Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  What they don’t know and what I suspect the number-crunchers underestimated is just how much I hate them in return. I hate them I hate them I hate them. I want them dead so much it makes me weep. I want them dead so much I can feel it eating away every other piece of me. I want them dead so much I would stab the world in the heart just for the chance of seeing it happen. I want them dead so much that there’s nothing else in the universe I care about. I want them dead because I know that if they came to their senses and offered me their friendship, I would fall to my knees and break down weeping, foolishly grateful for the chance to be one of them again. I want them dead so much I wake up every day shattered that they haven’t forgiven me, at long last, for whatever it is they believe I’ve done; for whatever mistake I’ve made; for whatever planned or random quirk of chemistry makes them want to treat me this way. I want them dead because I hate them, more than I’ve ever hated anyone or anything. I want them dead because the numbers were right about something else, too: how helplessly and without reservation I love them.

  *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Adam-Troy Castro made his first nonfiction sale to SPY magazine in 1987. His 26 books to date include four Spider-Man novels, 3 novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and 6 middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. The penultimate installment in the series, Gustav Gloom and the Inn of Shadows (Grosset and Dunlap) came out in August 2015. The finale will appear in August 2016. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands And Other Stories (Prime Books). Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). He lives in Florida with his wife Judi and either three or four cats, depending on what day you’re counting and whether Gilbert’s escaped this week.

  *

  Tracker

  Mary Rosenblum | 8571 words

  The City Man was calling him.

  Tracker lifted his head from his garden, distracted from the small fears and satisfactions of the black beetles sucking juice from the ruffled cabbages beneath his fingers. The scent of that calling came to him on the soft westerly winds that also carried molecules of ocean, fish, and seagull shit, dying shelled-things and hungry water-living mammals. It blew across City, too, and the scents it carried from that place bore images, but few names to Tracker’s mind. Only City Man’s calling carried a name.

  But City Man was not really a name. His name was a complex of scent and touch, of not touching, tone of voice, and the small sharp veerings of emotion—a thread that strung Tracker’s days and nights and more days of remembered history into a contiguous thread.

  City Man had created Tracker.

  Jesse whined, and nudged his leg with her nose, her canine eyes on his face. She couldn’t hear City Man’s calling, but she knew Tracker heard him because her engineered brain let her know. Since she stared at him, he saw himself briefly through her eyes, a long face with planes and slopes like the cliff faces above the cove beach, his hair the tawny red of the clay soil beneath the winter rains. He caught a glimpse of his cabbages, fat and green and round at the edges of her vision. Their smooth green roundness filled him with brief satisfaction. These were old genes, unaltered, the same cabbages an old-days human might have grown, a thousand years ago, when their genes were equally innocent.

  Jesse nudged him again. Conscience. Friend. Eyes.

  “All right,” he said aloud. “Let’s find out what he wants.” He put out his hand, felt the hair-warmth-duty of her presence come up against his palm. She showed him the dirt path between the irregular boundaries of his garden beds with her sight, tugged him along with her silent urgency.

  “He’s only going to want to play,” he said to her gruffly. “Show off one of his little creations.”

  Jesse didn’t answer, marching firmly along, showing him the path she knew he should take. She was good at that—keeping his feet from stumbling. Tracker felt a birdwing shadow of fear and thought back quickly. How old was she? City Man had made her for him and he had no idea what lifespan he had built into her genes. Had never thought to ask. His step faltered, as he contemplated the cabbages and old-days plants with lost names, swept by her eyes. Smelled earth, and the tickling lifethought of small squirming things. His world.

  She nipped at him. Impatient.

  “Coming.” Beyond the tall wall of his garden, City waited. He gathered his senses tightly into himself as he absently admired the paving of white marble inlaid with abstract patterns of green jasper and blue lapis in front of Jesse’s paws. Too bright, he thought, but that would change, as soon as one of the City got bored. For a while—years or decades—it had been paved in mother of pearl. He had liked that, liked the subtle opalescent gleam that Jesse had showed him and the memory-song of the shells that had once held life. They walked a lot then. It had been a cloudy cool time, before someone turned up the sun. They passed a few folk on the wide street, but no City people. You rarely saw City people. Few that they were, they didn’t spend much time in City unless someone had made it new. No one had made it new for some time now.

  They reached the City Man’s gate. Jesse would never look wholly at it. She looked aside, studying the thin-sliced agate that tiled the wall. He knew the gate by its feel beneath his palms. It was made of bones. He wasn’t sure whose bones they were, but they were delicate—a flying creature. They murmured to him of wind as a solid living thing as he pushed the gate open.

  He was right. City Man had a visitor. Woman, he smelled, hormones in balance, full of life, unshadowed by death. He could always smell it—that lack of Death’s shadow. It shaded all the City creations, a hint of darkness on a sunny day. Not so, for City’s Residents. Death could not shadow them. They summoned it only at will, their servant, no master. Jesse wouldn’t look at the Woman or at City Man, so he stood still, admiring the raked sand and small, perfect shells that she showed him. It occurred to him that he had never really looked at City Man. Jesse wouldn’t do it.

  “Of course he’s blind,” City Man was saying to the Woman. “He doesn’t need eyes. If I asked him to find you, he would feel you on the far side of the planet. Or on the orbital. On the Moon Garden. He’s that aware.”

  “Oh, you’re so sure you’re the top Creator in the solar system.” The Woman sounded bored, but it was an act. He could feel her interest prickling his skin, mixed with a sharp edge of jealousy. Tracker studied the tight spiral of a shell the color of a rainy morning. A creature had made that, without thought or intent. City Man had made a tribe of men and women who built endless sand sculptures on the beach below his garden—sculptures that the tide daily washed away. Like the shell maker.

  Slowly, he realized that the Woman had left the garden and that City Man was contemplating him. Jesse was leaning against his knee, wanting hard to be gone.

  “Tracker.” City Man came close enough that the clove and sweat-scent of him, and that hard clean lack of Death’s shadow, filled Tracker’s senses.

  “I want you to find someone.” He put a hand on Tracker’s shoulder.

  Jesse flinched.

  “One of my creations. She ran away once before, and I found her. This time … I don’t feel like going. I have better things to do.”

  The jagged edge of his lie brushed Tracker’s mind and he stifled a wince. Jesse growled, so low and soft that City Man didn’t hear her. Tracker put a hand down on her silken head. Shushed her.

  “Here she is.” He moved away. Something rustled, and then City Man thrust a spider-silk bag against Tracker’s chest.

  He took it, felt softness and small bits of hardness within the folds of silk.

  “She probably went to find the kite flyers again.” Burning like bee stings filled his words. “She stayed with them a long
time, last time. Go find her.” He turned away, his scent and presence diminishing. “She’s mine, and I want her back, Tracker.”

  Jesse nudged at him, panting with eagerness to be gone from this place. He wound his fingers in her silky coat, feeling her fear. “Why are you afraid?” he asked her softly as she pulled him through the bone-barred gate and back out into City’s white marble and lapis. “He won’t hurt you. He doesn’t care.”

  Jesse licked his hand, then—deliberately—nipped the soft pad of flesh between his thumb and forefinger.

  Tracker sucked in his breath at the sting of pain, pressed his hand to his mouth, tasting the coppery note of blood on his tongue.

  • • • •

  Twilight shrouded the fat cabbages with their innocent genes by the time he and Jesse reached the garden. They went inside and he told Jesse to go play. He didn’t need her here. His house existed as scents of comfort, curving walls, cushions and tables that held his echo and Jesse’s, static and welcoming. He crossed the thick carpet to run his hands along a sculpture of wave-polished wood, crafted by a young man who helped carve the sand sculptures that the waves erased with each tide.

  Mindless and innocent, like the shell maker.

  He fingered the complex twine of wood with polished wood and shook his head, frowning. Then he sat at his table with its not-quite-satiny grain and opened the slick folds of spider silk. It held a rumpled wad of fabric. He lifted it to his face, inhaling the scents of dust, wind, and longing. A picture flickered in his mind—a melon-colored kite diving through a cloudless sky. She probably went to find the kite flyers again. The small hard things were freshwater pearls, lumpy and irregular, that filled his mind with the timeless passage of slow, watery days. Gold wires had been threaded through them, as if they had been used for earrings once. The nip on his hand had scabbed over and he touched the grainy roughness of scab, wondering what had upset Jesse. After a while, he got up and went out into the garden, to harvest lettuce, leaf by crisp leaf, and pull tiny, sweet carrots from the loose soil. He ended beside his trellis of peas, face to the gentle breeze blowing fish scent and the evening-smoke of the sand sculptors in from the shore. Each carrot root and tiny sphere of pea-germ was a small death. Tracker tossed the last empty pod into the compost bin at the edge of the garden. Life lived on death, he thought. Until City and the people who lived here came to be.

  They had defied Death.

  The cooking fires on the beach were burning out. The distant scent of orcas came to Tracker. They were playing out in the dark bay, not hungry right now, just playing. He went into this house, comforted by the familiar textures and contours, and lay down on the cushions in the corner. After a few minutes, Jesse crept in beside him. She licked his hand where she had nipped it, turned around twice, and lay down with a sigh.

  • • • •

  They left City in the morning, walking face-on into the warmth of the rising sun. Jesse frisked like a puppy. The land outside City’s walls was desert. That surprised Tracker a little. It has been prairie last time he had been out here, full of flowers. How long ago? He tried to fix the time, gave up. Someone had decided that the land should be desert so … it was desert. One of City’s residents sculpted the land with glaciers. Tracker remembered City Man saying so.

  They had time to sculpt a landscape with glaciers.

  Away from the shore, the wind blew hot from the center of the land, and Tracker lifted his head, his hand on Jesse’s head, not bothering to look through her eyes. He could taste her. The one City Man wanted. Out there. The melon-colored kite dove and rose in the cloudless sky and he scented that hint of dust and longing, mingled with … joy.

  They walked, living off the dried vegetables and meat in his pack, sleeping in the hottest part of the day, walking beneath the waxing moon. One of City’s members had sculpted the face of the moon. Dark lines and spaces crossed it, Tracker saw, as Jesse raised her nose to howl at it, stark against its white disk, a stain of crimson spread like a tortured rose near the center. He wondered who had made that stain.

  On the morning after the full moon, on the day they shared the last of their water, they found her.

  Her scent had been strong in his face all night, and an eager restlessness kept him striding on through the darkness, patient Jesse uncomplaining at his side. He stumbled on rocks, sometimes, and fell once, but he didn’t care. The wind, soft now, a desert breath against his face, stroking his cheeks like gentle fingers.

  In the first faint warmth of morning, he halted, Jesse forgotten, letting the now-light pack slide from his shoulders. Ahead he sensed life, bright with flesh scent and laughter, and the joy of being alive in the warmth of a new day. The kiters. It must be. Then Jesse looked, and he saw the bright greens and blues, yellows and oranges of the kites as they soared and spiraled into the bright air, forming tightly only to break apart into explosions of color and reform once more, tails writing cryptic glyphs against the sky. A single melon-colored kite soared suddenly, briefly, circling the twined and ordered mass of the kites, a rogue dancing to its own tune.

  She was there.

  Tracker let his breath out slowly, and as if it had heard him, the kite veered suddenly, soaring away from the dancing spiral, straining toward him briefly, before it settled lightly to earth.

  Tracker slung the near empty pack over his shoulder and strode forward. Jesse took her place at his side, her eyes showing him the rocks and scrub and small scuttling insects in front of them. He wanted her to look up again, to watch the kites, but she kept her eyes stubbornly on the ground. Then, abruptly, she stopped, and finally, she looked up. Tracker looked with her eyes, ready to see her, the melon kite in her hands, smelling of dust and longing.

  It shocked him a little, as Jesse’s vision showed him his quarry. Golden hair tumbled around her face, and over her shoulders. Her eyes, the color of spring grass, laughed at him and she smiled, the kite in her hands, the curves of her body hidden by a loose shift of kite-fabric. Two polished horns sprang from her temples, curving gracefully to deadly points. Two more horns, smaller, also curved, sprang one from each hip. The shift had slitted sides so that the curved spurs could protrude and the hemmed edges revealed a flash of tanned and muscular thigh. She smiled, and the laughter in her eyes was familiar, as if they were old friends.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, and held out one slender hand.

  He took it. Jesse growled and fixed her eyes on the woman’s leg, as if contemplating a bite. “Quiet.” Tracker no longer needed her eyes. The woman’s presence filled his senses so that vision would have been a distraction only. Life, he thought absently. She was life itself, a flame of vitality that radiated energy into the universe around her like a burning fire. Her fingers curved around his, holding his hand in a way that defined the casual phrase, as aware of the texture of his flesh, the tension of his bones, and the pulse of blood and neural synapses as he was.

  She was so aware.

  It disturbed him that City Man had made her, good though he was.

  Jesse growled again, softly, uncertainty shivering through her.

  “My name is Yolanda.” Her voice was low and as intimate as if they were lying side by side in a tumbled bed. “Donai sent you.”

  He nodded, comprehending that “Donai” was her name for the City Man, attuned for her reaction. Anger, fear, flight, attack?

  She laughed again, and he felt only sadness woven with silver threads of amusement. And … love. “He came himself, last time. But Donai never does anything the same way twice.”

  Jesse growled again, sharply this time, pressing forward between them, her head forward, ears pricked. Tracker realized that the kiters had come, forming a shifting vortex of curiosity, hostility, and fear around them. Jesse’s eyes roved from form to form, tension knotting her body as they drew closer, reading threat in their wary stares. He put his hand on her, not bothering to look, because he didn’t need to see their faces. She quieted instantly, but her tension shivere
d through the skin of his palm and up his arm.

  “Stranger.” One came close, radiating vitality and health, although the shadow of Death suggested that he was not young. Jesse tensed, attack hormones torturing her. “I am Karin.” He was source of the hostility Tracker had scented, although it was under tight control. “This is Sairee,” his tone indicated gesture. “She is Mayor. I am Center. We would like to know what we can do for you?”

  They knew. Tracker kept his restraining hand on Jesse’s shoulders as he bowed slightly. “I came to speak with … Yolanda.” It impressed them that he told the truth. Certainly the Center—whatever that was—Karin, expected him to lie, and Tracker’s small truth cracked his armor of hostility. Roiling tensions seeped through the cracks. “You have been in City,” he said.

  “Yes.” His sweat went acrid with suspicion. “If Yolanda wishes to speak with you, she may,” he said flatly. “If she wishes to go with you, she may. If she does not, she will stay. Is your dog going to attack? She wants to.”

  “She is only afraid that you threaten me.” Tracker stroked Jesse’s head, impressed again by this creation’s awareness. “She only wants to protect me.”

  “There are wild dog packs out here. They kill straying humans. I wonder where they came from.”

  The Center was staring at his face. Tracker felt the pressure of his eyes, shrugged. “They were created,” he said. “As you were. And I. And Yolanda. I don’t know why they were put here.”

  For a moment, everyone was silent. Then a hand touched his arm, and Jesse whined with his flinch. A soft, gray presence, a woman heavy with knowledge and authority stood close to him. “Come have water,” she said. “And food. The flight wind is past and it’s time to eat.” She took his hand and Tracker felt an odd sense of déjà vu, as if this had happened before. She tugged him forward—guiding him, he realized with a small twinge of surprise. She had guessed he was blind. He let her steer him around the scrubby tufts of thorn and ancient, worn stones. As Jesse fell reluctantly in at his heel—still growling—he realized that the sense of déjà vu was hers, not his.