Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

“I guess not.” Paul stepped gingerly around heaps of clothes, clean and filthy piled separately, and eyed with distaste a clutter of empty morpha tubes and wine jellies in a corner. A monitor flickered on a table, rows of numerals and gravid shapes tracing the progress of the Breeders Project.

“ Not ,” a voice trilled. On the balcony the argala did not turn, but its bright tone, the way its vestigial wings shivered, seemed to indicate some kind of greeting.

“All right. Let’s see it—”

Claude shoved past him, grinning. Paul looked over and for a second the argala’s expression was not so much idiotic as tranquil; as though instead of a gritty balcony overlooking shattered concrete, it saw what he had imagined before, water and wriggling live things.

“ Unh .”

Claude’s tone abruptly changed. Paul couldn’t help but look: the tenor of the other boy’s lust was so intense it sounded like pain. He had his arms around the argala and was thrusting at it, his trousers askew. In his embrace the creature stood with its head thrown back, its cries so rhapsodic that Paul groaned himself and turned away.

In a minute it was over. Claude staggered back, pulling at his clothes and looking around almost frantically for Paul.

“God, that was incredible, that was the best —”

Like what could you compare it to, you idiot? Paul leaned against the table with the monitor and tapped a few keys angrily, hoping he’d screw up something; but the scroll continued uninterrupted. Claude walked, dazed, to a chair and slouched into it, scooped up a half-full wine jelly from the floor and sucked at it hungrily.

“Go on, Pathori, you don’t want to miss that! ” Claude laughed delightedly, and looked at the argala. “God, it’s amazing, isn’t it? What a beauty.” His eyes were dewy as he shook his head. “What a fucking thing.”

Without answering Paul crossed the room to the balcony. The argala seemed to have forgotten all about them. It stood with one leg drawn up, staring down at the empty courtyard, its topaz eyes glittering. As he drew near to it its smell overwhelmed him, a muskier scent now, almost fetid, like water that had stood too long in an open storage vessel. He felt infuriated by its utter passivity, but somehow excited, too. Before he knew what he was doing he had grabbed it, just as Claude had, and pulled it to him so that its bland child’s face looked up at him rapturously.

Afterwards he wept, and beside him the argala crooned, mimicking his sobs. He could dimly hear Claude saying something about leaving, then his friend’s voice rising and finally the snick of the door sliding open and shut. He grit his teeth and willed his tears to stop. The argala nestled against him, silent now. His fingers drifted through its thin hair, ran down its back to feel its wings, the bones like metal struts beneath the breath of down. What could a bird possibly know about what he was feeling? he thought fiercely. Let alone a monster like this. A real woman would talk to you, afterwards.

To complain, he imagined his father saying.

…never enjoyed it, ever, his mother’s voice echoed back, and Father Dorothy’s intoned, That’s what’s wrong with it, it’s like a machine.

He pulled the argala closer to him and shut his eyes, inhaling deeply. A wash of yellow that he knew must be sunlight: then he saw that ghostly image of a house again, heard faint cries of laughter. Because it was a woman, too, of course; otherwise how could it recall a house, and children? but then the house broke up into motes of light without color, and he felt the touch of that other, alien mind, delicate and keen as a bird’s long bill, probing at his own.

“Well! Good afternoon, good afternoon…”

He jumped. His father swayed in the doorway, grinning. “Found my little friend again. Well, come in, come in.”

Paul let go of the argala and took a few unsteady steps. “Dad—I’m sorry, I—”

“God, no. Stop.” His father waved, knocking a bottle to the floor. “Stay, why don’t you. A minute.”

But Paul had a horrible flash, saw the argala taken again, the third time in what, half an hour? He shook his head and hurried to the door, face down.

“I can’t, Dad. I’m sorry—I was just going by, that’s all—”

“Sure, Sure.” His father beamed. Without looking he pulled a wine jelly from a shelf and squeezed it into his mouth. “Come by when you have more time, Paul. Glad to see you.”

He started to cross to where the argala gazed at him, its huge eyes glowing. Paul ran from the room, the door closing behind him with a muted sigh.

At breakfast the next morning he was surprised to find his mother and Father Dorothy sitting in the twins’ usual seats.

“We were talking about your going to school in Tangier,” his mother announced, her deep voice a little too loud for the cramped dining hall as she turned back to Father Dorothy. “We could never meet the quotas, of course, but Mother pulled some strings, and—”

Paul sat next to her. Across the table, Claude and Ira and the twins were gulping down the rest of their breakfast. Claude mumbled a goodbye and stood to leave, Ira behind him.

“See you later, Father,” Ira said, smiling. Father Dorothy waved.

“When?” said Paul.

“In a few weeks. It’s nearly Athyr now”—that was what they called this cycle—“…which means it’s July down there. The next drop is on the Fortieth.”

He didn’t pay much attention to the rest of it. There was no point: his mother and Father Dorothy had already decided everything, as they always did. He wondered how his father had ever been able to get the argala here at all.

A hand clamped his shoulder and Paul looked up.

“—must go now,” Father Dorothy was saying as he motioned for a server to clean up. “Class starts in a few minutes. Walk with me, Paul?”

He shook his mother’s hand and left her nodding politely as the next shift of diners filed into the little room.

“You’ve been with it,” the tutor said after a few minutes. They took the long way to the classroom, past the cylinders where vats of nutriment were stored and wastewater recycled, past the spiral stairs that led to his father’s chamber. Where the hallway forked Father Dorothy hesitated, then went to the left, towards the women’s quarters. “I could tell, you know—it has a—”

He inhaled, then made a delicate grimace. “It has a smell.”

They turned and entered the Solar Walk. Paul remained at his side, biting his lip and feeling an unexpected anger churning inside him.

“I like the way it smells,” he said, and waited for Father Dorothy to look grim. Instead his tutor paused in front of the window. “I love it.”

He thought Father Dorothy would retort sharply; but instead he only raised his hands and pressed them against the window. Outside two of the HORUS repair units floated past, on their interminable and futile rounds. When it seemed the silence would go on forever, his tutor said, “It can’t love you. You know that. It’s an abomination—an animal—”

“Not really,” Paul replied, but weakly.

Father Dorothy flexed his hands dismissively. “It can’t love you. It’s a geneslave. How could it love anything?”

His tone was not angry but questioning, as though he really thought Paul might have an answer. And for a moment Paul thought of explaining to him: about how it felt, how it seemed like it was showing him things—the sky, the house, the little creatures crawling in the moss—things that perhaps it did feel something for. But before he could say anything Father Dorothy turned and began striding back in the direction they’d come. Paul hurried after him in silence.