Interzone #267 - November-December 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  Dorian swilled beer in his mouth, letting the carbonation sting his tongue while he listened to Nahm explain, in her roundabout way, how her “little” brother had caught him running a scam in a bar where he bounced. How Dorian had drunkenly bragged about his takings. How Nahm had shopped photos from Alexis Carrow’s vacation in Malaysia six months ago and slipped the fake news report into the mirror for him to watch.

  Her brother, working as a valet at the Emerald Palace, had gotten the imposing black ute out of the garage for a quick spin. She’d worked on her Cockney accent for a few weeks and done up a voice synthesizer. And from there, Dorian realized his overactive imagination had done the rest of the work.

  “I hope the last part is so easy, too,” Nahm said sweetly, smearing her lip gloss across her face with the heel of her hand. “With the money, we think maybe to buy a boat. Mwah.” She blew a kiss to the cam, then reached in and switched it off.

  Dorian leaned back at his table. Unprofessional of her, to add insult to injury like that and lay out her method besides. But he supposed it was understandable in the excitement of pulling off a semi-long con for the first time. And at least this way he’d recouped one of the cams. Dorian slid it back into his pocket, pensive.

  For a little while he rewound the footage and sourly watched Nahm blowing kisses on loop, then finally he put the tablet away. He still had enough cash stowed to take a domestic down south and start over from there.

  A fresh wave of tourists would soon be showing up on the islands, and Pattaya just wasn’t doing it for him anymore.

  ***

  Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and now writes from Ottawa, Canada. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon, featured on io9, and appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Apex. He was the most prolific author of short science fiction in 2015. Find him online at richwlarson.tumblr.com.

  ROCK, PAPER, INCISORS

  DAVID CLEDEN

  illustrated by Martin Hanford

  The 2016 James White Award Winner

  The James White Award is a short story competition open to non-professional writers and is decided by an international panel of judges made up of professional authors and editors. Previous winners have gone on to either win other awards or get published regularly, which is exactly why the award was set up. The winning story receives a cash prize, a handsome trophy and publication in Interzone. Entries are received from all over the world, and a shortlist is drawn up for the judges. This year’s judges were Neil Williamson, Ruth E.J. Booth and Ian Sales. To learn more about the Award itself visit jameswhiteaward.com. The 2017 James White Award is now open. Entry is free.

  The James White Award was instituted to honour the memory of one of Ireland’s most successful science fiction authors, James White. To learn more about James White and his writing visit www.sectorgeneral.com.

  ***

  First, the quickening. Then comes the hardening. I forget now which is worse. Each bears its unique price, redeemable in pain.

  I try my best to fight the changes. The darkness fills with soft, liquid sounds as I writhe within the underground chamber. Strange, alien sounds. I have a sense of new-formed membranes quivering and tightening, the budding of raw flesh and the grind of bones knitting together – sounds from a waking nightmare. For a moment I wonder what else lies in the darkness with me. But they placed me here alone.

  I reach out a hand to where it hurts the most, forgetting. I have no hand left, only a bloody stump that flares with pain as surely as if thrust into a fire. How could I forget that? But forgetting is part of the quickening. They told me that but I didn’t believe them.

  So use your pain. Shape it, then let it shape you.

  I will not forget. My name is Silja, adopted daughter of the Tribe, and once I dreamt of a future. Those dreams – betrothal to Quaid, the status accorded a young hunter’s bride, perhaps even motherhood in a few years – are crushed. Now I pray for a quick death, as all chosen ones are said to do, though I don’t believe there is a god to take notice.

  No, my little chiquada. Turn your anger inwards.

  Not long ago I prayed that as my body changed and flowed, my sanity would remain untouched. Yet as I enter my fourth week of incarceration, that awareness of suffering only makes things worse. Perhaps losing my sanity would be kinder.

  This dark chamber cut into the hillside grows uncomfortably hot. Before the quickening took my sense of smell, the stench of my own decomposing body was overpowering. I don’t envy the acolytes who come to feed me. Twice a day the stone is rolled back and they crawl in next to me: one to press a wet paste of food and poisons between my dry lips, the other to hold me down as I shake and retch. Yet now the quickening is done, I miss that companionship; the presence – no matter how brief – of other humans around me.

  But again I forget. I’ve become something different, no longer human.

  My flesh has slackened, muscles wasted away, my bones shrinking back to their marrow ready to knit together in new arrangements. I am like a puddle of flesh and organs, a blank canvas awaiting the artist’s brush to paint something new in place of the human I once was.

  Already I can feel a spiky line of feathers growing along the ridge of my spine. They itch unbearably. Feathers! What use will they be in the fight? I try to focus my mind again, conjuring layers of muscle and sinew, imagining razor-sharp talons and powerful jaws that can crush a man’s leg.

  Markov is here again. My mentor crawls in beside me, the light from the old world momentarily painting my vision white. My eyes haven’t been lost to the quickening yet. Then the stone is nudged back into place and in rolls the darkness, imprisoning us both.

  Gently, questioningly, he touches me, inspecting the changes. Focus! he urges. Time is short. As if I don’t know that. Make tooth and claw your weapons! Nothing is more effective at close quarters. Nine out of ten killing moves are done with teeth.

  I remember each of the years gone by, standing with the Tribe on the ridgeline, watching as the changelings fight in the arena below. I remember last season’s champion, their champion: a brutish creature twice the height of any hunter, splitting rocks with hammer-like fists. A fine array of sabre teeth had not saved our changeling that year, his skull crushed beneath a man-sized rock hefted by the Others’ champion.

  I try to do as instructed. I think of teeth: long dagger-like protrusions, serrated edges, wickedly honed points, inset with a channel along which flows poison secreted from glands beneath – this my own addition – and try not to think of the gamble I am making.

  Markov drip-feeds suggestions into my brain. Asleep or awake, his voice is a constant tone like the keening of the wind. His thoughts guide me through the hardening. I try to visualise all that he tells me, imagining my body taking shape anew, flowing as if from a crucible into the mold formed by his words and images.

  But it’s no good.

  If I had vocal chords left, I would tell him. I am no champion. What were the gods thinking by choosing me? The hunting grounds are lost to the Others as surely as if the fight had already taken place.

  Be strong, Markov tells me. Grow powerful. Build from an inner core. He paints pictures in my head of armoured plates, a creature walking on all fours, squat and belligerent. A narrow whip-like head carries a complement of long needle-sharp teeth to rip and tear my opponent’s flesh. This is the creature I must become.

  Should I tell him about the feathers growing soft and downy my back? Warn him that the strength of the vision is failing?

  The Tribe hasn’t won the right to the best hunting grounds in three attempts. Three long years we’ve scratched around the edges of the plains, our bellies rumbling from near-starvation, tempers frayed by each fruitless day when the hunters return with little of substance for the cooking fires. It occurs to me that Markov has mentored every s
ingle one of those defeated changelings. That doesn’t bode well for me, does it? If I cannot rely on Markov, who else is left? Not Quaid, not my betrothed, that’s for sure.

  Concentrate, Markov tells me.

  I mumble a question. Why?

  Because one death is better than many, Markov tells me. Your sacrifice – no, your victory, means neither tribe is weakened by the slaughter of battle. Our forebears learnt that lesson the hard way. This way is better. And this year, the hunting grounds will be ours.

  But that isn’t what I meant.

  I meant Why me?

  ***

  The bowl of nuts passes along the line. Each adult member of the Tribe takes one. In the firelight, they all look the same. There’s no way to tell which contains the diseased kernel.

  Quaid, my betrothed, leans across before the bowl reaches me. “Let me,” he says with a smile, cupping one in each hand as if weighing them. After a moment he presses the warm shell of a nut into my hand and the bowl passes along the line. I say nothing.

  A half dozen times or more during the feast, he has left my side to exchange a word or two with friends or ingratiate himself with the hunters. Twice I glance round to see him sharing a joke with Helne, a hunter’s daughter whose dark, sultry looks draw hungry glances from the younger hunters. Quaid has no business with her, no favours to seek. I bite my lip, feeling the prick of jealousy and hating myself for it. Next season will be Quaid’s first and he’s only anxious for acceptance, to pay respects where they are due. Why should I be concerned? Is my face not every bit as pretty?

  My foster family will be glad to see me gone. It’s the custom that when twins are born, one of them – the dibchik or ‘motherless one’ – must be given up for adoption by the other tribe. Raising twins can only bring bad luck on a tribe. Perhaps in some small way it helps us remember we are not so very different.

  I wonder sometimes about my mother who has lived all her life amongst the Others. Is she happy there? Why wouldn’t she be?

  But mostly I wonder why I was the one she chose to give away.

  The mood of the Tribe is sombre and the grumbling runs deeper than usual this year. There is talk of injustice and the tricks the Others must be using to gain advantage in the battle of the changelings. I hear Markov’s name muttered in the darkness around me.

  And then it’s time. The Elder speaks a few words and we split open our nuts. For the first time that evening, the chatter dies away and the Tribe grow quiet.

  In my palm lies the broken shell and in the centre of that a shrivelled, disease-ridden lump of snot I do not recognise. I stare at it without comprehending, unaware of time passing. Then supporting hands gently lift it to my unresisting lips, force the kernel into my mouth, and thus begins the quickening process.

  But it makes no sense. I cannot be chosen. I am too young, hardly yet a grown woman. And I am betrothed. I have a future ahead of me. How can the gods have chosen me? I even helped dig the shallow burrow of the quickening nest – a body’s length and a half into the soft soil of the hill above camp. We hollowed out a bell-like chamber, wide enough to contain whatever variant the quickening might bring forth. I helped line the nest with woven sheets of flax and woolskins, crawling inside to layer them until the nest was a soft, warm cocoon.

  Everyone is staring at me. I search the ring of faces for Quaid, needing his reassurance now more than ever. He sits quietly next to Helne, and I see it in their postures, their hands close to each other though careful not to touch. He gives me no answering smile.

  This, I realise later, is what betrayal feels like.

  ***

  “They will send a dancer,” Markov whispers in the darkness. “All speed and agility. A flash of sunlight. Light dazzles but it does no lasting harm. Your foe will keep their distance. But when they tire of dancing, you will strike with all your might. You will rip chunks of flesh from his body and you will not stop even though they beg you.”

  How does he know this? No one can know what form the other changeling has chosen, not until the moment they enter the arena. And three seasons in a row, Markov has been wrong.

  I remember a childhood game played around the cooking fires. Rock, paper, knives. They will send a champion who is light and flexible – like paper. Paper wraps rock. Death comes through paper’s smothering embrace. So Markov wants me to be a knife; to become a creature with sharp-edged claws and fearsome teeth and jaws that can cut and grind. Slow and ponderous, but deadly up close. A knife cuts paper – and when it does, the hunting grounds will be ours again.

  But rock blunts a knife. What if Markov is wrong and they send a rock instead?

  I have no shortage of time to brood on this point.

  ***

  Markov is back. He doesn’t stay with me throughout the hardening process. He is old and needs help even to crawl in alongside me. I doubt his body could withstand the heat I generate and the airlessness of that chamber for more than a few hours.

  I feel his hands moving over me. He asks no permission, my body no longer my own. The Tribe have placed their faith in me and what I have become. But still I feel violated. At his touch, pain leaps like a flame where my body is still raw and unformed. Elsewhere I cannot feel his probing hands at all. I sense a hardened shell has formed, nerve endings burned away.

  He is angry. “No, no. This is wrong,” he mutters in the darkness. “The form is all wrong. Have you listened to nothing I have said?”

  It is too late to change now – and we both know it. The quickening takes weeks, but the hardening – the settling of shape and form – much less.

  I try to protest. I try to offer my explanations. But the guttural rumble that rises from my chest is not my voice. It is a primitive thing, a growl.

  I listened, I want to say to him. But I made a different choice.

  My body has swollen with the changes and there’s no room in the burrow to turn round so they have to haul me out into the light. It’s rough, inhuman treatment – the way a hunter hauls some squealing sow from a hole in the ground. I hiss and spit with anger, cursing with something other than words. The sudden daylight is blinding and I try to wipe away grittiness from the corners of my eyes but my hands have swollen into callused, leathery stumps. Four icicle-like shards of bone protrude where fingers had once been, stubby and pointless in every sense of the word. Hardly the knife-like daggers Markov described.

  I am naked yet feel no shame. Shame is reserved for humans and I’ve become something else. My torso carries some kind of carapace. Hard grey plates of some chitinous material slide and flex as I move my limbs. I stagger to my feet which have become wide pads of scabrous, leathery flesh. My movements are stiff and painfully slow.

  I am not the knife Markov intended, that much is clear. I am nothing but a rock. He told me they will send paper – and paper wraps rock. But Markov has been wrong before. Three times.

  Without warning, the anger is back. It burns deep within and now it explodes upwards. I bellow with rage and the honking sound of my cry sounds both pitiful and terrifying. The watching tribesmen fall back. I turn, letting my arms swing like clubs, feeling the heft of my new body, its slow ponderous power. The urge to destroy almost overwhelms me. I could crush the Tribe – once my friends and neighbours – who have condemned me to this. I take a step towards them.

  Markov is there, whispering in my ear. “Control it. Direct it. Use it to do what you set out to. For the good of those you once cared for.” I want to tell him I did not set out to do anything. None of this was my choice, but I follow his gaze up the hillside. The ridge path leads to the natural amphitheatre beyond and slowly, as though with great effort, I do remember my purpose. Markov is right, better to die for a reason than in blind anger.

  I catch sight of Quaid amongst the crowd of watchers. I stare at the man whose body I snuggled against on cold nights, but there’s no tenderness left in my heart any more. The changes have consumed it, broken it down and reformed it into something more raw. He takes a s
tep back when he sees my gaze come to rest on him. Just for a moment, I am tempted.

  At a signal from the Elder, they lead me the last few steps to the lip of the amphitheatre. Somewhere, approaching from the opposite side, must be my challenger. Just before I step over the ridge and into the arena, Markov turns to me. “You chose not to listen,” he says. “This failure is yours. Yours alone.”

  His words sting. Markov is supposed to be my mentor, supposed to prepare me in every way possible as the Tribe’s champion. Instead he condemns me. And now I can hear the crowd muttering. “A dibchik always brings dishonour,” they are saying. I haven’t been called that name since I was nine or ten. The last girl to try had earned deep claw-marks on her face where my nails dug into her skin. “I do have a mother!” I had screamed at her. “I do!”

  “Yes but she’s an Other,” the girl had spat back. “And you were the one she chose to give away.”

  Remembering, with a bellow of rage I stamp down the slope into the amphitheatre.

  ***

  The ground is uneven beneath my clumsy feet. Taking stock, I see rock outcrops piercing the carpet of wiry grass, and gorse thickets peppering one side of the curving bowl of land. The ground is boggy at its lowest point; a spring spilling from the ground and trickling down the valley. Are they here yet? He? She?

  One of the nearer boulders unfolds; stands. He – it must be a he – is a head taller, but it’s his bulk that intimidates – the rounded torso all brawn, stubby arms and legs as thick as tree trunks, and powerfully muscular.

  He snarls and takes a step towards me, and I can actually feel the ground shaking with those heavy footsteps. But I’m relieved too. He’s a rock like me; not a paper dancer darting and stabbing while I hopelessly flail. A rock. There is a chance…