G. Nordley: Final Review

Zo Kim had recently excoriated Stendt’s historical novel concerning the first Kleth-Human contact as chauvinist, overdetailed, and boring. Its length was over four dimacrobytes and Drin had not had time to experience it yet—so Zo Kim may have been right—not that that mattered anymore.

Drin touched his beak to his mat. This was tragic. And suppose that Zo Kim’s information was wrong? Or worse—false? Drin’s professional interest was triggered by the thought, and he fixed an eye on Richard Moon. Pretending to be reluctant? He discreetly slid his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, slipped a branch into his ventral pouch, and triggered the alert on his comset. Mary, Do Tor and Go Ton, and any other monitors present would feel the low frequency signal and start paying attention, if they weren’t already.

“You and your spies and your claque can drop dead!” Stendt yelled at Zo Kim, still apparently ignorant of what was happening to the Kleth.

“Right on!” a Do’utian woman added.

“Shut your beak!” another human added—Drin couldn’t tell if at Zo Kim or his detractors.

This shouldn’t happen here, in public, Drin thought—a spectacle utterly at odds with the Compact’s goal of interspecies amity. Perhaps he could delay Zo Kim’s demise—move it out of view.

“Silence!” Drin finally roared. “Zo Kim, things may not be what you think! Hold onto that thought. You are not complete, you and Bi Tan have things to do. At least let the monitors investigate this rumor—you have enemies. It may be a lie, and if you let yourself believe it, you’ll kill her, too!”

The whispers hushed, as from perches, chairs, and pads, the audience realized what was about to occur. Stendt and the others, Drin thought, would wish to call their words back the rest of their lives—for drop dead was what just what Zo Kim was about to do.

The Kleth leapt to the podium in a single bound, already visibly trembling. The need for a Kleth to die when his or her mate died, and whatever assistance he or she is given, was normally a very private matter, not a public spectacle. But there had never, ever, been anything normal about Zo Kim.

“No, you phony. I know, now, that Bi Tan is really dead,” Zo Kim declared, shaking with an almost manic intensity. “Richard Moon is incapable of credible fantasy.”

Despite everything, a scattering of dry spouts, laughs, and chatters filled the hall. Zo Kim would go out like Don Giovanni, Drin decided. Unrepentant.

But Zo Kim had a surprise even there. “I suspected for days, but hung on in the balance as my body prepared itself—it will end quickly now. Well, everyone, whatever little merit she had as a mate or an author matters not now. Bi Tan was mine and, observe everyone, my destiny is to go with her.” Zo Kim’s wings raised in an unbalanced, almost involuntary spasm. He would not fly again. “I note that while there are two-eights and one of Bi Tan novels, there are none of Zo Kim. So she will fly higher in history despite my superior wit and literary sense. What irony!”

Zo Kim’s head jerked from side to side. The Kleth’s wings went out and in, restlessly. “What irony! My body has begun to prepare itself to feed the nestlings we never had because of Bi Tan’s career. It is now far too late for me to join the debate about engineering this out of our species, so please watch the effects for a while with whatever curiosity you may possess.” Zo Kim gave a horrid little cackle, both high and low pitched. “Become edified as I become putrefied! Consider it as performance art! I will have my fame, too!”

Did self-digestion trigger self-loath-ing? It might make some evolutionary sense, Drin thought, as an abandonment of all urge to self-preservation. With such analytical thoughts, he tried to put some emotional distance between himself and the awful thing happening in front of him.

“Yes, friends, it looks painful and it is,” Zo Kim continued, his dry intellect seemingly unaffected by what was happening to his body, “but the pain is curiously comforting. Drinnil’ib, you sterile, clinical, mannered murder detective: look, learn, and put a little sense of the horror of this in your next one. Eh?”

Drin rocked forward, his four powerful webbed claws digging into his pad, speechless now.

Zo Kim’s wings snapped in and out, and his head back and forth. “What a show, everyone! But I am getting bored now. Will someone help me end this? Someone with a little style? Do Tor and Go Ton, your execrable contributions to Drinnil’ib’s mindless horror at least had the minor virtue of being interesting. Would you? Please?” This was followed by some almost intelligible Kleth dialect.

Drin rolled an eye toward Kleth Monitors Do Tor and Go Ton, frequent collaborators in real life as well as popular history. In fiction, Go Ton swam in the currents of classic Kleth air-battle, sounded in multilevel free-verse, and had achieved some minor success, at least in terms of the number of downloads from the Trimus net. Enough success, it seemed, to attract Zo Kim’s withering attention.

Go Ton, characteristically ignoring her own treatment at Zo Kim’s beak, had earlier fumed to Drin about the extremity of personality defect required for a Kleth to be rejected by even its own mate. Even being apart for a few hours was risky for Kleth; living apart was a fatalistic, almost nihilistic act—and Drin was seeing the results of it now.

Do Tor, seated with his bright yellow mate, had been silent about Zo Kim’s insults, but now he flew up and lit about half a charter unit from the dying critic and came no closer.

“Calm down, Zo Kim. Shouting and fighting makes it faster and worse. You need to clean your nest one last time. Could you say something good about The Last of the Air first?”

“No!” shouted Zo Kim, his crest snapping erect.

Do Tor simply stood there. Kleth had different feelings about suffering. And death.

By the compact, Drin thought, Do Tor had reason to let Zo Kim suffer, but this was unseemly—the Kleth monitor was cutting his tail for a transitory revenge. How long was this going to go on? There were tales in legend of Kleth who had, by force of will, lasted as long as a Trimus week. Drin slipped his tongue out the corner of his beak and down into his ventral pouch. The hand on the left branch of his tongue found his gun and changed the load by feel—self-guiding darts, short ones for Kleth. He could double-check the gun’s audio display in a second when he had it out.

No, it wouldn’t do. Zo Kim was alone on the stage, and while he could probably lock on from here and deliver the euthanasia, probably wasn’t good enough in a crowded room.

“Mary,” Drin said softly. “Get your piece. It wouldn’t look right—if I did it.”

Mary nodded and raised her many-curved body with ever-fascinating, seemingly boneless fluidity. She drew her gun from her belly kit, loaded the nerve poison clip, and sprinted toward the stage. She seemed to almost fly, though her feet had to strike the aisle every half charter unit or so.

But Zo Kim himself broke the impasse. “I can’t say anything good about it, Do Tor, because I haven’t read it! Have mercy—I cannot fly. Look, the stage below me is stained! Isn’t that interesting, everyone? I am leaking! I am becoming very digestible, right before your eyes!”

Someone actually laughed—indigestible was a word Zo Kim often used to great effect in his critiques. He was clearly in agony with his morbid not-pain, but his brain would be the last thing affected, and he would probably be able to critique the process almost to the last, cutting and ironic as if by some unconscious mental reflex. Drin shuddered.

A putrid smell reached Drin. How long, he thought, could we, the arguable intellectual elite of three species who together have traveled the stars long enough to reach halfway to the core of the Galaxy, sit here and watch this?