Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  She was shaking her head, sadness deepening.

  “Not possible, Tracker. I … have a daughter, remember? City people can’t breed with the beings they create. That has always been true.”

  And it was, and it was true, he had sensed her relationship to Karda, had forgotten in the shock of his discovery. He groped for her hand, lifted the palm to his face, tasting that absence on her skin. She had to be City. Yolanda made no effort to pull her hand away.

  “You scared me when I first saw you, blind Tracker. It’s as if I live on the surface of the world that you inhabit. You see things, sense things, that I can’t perceive, and that scares me.”

  Jesse was looking at his own face now, carved with strain, but he could feel the emerald pressure of her eyes on him.

  “And you scared me,” she went on softly, “because I thought you were City, here to claim me, not someone sent by Donai.” She paused, her stare warm against his skin. “At night, years ago, Karin would come to my bed. And in the morning, after he had gone back to sleep with Sairee, I would smell him on my hair and skin, as if his spirit was still lying in my arms. What are you sensing, Tracker? I am dying a little with every passing day, ticking off a finite life. What about you? Tell me about the woman who carried you, Tracker. I remember mine. I called her Mother, and she sang to me in the sun of the garden.”

  “No.” It was sigh more than whisper. He wanted to tell her that he remembered, describe this woman for her.

  He could not.

  Grope as he might, all he found was a chain of days that disappeared into a far distance, endlessly. Before Jesse, another creature, lithe and furry, and before that one, before that one?

  “City people don’t just breed.” Yolanda went on relentlessly. “They select genotypes, they match carefully. There are only so many who can live in City, only so many who can be admitted to share the universe. Donai told me about this, about the rules. That is the only rule they may not break, Tracker. To breed without consensus, without permission. I remember when he told me, Tracker. It was not long after I had left the garden, when I was his lover. And his words were bitter, but his tone was not, and I wondered about that.”

  He felt her smile, sharp and cold as a blade edge against his skin. “I think you are City, Tracker. Didn’t you ever notice? Were you too close to see it? I think you are Donai’s own son.”

  She was right, oh yes, the memory was there, opening now, unrolling like an endless carpet, drawing his mind’s eye back though a storm of days and nights and days, faces, voices, hands touching, animal fur and cold noses, summers and winters … Drowning. All the time, City Man’s face, everywhere, in all the seasons. City Man. Donai. Drowning. Tracker sank silently beneath the endless, bottomless sea of yesterdays, weighed down by his sudden understanding of … what he was.

  • • • •

  He woke to nighttime cold, to the rough-wet caress of Jesse’s tongue punctuated by the cold thrust of her nose. He was lying on the fabric quilt and the crackle of flame and scent of smoke suggested a fire nearby. Jesse nudged him again. He reached out, patted her, dizzy briefly as the deep sea of past threatened to suck him down once more. For an instant, a hundred Jesses with different fur and form and faces nudged him. Treading water in those depths, he focused until he was aware of only this one, and sat up.

  “I was getting worried.” Yolanda sat on the corner of the quilt, Jesse showing him her knees drawn up, her shift pulled down over her legs for warmth. “We’re nearly out of water. I didn’t find any communication device in your pack, so I assume you need to call Donai yourself. And the Caravan is heading east, not west. So we’re on our own.” But no trace of worry colored her words. “You’ve been unconscious for two days. I gave her the rest of the food.”

  He might not have woken up. For a long time he had been lost in the depths of that huge, chaotic sea. He might never have found his way back to this moment, this time. Slowly, Tracker reached out to touch her arm. She accepted his touch, even put her hand on his with a gentle sympathy.

  That acceptance was the same acceptance that Jesse offered him.

  Tracker summoned City Man through his link. Then they waited for the flyer, which arrived as the day’s heat grew. He was not on board, and Tracker felt a moment of piercing gratitude for that. They climbed the ramp, Yolanda first, her cool composure tinged with sorrow, then Tracker, and last Jesse, panting in the noonday heat. The cushioned interior was cool and Tracker got Jesse a bowl of water from the refreshment wall. A tiled shower cabinet drew Yolanda to strip and step inside, turning so that the jets of warm water scoured every square centimeter of her lithe body. He looked through Jesse’s eyes at the sleek curves of her flesh, momentarily swept away by the memory of the night spent with her on the kite fabric blanket beneath the ancient and weary sky.

  He grieved for it.

  She emerged, dry, naked and glowing. She didn’t invite him to make love to her. She would surely accept if he asked, would no more refuse than Jesse would refuse his summons. That had been built into her, lay there as real as the shadow of Death.

  He didn’t ask.

  He could feel the swift approach of City. Beyond it, the sand people would be working on the sculptures that the waves would erase. The flyer skimmed above City’s silent clamor, settled into the quiet lawn behind City Man’s residence. Grass like living velvet gave beneath Tracker’s feet as he stepped out. Yolanda leaped lightly down beside him, but her sorrow clouded the air around them. Jesse kept her eyes low, tail down, afraid. He closed his fingers in her fur, tugging gently, and he felt her tail move briefly.

  City Man was in the garden. Jesse showed him blue-flowered twining plants. The snaky shoots wove about his legs, not touching him, their blue flowers like eyes. As he and Yolanda and Jesse approached, the vines lifted and pointed in their direction. Jesse shouldered into Yolanda and planted her feet, refusing to move farther. Yolanda stood still, her knees against the furry barricade that was Jesse. Tracker felt her gaze fixed on City Man.

  Tracker walked up to him, not needing Jesse’s eyes. The vine things twined briefly around his calves and then released him, retreating as if he poisoned them. They knew City when they felt it. Like Yolanda. “Donai,” Tracker said.

  City Man’s attention focused sharply on Tracker. The plants cowered away from both of them, and City Man finally shifted his attention to them. “Waste of time,” he said. “I’ll have to start over. I never doubted you’d find her.”

  “She’s not yours anymore,” Tracker said gently. “Donai.”

  City Man’s attention was on him fully, now. “I can go to the City Council.” He enunciated each syllable precisely. “I can tell them what you did. What I am.”

  Stillness. A spike of caution, quickly extinguished. “What I did?” City Man put on a good-humored tolerance that was as translucent as gauze. “And what are you, besides a very well created tracking dog?”

  “I’ll go to the Council and tell them that I am … your son. Father.” The word made him sway, and the dark, bottomless sea beneath his feet nearly rose to swallow him again. But the effect on City Man was visible. He went still, and Tracker tasted his … vulnerability.

  This was new. Never before.

  “Yolanda couldn’t know,” City Man whispered.

  “Oh no.” Tracker shook his head, demons shrieking in his head. “She doesn’t know. I simply … remembered.”

  “You can’t,” City Man said calmly. “You don’t have the ability. I made sure of that.”

  It was an admission and they both realized it at the same instant. City Man swallowed, an audible, dry sound. “They’ll destroy you, if you tell them.”

  Tracker bent his head, wishing he could cry, but that ability had slipped away from him as he drowned in that vast sea. “They’ll destroy us both, Father.” Again. The name burned them both equally.

  “They denied my petition for offspring.” City Man breathed the words. “My DNA contains too many flaws. But it also conta
ins vast talent. I can twist that ladder to create people and tribes, plants and animals that no one has ever been able to rival. I can do things that nobody else can do, no matter how much they copy me. So what if you can sculpt glaciers, mountains, the face of the moon? I can sculpt races!” He turned to face Tracker, filled with a depthless calm. “They’ll destroy you. Think about that. You have forever.”

  It was a weapon, those three sentences. Oh, he felt it, that tug of cells. Live forever. It weakened his knees, called to him with a Siren’s voice to go back to his garden, pet Jesse, and make love to Yolanda. He could do that. City Man would reward him for doing that. He would help him to pretend, and after a while, Tracker would … forget. The promise was there. And real. “Let’s walk,” he said and it was the first command he had ever uttered.

  City Man complied, and that was another admission. They strolled away from the cowering vines, through a garden of growing green things, sweet with the scents of plant sex. Behind them, Jesse and Yolanda waited and Tracker felt a clench of sorrow for the similarity of their waiting. Tracker finally stopped, feeling the silence between them like a pair of crossed swords, a silent struggle. Tracker shrugged suddenly, fingers groping to find a fleshy blossom humming with a summer’s joy. He fingered the petals gently, did not pick it. “Who was my mother?” he asked.

  “You don’t remember.” A silver thread of triumph wove City Man’s words together.

  Tracker shook his head. “I just can’t find her.” She was somewhere, lost in that sea. “ I would like to know.” And he wasn’t challenging, wasn’t threatening, was merely … asking.

  City Man walked on and Tracker followed, waiting.

  “There was no other.” The words came slowly. “I used my DNA, recombined it to grow, and implanted it in a … creation.” He was silent for a long time. “I … sculpted you.” He spoke slowly, thoughtfully. “If I wasn’t good enough for them, then I could make you into whatever I wanted. I gave you a gift.”

  Tracker felt his stare as City Man pivoted to face him, like desert sunlight on his skin.

  “You can’t remember. Not for more than a few decades. Tell me about your last lover? Your last dog?” Sly triumph shaded his words. “I made you immortal, but I gave you a mortal memory.”

  And by that, he could own Tracker forever. Tracker lifted his head, feeling the early starlight on his face, remembering the wide, bright eyes of the kiter girl. “You failed,” he said gently. He reached out to touch his father’s face, felt the hard edge of his disbelief. “I could wish you had succeeded.”

  “You belong to me. If you tell, we both die,” Donai whispered. “Life forever. It’s not so easy to give up.”

  “No,” Tracker said. “It’s not.” Then he turned and walked away, not needing eyes, back to where Jesse and Yolanda waited beneath the silver moon.

  • • • •

  The sun was barely peeking up over the horizon as Tracker crested the desert rise and spied through Jesse’s eyes the circle of kite-roofed wagons below. He halted, and Yolanda came up to stand beside him, still and silent, her awareness of his City flesh a thin and impenetrable wall between them, one that would always be there.

  Her scent tickled him, overlaid with dust and the bright, spiraling joy of the kiters’ morning flight as their kites twined the dry sky. It had changed, her scent, richer now, tinged with tentative new life. He groped, touched the polished curve of her hip-spur, felt the texture of her joy. It matched the kiters’.

  With a sigh he stepped forward, making his way with Jesse’s guidance, down the gentle slope of the sage-covered hill that had once been a roving dune, but was now netted to the earth with roots. Before they reached the bottom, a shadowy figure emerged from one of the wagons and ran to meet them.

  “I knew you were coming.” Karda halted breathless in front of them. “I knew you were coming back.”

  Yolanda stepped forward, arms outstretched, enfolding the child to her. The girl winced slightly as one hip-spur scratched her arm lightly, but barely noticed the tiny trickle of blood.

  And so she was inoculated with the antidote to City Man’s lethal virus. And Yolanda would free the rest of the kiters from City Man’s vengeance. That had been part of his bargain with City Man. He looked through Jesse’s eyes and found Karda standing in front of him, looking up at him. “Are you going to stay here, too? Forever?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She frowned, because she could sense truth, and this was not truth but it was not a lie, either. “For as long as you live,” he said, and that truth she heard.

  “I’m a lot younger than you,” she said, with a child’s forthrightness.

  “You are.” He smiled, because for the kiters, he was like them. Not City. Yolanda might know, but she would not say, and here he would be … not alone. And that tentative silver note of life in Yolanda would grow and strengthen, and, in a space of time, would be born as a child. His child, and Yolanda’s. You made me too much like them, Tracker thought. Enough to do this. Enough not to fear Death. He groped for Karda’s hand and she closed her small, slender fingers around his. For a while this would be an island, where he would learn to swim in the dark sea that lurked in his head. And when the child was old enough, they would leave. Because there were others like them. He felt them. Behind him, he felt the distant forever murmur of City rising beside the patient sea. Beginning and end, he thought. My gift to you. Father.

  With Karda guiding his feet, they walked through the sage as the first kite spiraled upward to meet the rising sun, and for the first time Tracker felt a sense of peace.

  *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mary Rosenblum is the author of four science fiction novels, including her latest, Horizons, and The Drylands, which won the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. Water Rites— a compilation of The Drylands and the three novelettes that preceded it—is recently available from Fairwood Press. Her short work frequently appears in Asimov’s, but has also appeared in Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and has often been reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction annual.

  *

  Nine-Tenths of the Law

  Molly Tanzer | 6220 words

  Donna had picked up Jared’s favorite—Romano’s to go, he liked the rosemary bread and the penne rustica—and was just putting it in the oven to keep warm when they brought him in. They being EMTs, after pounding urgently on the door, and brought him in meaning he was on a stretcher. He had an IV in his arm and his eyes were bandaged with thick layers of gauze.

  Donna felt a flash of annoyance as the EMTs wheeled him toward their bedroom, sending their cat Skimbleshanks hissing and skittering nervously out of the way. She had planned to propose they separate that night, over the tiramisu she’d put in the fridge. Then Jared moaned, and she chided herself. She was still his wife … for now, at least. She ought to be beside herself with worry, not annoyed over having to put off an awkward conversation.

  “What happened?” she asked, hovering in the doorway while they got him into his pajamas and between the sheets, fumbling in the darkness of the room. Jared seemed pretty out of it. Doped up on painkillers, maybe? “Why didn’t someone call me?”

  “Workplace accident,” the woman replied, answering only the first of Donna’s questions. “He’ll be fine, he just needs to rest. Please don’t turn on those lights. His eyes are very sensitive right now.”

  Jared worked in administration at Denver International Airport. “What sort of workplace accident?”

  “Someone will be by to talk to you,” the woman assured her, her eyes flickering to the other EMT, a buff young man with tattoos and one of those man-buns.

  “What sort of someone?” Donna did not have to fake the concern in her voice, as it was due to the oddness of the situation rather than her husband’s condition.

  As if on cue, there was a knock at the front door. Donna left the EMTs to let in a man in a gray suit. His hair was short; his shoulde
rs, broad. Donna thought he looked vaguely military, but the pin on his lapel was the new DIA logo, the white peaks of the airport’s distinctive roof against a dark blue background.

  “Mrs. Crane?”

  For now. She pushed away the thought, and nodded.

  “My name is Mr. Smoot. I’m sorry to meet you under these circumstances, but it’s a pleasure.” He did not try to shake her hand. “How is he?”

  “He’s in bed,” she said. She suddenly smelled the food, and rushed into the kitchen to turn down the oven temperature. Mr. Smoot followed her. “That’s all I know at this point,” she said, over her shoulder. “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing a few days of rest won’t cure.”

  She frowned. “That he needs rest is all anyone’s told me.”

  “There’s not much to tell. Just a workplace accident.” Donna was becoming annoyed; given how everyone was putting her off, she suspected something might really be wrong. Her face must have betrayed this, as Mr. Smoot set his briefcase on the table and opened it, withdrawing a single sheet of paper from one of the files. He handed it to her—it was a photocopy of an incident report.

  She began to skim it as Mr. Smoot spoke; he and the document said basically the same thing: “He was riding in the employee train. They were testing a new sort of lighting system down there, and a bulb flared and burst. He was looking in the wrong place at the wrong time. We had him rushed to the hospital. They did a quick surgery—with a laser, nothing to worry about. Really, he will be fine. He’ll have to wear the bandages for a few days. When they come off, he’ll have two black eyes, but that should be it.”

  “I see.” Donna set the paper on the table. She was relieved to finally have an answer, and understood why they’d wanted a DIA rep to tell her. Damage control; lawsuit avoidance. “I’m glad it’s not serious.”

  Mr. Smoot smiled. “We are, too. Now, as to the logistics, you work as a dental hygienist, correct?”

  Donna frowned. “Um, yes.” Creepy that he knew, but it must be in Jared’s file somewhere …? And yet, every time a new acquaintance learned her husband worked at Denver International Airport, they inevitably asked about one or more of the X-Files -style rumors that floated around the place like cottonwood fluff in the springtime. Was DIA where they’d take the President in the event of a global crisis? Did its murals predict the rapture? Were the delays and budget increases that had plagued its construction due to the secret alien research facility beneath the tunnels? The truth is out there … except it wasn’t. She’d been on tours of the facility with Jared. It was just an airport.