The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (22 page)

I stare at the bar, and the pus-colored scorpion’s returned. This time, I don’t bother to make it go away. I do wonder if dead scorpions can still kill a guy.
Was you ever bit by a dead bee?

All those people in the bar have begun applauding, and Eli takes a bow and sets his mike back into its stand.

“What you saw,” Joey sneers, “I got as much right to know as you. We were both slopping about in that stiff’s innards, and if something was wrong with him, I deserve to know. You got no place keepin’ it from me.”

“I didn’t see anything,” I tell him, wishing it were the truth. “Now, are you going to shoot me or put away the roscoe and make nice?”

“Making you nervous?” asks Joey,

“Not really, but the potential for injury is pissing me off righteously.”

I reach the top that’s not a top, and now I’m almost certain it’s actually some sort of return capsule from a space probe. One side is scorched black, so I suppose that must be the heat shield. I stand three or four feet back, and I never, in any version of the dream, have touched the thing. It’s maybe five feet in diameter, maybe a little less. I’m wondering how long its been out here, and where it might have traveled before hurtling back to earth, and why no retrieval team’s come along to fetch it. I wonder if it’s even a NASA probe, or maybe, instead, a chunk of foreign hardware that strayed from its target area. Either way, no one leaves shit like this laying around in the goddamn desert. I know
that
much.

“Yeah, you know it all,” Joey says, and jabs me a little harder with the muzzle of his gun. “You must be the original Doctor Einstein, and me, I’m just some schmuck can’t be trusted with the time of day.”

Catch a falling star an’ put it in your pocket…

And on the rooftop, Eli tells me, “The star at the centaur’s knee is Alpha Sagittarii, or Rukbat, which means ‘knee’ in Arabic. Rukbat is a blue class B star, one hundred and eighteen light years away. It’s twice as hot as the sun and forty times brighter.”

“You been holding out on me,
chica
. Here I thought you were nothing but good looks and grace, and then you get all Wikipedia on me.”

Eli laughs, and the crowded, noisy bar on Locust Street dissolves like fog, and the desert fades to half a memory. Joey the Kike and his pea-shooter, the dead scorpion and the bottle of Wild Turkey, every bit of it merely the echo of an echo now. I’m standing at the doorway of our bathroom, the tiny bathroom in mine and Eli’s place in Chinatown. Regardless which rendition of the dream we’re talking about, sooner or later they
all
end here. I’m standing in the open door of the bathroom, and Eli’s in the old claw-foot tub. The air is thick with steam and condensation drips in crystal beads from the mirror on the medicine cabinet. Even the floor, that mosaic of white hexagonal tiles, is slick. I’m barefoot, and the ceramic feels slick beneath my feet. I swear and ask Eli if he thinks he got the water hot enough, and he asks me about the briefcase I delivered to the Czech. It doesn’t even occur to me to ask how the hell he knows about the delivery.

“What about we don’t talk shop just this once,” I say, as though it’s something we make a habit of doing. “And how about we most especially don’t linger on the subject of the fucking Czech?”

“Hey,
you
brought it up, lover, not me,” Joey says, returning the soap to the scallop-shaped soap dish. His hand leaves behind a smear of silver on the sudsy bar. I stare at it, trying hard to recall something important that’s teetering right there on the tip end of my tongue.

For love may come an’ tap you on the shoulder, some starless night…

“Make yourself useful and hand me a towel,” he says. “Long as you’re standing there, I mean.”

I reach into the linen closet for a bath towel, and when I turn back to pass it to Eli, he’s standing, the water lapping about his lower calves. Only it’s not water anymore. It’s something that looks like mercury, and it flows quickly up his legs, his hips, his ass, and drips like cum from the end of his dick. Eli either isn’t aware of what’s going on, or he doesn’t care. I hand him the towel as the silver reaches his smooth, hairless chest and begins to makes its way down both his arms.

“Anyway,” he says, “we can talk about it or we can not talk about it. Either way’s fine by me. So long as you don’t start fooling yourself into thinking
your
hands are clean. I don’t want to hear about how you were only following orders, you know?”

It’s easy to forget them without tryin’, with just a pocketful of starlight.

My ears haven’t popped, and there’s been no dizziness, but, all the same, the bathroom is redolent with those caustic triplets, ammonia and ozone, and, more subtly, sugar sizzling away to a black carbon scum. The silver has reached Eli’s throat, and rushes up over his chin, finding its way into his mouth and nostrils. A moment more, and he stands staring back at me with eyes like polished ball bearings.

“You and your gangster buddies, you get it in your heads you’re only blameless errand boys,” Eli says, and his voice has become smooth and shiny as what the silver has made of his flesh. “You think ignorance is some kind of virtue, and none of the evil shit you do for your taskmasters is ever coming back to haunt you.”

I don’t argue with him, no matter whether Eli (or the sterling apparition standing where Eli stood a few moments before) is right or wrong or someplace in between. I could disagree, sure, but I don’t. I’m reasonably fucking confident it no longer makes any difference. The towel falls to the floor, fluttering like a drogue parachute in a desert gale, and Eli steps out of the tub, spreading silver in his wake.

1.

Alieka Ferenczi has been walking for seven days, ever since the roller she’d bought back in Annapolis salted and sputtered its final sorrowful sput. She’d known the mole’s conversion coils were half a step from fried when she bought it off a scrapyard at the edge of the city by the sea. But she was almost at her last wad now, having already paid so much to the datswap jig for cords that would lead her across the Lunae to the walls of the Yellow House – or
might
get her there,
if he’d been that solo honest jig in ever one thou. The sand and dust swirls around her, various-sized dervishes to testify to how BrantCorp and AOWT’s had gone so toto hit and miss on Barsoom. Sure, there were the shallow seas stretching from Chryse north to the pole, and the southern sea, and, here and there, patches of scrubland – cactus, josh trees, verde and ironwood, yukka, shitty little paradisio’s for snakes and lizards and the occasional rodent, but not much else. Alieka had always heard about how ace things had gone at far off Lake Hellas, with its drip-dense rainforgets and those silver cities rising from the shore like spirals bound for Heaven – Ausonia, New Moscow, Cañas, Tugaske, Kyoto Neo – three quarters of the planet’s population crushed into the lake’s eastern shore, and no newcomers welcome. Fuck all to the rest assward, right? Damn so, damn so.

These were among Alieka Ferenczi’s bitter, weary thoughts as she dragged herself across wastes under the sky so bright with stars. Now and again, she’d stop and pick out the dot that was Earth. All sorta tales what went on homeworld, and they were most ghost tales for children and workers, House all happy and content out on the ring, sure. Talk about war and famine and tox oceans. Why, we’re better off than them leftbacks, them shite-rat also-rans, ain’t we just? Shi and she dy jarroo, lay your glimmers down if we’re wrong on that. These were among the jumble of her thoughts while the winds roaring down from the western highlands beat and whipped at her traveler’s fraying swaddle. She kept a hand on her leather cap lesten it sail off her scalp, and she pulled the layers of insul tighter about herself. She only walked at night, so here were the wastes at their coldest, but better than the sun. Better be gnawed at by Old Man Aeolusk than have her brains nuked by Old Lady Sol, eh?

There was a light from the stars and light from Phobos rising in the west. She often ruminated on Phobos. Her da, whom she’d never met, had died in the phyllo mines up there. Lock breach, said her ma, and the entire shaft had gone spitter and kaputsky, said her ma. Not a dram of atmo, not nuff grav to house a cow tin from floating off. “He’s up there,” had said her ma. “You recall that, Alieka, when you gaze at the west moon. Still up there, goin’ round, round Barso. And watchin’ out for you.”

Never did believe that, and she tried not to ponder at his frozen corpse orbiting the planet for all those centuries to come.

Alieka managed to climb up one side of a dune, and managed not to take a tumble coming down the windward slope, so she decided that worthed her a sit at the base, just enough time for a stingy sip from her jug. Only a stingy, though, because out here on the Lunae, not even hardly enough humidity for a dew spread. Not dry as dry can get, but damno dry, betcha. Even with the purdah shielding her nose and mouth, her throat and lungs felt crisp as crack, and her lips bloody. Her sinuses ached.

May be I won’t make it to the Yellow House
, she thought.
Could be best, that turn, eh?
And Alieka thought how good it would feel to lie down on the sand and never get up again. Let blazing Nair’s eye find her without the scant shade of the sheltie folded up in her knap, let the sand bury her, and let the scorpions and asps have their way. Tired as this, it was easy to forget why she’d ever started this fool’s parade across the rusty wastes where not even the sappers and sourdoughs dared to tread.

“Muirgheal,” she whispered. “Bring back Muirgheal from the Maafa. That’s why, you withered cunny. You house your eyes and your mind on her. Ain’t no sleep surrender, or you’re something worse than the worst coward.”

Not that anyone had ever come back once snatched by the Maafa. The slaver caravans tripped back and forth across the plains, and no one much argued when they set their sights on your daughter or son. Oh, there were a few had tried, put up barricades and taken up arms and all that happy crap. Right. But the Maafa were keen to any wait out, and sooner or later took their wares. You say any different, there were enough burnt settles to testify to having gone to the trouble, having been that much the imbecile. But, the long and short, Maafa bitch snatched up Muirgheal from her bed, and no matter what anyone else heard going on, ’cause no one right says no, leave her be, sidewinder eeshobee, and be on about. They took her, and she was ghosted, like never had she been. Excepting for Alieka, who’d had it stone for that pretty-pretty since they were in study together in low sector. But Alieka never had found the requisite, and so sure by now Muirgheal didn’t even spare a reminisce her way. And yet, and yet, and still, here was daft Alieka Ferenczi pilgrim on the waste and marching, what?, right up to the Yellow’s gates and saying “Let me in, and turn her back.” Or what? Have you even thought that far ahead?

The sappers have a phrase for what happens to the human faculties out on the woestenij, and that phrase is
gone vergessenen cranio
. Or just gone, gone, gone. Same on either, and what it means is that the wanderer loses track of her or his intent, and, bereft of purpose, might turn feral or suicide on the red sands, the Kyzyl-Kum, or, luck shines down, poor soul might find its way home again or to some other home of men. But mad as Easter in Rishabha, Ramadan at Xmas. Oh, she dy jarroo, betcha flat. 

Alieka bows her head, driving back the dust between her ears to uncover the memories of the one kilo canister tucked in her knap, the explosives, cush and hyped HNB, which took a hefty chunk of her savings
before
the meet with the datswap.
Here to there, old girl
, and if
here
was the bomb, then
there
was making a hole in the House big enough confusion might aft ensue she’d have time to find Muirgheal and beat a hasty get-shy before the Maafa fucks knew what had swatted them. “You don’t forget that again,” she whispered to the desert night, and might be the wind blowing down from the Tharsis listened and took note. But she doubted it. Alieka promised herself another five minutes rest, and then she go on about her southerly way. Just another four and one, ja, ja, shì. Safe than sore, though, so she pulls the prox rod from her knap, unfolds it, and sticks it into the sand. When she switches it on, it hums like bees. 

2.

Here we are now, in the
then
of
now
, past and present and future always leapfrogging, and all cohabitating in the same instance, anyhow. But on this day, four solis before that night at the foot of that tall, tall dune out on the freezing plateau of the Lunae Palus,
this
day, Alieka Ferenczi is at the shop, just like any other Jovis afternoon. She’s goggles down, grinding valves smooth enough the hydro farms won’t put the boot to her boss, which means he won’t put the boot to her. Five hundred ingots down, five hundred more to go before the whistle blows go home, because the boss sure ain’t gonna spring for over. The shop noise is a scream to put the season of storms to shame, those perihelion sirens screeching down alleyways and street, and howling over rooftops. But these are not the thoughts Alieka Ferenczi is thinking on that four days ago now, if only because the earphones dampen the racket to the dullest whine of its true self. 

She’s thinking, instead, of the tix she’s lucked into for the evening’s match, right down front, her and her ma will be able to hear the whack, whack of the sticks against the leather balls. But then the siren sounds, the repeating triple bleats to warn all low sector of a Maafa sighting within the borders of Annapolis. Not that business as usual stops. She doesn’t shut off the bonnet grind. The lane helmer doesn’t pop round to end the shift and call it a day and send them safely home, send them to be sure family and friends are accounted, and, besides, all Alieka has is her ma and an elderly hound, and neither is on the Maafa’s shopping list. They go for the young and the pretties. So, let the others worry, and let the militia do it’s job while she does hers.

And it’s only later, over their quick dinner before the match, that ma tells her how the slavers grabbed five before the law drove them away, and one of those, wouldn’t you know, says she, was an old schoolmate of yours, Alieka, that sweet girl Muirgheal who always made such fine grades and wore sky-blue ribbons in her silver-grey hair. Alieka, though she’d not thought on Muirgheal Hemingtrust for years, hardly noticed the game, the goals, her ma so jubilant when home sector won, the cries of the fans, the press of the crowd, the smell of hot crisps and bags of fresh roasted chapulines. She only had room in her head for Muirgheal, whom she’d once loved, first crush and never a love thereaft. Too plain, too gruff to win a wife, and no eye for men. Muirgheal hauled away by the Maafa, chained in one of their bamboo wagons and rattling across the sands to her torture and eventual death behind the basalt walls of the Yellow House.

That night she dreamt of Muirgheal, and of all the rumored tribulations and harrows doled within those halls, how the Maafa butchers saw about their work such as no one went quickly. And before sun up she wrote a letter to her ma, packed her knap, and set about town gathering that which she imagined she would need, visiting ill-rep kiosks up west sector, spending for the tram because time was of the essence. The Maafa moved fast on gyped-up, seven-tread rollers, and might easy be fifty kilos in any direction by the now of then. It was mid-morning before she left Southgate, and too soon left the pave for southeast and the Lunae and the reputed location of the Yellow House. She knew she was pressing the mini past its castaway limits. But time was of the essence. Time was slipping by sure as the dust devils and the few birds wheeling overhead.

What you after, Alieka? Something you ain’t ever had, something wants no part of you? Half forgot dream of a dream of a dream? Kiddish wishbegones? What you think you’re gonna find, you find anything at all?

There was supposed to be a well at Pompeii, but the settlement had vapped since last she’d heard. The plains herders had moved on, as herders do. A dry, dry set of months, worse than usual, and the crater was cracker dry. The stones laid round the rim of the well had fallen over in the wind, and the bore had filled with dust in however many days since. She’d have to watch the level of her jug, and hope for better in the Maja. She’d have to keep the thirst in the back of her mind, lest it lead her to despair or lead to try for home again.

What you after, dirty factory prole? Cognations that slice of quim gonna have anything but plain and simple gratitude even should you get yourself in and get herself out, which you ain’t gonna do, anyway? You think eve a half that you’ve gone soft long ago, eh? She dy jarroo, betcha nothing and get nothing back.

“I don’t know,” she said aloud, jostling along, astride the roller. She said these self-assurances to herself, but aloud, as the roller topping dunes and rushing down the other side, rattling kidneys as the vehicle bounced and lurched when rocky terrain was come upon. She only thought the bad thoughts, so she had to speak the good ones, even if her voice was lost in clack, clatter, roar of the conversion coils and the last-legger engine.

You after a few wadda for hauling this girl home again, home again, jiggity quick? Maybe a hero’s tumble you get lucky and make it back? And you won’t, ’cause you and luck ain’t no kinda intimates. You, Alieka Ferenczi, gonna get no better off them Maafa fucks but maybe a slug in the gut, a cattle bolt to the skull, ’cause how they ain’t about to waste the tribulations on a slag like you.

“Mysterious ways, his wonder to perform,” she mutters. “Ain’t that what the liturgicals say? So, I might be that mysterious way, I might, and this might be a wonder to perform, might not?”

Not even a believer, and look at you burbling holy muck.

“I believed once,” she replies, talking back at herself and thinking of the news of her da dead in a Phobos blowout. That might have been what took away her faith, but it might have been half a hundred other things. “And since that’s fact, I might well find divine again, might’n I not?”

And this now of then, this moment passed, but not passed then, is when the roller growled, and sparks came showing off the coils, and Alieka only just managed to throttle back and avoid a tump down a gully. She sat on the dead roller a long time, watching diminutive twin Diemos rising above the western horizon, one night past full, but still hardly brighter than Earth or Venus. She sat and thought on the walk, and on water, and on the canister of HNB in the roller’s side basket. It would fit easy in her knap, not much weight at all. She sat ten or fifteen minutes, thinking on all the ways a woman can find her death in the arms of Kyzyl-Kum, as the Turkics named the wastelands. And then she took what would fit into the knap, checked the straps on her boots, and started the slog towards the fabled but all too factual Yellow House of the Maafa.

3.

She thinks, distantly, through a dumb obscuring haze of thirst and muscles stripped down to copper threads, a mouth full of ferric dust and the ferric taste of blood, not even a tear left in her, so long since a decent sip of water. She thinks, distantly, of how a
sound
mind would pause to gape at all this bahà, for no matter the scratch and scrab of the worst of the wind-raw Lunae scape is not out beyond the reach of the hand of beauty. Alieka Ferenczi, who, since birth and across all her days, has never left the smothersome abbrayshio sanctuary of Annapolis. The sun is up, but she has not stopped walking.
I am at the edge,
she thinks.
Few more steps, moments, and here I go gatherin’ vergessenen cranio and never gonna strike the prize, just gonna lay me down to sleep and Mama Red will rock me off to sweet blivie. I won’t need wet in the blivie black.