David Nickle - Eutopia

She would also be the last to go in.

Loo never spoke of that operation, but her cousin Jacob got the whole story for them. Jacob was little for his age, but fast and smart. While he was waiting his turn outside the tent, he managed to slip away and get around the back side, and stick his head underneath the cloth to see what was going on.

Loo was strapped down to a bench, and struggling a bit. The doctor held what looked like a shoe over her face, and she stopped moving. Then he took a shiny knife, and started cutting away at her middle—her privates. There was a bit of blood, and although she was quieter, Jacob could tell by the way she moved that it still hurt.

Before the doctor was done with her, Jacob had relayed all this to the rest of the family—and when the doctor came out, he found himself faced with Norma, Hank, and Karl ( the giant that Andrew had seen coming in, Norma explained).

There might have been shooting, but the doctor seemed anxious to avoid it. He begged the families to trust him, that he was doing this work for the good of everyone. When Karl wondered what he meant by that, he explained:

“I am doing you a service,” he said. “Your daughter Lou-Ellen was born feebleminded. If she had children of her own, the chances are that they would be feebleminded too. Now, there is no danger of that.”

“What d’ you mean to do to the rest of ’em?” asked Norma.

The doctor shrugged. “You are all family,” he said. “You all carry the germ. You all need to be cleaned.”

The doctor and his men left not long after. For as the talk went along, guns and knives and axes started to appear among the families, and the two men with rifles took the measure of their hosts and whispered to the doctor that a fast leave-taking might be the best.

And so the doctor made sure that Loo’s cuts were properly dressed, set her out and set his men to rolling up the tent. On leaving, he told the families that he thought they would thank him for the work he did on Loo. In the end, he said, they might wish that they took him up on his offer.

“In the end,” he said, “it might save you all a lot of grief.”

“So if I understand, the doctor—Dr. Bergstrom—sterilized Loo two years ago.”

“That’s the word he used,” said Norma. “Sterilized.”

“Did he ever come back?” asked Andrew.

“Not him. Couple time, his friends with the guns came up. Them and some others.” Norma looked at her hands. “They come up with their guns and rope and horses… They take a few folk back. To the hospital.”

Andrew was horrified. “They kidnapped people?”

Norma said she didn’t know that word. “But they took ’em. They always brung ’em back.”

“Have you—”

Norma smiled thinly. “I haven’t,” she said. “Too old to worry about, I expect. But it’s been a long time since a baby’s been born to the families.”

“Until now,” said Andrew.

“ Huh .”

“And this one was… fathered by the…”

“Faerie King. That’s what we call it.”

“You believe—” in faeries , Andrew was about to say. But he stopped himself. The fact was that he’d seen them too. It would be insulting and worse, unreasonable, to feign scepticism.

So he took a breath and started again.

“Tell me everything you know about the Faerie King,” he said. “Then tell me what happened.”

The families had never held much to religion. There were some around who did—but they lived further up the hill and grew stranger by the season, and although they seemed happy it was not the kind of happiness you wanted to share in. Families here on the slope had nothing but bad to say about the clergy they’d left behind and had not much to care for a God you couldn’t see or hear. But they knew the old stories of the creatures that lived in the forest. The stories all pointed to a simple warning—don’t expect help from them without paying a price worse than the help was good.

And though they may speak fair and smell sweet, don’t walk off with one if it beckons, and don’t ever lie with one.

It was this last thing that the family thought had happened to Loo, from the simple story she told over the days.

Loo said she had been digging for leeks with her knife in the early spring soil, when she met the fellow. He was fast and no bigger than a baby, but she thought he was fine. In the early days, she would listen to birdsong as though it were speaking to her, and nod or shake her head or say, “Ho!” or “Yep!” or just laugh, and no one thought anything of it.

But as the days got longer she took to bed more and more. And then the elder members of the family, folk like Norma, started to pay more heed—both to her and to the birdsong.

“You listen to it in the right frame of mind, it’s like words,” said Norma.

“Can you hear it now?”

Norma looked at her hands. “Always,” she said.

“What does it say?”

Norma snorted. “Preacher talk,” she said.

“Preacher talk,” said Andrew. “You know, I’ve seen some things that’ve had whistling attached to them. I don’t hear the words.”

“That’s because you ain’t kin,” said Norma. “And you’re a nigger. Ain’t even the same race.”

“I’m the same race.”

“Oh,” she said, seeing his expression. “M’ apologies. It’s just… the whistling seems to come clearer the closer kin you are.”

“And it talks like a preacher,” said Andrew. “To kin of the woman that was pregnant with it.” Andrew leaned back. “Not pregnant,” he said. “I should have said the woman carrying its eggs. Does it normally attack pregnant women?”

“It does, but not always,” said Norma. “Doesn’t happen often enough to really say.” Now she sat back and thought about it. “But it’s queer—you hear stories, how after the Faerie King picks a virgin bride, she goes off and lies with her sweetheart.”

“Ah.”

So the Faerie King would lie with a woman, and put his seed in her—his seed in this case, not spermatozoa—but something like an egg. He would choose pregnant women preferentially, and they survived better. That made sense. Women who were with child went through many changes that allowed them to carry a foetus—really, another animal—not only without casting it out, but providing nourishment through the umbilical cord. Andrew wondered: did the tiny creatures latch onto the cord and steal food from the withering foetus?

Ingenious, so far as it went. But what if the mother was not pregnant? What if—

Then Andrew recalled Mister Juke, and the one thing that Dr. Bergstrom had let slip.

Mister Juke was a hermaphrodite.

And that drew his consideration to Jason Thistledown, and the night he had in the quarantine.

“You ever hear,” he finally asked, “of the Faerie King lying with a man that way?”

She did not answer that question but looked at Andrew, her fingers drawing into a loose fist on the table, and asked: “So can you help Loo or not, Dr. Andrew?”

Andrew said he could—although he was less sure of that than he was of his own desire for a serious look under the blanket—a look at one of those things alive . And for the second time since he’d fled Eliada, Andrew felt himself fill up with a terrible shame.

He made himself smile around it—pushed that shame down, and to make sure it stayed there said again:

“I can help her. Perhaps.”

Andrew rose early in the morning, and took stock of both his equipment and his circumstance. He had not, since departing Eliada, done a close inventory of the physician’s bag, so he did so now and was pleased to find the bag well-equipped if not precisely modern.