Unfettered III

by Shawn Speakman (ed)

  Dr. Fisher squinted at her inbox. Every evening brought another spate of email from zoos around the world reporting on the inconsistencies within their breeding programs. Animals—healthy, normal, genetically sound animals—were giving birth to offspring they couldn’t possibly have given birth to. Genetics didn’t work that way. All nature was not an incubator for everything else.

  But the evidence was there, as undeniable as a Caspian tiger . . . or a passenger pigeon.

  The evening’s mail brought with it the news of two dodos hatched by an ostrich, and what several people suspected was a moa hatched by an emu. “If it is a moa, we can expect a lawsuit from the government of New Zealand demanding it be delivered to them,” wrote the keeper in question. “What do we do? The native people of New Zealand own the genetic code of the moa, but this is a unique specimen, and legally, it’s probably an emu.”

  “Deal with it when it happens,” Dr. Fisher typed. “Has anyone else got a Caspian tiger?”

  Futures were discussed. Plans were made. The odds were good that none of them would account for anything, but plans were comforting things to have.

  It was unlikely, based on the discovery of the passenger pigeons, that these miraculous, impossible births were confined to the zoos of the world. Ironically, it was extinction and poaching that were buying them the time to plan for anything at all. In a world where there were almost no tigers, how many odd-looking cubs would be spotted in the wild? If someone saw a cub, they were probably looking through the crosshairs of a rifle.

  The Caspian tigers in Dr. Fisher’s zoo should never have existed. Now that they did, they were very likely to once again be the last in the world. If they died, they would carry their species with them into extinction for a second time, and it seemed unreasonable to ask the world for another miracle resurrection. This was the only second chance the human race was going to get.

  They had to do it properly.

  “I don’t understand,” said the young woman, her hands folded in her lap, a miserable expression on her face. “If everything is working the way it’s supposed to, why can’t we conceive?”

  Dr. Marlowe had been helping patients achieve their dreams for nearly twenty years. She had kept abreast of developments in all forms of fertility treatment, from the hormonal to the surgical, and if she didn’t know how something worked, it was unlikely to have been legalized for use on humans. She was touted on all the message boards and in all the private forums as being the woman with the answers.

  Looking at this couple, who had come to her like so many before them, hoping for a miracle, she had never felt further from the answers in her life.

  “Well,” she said. “Sometimes it can take a while for everything to fall into synch.”

  She spoke the platitudes like they were somehow new, like they had never been spoken before, while inwardly, she was raging and confused. Nothing was working. They followed the steps as they always had, combined the genetic material as they had always done, and . . .

  Nothing. There hadn’t been a single pregnancy out of her office in months. She worried for the couples who still came to her, still looking for their miracle. More, she worried for her staff and her own reputation. This couldn’t be the way it ended. This couldn’t.

  The announcement that two confirmed Caspian tigers were being raised in an American zoo was neatly buried under the announcement that no human babies had been born for a full month anywhere in the United States. The additional announcements about impossible animals were similarly buried. Only a few countries continued to report normal birthrates, and there was reason to believe, based on information coming from those regions, that the reports were lies.

  In a small town in Oregon, a domestic cat nursed her litter of kittens and sea minks, purring all the while, unaware that the world was changing.

  “The animals and the fertility rates are connected; they have to be.” The man who spoke was old enough that his three children were grown, and several of them had already had children of their own. The current situation was largely academic to him. It was frightening people. Frightened people were unpredictable. He wanted that to stop. As to the rest . . .

  There were too damn many babies around these days as it was. Maybe a little break was exactly what the doctor had ordered.

  “But how is this happening?” The man behind the desk had not risen to the position of leader of the free world by refusing to listen to his constituents, if only so he could be sure of what needed to be hidden from their innocent ears. “Surely someone has some idea.”

  “It’s happening on a global level, as near as we can tell,” said one of the few women in the room. She was smart, she was savvy, and she was twice as skilled as any of the men around her at feeling out which way the wind was blowing. She had to be. It was the only way for someone like her to break into the boys’ club that they still represented. “Scientists around the world are looking for a cause. If there’s something for them to find, they’ll have it soon.”

  “There has to be something for them to find,” snapped the President. “Things like this don’t simply happen.”

  The woman, who had watched as her daughter’s cat gave birth to a litter of sweet-faced flying foxes the size of kittens, said nothing.

  When faced with the impossible, historically, humanity has risen to the challenge: has reached out to find the place where improbable and actual collide, chart it, and in the charting, make it so.

  Not this time.

  Around the world, scientists wrested supposedly extinct animals away from their caretakers and vivisected them, looking for the answer to a question that no one was entirely sure how to phrase. Why were things that had long since been written off as dead and gone returning, and why in such an impossible, improbable manner? What was determining their birth rate? Why had humans stopped getting pregnant? Were all these things the same question, or were they a chain of questions, barely connected, tangled in the same string of illogic and confusion?

  The zookeepers began hiding their charges, spiriting them out of what should have been their safe havens and tucking them away in garages and attacks, rented storage lockers and the back rooms of certain trustworthy animal rescues. Arrests were made. Still there were no answers; still there were no causes.

  Time passed. Time always does.

  The Caspian tigers, heralds of this bright new world, paced in their enclosure, eyes on Dr. Fisher. They knew the veterinarian well enough not to be disturbed by her presence, but they didn’t trust her, any more than they trusted any human. They were wild things, for all that they had been raised by human hands. They had always been intended to be wild things.

  Dr. Fisher stopped, looking at them. The tigers looked back.

  “You’re going to die in here,” she said. “You’re never going to be free. You’re never going to hunt, or kill, or fade into the shadows. Humans have long memories, and they blame you more than you can possibly understand. Not for anything you did. For existing, and for being the bellwether of a change that they can’t turn aside. They ask themselves what they did, how this could possibly have happened, why, why, why. They never ask the reason that it took so long. But Nature would have her due, wouldn’t she? We broke too many of her toys. We had to be removed.”

  If anything, the process—inexplicable and impossible as it was—had been as kind as it could have been. No human babies, no, but no babies of other species born to human parents. No resurgence of the Neanderthal in a neonatal ward, no proof of their replacement.

  She had her suspicions about the gorillas, and what some of them might carry in their bellies, waiting to be born.

  She hoped that this time, the coming custodians would be kinder.

  “The world may not have loved us, but oh, how we loved you,” she murmured to the tigers, watching them move, all elegance and potential behind the clear plastic wall. “We loved you to death, and now you’re back to return the favor.”

  The tigers said nothing.
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  The kangaroo scratched her ear with one vast hindfoot, relieving the itch. Her joey was a few feet away, snuffling at the ground. She barked to call the young one back. It was large, yes, but not large enough to leave her yet. That would come soon. She could feel the next joey stirring, ready to take the pouch for its own.

  Her child was strange, stripes across its back, body too low, head too long, but she groomed it all the same before it scrambled back into her pouch, and she was content. This was as the world should be.

  All around her, kangaroo mothers tended thylacine children, their stripes shining in the sunset, and nature moved on.

  MARC TURNER

  AS THE TITLE “ALL THAT GLITTERS” SUGGESTS, MY SHORT STORY TAKES a sideways look at the risks connected with the pursuit of wealth, and, by extension, the value of more important things in life—a theme particularly relevant considering the origins of the Unfettered anthology. The tale also delivers a generous serving of revenge, with a side order of humour. Oh, and dragons, of course, because you can never have too many of those. Although they aren’t quite the same creatures of marvel for those unfortunate souls who are about to find themselves staring into the beasts’ golden eyes . . .

  Marc Turner

  All That Glitters

  Marc Turner

  From her hiding place behind a rocky ridge, Castella looked down on the dragon’s carcass in the shallows. Breakers tugged at the creature, dragging it shoreward before releasing it to settle back again. The moonlight flickering off its copper armour made it seem as if the beast were aflame.

  Beside it, a dozen shadowy figures worked to extract the dragon’s precious blood from its veins. It was dangerous work, Castella knew. If the liquid splashed your skin, it would burn like acid; she had a small scar below her left eye to prove it. It was grueling work, too, prising apart the overlapping scales and hacking at the flesh with boarding pikes. But if there was one type of work Castella didn’t object to, it was work done by others to her imminent profit.

  Considering the perils involved, the workers on the beach were going about their labour with imprudent haste. Doubtless this was due to the trumpeting of more dragons to the south, for the blood of the dead beast would draw others of its kind like sharks. And there was no shortage of dragons abroad in the Rubyholt Isles at present. With Dragon Day less than a week away, the creatures were being lured to the Dragon Gate in readiness for the Hunt.

  Castella had been dodging the wretched beasts all week. Just yesterday she and Araline had seen a silver dragon maul a Raptor brigatina off Summer Point. But the creatures hadn’t been having it all their own way, as the carcass in the bay proved. The scales across the dragon’s neck were crumpled like a cheap suit of armour. And since no earthly weapon was able to damage the plates, the creature must have fallen foul of the beast that dwelled in the Dragon’s Boneyard, then limped to this place to die. The sound of its death cries had clearly drawn the people on the beach just as they had Castella.

  She looked over at Araline. Her companion was studying a piece of driftwood. With a series of languid movements, she turned it in her hands as if she were trying to work out which way was up. Everything the woman did seemed elegant, but maybe that was because she was standing next to Castella when she did it.

  Castella caught her eye and nodded toward the workers. “They’re Squall clan,” she whispered.

  “How do you know?”

  “The man with the headscarf and the ponytail—that’s their krel, Malavon Tempest.”

  Araline stiffened. “The Malavon Tempest. The man who keelhauls crewmen just for staring at him the wrong way?” Her look turned suspicious. “The man you used to sail with until a year back.”

  “No, a totally different Malavon Tempest,” Castella muttered.

  And he had been a different man when she first met him a year ago. Flushed with the honour of being promoted to krel, he had had a spirit and a fire to him that had drawn Castella like a feathermoth. The feeling had been mutual too. In fact, he might even have fallen enough for Castella that she could tell him she wasn’t really a sandclaw hunter and dragon rider in her spare time. The relationship hadn’t lasted, of course; nothing good ever did.

  Araline regarded her impassively. As ever, Castella had no idea what her friend was thinking. For seven months they’d been working together, yet all Castella had learned about the other woman in that time was that she liked keeping secrets. They had met in Skarl on midsummer’s eve. Trying to rob the same waterfront warehouse, they had blundered into the same drugs deal and been forced to flee on the same leaking skiff. In retrospect, that debacle had set the tone for their working relationship to follow.

  “We’d better tell Dresk about Tempest,” Araline said at last. By rights the dragon’s carcass belonged to the warlord of the clans, because the island upon which the corpse had washed up—the Cross—was in Spear territory.

  “What’s the point?” Castella replied. “By the time we get to Bezzle, Tempest will be long gone. Then it’ll be our word against his that he was ever here. I’ve got a better idea.” She gestured to the top of the beach and a cluster of pearlshell flasks containing siphoned-off dragon blood. “I’m going to steal one of those.”

  Araline stared at her. “You’re mad.”

  “Relax, it gets worse. You’re going to help me.”

  “I am?”

  “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll creep down and hide behind that dune there”—Castella pointed to it—“then you’ll stir up the sea around the dragon’s head to make it seem as if the creature is still alive.” Araline was a water-mage, so manipulating the waves would be easy for her. “While the Squalls are changing their breeches, I sneak in, grab one of the flasks, and sneak out again.”

  Araline pretended to consider. “Let me get this straight. Your plan is to trick the Squalls into thinking a dragon they’ve been drawing blood from for the last quarter-bell isn’t dead, then walk across twenty paces of open sand without anyone spotting you.”

  “More or less.”

  “Sounds like less to me.”

  Castella grimaced. “Have some faith,” she said. “When have my plans ever gone wrong before?”

  The mage resumed fiddling with her piece of driftwood. “Well, there was the time when we tried to take back our boat from those Raptors, and they were woken by that cough.”

  “Your cough.”

  “Then there was that business with the sunpearl divers in the Outer Rim—”

  Castella raised a hand to cut her off. For all Araline’s reservations, Castella knew her friend would go through with the plan because the money they stood to make should set them up for years. Besides, Castella’s scheme would work. Judging by the way the Squalls’ heads came up at every sound, they were already twitchy about the prospect of a gate-crashing dragon. When Araline stirred the waters about the copper beast’s head, the mere possibility of the creature still being alive would capture the clansmen’s fullest attention.

  With luck, Castella could tiptoe in without the Squalls even knowing she was there.

  And so it proved.

  Two hundred heartbeats later Castella was back at the rocky ridge, clutching her prize. That had been too easy. After grabbing the flask, she had crept away so slowly she’d felt sure someone would notice her. But the beach behind her remained silent. No cries of outrage, no demands for her to stop.

  There had to be a catch, though. Life loved knocking Castella down just to see how quickly she bounced back up again.

  That was when she noticed that Araline was not alone. A step behind and to one side of the mage was a man holding the largest crossbow Castella had ever seen. Even in the darkness, Castella could make out the zigzag burn of a lightning bolt on his neck—the symbol Tempest now branded onto his followers as if they were cattle. Castella didn’t recognize the man from her time on Malavon’s crew, and she seemed equally a stranger to him. A handspan shorter than Araline, he sported a self-inflicted haircut and a smile wi
th more gaps in it than teeth.

  When Castella caught Araline’s eye, the mage had the decency to look sheepish about being caught.

  “That’s close enough,” Gap-Tooth said, pointing his crossbow at Araline. “One false move and I put a bolt in your friend’s back.”

  The size of that crossbow, his quarrel would probably punch straight through Araline and hit Castella as well. She raised her hands. “Take it easy,” she said in a low voice.

  Gap-Tooth glanced at the flask she was carrying. “Put that down,” he said.

  Castella looked around. The ridge hid her from the Squalls on the beach, and the continued silence suggested Gap-Tooth hadn’t yet alerted his companions. That got her thinking. “You don’t have to turn us in,” she told him.

  He snorted.

  “If you take this flask to Tempest, what do you think he’ll do? Throw you a party and let you keep half the blood as thanks?” Castella shook her head. “The only thing Tempest is generous with is the lashes from his whip. Most likely he’ll blame you for letting me steal the flask in the first place.”

  From Gap-Tooth’s expression it was clear he knew this was true. Along with his wariness, Castella saw a greed and a calculation she could play on.

  “If you give him the flask,” she went on, “no one wins except Tempest. Whereas if you take it for yourself, he probably won’t even miss you when you’re gone. We won’t stop you.”

  Araline surprised her by speaking. “The Nine Hells we won’t!”

  Castella blinked.

  Araline tried to turn to face Gap-Tooth, but a jab from the Squall’s crossbow kept her looking forward. “If you steal the blood,” she said, “how do you plan on getting off this island without a boat?”

  “I’ll take yours,” he replied.

  “And what about the sea dragons? How will you avoid them?” Araline paused to let her words sink in. “I’m a water-mage. You need my help.”

  Castella took up the baton. “Plus even if you could get to Bezzle,” she said to him, “what would you do then? Do you know someone you can trust to broker a sale? Someone who won’t rat you out to Tempest as soon as he sees the zigzag mark on your neck?”