Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

There, she had said it.

Tesla's face twitched, but he did not fly into a rage. He put down his stimpaper stylus. "Domestics can't be murdered," he said in an even tone. "They are a resource. They can only be utilized. "

"They are not a resource," Jenette disagreed. "Khafra are a sentient species. They think and feel. They have their own language and they have even learned to speak ours."

"Monkeys were taught to speak thousands of years ago on Earth," Tesla insisted. "That doesn't make them sentient. Are their thoughts productive? Do they write books? Do they make machines and colonize the stars? No."

"Khafra are not monkeys. It's wrong to kill them for our own selfish reasons."

"Survival," Tesla explained, "is inherently selfish. It is our most basic, selfish right. The Body of humanity has survived from savanna to continent, from planet to planet for millennia precisely because it is selfish. It is our duty to survive. The Body was seeded on this world to survive, no matter what the cost."

Jenette did not buy it. "Spin it any way you want. Sacrament is still wrong."

Tesla rubbed his eyes in frustration. "Why does everything have to be a crisis with you?"

"Because if it isn't a crisis, you ignore it!" Jenette said resentfully.

"We have to be strong, Jenette. You and I have to sacrifice for the good of the weak. I know you don't believe it, but I'm trying to keep us all alive. This road you're going down, it's a dangerous path. I've seen it first hand. I've allowed it to occur in the past and it always ends in heartache. Why don't you learn from my mistakes? Abide by the laws against becoming attached. They are there for a reason: because it hurts. That's exactly why you are avoiding Sacrament right now, because it hurts."

"Because it's wrong," Jenette corrected.

Tesla's temper finally began to rise. "Sometimes we have to make decisions that hurt. Sometimes we make a stand and suffer small pains to avoid greater ones."

Jenette crossed her arms defiantly. "I am making a stand. I didn't reschedule my Sacrament. I canceled it. I'm not going again. It's an abomination."

A dozen angry expressions played on Tesla's face. "You complain that I don't treat you like an adult, that I don't trust you with responsibility? What kind of responsibility is this?"

"The Enclave can't go on like this," Jenette said fiercely. "I have a plan? "

"I don't want to hear it," Tesla roared, furiously. "I have my own plans."

"The supply of domestics is running out. Halifax and I can't keep up with the demand. We must seek help to find a cure? "

"Silence!" Tesla pounded his desk. "I have been patient, but suicide is not an option! Not for you, not for anyone in this Enclave! This is the real world, not your childish fantasy. In the real world adults don't get to do what they want. They do what they must. If you weren't so selfish you'd see that this colony needs you alive, you'd see that I'm grooming you to lead this world when I'm gone!"

A water mug crashed to the floor. Father and daughter glared at each other.

"I don't want to lead," Jenette spat, refusing to break down and cry in front of her father. "I don't want anything to do with you or your power or your Sacrament. They make me sick."

Muscles flexed up the side of Tesla's head and he spoke through clenched teeth. "I'm sorry you feel that way." He hammered through the entries in his mindercard. "You are due ... no, you are a week overdue for Sacrament. I waited for you to do the right thing and you made a fool out of me. That ends now. Tomorrow you go to Sacrament, either like an adult, or kicking and screaming, but you will go to Sacrament before the meeting of the Body tomorrow night. Do we understand each other?"

Jenette did not argue. What was the point? Battle lines were drawn and they were on opposite sides.

"I understand."

"Good. You and I will talk tomorrow, when you are in a more civil mood."

Jenette contemplated the coins in her hand, heat from the open incinerator warming her face.

Flames licked at Trum's shroud.

"Must be more," Arrou said.

Jenette nodded, catching the philosophical inflection.

Arrou asked, "What father say?"

"We're in trouble," Jenette answered. "We have to go to Sacrament."

"Urrr," Arrou rambled thoughtfully. "Jenette needs Sacrament."

"Arrou, you'll die."

Arrou shrugged innocently. "Everything dies."

The alien's seeming indifference exasperated Jenette. "Do you want to die now?"

"No."

"Do you want to die tomorrow?"

"No."

"I didn't think so." Jenette clenched the coins until they bit into her palms. It had been foolish to confront her father. His response was preordained right from the start, but she had gone anyway, with childish hopes of? what? Conciliation? Compromise? What a joke! She hated how stupid she had been.

Why couldn't she just write her father off, once and for all? Why did she have to keep trying? And why did it have to hurt so much? No matter, she told herself, her plans were already in motion. In a way, Tesla's ultimatum made it easier for Jenette, by forcing her resolve.

Jenette had seen too much death during three years as Subconsul in charge of the Enclave's domestics. Too many had died because of her decisions. Suffering might be the law of the jungle, but she was a sentient being, not a beast. Sentient beings could choose not to kill. Standing there before the flames, Jenette made a pledge that not a single additional domestic would die at her hands, starting with Arrou. She would not go to Sacrament tomorrow; Arrou would not die.

No matter what the cost.

Jenette threw the coins into the flames with Trum's body. When the cremation was over, she gathered the ashes into a jar and left with Arrou.

The incinerator was in an out of the way part of the island, surrounded by agricultural plots and hidden in a thicket of trees. Behind it was a secluded glade where no one came anymore. It was empty, as usual.

A lot of flowers grew in and around the stripped hulks of crawlers and skimmers destroyed in the Feral Wars. There were even a few mysterious flitters, which Jenette had never seen fly. Nothing remained of the machines but inert composite-fiber hulls and skeletons. Everything useful had been stripped long ago.

The glade had always been a graveyard of sorts, but now it served double duty.

Arrou dug dirt away from the torpedo-shaped belly of an old, upturned skimmer. His paws opened a battered hatch, revealing a cache of makeshift urns within the hollow hulk. Jenette placed Trum's urn with the others, wrapped it in rags and wedged it in tight so that violent movement of the island during a storm would not shatter and spill the solemn contents. Then she cried, somehow still able to find tears even though she had placed hundreds of similar jars in the clandestine tomb.

As Jenette wept, a change came over the glade. What had looked like rocks or moss-covered vehicles magically transformed into dozens of Khafra gathered in the graveyard, sitting upright and still, like tombstones. They had been in the empty glade all along, of course, hidden by their ghostly chameleon camouflage. Their bullet heads bowed in silence; blood red spots flared from flashbuds on their foreheads, chests, and paws. Trum's urn in place, Arrou closed the skimmer hatch, reburied it, and glowed with the same alien stigmata.

After a while Jenette spoke. "Arrou, go keep watch." Arrou padded away. She looked upon the aliens gathered around.

Jenette's hopes hung on these ghostly beings.

These were the domestics Arrou had signaled with secret light-code messages earlier that day. Years ago, Jenette had taken the time to learn their language and in doing so she had learned a precious secret: domestics knew everything that happened on the Enclave. With the exception of the Chamber of the