Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (619 page)

“You miss my hair?” His voice tickled the inside of my thighs.

“I miss all of you.” I undid his shirt to feel my face against the wiry hairs on his chest. His skin shivered and puckered under my lips.

He lifted my face toward his. “Look at me, Renee.” I felt the words more than heard them, his chest vibrating mine, notes so low as to resonate backbone and heart. “Look at me.”

A deep ache I didn’t understand, something from his and Renee’s past threatened to override my passion before I felt it. I opened my eyes slowly, not wanting to blur this moment with tears, Renee’s tears or twice ten thousand years of…

“We don’t have time for…” He trailed off.

“I am looking at you.” A weathered, moody face with high cheekbones, full lips and prominent chin. For an instant Renee’s memories came so vividly to me.

The smell of jasmine incense filled a cramped apartment. An elevated train smashed through the night just beyond the window, shaking the floorboards under our naked bodies. Before the disaster in Juba…I ran my fingers through thick black hair that fell below his shoulders. Sharp brown eyes smiled at me from under bushy brows raised in question.

“Is this what you like? Tell me. I want to feel you happy.” And Renee could say nothing to him. Too shy, too uncertain for words.

“You can still see all that?” he said, holding back tears.

I’d been talking again, without knowing what I was saying. “Of course.”

“Is this what you want?” His words moved through my skin and opened me up, like a voice from deep time singing my code. I was flooded with ancient memories.

I had a horse’s head, feet of a jaguar, leaves sprouted from my fingers, wings broke across my back, my mouth was in bloom, the kick of a machine gun bruised my ribs, I swallowed a harpoon, and sang with elephants on the stage of a great hall.

“I want your best self,” I said and fell into him.

Delicious images exploded across my body, yet I wasn’t overwhelmed. He didn’t mean to set me off. I was not who he expected at all, not his Renee. I was Axala, a griot from the stars, come for the story of life, now in the body of a dead terrorist. And who was he? What was his story? A new beard covered his coppery skin like morning frost. My fingers slid through the hard little hairs up to the lines that broke apart the edges of his eyes. I didn’t care if this moment was a lie.

“Are you sure?” he murmured. “You’re hurt.” His fingers were tentative, careful. “There’s no time . . .”

“We’ll steal the time. This is what I want.”

His lips nudged mine open. My body knew exactly what to do.

* * * *

We snatched long moments out of nowhere and then…

“I’m not your Renee.” He was still inside me when I said this. I felt his shock and embraced it. “I only remember bits and pieces of your Renee.”

I flashed on Renee and her man, his long hair pulled tight against the skull, his face smooth. They were flattened against a rough wall, waiting for a blast in the village beyond, then they ran along a broken walkway.

“Blowing up shit…the only thing I ever got a chance to get good at,” Renee shouted.

“Not the only thing,” he argued.

“And I was gonna do something noble…” Renee muttered as they dropped into dung and mud for a second explosion. She closed her eyes on a stream of blood.

“Are you having one of your episodes?” He tried to pull away from me. I was stronger than he expected. “We don’t have time for you to snap out.”

What did he mean? He had offered me his best self. I wanted him to know my story. Body historians didn’t usually reveal themselves or get involved, certainly not with pure natives. Just grab the dead miracles and run. Well, not any more.

“My name is Axala.” I released him. “I’m from…” I didn’t remember my specific griot life, before Earth. Damn serial amnesia. “Light-years from here…”

“Stop it!”

We stuck together where I had started bleeding again. I winced as he moved out of my body and rolled against a tree root arching up at the entranceway.

“You can’t snap on me, not now, not on this job.” He jerked his sweaty clothes back on his body. Clots of dirt clung to the hairs on his chest. “We could retire after this job.”

“I’d like that.” I wanted to wipe my blood off his stomach, do something, anything, instead of waiting for him to curse me out for playing games, going insane, fucking with him.

“You’d consider retiring, just living our lives, putting the shit behind us?” He sounded desperate.

“Look, I don’t know how to be straight with you.” I pulled on clothes. Cool, slimy bugs crawled across my ribs. “Some of Renee is still in me. She loves you.” Stalling for time, I brushed away the bugs. They made Renee’s skin crawl. “Despite…whatever…has happened between you.”

“What hasn’t happened? I don’t know how much more I can take.” He pressed himself further into the darkness of the tree, but I could still see his eyes, like the husky’s eyes watching wounds on my neck heal. A freak show glare, foam at the corners of his mouth. I turned away, before he started howling.

“What I’m saying is…I know I can handle the memories. Everything I’ve been.”

He shook his head. “But I can’t handle all that.”

“What do you mean?” I dug my fingers into the dirt. The head of a whale breaching on a rocky beach, the hands of a samurai clutching a sword, the feet of a Maasai cow herd running from demons, the oxygen breath of an orange tree . . .I was lost.

“We don’t have time for this.” His voice found me. “Cut it!”

I moved close to him, felt his breath on my cheeks, smelled his sweat. We had the same smell now. That brought me back for a moment. “What’s your name, tell me your name,” I pleaded, wiping my blood off his stomach.

A stream of gibberish, a hundred tangled languages, gestures from around the world, from sequoias, bald eagles, deep-sea divers, hostages, and nuns, all broke out of me and I was nobody, flailing inside a tree. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me like an hysterical woman who could be jerked back to reality.

“We have a job to do, remember?”

I found Renee and held on. Twice ten thousand years of history wouldn’t swallow me. “I didn’t screw myself.” He stopped shaking me. Even in my anger, I could taste his best self. “I want to hear your name.”

“All the fucked up things that happened to you, aren’t my fault, Renee.”

“I know that.”

“For years, you don’t even let me touch you.” His grip on my shoulder softened. “And now in the middle of a job…you come on so strong. . . ”

I dragged him down in the dirt. It smelled of us, of lovemaking. “I just want to know your name, hear you say it.”

“I lost my name after Juba…somewhere in the goddamned desert.” He rubbed his hands against sweaty pants. “We don’t have names, causes, just a price tag. We’re gig sluts now. Not freedom fighters like in Juba, just terrorists for hire.”

“Gig sluts?” I got a face full of sticky spider web and clawed it away. “Are you saying we’re not committed to anything?”

“For a long time now.” He spit web from his lips also. “From the Juba fiasco on, I did every crazy revenge thing you wanted.”

“You don’t think we’re going to make it today, do you?” Inside the tree was getting claustrophobic.

“What difference if we do?” He stood up. “It just goes on and on . . .”

“Yes, yes, but it doesn’t have to.” I crawled over to my knapsack, to the griot Mission, a praise song to life. “You may be pointless. I am not.”

“Oh yeah? You’re fine now?”

“On top of the world.” I couldn’t tell who was talking anymore. Axala, Renee, an angry tree…

“When you lost yourself before . . .” He picked up his bag. “The amnesia thing after Juba, after they…after they . . .” He couldn’t say what
they
had done to me in Juba.

“It’s not your fault,” I murmured, sucking mucous down my throat and scratching my nose. “Let’s get out of this hole. Do the job. I can’t breathe.”

He blocked my way. “In Juba when they jumped you, I hid in the back of the plant, where they’d stashed the stolen weapons. Listening. I didn’t do anything!”

“What could you do?”

“They had guns, six of them. But I didn’t even…”

I tried to wriggle past him. “So?”

“Don’t interrupt me, let me say this!”

My mouth clamped shut.

“You never let me say this.” He clutched at several stringy vines.

“Say it.” I set my face hard to listen to what Renee didn’t want to hear from him.

He was spread-eagled against the vine mass, silhouetted by pink twilight. “They had you. I was afraid. I should have done…anything. But I didn’t want them on me too. I thought, please god, don’t let her tell them I’m here, don’t let them find me. You were screaming and screaming, but you told them nothing, then they gagged you, and I prayed, don’t let them hurt me. Praying not for you, still just about me.”

The scars on my breasts and thighs throbbed with old pain, but I couldn’t see Juba, the story he told. Renee was suddenly desperate. She wanted to know. I balled up my fist and pounded his chest. “Tell me what I forgot.”

“I can’t,” he whispered, fighting tears.

“You’re all the memory I’ve got.”

“I don’t know what they did.” He hung in the web of vines.

“Tell me what you know or I swear to god, I’ll blow us up now.” I pointed my pistol at the explosives in the knapsack. Several vines snapped from his weight and he staggered toward me. I pointed the pistol at him. For a moment Renee wanted to shoot him down like a dog, but I didn’t. “Tell me.”

“After they worked you over I remember you screaming my name…like a prayer, but you never betrayed me.” He stared at the gun until I finally lowered it. “For a time you forgot everything, but if somebody touched you, it was the rape happening again.” He looked far away though I was close enough to smell his fear. “Doctors said you might never remember. It was a miracle you got out alive.”

“You call that a miracle?” My voice was hollow. I felt like a spirit unhinged, floating above this body.

“Your mind came back without those memories, but you couldn’t stand to be touched—until now.” He shivered. “I would have told them anything, but you . . .”

He waited for me to say something. He pleaded with his eyes, with all the tiny muscles of his face for contempt, forgiveness, something. I teetered at the edge of chaos, vertigo claiming my senses. “I gotta get out of this hole, now.” I pushed through him and the vines. The air outside was a welcome relief. I drew myself back into Renee’s flesh. The sun had disappeared behind distant hills. Birds sang love suites and battle sonatas. I took out a Soya Power Bar and chewed at it furiously.

After a few moments he emerged from the tree, mumbling something about the Perez woman and the damn Mission. I forced myself to listen. “Blowing up a bunch of trees. She could’ve done this bizarre shit herself.”

Shop talk. I could do that too. “Perez is a biologist or something. These trees are old souls, a couple thousand years even. Maybe Perez didn’t have the heart to blast millennia of living into nothing.”

He stared at me. “You sounded like her just now. That was exactly her little speech, when she hired us.”

I shrugged. “Good memory.”

“You weren’t there.”

“You told me.”

“Right. But you sounded JUST LIKE HER.”

“Your mind is playing tricks on you. How could I sound just like Perez?” Unless I’d been her, but I couldn’t share that suspicion with him.

“Of course.” Methodically, he pulled explosives out of my pack, fussed over detonators, and every hundred feet buried a bundle in the roots of a giant tree. He didn’t ask for my assistance and I didn’t offer. So much history behind and between people, one moment was always a nasty echo of another time, most of who you were already scripted. That was Renee. Axala was outside of history, dropping in for samples, but not really taking part. Not committing to the lives she became. More of a gig slut than Renee could ever be. And sick to death of it.

“Are you setting us up?” He looked up from the last detonator, hand on his pistol, eyes frantic. “You and Perez, setting me up? Some kind of final revenge?”

“What are you talking about?”

He stared at me, fighting with something inside himself. I touched his hand.

“Sorry. You’d lay down your life for me, I know that. I’m just being paranoid.” He brushed his lips across my damp palm and headed for the dense new growth beyond the trees. “You got the map to ‘the final shore’?”

“Like I told you.” I started after him, but stumbled over roots and fell back against a tree. The impact knocked the wind out of me, slapped my brain against the skull, and I lay a moment plastered against smooth bark, seeing stars.

“What’s the matter? Come on!”

I couldn’t speak or move. The tree wouldn’t let me go. It snagged me in a magnetic field, lined up my electrons, and started generating current. Energy rushed from my toes out through the fuzzy ends of my hair, like a lightning bolt sparking into the ground. The tree was a body historian, this rain forest, a jungle of galactic griots, roots intertwining underground, branches interwoven above, and their fields all lined up. Perez had gathered all the griots in the forest! I was in the home grove, the bosom of family, connected to deep time, praise singing life. All of our griot experiences, a polyphony of memories rushed through me. Together the trees and I made meaning and broadcast twice ten thousand years, the incredible story of life on Earth out to the stars. Imbedded in this polyrhythmic history, I remembered everything, the story I’d become. Axala of Earth.

Renee’s man watched my hair catch fire and my hands and feet turn white-hot. I saw myself in his eyes. I heard his voice rumble out a warning, a prayer, I didn’t know which. His body was a blur of impulses—his legs tearing away from me, his hands reaching for mine. I wanted to share the spectacle of Earth with him, despite the danger, but I couldn’t move the inches it would take to touch him. I was caught in deep time, with all the ancestors walking through my body, making sense of the present moment from so many gone by. I felt the mother ship leave the shores of our birth world to wander through star systems and collect the genealogy of life in the galaxy. We body historians were a Diaspora of ghosts living only in borrowed bodies, collecting the wisdom of others, slaves to their appetites, lost to ourselves. After twice ten thousand years on this watery outpost, we were so full of life, the past broke out all over us. Earth had made us aliens to our former selves. We had no desire to be spirits in perpetual exile, we longed to make Earth our story.