Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

“There was an Emily Dickinson, too,” Simon said. “Yes. There was.”

Simon said, “I have”

“What do you have, son?”

“I’m not your son.”

“Sorry. Figure of speech. What do you have? Tell me.”

“I have this sense of a missing part. Some sort of, I don’t know. Engagement. Aliveness. Catareen calls it stroth.”

“Go on.”

“I feel like biologicals just wallow in it. I mean it falls over them like rain, and I’m walking through the world in a space suit. I can see everything perfectly, but I don’t quite connect with it.”

“That’s very interesting.”

“Frankly, I was hoping for a little more from you than that.”

“It’s the poetry, isn’t it? All those conjurings and all that praise roiling around in your circuits. Your poor synapses aren’t quite up to it, I don’t suppose.”

The seizing up started again. No, it was the new sensation, the floaty, sleeplike electrified thing.

Simon said, “I am exposed… cut by bitter and poisoned hail.”

“Are you all right?” Emory asked. “No. Something’s happening to me.”

“What?”

“Lately I have these strange sensations. Like when my antiaggression override kicks in but different. Softer or something.”

“I’ve always wondered if actual emotions might start springing up in you. If your connections might start firing, given the proper stimuli.”

Simon said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

“You know,” Emory said, “I could probably do a little more work on you. If you and the others want to come with us, I could do some tinkering en route. There’s no time now, but there’ll be plenty of time during the trip. There’ll be lots and lots of time.”

“You think you could modify me?” Simon asked. “I’d be glad to give it a shot.”

“What do you think you could do?”

“I’d have to get in there and poke around a little. I could probably override a few commands, program out the aversion to violence. I suspect that inhibits your neurals. I could also enhance a few of the pathways in your cerebral cortex. Though I must say, things seem to be happening on their own. It might be best to just wait and see what develops.”

Simon stood facing the farm and the silver spaceship. He said, “Achild said-”

Emory joined in. They said in unison, “ What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.”

When they returned to the farm, Othea was waiting for them outside the barn door. She said to Emory as they approached, “Please don’t wander off like that. Not today.”

“Simon and I had a few things to discuss.”

Othea aimed a brief orange stare at Simon. She said to Emory, “There’s a question about the launch coordinates. I don’t think it’s anything, really, but Ruth is getting out of her depth in there. She needs you to talk her through it.”

“Glad to,” Emory said. “Simon, please excuse me.”

Othea continued staring at Simon. She said, “Do you know who Catareen Callatura is?”

“I know who she is to me,” Simon answered.

“She was a member of the resistance on Nourthea. The kings, as you may know, rule absolutely. They take everything the people are able to grow or build.”

“Catareen rebelled?”

“She was part of a band of women who held back half their harvest. She was a member of the first group, and they organized others. Didn’t she tell you?”

“She doesn’t tell me anything. I assumed it was a Nadian custom.”

“They executed the women’s husbands and children.”

“What?”

“Publicly. Then they banished the women to Earth.”

“Catareen was deported.”

“She really hasn’t told you anything, has she?”

“Nothing at all.”

“There’s something else.”

“What?”

“I’m going to tell you, because I think you might be able to help her if you know. She’s at the end of her life cycle.”

“What?”

“I was surprised to see her at all. I’m certain all the others are dead. She must be, oh, well over one hundred years old.”

“She’s old?”

“Extremely. We age differently. We don’t decline gradually. We are vital and productive right up until the end, and then we deteriorate quite rapidly. There was a fish called a salmon, I believe. It’s a little like that for us.”

“And Catareen is dying?”

“Oh, yes. I knew it the moment I saw her. Her coloring. She’s turned that brilliant green.”

“How long will it take?”

“It’s difficult to say, exactly. It could be a week. It could even be a full month.”

Simon went back to the house. He mounted the stairs and entered the bedroom that had been given to Catareen. She lay on the narrow white bed. She appeared to be sleeping.

“Hey,” he said. Not as gently as he’d intended to.

She opened her eyes. She did not reply.

“You’re dying?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re fucking dying?"

“I told.”

“Well, yes, technically you did. But a few more details would have been helpful, don’t you think?”

“No.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Dying,” she said.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Dying,” she said again.

“Is that why you keep going catatonic?”

“To keep energy.”

He went and stood at her bedside. She looked so small against the white sheet.

He said, “They killed your husband and children back on Nadia.”

“Grandchildren also.”

“And they sent you here.”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes. “Catareen,” he said.

No response. Her head might have been a stone, carved with lines for mouth and eyes, two holes for nostrils. Only the nostrils betrayed the fact that this was a living being. They fluttered with her breath. They revealed their pallid hints of inner brightness, like circles of illuminated jade.

“Catareen,” he said, “I don’t know what to do for you. I don’t know what to say to you. I feel like I don’t know anything about you. Anything at all.”

She did not open her eyes. The conversation was over, then.

Later, at dinner, Simon and Luke were introduced to the rest of the group. Luke appeared to be recovered. Catareen seemed to prefer remaining in bed, as far as anyone could interpret her preferences.

They all assembled for dinner at a long table set under the big tree to the immediate east of the house. There were seventeen of them: twelve adults and five children; eight Nadians and nine humans.

Othea sat at one end of the table, beside Emory. She held in her arms the eighteenth member an infant, half Nadian and half human.

Simon had never seen such a being before, though he’d heard the rumors. The baby’s skin was the color of a celery stalk. She (it was a she) had the big, round Nadian eyes and the agitated Nadian nostrils, but in her the eyes were a creamy coffee brown and the nose an Emoryish minibeak upon which the nostrils perched like sea urchins on a sliver of rock. She had ears, perfectly human but dwarfed, like tiny shells. Atop her smooth green head stood a silky fury of fine white-gold hair.

Emory said to the others, “We seem to have acquired a couple of new members. It is my great honor to introduce Simon and Luke and to express my hope that they will accept my invitation to accompany us all on our journey to Paumanok.”

There was scattered applause and a general murmur of greeting. In truth, Simon did not find the company especially promising. The humans were for the most part rather seedy-looking. One woman (she would prove to be the Ruth who was having trouble with the launch coordinates) was sallow and overweight, wearing a battered sun hat and what appeared to be strands of little silver bells around her neck. Another, a man of indeterminate age with a great rust-colored curl of mustache and a chin slightly smaller than an apricot, bobbled his big square head and said, “Welcome, friends, welcome, friends, welcome, friends.” The Nadians were more restrained in their dress and their vocabulary of gestures, but they, too, seemed to possess some vague aspect of off-centeredness. The two females were grim and silent. The males, three of them, had an overeager look uncommon among Nadians. They sat together, whispered among themselves, and broke into occasional fits of high-pitched laughter, during which they pounded one another on their scrawny backs and slapped their slender palms together.