Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

“Can I help you paint?” I ask.

It is the wrong thing to say. “Go!” Tski cries. “These are not here for you, for your eyes or alien thoughts. These are our memories, made in love of one another, a declaration for future generations, and you have destroyed us. Leave now and do not return.”

I stand there for a while. Tski watches the fires burn, and does not move to tend it, nor to throw itself upon it. The thought that Tski might burn the grove down once I am gone keeps me there longer, until at last the burning nests have been consumed and the grassfire has died out, leaving a three-meter blackened, jagged scar on the land, an indelible fracture that will never grow back.

Tski makes a sound that the translation implant cannot work with, perhaps because it is not a word, just inarticulate grief. I should not have come, should not have stayed this long. These conversations with Tski have not been forward-thinking, and I know this, and knew better, but yet I came. It is a defect in my commitment to my own people that I let strangeness and novelty tempt me.

“I am sorry,” I say again, and this time I leave.

I stay on the path, even though my feet want to walk upon the native grasses one last time, because I am certain I will not come again.

At the gate, I leave my linen shift, bathe again with the lukewarm water, and when the sun and meager breeze has left my skin chill and mostly dry I dress and gather my things and put my real life back on.

The gates open, and despite a life of training and my commitment to our ways and philosophies, this time I look back.

Tski is coming up the path toward me. It is moving with difficulty and obvious pain, made the worse by the urgency with which it is trying to catch up to me. I should not have looked back, should now turn and step through the gate and close the doors for this last time, but I cannot.

Tski stops a few meters from me, and almost collapses before it gathers its strength to stand tall again. “Show me,” it says.

“What?” I ask. I do not understand.

“Show me what is now outside this wall, where once my children played and ran and climbed. Show me what you have done with my world, what you have that is so much better than us.”

On my side of the wall, it is city under construction, a thousand identical structures for ten thousand people, all looking only forward, in the direction we, the council, point. There is no art, no individual movement away from the whole, nothing rare to puzzle over. It is an existence I am proud of, and proud of my part in, but it is only for us and I do not want to explain or justify any of it, nor have to face the council and explain myself.

“No,” I say.

“Could you stop me?” Tski asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Would you, if you could?”

“Yes,” I say again.

“Then stop me,” Tski says, and it steps around me and heads toward the gates.

I take the small gun from my bag. All council members carry one for protection, for moments of dispensing justice, and although I have never used it except in training, it is solid and comfortable in my hand, and with it I kill Tski.

It crumples, and becomes still, and in the removal of its animation it becomes just a thing, a leftover bit of debris from this world that has been repurposed. Now, I can turn my back and proceed through the gates and return to this city of ours, and be whole and compliant in forward-thinking again.

Joesla speaks barely a moment after the council chime has rung and everyone has settled in their seats. “The Ofti are extinct,” she says. “Three of the remaining population appear to have self-immolated, and the last was found dead at the exterior gates with significant burns. I recommend a necropsy to determine the cause.”

“Surely it must have succumbed to the burns?” Motas says.

“There may be things we can learn—”

“Counselor Tauso, do we have any incomplete biological or behavioral data that could still be obtained from this specimen, if retrieved?” Motas asks.

Tauso looks miserable. His eyes are puffy, as if he has been crying, though none would ask and none would admit such a thing in his place. Tears only ever serve the past. “No,” he says, his voice barely a whisper, then he speaks again louder and more firmly. “No.”

“Then what would you propose we learn from such a procedure, Counselor Joesla? Its death is sooner than we would have anticipated, but it was also inevitable, and its cause does seem self-evident.”

I want to know why it crawled all that way, after being burned, to die at our gate, Joesla wants to say, but Motas is right, for all she hates it. The Ofti was old and injured. There is no purpose now, nothing to be gained, and whatever the Ofti wanted in its last moments was already lost to them. “I feel it would be a matter of completeness of record,” she says instead.

“So noted,” Motas says. “Does anyone second that proposal?”

There are hesitations, shared looks, mutual avoidance, but in the end, predictably, no one does.

“There is the matter of the grove and it surrounding lands,” Avel brings up, from Joesla’s right. “We had spoken about keeping it as is, as an educational, historical attraction. If we wish to do so, we should act now before the remaining grass and trees deteriorate further; it would only be a matter of a week or two of work to encase everything individually so they are preserved in their current state.”

“It is a waste of space that could be used for something productive,” Banad speaks up.

“I would vote for preservation,” Joesla says.

“As would I,” Tauso adds.

Motas turns to Avel. “I propose you bring the full details of a preservation project to our next meeting, so we may view and assess its merits and costs objectively. Banad, if you have an alternate proposal, then likewise we need all the relevant specifics and an objective justification for why it is a better use of the space. Does anyone second me?”

Tauso nods, and swallows. “I do,” he says.

“Good. Forward,” Motas says, and then they adjourn.

The grove looks the same as the last time I was here, but it feels empty.

It has not rained here in weeks—the moisture-laden clouds were needed elsewhere, with our fledgling farms—so the ash and small remains of the three burned nests have not washed away. I walk around them to where Tski had set up his leaves of paint, and I sit in front of them, and I look at the trees, dozens and dozens of them, here and in the forest behind, many freshly painted, many more marking the fading record of thousands of generations gone.

I still do not comprehend my own attraction, how this uncivilized, unrefined, unforward art can feel so alive, so in the moment, so connecting. So utterly alien. Perhaps it is the simple act of remembering the dead, when I come from a people where to mourn, to grieve, to remember those who are no longer part of the future, is the most foolish backward thinking of all.

Yet it is the painted trees that keep drawing me here, and they are still here; Tski was, ultimately, an obstacle to my full and peaceful enjoyment of them. Surely, though none of this would exist without the Ofti, now it is ours. Mine.

There is pride and relief as I think this, and also a deep shame that feels wrapped around the core of my being. Guilt is a backward emotion and I disavow that shame, even if it will not leave me be. Instead, I find that the more I study them, the more the designs on the trees seem to be mocking me, forever locked away from my comprehension. Tski must have followed me, made me kill it, because it knew that by doing so it would steal this from me.

The worst is the half-finished memorial on Ceye’s tree. I should have stayed here that day and forced Tski back to work, forced it to finish this last tree, so that I could have the whole now, and walk away satisfied that I missed and lost nothing. But it is broken, like Tski is broken, and it is Tski’s doing that both should be so.