Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

"The Pilot will go," Tesla said quietly. "This is not my choice of a plan, but it is a righteous plan. I hereby sanction an expedition to Coffin Island by edict." The Prime Consul's supporters shifted unh appily. "If you can marshal the spine to vote me down, go ahead, but you might as well elect a new Prime Consul while you are at it, because I will resign!"

Tesla turned from his desk, looking suddenly old and weak, and left the Chamber through a small, back exit.

Jenette was relieved at his intervention, but not very sympathetic. Her father wondered why the Consuls were so quick to consider using Karr for their own survival, when it was he, Olin Tesla, who had invented Sacrament. He was the one who had accustomed them to living off the suffering of another sentient species. How big a jump was it to then substitute a sentient human in place of a sentient alien?

The colonists were stunned by Tesla's departure, especially Bragg. Olin Tesla was their lifeline. They had never known another Prime Consul, and the thought of losing his leadership was far more frightening than the possible loss of the Pilot. No one so much as proposed a vote to challenge Tesla's edict.

Jenette lived in a one room cube in the domicile for unmarried colonists, one of many heaped up like children's blocks among sprawling meat-fruit vineyards. Flat surfaces inside the domicile were piled high with books and Khafra artifacts, every bit of information Jenette could find from before the Feral Wars.

The walls were papered with holos of far-off worlds: squat temples in the mountains of Valhalla, triple sunset on Solara, a happy robot bounding through fields of whispering poppies on Chazz. Peaceful places. One day Jenette would add another holo to that gallery: a picture from New Ascension.

Bleep, went the entry chime.

Jenette slid the door open for Dr. Deena Marsh, a handsome young woman with olive skin, curly dark hair pulled back from a gaunt face, and a labjumper sealed to the neck. Marsh was expected. She handed Jenette a stimpaper printout. Jenette scanned the printout's complex graphs and stacks of numbers.

"The sample was positive for fugue," said Marsh. "Hope there's more where it came from."

"There isn't."

"Too bad."

"Yes. Who knows about this test?"

"Me and my shadow," said Marsh. "And I wasn't here. I never saw that report." With a wink, she left.

Jenette closed the door and sat on the edge of an unmade bed. Her head throbbed from the chaos she had unleashed. Arrou lay beside her, dozens of tiny scrapes on his armor from when he fell off the Chamber roof and landed in a bristle bush. His face was full of concern.

"Jenette okay?"

She tossed the printout on the bed. "I'm fine."

"Want back scratch?"

"No, thank you." She rubbed dirt from a scrape on Arrou's back. "What am I going to do with you?"

she chided. She had warned him the Chamber roof was dangerous.

"What Arrou do with you?" he chided right back.

Knock, knock, knock, went the door.

Jenette got up. What had Marsh forgotten?

Arrou's head dipped low and he turned a somber blue. Jenette though that strange behavior; Arrou liked Marsh. She slid the panel aside.

Her father stood on the balcony. "Jenette," he said, entering.

Jenette stood aside, baffled. Her father never came to visit her. She was always summoned to him.

"Arrou, out," Tesla ordered.

Arrou slunk out, insult patterns washing over his back. Jenette pulled the door shut and cleared a pile of data cubes and clothes from her only chair. These she discreetly dropped on top of Marsh's printout.

Tesla paced the tiny room, looking less the tyrant, but still giving the disorder a wintry once over. He stopped abruptly and, like Marsh, handed Jenette a folded stimpaper.

It was Karr's official request for equipment and personnel? and right at the top of the list was her name. Karr wanted Jenette to head up the New Ascension side of the mission to Coffin Island.

"You're not going," said Tesla.

"But? "

"Show me your neck."

Jenette's mouth became a thin, hard line and she lowered her chin.

"Your glands are tender and swollen," Tesla accused. "Am I wrong?"

Jenette's hand went reflexively to the juncture of her jaw and neck. It did feel swollen, but she knew from close scrutiny in a mirror that her neck still looked normal. At least there was no movement under the skin yet. Her hands went clammy at the thought.

She forced her arms down to her sides.

Now Tesla sat on the arm of the chair, arms folded. "No Sacrament. No mission."

"I won't."

Tesla frowned. "I'm going to tell you a secret, Jenette. Against isn't good enough. You have to be for something in order to succeed. Against is the coward's way. Against is bitterness and failure and a misspent life. That's why I voted for your motion to assist Pilot Karr's mission."

"Dr. Bigelow's motion," Jenette corrected.

"Your motion," Tesla asserted. "Let's get to the point. It took guts to vote me down. And it took guts to take off in the crawler," stern fatherly disapproval met her eye. "But it was stupid."

"Maybe," Jenette begrudged.

The half-concession mollified Tesla a little. His conversation spun onto a different track. "You know what this Enclave needs, Jenette? It needs a new generation that stands by its convictions? not like the simpering toadies I see in the Chamber every day. My convictions took me to the top. Yours will, too."

"I don't want to get to the top."

"So you say. There won't be any choice when the time comes, believe me." Tesla fell quiet a minute, as if reliving distant memory, but soon enough he was back to business. "I've arranged a different domestic for your Sacrament. Not as good as Arrou, but it will keep you alive. You can head up the mission to Coffin Island. We'll take the tracking collar off Arrou. You can even take him and dump him on another Feral island to die of starvation, whatever you like."

Jenette was surprised by her father's concession, but held steadfast. "If it's wrong to kill Arrou, it's wrong to kill any domestic."

"Nothing comes without a price, Jenette. Nobody will fight your crusade if you're dead. Please decide. I'm feeling very tired."

"Decide tonight?"

"Now."

It felt unreal. Her father was talking to her like an equal. She hesitated. "There is another option."

Digging into a bedside drawer, Jenette retrieved a medipak filled with the substance that she had told Marsh didn't exist. Unzipping the seal, she offered it to her father.

Tesla took a sniff: jasmine, burned jasmine.

It was the shriveled strips of Karr's burned flesh.

"The Body Pure," Jenette said.

Tesla grimaced. "Haven't you been paying attention? Weren't you in the Chamber tonight?"

"The Body Pure doesn't mean the same thing to us, Father," Jenette confessed. "I subscribe to the principals, but it's not a religion to me."

"More sacrilege," Tesla said numbly. "Where did I go wrong?"

"I didn't choose to come to this planet; I was born here. I'm just doing the best I can."

Jenette pulled out a strip of oily skin. Before her father could react, she popped the stringy strip into her mouth and chewed. She swallowed, clapping a hand over her mouth to keep it down.

"You see, Father," she gagged, "you won after all."

Tesla rose, looking older than ever, and let himself out the door. "Nobody won. I lost a vote and you lost your soul. May the Body forgive you." To Arrou he said, "Don't call a doctor."

"Not call doctor? About what?" the alien asked from the balcony.

"You'll see," the old man said. "She will sleep now and you won't be able to wake her up, but she will be okay."

Arrou padded into the cubical. Tesla shut the door. When she was sure he was gone, Jenette bent over, jabbed her fingers down her throat and vomited into a waste bucket. Then she curled onto fetal position on her bed and prayed that she had been quick enough, that she would not sink into a fugue-coma and that she would live long enough to accomplish what had to be done.