, or their father’s, differing only through effects on the body by age and the environment. But while she sought, always to retain the same basic grooming standards as the others, Nashota sought to stand out. He could have been from an entirely other people, with his wild purple hair and black tattoos on his forearms. He had hold of a duffle pack in one hand and had a wide-brimmed hat on his head, pulled down low over his eyes to keep the sun off, causing his ears to stick out. The long curl of his tail was bent up over his shoulder, and she saw that he had dyed the tuft of hair at the end a violent crimson. And he wore spectacles. He had clipped the round titanium frames onto the bridge of his hawkish nose, and gazed through the clear lenses with gray eyes. Only rebels and radical scholars wore those antique lenses; only those Kell who insisted the Senate had closed its eyes to the nature of its own existence. Paired with the rest of his physical abnormalities, it was a wonder he had not been locked up for indecency.
“Ashonda?” Nashota said, and she enjoyed the questioning note is in voice. It meant she had done what her father asked and made herself indistinguishable from the rest of the family.
“You’re not permitted here,” she said, repeating what the matrix told her; his profile was flagged as being barred from the estate. “I would have preferred advanced notice of your arrival.”
“Father cut my access to the House channel years ago. If I want to speak with him I do it to his face, like someone else’s sal.”
Another chime sounded in her mind. The House channel this time. She acknowledged the call. It was her sister Vonisyn.
“Father says you experienced a fleeting moment of alarm this morning,” Vonisyn sent.
“A mere moment of surprise at the favorable southern progress reports,” Ashonda sent.
Vonisyn severed the connection.
“I thought we might have a drink together,” Nashota said. “Yesterday was your hundred and fiftieth birthday gifting. One doesn’t become an adult every day. There were some who thought you and I wouldn’t live that long.”
He pushed up the brim of his hat, gazing at her with deep brown eyes the same color as those she saw in the mirror whenever she dared look.
“Do you remember anything at all?” he murmured, as if what they said aloud could not be recorded or viewed by those on the House channel.
“I remember what mother deemed appropriate for me to remember,” she said, and she began to casually check on the emotional status of the sals, as it felt more soothing than this conversation.
“Then you don’t remember anything.” He pulled the brim of his hat back down. “Will you invite me in, Estate Matron? I expect that’s something you can still do without checking the House channel.”
She considered that. The warm, secure part of her understood it was best to turn away. Some darker part wanted to know what happened if he stayed. Perhaps there could be a compromise.
“One drink,” she said, “as a family courtesy, no more.”
A smile tugged at his lips.
#
Ashonda stood at her mother’s ancient liquor cabinet in the library. The cabinet was a towering piece of ginger-colored woodwork that stood a good meter taller than Ashonda. The trees that once produced that wood had been extinct over a thousand years. The cabinet was preserved with an amber wash. Ashonda often found herself rubbing at it, though she could not say why.
“What would you like?” she asked, pulling open the cabinet door and breaking the humidity seal. Inside, the cabinet was cold, its amber surface covered in gently throbbing frost colonies.
“Spring wine is fine,” Nashota said.
Ashonda pulled out a spherical decanter of yellow wine and two bowled glasses. It felt odd to hold them. When was the last time she had wine? She didn’t remember. She turned back to the low circular table at the center of the room and settled onto one of the raised yellow cushions built into the floor.
Nashota pulled off his hat and sat across from her. He balanced his hat on the end of his tail, an obscene and annoying gesture that nearly made her throw him out again. “When was the last time you left the estate, Ashonda?”
That, certainly, was in her memory. She reached for the moment, for the travels to the city, to the outlying House estates, but found nothing but half-hazy snatches that must have been well over seventy years old.
“I don’t remember,” she said.
Nashota picked up his glass. “Have you been having trouble with your sals?”
“No,” she said. “Well… a few disappearances. Nothing serious. A malfunction in the linking matrix.”
“Many estates have lost sals,” Nashota said. “I’m here to see if your situation is the same, so I can prepare a report to the Senate.”
“The Senate will never see you,” she said. “Not looking as you do.”
“Perhaps you could do it for me,” he said.
“And say what? Sals are disappearing? It’s not my place.”
He leaned toward her. “Are you certain?”
“Yes. Why do you look at me as if expecting me to turn into an animal?” She drained the wine in her glass. She felt the nits in her blood pick up on the alcohol; the modified cells aided in the mending of old and bruised tissue and fought off disease and contagion, the plagues of a world not yet fully compatible with the Kell form. The only way to get truly drunk was to drink hard and fast.
“It’s time we faced the fact that the sals are changing,” Nashota said. “They are adapting to this world. We aren’t.”
“Don’t argue the flawed Creator theory with me. You’ll lose.”
“Open your eyes,” Nashota said. “We have stopped evolving, but the world hasn’t. The sals are better suited, and they become more suited to it every cycle. What does that mean for the future of the Kell? Eventually the world will kill us.”
“We are the superior people,” Ashonda said. Her pulse quickened, and she felt a terrible anxiety move into her body. This was not a conversation proper people had. “The world is in balance exactly as it is.” She pondered his words, weighing her anxiety about the conversation with her need to be a gracious host. “You know where the guest room is, of course. I can send you out with Konaa on a landbike tomorrow. She has all of them out at the northern property line today, but I can spare one tomorrow. You should go now. This is not an approved conversation.”
“Thank you,” Nashota said. “How are you feeling?”
Heat moved up her face. “Get out of here,” she said.
He twisted his tail and set his hat atop his head and stood. He left her, and his drink.
Ashonda sat in silence. One by one, the light globes in the room began to fade, all but the one on the table, the only globe close enough to detect her breath and body heat. Pale light fell through the window.
She felt empty.
Vonisyn found her still sitting there at dusk, staring into her empty glass.
“I’ve got section 403 seeded,” she said as she strode into the room; the big light globe on the ceiling brightened. “But the red grass hasn’t taken in the 200 sector. I was hoping –” She stopped at the center of the room, stared down at her. “Ashonda, are you listening?”
She looked up from her glass. Vonisyn’s brown hair was tied back neatly at the nape of her neck. She was more muscular than Nashota; cleaner, straighter, with a permanent expression of neutrality to her features that reminded Ashonda of her father.
“I’m listening,” Ashonda said.
“What are you drinking?”
“Spring wine.”
“He’s here, isn’t he?”
“Who?”
“Nashota. You only drink when he’s here.”
Another chime sounded from her house matrix. She felt Vonisyn open up her own channel to view her emotional state. Ashonda said, “He came for my birthday, to wish me well. It was too late in the day to send him back. He’ll be in the guest room tonight.”
“You should have let him take his chances,” Vonisyn said.
“He’s my brother.”
“What of it? We’re not sals, Ashonda.”
“No,” she said, “We are Kell. But what is that, really?”
Vonisyn’s gaze was steely. “It’s the drinking that ruined mother. She very nearly toppled us.”
My mother, Ashonda thought. What happened to my mother? That was important. Something about their mother… She got up and moved past Vonisyn and into the garden, dark now that the sky panels were shut. She found the lighted walkway leading up to her study and entered the room. The light globes brightened. She sat down in her mother’s yellow chair and stared at the image projector on the corner of the desk. She listened to the rhythmic drip of the water clock.
She turned to the big cabinet built into the wall behind her, opened the cabinet door, and reached up to the top shelf where her mother had left two big bottles of salian wine. She set them both down on the moon-shaped desk, broke the seal on the first bottle, and drank.
My mother, she thought. The sals. The world is changing, and we are not. But they are. This is important.
But she could not remember, and she dared not.
As she sat back into the chair, staring into the amber liquid in the bottle, she began to pluck unconsciously at the links to her sals in the House matrix, checking up on Konaa first, then the rest. Her feeling of emptiness did not go away.
The chime in her secondary matrix sounded. Her father began his second review of the day. He would have Vonisyn check up on her once he finished experiencing the report. He would be highly dissatisfied.
Perhaps he would send for the physicians.
Ashonda put the wine away, and went to sleep before her mind grew any more muddled.
#
Ashonda awoke to fear and panic. She was on the floor, sprawled next to her sleeping mat. Light peeked under the doorway and through the filtered window. She stumbled toward the entryway. One of the links in her matrix was throbbing, causing her to experience a ghost of the emotional state being experienced by the sal.
Pain shot through her head, just behind her eyes. The link was to a sal called Traal, one of the field sals out by the northern property line. She tried to send him calm, tried to soothe the fear in him, but his body had clouded her connection with too many endorphins; her own signals weren’t getting through.
All twenty links with her overseers were blinking at the edges of her vision, begging for acknowledgment. Messages kept popping up in her left eye. Konaa had sent her three messages. The House channel had picked up six more; two from Vonisyn, one from her cousin Donasha, two from her father, and one from Nashota.
