In A Stranger's Memory

"Intercessor. Subcommittee. Is that what I should say?" Her face, pinkly aglow, was a heat mirage above her supine body.

"If you like."

"But I could say something else...something more personal."

"Whatever you like."

Her breathing was labored, not yet the minute to minute struggle it would be. She was durable, rugged, typically Colonial; but she would not endure this. She clutched his sleeve. He wore a nondescript coat.

"I'm proud of the work I did," she said, giving the very words a prideful energy, which cost her, and the fingers biting into his coat sleeve whitened where the rest of her flesh blushed brightly, with the sickness. "But I want to talk about the cat..."

She did so, a girlhood fable of an orange cat who birthed a litter aboardship. It brimmed with all the adventure, joy and frolic a tale of kittens negotiating 0-gee ought to have. At the end, drowsing, she was smiling. He unclawed her hand from his sleeve, laid it to her chest.

The medical services, when they came, were in the form of a single technician in a soiled uniform, his eyes stunned and stony.

There were still places to get water, but none were from taps or pipes anymore. The night sky scattered radiantly without the Colony's ambient light. From the southern line of hills the lively dots of fires were visible here and there. Some were deliberate, fires for cooking and warmth, and the basic comfort of discernible faces across the flickering light, Anastas guessed. Other parts of the failing Colony were just burning.

He chewed a protein stalk, limestone-hard, unappetizing, but he had a carton of them up here in his hills. Foresight. Planning. Very likely he had seen the collapse of this place before anyone else. It had streamed out ahead for him, inevitabilities unfolding, wrong turns already made, critical decisions irrevocable. Nobody had asked him, though. And of course he hadn't volunteered anything. Humbly he'd worked, at the silicates processor, deferring to all others, especially those who administered the Colony.

Anastas himself was pure Colony, as they said. Born five days after the Certification, lived every day of his life here. He still wore his work coat from the processor plant, but had removed all insignia. The remaining green-gray was a close match for the native rock.

Across the immense oval of the valley, adrift only with pricks of firelight, the northern hills were mounds like bunched fabric. And beyond those lay what Anastas, in his twenty-seven years, hadn't seen. The purpose for this Colony, the grounds for its Certification. It was, after all, easier to get a Certificate if yours were a proposed Contact Colony.

Anastas had never qualified to have anything to do with Contact. He had never seen a Spook; and he didn't care, not even now, if he ever did.

Finishing the stalk, he rose from his crouch and started plodding downhill, to the streets and structures of the Colony, where dying people would leave him their memories.

Warm moist light bathed the littered lanes and illuminated the translucent metaplastic roofs, under which Anastas did his work. He slipped from place to place, finding dead, the soon-to-be dead, and those--like him, it seemed--who weren't going to have the sickness. These last he only observed, from a distance, from hiding places. He had a particular eye out for the rough types.

One of the people he slipped in to see blinked up at him and, with a look of confusion rather than surprise, said, "An. That is you, I think."

Two dead shared the room, which was even now meticulously appointed. Anastas told the man, whose flowing graying hair fanned an embroidered pillow, what he'd said several times today already, and had been saying to those he'd visited since the epidemic took real hold.

The older man seemed to recognize it as a spiel. Amusement crossed his flushed face. "An from the rock factory. And playing...what? Absolver, I think."

"You can tell me whatever you like."

"And you'll, you said, keep it...." His chest, a floral shirt basted to it, struggled to rise, then strained to fall. But he had dark eyes which had sharpened in the last minute.

"Anything you want remembered."

The face moved into a configuration that should have accompanied a laugh, and not a jolly one, but he could only make the shape with his mouth and crinkle the dark disdainful eyes. "An. An. An. Simple soul. I have treatises that shall live on after me. Masterworks. To say nothing of a spirited collection of adolescent poetry that got popular when I was your age..." The eyes crossed; with a visible effort he uncrossed them. "I am already remembered. And by more than...than---" The dismissive wave was, now, the lifting of a single finger.

Anastas waited awhile more, because the man might change his mind, which he did, sort of. He murmured strings of lyrical words. Anastas listened and committed them to memory, acts that were one and the same to him. After the man couldn't spare breath any longer, Anastas, leaving, realized that these must be the poems he'd mentioned. He played the lines silently to himself and liked the few images that stood out clearly. One was about a snowflake. He had never seen such a thing, but it sounded wondrous and mysterious.

Later that same day, when he was getting tired and thirsty and hungry, he saw the rough types.

They were riding in a flitskiff, a fancy one. They had hand-held mining imploders they were brandishing like weapons. With whoops and hollers they navigated the streets. Anastas scuttled across rooftops, dropped off on the fringe of the Colony, blending with the gray-green rocky terrain. He stole up into his hills, with the onsetting night.

Above, again, the stars beamed. Occupying himself on the climb, he wondered how many Colonies were lit by those stars, how many had also failed, how many lives of Colonials those failures had cost.

Of more immediate impact and interest, he thought it odd that the scholarly man had recognized him when so many others he'd visited had not, even people he'd had some repeated contact with at the silicates plant. But that was Anastas. Unassuming. Unobtrusive. Always the stranger.

It was immediately more difficult to get around after the rough types had truly taken over. They did very little that was good. Even what was helpful to Anastas' work--moving the sick they found into one place--wasn't good for the sick people themselves. They clogged a hangar, gasping and sweating and reeking. Anastas had to bring them water to get them to talk; and that was now very dangerous. Imploder discharges were heard all over the Colony. 'Skiffs raced through the streets.

Anastas, stock-still and invisible behind mounds of rubble and scorched 'plastic, knew some of the rough types by name. Two he'd worked with closely at the plant. Brawny, able to do the strenuous work, but complainers, both. Convincing each other daily that others had conspired to keep them down, to make miseries of their lives.

They and the others were still amassing all the Colony's supplies, bringing them to a central site, like greedy hands raking in the kitty after winning a crooked hand of cards. Anastas had liked card games as a boy, until no one dared to play him anymore.

The supplies weren't going to be enough. Anastas saw that, though the rough types probably didn't yet. There were other people without the sickness who hadn't joined with the new regime. Some were Contact personnel. Warning them, Anastas knew, would do nothing.

The power didn't come back on, and the water didn't flow anew; but the Colony's new authority was absolute for anyone who fell under it. Impressed crews started burying the dead, a massive effort. No one who had gotten sick was alive anymore.

The rough types, draped in finery and flanked by an imploder-bearing cadre, addressed the remaining Colonials. Long, loud, rambling speeches. Anastas heard enough from a distance, ignored the rest.

He returned to his southern hills and waited. He gnawed protein stalks and drank untreated native water from a tiny pool in a cave.

After a time, when the Colony's remaining supplies were running critically low, a delegation in flitskiffs headed toward the northern hills. The Contact men and women had been put on a new mission. Anastas, in this instance, didn't know how that would eventuate. That was how it was, for him, with the Spooks. It was why they'd never interested him.

Seasoned Contact personnel had spent decades at their work, with little to show for it. Now they were expected to parley successfully. Anastas looked north from his hills and waited some more, the memories of many, many others keeping him company.

One of the people dying in the hangar had been in the Contact corps, in a capacity more prominent than the many who filled out committees and subcommittees. He had traveled beyond the northern hills for direct engagement. What he'd said to Anastas, the specific moment he had wanted to leave behind, dealt with an episode of hand-holding involving a girl with soft brown eyes and soft brownish hair. But he had continued to wheeze out words, after. He spoke of his work. He strung together deteriorating sentences regarding the counterintuitiveness of the Spooks, how difficult they were to deal with, how seemingly recalcitrant. He finally, and clearly, called the Contact futile; and then said nothing else.

This Colony had been failing before the sickness came. Anastas had foreseen the shortages and the Colonials' hardy acceptance of them when they did arrive. Now, though, a new level of crisis had come. This wasn't hardship, to be stoically withstood. This, instead, was famine, and a fresh wave of people started a this time slower process of dying, even as the new authority bellowed promises. Much hope, it seemed, rested with the repurposed Contact delegation.

Anastas, remaining free and moving unseen at will, observed the gaunt survivors as they labored, some in shackles now, at taxing tasks that seemed to have no real object. Bodies crumpled by implosion were hung on posts.

Two days after the delegation came back over the hills, the collecting of fingers commenced.

Anastas put those two days down to squeamishness and incomprehensibility. The rough types in their finery probably argued it out among themselves, but there was ultimately, in their view, no argument to be made. The work crews were set to excavating. Some, maddened by weariness and hunger, objected, and were shackled or, in extreme cases, hung from posts.

The mass disinterring wasn't just repugnant, profane, and a great deal of grueling labor; worst, maybe, it was the undoing of the only sure good work the new regime had inaugurated.

Still, it was done, and the fingers were removed--at first with reverential care, later with the ceremony of cutting into edible meat on a plate. It was a complicated frustrating operation, since no diagram of the mass graves had been drawn. Some of the malnourished died digging in wrong places. The smallest fingers on the left hands, as had been specified, were severed, collected, counted by those grim appointed counters who were waiting to reach the prescribed number.

Eventually, Anastas saw, this occurred. And with the separated digits in a large yellow mesh sack, the delegation 'skiffed north again.

Anastas skulked and prowled, lurked and crept, coming near enough to hear conversations pitched sufficiently low to, reasonably, reassure that they wouldn't be overheard.

"I think it's a joke. A big ugly...alien...joke. Spooks just want us to do something awful. They want to make us do that something awful."

"Yeah. Maybe. But that's the deal. We give 'em fingers..." It ended on an inflection, with the second unsaid sentence regarding the reward for those fingers voiced by the horrid hollow pained gurgling of stomachs.

A full day passed, and those carrying the imploders looked more and more anxious. The hours were lengthy, fragile, and each promised to end badly. There was a coppery taste of massacre in the air.

But the flitskiffs returned, riding lower and slower, burdened with foodstuffs. The authorities tried to warehouse the supplies, no doubt to mete them out at rates of their own stingy reckoning, but here the hungry mob wouldn't be denied. They rushed the transports. Imploder fire started, grew pervasive, deafening. The promised massacre had arrived, despite the abundance of food on hand. Anastas, concealed, was nonetheless flung by the edge of a stray shot. He rebounded off a metaplastic wall and lay, blood seeping and gathering a tidy little pool. His body's cells hummed and fluttered indignantly from their brush with the effect. Those struck directly by implosion fire didn't have the luxury of assessing the influence.

Prone and bloodied, though, was in this circumstance nearly as good a camouflage as sneaking and hiding. Recovering from the shock, he also waited out the shots.

Several shooters had been overrun and brought down by the time the cacophony ended. Really, only a handful of people were still upright and mobile. They grabbed food off the 'skiffs and ran away, so that when Anastas finally levered himself onto his feet and limped forward, he was alone.

What the Spooks ate was comestible and digestible for humans. They had a talent for the hard clayey soil, which only made sense, since they themselves had sprung from it. In that, ultimately, lay the failure of this Colony and the failures of some uncounted number of others. Humans were where they did not belong, no better than Anastas had ever belonged among the Colonials.

Anastas, who was pure Colony, improvised a bandage for his wounds. He took some of the food still lying on the 'skiffs' flatbeds. It didn't matter to him what he ate. The protein stalks had done him fine.

He returned to his hills.

Days later the visitors came. It wasn't an organized arrival; rather, a wandering in. Naked and pinkish--a different pink from the sickness' hue--Anastas, on first sighting them, thought of them as newborns. He wasn't usually so clever with language. It woke a wan little smile on his face, which was unaccustomed to much expression.

They were adult in appearance, and human. At least, they were a conception of human, an idea that had undergone revision according to unknowable criteria. Who knew why the Spooks did anything? That had been an oft-repeated phrase, here in the Colony.

The visitors evidently scared off the few survivors of the massacre, since Anastas never saw any of them again. He came down from the southern hills and moved among the listless, blinking, unclothed, reimagined humans. They were not violent. They weren't judgmental. They had no presumptions. After a time he was able to recognize individuals, despite the changes, and match them to their original identities. All had died of the sickness and, later, had surrendered their smallest fingers from their left hands.

They responded to him in an almost mannerly fashion when he accosted them. To each individual he retold the appropriate memory that had been left with him, for safekeeping. It seemed the thing to do. They absorbed the stories. They responded with an increasing mental vigor. So he told different stories to different individuals, deliberately mismatching. Later still, he held forth at whole assemblies and talked until night fell. His audience didn't need sleep, nor clothing, nor much food.

Eventually, with the dull shock of great revelation, Anastas realized that he was never again to be the stranger.

Eric Del Carlo's short fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Redstone Science Fiction, Strange Horizons and many other publications. He is the co-author with Robert Asprin of the Wartorn fantasy novels, published by Ace Books, and NO Quarter, a New Orleans murder mystery made available by DarkStar Books. Visit http://www.ericdelcarlo.com for contact or info.