Anomaly

By Xauri’EL Zwaan

Xauri’EL is this month’s winner of $517.50 for a story that creates a whole new world.

Bio:  Xauri’EL Zwaan is a mendicant artist in search of meaning, fame and fortune, or pie (where available). Ze resides in a little hobbit hole in Saskatoon, Canada on Treaty 6 territory with zir life partner and two very lazy cats.

Without further ado, “Anomaly” by Xauri’EL Zwaan.

The asphalt streets were cracked and broken, the houses scabrous and decaying. From every chink and crevice in the urban waste, fungi sprouted, a riot of colour and moist meaty flesh. Renee picked her way gingerly through the fruiting bodies, trying her best not to touch any. A hundred rumours swirled around this place, that the mushrooms were carcinogenic or deadly poison, that they put you to sleep for a thousand years to wake up in a world cleansed and healed, or worst of all, that they changed you.

She turned a corner and came upon what she had vaguely been told in Omegatown to expect: an old church, hewn from granite resistant to rot and corruption, its ancient wooden doors heavy with fungus and huge blooms twisting from its collapsing spire. The full weight of what she had come here for fell on her, the enormity of what she was planning on doing to herself. Gently stroking the weird treasure in her pocket, she took a deep breath and stepped resolutely forward, walking through the open doors and into the church’s cavernous nave.

The inside was blessedly free of mushrooms, the walls unexpectedly clean, the arched vault lined with mouldering but serviceable pews. She looked around as she walked slowly between them. This had to be the right place; she saw nobody, but someone had to be maintaining the church, repairing it and keeping it free of fungal taint. She stopped in the midst of the marching rows, called in a hesitant voice, “Is anyone here?”

“What’s wrong, Barbie? Lost your way?”

A lisping, mocking voice called from behind her. Renee turned and saw someone standing between her and the door. She gasped, though trying to stifle it. The girl looked to be her age, or not much older, and wore homespun clothes that shimmered like spider webs, but had vivid red skin and small curled horns nestled in her coal-black hair. She grinned, and a forked tongue flickered from between needle fangs.

Renee jumped back, and nearly ran into another body. A deep, mellifluous voice growled near her ear, “Cat got your tongue, Barbie?” She started and lurched away, head whipping around to see thick thatches of fur; as her eyes travelled up, they fixed on a bestial snouted face twisted in a menacing snarl. She walked backward, trying desperately not to panic. As she did, another form rose from between the pews, scaled skin morphing smoothly from a camouflaging brown to a brilliant pattern of blue and gold. She sensed movement beyond her, and turned to see the red-skinned girl standing only a few feet away now, arms crossed.

“You’ve come to the wrong place, Barbie,” she crooned. “Don’t you know? These are the poison grounds. Your kind have no place here. You should have heeded the warnings.”

Heart hammering in her chest, Renee plucked up her courage. “My name’s not Barbie,” she said tremulously. “It's Renee, and I’ve come to see the Witch.”

“Enough!” a silken alto voice called from the far end of the nave, near the blank absence where the altar should have been. “Leave her be, she has just as many rights here as you.”

The red-skinned girl turned and flounced away, pouting. Renee turned and saw the graceful catboy and the scaled chameleon also retreat back toward the walls. The muzzled one was clearly angry, but the scaled one was giving her a neutral, measuring look. Renee craned her neck to look beyond them and saw another figure ascending from a staircase that must lead to a buried crypt.

She was tall and very thin, unnaturally so, her fingers long and slender, her neck a swanlike arch. Like the others, she wore a tunic of simple homespun that glistened and moulded to her spare ascetic form. Her features were oddly but elegantly symmetrical, and her blonde hair cascaded like a waterfall to her waist. She more glided than walked across the intricate patterns of the tile floor, hands curled loosely against her hips.

“I’m sorry,” she said gently as Renee gawped. “We do tend to reproduce the traumas we have suffered. They will do you no harm. What is your business here, child? You are welcome in my home, but I’m sure you know that it’s forbidden. If your Proctors found out, they would be very displeased.”

Renee breathed deeply and tried to still her heart. She had expected the Witch to be strange, but not so beautiful. She said boldly, “It is said that you desire gifts of Anomalies.”

The Witch breathed a deep sigh. “I desire many things,” she replied solemnly, “but yes, Anomalies are one of them. Let me see what you have brought.”

Renee reached into the pocket of her tunic, pulled out a small frog, still alive, and presented it to the towering figure. It sat calmly on her palm, acting for all the world as if it did not have two faces, one of which gave a reedy croak. The Witch leaned forward, took it from Renee’s hand, and studied it carefully. “Where did you find this?”

“The corner of Darwin Street and Galton Avenue,” Renee replied, “on the grass berm by the catchment pond.”

“Then the toxins may have been leaching into the groundwater nearby,” the Witch said thoughtfully. “I must investigate this. You have done well. You have brought my attention to a problem I was not aware of.”

Her gaze refocused on Renee. “And what do you ask in exchange for this gift? I don’t suppose you brought it to me purely in the interest of furthering my research, though well you should; it concerns your community just as much as mine.”

Now that it came to it, doubts crept into Renee’s mind, but she stilled them. She had gone over this in her head a thousand times. She nearly whispered, “I want to be able to hear better.”

“Yes?” the Witch replied, a deep well of sympathy in her voice. “And what is it you would hear, little one?”

“I want to hear what people say about me. What they whisper behind my back.”

“I see.” The Witch put a hand to her chin, her brow wrinkling. “And you would not have noticeable changes made? No pointed pinnae, or ears capable of twisting to focus the sound? You want to remain part of your community, to continue to live by its mores?”

“Yes,” she said defensively. “I don’t want to be like…” she vaguely waved toward the red-skinned girl, who made a rude gesture back. “I just… I want to fit in. All I need is a little help.”

The Witch nodded. “Come to my laboratory,” she said, pointing to the stairway as she walked toward it. Renee cautiously followed, tamping down the dread that welled in her bosom. There was still time to back out… but if she did that, things would just continue on as they had. At least this way, whatever ended up happening would be the result of her own choice.

The Witch led her down into the crypt, which was lit by blooms of glowing fungus. The bare stone walls were lined with shelves holding racks of jars and vials filled with translucent fluids; Renee tried hard not to look at what was floating in them. A steel bench held anachronistically modern equipment, the only product of civilization she had seen in this whole place, a microscope and other less recognizable things. In the murky depths beyond, a hospital bed and medical equipment lurked.

The Witch rummaged in one of the cupboards and drew out a vial filled with an opaque, milky fluid. “I can slightly thicken the bones of your inner ear,” the Witch said as she held the vial up and scanned the label. “A subtle modification, one the Proctors’ screenings would be unlikely to detect. It will increase your sensitivity to lower frequencies, to catch deep vibrations that travel far.”

Renee nodded. “That’s what I want,” she said. “I’ve got to find out how to make them stop.”

“Be warned,” the Witch said gravely, “If the change is discovered, you will be lucky to live. You yourself will be treated as Anomalous. Should that happen, there is a place for you here, but it would be your own responsibility to find the way. Are you absolutely certain?”

Renee breathed deep. “Yes,” she said in a hoarse voice. “Change me.”

The Witch picked up a gleaming syringe and drew fluid from the vial. Renee rolled up her sleeve, her heart quivering as the Witch poked the needle into her shoulder and pushed the plunger down, injecting the stuff into her body. She panted, nearly hyperventilating as she felt it suffuse the delicate muscle.

“The mutation will take place over a matter of days,” the Witch said. “Be careful as you return, and careful not to reveal that you hear more than you should. You must give them no reason to suspect that you have deviated from the Guideline.”

Renee nodded, and the Witch led her back up the stairs. As she marched out of the doors of the church, head high, the red-skinned girl smirked at her, leaning nonchalantly against the stone frame. “Come back anytime, Barbie,” she teased. “You’re one of us now.”

#

At first, she didn’t even realise it was happening, thought that the Witch’s strange brew must have been a dud, that the promised transformation wasn’t going to occur, and disappointment warred with relief in her breast. Then she started to hear them: soft, rumbling voices, barely discernible, beneath the murmur of normal conversation in the halls of the Athenaeum or the choral recitations in the Pantheon. She strained and fought to make them out, and eventually the day came when she finally understood.

“Gerald went to meet that slut Myrna again in Sanger Park last night.”

Renee’s face blushed deep red, and she slowed her walk while fighting not to show that she had heard anything. Meaghan and Zelda were murmuring to each other in the corner by the storage pods. She stopped, looking at one as if planning to open it, far enough away that they should not suspect she would be able to hear them.

“He knows if he gets caught, the Proctors will have him in confinement.”

Meaghan smiled sardonically. “Boys don’t think of those things. They think with their dicks. He probably can’t even see past her tits and ass.”

“What if he gets her pregnant?”

“So what if he does? Both of them would have to do a full screening. It’ll probably just get pruned anyway. That’ll snap him out of it.”

“An unplanned pregnancy will get him a black mark. He’ll be held back from the breeding rounds, and assigned scut work for years at least.”

“If he’s stupid enough to do it without taking kill pills, he deserves it. Corrupting the pool like that. It’s sick.”

“That stuck-up bitch is looking at us.”

Renee immediately spun and walked away. As she did, she tried to block the voices from her ears, but couldn’t.

“God knows how she got through the screening,” Meaghan said. “She’s such a space case. Probably autistic.”

“Did you see the way she was looking at me? Like she knows some secret and she’s not pleased.”

“She looks at everyone like that. Thinks that just because she has better mental Aptitudes, she’s worth more to the pool than us.”

“We’ll see about that when she’s ready for the breeding rounds. She’ll probably be assigned to a halfwit Omega. Serve her right.”

Well, she had wanted to hear what people said behind her back. But it was dawning on her that that wasn’t all she was going to hear. She had bought herself much more than she had bargained for.

As she stumbled down the halls, trying to get away from the mocking voices, Jannice called out her name from behind her, and walked quickly to catch up. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look like you’ve seen an Anomaly.”

“It’s- it’s nothing,” Renee stuttered. “I just heard something I probably shouldn’t have.” There were very few people in town she could reasonably call friends, and Jannice was the only one with whom she was close, but even she couldn’t be trusted not to turn Renee over to the Proctors if she found out the truth. It seemed like nobody was going to be able to hide their secrets from her anymore, but her own secret had to be held as close as the grip of death.

Over the coming days, Renee was burdened with everything her peers and guardians whispered for the ears of their closest confidantes alone. She learned that Rickhart was falling behind in the Aptitudes and was worried he was going to be demoted to Beta status. She learned that Belmont preferred boys over girls, and was dreading his first breeding round and trying to find some way to get it put off. She learned that Lilian snuck out to Omegatown at night to get drunk with manual labourers and get into fights. Her own mother was due for screening, and she learned that she had been concealing health problems and was terrified of what it might find. She learned far more explicit details of people’s covert trysts than she was comfortable with. And of course, she learned very thoroughly what the other young Alphas thought of her.

Renee’s existence was a tradeoff; a little bit of physical degeneration and social anxiety had been tolerated in exchange for slightly superior mental faculties. Her genes were valuable, and it was hoped that the intelligence would breed true while the imperfections could be compensated for with dominant genes. But the youth of the Athenaeum were hypersensitive to the slightest deviation from the Guideline. She was not officially Anomalous -- not yet -- but as far as the rest of her elite peers were concerned, she might as well be. She was just a little too awkward, a shade too slow and clumsy in conversation and repartee. And as the years had passed, those deficiencies had only reinforced themselves. She had become socially isolated, and in return, she grew more and more withdrawn, found it more and more difficult to make friends with the other children, or even to get them to just leave her alone.

She didn’t remember, now, why she had thought that the knowledge she had taken on herself would change that. It wasn’t helping her blend in or increasing her popularity. If anything, knowing all the things her peers wanted to keep hidden was making her more strange.

Jannice clearly knew something was wrong, though she didn’t openly talk about it; she was just more careful and kind with Renee, more tolerant of her growing eccentricity. And occasionally, overwhelmed by the weight of the unknowing confessions, Renee told her things. Innocuous things, or information with immediate value; nothing terrible, nothing that would cause a major scandal or get someone confined or screened. Just a few meaningless tidbits to ease the load.

Several months later, as she walked down the Athenaeum hall, working carefully to ignore the susurrus of phantom voices, she heard a whisper from a circle of other girls as she passed: “We’ll meet at Huxley Lane and intercept her on her way home. Time to teach that arrogant bitch a lesson.”

Renee gave the slightest of side-eyes and saw Meaghan, Tilly, and Brendas in a knot by the gymnasium door, looking at her while pretending not to look. The worst of her tormentors, the ones who took it beyond slights or insults and into open bullying and persecution. The exact people she had wanted to gain a leg up over. Well, now she had it. Instead of walking back to the Alpha quarter via Huxley Lane as she customarily did, she detoured through Sanger Park.

It was a mistake.

Her enhanced hearing detected them hiding in the bushes long before a normal person would have, but even by then it was too late. She stopped, searching desperately for some way to avoid what was coming, and finding none, decided that she would at least face it head-on instead of running or cowering. “I know you’re there,” she called.

Brendas stepped from a copse to the left of the path in front of her, and Meaghan from behind a berry bush to her right. Tilly remained hiding behind a berm to her rear, but Renee knew exactly where she was.

Meaghan took the lead. “Well, well,” she said with a smirk. “Look who decided to take a walk in the park today.”

Brendas crossed her arms. “You decided to avoid Huxley Lane today, to go the long way. I wonder why?”

“I like the park,” Renee said defensively. “What business is it of yours whether I walk here?”

“You thought we were going to be waiting for you,” Meaghan accused. “Don’t pretend. We know you heard us.”

“You and that filthy degenerate who pretends to be your friend have talked about a few too many things you shouldn’t know,” Brendas said. “Now we know for sure. You’re fucking Anomalous. What do you think the Proctors will do if we tell them?”

“You have no proof of anything,” Renee said in a clear if quavering voice. “Get out of my way. You’re violating the Guideline. You could be put in confinement.”

Meaghan’s face turned sour. “Nobody is going to stick up for a freak like you,” she spat. “You know damn well everyone hates you. You’re not going to tell anyone anything about this. You’re going to take your medicine like a good little reject, or you’re going to get pruned.”

Tilly had been sneaking up from behind in a futile attempt to ambush her. As she moved into range, Renee jabbed her elbow back hard, striking Tilly in the midsection and knocking the breath from her. She turned and tried to flee, but Meaghan and Brendas were both faster and stronger than her, which she knew perfectly well from constantly repeated testing. The Witch’s gift had given her an advantage, but it had not been enough.

#

This time, Renee walked less hesitantly into the Witch’s slowly rusticating church, doing her best to act as if she belonged there. After all, she was like the others here now, and even better, she had made herself one of them by her own choice. Surely that gave her the right. She was an Anomaly; something to be feared, hated, reviled, perhaps pitied as Jannice surely did. But it seemed that here, she was also something worthy of respect.

The horned, red-skinned girl lounged insolently on a chipped and mouldy pew as Renee entered the sturdy stone building. “That was quick,” she said with a smirk. “What happened? Didn’t like the things the Barbies and Kens had to say about you?”

Renee paused. “Why do you call us Barbies?” she asked, halfway between annoyed and genuinely curious.”

The girl rolled her eyes. “You should read some history sometime. It’s about a bunch of dolls. Identical dolls. You wouldn’t understand.”

This time, the Witch was busily cleaning the walls of the church, the boy with the face and grace of a cat helping her. The chameleon-skinned one was nowhere to be seen, though of course that didn’t mean they weren’t there. As her footsteps sounded on the tiles, the ethereal woman turned to look at her, then rose from her knees and put her hands on her elbows, a frown distorting her perfectly symmetrical features. “Welcome back, little one. Have you had problems with the alteration? Has it not developed adequately?”

Renee marched up to her with confidence she didn’t feel and thrust a butterfly with half-male and half-female markings toward her. The first Anomaly she had come upon by chance, but she had had to methodically search the entire town to find this one. “I need a way to defend myself,” she said without preamble.

“Do you indeed,” the Witch said. “I must admit, I don’t think I need inquire about the source of this sudden desire.” She held up the butterfly and gave it an appraising look. “A common enough mutation, but every datapoint is valuable. Very well, let us see what we can do.”

As she puttered about with potions and specimens in the crypt, Renee asked, “Are those other…” she managed to stop the word Anomalies before it escaped her lips. “Are they your children?”

The Witch arched an eyebrow. “Not biologically, no. I gave up that capability long ago, in return for a longer lifespan to continue my work. The success of a major bioremediation project is measured in generations. No, the young ones are also from nearby settlements that have grown up on the tracts of land which my forebears cleansed of pollution. They were like you once; they also desired my gifts. Eventually, the desire for what is forbidden became too great, or hiding the alterations from the others became too onerous, and they chose to come here instead of living life confined by the Proctors’ Guideline.”

Renee gasped. “You can do that?”

The Witch nodded. “As I told you before, there is a place for you here, though you must understand that it means turning your back on that other world forever.”

Renee considered it for a long moment. What was keeping her in the place where she had been born? Her mother? Jannice? The perfect children of the Athenaeum? The opportunity to be bred with other Alphas, and for her genes to enrich the pool and give a slight advantage in the Aptitudes to her descendents? In the end, fear overcame her, but not without planting a seed.

“Fangs and claws will surely not do,” the Witch murmured as she sorted through the weird bottles. “Electrostatic shocks? Still perhaps a bit too… ostentatious.” She tapped a fingernail thoughtfully against the side of a tiny vial. “Jellyfish stingers threaded into the palms of the hands, perhaps. It won’t be obvious to casual examination, though a thorough screening with tissue samples would detect it immediately. But those whom you stung with them would definitely know something unusual had happened. Is that acceptable?”

Renee nodded firmly, her heart throbbing. The first time she had done this, she hadn’t fully thought through the consequences, and this too would surely have unintended ones. But Renee was done with letting people push her around. “Change me,” she said, dread and eagerness warring in her voice.

#

“Jannice has cancer.”

Renee stopped dead in her tracks as the whisper rumbled in the lowest range of her hearing. Her only friend had been missing from the Athenaeum for a week now, and the social isolation was that much more unbearable for her absence, with the worry on top of it that a weakness of her immune system would be deemed a sufficient defect to remove her from the ranks of the Alphas and from Renee’s social circle permanently. But this was worse, much worse.

She spun on her heel and confronted Jerrick as he huddled with Deegan by his storage pod, heads tilted close to hide their conversation from the youths who passed around them. “What did you say?”

Looks of shock and fear came over them; they had surely heard the rumours, that Renee knew secrets she should not. “Yes,” she said impatiently, “I heard you. Did you say Jannice has cancer?”

Jerrick blinked a couple of times. “That’s what they’re saying,” he said. “You know she had a screening recently? They found a tumour in her stomach. She’s in confinement now, waiting for the Council of Proctors to convene.”

“How about that,” a shrill voice sounded from behind her. “You won’t have your little protector any more.”

Renee turned and saw Meaghan in the middle of the hall, flanked by Tilly and Brendas as usual. Other students were gathering to watch the confrontation.

“We all know you’re Anomalous,” Meaghan continued, “and now your dirty friend is too. You’re both going to get pruned. You fucking filth. You’re not going to be able to contaminate us anymore.”

Something snapped inside Renee. She was no longer one of these cruel harpies, the perfect dolls who brutally enforced conformity to the Guideline above all else. Jannice had been her last lifeline, and now that too was being cut away. “You’d better take that back,” she said in a quavering but defiant voice. “You can talk that way about me if you want, but not about Jannice. Not when she’s not here to defend herself.”

“Ooh,” Meaghan smirked, “the kitten has claws. Do we have to teach you another lesson? Right here and now?”

The other youths surrounding them began to murmur, and then to rhythmically chant, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Renee slowly raised her hands. It was still going to be three on one, but she had a secret advantage that nobody yet knew. Revealing it in public this way was a gamble, but the only alternative was to let herself get beaten again, and she was no longer willing to tolerate that.

Grinning widely, the three girls began to stride confidently toward her. Before she could react, Brendas and Tilly were on each side of her, grabbing her arms. Meaghan balled up a fist, clearly intending to punch her in the stomach. Renee struggled with the girls pinning her arms, and managed to get her right hand around Tilly’s wrist. She had never done it before, but right now it felt like the most natural thing in the world, like just stretching a muscle she didn’t know she had. She could feel the stinging fibres in the palm of her hand flexing, the almost sexual warmth as they delivered their load of venom. Tilly screamed and snatched her arm away, and Brendas dropped the other one, startled at the sound. Just as Meaghan was pulling her fist back to strike, Renee swung her left palm and grabbed her tormentor’s face. Meaghan let out a thin piercing cry and stumbled backward, her hand flying to her cheek, where an angry red burn was already welling up. “What the fuck!” she shouted.

“That’s a nasty rash,” Renee said with the calm of shock. “You should be careful who you associate with. I hear the Omegas carry diseases.” The students surrounding them crowed and guffawed at the barb.

“She did something to me!” Meaghan shouted. “You all fucking saw it! She’s Anomalous! Her genes are tainted!”

“You shouldn’t make accusations like that,” Renee said. “People could get hurt. Badly.”