Grazing The Long Acre Page 3

  While Sasha saw this, Bob Irwin was catapulted back to Earth by bewilderment. He saw the boy as a youngster of his own race, and was appalled.

  “You can’t mean to live with him!” he cried. “You’re ruining your life, kid. The man’s a horror story. He eats red meat!”

  He remembered the glossary, and tried whistling and clicking, and hoped he was saying something. “Don’t stay with bad stranger. Your people better. Go home!”

  The boy whistled and clicked, too: it sounded almost the same.

  “Hey! Leave the kid alone!”

  Nanazetta came running out from behind the half—built hut, brandishing a knobbled tree root.

  Bob and Sasha grabbed at each other clumsily.

  “Okay, Nanzetta,” quavered Bob. “Party’s over.”

  “Don’t waste your breath. I like it here. I’ve got myself a girl, the food’s good. When you get back, you can report me missing.”

  “That’s a boy, Nanazetta,” Irwin told him, exasperated. “We can tell by the kilt.”

  The physiologist flushed darkly, colour spreading down his chest through the thick mat of hair. He was wearing a Ma’atian kilt too.

  “What the fuck business is it of yours? Get off my patch!”

  “For God’s sake, Nanazetta. You aren’t really here. None of us are really here. You don’t exist at the moment, except as an array of, of psychic dots and dashes, or whatever it is, in Cheops’ memory. You can’t have forgotten that.”

  He had never accepted it, not deep down. That was his secret. He could not take seriously any theory of the human entity as something that could exist separated from the body. Nanazetta believed in flesh and blood. He hefted his twisted root, smiling contemptuously. He knew who was crazy.

  “Nanazetta!” cried Sasha. “You’re betraying your planet. I don’t know what you’ve done, but you mustn’t do it. We are all of us part of the Cheops. You’re going to wreck the whole project.”

  “So why should I care? Did anyone care what would happen to me, stuck in a cryogenic vault while my ‘Kirlian structure’ was off shooting round the galaxy? Piss on them. Piss on the Sahel, piss on the Boers, piss on the teeming masses everywhere. This is my promised land. I’m staying.”

  “Oh Bob, this is crazy. This is just another shared hallucination. He can’t have escaped. He’s still part of the Cheops, and he’ll be back in the crew environment at take off with the rest of us. He can’t help it.”

  Nanazetta’s fury boiled over. He charged across the cove. Sasha and the boy clung to each other this time. Bob tried to run.”Get the fuck off! Get the fuck off!” gasped the big man hoarsely, flailing with his root. Bob scuttled, dodged. Nanazetta went flying past him, still yelling furiously, over the edge of the shelf.

  He landed with a crunch, out of their sight below.

  “Oh, God.”

  Down by the side of the stream, the two adult Ma’atians were bending over something fleshly, solid, and still. Nanazetta had broken his neck. He was dead.

  The boy brought a kind of digging stick down from above and all five of them took turns at the work. They buried him where he lay. The Ma’atians seemed to think this was the right thing to do, and Bob and Sasha were in no state to argue.

  On the journey back they camped when darkness fell, as before. In the middle of the night, Sasha jerked awake. She shook Irwin violently.

  “Bob! We shouldn’t have buried him! The contamination! All kinds of bacteria, viruses. We’ll have to go back and dig him up and burn him….”

  Bob waited until her babbling ended in silence. Each of them, in Ma’at’s radiant starlight, bright as a full moon on Earth, stared at a metallic doll.

  “Was there a body?” asked Sasha at last. “Do you think we’re imagining all this?”

  “I don’t know. But no body left Earth, Sasha.”

  “Oh, good. So no Earth bacteria can be contaminating Ma’at.” Slowly, Bob removed his suit. Sasha did the same. Bob dug his bare hands into the dark soil and looked at them. There was dirt under his fingernails. He could feel the grit on his palms.

  “This is impossible,” whispered Sasha.

  They put the suits back on.

  Sugi was waiting for them at the settlement. She didn’t seem to take in the news of Nanazetta’s death. She had worries of her own.

  “I don’t know what it is, Bob, but I can’t seem to get into the lander. I must have locked myself out.”

  She was confused, showing the pathetic wariness which they remembered from the first days of Cheops, before she got to trust them.

  The Cheops lander looked the same as always, a glassy tetrahedron that turned from black to silver as the light struck it. It stood in the centre of the glade, under the clear blue sky, a large packing case that would open when triggered by Cheops, just big enough to fold in all the AI’s mobile exploratory hardware. Including five servo-units converted from human pressure suits.

  “It’s bigger inside, isn’t it,” suggested Sugi uneasily.

  “Only, I can’t get in anymore.”

  It was cooler that night. Sasha and Bob sat on the porch of the house that had been lent to them and watched fireflies. They had taken off their suits again and were wearing borrowed Ma’atian garments, the light swathing folds making a comfortable cloud of Sasha’s gentle bulk. Sugi, surprisingly, had made a swift and complete recovery. She was down in the settlement somewhere with her holiday friends. Faintly, the marooned explorers caught strains of the Earthling dance track which had been top of the charts when Cheops departed.

  Merle was gone. They had searched for her, they had asked the Ma’atians. But all that anyone would do was to point to the hills. She went that way. Schoo…Schoo. She has gone far.

  “Should we go after her?” wondered Sasha.

  Bob shook his head. In the quiet of this night he could think of the captain with apology. They had all picked on her, and it wasn’t fair. It was only the nature of a born solitary, forced to live always in a crowd, that had made her so abrasive. But he could do without her angry, restless presence.

  “No, let her be. Let her find her own promised land.”

  On Earth, the Cheops development team was waiting for the ship’s return. Cheops had been launched by a conventional rocket system from Earth’s surface, for no space station yet had the capacity to deal with such a major event. It had winked out of existence slightly beyond the orbit of the moon and at once passed out of all human contact, all knowledge. Its return was supposed to be to the same location, a year downstream in time. There was no real reason for the ‘safety’ period. But even the designers of the probe still found themselves unable to accept completely that time could now be treated as a landscape…Meanwhile, here, on Ma’at…

  The fireflies were luminous spots on the tails of little night-hunting lizards. But they danced just the same.

  “Look.”

  Bob pulled something out from under their doorstep. It was one of the lobsterlike remotes: stiff and dead.

  “I found it in the street. What happened, Sasha? Don’t worry, I know we’re stranded, I’m not going to get hysterical about that. But I simply don’t understand….”

  “I suppose…well, Nanazetta broke free, but I think we all….We found out how good life can be, and didn’t want to be ghosts anymore. The probe, the Cheops AI, started off with the directive to preserve our sanity by giving us what we wanted—immaterially. But I think five hungry humans influenced it more than the team at home reckoned for. In the end that directive had become its vital task. And there was the flux principle. I mean, the process of break-down and build-up was there, and we unconsciously activated it with a different orientation. Instead of remaking itself somewhere/somewhen else, Cheops made itself into something else. What are bodies after all: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen…and it had all the information. That’s my theory, anyway.”

  “But it doesn’t work out, Sash. Nothing comes from nothing. Look—this, er, lobster’s still here. And the lander,
and all our suits. It can’t have made us out of Ma’atian materials. How could it affect them? That’s crazy.”

  “No, Bob. You’re not thinking straight. I said the Cheops converted itself, didn’t you hear me?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Watch the sky, Bob.”

  The shore party had often watched the Ma’atian sky at this time. Together, and briefly, more or less at peace, they had waved and cheered as little Cheops tracked by overhead. The Ma’atian night was the same: moonless, ablaze with jewels. Maybe the good ship Cheops had gone home alone. But Sasha didn’t think so. Five solid human bodies had to come from somewhere. She heaved a sigh. Her socialist conscience pricked her a little, but she could not seriously regret the way things had turned out.

  Tonight, all the stars stood still.

  THE EASTERN SUCCESSION

  In the year 480 Ranganar, 2022 of the old count, there was a dynastic failure in the Federation of Timur Kering. Our prince died, and there was no heir male to take his place. A prince plays an important role in traditional Peninsulan government. He is the ceremonial head of state, the symbol of his family’s mandate to rule: without a prince, there is no princedom. Therefore a new royal family must be chosen—one approved by the whole nation, not just the Federation of Timur. And so the remaining powers of the Peninsula gathered on Temple Mountain, “between five princedoms,” under the eyes of our brutal caretakers the Koperasi, to debate the Eastern succession.

  There were three candidates. The ancient Bangau clan should have taken precedence, except that the only prince they could offer was an infant. This implied a Koperasi regency which would face dangerous popular resistance. There was an elder Bangau. But his mother had changed her House and become a commoner, to escape the restrictions placed on dissenters of rank. He could only be offered as the candidate of her new family. The young man, Ida Bagus Sadia, was reported to be beautiful, intelligent and good. It made no difference. His pedigree was null and void: no orthodox Peninsulan would vote for him. The Siamangs, who offered the third candidate, had never been involved in unrest. Nor were they burdened by ages of tradition. They were supposed to have connections with contraband trading: but this did not make them unacceptable to the Koperasi, or to the people. The man, Gusti Ketut Siamang, was strong and healthy and had fathered children (an important point). He was the obvious choice, not only for the people of Timur, but for anyone interested in change and progress.

  My family allowed me to go to the debate as an observer. The result was almost certain, but not quite. Even with the Koperasi looking on, various feuds and loyalties would be simmering under the surface. Jagdana, the elegant Western princedom, might favour Ida Bagus Sadia, the good young man—for Sadia’s mother was a dissenter, and ]agdana sympathised (discreetly) with the lost cause of independence. The Gamarthans of the north, fierce and narrow traditionalists, might support the Bangau infant, if only to oppose Jagdana. Or perhaps with a view to controlling the regency themselves, an idea that made me shudder. The third vote was Timur’s, and safe. The fourth belonged to the Aneh, called “Polowijo” in the Western princedoms. The Peninsula‘s cripples, freaks of nature, the Aneh were powerless: but their “vote” was a matter of tradition. They usually followed Jagdana. The fifth vote had once belonged to the Garuda family, our native sovereigns over all the Peninsula. But the Garudas had been wiped out in the Last Rebellion. It could now be counted as belonging to the half-rebel criminal gangs of the hills. The bandits could make large areas of Timur ungovernable if they were not satisfied, and no one wants to be ungovernable. It is what the Garudas were.

  I arrived at Canditinggi, the town on Temple Pass, with all these complications at my fingertips, on an afternoon of black, streaming rain. Desperate, clinging, cantilevered streets lurched up and down all around me (after effects of the “night express” transport). There was a smell of wet cabbage. The view, which should have been staggering, was entirely obliterated by cloud: Timur below me, Jagdana at my back, and about a hundred batu south the towering cones of BuAwan, where the Aneh live. The roadway was cobble and mud, packed with sedan chairs and animals. The public buildings showed raw scars where the wings of the Garuda eagle had been defaced, but not removed, as if the Rebellion had happened yesterday. The crowd swept around me: giggling servants, Koperasi patrollers, hangers-on, criminals, beggars, spies. Three veiled figures slipped down from their chairs, and vanished into a closed courtyard. Everyone dutifully looked the other way, except for me and the Koperasi. The women who run our native governments are intensely secretive. I stared at the broken wings of Garuda, defiant badges of mourning: I knew I had made a mistake.

  I was right! They wouldn’t let me in. My letters of introduction were useless. I, a man, could not possibly enter any of the Dapur courts while the debate was in session. Not even behind a screen like an unwanted piece of furniture? No. “It wouldn’t mean anything to you,” they told me. “The Dapur is the hearth. There is no place for a man there.” And (worse!), the eternal perhaps. “Perhaps later…Perhaps…” Am I an animal? When I was fourteen the last of my sister-mothers died. I fled our conservative neighbours, not to mention our own servants, and flung myself on the mercy of distant connections in Timur. They were kind to me. They even sent me to college in Sepaa, the Koperasi city. But my education was no use to me here, in the heart of the old traditional Peninsula. Simpering, doe-eyed servant boys tripped after the Dapur ladies. If I were like them I could go in. In my frustration, I contemplated castrating myself on the spot.

  It was night before I gave up and started hunting for a place to stay. In the morning the inn I had moved into turned out to be a disreputable collection of palm thatch shacks, sharing an unpaved compound with a brothel, in the tail of the town where it trailed to steep bedraggled fields. I didn’t like the look of the other guests at all. But when I tried to move out, everywhere was “phuuul”. The two forms of Inggris are actually two different languages. Perversely, the debate town was using “High Inggris,” the speech of our Rulers. When I spoke in our own tongue, the Canditinggi women refused to understand my accent. They were not impressed by money: “Koperasi paper. What good that?” Women’s eyes followed me everywhere with implacable suspicion: staring at my city clothes, the shoes on my feet. A respectable man, they told me, does not travel alone. I was stuck. And, as I had I suspected, I was lodging in a den of thieves.

  It was their country, too; why should they not be interested in the debate? Who could keep them away? Having no papers at all, “permisi travel” didn’t worry them. The brigands had come from all over Timur: swaggering at night in the back alleys, loafing about by day in low dives like mine. The patrols that roared around the town day and night, slaughtering chickens and fouling the streets with the alien stink of hydrocarbon, took no notice. Koperasi law and order has no real quarrel with organised crime. After dark, my inn was like a pasar malam, a night market: young men preening themselves and posing under the sizzling white lamps; whispered dealing in corners. Short-lived, bold-eyed, wild-haired—in other times they would all have been boys and safe at home. But we seem to be returning to a state of nature, where unneeded males are simply driven away, to strut and fight and die like falling flowers in the wilderness.

  But these bravos were not entirely abandoned. They had a guardian. I met her on my second night in the town: a lean young woman with a cadaverous dark face, dressed like the bandits in coarse silk breeches and a vivid embroidered jacket. It was raining hard. About ten of them were sprawled around the empty hearth in the common room, drinking beer under the notice that said no alcohol could be served to Peninsulans (she wasn’t drinking, of course). Someone had been very wicked, I gathered. The dark woman was the bandits’ conscience, trying to persuade them to defy the villain. But she didn’t nag. She recognised that even fierce ogres can sometimes feel small and helpless.

  ” As for me, I don’t have any support at the moment. But when I do, I plan to withdraw it immediately.”

 
; They laughed in relief. “Me too, me too. “

  ” As soon as ever—”

  ” I’m just going to walk right up to him—”

  Watching this, and wondering about the woman, I didn’t notice I had company. Suddenly there was a grubby, red and gold sash in front of my face, with the ornate hilt of a knife sticking out of it.

  “D’you like it?”

  If I stood up we would be practically mouth to mouth. He had come upon me soft-footed as a cat. I was horrified. I knew from experience nothing I could say would be right. These things ignite in a moment: I’d be in a knife fight, or I’d be raped—

  “I said, d’you like my knife? What’s the matter boy? Does pretty little bottom think he’s too pretty to talk to me?”

  I flushed crimson, ridiculously. “I am not a boy.”

  The demon grinned broadly, eyed my lap, stroked his knife hilt. “Not a boy, eh?”

  “Leave him alone Tjakil. He’s a stranger, he doesn’t mean to offend.”

  The dark young woman smiled, almost indifferently. My suitor, after a moment’s hesitation, shrugged his shoulders and stalked away.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you madam. It was good of you.”

  “It was nothing. It is just that I know their names. Names are magic, you know….I suppose your people are staying in town?”

  I had spoken in our language: she followed. I was surprised to hear a cultivated voice, without a trace of dialect.

  “No. I’m here by myself. I am an observer.”

  “Oh. ” She frowned, but kept the rest back. I was grateful that she didn’t say I ought not to be alone.

  “My name is Endang. I am from Timur.”