Murasaki, page 16
Of course, he realized as his sides began to hurt. Of course it had to be this way. In order to make this our home, we had to do more than just partake of its substance . . . we must also share its karma.
And what better way to do that than to sacrifice the one thing on Genji we might have come to treasure above all others? Above—may the gods forgive us—even the Ihrdizu?
What better way to demonstrate what we have to lose?
Oh, he would do his best to persuade his fellow col-onists to establish rules and traditions that would keep the Earthling share of ecological shame to a minimum. Perhaps they might even help the Ihrdizu escape the cyclic trap that had them ensnared for so long.
On the other hand, perhaps humans would prove a bane to this world, helping the Genjians complete a job of destruction their own limitations had prevented them from finishing before. He would fight to prevent that, but who could predict the future?
All of that lies ahead, though, Minoru thought. All that and much more. For well or ill, we are part of this world now. Phs’n’kah was right. This is now our home.
Yukiko held up the last pair of zu ‘unutsu rolls, now cold, but still aromatic with a flavor to make the eyes water with delight ... and irony. “One we save for Emile, of course. Shall we seal and refrigerate the other one for Sato?”
He took the tender object from her, tore off a morsel, and tossed it into the bay far below. She met his eyes, and reached out to do the same. Then, with his free hand, he helped her stand.
“Let’s save it, all right,” he said. “But for a special occasion.”
“Like tonight?” Yukiko smiled. know just the thing.”
She took his arm and led him past the singing natives, down through a reed-lined valley, across glistening fens, and then up to a plateau where a white dome shone in the glow of a lantern hung over the door.
Minoru glanced back to see Emile dashing to and fro, joyously recording every aspect of the native celebration. He probably wouldn’t be back for hours.
A Plague Of Conscience
by Greg Bear
Kammer looked worse than any corpse Philby had seen; much worse, for he was alive and shouldn’t have been. This short wizened man, with limbs like gnarled tree branches and skin like leather—what could be seen of his skin beneath the encrustations of brown and green snug—had survived ten Earthly years on Chujo with-out human contact. He could hardly speak English any more.
Kammer regarded Philby through eyes paled by some Chujoan biological adaptation—the impossible that had happened to him first and then had spread so disastrously to the Quantist settlers and the Japanese stationed here. Three hundred dead, and it had certainly begun on Kam— mer’s broken, dying body, pissed on by a Chujoan shaman. They stood four meters from each other, Chujo’s sky darkling to squid’s-ink purple in the gloaming. Philby was unused to feeling nervous before any human.
Kammer, not wholly human any more, coughed, and his snug wrinkled and crawled in obscene patches, revealing yet more leather. “Not many people let to see me,” he said. “Why do you?” I come from Genji,” Philby said, “with a message from the Ihrdizu to the Chujoan shamans. Talking to you seems to be a bonus.” His voice was somewhat muffled by the isolation suit’s helmet; they were taking no chances with Kammer, or with the Chujoans.
“Ah, Christ,” Kammer said roughly, and spat a thin stream of green and red saliva on the rocky ground between them. The stream lapped onto Philby’s plastic boot covers. “Pardon. No offense. I still hate the ... taste. Keeps me alive, I think, my human thoughts think, but tastes like es-sence of crap profane.”
“You’ve heard what happened to the Quantist crew?” Philby asked.
“Bloody *criaock* and *oonshlr#hack*.”
The translator could not work with this humanized pronunciation; so little was known of Chujoan language anyway, the Masters being spare with their communica-tions. Philby jotted the words on his
,
notepad in the Chujoan phonetic devised by the Japanese, who had dropped trans-miners into a number of encampments and farm centers four years before Philby’s ship arrived in the Murasaki Sys-tem. The Chujoans had tolerated the transmitters, and what few phrases they uttered had been fed into the All Nihon shipboard supercomputers. The Japanese had been kind enough to share their knowledge with Philby.
They knew Philby would be useful. He was, after all, rational—unlike the members of the God the Physicist Church, the Quantists.
“I’ve come to talk about Carnot,” Philby said. Kammer hummed briefly and leaned on his thick, snug-encrusted stick.. Dusk was settling quickly, and Genji was a huge rotten orange high above, its own sunset line green and purple and yellow. “He’s using your name. Claims to have been blessed by you.
,
He’s spreading a re-ligion, if you can call it that, around the Budizu associa-tions, the families.... “
“I know little about the Ihrdizu,” Kammer said, voice cracking. “Never been there.” The leathery face seemed to half smile.
“He met with you, talked about his version of Jesus with you. He says you have seen visions of Chujo and Genji united under the rule of Jesus, who will come to these planets when the time is right”
The moss-covered mummy shrugged. “We didn’t talk much, doing the first,” Kammer said.
Philby tried to riddle what he meant, and decided to let context be his guide. The notepad was recording all—perhaps meaning could be found later.
“Doing the second, he was already ill. Could see that.”
“You met with him twice?” Philby asked.
Kammer nodded. “Sick the second time. He was do-ing the wind.”
“He was ill with the plague,” Philby paraphrased hopefully, his skin crawling even beneath the protective suit at the thought that Kammer had probably been the source of that plague.
“He was doing the wind,” Kammer said. “Pardon me. He was almost dead. He was looking for signs. I did what I could.”
“What was that?”
Kammer shook his head slowly and lifted his stick. “I hit him.” He brought the stick down on the ground with a sharp crack. Philby noticed there was snug on the stick as well. Some of the snug on the stick fell away in patches. “He made away before I could hit him again.”
“Do you know where Carnot has set up his base?” Philby asked, hoping that Kammer’s use of his stick had reflected an extreme personal distaste.
“Wonderful man,” Kammer said, hawking again—his entire chest patch of snug heaving like a sewage-befouled sea—but not spitting. “I don’t. Where he is. On Chujo or Genji. Who are you? Beg pardon. That means ... What will you be doing here?”
General clean-up. Triage. Sanitizing. After four years of intermittent dialogue with the Quantist ship, between the stars, pondering imponderables, watching their quasi-New Age religion grow to an obsession in the rainbow-belted times, the times of funhouse stars, in the dark profundities of loneliness every ship knows.. .
“I’m here to investigate the plague,” Philby said, ad-justing his hydrator.—And to find Carnot.”
Kammer laughed. “Thinks I’m something.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Risked doing martyr to the bullyboys. The trolls. They dislike anything new. Do the thorn fence.–
Kammer made a disgusting excretory sound in his throat and rasped, “Knew. Knew.”
Philby glanced at the line of Chujoans standing mute, motionless, six human paces east of them, and the trolls—good name that, and original with Kammer, apparently—standing with mindless patience at the edge of the village waiting for some false move, some physical or biochemical sign of his alienness, his undesirability.
“He survived the plague,” Philby said offhandedly, as if conveying sad news.
“Know that,” Kammer said. He snorted, looked di-rectly at Philby, and Philby saw for a moment the remain-ing humanity, as one might see the shadow of a former man in the face of one who has walked the streets too long, cut away from social graces. “Vector of the cultural disease.”
“Yes,” Philby said, surprised that Kammer was so in tune with his own thoughts.. “Then you agree with me, that he—that his people area danger?”
“You try to block him?”
“Yes,” Philby said. “We ... communicated with them on the way to Murasaki. They’re from the American Southwest. Fifty million New Age believers in the South-west commissioned a starship from orbiting—”
“How?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“How will you do the stopping?”
“By going from village to village among the Ihrdizu, and telling them the truth. Not mystical nonsense.”
Kammer smiled, his teeth a ruin encrusted with gray. “Doing the good. I mean, that’s good of you.
What will you make of Carnot ... doing with him when you find him?”
“Make him stop polluting these worlds,” Philby said. “Ah. A service to us all.”
“You tried to stop him as well, didn’t you? With your stick?”
“He’s alive, isn’t he? You’d better go now,” Kammer said, turning his head and poking his raw-looking chin at their Chupchup observers. “They’ll make you do martyr soon. Best pass on your message from Heaven and do a ... be a trotter. Trot off. You’re beginning to bore them, you silly wretch.”
“Do I bore you as well, Kammer?” Philby said sharply. He trusted the trolls would not detect or react to his human irritation.
Kammer said nothing, the whited eyes with their pas-tel-green irises and pinhole pupils moving back and forth independently, like a lizard’s hunting for a flying insect.
“No, old fellow,” Kammer said. “I’d really like to sit and do the talk some more. But my skin tells me I’m not up to it. I always listen to my skin. Without it, I’m an indigestible memory.”
Philby nodded, the gesture almost invisible inside his helmet. “Thank you, Mr. Kammer,” he said.
Kammer had already turned and begun his limping retreat to the safety of the village. “Nothing, old folks,” Kammer said. Lurching on his beggar’s rearranged limbs, S-curved back hunched like a ridge of iron-rich mountains, without looking back he added, “Hope you know what the lo-Ihrdizu *fchix * are saying to these.” He waved a thin, crooked hand at the shaman and his attendants.
Philby didn’t. He had to take that risk.
The flat-faced, large-eyed shaman approached, ears swung forward like tiny sails, and without looking at him, as if direct eye contact was either unknown or an unspeak-able breach, snatched the Ihrdizu package from Philby’s grasp and walked away, quietly erecting his genitalia and pissing all over the sacred himatid pelt wrapper.
Philby, hair on his neck rising with fear of blue troll claws and shark teeth, walked away from the village to rejoin the transport crew on the cliff ledge a kilometer out-side the village. The Japanese escort, a small, attractive, middle-aged woman named Tatsumi, bowed on his return. Sheldrake and Thompson, pilots from his own crew, stiff-ened perceptibly. He lifted his arms and they sprayed him down, just as a precaution. Our own pissing ceremony.
Kammer’s spit had landed on the toes of his disposable boots.
“He’s become the Old Man of the Mountain,” Philby said, doffing the boot covers and tossing them into the transport’s external waste-hopper. Removing the helmet, he was left with only a hydrator and supplemental tank. Doff-ing these, he climbed into the transport. Tatsumi, Sheldrake, and Thompson followed. “He knows what I’m here for. I think he approves.”
Dream journey above the pastel land, dreary dry old Chujo, yellow husk of a world with a thin cloak of dry air and an illustrious past, if what the Japanese had witnessed years ago—that incredible ceremony of bioloons carrying Chupchups high into the atmosphere—was any indication ... And of that, Philby was doubtful.
Edward Philby, First Planetfall Coordinator of the multinational starship Lorentz, who answered only to the captains and First Manager, tried to sleep and found himself opening his eyes to stare over the mountains and once, briefly, a small pale-green lake with ancient shores like lids around a diseased eye.
We have come so far and suffered so much to be here.
He concentrated on the crooked shape of Kammer in his thoughts, broken and mummified, smelling like an un-washed tramp and yet also like something else: flowers. An odor of sanctity. Eyes like that lake.
The Quantists had come here to find something tran-scendental, their ragged poor ship surviving the voyage just barely, their faith strengthening in the great Betweens, knowing they could not return if they could not find It here, and they had been lucky. They had found It, and then It had killed them as mercilessly as the unthinking void.... Listening to the tales of their shipboard problems, the tech-nical problems with a ship not well made, the social prob-lems with a crew chosen haphazardly, on principles of ignorance. Coming to truly despise Robert Carnot as it be-came obvious the New Agers were falling into the grip of an even more radical revelation, receiving truth. . . The bitter debates corning to an end, mutual silence. . . And real-izing the New Ager ship would reach Murasaki first, a year ahead of the British ship. Arriving first, and eager to spread their revelation. And before the Lorentz had gone into or-bit, hearing the news, that ninety percent of the Benevo-lent’s crew had died of an unknown plague, and several dozen Japanese, as well. Relief at the decimation of a foe? Sadness? Triage . . .
But Carnot and twenty of his shipmates had survived, and their faith had strengthened, as Carnot integrated Kam-mer into his new religion: a glory of Chujoan biology, the truly transcendental; that which takes a man and transforms him into a survivor and a symbol. Carnot had said: “He is resurrected. The old Kammer died, just as we thought. They resurrected him, cured him of his radiation disease and his wounds, and imbued him with their spirit of Christ.” A dirty, ragged, smelly sort of Christ.
Tatsumi saw that he was not asleep. “You are worried about the settlers on Genji,” she said. “Your countrymen.”
“They’re not my countrymen,” Philby said. “I’m English. They’re bloody Southwesterners from the U.S.A.”
beg your pardon.”
“Easy mistake, we might as well be a state of the U.S.,” he said. “Europe won’t have us now. And the Spac-ers won’t have the Earth now. Or rather, then . . . “ He waved a hand over his shoulder and the seat back; time dilated by decades. He had not bothered to catch up on the thin messages from distant Sol, slender lifelines to far-flung children.
She smiled and nodded: Earth history, all past for her as well.
“You believe they will do great damage,” she offered cautiously, as if Philby might be offended to have a Japa-nese commenting upon people at least of his language and broad culture, if not his nationality.
“You know they will, Tatsumi-san,” he said. “Kam-mer knows they will. He says he tried to kill Carnot and failed.”
Tatsumi pressed her lips together and frowned. She did not appear shocked. “Camot thinks Kammer is a ... Jesus?”
“An avatar of the ancient spirituality of Chujo,” Philby said. This he had picked up from conversations with several Quantists during welcoming ceremonies on Genji. Welcome to the world we have already made our home, and the peoples we are already trying to convert. Pity you couldn’t get here sooner. “Cognate to Jesus. Jesus can be found in the universal ground state, where all our redemp-tions lie. God the Physicist shows us the way through phys-ics. Just what the Ihrdizu need—visitors from the sky able to take messages to Heaven.”
“So you take messages in his stead.”
“They know I’m not a spirit. I’m a man of solid mat-ter. I don’t feed them Physicist nonsense.”
“And what will you do next?”
“Talk to Carnot, if I can find him.–
Tatsumi frowned again, shaking her head. “He is not on Chujo? Our information was that he had left the moun tains of Nighland to come here.... “
—I’ve been looking for him for the past three weeks.—“Then he must be back on Genji. If he is there, I can find out where he is, and take you to him.”
Philby hid his surprise. “I thought your people wanted to stay out of this.–
“We thought all the cultists would die,– Tatsumi said, lowering her eyes. “They did not.”
Philby looked at her intently. Did you offer them your cure? No; they had already found their own, somehow. Would you have offered them your cure?
“Pardon my inquisitiveness—” Philby began.
Your inquisition?” Tatsumi interrupted with a faint smile. He returned her smile, but with slitted eyes and an ironic nod.
“Believe me, I represent no religious authority on Earth. We are England’s last vanguard, but England is hardly a religious state.”
“Of course not,” Tatsumi said.
“I’m wondering just what your position is on these settlers.”
“Earth will keep sending them,” Tatsumi said sadly. “There is nothing we can do. Dialogue takes decades. The people back home have apparently made the Murasaki Sys-tem into a symbol of ...
manliness? National prestige? Earth in particular. They purchase broken-down starships, and they flee the solar system to die in darkness. Some survive. We cannot fight such a thing.”
“There are two more ships nearby,” Philby said. “They’ll be here in a year or so.”
Tatsumi nodded. “We hope they are as enlightened as your own expedition.”
Irony? “Thank you,” he said.
“But since dialogue with the solar system is so diffi-cult, we wonder where you derive your authority.
You rep-resent no church, and any government is too far away to instruct you. Who gives you orders to quell the Quantists?–
Philby shook his head. “Nobody outside of the Mu-rasaki System.”
‘Then you perform your duty autonomously?”
“Yes.”
“Self-appointed.”
He flinched, and his face reddened. “Your people should remember the nastiness of a cultural plague.
The nineteenth century... Admiral Perry?”
