Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

Jenette drew the door shut behind her. Click.

The wounded Prime Consul strained, unsuccessfully, to turn his head. "Who's there?"

"It's me," Jenette answered in a small voice. She did not want to go any further into the room. She did not want to see what she would see if she moved closer. She leaned against the door for support. Don't forget, he brought this on himself. He brought this on all of us.

"Jenette," Tesla said, hope flaring in his weak voice. "I knew you would come. Your mission, was it a success?"

"No," Jenette admitted. Her father sagged visibly. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry," he said. "Succeed or fail, but don't be sorry as long as you did your best."

Jenette flinched. Was that compassion from her father? She did not want it. Not with what she had festering in her gut. Soon it would explode. Soon, but not just yet.... For now Jenette was still intimidated by what she saw. "Colonel Halifax says you saved a squad of Reserves," she said, her voice sounding distant in her own head. "He says you fought off two Ferals with your bare hands."

"With a knife. I didn't fare so well."

"Halifax says you won."

"Halifax has a strange definition of winning."

As if to punctuate the irony of that word, a fit of choking overcame the Prime Consul. Thick fluid appeared at the corners of his mouth. The drawn-out sounds left the room feeling empty.

Jenette's hands began to shake. She clenched them behind her back and forced herself to walk to her father's side. His Feral opponents had not surrendered their lives easily. Her father's head was a broken mess, his extremities slashed in a dozen places, his abdomen gored open. Surgical foam covered the wounds, inset organisms buzzed frantically to stem internal damage, but they could not hide the severity of his condition.

Jenette's father, Olin Tesla? the berator, accuser, and cold remote rock around which so much of her existence revolved? was dying. So many times she had wished death upon him, and now here he was, just as she had wanted, the planetary pathogen consuming from within what his attackers had not incapacitated from without. Conflicting emotions made Jenette queasy. Elation. Guilt. Fear.

Time was running out.

And Jenette desperately needed more time. Time to yell and scream. Time to hold her father accountable for his transgressions. Time to demand explanations and receive answers. How had he made such callous decisions? What could he have been thinking?

Didn't he see how badly those decisions hurt the colony? Didn't he see how badly he had hurt her? Fathers were supposed to make things better, not worse! Weren't they? Jenette wanted to know. And, deep down, maybe she wanted something else, too. Maybe she needed to find an intangible something which had been lost in all the anger and expectation and rebellion, whatever it was that fathers and daughters were supposed to have but which she and her father had never found. If only she knew what to say...

Her father's hands, thin and swollen-jointed, fumbled with a froog, a golden-pink fruit with spiky skin and succulent insides. He was too weak. His nails scratched the thick rind, freeing a few sweet vapors, but were not able to break through. They fell still in frustration.

Before Jenette knew what she was doing, she picked up the froog. Her own youthful hands made short work of peeling the spheroid and splitting the internal nodules into bite-sized clumps. Her father strained to eat them. Jenette put a hand under his neck to hold his head erect. The physical contact seemed electric to her, in a chilling sort of way. His body, so long robust, was shrunken and bony. She felt tremors of his pain as he slowly chewed and swallowed.

"Your mother used to peel froogs for me when we gathered flutterbys," her father ventured after consuming a few nodules.

The comment took Jenette by surprise. Her father never talked about her. "You and Mother gathered flutterbys?"

"Back at Elysium." Tesla's expression became nostalgic as he thought back. "Clouds of color in the air. Your mother liked the blue-blue ones best."

Jenette imagined her parents stealing away for a quiet afternoon on the open ocean, misting fresh-water on the wave crests to simulate rain and then angling hand-tossed nets to capture the clouds of damsel wings which sprang up to court, mate, and die in the course of their absurdly short life cycles.

"Some things you can't forget," her father continued. "You can put them away for a while, but they always come back. Even if you don't want them to."

"Don't you want to remember her?"

Wistful eyes said yes, but Tesla's words were full of self-reproach. "Now is now. Then is then. Living

in the past is good for nothing."

To Jenette, who had no memory of her mother, the idyllic image sounded nice. Jenette remembered her father taking her flutterby hunting once, the two of them simply spending time together, not talking and far from the demands of the Enclave. She had liked it, but after a while he had grown sad. They stopped suddenly and he had never taken her again. Until that moment in the records room, Jenette had thought that it was because he did not want to go with her, but now she saw otherwise.

"You still miss her."

Tesla stopped eating. His neck, still cradled in Jenette's hand, bowed foreword and shook. It took a moment for her to realize he was weeping.

"You have her face, her nose, her chin," he said, without looking up. "I see her every time I look at you."

"Is that... good?"

A bony hand sought out one of Jenette's and clasped it tightly. This was a father she had never seen before, a father who showed emotion, a father who tried to communicate on a real, honest level. Jenette did not know how to react. All at once, the confrontation she had come for came out of her? but not in anger, in utter childlike disbelief.

"Why, father? Why?"

Tesla looked up with watery, uncomprehending eyes. "Why what?"

"I've been to a Feral city," Jenette said miserably. "To a place where they record history chemically in glowing roots. One of the roots told the history of humans coming to this world. It recorded everything those humans did when they came to this planet. I read it."

Tesla's face pinched, as if he knew what was coming.

"We could have made Pact!" Jenette wailed, verbalizing the awful revelation for the first time since reading the Roots of Wisdom with the Judges. "It said so in the Feral texts. Pact is not specific to Feral physiology. It's a substance they pass on to their children? and twenty years ago, when we were all born, there were childless Ferals willing to pass their Pact on to human children. But you didn't let them!

None of this had to happen! All the fighting, all the suffering, all the dying...." Jenette choked up. The scope of the atrocity was too much to comprehend. Every year of Sacrament, the Feral Wars, every human or Khafra who was dead outside the Great Hall at that very moment, it all stemmed from the same incomprehensible decision. Jenette's head pounded so hard she thought it would explode. "Why? Why?!"

Her father's voice rasped quietly. "Evermore. If you could understand Evermore... but you can't."

"How bad could it have been?" Jenette railed. "Nobody on Evermore died just because they grew up!"

Tesla struggled to explain. "Our bodies lived, but our souls did not. Do you know how much you hate Sacrament? That is how much we hated Evermore. It was so beautiful, the white rolling hills, the rift valleys, the everblue forests, but... the sound of an evening breeze would chill our hearts. Narcotic pollens came on those breezes. They would come and our minds would numb and our bodies would do things that should not be done. Sick things. Immoral things." Tesla clenched his eyes. "And as if that that was not bad enough, humans on Evermore began to forget what was right and what was wrong, even when the winds did not blow. Whatever abomination occurred, they were not to blame. It was the