Talp Hunt

By Nancy Kress

Reincarnation again.

After this second story on the same theme, people began asking me what I had been in my previous lives. (Most of them seemed to have been interesting and dramatic figures. No one ever thinks he was a feeble-witted chimney sweep.) But this story, like WITH THE ORIGINAL CAST, is a thought experiment, the working out of a possibility that the writer does not necessarily believe could happen, but still finds intriguing.

Terry Carr made several valuable suggestions for the revision of this story.

Just after sunrise, I bring down the talp. It is feeding on the tender green shoots along the creek, its soft boneless tail swishing mindlessly in the water when the stone from my sling strikes it cleanly along the side of its head. It flops over into the creek and water rises along its side and mats the green fur. Picking it up by the tail, I swing it a little to shake the water off and study it carefully, turning the head from side to side to see more clearly the place where the green of sea water shades into the green of cale leaf and then into wet moss.

It is not the same one.

This talp is paler, younger, with a shorter snout. From behind the tree, the sunlight filtered green by leaves hanging over the creek, I was sure it was the talp I have tracked every morning for … I was sure. I have watched it amble from its hole by the sea cliffs, eat the young shoots, slide aimlessly through die forest. I was sure. This was the same talp.

Only it is not.

Suddenly I swing the talp against the cale tree. The green head caves in over one eye, and bones shudder and crack. The foul smell the talp uses against predators is released and fills the air. Over and over again I smash the carcass, until the cale bark is soggy and bits of bloody green fur sticks to my arms and breasts. I smash the talp until it is not recognizable as a talp, and then I leave it and walk into the forest, breathing heavily, not looking back at the mistaken talp, not looking back at the lost morning, not looking back.

Halfway across the clearing, I whistle softly, and the ralum-alloy door on the hut slides open. Inside, it is dim and cool. The mother lies on the floor near the gray bulk of the Colonizer. She is folded over on her self, knees to forehead, keening softly, and the brother crouches near her, naked and miserable. “Mother,” he whispers, over and over. “Mother, Mother, Mother …” I know that he has been there all night and all morning, and I look away from her. Although we are the same age, he is so thin, except for his face. His face is round, with curved cheeks and eyes so wide that suddenly I think of the talp I have smashed and then I cannot look at the brother either.

“Mother, Mother, Mother …”

“Who is she?” I whisper.

“Mother, Mother …”

He will not answer me until the mother’s bad time is over. I wait rigidly, gripping the two fish I caught after leaving the talp. A little water drips from the fish to the floor of the hut, and the floor disinfects and dries the puddle. I do not move; the mother’s keening holds me still. Slowly the keening lessens, but not all at once. She lies still for a moment, then suddenly jerks and looks around, her eyes unseeing. Then the keening again. Every time her body jerks, the brother puts out his hand, careful not to touch her but only to stroke the air above her head, murmuring, “Mother, Mother, Mother.” The mother glances at him, but it is impossible to tell what she sees. The times when she is no one are always the worst.

“Mother, Mother, Mother …”

The keening becomes softer; she is starting to sleep. Sometimes, however, sleep can take hours. My knees hurt from being locked in waiting, but I dare not shift position. The spaces between jerks become longer, and in one of them the brother impatiently waves at me to leave the hut. Released, I go gratefully, my legs weak. I head across the clearing to the creek, wash the fish, and blow on the embers in my fire circle.

I cannot watch the mother’s bad times anymore. Once—but once there were not so many bad times. For whole days at a time, the mother was Hwang Ho or Uba or Gianelli or Karen or Colette. Even Colette was better. When she was Uba, she would sit with the brother and me in the sunshine, nuzzling us and cracking nuts for us the whole afternoon. When she was Hwang Ho, we would all plant shoots, scratching with long sticks where the creek lay flat and squishy over the warm ground. When she was Karen, she sat with us on the flat rock by the creek and told us how the creek flowed to the sea and the sea flowed to another creek and up that creek was the City, the only City in the world.

She has not been Karen or Uba or Hwang Ho for a long time.

The brother said once, not looking at me, that it might not be this creek after all that flowed to the sea that flowed to the City. It might be another creek, another City, another time. It might be anywhere. But he is wrong. I know he is wrong. It is this creek, this sea, this time. It must be, because although the brother says he remembers nothing, I remember the City. I remember—

“The fish smells good,” the brother says timidly, coming up behind me. There are shadows around his eyes. He looks at me sideways, crouching a little; I know the look. He is sorry for his impatient wave in the hut, afraid that I am hurt at being sent away, ashamed that his choice to be the one endlessly crouching by the mother has shut me out. Sorry, afraid, ashamed—the brother is always sorry or afraid or ashamed, while he spends with the mother those long hours I cannot make myself do. I scowl at him savagely, and touch his hand.

“The fish is ready. You have the middle part.”

“Oh, no. I ate already—out of the Colonizer. You take the middle, sister.”

“You,” I say, very slowly and clearly.

The brother looks longingly at the fish, lying golden in the ralum-alloy pan. “I’ll take the middle to the mother. That’s what she always liked—before.”

I look away, stony. The brother moves closer; I can feel him by my elbow, Sorry, afraid, ashamed.

“Sister—”

“I don’t care what you do with the fish.”

“I just—”

“I don’t care.”

“I’ll eat the middle,” the brother says. He picks it off the pan, gingerly; it is very hot. As he eats it he smiles, first in pleading, but then with pleasure, and I feel my face unclench.

“Is it good?”

“It’s good.”

“The mother can eat the middle of the other fish,” I say, and he smiles at me. It is like Big Moon coming up in the sky.

“Sister, do you remember when we had that picnic with her, before? It was when Big Moon and Little Moon were close together—remember? She was being Gianelli and we were being Santo and Domenico, and we had some fruit saved up in the Colonizer, and you cooked that talp you—”

“No.”

“Yes, you remember! She told us about that time with the prince, and the city with all the bridges, and—”

“It wasn’t the City,” I say.

“She said there was a city and—”

“It wasn’t the City!” I reach over and grab his arm. Red spots grow under my fingers. The brother looks frightened, holding a piece of fish uselessly between us. I drop his arm.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But that was a different city she was telling us about that time, don’t you remember? Roma. That wasn’t our City, the City we came here from. Don’t you remember that City at all? Can’t you remember … anything?”

The brother shakes his head. There are still red spots on his arm where I grabbed him. “You tell me,” he whispers.

But I cannot. I have never told it. There is so little to tell, and if I tell it, it will be even littler to anyone who has not remembered it and dreamed it and seen it as much as I. Just one room, one person. No, two persons, because the mother was there, too, although I can’t remember who the mother was being. But the mother wasn’t important. I was sitting on the floor, not a ralum-alloy floor like the hut, but a floor soft and green as talp fur, shading from sea water to cale leaf to wet moss. The room was filled with shaded light that was not sunlight. Someone who was not the mother or the brother picked me up and held me close. His face bristled with black, thick hair, and I squealed. He whispered, “Alea. My precious little daughter Alea,” and then tossed me into the air, over and over, and I laughed while the green floor far below jiggled and danced, rushing toward me and away, toward me and away, full of green light.

“You tell me,” the brother whispers again, and I stare at him, dumb. If I tell him, he will either remember the room— or he will not. He will know that I am Alea—or he will not. But I am Alea. With him, I am being the sister, but I am Alea, and if he does not remember the greenlit room—if I tell him and he does not remember—

I cannot tell him.

I look at the ground. In a moment, the brother says, “I will take the fish to the mother now.” His voice is sorry, and afraid, and ashamed. I bend my head and hug my knees in the hot sunshine, as if I were cold.

“She’s gone! The mother is gone!” The brother runs from the hut, hot fish on a flat rock still in one hand.

“Gone? She can’t be gone!” I say, but of course she can. Where? Who? The brother stands trembling; the fish slides off into the dirt.

“Go search the cliffs!” Where? Who? Last time it was the cliffs, she was Maria Torres, she tried—

“No, wait, I’ll do the cliffs. You go to the fruit grove, see if she’s Uba. Then try the beach—remember when she was the fisherman? If she’s not there … if she’s not there, come back here. Run!”

I dash toward the cliffs, looking back over my shoulder. The brother stands still, trembling. “Run!” I scream, and he starts to run.

The cliffs are a long run from the hut, where the sea curves back around the land and the forest thins. The waves are much higher there, smashing against the rocks with a booming sound I cannot hear over my own heart. Can the mother run this far? But if she is being Maria Torres, she is running in terror, chased by those vicious animals she calls … What are they called? I cannot remember. It is almost the worst when she is Maria Torres, running blindly, chased by men shouting she is la bruja, and by those animals—los perros, yes—who want to tear her apart. Chased until it was better, the first time, to throw herself off the cliffs. If the mother is being Maria Torres again …

I try to run faster, stumble on a root, and fall. Blood fills my mouth. I force myself up, already running. Pain tears at my left side. Sweat streams into my eyes, blinding me so that when I reach the mother, I nearly run past without seeing her.

She is standing near the cliffs, placidly picking up stones, and I see at once that she is not being Maria Torres. Who? Leaning against a cale tree, heaving for breath, I try to think who might be picking up stones. Uba? It could be Uba. But no, the mother is walking fully erect, looking thoughtful; it could not be Uba. Uba walks bent over, dangling her arms, her mouth gaping. Not Uba.

Who?

“Carl, look at this,” the mother says. She sounds very happy. She comes over to me, holding out a rock. I bend with a sudden cramp and spit blood. “Just look at it. The ore content is phenomenal, and it’s right on the surface. Extraction wouldn’t even be a problem!”

“Mother—”

“Surface mining all the way,” the mother says happily. “Even in this gravity, it would be profitable—what they’d lose in shipping, they’d save in extraction. And with z-post less than three light-years for processing—!”

“Come with me, Mother. It’s all right.” Slowly I circle, trying to get between her and the cliffs before she stops thinking I am “Carl” and starts thinking I am someone else, someone chasing her with los perros, someone trying to—

The mother’s head snaps up and her eyes grow terrified. I throw myself forward and grab. But she is too quick; she sprints backward and I sprawl on the rocks, something twisting painfully in one ankle. The mother screams and backs away, her hair whipping back from her face. Behind her, the sea pounds. I cannot reach her in time, she will jump from the cliffs like Maria Torres the first time and lie mangled and smashed as the talp in the green light, she will—

But at the very edge of the cliff, the mother stops and turns around. Silhouetted against the sea below, she is a dark shape, suddenly still and graceful, one knee bent forward and the opposite hip rounded. She raises her arms and laughs softly, low, in the back of her throat. Behind her, the sea crashes on the rocks, smelling of salt. Her laugh is the laugh of the picnic by the creek, of the dark man in the greenlit room.

“Andre,” the mother says softly, licking her lips. “Cheri. Viens ici.”

I move toward her, dragging one foot.

“Viens à ta Colette.” She closes one eye and smiles, waggling her fingers.

“Mother, come here.”

“Ah, Andre!” she says, and then she is on me, wrapping her arms around my back and kissing my mouth. I roll with her away from the cliff and she laughs, a laugh from the back of her throat. Away from the edge, I try to break her grip, but her arms are locked behind my back and the laughing mouth is pressed to my hair, pulling at it with sharp white teeth.

“Andre, Andre, je t’aime,” she laughs, and I break one arm free and hit her in the mouth.

“Alea!” I scream. “I am Alea! Alea!”

Blood trickles from her mouth. She goes on laughing, calling, “Andre, Andre.” I hit her again. I am sobbing, “Alea, Alea,” but I can hardly hear myself over the mother’s laughing and the screaming of the sea birds and the crashing of the sea, until the brother comes and pulls me off her and abruptly she stops laughing and starts being somebody else. Neither of us knows who.

I will not sleep in the hut. The brother does not try to change my mind. It was he who brought the mother back to the hut, staggering under her weight while she keened and stumbled in one of the nameless bad times. It was he who pulled the Bubble out from the Colonizer and wrapped it around her so that it could spray the mist that would heal her cuts and scratches and the place on her mouth where I hit her. I watched from the door. The brother looked up at me, once, but I do not think he saw me.

I will never sleep in the hut again.

I lie near the creek, wrapped in my blanket, planning how the brother can take the blanket every morning and put it in the Colonizer to be cleaned and disinfected. If it rains, I will go into the forest, under the cale trees. I will make a sort of hut of leaves and branches, away from the mother’s hut, where she does not go. I stare up at the Big Moon rising from the sea, and the brother comes and sits down next to me.

“Who was she?” the brother asks. I see that he needs to know; he will keep the name like a colored stone, turning it over and over, running his fingers through the pile of colored, useless names.

“Colette.”

“Only Colette?”

“No. Colette when I hit her. Before that, Maria Torres. With los perros. Before that, someone else, I’m not sure who, maybe Karen. She sounded like Karen. Only I didn’t understand all her words, only some of them.”

“Who were you?”

“Andre. Before that, one of the men chasing her with los perros. And before that, someone called ‘Carl.’”

The brother sits up straight. “‘Carl.’ Are you sure?”

“Yes. Why?”

“She says the name ‘Carl’ sometimes, in bad times. Who is Carl?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Who is she being when you have to be Carl?”

“I don’t know.”

“But when you—”

“I said I don’t know!” I shout, and the brother turns his head away. In the light from Big Moon, his cheek is round and pale. Sorry, afraid, ashamed. But he does not care who Carl is, who I have to be when I am Carl. But I am not Carl. I am Alea, and now I see why I do not tell the brother about Alea and the greenlit room. He would only ask who the mother was being when I was being Alea.

I roll over on my face. After a while, I hear the brother get up and walk back toward the hut. Big Moon shines in the waters of the creek, wavery and silent, changing as the water flows so that now it is this shape, now that. The trees and sweet grasses murmur around me. I whisper to them, “Alea. My precious little daughter Alea,” but they only rustle in the wind, wordless, remembering nothing.

The day I find the red globe, the mother is Hwang Ho. She is better; she has been Hwang Ho for days now, planting green shoots and cleaning fish and talking Hwang Ho’s words to the brother, who answers back with the words he knows and helps with the hoeing. He is being Hwang Lung and is very happy. I hunt talp, searching far inland where the forest climbs the sides of steep hills, coming back to the hut after sunset to store the meat in the Colonizer and let the Bubble mist my cuts and scratches. The brother and I talk very little.

The red globe lies on the ground near the small waterfall, high in the mountains. When I first see it, I think it is a flower or a stone, but it is too bright for either. Splashing across the falls, I pick it up. Smooth and seamless as the ralum-alloy hut, it fills my palm, glowing redly. Despite the glow, the globe is not hot; it feels cool and heavy as I wait for it to do something. It does nothing.

Still, it must be from the City. Where else could it come from? “There is only the City and the forest, the City and the forest,” the mother said once. “In the whole empty world, only the City and the forest.” Who was she when she said that? I cannot remember. But it must be this world she meant, because here is this heavy red globe, lying in my palm. Looking at it, I feel my chest begin to pound, slow and heavy.

All the way down the mountain, I clutch the cool red glow from the City.

“What is it?” the brother asks. He keeps his hands behind his back, not touching the globe.

“I don’t know. But look, it doesn’t come from here. It must be from the City.”

“How could it be from the City?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know how long it’s been up there. But I’m going to show it to the mother. Maybe she knows what it is.”

“No!”

I stare at him. He backs away from the glowing red ball, his round face fierce. “You don’t show it to the mother! She doesn’t need to see it!”

“She might know what it is!”

“It will only hurt her!” the brother shouts, but he cannot keep the shouts strong. They trail off into whispers, and the brother’s fierceness collapses. “Don’t show it to her,” he whispers. “Please don’t show it to her.”

Before I can answer, the red globe goes out. In my hand, it changes from bright red shining in the sunlight to the color of wet stone, gray and dull. The brother and I stare at it, too surprised to move, until the brother points behind me, gibbering. I turn slowly, and in the great slowness I suddenly feel as if I am falling. But it is another red globe, a huge one, that is falling, falling above the trees more slowly than anything can fall. It cannot fall that slowly, but it does, until it touches the ground near the hut and the red goes out and then there are two ralum-alloy huts in the clearing, side by side. The brother whimpers, and drops to his knees. The door of one of the huts opens and two figures come out, a man and a woman. In the sunlight, the woman’s breasts cast little bobbing shadows, but it is at the man that I stare so hard my eyes blur and the two huts fuse into one. But the man is blond, his face round and hairless.

“Karen,” he says. “My God—Karen.”

“No, Carl,” the woman says. “Look how young she is. It can’t be.”

“No, of course not,” the man says shakily. He passes a hand over his eyes. “Of course not. Harol? Davey?”

Inside my ears is a rushing sound, a clean bright roar like a high wind. Karen—he is looking for Karen. He knows the mother when she is being Karen. He must be from the City, he must know the greenlit room, he must know—

“The shot,” he says unsteadily, and points to the dull globe in my hand. The brother, still on his knees, draws behind me.

“Carl, you’re scaring them,” the woman says. She bends down and looks at the brother. “Don’t be frightened, either of you. We won’t hurt you. We’re just looking for someone, three someones, and we sent out scattershot large-life signals days ago”—she points to the now-dull globe—”to see if they might be on this island. I’m Tina O’Connell and this is Carl Biscardi. He’s looking for his sister Karen and her two children. They—”

Suddenly I laugh. I cannot help it—they are here! They have come for us! They will take us back to the City, to the black-bearded man and the green room. They know who all of us are being, the mother and the brother and I. They know. I pull on the brother’s arm and step forward, laughing again. Tears fill my eyes, and I cannot help them either. Holding out the globe—the “shot”—I drag the brother to his feet and toward the man being the mother’s brother.

“Alea! I am Alea! This is the brother, Alea’s brother! And Alea’s mother is asleep there, in the hut!” And I laugh because for a single flying moment I cannot remember which hut she is in, which hut was here first, of the two that look so much the same. The clear bright rushing sings in my ears like water.

But the man Carl is frowning. “The girl twin—”

“Carl, listen,” the woman being Tina says. “Their mother is in the hut. You check there.”

He starts for a hut, but suddenly the brother is there first, whistling open the door. Through it I see him, standing protectively over the mother while the man Carl enters. The door closes.

“Is she—” the woman Tina asks, but then she stops; I see her looking for words. “Is your mother—does she always know who she is?”

“Oh yes,” I say, and laugh again, the laugh tumbling out on top of the words. It is easy to laugh, easy to talk, after so many days of silence. “She’s Hwang Ho or Uba or Gianelli or Karen or Colette or Maria Torres or Abdul. She always knows.”

The woman draws a deep breath. “And then you—”

“I am Alea.” Around us the sunlight shimmers and sparkles, and in the pause of the woman’s voice I hear the sea. It is singing, laughing: Alea, Alea, Alea. The woman takes my hand. Her voice is gentle.

“What can you remember … Alea, from before your mother brought you to live here? Do you remember New Roanoke? Do you remember your Uncle Carl at all?”

“No. But I remember a room filled with green light, and I remember—” But I stop, suddenly shy. My precious little Alea.

“Listen. I’m going to try to tell you what I know, what Carl told me. I don’t know how much of it you’ll understand, but I’ll try.” She pushes her hands up through her hair, frowning. “You and your brother are twins—two babies born at the same time. Carl and Karen, your mother, were partners in a mining survey team. That means that you go to other … other worlds and look for certain very rare metals, for ore—”

“Ore,” I repeat. One of the strange words the mother said on the cliffs. The woman being Tina stops and waits, but I say nothing.

“When Karen became pregnant with you twins, she decided to stay here—not this place, but on this world, in the city of New Roanoke—for the birth, and I became Carl’s partner looking for ore. Now this part is a little hard. There is a time difference. Only a little while passed on our ship, but it’s been ten years here. Do you understand? When Carl and I went offworld, you and Davey were just walking. But when he got back, we found out that Karen had had herself eternalized. That means—” The woman stops and turns her hands palms up, looking at me helplessly.

“It’s hard to explain to you. Karen had been to so many worlds, looking for ore … not just different places like the city, Alea: different worlds. She and Carl stayed together, but everyone else they had known, their parents and friends and everyone, was not only worlds away but centuries away, because of the time differences on ship that I just told you about. Karen had been prospecting for years, but on all the worlds she landed, time had gone by much faster. Everyone she knew, everwhere, was dead. Do you see, Alea? Karen didn’t belong anywhere, anytime. She began to have bad periods of depression, and to cry a lot, and her pregnancy seemed to make both of those worse. She didn’t know where she fit, and after a while that made her wonder even who she was. Worlds changed, time changed; Karen felt she couldn’t be sure of anything, and she wanted something to hang onto. Can you understand that?”

The woman peers at me closely. I will not look at her. Inside my chest, my heart thuds so hard I am afraid she can hear it. Something to hang onto.

She sighs and goes on. “The thing that Karen wanted had to be big, big enough to take in all those worlds and all that time. A secure sense of identity big enough to dwarf all that she had already lost. So she had herself eternalized. That means she had an operation—had something done to her head—so that now she remembers all the people she ever was. In other lives. She remembers her entire past. Only it was a new operation, and a dangerous one, and Karen was one of the first. Carl and I found out when we got back that she had been eternalized and that she was one of the ones who can’t deal with all that past. Some people can, but a few, already disoriented, just can’t. The past is supposed to be merely memories, but instead Karen gets—she gets lost in it, in her mind, like getting lost in the forest. There’s too much of it for her. Do you understand?”

“Eternalized.” Somewhere I hear the word in the mother’s voice, with sobs and tears. She is grabbing my shoulder and begging me to understand, to … But the picture is gone, scattered like the reflection of Big Moon in the creek. I cross my arms across my chest; the wind from the sea is suddenly cold.

“When Carl and I got back, Karen had taken you and your brother away from the city, no one knew where. At the hospital, they said she took a reconnaissance ship equipped with a Colonizer and just vanished. We’ve been looking for months, sending out the scattershot signals, but God it’s a big continent, and … Do you understand at all what I’m trying to say, Harol? Your mother is supposed to be just one person all the time, just Karen. Only what’s in this life is supposed to be real to her. We can take her back to New Roanoke and have the eternalizing blocked again, and she’ll be one person, Karen, all the time.”

One person all the time. She would not run for the cliffs, or plant shoots by the creek, or nuzzle the brother and me in the hot sunshine while picking bugs from our hair. She would not be Colette, she would not try to—only Karen. And I would not be los perros or Hwang Lan or Andre. I would be Alea, only Alea. But—

“Why did you call me ‘Harol’?”

The door of the hut opens and the mother comes out, with the brother on one side and the man being Carl on the other. The mother is Uba: she walks bent over, jaw gaping, grunting softly. One hand brushes the ground; the other is fastened in the brother’s hair. Tears lie on Carl’s cheeks.

“She’s very bad. Tina, get Harol and Davey into the ship.”

“Carl—”

“She’s become just—God!” He takes the mother’s hand and pulls her gently toward the ship. She ambles slowly, without protest, blinking in the sunlight. The brother presses against her, his eyes round and frightened. Beside me the woman Tina moves forward and touches my shoulder.

Something is wrong, something without words, without names. The woman Tina’s face, and the man being Carl who keeps calling me ‘Harol,’—Suddenly, for no reason, I think of the talp I had tracked for days, the talp I had killed for being the wrong one.

“I am Alea,” I say loudly and slowly. Even Carl stops and turns. “I am Alea. There was a room filled with green light that is not sunlight. The floor is soft and green, like talp fur. A man picked me up and threw me in the air. A big, dark man. His face had black, prickly hair on it. He threw me up and caught me. He said, ‘Alea, my precious little daughter Alea.’ That is what he said. I am Alea.”

The four of them look at me, silent. The brother looks the way he does when the mother begins to be someone new, someone he has not seen before. The man Carl does not really see me; even looking straight at me, he see the mother, and the interruption I am making getting the mother into the “ship.” The woman being Tina stares at me with so many shades in her face that suddenly I am afraid of her most of all.

“I am Alea!”

Beneath me my legs tremble. I make the trembling legs carry me up to the mother, and I push my face close to hers, to the dull eyes that blink at me in confusion.

“I am Alea!”

The mother does not speak. She tips her head to one side and studies me, then lets go of the brother and raises her arm. I see it come up slowly, as slowly as the hut falling out of the sky. She puts her hand on my head; the woman being Tina breathes in sharply. For a moment, something gleams deep in the mother’s eyes and I almost think she is someone else, not Uba at all, someone who remembers herself all the way through and so me as well. Then the mother’s hand parts my hair and begins looking through it for grubs to eat.

Savagely I knock the hand away. “Alea!” I scream, and hit the mother in the face. She crumples to the ground. Carl grabs me and shakes me so hard my teeth rattle.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? She’s sick, goddammit, and I won’t have some— You lay a hand again on—is this what the two of you—you do that again and I’ll whip you so hard you won’t sit down for a week! She’s your mother, dammit! And your name is Harol, not this ‘Alea’ rot, and you can just learn it! Harol! And your father died before you were born, so you can just forget this black-bearded stuff—”

“Carl!” Tina cries. “Don’t!”

“—and help your mother get well instead of feeding her more lies! Your father was blond, and you never laid eyes on him! And if you ever again—just who the hell do you think you are, young lady, hitting your mother when she’s—just who the hell do you think you are! Who?”

Who-who-who goes the bright hard wind, rushing past my ears as I run for the forest. The trees close around me, blind, and I cannot see any of the shouting people any more.

I see the City, far below. It shades from sea wave to cale leaf to wet moss, and the light of Big Moon slides over it with water. Someone tosses me into the air, and then I am falling, falling down through the city made of green talp fur, bloody and mangled with its foul scent choking my mouth, and I keep falling through the bloody fur and falling and falling…until I am caught by the voice of the man being Carl, rising up from the clearing below.

“Listen! What was that?”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“Like a cry. No, a sort of choking,” the man Carl says. They are far below me, two heads bobbing in the sea of green bushes. I lean against the trunk of the cale tree, pushing away the dream. The branch under me shudders, but the man being Carl and the woman being Tina do not look up. In a day and night of searching, they have not looked up. I shake my head to clear it; the leaves around me dance and blur, as if in a high wind. I have not eaten since yesterday, and my head feels shivery as the cale leaves.

“I didn’t hear anything,” the woman Tina repeats.

Carl raises both his hands to his mouth and shouts, “A-leee-a!” I hold my breath.

“Damn it, where is she? Don’t look at me like that, Tina!”

“Like what?”

“Like it’s all my fault!”

“It is all your fault,” Tina says coldly. They never look up.

“How’s Karen?”

“Still out. I gave her another hypodermic. I gave one to Davey, too. He wouldn’t take his eyes off her.”

“She needs hospitalization,” Carl says, and his voice sounds like a branch ready to snap. “Now. And that brat—”

“She’s not a brat,” Tina says. “She doesn’t know what she is.”

I have never shot my sling straight down before. I reach for it carefully, rustling no leaves, and fit in a stone. Their heads below look like two pelts, blond and silky.

“You of all people ought to understand her,” Tina says. “She’s just like Karen.”

“Karen’s sick! She had that damn operation! Harol didn’t!”

“Alea, not Harol. And what made Karen have the operation in the first place? She wanted to know who she was. She wanted some anchor to the past, some secure identity. She wanted—”

“I don’t think you know her that well,” Carl says coldly, and turns his back to her. I pull back the sling. Tina grabs Carl’s shoulder and yanks him around.

“I know you that well! You charge in here and bluster and cry to try to make everything with Karen exactly the way it was when we left ten years ago. Karen wallowed and brooded and finally hooked her mind to a bunch of wires and chemicals. Well, Alea invents. She’s invented herself a past and a father and a name. You’re all the same, all three of you—all trying to find some sure way to control the world, so that you can define yourself by it. Did you think that just because Alea grew up in this primitive camp that she wouldn’t feel that need, too? Or didn’t you think at all? God, Carl, at least try to see past Karen and look at Alea for a minute. She’s looking for some anchor in time. But the past won’t help! It can’t, because our relationship to it is too damn complicated to pin down that easily!”

The man being Carl walks away from her. I try to pull back my sling but my hand shakes; the tree under me is riddled and trembly, as if it might snap. Not even when the mother was being Colette did she say such terrible things; not even when she was Maria Torres was she so terrifying. “Inventing … the past won’t help… .” Terrible, dangerous things, mangled things. I will not listen to them, I do not want to look at them. They will not let me be Alea, not even the woman being Tina would let me be Alea, she said I invented … I pull back my sling. She would not let me be Alea. I would have to be Harol, someone I do not know. They would smash Alea forever, just as they would smash Hwang Ho and Uba and Gianelli and Maria Torres. They would smash Alea. I aim the sling.

The rushing fills my ears. Around me the leaves spin, scrambling and crying. I slip sideways and grab at the cale trunk. The stone falls out of the sling and bounces down the tree, hitting branches and leaves until it falls to the ground, and the man and woman look up.

“There she is!” the man cries. He starts toward the tree, his face tilted upward, faintly green in the light sifted through the trees. I stand up, steadying myself with one hand on the trunk. Below, the forest floor is green, shading from sea water to cale leaf to wet moss. The leaves jiggle and dance. The man below strides toward me, his arm raised. He is directly under me, waiting. He is not the mother or the brother. His face tips up, calling to me, calling something I cannot hear in the rush of wind, in the strange light. I jump forward, laughing, onto the air and the waiting arms below, and the floor rushes toward me, full of green light.

Big Moon rises over the City. I watch it from my window, every night when there are no clouds. In the next room, the mother is cooking. She is being Karen. Across the room the brother, practicing reading on his tutor, is being Davey. Every once in a while, he glances at me over the top of his machinery, his face creased, and I think for a moment that he is going to warn me away from the cliffs.

I have sat here every night for months now.

Tomorrow Tina O’Connell will come to see us again, but this next visit will be different. She will bring Carl home from the hospital. That is why the brother gives me those worried looks. He is afraid that when I see Carl being a man who had to get new legs because I smashed the old ones, it will make me cry the way I did before. But the brother doesn’t know about the paper.

I found it in the park. I cannot read very well yet—although I read better than the brother—but the paper has only three long words, and one of them I could hardly mistake. The paper is in the pocket of my jumpsuit while I watch Big Moon. The tutor calls Big Moon “Ramses,” but of course it does not matter what they call it. It is still Big Moon. The paper crackles when I move, like wind in trees.

WHO ARE YOU?

Do you know, REALLY? Most of us do not, thanks to outdated and repressive laws that kill new discoveries. But you can know who you are, who you have always been. Eternalizing can give you a whole new sense of yourself—your real, whole self.

Join those of us who know. …

“The past never helps anyway!” Tina O’Connell screamed when she lifted me off Carl’s legs. But that is stupid. It is now that doesn’t help. Now I do not know who the mother is when she is being Karen. She makes up Karen every day. She is never Uba or Gianelli or Hwang Ho or Maria Torres. She is never the people I knew all my life. Those people are gone. Karen found her past and then she gave it back, but she gave back mine, too. I do not know her.

Nor do I know who is that man in the picture that Tina and Karen keep showing me, the picture of the thin blond man they say was my father. He is dead, they say, long ago, on another world. He is a stranger.

Even the brother is strange when he is being Davey, squinting at his tutor and calling Big Moon “Ramses.” He is different, wavery. I do not know who he is in this wavery now, and I don’t think he knows, either. Davey and Karens—they neither of them know what talp they are following. They track it everyday, and never ask if it is the right one.

But I ask. I must know what talp I follow, and if I smash the wrong ones in the following—then that can’t be helped. I will smash them. I will go away from Karen and Davey and Carl and Tina—watchful Tina—and I will take whatever risks are necessary, do whatever is necessary to find Alea and Alea’s greenlit room and Alea’s black-bearded man, because they are somewhere. Not now, perhaps, but somewhere.

They must be there.

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