Sleeping Dogs
Copyright © 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro
All rights reserved.
Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 2015.
Published as an ebook in 2017 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
Cover design by Jack Fisk
ISBN: 978-1-625672-89-6
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Sleeping Dogs
Also by Adam-Troy Castro
About the Author
Sleeping Dogs
Cutting through the turquoise waters twenty meters below the ocean surface, the old man is not so much an alien to that place as a temporary inhabitant granted full citizenship for the length of his stay.
He is lean, this old man. His body is a sharpened instrument that time and the habits of a lifetime have sculpted to its most basic components. His limbs have been flensed of all fat or weakness. His muscles have been reduced to machinery and the will that drives them. His skin is a lattice of hairline scars, some lighter than the tan left behind by decades of exposure to the tropical sun.
The old man wears no external breathing apparatus, but he has spent a lifetime conditioning his lungs to the peak of human potential, and he thus shows no particular distress as the time since his last visit to the surface passes two minutes and edges toward three. Even so, time runs short and so he does not allow himself to be distracted or delayed by anything he sees around him—not the silvery needlefish, traveling in schools so dense that light cannot be discerned in the spaces between them; not the great gaping Hungrymouth, five times his size, that glides on past, large enough to eat him but intelligent enough to avoid the attempt; not the skeleton of a fishing boat broken in two and impaled on an outcropping of rock during one of this backwater world’s many violent storms.
Nothing moves him until his eyes alight upon a mound in the sandy bottom, one that eyes any less experienced than his own would have mistaken for just another irregularity in an underwater landscape carved by currents ancient before his birth.
The old man circles the mound twice before coming to a halt an arm’s length over it. Drifting, he positions his right hand above the mound’s highest point, points his fingers downward, and tenses.
Most human beings would have trouble discerning just what happens in the next instant, but there is a sudden violent flurry of movement, ending with a clouded sea bottom and the old man paddling toward the surface, grasping a dead eel by the neck.
The creature the old man just caught is twice his length, eyeless, and possessed of teeth like razors. Its jaw is thick and powerful enough to have crushed the old man’s skull, its throat flexible enough to have swallowed his corpse whole. Most Greevian fishermen hunting this creature would have used the tool designed for the purpose: a pole, three times the height of a human being, and so studded with barbs that a captured eel turns itself inside out recoiling after its first instinctive strike. Most of Greeve’s people don’t make the attempt. They seek easier prey. After all, this is Greeve. The oceans teem with life. There are plenty of delicious fish eager to strand themselves in nets. Sure, everybody’s heard the stories of the old-time colonists from a century ago, the ones who drove the deadliest of Greeve’s predators from the shallows and turned a hard world into a paradise. Some of those did what this old man just did: dive down bare-handed, provoke one of these monsters, and survive the lunge by seizing and snapping the fragile vertebrae directly behind its deadly hinged jaw. Today it’s mostly something idiots do to satisfy drunken wagers placed just before they become late idiots. It’s how the old man makes his living.
He kicks his way to the surface in no particular hurry, the dead eel trailing behind him like a banner. He has no trouble supporting its weight. Nor does he gasp when he emerges; he takes a deep, controlled breath, before scanning the horizon and finding his launch, a brown speck bobbing about two hundred meters away. The verdant arc of an island breaks the horizon, some four kilometers behind that. The sky is a warm, cloudless blue, the water peaceful but for the spreading circles where the old man’s appearance has disturbed the surface calm. It is a beautiful day. The old man allows himself less than a heartbeat of appreciation before he begins the swim back to his boat, his pace not at all hampered by the weight of the leviathan he has captured.
The old man does not yet know it, but this will be his last day fishing Greeve’s waters.
* * *
It is twenty minutes later. The old man sits in his tiny launch, cleaning his kill. He uses an energy blade, one that cuts through the eel’s muscular flesh as easily as it cuts through air; the skin falling off the muscle and bone with an ease that suggests eagerness. The few edible organs go into one stasis locker; the narcotic bladder rich in secretions illegal on most civilized worlds but prized here on Greeve, into another. There are eggs, so fragile that only an expert can remove them without causing the kind of damage that would reduce them to as little as one tenth their potential value. The old man destroys three on purpose, and is more generous to the fourth and fifth, which he mars just enough to avoid making too great a fortune at market.
The old man has made a living, and has even managed to put away some money, but has always avoided having too much success.
He is still sectioning his catch when he hears the sound of a skimmer approaching from the west. He does not look up. Routine is the binding force of his life, and he can identify the sound of this particular vehicle. It is old and battered but well-maintained, by an owner who would be hard-pressed to replace it if anything went wrong with it; and it takes the form of a streamlined missile with a saddle large enough to accommodate its single rider, a young boy.
The boy’s name is Squall. If he has another, first or last, the old man does not know it. He is somewhere between ten and fourteen years old Mercantile standard, his precise age indeterminate because of his slight build and a stubborn refusal to grow past the height of his late pre-adolescence. He has startling black eyes, mahogany coloring, a squashed nose, a thatch of permanently askew hair, and a smile he shows only to people he would trust with his life. He has no living parents, as far as the old man knows, but has never suffered for it. On Greeve, where community is all, that simply places him under the protection of any home island where he chooses to live. That makes the old man one of a hundred fathers.
Squall slows his skimmer as it pulls up alongside the old man’s launch, and descends just enough to dangle his bare feet in the water. “Hey. Spiff catch.”
In the old man’s personal universe, not looking up is a sign of trust. “I know.”
“Is ye emped for the shiff?”
The boy means, Are you finished for the day?
The old man shrugs. “I was going to go in again, in a little while. I can choose to be finished, if we have business. Have you eaten?”
The boy shrugs. “I could nock a little kip.”
The old man wipes his hands, deactivates his stasis drawer and takes out a khasth filet, broiled to his liking and giving off fresh steam even through its paper wrapping. The first whiff leaves him as hungry as he hadn’t been before Squall’s arrival, but he has skipped meals before, in harder times, and Squall needs the calories more than he does.
> The boy catches the toss single-handed. “Fliish.”
“You‘re welcome. Help me scrub down the launch after you’re done with that and I’ll give you one of these eggs as a tip.”
Squall’s grin is broad, white, and without artifice. “Is no suck, greybeard.”
A few seconds pass while Squall nibbles on his lunch. He finishes only half of it before tucking the rest away in his pocket, then faces the old man again, wearing the expression common to all boys who have a sensitive story to tell. “I kenned a pinkie today.”
Kenned means “saw,” and pinkies are pale-complexioned people, who are a distinct minority among Greeve’s more bronzed population. The old man is a pinkie himself, but years under the sun have made that a moot point.
“Offworlder?”
“Truth.”
“What kind of Offworlder?”
“A pinkie, as I spake.” Squall hesitates, then gets into it. “Like ye.”
“And?”
“Grayer than ye, truth.”
When the old man smiles, the entire side of his face folds up into nested half-moons. “Grayer even than me? He must have seemed ancient.”
Squall drops the local patois and speaks to the old man in the common tongue, Hom.Sap Mercantile. It is a colorless language, that lacks the fluid poetry of the boy’s usual form of speech, but it is better at discussing matters of grave import. “Do not make fun of me, old John. I thought you would be interested in hearing about this man.”
“You are right,” the old man tells him in the same language. “I am wrong. I apologize. What was he doing?”
“When I saw him? Drinking. Eating. Sitting around. Wearing a big floppy hat to protect his fish-belly skin from the sun, and then sitting around the beach all day anyway. I am told that he came here a week ago and that every day since then has been more of the same. He sleeps late, gets up, walks around the marketplace, drinks, pays for a night of love when it suits him. He has taken one of the rooms above the café at Fritaun. I do not know his name, and have no reason to think that his business has anything to do with you because the two of you are so different, but he is an offworlder and you have told me to keep you informed of any offworlders. Have I done the right thing?”
The old man cuts up and stashes the rest of his catch, his leathery hands not faltering for a moment even as his mind travels many years and many worlds away. When he closes the lid, sealing the day’s bounty in a vault of frozen time, he does not fail to miss the comparison to his own situation: of the way he has lived for so long, content and comfortable and yet not fully connected to the passage of the days.
“You have done the right thing. Will you do something else for me, Squall?”
The boy returns to the argot he prefers. “Truth.”
“Take your skimmer to one of the outer islands. Stay with someone you know. Don’t come back for a couple of days. If you hear anybody asking for me between now and then, pick up stakes and move somewhere else. Don’t even mention my name unless you hear that I’m still up and about. Can you do that much for me, boy?”
The boy now frowns. “Is ye fecked, greybeard?”
Fecked is local fisherman slang, an adjective for the moment when one realizes that the catch you’ve been seeking is about to have you for lunch instead.
“I don’t know. It’s probably nothing. But I’d rather keep you out of it until I know it’s nothing serious. Do I have your promise?”
The boy considers that and pops the last bite of his meal into his teeth. “Truth.”
* * *
The town square at Fritaun is one of a hundred identical markets scattered among the sprawling chain of islands that dot this region of Greeve. Women sell colorful tapestries from the fine silken fibers spun by the mats of weed that float in the shallows; cooks offer glistening, multi-legged worms from the coral beds; mindless yeshtim chatter in their cages, awaiting their sale as pets or food.
The old man strolls through the narrow aisles between the stalls, nodding at the familiar faces, pretending interest in their wares, exchanging the polite greetings people offer those who have lived among them but never been more than a stranger.
After a while he stops beside a stall selling gaudy but worthless gemstones and pretends deep interest while really paying attention in the low, squat cafe across the square. It is a small, unpretentious place occupying the ground floor of a three-story inn offering both beds and bed partners for travelers who have found themselves passing through this dot on the map. The old man has dined there enough to become a familiar local face, but he has never gotten drunk there, never spent a night plugged himself into the buzzports the impatient use to jack their pleasure centers without all the messy metabolic demands of the powerful local weed or brew. For most of his time here, it has been a place to listen, to learn, to pick up the tenor of the community without the clumsy, off-putting necessity of asking questions. It has never been a place to spy on from the other side of the square, but as the old man stands hidden by banners of gaudy cloth, that is what it becomes, and so it is not long before he witnesses a certain rotund figure in big floppy hat sweating from too much fat and listing from too much drink, sealing the front of his trousers as he emerges from the unmarked door beside the long bar.
There are maybe one dozen unenhanced human beings, out of all humanity’s billions, capable of perceiving the old man’s bottomless dismay. Certainly none of the locals do. He covers it by clapping a hand to the back of his neck and rolling his head from side to side, a gesture that most around him mistake mere compensation to muscular stiffness. In truth he’s scanning the rooftops, the skies, the balconies of all the buildings on this one crowded little street. He’s looking for spotters, for tracer-drones, for people focusing their attention on him when there are so many other people, even within this uncrowned place, more interesting than the old man with the aching neck and sun-beaten skin. If he sees any enemies he fails to react. Or he succeeds in not reacting, which is not even remotely the same thing.
After a moment he selects a long purple scarf, the length of his powerful corded arms, overpays the toothless woman by at least twice its true value, and ambles across the square, his manner that of a man in no particular hurry who is now moving from nowhere very special to no place worth mentioning. His gait adds twenty years to his apparent age, much as his blank facial expression subtracts at least half of his fierce intelligence. There is no reason for anybody, let alone the close-lidded fat man returning to his table, to take any particular notice of him, or to consider him a threat.
He passes behind the fat man like any other local on his way to the bar, intent on nothing more than a mug of ale or fifteen minutes worth of current from the buzzport. He times the moment so that he’s at his closest just as the fat man’s off balance and lowering his voluminous rear end into the tiny chair beside the little table already bearing half a dozen glistening empties; and it is with absolute grace and artistry that he twice loops the scarf around the fat man’s neck, drawing it taut enough to constrict the other’s throat without, quite, cutting off his air.
The old man does not raise his voice. “You do know how long it would take me to kill you if you even try to signal your friends?”
The fat man has frozen, but not panicked. “What friends?”
“Don’t treat me like a fool. You would not come here without backup.”
The fat man places both hands on the scarred wood grain of the tabletop and drums his sausage-like fingers as if in idle contemplation of the many hours of drinking still left to him. “In the name of courtesy, man, if you’re somebody I should know, and with whom I need to have this conversation, then at least have the decency to give me a hint.”
The old man‘s words have a way of growing more clipped, the more rage overtakes him. “I told you, many years ago, that I was not your mystery to solve. Do you remember me now, fat man?”
The fat man freezes. “Draiken?”
It is the first time the old man
has heard his own name in thirty years. “Your ability to feign innocence has not improved since I knew you.”
“I swear. You’re the last person I expected to see here.”
“Don’t insult my intelligence. You complained about it often enough.”
The fat man wheezes. “That I did. I should have known you’d catch me sooner or later.”
Draiken tightens the scarf to a degree perceptible only to himself and his adversary. “I would think we have passed beyond the need for such empty mind games. But we both know the truth. You came to this place looking for me.”
The fat man’s only response to that is a heartbeat of amazed silence, followed by laughter. It turns into a gasp when Draiken tightens the scarf, but becomes merriment again the instant the old man permits him another breath. “You have extraordinary faith in my persistence. But this is as much a surprise to me as it must be to you.”
“Liar.”
“I retired from the branch ten years ago. I came here wanting nothing but a sunny place to live in obscurity.”
“Men like you don’t retire. You know too much to retire.”
“I could say the same of you. And yet you are here, looking like any other native. Come; this is tiresome. Either snap my neck and be done with it, or let me buy you a drink, so we may make our peace as professionals.”
Draiken comes within a twitch of ending the fat man’s life then and there…but he is as always acutely aware of his surroundings, of the faces in the café turning to them with concern, of the people in the marketplace beginning to realize that this is more than just a cranky dispute between old men.
It is not fear for his own freedom – a blessing he has always recognized as transitory, and likely to be taken from him at any time – than respect for the sensibilities of the locals, that stays his hand. He knows that if he killed the fat man in their presence, the ugliness of the moment would become a scar in their memories, as indelible as its own way as the one that mottles his own chest. He owes them too much gratitude, for too many years of peace, to leave them with such a terrible bequest. And so he decides, releasing the scarf with a contemptuous snap, and settling into the opposite chair with a feeling a lot like what a veteran actor must feel, when he returns to the stage for the role that once made him famous.
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