The Biography of Lot’s Wife (Conclusion) * It has been years since he has spoken of that time in the forest south of the city: that time (three arduous years) as the son of a missionary: the middle child. Memories linger, but there are no spoken words attached to them. Though he has shared a city with his surviving sister, they’ve never spoken of it. They’ve never caressed those bleak remberances or retold the minor epics attending one scar or another. There have been oblique, glancing references, with Iakobello, but nothing more. He understands very little of the ghost that is his father. He doesn’t even know if the man is still alive, though—most probably—he is dead. All he knows is the vanished man’s strange ambition: to spread the archaic word of an anachronistic god to the uninformed at home in the wilderness. He understands—and remembers—three years in soggy, temperate forest as the sidelined pawn in his father’s war on savagery and spiritual decadence: three years of near-starvation, perpetual infection (from mites, from fungi, and from burrowing, ravenous flukes) all taken in stride by God’s Chosen messenger, even as one of his children died. His youngest son. Arémiah. He remembers the burial (against the local custom of cremation) and the impenetrable walls of silence that were Mother’s only expression of anger, grief, and something far-too-complex for a young boy to understand. He remembers the word she spoke—at last—on the night she took her remaining two children and marched into the forest. After that, none of them looked back. “It was too much to bear,” the house-dowager says, quietly. They’ve returned to the office parlor and sit—now—with drinks and a spread of fruit on a table between them. Sunset flares in the colors of peach and salmon to the west; light slants into the room, resting on her skin, her hair, and her shapeless, gray dress. He doesn’t look at her face. It is important—more than anything—to avoid her eyes. “Did you believe?” Suldán asks. “In your father’s god?” Suldán nods, considers the gesture and its meaning, and then shrugs. Yes, he believed. No, he didn’t. He doesn’t, but as a boy hoping to please his father, he tried to believe, but Father had been the sort of man to shun expressions of gentle sentiment, and so Suldán’s boyhood drive to please the man failed. Utterly. “Did you?” “No.” Another blush warms his neck, his cheeks, the crests of his ears. His hands ball into fists on the table-top, and his toes curl under, as if attempting to claw through varnished, sun-warmed wood. “Your father believed in an Earth god: the last of them. No one in his lifetime has ever been to Earth. The last of us to possess any dim knowledge of that world died more than five-hundred—local—years ago. What good is an Earth god on a world belonging to aliens?” Them. The Ött. “What word could save a mass of unwashed heathens in a non-terrestrial wilderness while allowing a child to die of a profound, hemorrhagic infection? Who was the man that I married, Suldán, and how many more of my children had to die on the altar of his faith before I did anything about it?” She shrugs. “It was one thing to follow him on his crusade. I was his wife and I made that choice, but you were children. What choice did the three of you have? This isn’t a human world; there are only two human cities on the face of it. What kinds of parents would expose their children to the wilderness here, an alien wilderness, known for its notorious, hungry compatibility with human physiology? Who would we be if I’d made the choice to leave him before his Mission?” She smiles, and the expression is bitter. She reaches across the small table and clasps his fingers, touching him for the very first time in more years than Suldán cares to count. He flinches, for reasons he can scarcely understand, but he doesn’t pull his hand away. “Suldán.” “Yes.” “You scarcely look at me. Is it because of what I am, now, or what I’ve failed to do?” “I don’t know,” he says. “I…” the right words linger somewhere at the back of his throat, somewhere under the meat of his tongue. “I saw—” “I can guess at what you saw, and I understand.” “I’m a pilot,” he says. “I’ll be a part of the evacuation.” “And you came here…why?” “To see you. To ask if you need anything. Other things, too, but I…I don’t know.” “Are you disappointed?” “Surprised. But it makes sense I suppose…it makes sense that you’ve taken the change, to find out what happened, what became of him. But this means that you’re not subject to evacuation.” “It means,” she said, “that I’m its cause, now.” * A diffuse line of departing shuttles gleams in the night sky. Familiar street-sounds transport Suldán back into the turbulent days of his fatherless return to this city. He is dressed—again—in knee-length shorts, his billowing, white shirt, and sandals. Mother walks beside him. It has taken a substantial portion of the evening for him to find some comfort in that word, and he can pinpoint the moment in which the word roused itself from slumber. “I need fresh air,” the house-dowager had said, as if rousing herself from the most stagnate of dreams. “And you need a meal: something more than the kitchen here can provide.” And so, they ate at a restaurant she knew: an expensive place that was all candle-light and shadow. They spoke, haltingly at first; and after eating, Suldán braved a long and probing stare into her eyes. Nothing moved across her gaze. “Why did you accept the change?” he asked. And now, he listens to city noise and the echo of her response. A woman came from that fly-speck of a village we’d left. Looking for me. She came with news of your father. She was aphasic, but her worms were well-acclimated to the human nervous system. I didn’t think, I simply accepted them, and all they had to say. It took a month of fevers and hallucinations before the story began to unravel in my mind. Father is dead: a ghost in heathen folklore. And now, on Cane Street, Suldán tries to feel something about that, but he can only think of the taste of black wine punctuating the moment when an aphasia-house dowager became his mother. “How long will you stay?” she asks, from beside him as they stroll back to the house. “My train leaves tomorrow.” “There’s room,” she says. “If you can bear to stay.” He nods, unsure of whether or not she catches the gesture. “I’ll bear it,” he says. Mother nods. “There’s so much to say…and so little.” “There’s always so much.” Silence follows his comment, leavened with street noise, and the hissing whisper of a shuttle overhead. * Mother has made an easy arrangement for Suldán’s accommodation in a small room behind her office/parlor; the aphasic chatter—clogging the central atrium and its recessed niches—is little more than a muted, half-whisper: background noise that is easy to ignore. It is a real world counterpoint to the echo of the question (and its answer) in his mind. It plays in the dark (wormless) recesses between his thoughts. “Did you truly love him?” he asked. The answer she gave was the one he’d come for, and now, in the darkness of a room that isn’t his own, he basks in the aftermath, listening to the answer she has given him. “Yes,” she said, glancing down at the table between them, at the ruins of a dinner consumed in relative silence, with only restaurant noise to bind them in the shared experience of dining. “Yes,” she said, again. “I loved him very much.” “Was it enough?” he asked. “Did it justify everything that happened…with all of us? With Arémiah?” He’d expected the taste of anger in that question; there was none. There was little more than a sense of release, a sense of answered waiting. “I don’t know,” she said, after a long, pained eternity of contemplative, inward-staring silence. It was clear that she recognized the question by the manner in which it shaped his voice, by some body-language verb, released and dissolved as the words hung, spoken, between them. “But when you love someone, you don’t always consider the unknown and unknowable consequences of loving them. Your father wasn’t always the same man: he’d always been a believer of one sort or another, but his belief was…I don’t know; it might have had a place on the ancestral planet, on Earth, but here…there was no environmental niche for it, no meaning for it to acquire, and so it mutated, I guess. I loved the man your father had been, and I wanted to love the man he’d become, but I couldn’t get a bead on him. His belief was stronger than I was; it was atavistic, and at times, monstrous. I couldn’t understand those drives, that need…and it was that need that broke us all, and killed your brother.” Her words, their echo, are his only company. Now. Suldán—a guest of the house dowager—has been allowed entry through the back of the establishment, and so he has forgone the required ritual of another bath. He sits, now, on an unfamiliar bed, in nothing but briefs, as the blades of a fan draw lazy arcs from the center-spot of the back-room ceiling. He watches the rotating blades for a while. He sits on the bed, like some ancient monk, lost in mediation, his hands clasped at his ankles. The ceiling fan stirs currents into the air, and those currents tickle the faint hairs on Suldán’s forearms and shins. For an instant, it feels as if living things move across his skin: little sweat-born creatures as long and as thick as silvery-white eyelashes. It is only air, only strands of his own hair, disturbed, and not the worms that exist as a language among those who carry them. He presses back into the nest of pillows behind him, dreading what will come in the hours immediately following sunrise. He will face a train-ride back to Elwyn, and walk into the most thorough and invasive of biological interrogations in Elwyn City’s primary travel clinic. Ött observers and human doctors will interrogate him, one cell at a time, in their bland and oh-so-casual search for signs of worms and spores. He will offer questions and depositions. They will clear him for entry. As a diplomatic pilot, he is exempt from the law of biological non-interference; he will be decontaminated, if necessary. Sterilized. The thought of it rankles. The whole evacuation exists as a means to sidestep biocidal decontamination. In Ött ecological logic, infested humans are an expression of native-evolved life, native intelligence: it is necessary for them to evolve their own culture, without interference from speech-endowed humans, without interference from the Ött, the masters of this world, though only a tiny number of them actually occupy it. They will leave in the evacuation, they will relinquish the planet to its speechless, paraphasic natives. Non-infested humans—in their fast-dwindling numbers—are both interlopers and an endangered species. —an endangered species and a family reduced in number by one memory-haunted mother. She will watch her children leave. Her words echo: …and now that the world is ending, I’d like to know if you’ve come to ask it. That question. But not her world. She is his mother, but she isn’t human anymore: not in the same way. She carries a hybridizing population of worms and fungi that reveal within themselves the snippets of a thousand (or more) stories: that of her husband’s death, and the stories of the woman who witnessed it, stories—as well—of every other person who has played host to at least one of the worms now at home in Mother’s evolving body. Suldán considers the fine sheen of sweat on his own flesh; there are no worms in it, no chemical narrative retelling the small epics of tragedy, beauty, and any other facet of human existence carried in the brain and in the neurochemicals of their carrier. Nothing. Empty, Suldán thinks. As he draws a deep breath, a pebble seems to harden in the middle of his throat. It takes a moment of effort to breathe past it, a moment of effort to chase the sudden jitter of electricity from his fingertips. He clasps his ankles, watching as his knuckles and fingertips grow pale as proof of blood pressed out of them. Empty, he thinks again, and closes his eyes. He opens his eyes, after a while, stretches, and extinguishes the bedside lamp. Darkness spills across the room, as night-light traces window-born patterns across the ceiling. A superstitious mind might find a pattern in the diffuse light-scrawl, on omen; but superstition—Suldán thinks—died with his father in the no-man’s land south of this city. And so, he sees nothing but light-smears and darkness, as he stretches out in bed and listens to distant noises and voices: city sounds, house sounds, and the echo of the day, receding in the darkness. For an instant, he sees a ghost-image of the house-dowager (his mother) standing motionless on Cane street, as shuttles climb into the sky and whisper into orbit. They will be the apocalypse that they flee: the end of two human cities (the only human cities on the face of the planet.) Holden and Elwyn. She will witness the deaths of those cities and remain trapped in place, unable to tell another speech-endowed human the tale of what has happened. And Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt… Those words echo the fire, the brimstone, and the divine wrath that lived, permanently, in Father’s voice. It is chilling to hear the man speak, after so long a silence, so long an absence. He is an unwelcome ghost. Suldán cannot understand his muddled, conflicted, and complicated feelings about the now-dead man, and his phantom echo in the dark place where dreams live, though he tries to dig deep into himself and draw those feelings into the open. Perhaps, if he can grasp them, they will reveal themselves, glowing in the darkness, giving shape to the things he cannot say, the things he doesn’t know the language for. Nothing happens, and so he closes his eyes, instead. He sleeps: fitfully, at first, and then, later, soundly. THE END I suspect that there will be more of this story, but I can’t actually be sure. There is more to tell, especially since the Ött remain in the background, and I say nothing of how/why a settlement of humans became marooned on an Ött-controlled planet with a distinct lack of Ött inhabitants: there’s a whole treatise on extraterrestrial behavior lurking inside of that particular plot point. (Of course, there may be more stories in this universe, but told from the viewpoints of different characters.) The urge to write this story evolved from the “Smile” challenge, despite the fact that this story has nothing to do with that challenge. It’s something else, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed reading it. As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.