The Flowers

of Aulit Prison (v1.1)

Nancy Kress, 1996

My sister lies sweetly on the bed across the room from mine. She lies on her back, fingers lightly curled, her legs stretched straight as elindel trees. Her pert little nose, much prettier than my own, pokes delicately into the air. Her skin glows like a fresh flower. But not with health. She is, of course, dead.

I slip out of my bed and stand swaying a moment, with morning dizziness. A Terran healer once told me my blood pressure was too low, which is the sort of nonsensical thing Terrans will sometimes say — like announcing the air is too moist. The air is what it is, and so am I.

What I am is a murderer.

I kneel in front of my sister’s glass coffin. My mouth has that awful morning taste, even though last night I drank nothing stronger than water. Almost I yawn, but at the last moment I turn it into a narrow-lipped ringing in my ears that somehow leaves my mouth tasting worse than ever. But at least I haven’t disrespected Ano. She was my only sibling and closest friend, until I replaced her with illusion.

“Two more years, Ano,” I say, “less forty-two days. Then you will be free. And so will I.”

Ano, of course, says nothing. There is no need. She knows as well as I the time until her burial, when she can be released from the chemicals and glass that bind her dead body and can rejoin our ancestors. Others I have known whose relatives were under atonement bondage said the bodies complained and recriminated, especially in dreams, making the house a misery. Ano is more considerate. Her corpse never troubles me at all. I do that to myself.

I finish the morning prayers, leap up, and stagger dizzily to the piss closet. I may not have drunk pel last night, but my bladder is nonetheless bursting.

At noon a messenger rides into my yard on a Terran bicycle. The bicycle is an attractive design, sloping, with interesting curves. Adapted for our market, undoubtedly. The messenger is less attractive, a surly boy probably in his first year of government service. When I smile at him, he looks away. He would rather be someplace else. Well, if he doesn’t perform his messenger duties with more courteous cheer, he will be.

“Letter for Uli Pek Bengarin.”

“I am Uli Pek Bengarin.”

Scowling, he hands me the letter and pedals away. I don’t take the scowl personally. The boy does not, of course, know what I am, any more than my neighbors do. That would defeat the whole point. I am supposed to pass as fully real, until I can earn the right to resume being so.

The letter is shaped into a utilitarian circle, very business-like, with a generic government seal. It could have come from the Tax Section, or Community Relief, or Processions and Rituals. But of course it hasn’t; none of those sections would write to me until I am real again. The sealed letter is from Reality and Atonement. It’s a summons; they have a job for me.

And about time. I have been home nearly six weeks since the last job, shaping my flowerbeds and polishing dishes and trying to paint a skyscape of last month’s synchrony, when all six moons were visible at once. I paint badly. It is time for another job.

I pack my shoulder sack, kiss the glass of my sister’s coffin, and lock the house. Then I wheel my bicycle — not, alas, as interestingly curved as the messenger’s — out of its shed and pedal down the dusty road toward the city.

Frablit Pek Brimmidin is nervous. This interests me; Pek Brimmidin is usually a calm, controlled man, the sort who never replaces reality with illusion. He’s given me my previous jobs with no fuss. But now he actually can’t sit still; he fidgets back and forth across his small office, which is cluttered with papers, stone sculptures in an exaggerated style I don’t like at all, and plates of half-eaten food. I don’t comment on either the food or the pacing. I am fond of Pek Brimmidin, quite apart from my gratitude to him, which is profound. He was the official in R&A who voted to give me a chance to become real again. The other two judges voted for perpetual death, no chance of atonement. I’m not supposed to know this much detail about my own case, but I do. Pek Brimmidin is middle-aged, a stocky man whose neck fur has just begun to yellow. His eyes are gray, and kind.

“Pek Bengarin,” he says, finally, and then stops.

“I stand ready to serve,” I say softly, so as not to make him even more nervous. But something is growing heavy in my stomach. This does not look good.

“Pek Bengarin.” Another pause. “You are an informer.”

“I stand ready to serve our shared reality,” I repeat, despite my astonishment. Of course I’m an informer. I’ve been an informer for two years and eighty-two days. I killed my sister, and I will be an informer until my atonement is over, I can be fully real again, and Ano can be released from death to join our ancestors. Pek Brimmidin knows this. He’s assigned me every one of my previous informing jobs, from the first easy one in currency counterfeiting right through the last one, in baby stealing. I’m a very good informer, as Pek Brimmidin also knows. What’s wrong with the man?

Suddenly Pek Brimmidin straightens. But he doesn’t look me in the eye. “You are an informer, and the Section for Reality and Atonement has an informing job for you. In Aulit Prison.”

So that’s it. I go still. Aulit Prison holds criminals. Not just those who have tried to get away with stealing or cheating or child-snatching, which are, after all, normal. Aulit Prison holds those who are unreal, who have succumbed to the illusion that they are not part of shared common reality and so may do violence to the most concrete reality of others: their physical bodies. Maimers. Rapists. Murderers.

Like me.

I feel my left hand tremble, and I strive to control it and to not show how hurt I am. I thought Pek Brimmidin thought better of me. There is of course no such thing as partial atonement — one is either real or one is not — but a part of my mind nonetheless thought that Pek Brimmidin had recognized two years and eighty-two days of effort in regaining my reality. I have worked so hard.

He must see some of this on my face because he says quickly, “I am sorry to assign this job to you, Pek. I wish I had a better one. But you’ve been requested specifically by Rafkit Sarloe.” Requested by the capital; my spirits lift slightly. “They’ve added a note to the request. I am authorized to tell you the informant job carries additional compensation. If you succeed, your debt will be considered immediately paid, and you can be restored at once to reality.”

Restored at once to reality. I would again be a full member of World, without shame. Entitled to live in the real world of shared humanity, and to hold my head up with pride. And Ano could be buried, the artificial chemicals washed from her body, so that it could return to World and her sweet spirit could join our ancestors. Ano, too, would be restored to reality.

“I’ll do it,” I tell Pek Brimmidin. And then, formally, “I stand ready to serve our shared reality.”

“One more thing, before you agree, Pek Bengarin.” Pek Brimmidin is figeting again. “The suspect is a Terran.”

I have never before informed on a Terran. Aulit Prison, of course, holds those aliens who have been judged unreal: Terrans, Fallers, the weird little Huhuhubs. The problem is that even after thirty years of ships coming to World, there is still considerable debate about whether any aliens are real at all. Clearly their bodies exist; after all, here they are. But their thinking is so disordered they might almost qualify as all being unable to recognize shared social reality, and so just as unreal as those poor empty children who never attain reason and must be destroyed.

Usually we on World just leave the aliens alone, except of course for trading with them. The Terrans in particular offer interesting objects, such as bicycles, and ask in return worthless items, mostly perfectly obvious information. But do any of the aliens have souls, capable of recognizing and honoring a shared reality with the souls of others? At the universities, the argument goes on. Also in market squares and pel shops, which is where I hear it. Personally, I think aliens may well be real. I try not to be a bigot.

I say to Pek Brimmidin, “I am willing to inform on a Terran.”

He wiggles his hand in pleasure. “Good, good. You will enter Aulit Prison a Capmonth before the suspect is brought there. You will use your primary cover, please.”

I nod, although Pek Brimmidin knows this is not easy for me. My primary cover is the truth: I killed my sister Ano Pek Bengarin two years and eighty-two days ago and was judged unreal enough for perpetual death, never able to join my ancestors. The only untrue part of the cover is that I escaped and have been hiding from the Section police ever since.

“You have just been captured,” Pek Brimmidin continues, “and assigned to the first part of your death in Aulit. The Section records will show this.”

Again I nod, not looking at him. The first part of my death in Aulit, the second, when the time came, in the kind of chemical bondage that holds Ano. And never ever to be freed — ever. What if it were true? I should go mad. Many do.

“The suspect is named ‘Carryl Walters.’ He is a Terran healer. He murdered a World child, in an experiment to discover how real people’s brains function. His sentence is perpetual death. But the Section believes that Carryl Walters was working with a group of World people in these experiments. That somewhere on World there is a group that’s so lost its hold on reality that it would murder children to investigate science.”

For a moment the room wavers, including the exaggerated swooping curves of Pek Brimmidin’s ugly sculptures. But then I get hold of myself. I am an informer, and a good one. I can do this. I am redeeming myself, and releasing Ano. I am an informer.

“I’ll find out who this group is,” I say. “And what they’re doing, and where they are.”

Pek Brimmidin smiles at me. “Good.” His trust is a dose of shared reality: two people acknowledging their common perceptions together, without lies or violence. I need this dose. It is probably the last one I will have for a long time.

How do people manage in perpetual death, fed on only solitary illusion?

Aulit Prison must be full of the mad.

Traveling to Aulit takes two days of hard riding. Somewhere my bicycle loses a bolt and I wheel it to the next village. The woman who runs the bicycle shop is competent but mean, the sort who gazes at shared reality mostly to pick out the ugly parts.

“At least it’s not a Terran bicycle.”

“At least,” I say, but she is incapable of recognizing sarcasm.

“Sneaky soulless criminals, taking us over bit by bit. We should never have allowed them in. And the government is supposed to protect us from unreal slime, ha, what a joke. Your bolt is a nonstandard size.”

“Is it?” I say.

“Yes. Costs you extra.”

I nod. Behind the open rear door of the shop, two little girls play in a thick stand of moonweed.

“We should kill all the aliens,” the repairer says. “No shame in destroying them before they corrupt us.”

“Eurummmn,” I say. Informers are not supposed to make themselves conspicuous with political debate. Above the two children’s heads, the moonweed bends gracefully in the wind. One of the little girls has long brown neck fur, very pretty. The other does not.

“There, that bolt will hold fine. Where you from?”

“Rakfit Sarloe.” Informers never name their villages.

She gives an exaggerated shudder. “I would never visit the capital. Too many aliens. They destroy our participation in shared reality without a moment’s thought! Three and eight, please.”

I want to say No one but you can destroy your own participation in shared reality, but I don’t. Silently I pay her the money.

She glares at me, at the world. “You don’t believe me about the Terrans. But I know what I know!”

I ride away, through the flowered countryside. In the sky, only Cap is visible, rising on the horizon opposite the sun. Cap glows with a clear white smoothness, like Ano’s skin.

The Terrans, I am told, have only one moon. Shared reality on their world is, perhaps, skimpier than ours: less curved, less rich, less warm.

Are they ever jealous?

Aulit prison sits on a flat plain inland from the South Coast. I know that other islands on World have their own prisons, just as they have their own governments, but only Aulit is used for the alien unreal, as well as our own. A special agreement among the governments of World makes this possible. The alien governments protest, but of course it does them no good. The unreal is the unreal, and far too painful and dangerous to have running around loose. Besides, the alien governments are far away on other stars.

Aulit is huge and ugly, a straight-lined monolith of dull red stone, with no curves anywhere. An official from R&A meets me and turns me over to two prison guards. We enter through a barred gate, my bicycle chained to the guards’, and I to my bicycle. I am led across a wide dusty yard toward a stone wall. The guards of course don’t speak to me; I am unreal.

My cell is square, twice my length on a side. There is a bed, a piss pot, a table, and a single chair. The door is without a window, and all the other doors in the row of cells are closed.

“When will the prisoners be allowed to be all together?” I ask, but of course the guard doesn’t answer me. I am not real.

I sit in my chair and wait. Without a clock, it’s difficult to judge time, but I think a few hours pass totally without event. Then a gong sounds and my door slides up into the ceiling. Ropes and pulleys, controlled from above, inaccessible from inside the cell.

The corridor fills with illusionary people. Men and women, some with yellowed neck fur and sunken eyes, walking with the shuffle of old age. Some young, striding along with that dangerous mixture of anger and desperation. And the aliens.

I have seen aliens before, but not so many together. Fallers, about our size but very dark, as if burned crisp by their distant star. They wear their neck fur very long and dye it strange bright colors, although not in prison. Terrans, who don’t even have neck fur but instead fur on their heads, which they sometimes cut into fanciful curves — rather pretty. Terrans are a little intimidating because of their size. They move slowly. Ano, who had one year at the university before I killed her, once told me that the Terran’s world makes them feel lighter than ours does. I don’t understand this, but Ano was very intelligent and so it’s probably true. She also explained that Fallers, Terrans, and World people are somehow related far back in time, but this is harder to believe. Perhaps Ano was mistaken.

Nobody ever thinks Huhuhubs could be related to us. Tiny, scuttling, ugly, dangerous, they walk on all fours. They’re covered with warts. They smell bad. I was glad to see only a few of them, sticking close together, in the corridor at Aulit.

We all move toward a large room filled with rough tables and chairs and, in the corner, a trough for the Huhuhubs. The food is already on the tables. Cereal, flatbread, elindel fruit — very basic, but nutritious. What surprises me most is the total absence of guards. Apparently prisoners are allowed to do whatever they wish to the food, the room, or each other, without interference. Well, why not? We aren’t real.

I need protection, quickly.

I choose a group of two women and three men. They sit at a table with their backs to the wall, and others have left a respectful distance around them. From the way they group themselves, the oldest woman is the leader. I plant myself in front of her and look directly into her face. A long scar ridges her left cheek to disappear into grizzled neck fur.

“I am Uli Pek Bengarin,” I say, my voice even but too low to be heard beyond this group. “In Aulit for the murder of my sister. I can be useful to you.”

She doesn’t speak, and her flat dark eyes don’t waver, but I have her attention. Other prisoners watch furtively.

“I know an informer among the guards. He knows I know. He brings things into Aulit for me, in return for not sharing his name.”

Still her eyes don’t waver. But I see she believes me; the sheer outrage of my statement has convinced her. A guard who had already forfeited reality by informing — by violating shared reality — might easily turn it to less pernicious material advantage. Once reality is torn, the rents grow. For the same reason, she easily believes that I might violate my supposed agreement with the guard.

“What sort of things?” she says, carelessly. Her voice is raspy and thick, like some hairy root.

“Letters. Candy. Pel.” Intoxicants are forbidden in prison; they promote shared conviviality, to which the unreal have no right.

“Weapons?”

“Perhaps,” I say.

“And why shouldn’t I beat this guard’s name out of you and set up my own arrangement with him?”

“He will not. He is my cousin.” This is the trickiest part of the cover provided to me by R&A Section; it requires that my would-be protector believe in a person who has kept enough sense of reality to honor family ties but will nonetheless violate a larger shared reality. I told Pek Brimmidin that I doubted that such a twisted state of mind would be very stable, and so a seasoned prisoner would not believe in it. But Pek Brimmidin was right and I was wrong. The woman nods.

“All right. Sit down.”

She does not ask what I wish in return for the favors of my supposed cousin. She knows. I sit beside her, and from now on I am physically safe in Aulit Prison from all but her.

Next, I must somehow befriend a Terran.

This proves harder than I expect. The Terrans keep to themselves, and so do we. They are just as violent toward their own as all the mad doomed souls in Aulit; the place is every horror whispered by children trying to shock each other. Within a tenday I see two World men hold down and rape a woman. No one interferes. I see a Terran gang beat a Faller. I see a World woman knife another woman, who bleeds to death on the stone floor. This is the only time guards appear, heavily armored. A priest is with them. He wheels in a coffin of chemicals and immediately immerses the body so that it cannot decay to release the prisoner from her sentence of perpetual death.

At night, isolated in my cell, I dream that Frablit Pek Brimmidin appears and rescinds my provisional reality. The knifed, doomed corpse becomes Ano; her attacker becomes me. I wake from the dream moaning and weeping. The tears are not grief but terror. My life, and Ano’s, hang from the splintery branch of a criminal alien I have not yet even met.

I know who he is, though. I skulk as close as I dare to the Terran groups, listening. I don’t speak their language, of course, but Pek Brimmidin taught me to recognize the cadences of “Carryl Walters” in several of their dialects. Carryl Walters is an old Terran, with gray head fur cut in boring straight lines, wrinkled brownish skin, and sunken eyes. But his ten fingers — how do they keep the extra ones from tangling them up? — are long and quick.

It takes me only a day to realize that Carryl Walters’s own people leave him alone, surrounding him with the same nonviolent respect that my protector gets. It takes me much longer to figure out why. Carryl Walters is not dangerous, neither a protector nor a punisher. I don’t think he has any private shared realities with the guards. I don’t understand until the World woman is knifed.

It happens in the courtyard, on a cool day in which I am gazing hungrily at the one patch of bright sky overhead. The knifed woman screams. The murderer pulls the knife from her belly and blood shoots out. In seconds the ground is drenched. The woman doubles over. Everyone looks the other way except me. And Carryl Walters runs over with his old-man stagger and kneels over the body, trying uselessly to save the life of a woman already dead anyway.

Of course. He is a healer. The Terrans don’t bother him because they know that, next time, it might be they who have need of him.

I feel stupid for not realizing this right away. I am supposed to be good at informing. Now I’ll have to make it up by immediate action. The problem, of course, is that no one will attack me while I’m under Afa Pek Fakar’s protection, and provoking Pek Fakar herself is far too dangerous.

I can see only one way to do this.

A wait a few days. Outside in the courtyard, I sit quietly against the prison wall and breathe shallowly. After a few minutes I leap up. The dizziness takes me; I worsen it by holding my breath. Then I ram as hard as I can into the rough stone wall and slide down it. Pain tears through my arm and forehead. One of Pek Fakar’s men shouts something.

Pek Fakar is there in a minute. I hear her — hear all of them — through a curtain of dizziness and pain.

” — just ran into the wall, I saw it — “

” — told me she gets these dizzy attacks — “

” — head broken in — “

I gasp, through sudden real nausea, “The healer. The Terran — “

“The Terran?” Pek Fakar’s voice, hard with sudden suspicion. But I gasp out more words, ” … disease … a Terran told me … since childhood … without help I … ” My vomit, unplanned but useful, spews over her boots.

“Get the Terran,” Pek Fakar rasps to somebody. “And a towel!”

Then Carryl Walters bends over me. I clutch his arm, try to smile, and pass out.

When I come to, I am lying inside, on the floor of the eating hall, the Terran cross-legged beside me. A few World people hover near the far wall, scowling. Carryl Walters says, “How many fingers you see?”

“Four. Aren’t you supposed to have five?”

He unbends the fifth from behind his palm and says, “You fine.”

“No, I’m not,” I say. He speaks childishly, and with a odd accent, but he’s understandable. “I have a disease. Another Terran healer told me so.”

“Who?”

“Her name was Anna Pek Rakov.”

“What disease?”

“I don’t remember. Something in the head. I get spells.”

“What spells? You fall, flop on floor?”

“No. Yes. Sometimes. Sometimes it takes me differently.” I look directly into his eyes. Strange eyes, smaller than mine, and that improbable blue. “Pek Rakov told me I could die during a spell, without help.”

He does not react to the lie. Or maybe he does, and I don’t know how to read it. I have never informed on a Terran before. Instead he says something grossly obscene, even for Aulit Prison: “Why you unreal? What you do?”

I move my gaze from his. “I murdered my sister.” If he asks for details, I will cry. My head aches too hard.

He says, “I sorry.”

Is he sorry that he asked, or that I killed Ano? Pek Rakov was not like this; she had some manners. I say, “The other Terran healer said I should be watched carefully by someone who knows what to do if I get a spell. Do you know what to do, Pek Walters?”

“Yes.”

“Will you watch me?”

“Yes.” He is, in fact, watching me closely now. I touch my head; there is a cloth tied around it where I bashed myself. The headache is worse. My hand comes away sticky with blood.

I say, “In return for what?”

“What you give Pek Fakar for protection?”

He is smarter than I thought. “Nothing I can also share with you.” She would punish me hard.

“Then I watch you, you give me information about World.”

I nod; this is what Terrans usually request. And where information is given, it can also be extracted. “I will explain your presence to Pek Fakar,” I say, before the pain in my head swamps me without warning, and everything in the dining hall blurs and sears together.

Pek Fakar doesn’t like it. But I have just given her a gun, smuggled in by my “cousin.” I leave notes for the prison administration in my cell, under my bed. While the prisoners are in the courtyard — which we are every day, no matter what the weather — the notes are replaced by whatever I ask for. Pek Fakar had demanded a “weapon;” neither of us expected a Terran gun. She is the only person in the prison to have such a thing. It is to me a stark reminder that no one would care if all we unreal killed each other off completely. There is no one else to shoot; we never see anyone not already in perpetual death.

“Without Pek Walters, I might have another spell and die,” I say to the scowling Pek Fakar. “He knows a special Terran method of flexing the brain to bring me out of a spell.”

“He can teach this special method to me.”

“So far, no World person has been able to learn it. Their brains are different from ours.”

She glares at me. But no one, even those lost to reality, can deny that alien brains are weird. And my injuries are certainly real: bloody head cloth, left eye closed from swelling, skin scraped raw the length of my left cheek, bruised arm. She strokes the Terran gun, a boringly straight-lined cylinder of dull metal. “All right. You may keep the Terran near you — if he agrees. Why should he?”

I smile at her slowly. Pek Fakar never shows a response to flattery; to do so would be to show weakness. But she understands. Or thinks she does. I have threatened the Terran with her power, and the whole prison now knows that her power extends among the aliens as well as her own people. She goes on glaring, but she is not displeased. In her hand the gun gleams.

And so begin my conversations with a Terran.

Talking with Carryl Pek Walters is embarrassing and frustrating. He sits beside me in the eating hall or the courtyard and publicly scratches his head. When he is cheerful, he makes shrill horrible whistling noises between his teeth. He mentions topics that belong only among kin: the state of his skin (which has odd brown lumps on it) and his lungs (clogged with fluid, apparently). He does not know enough to begin conversations with ritual comments on flowers. It is like talking to a child, but a child who suddenly begins discussing bicycle engineering or university law.

“You think individual means very little, group means everything,” he says.

We are sitting in the courtyard, against a stone wall, a little apart from the other prisoners. Some watch us furtively, some openly. I am angry. I am often angry with Pek Walters. This is not going as I’d planned.

“How can you say that? The individual is very important on World! We care for each other so that no individual is left out of our common reality, except by his own acts!”

“Exactly,” Pek Walters says. He has just learned this word from me. “You care for others so no one left alone. Alone is bad. Act alone is bad. Only together is real.”

“Of course,” I say. Could he be stupid after all? “Reality is always shared. Is a star really there if only one eye can perceive its light?”

He smiles and says something in his own language, which makes no sense to me. He repeats it in real words. “When tree falls in forest, is sound if no person hears?”

“But — do you mean to say that on your star, people believe they … ” What? I can’t find the words.

He says, “People believe they always real, alone or together. Real even when other people say they dead. Real even when they do something very bad. Even when they murder.”

“But they’re not real! How could they be? They’ve violated shared reality! If I don’t acknowledge you, the reality of your soul, if I send you to your ancestors without your consent, that is proof that I don’t understand reality and so am not seeing it! Only the unreal could do that!”

“Baby not see shared reality. Is baby unreal?”

“Of course. Until the age when children attain reason, they are unreal.”

“Then when I kill baby, is all right, because I not kill real person?”

“Of course it’s not all right! When one kills a baby, one kills its chance to become real, before it could even join its ancestors! And also all the chances of the babies to which it might become ancestor. No one would kill a baby on World, not even these dead souls in Aulit! Are you saying that on Terra, people would kill babies?”

He looks at something I cannot see. “Yes.”

My chance has arrived, although not in a form I relish. Still, I have a job to do. I say, “I have heard that Terrans will kill people for science. Even babies. To find out the kinds of things that Anna Pek Rakov knew about my brain. Is that true?”

“Yes and no.”

“How can it be yes and no? Are children ever used for science experiments?”

“Yes.”

“What kinds of experiments?”

“You should ask, what kind children? Dying children. Children not born yet. Children born … wrong. With no brain, or broken brain.”

I struggle with all this. Dying children … he must mean not children who are really dead, but those in the transition to join their ancestors. Well, that would not be so bad, provided the bodies were then allowed to decay properly and release the souls. Children without brains or with broken brains … not bad, either. Such poor unreal things would be destroyed anyway. But children not born yet … In or out of the mother’s womb? I push this away, to discuss another time. I am on a different path.

“And you never use living, real children for science?”

He gives me a look I cannot read. So much of Terran expression is still strange. “Yes. We use. In some experiments. Experiments who not hurt children.”

“Like what?” I say. We are staring directly at each other now. Suddenly I wonder if this old Terran suspects that I am an informer seeking information, and that is why he accepted my skimpy story about having spells. That would not necessarily be bad. There are ways to bargain with the unreal once everyone admits that bargaining is what is taking place. But I’m not sure whether Pek Walters knows that.

He says, “Experiments who study how brain work. Such as, how memory work. Including shared memory.”

“Memory? Memory doesn’t ‘work.’ It just is.”

“No. Memory work. By memory-building pro-teenz.” He uses a Terran word, then adds, “Tiny little pieces of food,” which makes no sense. What does food have to do with memory? You don’t eat memories, or obtain them from food. But I am further down the path, and I use his words to go further still.

“Does memory in World people work with the same … ‘pro-teenz’ as Terran memory?”

“Yes and no. Some same or almost same. Some different.” He is watching me very closely.

“How do you know that memory works the same or different in World people? Have Terrans done brain experiments on World?”

“Yes.”

“With World children?”

“Yes.”

I watch a group of Huhuhubs across the courtyard. The smelly little aliens are clustered together in some kind of ritual or game. “And have you, personally, participated in these science experiments on children, Pek Walters?”

He doesn’t answer me. Instead he smiles, and if I didn’t know better, I’d swear the smile was sad. He says, “Pek Bengarin, why you kill your sister?”

The unexpectedness of it — now, so close to almost learning something useful — outrages me. Not even Pek Fakar has asked me that. I stare at him angrily. He says, “I know, I not should ask. Wrong for ask. But I tell you much, and answer is important — “

“But the question is obscene. You should not ask. World people are not so cruel to each other.”

“Even people damned in Aulit Prison?” he says, and even though I don’t know one of the words he uses, I see that yes, he recognizes that I am an informer. And that I have been seeking information. All right, so much the better. But I need time to set my questions on a different path.

To gain time, I repeat my previous point. “World people are not so cruel.”

“Then you — “

The air suddenly sizzles, smelling of burning. People shout. I look up. Aka Pek Fakar stands in the middle of the courtyard with the Terran gun, firing it at the Huhuhubs. One by one they drop as the beam of light hits them and makes a sizzling hole. The aliens pass into the second stage of their perpetual death.

I stand and tug on Pek Walters’s arm. “Come on. We must clear the area immediately or the guards will release poison gas.”

“Why?”

“So they can get the bodies into bondage chemicals, of course!” Does this alien think the prison officials would let the unreal get even a little bit decayed? I thought that after our several conversations, Pek Walters understood more than that.

He rises slowly, haltingly, to his feet. Pek Fakar, laughing, strolls toward the door, the gun still in her hand.

Pek Walters says, “World people not cruel?”

Behind us, the bodies of the Huhuhubs lie sprawled across each other, smoking.

The next time we are herded from our cells into the dining hall and then the courtyard, the Huhuhub corpses are of course gone. Pek Walters has developed a cough. He walks more slowly, and once, on the way to our usual spot against the far wall, he puts a hand on my arm to steady himself.

“Are you sick, Pek?”

“Exactly,” he says.

“But you are a healer. Make the cough disappear.”

He smiles, and sinks gratefully against the wall. “‘Healer, heal own self.’”

“What?”

“Nothing. So you are informer, Pek Bengarin, and you hope I tell you something about science experiments on children on World.”

I take a deep breath. Pek Fakar passes us, carrying her gun. Two of her own people now stay close beside her at all times, in case another prisoner tries to take the gun away from her. I cannot believe anyone would try, but maybe I’m wrong. There’s no telling what the unreal will do. Pek Walters watches her pass, and his smile is gone. Yesterday Pek Fakar shot another person, this time not even an alien. There is a note under my bed requesting more guns.

I say, “You say I am an informer. I do not say it.”

“Exactly,” Pek Walters says. He has another coughing spell, then closes his eyes wearily. “I have not an-tee-by-otics.”

Another Terran word. Carefully I repeat it. “‘An-tee-by-otics’?”

“Pro-teenz for heal.”

Again that word for very small bits of food. I make use of it. “Tell me about the pro-teenz in the science experiments.”

“I tell you everything about experiments. But only if you answer questions first.”

He will ask about my sister. For no reason other than rudeness and cruelty. I feel my face turn to stone.

He says, “Tell me why steal baby not so bad for make person unreal always.”

I blink. Isn’t this obvious? “To steal a baby doesn’t damage the baby’s reality. It just grows up somewhere else, with some other people. But all real people of World share the same reality, and anyway after the transition, the child will rejoin its blood ancestors. Baby stealing is wrong, of course, but it isn’t a really serious crime.”

“And make false coins?”

“The same. False, true — coins are still shared.”

He coughs again, this time much harder. I wait. Finally he says, “So when I steal your bicycle, I not violate shared reality too much, because bicycle still somewhere with people of World.”

“Of course.”

“But when I steal bicycle, I violate shared reality a little?”

“Yes.” After a minute I add, “Because the bicycle is, after all, mine. You … made my reality shift a little without sharing the decision with me.” I peer at him; how can all this not be obvious to such an intelligent man?

He says, “You are too trusting for be informer, Pek Bengarin.”

I feel my throat swell with indignation. I am a very good informer. Haven’t I just bound this Terran to me with a private shared reality in order to create an exchange of information? I am about to demand his share of the bargain when he says abruptly, “So why you kill your sister?”

Two of Pek Fakar’s people swagger past. They carry the new guns. Across the courtyard a Faller turns slowly to look at them, and even I can read fear on that alien face.

I say, as evenly as I can manage, “I fell prey to an illusion. I thought that Ano was copulating with my lover. She was younger, more intelligent, prettier. I am not very pretty, as you can see. I didn’t share the reality with her, or him, and my illusion grew. Finally it exploded in my head, and I … did it.” I am breathing hard, and Pek Fakar’s people look blurry.

“You remember clear Ano’s murder?”

I turn to him in astonishment. “How could I forget it?”

“You cannot. You cannot because memory-building pro-teenz. Memory is strong in your brain. Memory-building pro-teenz are strong in your brain. Scientific research on World children for discover what is structure of pro-teenz, where is pro-teenz, how pro-teenz work. But we discover different thing instead.”

“What different thing?” I say, but Pek Walters only shakes his head and begins coughing again. I wonder if the coughing spell is an excuse to violate our bargain. He is, after all, unreal.

Pek Fakar’s people have gone inside the prison. The Faller slumps against the far wall. They have not shot him. For this moment, at least, he is not entering the second stage of his perpetual death.

But beside me, Pek Walters coughs blood.

He is dying. I am sure of it, although of course no World healer comes to him. He is dead anyway. Also, his fellow Terrans keep away, looking fearful, which makes me wonder if his disease is catching. This leaves only me. I walk him to his cell, and then wonder why I can’t just stay when the door closes. No one will check. Or, if they do, will care. And this may be my last chance to gain the needed information, before either Pek Walters is coffined or Pek Fakar orders me away from him because he is too weak to watch over my supposed blood sickness.

His body has become very hot. During the long night he tosses on his bunk, muttering in his own language, and sometimes those strange alien eyes roll in their sockets. But other times he is clearer, and he looks at me as if he recognizes who I am. Those times, I question him. But the lucid times and unlucid ones blur together. His mind is no longer his own.

“Pek Walters. Where are the memory experiments being conducted? In what place?”

“Memory … memories … ” More in his own language. It has the cadences of poetry.

“Pek Walters. In what place are the memory experiments being done?”

“At Rafkit Sarloe,” he says, which makes no sense. Rafkit Sarloe is the government center, where no one lives. It is not large. People flow in every day, running the Sections, and out to their villages again at night. There is no square measure of Rafkit Sarloe that is not constantly shared physical reality.

He coughs, more bloody spume, and his eyes roll in his head. I make him sip some water. “Pek Walters. In what place are the memory experiments being done?”

“At Rafkit Sarloe. In the Cloud. At Aulit Prison.”

It goes on and on like that. And in the early morning, Pek Walters dies.

There is one moment of greater clarity, somewhere near the end. He looks at me, out of his old, ravaged face gone gaunt with his transition. The disturbing look is back in his eyes, sad and kind, not a look for the unreal to wear. It is too much sharing. He says, so low I must bend over him to hear, “Sick brain talks to itself. You not kill your sister.”

“Hush, don’t try to talk … “

“Find … Brifjis. Maldon Pek Brifjis, in Rafkit Haddon. Find … ” He relapses again into fever.

A few moments after he dies, the armored guards enter the cell, wheeling the coffin full of bondage chemicals. With them is the priest. I want to say, Wait, he is a good man, he doesn’t deserve perpetual death — but of course I do not. I am astonished at myself for even thinking it. A guard edges me into the corridor and the door closes.

That same day, I am sent away from Aulit Prison.

“Tell me again. Everything,” Pek Brimmidin says.

Pek Brimmidin is just the same: stocky, yellowing, slightly stooped. His cluttered office is just the same. Food dishes, papers, overelaborated sculptures. I stare hungrily at the ugly things. I hadn’t realized how much I’d longed, in prison, for the natural sight of curves. I keep my eyes on the sculptures, partly to hold back my question until the proper time to ask it.

“Pek Walters said he would tell me everything about the experiments that are, yes, going on with World children. In the name of science. But all he had time to tell me was that the experiments involve ‘memory-building pro-teenz,’ which are tiny pieces of food from which the brain constructs memory. He also said the experiments were going on in Rafkit Sarloe and Aulit Prison.”

“And that is all, Pek Bengarin?”

“That is all.”

Pek Brimmidin nods curtly. He is trying to appear dangerous, to scare out of me any piece of information I might have forgotten. But Frablit Pek Brimmidin can’t appear dangerous to me. I have seen the real thing.

Pek Brimmidin has not changed. But I have.

I ask my question. “I have brought to you all the information I could obtain before the Terran died. Is it sufficient to release me and Ano?”

He runs a hand through his neck fur. “I’m sorry I can’t answer that, Pek. I will need to consult my superiors. But I promise to send you word as soon as I can.”

“Thank you,” I say, and lower my eyes. You are too trusting for be informer, Pek Bengarin.

Why didn’t I tell Frablit Pek Brimmidin the rest of it, about ‘Maldon Pek Brifjis’ and ‘Rafkit Haddon’ and not really killing my sister? Because it is most likely nonsense, the ravings of a fevered brain. Because this ‘Maldon Pek Brifjis’ might be an innocent World man, who does not deserve trouble brought to him by an unreal alien. Because Pek Walters’s words were personal, addressed to me alone, on his deathbed. Because I do not want to discuss Ano with Pek Brimmidin’s superiors one more useless painful time.

Because, despite myself, I trust Carryl Pek Walters.

“You may go,” Pek Brimmidin says, and I ride my bicycle along the dusty road home.

I make a bargain with Ano’s corpse, still lying in curled-finger grace on the bed across from mine. Her beautiful brown hair floats in the chemicals of the coffin. I used to covet that hair desperately, when we were very young. Once I even cut it all off while she slept. But other times I would weave it for her, or braid it with flowers. She was so pretty. At one point, when she was still a child, she wore eight bid rings, one on each finger. Two of the bids were in negotiation between the boys’ fathers and ours. Although older, I have never had a single bid.

Did I murder her?

My bargain with her corpse is this: If the Reality & Atonement Section releases me and Ano because of my work in Aulit Prison, I will seek no further. Ano will be free to join our ancestors; I will be fully real. It will no longer matter whether or not I killed my sister, because both of us will again be sharing in the same reality as if I had not. But if Reality & Atonement holds me unreal still longer, after all I have given them, I will try to find this ‘Maldon Pek Brifjis.’

I say none of this aloud. The guards at Aulit Prison knew immediately when Pek Walters died, inside a closed and windowless room. They could be watching me here, now. World has no devices to do this, but how did Pek Walters know so much about a World man working with a Terran science experiment? Somewhere there are World people and Terrans in partnership. Terrans, as everyone knows, have all sorts of listening devices we do not.

I kiss Ano’s coffin. I don’t say it aloud, but I hope desperately that Reality & Atonement releases us. I want to return to shared reality, to the daily warmth and sweetness of belonging, now and forever, to the living and dead of World. I do not want to be an informer any more.

Not for anyone, even myself.

The message comes three days later. The afternoon is warm and I sit outside on my stone bench, watching my neighbor’s milkbeasts eye her sturdily fenced flowerbeds. She has new flowers that I don’t recognize, with blooms that are entrancing but somehow foreign — could they be Terran? It doesn’t seem likely. During my time in Aulit Prison, more people seem to have made up their minds that the Terrans are unreal. I have heard more mutterings, more anger against those who buy from alien traders.

Frablit Pek Brimmidin himself brings the letter from Reality and Atonement, laboring up the road on his ancient bicycle. He has removed his uniform, so as not to embarrass me in front of my neighbors. I watch him ride up, his neck fur damp with unaccustomed exertion, his gray eyes abashed, and I know already what the sealed message must say. Pek Brimmidin is too kind for his job. That is why he is only a low-level messenger boy all the time, not just today.

These are things I never saw before.

‘You are too trusting for be informer, Pek Bengarin.’

“Thank you, Pek Brimmidin,” I say. “Would you like a glass of water? Or pel?”

“No, thank you, Pek,” he says. He does not meet my eyes. He waves to my other neighbor, fetching water from the village well, and fumbles meaninglessly with the handle of his bicycle. “I can’t stay.”

“Then ride safely,” I say, and go back in my house. I stand beside Ano and break the seal on the government letter. After I read it, I gaze at her a long time. So beautiful, so sweet-natured. So loved.

Then I start to clean. I scrub every inch of my house, for hours and hours, climbing on a ladder to wash the ceiling, sloshing thick soapsuds in the cracks, scrubbing every surface of every object and carrying the more intricately-shaped outside into the sun to dry. Despite my most intense scrutiny, I find nothing that I can imagine being a listening device. Nothing that looks alien, nothing unreal.

But I no longer know what is real.

Only Bata is up; the other moons have not risen. The sky is clear and starry, the air cool. I wheel my bicycle inside and try to remember everything I need.

Whatever kind of glass Ano’s coffin is made of, it is very tough. I have to swing my garden shovel three times, each time with all my strength, before I can break it. On the third blow the glass cracks, then falls leisurely apart into large pieces that bounce slightly when they hit the floor. Chemicals cascade off the bed, a waterfall of clear liquid that smells only slightly acrid.

In my high boots I wade close to the bed and throw containers of water over Ano to wash off chemical residue. The containers are waiting in a neat row by the wall, everything from my largest wash basin to the kitchen bowls. Ano smiles sweetly.

I reach onto the soggy bed and lift her clear.

In the kitchen, I lay her body — limp, soft-limbed — on the floor and strip off her chemical-soaked clothing. I dry her, move her to the waiting blanket, take a last look, and wrap her tightly. The bundle of her and the shovel balances across the handles of my bicycle. I pull off my boots and open the door.

The night smells of my neighbor’s foreign flowers. Ano seems weightless. I feel as if I can ride for hours. And I do.

I bury her, weighted with stones, in marshy ground well off a deserted road. The wet dirt will speed the decay, and it is easy to cover the grave with reeds and toglif branches. When I’ve finished, I bury my clothes and dress in clean ones in my pack. Another few hours of riding and I can find an inn to sleep in. Or a field, if need be.

The morning dawns pearly, with three moons in the sky. Everywhere I ride are flowers, first wild and then cultivated. Although exhausted, I sing softly to the curving blooms, to the sky, to the pale moonlit road. Ano is real, and free.

Go sweetly, sweet sister, to our waiting ancestors.

Two days later I reach Rafkit Haddon.

It is an old city, sloping down the side of a mountain to the sea. The homes of the rich either stand on the shore or perch on the mountain, looking in both cases like rounded great white birds. In between lie a jumble of houses, market squares, government buildings, inns, pel shops, slums and parks, the latter with magnificent old trees and shabby old shrines. The manufacturing shops and warehouses lie to the north, with the docks.

I have experience in finding people. I start with Rituals & Processions. The clerk behind the counter, a pre-initiate of the priesthood, is young and eager to help. “Yes?”

“I am Ajma Pek Goranalit, attached to the household of Menanlin. I have been sent to inquire about the ritual activity of a citizen, Maldon Pek Brifjis. Can you help me?”

“Of course,” she beams. An inquiry about ritual activity is never written; discretion is necessary when a great house is considering honoring a citizen by allowing him to honor their ancestors. A person so chosen gains great prestige — and considerable material wealth. I picked the name “Menanlin” after an hour’s judicious listening in a crowded pel shop. The family is old, numerous, and discreet.

“Let me see,” she says, browsing among her public records. “Brifjis … Brifjis … it’s a common name, of course … which citizen, Pek?”

“Maldon.”

“Oh, yes … here. He paid for two musical tributes to his ancestors last year, made a donation to the Rafkit Haddon Priest House … Oh! And he was chosen to honor the ancestors of the house of Choulalait!”

She sounds awe-struck. I nod. “We know about that, of course. But is there anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so … wait. He paid for a charity tribute for the ancestors of his clu merchant, Lam Pek Flanoe, a poor man. Quite a lavish tribute, too. Music, and three priests.”

“Kind,” I said.

“Very! Three priests!” Her young eyes shine. “Isn’t it wonderful how many truly kind people share reality?”

“Yes,” I say. “It is.”

I find the clu merchant by the simple method of asking for him in several market squares. Sales of all fuels are of course slow in the summer; the young relatives left in charge of the clu stalls are happy to chat with strangers. Lam Pek Flanoe lives in a run-down neighborhood just behind the great houses by the sea. The neighborhood is home to servants and merchants who provide for the rich. Four more glasses of pel in three more pel shops, and I know that Maldon Pek Brifjis is currently a guest in the home of a rich widow. I know the widow’s address. I know that that Pek Brifjis is a healer.

A healer.

Sick brain talks to itself. You not kill your sister.

I am dizzy from four glasses of pel. Enough. I find an inn, the kind where no one asks questions, and sleep without the shared reality of dreams.

It takes me a day, disguised as a street cleaner, to decide which of the men coming and going from the rich widow’s house is Pek Brifjis. Then I spend three days following him, in various guises. He goes a lot of places and talks to a lot of people, but none of them seem unusual for a rich healer with a personal pleasure in collecting antique water carafes. On the fourth day I look for a good opportunity to approach him, but this turns out to be unnecessary.

“Pek,” a man says to me as I loiter, dressed as a vendor of sweet flatbreads, outside the baths on Elindel Street. I have stolen the sweets before dawn from the open kitchen of a bake shop. I know at once that the man approaching me is a bodyguard, and that he is very good. It’s in the way he walks, looks at me, places his hand on my arm. He is also very handsome, but that thought barely registers. Handsome men are never for such as me. They are for Ano.

Were for Ano.

“Come with me, please,” the bodyguard says, and I don’t argue. He leads me to the back of the baths, through a private entrance, to a small room apparently used for private grooming of some sort. The only furniture is two small stone tables. He checks me, expertly but gently, for weapons, looking even in my mouth. Satisfied, he indicates where I am to stand, and opens a second door.

Maldon Pek Brifjis enters, wrapped in a bathing robe of rich imported cloth. He is younger than Carryl Walters, a vigorous man in a vigorous prime. His eyes are striking, a deep purple with long gold lines radiating from their centers. He says immediately, “Why have you been following me for three days?”

“Someone told me to,” I say. I have nothing to lose by an honest shared reality, although I still don’t fully believe I have anything to gain.

“Who? You may say anything in front of my guard.”

“Carryl Pek Walters.”

The purple eyes deepen even more. “Pek Walters is dead.”

“Yes,” I say. “Perpetually. I was with him when he entered the second stage of death.”

“And where was that?” He is testing me.

“In Aulit Prison. His last words instructed me to find you. To … ask you something.”

“What do you wish to ask me?”

“Not what I thought I would ask,” I say, and realize that I have made the decision to tell him everything. Until I saw him up close, I wasn’t completely sure what I would do. I can no longer share reality with World, not even if I went to Frablit Pek Brimmidin with exactly the knowledge he wants about the scientific experiments on children. That would not atone for releasing Ano before the Section agreed. And Pek Brimmidin is only a messenger, anyway. No, less than a messenger: a tool, like a garden shovel, or a bicycle. He does not share the reality of his users. He only thinks he does.

As I had thought I did.

I say, “I want to know if I killed my sister. Pek Walters said I did not. He said ‘sick brain talks to itself,’ and that I had not killed Ano. And to ask you. Did I kill my sister?”

Pek Brifjis sits down on one of the stone tables. “I don’t know,” he says, and I see his neck fur quiver. “Perhaps you did. Perhaps you did not.”

“How can I discover which?”

“You cannot.”

“Ever?”

“Ever.” And then, “I am sorry.”

Dizziness takes me. The “low blood pressure.” The next thing I know, I lie on the floor of the small room, with Pek Brifjis’s fingers on my elbow pulse. I struggle to sit up.

“No, wait,” he says. “Wait a moment. Have you eaten today?”

“Yes.”

“Well, wait a moment anyway. I need to think.”

He does, the purple eyes turning inward, his fingers absently pressing the inside of my elbow. Finally he says, “You are an informer. That’s why you were released from Aulit Prison after Pek Walters died. You inform for the government.”

I don’t answer. It no longer matters.

“But you have left informing. Because of what Pek Walters told you. Because he told you that the skits-oh-free-nia experiments might have … No. It can’t be.”

He too has used a word I don’t know. It sounds Terran. Again I struggle to sit up, to leave. There is no hope for me here. This healer can tell me nothing.

He pushes me back down on the floor and says swiftly, “When did your sister die?” His eyes have changed once again; the long golden flecks are brighter, radiating from the center like glowing spokes. “Please, Pek, this is immensely important. To both of us.”

“Two years ago, and 152 days.”

“Where? In what city?”

“Village. Our village. Gofkit Ilo.”

“Yes,” he says. “Yes. Tell me everything you remember of her death. Everything.”

This time I push him aside and sit up. Blood rushes from my head, but anger overcomes the dizziness. “I will tell you nothing. Who do you people think you are, ancestors? To tell me I killed Ano, then tell me I didn’t, then say you don’t know — to destroy the hope of atonement I had as an informer, then to tell me there is no other hope — no, there might be hope — no, there’s not — how can you live with yourself? How can you twist people’s brains away from shared reality and offer nothing to replace it!” I am screaming. The bodyguard glances at the door. I don’t care; I go on screaming.

“You are doing experiments on children, wrecking their reality as you have wrecked mine! You are a murderer — ” But I don’t get to scream all that. Maybe I don’t get to scream any of it. For a needle slides into my elbow, at the inner pulse where Maldon Brjfis has been holding it, and the room slides away as easily as Ano into her grave.

A bed, soft and silky, beneath me. Rich wall hangings. The room is very warm. A scented breeze whispers across my bare stomach. Bare? I sit up and discover I am dressed in the gauzy skirt, skimpy bandeau, and flirting veil of a prostitute.

At my first movement, Pek Brifjis crosses from the fireplace to my bed. “Pek. This room does not allow sound to escape. Do not resume screaming. Do you understand?”

I nod. His bodyguard stands across the room. I pull the flirting veil from my face.

“I am sorry about that,” Pek Brifjis says. “It was necessary to dress you in a way that accounts for a bodyguard carrying a drugged woman into a private home without raising questions.”

A private home. I guess that this is the rich widow’s house by the sea. A room that does not allow sound to escape. A needle unlike ours: sharp and sure. Brain experiments. “Skits-oh-fren-ia.”

I say, “You work with the Terrans.”

“No,” he says. “I do not.”

“But Pek Walters … ” It doesn’t matter. “What are you going to do with me?”

He says, “I am going to offer you a trade.”

“What sort of trade?”

“Information in return for your freedom.”

And he says he does not work with Terrans. I say, “What use is freedom to me?” although of course I don’t expect him to understand that. I can never be free.

“Not that kind of freedom,” he says. “I won’t just let you go from this room. I will let you rejoin your ancestors, and Ano.”

I gape at him.

“Yes, Pek. I will kill you and bury you myself, where your body can decay.”

“You would violate shared reality like that? For me?”

His purple eyes deepen again. For a moment, something in those eyes looks almost like Pek Walters’s blue ones. “Please understand. I think there is a strong chance you did not kill Ano. Your village was one where … subjects were used for experimentation. I think that is the true shared reality here.”

I say nothing. A little of his assurance disappears. “Or so I believe. Will you agree to the trade?”

“Perhaps,” I say. Will he actually do what he promises? I can’t be sure. But there is no other way for me. I cannot hide from the government all the years until I die. I am too young. And when they find me, they will send me back to Aulit, and when I die there they will put me in a coffin of preservative chemicals …

I would never see Ano again.

The healer watches me closely. Again I see the Pek Walters look in his eyes: sadness and pity.

“Perhaps I will agree to the trade,” I say, and wait for him to speak again about the night Ano died. But instead he says, “I want to show you something.”

He nods at the bodyguard who leaves the room, returning a few moments later. By the hand he leads a child, a little girl, clean and well-dressed. One look makes my neck fur bristle. The girl’s eyes are flat and unseeing. She mutters to herself. I offer a quick appeal for protection to my ancestors. The girl is unreal, without the capacity to perceive shared reality, even though she is well over the age of reason. She is not human. She should have been destroyed.

“This is Ori,” Pek Brifjis says. The girl suddenly laughs, a wild demented laugh, and peers at something only she can see.

“Why is it here?” I listen to the harshness in my own voice.

“Ori was born real. She was made this way by the scientific brain experiments of the government.”

“Of the government! That is a lie!”

“Is it? Do you still, Pek, have such trust in your government?”

“No, but … ” To make me continue to earn Ano’s freedom, even after I had met their terms … to lie to Pek Brimmidin … those offenses against shared reality are one thing. The destruction of a real person’s physical body, as I had done with Ano’s (had I?) is another, far far worse. To destroy a mind, the instrument of perceiving shared reality … Pek Brifjis lies.

He says, “Pek, tell me about the night Ano died.”

“Tell me about this … thing!”

“All right.” He sits down in a chair beside my luxurious bed. The thing wanders around the room, muttering. It seems unable to stay still.

“She was born Ori Malfisit, in a small village in the far north — “

“What village?” I need desperately to see if he falters on details.

He does not. “Gofkit Ramloe. Of real parents, simple people, an old and established family. At six years old, Ori was playing in the forest with some other children when she disappeared. The other children said they heard something thrashing toward the marshes. The family decided she had been carried off by a wild kilfreit — there are still some left, you know, that far north — and held a procession in honor of Ori’s joining their ancestors.

“But that’s not what happened to Ori. She was stolen by two men, unreal prisoners promised atonement and restoration to full reality, just as you were. Ori was carried off to Rafkit Sarloe, with eight other children from all over World. There they were given to the Terrans, who were told that they were orphans who could be used for experiment. The experiments were ones that would not hurt or damage the children in any way.”

I look at Ori, now tearing a table scarf into shreds and muttering. Her empty eyes turn to mine, and I have to look away.

“This part is difficult,” Pek Brifjis says. “Listen hard, Pek. The Terrans truly did not hurt the children. They put ee-lek-trodes on their heads … you don’t know what that means. They found ways to see which parts of their brains worked the same as Terran brains and which did not. They used a number of tests and machines and drugs. None of it hurt the children, who lived at the Terran scientific compound and were cared for by World childwatchers. At first the children missed their parents, but they were young, and after a while they were happy.”

I glance again at Ori. The unreal, not sharing in common reality, are isolated and therefore dangerous. A person with no world in common with others will violate those others as easily as cutting flowers. Under such conditions, pleasure is possible, but not happiness.

Pek Brifjis runs his hand through his neck fur. “The Terrans worked with World healers, of course, teaching them. It was the usual trade, only this time we received the information and they the physical reality: children and watchers. There was no other way World could permit Terrans to handle our children. Our healers were there every moment.”

He looks at me. I say, “Yes,” just because something must be said.

“Do you know, Pek, what it is like to realize you have lived your whole life according to beliefs that are not true?”

“No!” I say, so loudly that Ori looks up with her mad, unreal gaze. She smiles. I don’t know why I spoke so loud. What Pek Brifjis said has nothing to do with me. Nothing at all.

“Well, Pek Walters knew. He realized that the experiments he participated in, harmless to the subjects and in aid of biological understanding of species differences, were being used for something else. The roots of skits-oh-free-nia, misfiring brain sir-kits — ” He is off on a long explanation that means nothing to me. Too many Terran words, too much strangeness. Pek Brifjis is no longer talking to me. He is talking to himself, in some sort of pain I don’t understand.

Suddenly the purple eyes snap back to mine. “What all that means, Pek, is that a few of the healers — our own healers, from World — found out how to manipulate the Terran science. They took it and used it to put into minds memories that did not happen.”

“Not possible!”

“It is possible. The brain is made very excited, with Terran devices, while the false memory is recited over and over. Then different parts of the brain are made to … to recirculate memories and emotions over and over. Like water recirculated through mill races. The water gets all scrambled together … No. Think of it this way: different parts of the brain send signals to each other. The signals are forced to loop together, and every loop makes the unreal memories stronger. It is apparently in common use on Terra, although tightly controlled.”

Sick brain talks to itself.

“But — “

“There are no objections possible, Pek. It is real. It happened. It happened to Ori. The World scientists made her brain remember things that had not happened. Small things, at first. That worked. When they tried larger memories, something went wrong. It left her like this. They were still learning; that was five years ago. They got better, much better. Good enough to experiment on adult subjects who could then be returned to shared reality.”

“One can’t plant memories like flowers, or uproot them like weeds!”

“These people could. And did.”

“But — why?”

“Because the World healers who did this — and they were only a few — saw a different reality.”

“I don’t — “

“They saw the Terrans able to do everything. Make better machines than we can, from windmills to bicycles. Fly to the stars. Cure disease. Control nature. Many World people are afraid of Terrans, Pek. And of Fallers and Huhuhubs. Because their reality is superior to ours.”

“There is only one comon reality,” I said. “The Terrans just know more about it than we do!”

“Perhaps. But Terran knowledge makes people uneasy. And afraid. And jealous.”

Jealous. Ano saying to me in the kitchen, with Bata and Cap bright at the window, “I will too go out tonight to see him! You can’t stop me! You’re just jealous, a jealous ugly shriveled thing that not even your lover wants, so you don’t wish me to have any — ” And the red flood swamping my brain, the kitchen knife, the blood —

“Pek?” the healer says. “Pek?”

“I’m … all right. The jealous healers, they hurt their own people, World people, for revenge on the Terrans — that makes no sense!”

“The healers acted with great sorrow. They knew what they were doing to people. But they needed to perfect the technique of inducing controlled skits-oh-free-nia … they needed to do it. To make people angry at Terrans. Angry enough to forget the attractive trade goods and rise up against the aliens. To cause war. The healers are mistaken, Pek. We have not had a war on World in a thousand years; our people cannot understand how hard the Terrans would strike back. But you must understand: the outlaw scientists thought they were doing the right thing. They thought they were creating anger in order to save World.

“And another thing — with the help of the government, they were careful not to make any World man or woman permanently unreal. The adults manipulated into murder were all offered atonement as informers. The children are all cared for. The mistakes, like Ori, will be allowed to decay someday, to return to her ancestors. I will see to that myself.”

Ori tears the last of the scarf into pieces, smiling horribly, her flat eyes empty. What unreal memories fill her head?

I say bitterly, “Doing the right thing … letting me believe I killed my sister!”

“When you rejoin your ancestors, you will find it isn’t so. And the means of rejoining them was made available to you: the completion of your informing atonement.”

But now that atonement never will be completed. I stole Ano and buried her without Section consent. Maldon Brifjis, of course, does not know this.

Through my pain and anger I blurt, “And what of you, Pek Brifjis? You work with these criminal healers, aiding them in emptying children like Ori of reality — “

“I don’t work with them. I thought you smarter, Pek. I work against them. And so did Carryl Walters, which is why he died in Aulit Prison.”

“Against them?”

“Many of us do. Carryl Walters among them. He was an informer. And my friend.”

Neither of us says anything. Pek Brifjis stares into the fire. I stare at Ori, who has begun to grimace horribly. She squats on an intricately woven curved rug which looks very old. A reek suddenly fills the room. Ori does not share with the rest of us the reality of piss closets. She throws back her head and laughs, a horrible sound like splintering metal.

“Take her away,” Pek Brifjis says wearily to the guard, who looks unhappy. “I’ll clean up here.” To me he adds, “We can’t allow any servants in here with you.”

The guard leads away the grimacing child. Pek Brifjis kneels and scrubs at the rug with chimney rags dipped in water from my carafe. I remember that he collects antique water carafes. What a long way that must seem from scrubbing shit, from Ori, from Carryl Walters coughing out his lungs in Aulit Prison, among aliens.

“Pek Brifjis — did I kill my sister?”

He looks up. There is shit on his hands. “There is no way to be absolutely sure. It is possible you were one of the experiment subjects from your village. You would have been drugged in your house, to awake with your sister murdered and your mind altered.”

I say, more quietly than I have said anything else in this room, “You will really kill me, let me decay, and enable me to rejoin my ancestors?”

Pek Brifjis stands and wipes the shit from his hands. “I will.”

“But what will you do if I refuse? If instead I ask to return home?”

“If you do that, the government will arrest you and once more promise you atonement — if you inform on those of us working to oppose them.”

“Not if I go first to whatever part of the government is truly working to end the experiments. Surely you aren’t saying the entire government is doing this … thing.”

“Of course not. But do you know for certain which Sections, and which officials in those Sections, wish for war with the Terrans, and which do not? We can’t be sure. How can you?”

Frablit Pek Brimmidin is innocent, I think. But the thought is useless. Pek Brimmidin is innocent, but powerless.

It tears my soul to think that the two might be the same thing.

Pek Brifjis rubs at the damp carpet with the toe of his boot. He puts the rags in a lidded jar and washes his hands at the washstand. A faint stench still hangs in the air. He comes to stand beside my bed.

“Is that what you want, Uli Pek Bengarin? That I let you leave this house, not knowing what you will do, whom you will inform on? That I endanger everything we have done in order to convince you of its truth?”

“Or you can kill me and let me rejoin my ancestors. Which is what you think I will choose, isn’t it? That choice would let you keep faith with the reality you have decided is true, and still keep yourself secret from the criminals. Killing me would be easiest for you. But only if I consent to my murder. Otherwise, you will violate even the reality you have decided to perceive.”

He stares down at me, a muscular man with beautiful purple eyes. A healer who would kill. A patriot defying his government to prevent a violent war. A sinner who does all he can to minimize his sin and keep it from denying him the chance to rejoin his own ancestors. A believer in shared reality who is trying to bend the reality without breaking the belief.

I keep quiet. The silence stretches on. Finally it is Pek Brifjis that breaks it. “I wish Carryl Walters had never sent you to me.”

“But he did. And I choose to return to my village. Will you let me go, or keep me prisoner here, or murder me without my consent?”

“Damn you,” he says, and I recognize the word as one Carryl Walters used, about the unreal souls in Aulit Prison.

“Exactly,” I say. “What will you do, Pek? Which of your supposed multiple realities will you choose now?”

It is a hot night, and I cannot sleep.

I lie in my tent on the wide empty plain and listen to the night noises. Rude laughter from the pel tent, where a group of miners drinks far too late at night for men who must bore into hard rock at dawn. Snoring from the tent to my right. Muffled lovemaking from a tent farther down the row, I’m not sure whose. The woman giggles, high and sweet.

I have been a miner for half a year now. After I left the northern village of Gofkit Ramloe, Ori’s village, I just kept heading north. Here on the equator, where World harvests its tin and diamonds and pel berries and salt, life is both simpler and less organized. Papers are not necessary. Many of the miners are young, evading their government service for one reason or another. Reasons that must seem valid to them. Here government sections rule weakly, compared to the rule of the mining and farming companies. There are no messengers on Terran bicycles. There is no Terran science. There are no Terrans.

There are shrines, of course, and rituals and processions, and tributes to one’s ancestors. But these things actually receive less attention than in the cities, because they are more taken for granted. Do you pay attention to air?

The woman giggles again, and this time I recognize the sound. Awi Pek Crafmal, the young runaway from another island. She is a pretty thing, and a hard worker. Sometimes she reminds me of Ano.

I asked a great many questions in Gofkit Ramloe. Ori Malfisit, Pek Brifjis said her name was. An old and established family. But I asked and asked, and no such family had ever lived in Gofkit Ramloe. Wherever Ori came from, and however she had been made into that unreal and empty vessel shitting on a rich carpet, she had not started her poor little life in Gofkit Ramloe.

Did Maldon Brifjis know I would discover that, when he released me from the rich widow’s house overlooking the sea? He must have. Or maybe, despite knowing I was an informer, he didn’t understand that I would actually go to Gofkit Ramloe and check. You can’t understand everything.

Sometimes, in the darkest part of the night, I wish I had taken Pek Brifjis’s offer to return me to my ancestors.

I work on the rock piles of the mine during the day, among miners who lift sledges and shatter solid stone. They talk, and curse, and revile the Terrans, although few miners have as much as seen one. After work the miners sit in camp and drink pel, lifting huge mugs with dirty hands, and laugh at obscene jokes. They all share the same reality, and it binds them together, in simple and happy strength.

I have strength, too. I have the strength to swing my sledge with the other women, many of whom have the same rough plain looks as I, and who are happy to accept me as one of them. I had the strength to shatter Ano’s coffin, and to bury her even when I thought the price to me was perpetual death. I had the strength to follow Carryl Walters’s words about the brain experiments and seek Maldon Brifjis. I had the strength to twist Pek Brifjis’s divided mind to make him let me go.

But do I have the strength to go where all of that leads me? Do I have the strength to look at Frablit Brimmidin’s reality, and Carryl Walters’s reality, and Ano’s, and Maldon Brifjis’s, and Ori’s — and try to find the places that match and the places that don’t? Do I have the strength to live on, never knowing if I killed my sister, or if I did not? Do I have the strength to doubt everything, and live with doubt, and sort through the millions of separate realities on World, searching for the true pieces of each — assuming that I can even recognize them?

Should anyone have to live like that? In uncertainty, in doubt, in loneliness. Alone in one’s mind, in an isolated and unshared reality.

I would like to return to the days when Ano was alive. Or even to the days when I was an informer. To the days when I shared in World’s reality, and knew it to be solid beneath me, like the ground itself. To the days when I knew what to think, and so did not have to.

To the days before I became — unwillingly — as terrifyingly real as I am now.

Table of Contents

Start