I Am an Executioner (33 page)

I felt I had to say something, and there were several things that burned inside me, that she did not seem to have understood: “I liked that alien well enough. I don’t mean to talk badly about him. But I do not like that you felt you had to lie to him. Is anyone worth that kind of dishonor?”

She did not respond.

“Our profession is a dignified one. We have done it going back at least four generations. If these Earthlings don’t like it, then—as you like to say—they can go to hell. Must we live only by their model? Must we forget the old stories, give up every last remnant of our culture? Aren’t we as good as they are?” Still she said nothing; she had quieted her sobbing. To my surprise, she seemed to be listening. And finally she spoke.

“You don’t get it,” she said. “I told him the truth. I told him what we really do. And guess what? He wasn’t disturbed at all. Oh, no. It was exactly as I feared: he was
fascinated
. He wanted me to tell him every detail—if I’d been willing. He thinks we’re
freaks, Ka. He only spent time with me because he wanted to study me.”

I looked down at her, noticing then that her feelers were spotted with dirt and dried blood.

“What happened?” I reached toward her.

She pulled her feelers back, braiding them tightly, and tucked them to her side. “I just got scratched up on the cliffs.”

Then she turned away, to hide from me the distress in her face. I spoke: “I wish I could take your pain away from you, absorb it into my own body. I suppose it is no comfort for you to consider that this is often the way with young love; it is not meant to last.”

“What would you know about it?” she whispered.

“I have lived longer than you.”

She responded just as softly: “I wish I had a mother.”

My child—she has a tender way of gutting me. Slumping low in the craft, she let her gaze wander out over the recently cleared jungle, the rows and rows of hastily dug burrows. “She would know what I should do. I wish she was here, Ka. I wish that you had never killed her.”

An alien concept, “mother.” Beings are raised by only one parent, a ka, whether male or female. Nippima’s mother and I met when our families first moved to the city from the interior. We were nearly children ourselves, having just reached manifestation. Her parent and mine had dug burrows near to each other, close to where I live today, when this area was still dense with vegetation, considered the farthest outskirts. This was well with me, as I preferred to live in uncleared jungle; the idea of the city still terrified me.

The two of us would fly together collecting fiber, wood, and leaves for our families. We filled gunnysacks with aphids and weevils; we worked in concert to flush out and capture rodents.
She was a wise, imperturbable being. While I still missed my native place in the interior, she seemed curious about new things. She could understand and assimilate change with equanimity. My love and I were together the first time we saw an Earthling. The human had come near to our burrows to register our names on behalf of the Interim Authority. My reaction had been one of instantaneous panic: I flew into the air, beating my wings as loudly as I could and arching my abdomen to intimidate the alien. I was a fool. Meanwhile, my mate calmly let the female Earthling approach; she sniffed the human, appraised her with the end of one feeler, and then looked up at me with a reassuring smile.

A beautiful presence. Her parent and siblings disliked me because of my family’s profession, which they considered unclean. But their superstitious attitude only bespoke their own backwardness, for they were common laborers. But the main concern of both families was that we were too young—they did not trust us to delay consummation. This was a matter of great anxiety for my ka. She worked herself into fountains of saline every time I left the burrow. “It is nothing against the being,” my parent insisted to me. “I like her. I love you both too much. But please listen to someone with experience in life. You are young. Enjoy yourself for some more time.”

We should not have needed our parents to tell us; we were old enough to know. Yet at that age, a being believes one’s own love is unique, that it can overcome all of nature, and the normal rules don’t apply. In any case, we were held back by my own nervousness, my dull and dutiful nature. How many times, in retrospect do I see, I missed very obvious hints and flirtations. Although the same age, she was more sophisticated than I was. And so we did wait; nothing happened for more than a year. Until finally, one long summer twilight, at the end of a day spent exploring the edges of the gorge, the attraction became overwhelming. We had spent our afternoon among boughs of
red flowers, staring down at the breathtaking purple abyss. On our journey home, we found some excuse to stop in the jungle, sit and rest for a time. She leaned against me, raised her eyes to mine, slanted her face into my neck. I savored the warm felt of her face and proboscis, her feelers encompassing my head. We breathed each other’s air, felt each other’s bodies, slowly becoming more sure of ourselves, our desire gradually growing urgent, until it began to feel as if any price would be worth it. There was no discussion—as one, we rose up.

I remember the clacking partition of her legs, the give of her abdomen, as I pressed myself upon her, arching into her. The fall and surge, each unbearably pleasurable movement inside of her, and then a moment suspended: the delicate interval poised between touch and release, the pressure just so. The final scream from her mouth and mine, gut-rending, sublime agony. I withdrew, pulled my abdomen away, clacked my rear legs backward, but kept my face pressed to the flushed felt of her own, her feelers still entwined about my head. We wanted to treasure the last few tender moments, beginning to fear—but not yet understanding—what was to follow.

We burrowed into each other’s neck, rubbing our cheeks together, purring softly for a moment. But then she unwound her feelers from my head and pushed me away. Her abdomen writhed and pinched; she arched her back and tucked her lower abdomen down to the ground, groaning and wincing, her stomach rippling and undulating, twisted with pain; until finally the fertilized egg slipped out and fell softly to the dirt. We both looked at it: one egg, no more—a small, inexplicable feeling of disappointment. We scuttled toward it, her legs still unsteady from the birth. Together we smelled it, walked around it, examined it from every angle. Already, my emotions were transforming, the urgency of my desire for her draining into a peaceful emptiness; that emptiness gradually shaping itself into lack, into aching concern for the descending egg. Now the egg was
present, our egg, our child, and that feeling intensified again into an even fiercer love—I would call it a madness—for that slime-covered soft white oblong.

Soon it would be hungry. These next few minutes were crucial to its survival—we immediately knew it. My mate walked protectively in front of the egg, stepping her feelers up. I did not like to have my vision of the child blocked; it caused me panic. I tried to step around her, but she edged me away. I raised my feelers to move her, and that is when the fight began.

We each spread our wings wide and pushed against each other, our feelers entwined, grappling. We were conscious still of avoiding harm to the egg, and scuttled mutually away from it. Once we were in the clear, she flapped her shoulder into me and knocked me flat. She used her legs to stay down my feelers and legs, freeing her own feelers to wrap themselves around my neck.

She stared into my eyes then, her face the very emblem of fury and regret. I scarcely recognized her. I could not believe the suddenness of our transformation, our powerlessness in the face of it. In her expression, I saw reflected my own sad shock; it was all unfolding exactly as my parent had warned me, exactly as it had happened for every being before us to the beginning of time. We were no different. Moreover, we had no desire to be different, because it was now entirely clear that this was the only course, the best hope for the survival of our child. Still, we attempted to draw some last drop of affection from each other’s eyes; it was of little use. The instinct to fight was too strong. I could not think or care about who would be winner or loser of this fight; I wanted only to fight, to save our egg and draw to a close this drama initiated by our own impatient love. I tried to push her off me, but she was too large. I resisted with all my force. She bent open her mouth and lowered it to me, but I thrashed and squirmed, avoiding her. Then she looked up into the trees and arched herself beautifully backward, pulling
her feelers so unbearably taut around my neck that they began to tear into the felt. My proboscis stretched up, retching in vain for any particle of air. My mouth widened into a soundless scream.

As my body began to shudder, the muscles of each of my legs jerked up against her unbearable resistance. Then two of them found leverage in the dirt, just enough to tilt my body to the side. I had the angle now. I lurched my head toward her, with incredible effort raised my neck up, until my lips were flush against the side of her warm head. She pushed and thrashed in surprise, pulling her neck away, but she was too late. I had worked my incisors into the soft spot behind her ear, and released the paralyzing toxin, a single dose from our lifetime’s allotment.

I waited with desperate hope until her legs one by one slacked and buckled, and I was able to free my feelers and unwind hers from my neck. I pushed her off and sat heaving by myself, recovering my breath, probing the wound on my neck. But I gave myself only the briefest moment to recover, then turned back toward my mate. She had fallen onto her back, her legs bent into the air, her proboscis lifting and falling slightly with each breath. I sniffed her and touched her to make sure she was paralyzed. I did not look into her eyes; it would have been too painful, and at this point, a sentimental indulgence that might have weakened my resolve for what I quickly had to do. I focused on her beautiful, bright abdomen. With my incisors, I began biting away a spot of hard flesh until I reached the pulpy underbelly beneath. My jaws would never again know this strength, would never again experience this taste—or at least lack of revulsion—for the flesh of another being.

Finished, I turned urgently to our child. To my enormous relief, it was still alive, the eyes and striations already appearing in the fast-growing egg. I gently wrapped my feelers around it to lift it. Its round, just-opened maw was expanding and contracting, chewing the air, pulsing with hunger. I held her so she could
not bite me, and walked her carefully over, placing the babe in the small hole I had dug out of my love’s abdomen, where immediately it began to eat.

My mate would draw breath for another three weeks; by that time, my child would have eaten her way deep into the soft tissue, growing large and strong on that warm, living sustenance—flesh which in a dead being would have rotted by that time. Finally, it was Nippima—not I—who killed her mother. Because of what the Earthlings now tell us, I can infer that my mate would have felt unimaginable pain before breathing her last, that the toxin affected her motor centers but not her senses. But even if this is true, I know she would have been willing to bear that cost for our child, because I know that I also would have been.

As Nippima began her long first meal, I commenced digging into the jungle floor around them, creating a burrow for them to sink into. This burrow would become, after numerous enlargements and clearings, the same burrow where we now live. Nippima has been raised here from a larva.

There was no leave-taking ceremony for my mate, because finally there was very little body. We mourn for the dead who live past it, but for those who die in mating, there is no funeral. Their ending is more tragic but more noble; no ceremony could add to it. But when Nippima pupated, my mate’s family would enjoy pride of place in the celebration; their daughter’s praises would be sung. Perhaps it was small comfort to them, but all could see that in our child, my mate lived again.

For so many years, the Earthlings were preoccupied with the “brutality” of our mating—some of us began to believe it. They insisted that what we regard as natural is only a choice. That there was another way—the way the humans do it. But our way has nothing to do with brutality. It is the furthest thing from murder. I see clearly that it is for the propagation of our species. Life feeds other life: it is equal with the act of love, another component of love.

But in recent years, the Earthlings seem to have understood. They scarcely mention it anymore, or if they do, they excuse it as “instinct.” They have forsaken their prudish sanctimony—or perhaps it is only their desire to do business here. They may have noticed that, outside of mating, our incidence of violence and murder is actually somewhat lower than that of purely human societies. And as more and more Earthlings have themselves mated with locals, they have learned that although the mechanics of love may be roughly the same, the need and impulse for the drama that follows never arises, because no eggs are formed.

But I’ve always wondered if Barhoeven’s mate, Sroot, had ever had the urge, while Barhoeven was sleeping, to sink her teeth beneath the base of his skull, to chew a small home in the flat of his stomach and tuck her larva inside. Without this, did their love feel properly consummated? They raised their adopted child in an incubator on protein mush for its first month—could this be the reason the poor being must now attend the Special Learning Academy? That strange couple—did they do right by each other in the end? Did I do right by my own family? Perhaps we all take too much for granted, human and being alike, going along too thoughtlessly with what has happened before.

For two days after I found her on the via, Nippima was very subdued. She did not visit the resorts as usual, but spent much of her time sulking in her room, escaping only in the evenings for some hours of flight. On the third day, Inspector Barhoeven knocked at my portal. I touched him and invited him inside.

“What can I do for you, Barhoeven? Has there finally been progress in finding the driver of the craft that hit Eth? Would you like to reexamine her body?”