Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

As they turned down the last hallway, Father Dorothy said, “It’s an ethical matter, really. Like having intercourse with a child, or someone who’s mentally deficient. It can’t respond, it’s incapable of anything—”

“But I love it,” Paul repeated stubbornly.

“Aren’t you listening to me?” Father Dorothy did sound angry, now. “ It can’t love you. ” His voice rose shrilly. “How could something like that tell you that it loved you!? And you can’t love it—god, how could you love anything, you’re only a boy!” He stopped in the doorway and looked down at him, then shook his head, in pity or disgust Paul couldn’t tell. “Get in there,” Father Dorothy said at last, and gently pushed him through the door.

He waited until the others were asleep before slipping from his bunk and heading back to his father’s quarters. The lights had dimmed to simulate night; other than that there was no difference, in the way anything looked or smelled or sounded. He walked through the violet corridors with one hand on the cool metal wall, as though he was afraid of falling.

They were leaving just as he reached the top of the spiral stairs. He saw his father first, then two others, other researchers from the Breeders Project. They were laughing softly, and his father threw his arms around one man’s shoulders and murmured something that made the other man shake his head and grin. They wore loose robes open in the front and headed in the opposite direction, towards the neural sauna. They didn’t see the boy pressed against the wall, watching as they turned the corner and disappeared.

He waited for a long time. He wanted to cry, tried to make himself cry; but he couldn’t. Beneath his anger and shame and sadness there was still too much of that other feeling, the anticipation and arousal and inchoate tenderness that he only knew one word for, and Father Dorothy thought that was absurd. So he waited until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and went inside.

His father had made some feeble attempt to clean the place up. The clothing had been put away, and table tops and chairs cleared of papers. Fine white ash sifted across the floor, and there was a musty smell of tobacco beneath the stronger odors of semen and wine jelly. The argala’s scent ran through all of it like a fresh wind.

He left the door open behind him, no longer caring if someone found him there or not. He ran his hands across his eyes and looked around for the argala.

It was standing where it usually did, poised on the balcony with its back to him. He took a step, stopped. He thought he could hear something, a very faint sound like humming; but then it was gone. He craned his neck to see what it was the creature looked at but saw nothing; only that phantom flicker of red in the corner of his eye, like a mote of ruby dust. He began walking again, softly, when the argala turned to look at him.

Its eyes were wide and fervent as ever, its tangerine mouth spun into that same adoring smile; but even as he started for it, his arms reaching to embrace it, it turned from him and jumped.

For an instant it hung in the air and he could imagine it flying, could almost imagine that perhaps it thought its wings would carry it across the courtyard or safely to the ground. But in that instant he caught sight of its eyes, and they were not a bird’s eyes but a woman’s; and she was not flying but falling.

He must have cried out, screamed for help. Then he just hung over the balcony, staring down at where it lay motionless. He kept hoping that maybe it would move again but it did not, only lay there twisted and still.

But as he stared at it it changed. It had been a pale creature to begin with. Now what little color it had was leached away, as though it were bleeding into the concrete; but really there was hardly any blood. Its feathers grew limp, like fronds plucked from the water, their gold fading to a grey that was all but colorless. Its head was turned sideways, its great wide eye open and staring up. As he watched the golden orb slowly dulled to yellow and then a dirty white. When someone finally came to drag it away its feathers trailed behind it in the dust. Then nothing remained of it at all except for the faintest breath of ancient summers hanging in the stale air.

For several days he wouldn’t speak to anyone, not even responding to Claude’s cruelties or his father’s ineffectual attempts at kindness. His mother made a few calls to Tangier and, somehow, the drop was changed to an earlier date in Athyr. On the afternoon he was to leave they all gathered, awkwardly, in the dormitory. Father Dorothy seemed sad that he was going, but also relieved. The twins tried to get him to promise to write, and Ira cried. But, still without speaking, Paul left the room and walked down to the courtyard.

No one had even bothered to clean it. A tiny curl of blood stained the concrete a rusty color, and he found a feather, more like a furry yellowish thread than anything else, stuck to the wall. He took the feather and stared at it, brought it to his face and inhaled. There was nothing.

He turned to leave, then halted. At the corner of his eye something moved. He looked back and saw a spot on the ground directly beneath his father’s balcony. Shoving the feather into his pocket he walked slowly to investigate.

In the dust something tiny wriggled, a fluid arabesque as long as his finger. Crouching on his heels, he bent over and cupped it in his palm. A shape like an elongated tear of blood, only with two bright black dots that were its eyes and, beside each of those, two perfect flecks of gold.

An eft, he thought, recognizing it from the natural history book and from the argala’s vision. A juvenile salamander.

Giant Indian stork, feeding upon crustaceans and small amphibians.

He raised it to his face, feeling it like a drop of water slithering through his fingers. When he sniffed it it smelled, very faintly, of mud.

There was no way it could have gotten here. Animals never got through by-port customs, and besides, were there even things like this still alive, Below? He didn’t know.

But then how did it get here?

A miracle, he thought, and heard Father Dorothy’s derisive voice— How could something like that tell you that it loved you? For the first time since the argala’s death, the rage and despair that had clenched inside him uncoiled. He moved his hand, to see it better, and with one finger stroked its back. Beneath its skin, scarlet and translucent, its ribs moved rapidly in and out, in and out, so fine and frail they might have been drawn with a hair.

An eft.

He knew it would not live for very long—what could he feed it, how could he keep it?—but somehow the argala had survived, for a little while at least, and even then the manner of its dying had been a miracle of sorts. Paul stood, his hands folding over the tiny creature, and with his head bowed—though none of them would really see, or understand, what it was he carried—he walked up the stairs and through the hallway and back into the dormitory where his bags waited, past the other boys, past his mother and father and Father Dorothy, not saying anything, not even looking at them; holding close against his chest a secret, a miracle, a salamander.

I wrote this amidst my first three novels and wanted to use their milieu as a backdrop. Connie Willis’s “All My Darling Daughters” has a nice space station setting, which also seemed like a good idea: I liked the notion of an insular culture giving birth to its own sexual depravities, which over time would come to be considered normal. The rest was just spun out of the fictional history of my novels’ Ascendants and their geneslaves.