FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Brazil hadn't always been an easy place to live in. The country's history of slavery had left marks which hadn't proven to be easy to erase. Sand children and street urchins roamed the favelasdesperately struggling to keep themselves alive by any means necessary and you shouldn't have rolled down your car window at an intersection unless you were prepared to part not only with your watch but also with the hand and wrist you wore it on along with it, and having more hands than most people did didn't make Mano any less attached to them than they were. This kind of social climate had a way of making the forces of order believe that there was less to lose by arresting an innocent than by letting a guilty person get away, and that had been something to keep in mind around them as well. Klein had introduced her to a grand master whose reputation preceded him and who'd been mugged in an alley at gunpoint - reputation didn't bring much of the kind of protection you could have expected it to. She knew desperate times called for desperate measures and that work was hard enough to come by even without finicky ethical considerations, but she still wished that people could have found ways to survive without there having to be quite as much fishing and logging going on. Some things just weren't that easy to replace after they'd been lost.

Yet despite everything which went on, people in Brazil were still renowned for smiling, singing, dancing, playing music and wearing festive clothes in parades in which even the avians among them would stick extra feathers on themselves just for the heck of it. Mano got the impression they could have laughed while staring Death itself in the face. She couldn't help comparing that to places like Japan, Quebec and Finland, places with whopping suicide rates in which people weren't surrounded by crime and hounded by the wolf at their door, and concluding that money really couldn't buy happiness after all. Be that as it may, she'd still gone there to try to do what she could about the poverty level there, and somehow she still believed it'd been the right thing to do, enough that if it hadn't been for how things had ended up turning out for her in particular, if she'd been sent back in time and given the same choice, she'd have done it all over again.

Elizabeth had hated Brazil. Her opinion had been that all the joy around them was just a mask, and that repressing emotional distress the way people forced themselves to do so was nothing short of unhealthy. If they really were that happy, she'd wondered how they were intending the rest of the world to finally figure out that they were in a situation in which they couldn't afford to remain anymore. She hadn't regretted having given up what she'd had for a life of poverty the way she had, but it'd still been really hard on her every day, and she'd resented people who made it look easy. Admitting that there was a problem was an essential first step toward fixing it, she'd reasoned.

"Quit staring at me, will you?"

If gloom's better than panic, I'm on a roll, Mano thought, although she really wasn't quite sure about that. Gloom was thought without action and panic, action without thought, neither of which generally produced the results the person who felt them could have wanted them to, so she guessed they must have been fifty-fifty, after all. Maelstroms wrecked ships and stagnant waters drew disease-carrying bugs to them. She'd been brought up to value staying calm in crisis situations, but on some level she still thought action was generally likelier to be positive than inaction was, perhaps because the sea always rocked back and forth while the ground mostly just sat there being flat and boring.

Elizabeth had been part snapping turtle, part hermit crab. Mano was already reserved by bent and upbringing alike, but given how painful the memories associated with her were, even though she'd been the person she'd spent the most time with, she was also the one she talked about the least. She knew Elizabeth probably wouldn't have been too proud of her for that, not because she'd needed to be talked about a lot but because she'd always been a strong believer in better out than in.

Misery did love company. Even Mano had to admit that Elizabeth had been snappish and withdrawn, especially around people who didn't think understanding her was even worth going for. She'd learned from experience that often people you needed help from would only help you if you complained loud enough, which had been a lot easier for Mano to agree with regarding social issues than regarding what she thought of as the minor inconveniences of everyday life which had to be expected. She'd cared a lot for people as a whole but had had little patience for most individuals she'd come across. The few individuals who she had cared about, she'd been fiercely protective of.

"Look where you're going, damn you!"

She'd thought she was a more hideous beast than Frankenstein's monster and the Phantom of the Opera combined, and said she'd have had to have become the invisible man before feeling ready to go out in public, and not just for the invisible part. Back when they'd lived together in the Middle East before their final westward move, she'd been pretty passionate about how women shouldn't feel like they had to cover themselves up from head to toe, but even that didn't stop her from admitting that it was something she personally wished she could have gotten away with. Mano had told her that as far as she'd been concerned, she'd been the most handsome woman in the world, but she'd known that just couldn't have been reasonably expected to be enough for her.

Elizabeth had wanted her main contribution to the world to be her activism, but that hadn't stopped her from taking her poetic attempts pretty seriously also. She used to say the desert brought her inspiration because it was like a beach which went on and on with no ocean in sight, the same way life kept seeming like it was promising you things which you just never ended up getting. In her heart of hearts, Mano had hated the desert for its dryness and heat so dissimilar from the ocean she loved, but she'd tried to grin and bear it for her partner's sake while they'd had reason enough to live there. Ideals were all well and good, but sometimes they had to make concessions to reality or even to other ideals, she'd told herself. She knew Elizabeth had cared more about being there than she'd cared about not being there, so she never said she wanted to leave outright even though she did.

• I think it's somewhat ironic we'd have ended up living in the desert like this.
• Why's that?
• Well, Dante wrote that people who were in sterile relationships would end up in sterile places under a rain of fire.
• You know, deserts have more biodiversity, a more important environmental role and richer ecosystems than most people would think.
• Maybe there's more than one way in which relationships can be fertile that most people also don't see. Tip of the iceberg and all that.
• I can tell you Dante was right about one thing, Eli: rain of fire really does fall from the sky in the desert we're in.

The only hard and pointy part of octopuses may have been their stubby little beaks, but the ink they could project could reach their predators and prey at a much greater distance than that. In the same way, Mano had believed, her ink could be mightier than any sword, and be much more far-reaching. The only difference was that her ink hadn't been meant to blind people but to allow them to see.

She was an investigative journalist, and the Middle East had never been short on things for her to spill ink about.