Asimov's Science Fiction 10/01/10, page 13
Young Treble and I were on the barge, standing at the side rail and looking out toward the plants as we searched for our prey, a small amphibious creature the size and general shape of a small cat. It reached its juvenile, and tastiest, stage of development only for a week or two each year. Treble whistled and clicked its name and when I asked for a translation he said “bender” would do. Like some animals on Earth, the benders changed gender as needed. At the juvenile stage, they were all females. A few months later when it was time to reproduce, the larger, more aggressive ones became inedibly male.
Below us, the three S’hudonni were swimming effortlessly a meter deep, their motion so smooth that you couldn’t see any ripples from their movement. The water was the color of strong tea.
The animal sat along the edge of one of those plants, serene, as we glided past it, no more than ten meters away. It ignored us, and then as we looked back to watch there was an upwelling from beneath the water plant and the three S’hudonni emerged simultaneously.
The bender never knew what hit it. And then hit it again. And then a third time, Twoclicks and Octave and Whistle each taking turns toying with it for a while before, in unison, they ripped it apart and Twoclicks brought me the still-beating heart so I could take a ritual bite. I’d skinned rabbits in my backwoods youth and Twoclicks had told me he admired that aspect of my childhood. Now I understood why.
There was no question about my response: Twoclicks was my sponsor and my behavior was important. I brought the heart to my lips, opened my mouth, took a small bite and then handed the heart back to Twoclicks. My nanos, I guessed, would neutralize whatever toxicity was in that bite.
Twoclicks smiled and took his own ritual bite, and then they all passed it around and did the same, including little Treble, who finished it off. Somewhere along the line the heart had stopped beating.
How did they know the prey was there, quiet and still on a pad floating atop the warm, muddy water of the slough? Sonar? A sensitive sense of smell? Some sort of infrared sense that can tell a slight heat change through a layer of mud and plant fiber? Some other sense I’m not aware of yet?
It could be any or all of those. What I know about the S’hudonni could fill a book—the very book you are reading, in fact, since that’s why Twoclicks brought me here: to Sweep back home to all those simple Earthies about the wonders of mighty S’hudon and then to gather all that material into a book and a stemfeed and a linker and, I suspect, a touring minstrel show.
But what you learn in life, if you have half a brain, teaches you as much about what you don’t know as what you do, and while what I found out about the S’hudonni could fill a thick, musty old-school book and all the new forms, too, what I didn’t find out about S’hudon could fill a library. Ten libraries. A hundred. The S’hudonni are, by turns, kind and vicious, brilliant and stupid, physically handsome in their own way even while unspeakably ugly; simple and direct and unfathomably obscure. Their world and their empire are filled with these contrasts, rife with these contradictions. That much, at least, I’d come to understand.
— Several Items of Interest About the S’hudonni —
1) There is a small orifice just at the back of the dorsal fin.
2) Placing one of the fragile, small fingers from those delicate hands just at the edge of that small, black hole brings ripples of pleasure.
3) The sleek, taut, olive-colored skin across the flanks of the S’hudonni torso changes colors rapidly and constantly when sexually stimulated, waves of bright orange and yellow coursing over that skin.
4) A one-fingered caress over the thin black line that runs the length of the torso and separates the upper body from the lower also sparks a colorful stimulation, even when it’s an Earthie—your faithful correspondent—doing the running of the finger.
5) The female S’hudonni can shiver with pleasure.
6) Assuming Twoclicks and his siblings are typical, the S’hudonni happily embrace sexual activity from any—perhaps all—of their friends and relations who join the party after a hunt is done. The patterns of these embraces struck me as mostly random.
7) Human involvement is oddly welcome. I hadn’t realized that this would happen, but then I have a notable history of not knowing when I’m getting involved with strange women.
— Storytelling —
I have spent my life telling stories. My parents were disappointed in this. My mother was in corporate law and hoped I might follow in her capable footsteps and become an attorney. My father was a pediatrician, loved and respected by the families of the hundreds of children he served. The funeral cortege on the day that we buried him in Whispering Oaks was a half-mile long and made the local television news. He had been a community activist, raising funds for his favorite charities, vocal in his backing for the politicians he liked and admired. He and his wife were both good, strong, intelligent, caring people and expected their two sons to be the same.
Of course, they had some secrets, did Mom and Dad. At the end, those mattered.
But early on, Tommy lived up to our parents’ expectations. The youngest son, he left high school with enough science credits to start in as a sophomore at Vanderbilt; then he sailed right through his undergrad biology degree before turning to research in grad school as the way to find his truths in life. His doctorate, his tenure at Rice and then at the University of Florida, his research successes: these accomplishments won him respect and love from Mom and Dad, and they told him so often.
As for me, a bachelor’s in English literature and a minor in history struck Mom and Dad as foolish and indulgent and my later choices in life confirmed their disappointment. I had been a good high school athlete, wasting my time (as Father put it) playing basketball and baseball for the high school teams and getting some ink in the local papers. I could handle the ball and shoot from outside in basketball, and I understood the game. In baseball I played the infield, second or short, and had good hands and a solid arm if not much of a bat. Ultimately this meant I got to play both sports at a good, small college in a suburb of Orlando. It occupied my time. It made me happy. Father and Tommy were busy, always, and rarely saw me play, in high school or college. Mom, bless her heart, was there often.
Ultimately injuries ended the fun and I turned to my studies, working my way to a master’s in creative writing by serving as a grad assistant, teaching comp classes, and working for the college paper. I started sending sports profiles to magazines and websites and pretty son some got published.
That turned out to be my level and, over time, I became a part-time teacher and a writer of magazine articles. I taught at a perfectly nice little liberal arts college in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I was good at that.
It’s hard to get published—trust me, the odds are against you—so I was proud of my career, such as it was. But I wasn’t published in the New Yorker or by Knopf and I wasn’t teaching in the Ivy League. I told myself that it didn’t matter. Later, when I started Sweeping and millions were paying attention, I came at last to admit something different.
— Smoking —
My father smoked cigarettes most of his life: Camels, good, strong stuff that he’d started in on while an undergraduate at Princeton. You might be surprised to hear how many smokers there are in the health field: nurses, doctors, EMTs, even some oncologists here and there. Stress, they will explain, is why they smoke. And, of course, their certain knowledge that as medical people they are immune to the diseases of more common men and women.
Father found out on his sixtieth birthday that the cough he feared was lung cancer was, indeed, small-cell, stage 3B, revised after the first surgery to stage 4. The radiation, the surgery, the chemo: they were all palliative and he knew it and we knew it.
Except for Tommy, the great research scientist, the Great Mind, the Boy Wonder who’d had research published while he was still an undergrad, the man who always Had The Answer.
Tommy kept insisting that Father should try one new trial or another, look for that wonder drug, keep up your hope, stay positive, beat this thing. Tommy, I thought, seemed increasingly angry with Dad for accepting the cancer, embracing it, allowing it entry into his life and death. As the weeks went by, Tommy’s calm urgings with Dad turned into strident hectoring about battle and struggles and never giving up.
About a year after he got the news, on the last day of his life, my father walked over to me after yet another angry outburst from Tommy and said this to me: “Son, I do wish you’d done more with that fine mind of yours, but at least you’ve always been happy.”
Then he shook his head. “Now, your brother, for all his brains and all his publications and all his money and all his awards: that’s about the unhappiest guy I know.”
Then he coughed, almost politely, and turned away from me.
We were all gathered at Tommy’s house that day to share a Sunday meal and celebrate Tommy’s being shortlisted for the International Prize for Biology. There were some delicious ironies there, since the prize honors Japan’s Emperor Hirohito and while Tommy was on the list for his work in saving the Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, the Japanese were still busy slaughtering whales. I mentioned this to Tommy. He just stared at me, shook his head, and turned away to talk to Mom, who was in the kitchen with him, both of them whispering to each other, I knew, over how disappointed dying dad was that I’d thrown my life away on scribbling when, early on, I’d held such promise. I had, after all, won the countywide science fair in sixth grade.
A couple of hours later Mom and I sat in folding chairs on Tommy’s back deck and watched a distant line of storms boil and grow with rumbles of thunder.
“How long does Dad have?” I asked her, holding tight to my beer, some unpronounceable Belgian brand that Tommy liked. Me, I stuck with Corona.
“A month or two,” she said.
“He looks better than that,” I offered. “And he seems happy enough. I thought maybe things were a little better.”
A slight shake of her head, a thin smile: “No, they’re not. He accepted it a long time ago, Peter, that’s all. The inevitability of it.” She chuckled a bit. “I caught him in the backyard a couple of days ago smoking one of those Camels. I couldn’t believe it, but he just said it didn’t really matter anymore, so what the hell.”
I didn’t say anything, but looked out toward the distant thunderheads as they lit up the evening sky with half-buried lightning, miles away.
About an hour later I walked over to Dad to say goodbye. He got up off the couch and wouldn’t let me stop him from standing. I gave him a firm handshake and his grip was just firm enough in return to be a reminder of who he’d been. I looked at him, gave him a quick, clumsy hug and told him I loved him.
“Thank you,” he said. He seemed at peace.
As I got to my car in the driveway that line of thunderstorms was almost to us, but I beat the worst of the rain home. An half-hour later, just as I was pulling into my driveway, my parents were getting into their car for their longer drive home across the Sunshine Skyway and down to Sarasota. Dad, despite his health, always insisted on driving, a control freak right to the end. It was pouring by then, the blinding rain, the road across that high bridge. Rain, cancer, control and its lack: these are the things that ended my father’s life and put my mother’s into ruin.
— Emerging —
In the mud pit, some minutes had gone by and I was beginning to worry about when and how Twoclicks might emerge. Would he playfully attack me from underneath? Would he embrace me through the muck or run a thin, fragile finger along my spine? Would he stay down there for an hour or two while I sat like meat in a melting pot? My imagination was getting the better of me, but then I’d seen what I’d seen on S’hudon.
I heard the soft slap of flat, bare feet against the cold stone path that comes from the house to the fumarole. I turned to look and it was Heather: short and stocky, waddling along on those spindly legs, that upright shark shape useful to her when she was on S’hudon. She was smart and funny and strangely wise and I loved her in all her various forms, though I knew she was utterly a lie. I’d taught myself not to worry too much about that, despite the history we shared. Once, not that long ago—looking very different in that place and at that time—she’d broken my brother’s heart. For a while after that she enjoyed telling me that she was working on breaking mine. I used to laugh about that.
She stepped carefully down into the fumarole and slipped her body halfway in. She looked at me. She smiled.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi, yourself. You all right?”
“Fine,” I said, “just fine.”
“He thought it was time for you to know.”
“Great,” I said. “Know what?”
She stared. “He hasn’t told you yet?”
“Told me what?”
“Oh, I can’t be the one to say, Peter. This is all his idea; he should break the news.”
And so I knew, from the way she said it. “It’s about Tommy,” I said.
“In a way. Mostly, in fact.”
“And?”
“And nothing, Peter. I can’t say any more. I won’t.”
On cue, a bubble, round and mottled in the mud, rose across from me, grew larger, tension straining, and then popped. It smelled like cinnamon.
And these creatures, I noted, were the masters of our universe.
The muck began to part underneath the spot where the bubble had burst and I saw Twoclicks’ shuttered eyes rising, the nictitating membranes tight over them, the eyeballs visible within. Through the membranes he was looking at me. He rose a bit higher, so that his whole head was clear of the mud. The membranes slid up, disappeared. His eyes were clear.
“There iss trouble on Earth,” he said with that annoying lisp that he used as an affectation. Somehow it’s terribly condescending. “It iss getting worse.”
“There’s always trouble on Earth,” I answered. “Even before S’hudon arrived there was always trouble on Earth. And it was always getting worse. We Earthies do not play well together.”
“Ah, but this time iss different.”
“Sure,” I said. “This time is different.”
“Hass to do with your brother,” he said, “and iss very troublesome. Blowing up distilleries and pipelines. Burning crops. Burning a lot of crops.”
“And you can’t stop that? With your screamships? The hired Canadians? All your technology and all your mercenaries and you can’t stop the locals from burning some crops?”
He shrugged. It was an acquired gesture for him, since he doesn’t really have much in the way of shoulders. “Guesss not,” he said. “No. Certainly not. Cannot. Hass been going on for months now, all over northern areas of my district. Very low tech, friend Peter. Fly below radar ssort of thing, you know?”
Then he dropped what was, for him, the real bombshell. “Is so much trouble that family sayss it threatens profits. My brother says it will spread. He blames me, and thiss is very bad.”
And having said that he smiled at me and turned to Heather. “You explain how brothers are,” he said to her. And then he slid down again, the membranes coming over the eyes, the head sliding down into the muck. A bubble, a smoothing wave: he was gone.
Heather smiled at me. “You know how much Two hates confrontation, Peter. That wasn’t easy for him, what he just did.”
“Sure,” I said, “it couldn’t have been easy. So what’s really the problem, Heather? It can’t be some crops getting burned.”
A bubble rose in the muck, popped. We both knew that Twoclicks was listening.
Heather gave me a complicated wink, which is hard to do in that body. Right, I thought, just us insiders. Wink, wink.
“The crops are a problem,” she said, “and the distilleries and breweries and the production and transportation systems, those are problems, too. It must all be handcrafted, you know, Peter. No enhancements, nothing artificial, wooden casks and barrels and the whole lot. The demand for this, this authentic Earthie alcohol in its various forms, is very high on Downtone and Blink right now and doing okay on the other planets of The Seven. Twoclicks needs to capitalize on that demand while he can, and expand the market before his siblings get in on it. He sees this as the opportunity he’s been waiting a very long time for. It’s his chance to rise in the hierarchy. His chance to please his father.”
“Of course,” I said, “he would certainly want to please the old man.”
“Don’t be snide, Peter, you know how it is.”
And I did, in fact, know how that was, trying to please the old man.
It was a typical family squabble, the struggle between Twoclicks and Whistle; a brotherly disagreement over who had the bigger dorsal fin and which one their father loved more. They were both quite willing to spill blood over this.
Heather said, “Peter, the burning of the wheat and corn has meant significant loss for Twoclicks. He has contractual obligations to Whistle that he’ll have a hard time meeting now. There are debts between the two of them. Two has to meet his obligations.”
“Or else?”
“Or else war, I’d guess, Peter. This would be an excuse for Whistle to invade Two’s territory. Here it would just be a family spat and the two brothers wouldn’t talk to each other at family gatherings....”
She let that thought hang and I picked up on it. “But on Earth?”
“A lot of people would die before it got settled, Peter.”
I knew Whistle pretty well and don’t like him. He didn’t like me, either, and I knew he thought of me as his little brother’s Earthie pet. I resented deeply the truth of that.
Heather looked sad. “Understand, Peter, that despite what Two has said to you, this isn’t any trouble that he can’t fix. There’s a screamship waiting in Earth orbit and all Twoclicks has to do is give the word.”
