The Long List Anthology Volume 3

by Aliette de Bodard

  “Yes.” He thumbed opened one of the cases. Inside were rows of ammunition nestled in foam. He slid the clip into its place and shut the case again. I could hear the slight SNICK as it sealed.

  “Johnny, I need you to explain to me what I have to do with deer and why you are keeping me here.”

  “Or?”

  “Or I won’t cooperate when we get to whatever it is your bosses want me to do.”

  “We don’t need you to cooperate.”

  That stopped me. And chilled me.

  “You were in the way when I had work to do. I need you to be quiet about what you saw until I’m finished. My choices were to bring you with me, or to kill you.” He cocked his head and glanced to the left at his bosses, whoever they were, in his virteo projection. He shook his head, I think at them. “I took responsibility for you, but this has nothing to do with you.”

  “But . . . but you said we had something to discuss. My client list interested you”

  He stared, and the sun seemed to drop visibly lower in the sky while he thought. Then he shook his head.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Have you eaten dinner?”

  “You can’t just change the subject”

  “Yes I can. You know I can. Do you want something to eat?”

  “Bastard.”

  “See. I was right. I told you I didn’t need a name.”

  I did not give him the courtesy of a laugh. I sulked, like a goddamn five-year-old. I sat down in the only chair and picked up his goddamn book and started to read. Then realized that it was HIS book, and I wanted to throw the thing across the clearing, but I didn’t because that would have done exactly no good. Nothing, in fact, that I could do would do any good at all. The utter impotence of my situation—the helplessness of knowing there were no good choices . . . The only one open to me, to wait, seemed like a surrender.

  He gave me a foil pouch of some other unmemorable meal. I’d had dried fruit and a trail bar for breakfast, a different forgettable pouch for lunch. Johnny still didn’t eat in front of me. Oh, no. That would have meant removing his mask, and that might have revealed who he was.

  Silent, resentful, I went to bed when full dark came. That night I didn’t sleep well at all.

  • • • •

  Despite that, the birds woke me again at dawn. I lay in the tent, glaring at the roof. If I could have killed them with my mind, I would have. Alas, the cheerful little bastards lived on.

  The inside of my mouth tasted as if something had died in it. Modern advances are all well and good for making sure your dental hygiene is in good order, but when you go days without brushing your teeth, there’s a bit of a buildup there. My breath stank. I stank. I’d been wearing the same clothes for days now.

  I crawled out of the tent hating everything and everyone.

  Johnny was awake, watching me again. I didn’t jump this time.

  “I need some clean clothes.”

  “Good morning.” He sat up. “I haven’t got any to give you.”

  I was so frustrated that the state of my clothes mattered more than it should have. “Is there a stream where I can wash them?”

  “They’ll be wet all day. Not enough sun to dry.”

  I asked him again. “Is there. A stream. Where I can wash them?”

  He rolled his eyes, and I just barely bit back a scream of frustration—and only then because in the dawn light the glow of his virteo projection was a little more visible. “Yes. There’s a stream about a half hour walk due east. There’s a bank closer, but walking due east will make it easier to find your way back.”

  “If I get lost, you can always come find me.”

  He blinked the virteo off. “I can.”

  “You’re shooting things again today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Try not to shoot me.”

  He sighed and got out of the sleeping bag. “Believe it or not, Katya, that’s been the goal all along.”

  I grabbed some dried fruit from his bag and stalked off toward the rising sun to wash my damn clothes.

  To you, now, I will admit that this was a mistake. It left me with wet clothes in the early morning, and a walk back through the woods with the choice of either wearing said wet clothes, or adding scratches to my torso to my list of injuries. I opted to wear them. The technical fabric was good at wicking water away, though not in those volumes. Still, that was something, and they dried fast enough that by lunchtime I was only mildly damp. The gunfire that day had been mostly west of me. It stopped shortly after lunch, I think. I remember getting to the end of Bashar’s chapter on “self-actualizing interpenetrated communities” and realizing that I hadn’t heard anything for hours. Then I wenton to the next chapter.

  In all other ways, the day was exactly the same as the one previous, with one exception.

  I was sitting in my chair when I heard a slight rustle of leaves at the edge of the clearing. A deer stepped out of the woods. A buck. He lifted his head, under the crown of antlers, and his nostrils flared. Those delicate, velvet ears flicked back, listening to something behind him. He turned his head and regarded me. I sat, utterly frozen, in my chair. I fully expected Johnny to shoot the deer, but the woods stayed quiet around us. After a moment, evidently deciding I was not a threat, the deer crossed through the clearing. A few paces behind him, a collection of does and a younger buck trailed behind. I wondered if they had been tagged yet with Johnny’s nanodrives.

  In a few breaths, they were gone again, as if they had never been. I sagged in my chair and went back to waiting. I was so tired from my anger the previous night that I half dozed. I could be poetic here and say that I dreamed of deer, since no one can contradict me, but the truth is that if I dreamed, I don’t remember it.

  I awoke with a crick in my neck. I hate those.

  When I heard the footsteps in the woods, even as far away as they were, I was surprised, then pleased that Johnny had remembered my request not to frighten me. He made a tremendous crashing, compared to his previous progress. I stood, rubbing the ache in my neck, and picked A SYMMETRY FRAMED up from where it had fallen. The slight brown discoloration in the corner had added my own bit of decay to the book, though I’m not sure anything about my nap was graceful.

  I can’t say exactly what made me realize something was wrong. I think it was that his footsteps were so irregular. A set of five, rushed together, then a pause before another syncopated series of footsteps. There was a moment when I thought it wasn’t going to be Johnny at all, and I didn’t know if that would be good or not.When I caught sight of him, his camouflage made it difficult to make out his figure when he was at rest, but the erratic, weaving motion throu gh the trunks pulled at my eye.

  And then I saw the blood.

  In a forest made of browns and greens, blood is shockingly, artificially red.

  There is something about the sight of blood that makes me run toward someone to help, even someone I have good reason to hate.

  I ran toward Johnny. He had stopped to lean against a tree. This was what had made his progress through the forest so staggering and uneven. He was barely on his feet at all. The front of his shirt was stained a deep red, shading to brown and, in places, almost black. He had a hand pressed against his stomach, and his fingers were caked with blood.

  “What happened?”

  His voice was cracked and hollow. “Deer. Woke up angry.”

  I slipped an arm around him, and he let me. The rifle was slung over his back, and his handgun was at his waist. I could have taken either and fled, leaving him there. But I also couldn’t have.

  He let me take some of his weight, and we walked the last yards back to the camp. . I eased him down into the chair. “Do you have a first-aid kit?”

  “Second trunk from the bottom.” He gestured in that general direction and beckoned. “It’s keyed to me.”

  I shoved off the other trunks and picked it up. The thing weighed more than I expected, and I staggered a little as I carried it to h
im. At his side, I dropped it with a thump. He bent forward to reach the print reader and toppled out of the chair. I reached for him, but my hands just brushed his coat. He hit the ground.

  Johnny grunted at the impact and tensed, his whole body freezing.

  By that point, I had knelt next to him and had my hands on his back. “What can I do?”

  He shook his head. Let his breath out. Tried to push up to his knees, but he was clearly spent. I helped him roll over instead. As he did, the damage was clearer. The deer had stabbed—no, wait. There’s a word for this, isn’t there? The deer had GORED him with its antlers. A rip in the cloth of his shirt was mirrored in his skin. I could see parts of his body you’re not supposed to see. I didn’t understand how he’d managed to walk back. Oh—and here’s the really insane thing. He still had the mask on.

  I dragged the case close enough that he could thumb it open. The seal gave with a hiss, and I opened the case to root through it. There was nothing I could imagine that would be able to deal with his horrific wound. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

  “Not sure that’s an option.”

  He clearly couldn’t walk out of here, and there was no way I could carry him. I cut his shirt out of the way and pressed a nu-derm pad against his stomach. It sealed against the skin, controlling the bleeding, but would do little to keep him alive beyond that. I had this crazy thought about making a litter out of the sleeping bag and trying to drag him out of the forest. As I turned to look for sticks, I saw the robo-mule. “I can strap you to that.”

  He stared at me and then at it. “Okay. Yes. Thank you.”

  “Can you key it to me?”

  “Yes.” He pointed to the cases again. “Grab the blue one and bring it to me.”

  That one was where he’d put the hard-body computer the other night. I grabbed the case. He opened it. To my surprise, he didn’t do anything with the computer; instead, he pulled out my earbud. “Once you get me on the robo-mule, start walking north. You should hit a road in a couple of hours.”

  Surely he didn’t have a couple of hours. “I can’t just leave you.”

  “Ah . . . but you have to get out of range to call for help.”

  “Out of range of what?”

  “Me and the d—my damper.”

  I don’t know, but I think he almost said “the deer.” I didn’t question him and probably should have, since I think his judgment was slipping. Seeing someone dying though . . .

  I pointed at the hard-body computer. “Can’t I just call out on that?”

  “Local network only. Gotta hoof it.” He held up his hand. “Help me up?”

  I got him to his feet and over to the robo-mule. We used the straps from the tent to improvise reins that he could grip. I used the luggage tie-downs to create a harness that would hold him on if he lost consciousness. We both thought that was pretty likely, all things considered. Apparently, he’d passed out on the way back to the camp. I had no idea how he was still alive. His breathing was pretty ragged by the time I was finished with the tie-downs.

  I told him he should take the mask off.

  He shook his head and tugged it higher on his face. “Got an NDA, and right now I really need my employer to stay invested.”

  “Surely they would understand—”

  Again he shook his head, stopping my protest with a gesture. “Not the sort that understands things like breathing difficulties.”

  You hear what he wasn’t saying? He couldn’t come out and say he was working for a nonhuman entity, but I think that was what he meant. Whether it was an AI or a corporation, I don’t know. But whatever he was doing with the deer, they didn’t want it traced back to them, and that meant keeping Johnny unidentifiable.

  I should have thought of that, I really should have, before I left him.

  We got the robo-mule going, and once it was aimed and keyed to head north, I set out. At first, I was still close enough to hear it clomping through the woods, gyros whirring; then I left them behind. He’d said a couple of hours, and I was determined to try to get out of range as fast as possible. Every few minutes, I’d query to see if Lizzie was there. Not a thing. This surprised me, because I’d thought my data connection earlier had cut off when Johnny was close to me. I didn’t realize the range. So my calves and thighs ached from the pace I was setting. The forest added a whole new set of scratches to my growing collection. Too bad I can’t sell those as a unique experience . . .

  “Katya!” The call from Lizzie nearly dropped me in my tracks as all my systems came back online at once. One minute I was out of range; the next minute the full connectivity of my life slammed back into me. Messages, calendar alerts, namedrops, interest points—all of it flooding back in to demand my attention. I shook it all away and focused on Lizzie.

  “Here. Do you have me? I need emergency services.”

  “Yes. Yes, I have you. Where have you been? How are you injured?” The i-Sys almost sounded concerned.

  “I’m not injured—well, not seriously, but someone else is.”

  “Show me the injury, and I will have a medical patch assess it.”

  “I’m not with him. Send the emergency team to me, and then I’ll lead them to where he is.” With that, I realized I would need to keep walking north until they got a lock on me, or Johnny would catch up and I’d get cut off again. “Please hurry. He’s lost a lot of blood and was stabbed. Sort of.”

  “Complying. Emergency medical service is en route. Please be advised that this will be billed to your account if the patient is unable or unwilling to cover the charges.”

  “I understand.”

  They were fast. Fifteen minutes after the call, during which time I made an attempt to answer the messages that Lizzie rated as urgent priority, a medchopper disturbed the forest with its rotors.

  From here, you can watch the public record of what happened, and I’m assuming you have. My cameras were working again. The medteam had their LiveConnects running the entire time.

  You can see the way they reacted to me, and the blood that covered me. I hadn’t realized how stained my clothes had become with Johnny’s blood.

  Once I reassured them, we retraced my steps. We got all the way back to the clearing. No Johnny. No robo-mule. The site was completely empty, and the ground had been churned by the hooves of deer. No trace of humans at all.

  The only thing that makes my story at all believable is that I was offline for three days. During that time I had moved from south of Salem northward by about 400 miles, close to Lake Chelan. The bike and cart were where I had said they were hidden, but I could have done that myself. And since mine were the only footprints the investigators found . . . well. It’s easy to see how it might have been a publicity stunt designed to raise the price on my merchandise by giving it a unique provenance.

  But the blood—that should be proof, shouldn’t it?

  It was blood from a deer.

  I REMEMBER seeing the ragged hole in his stomach and innards. I remember how gray his skin looked and how labored his breathing was. But those memories . . . they must be false, right? Something I THOUGHT I saw in the moment. Something that took advantage of the failability of memory.

  And why? That’s what is hard to understand. Why would he fake an injury or a death if all he had to do was let me go? And even then, why not use human blood from a blood bank?

  I have wondered . . . It has occurred to me that it might have been a message. Though that raises its own set of questions.

  I looked for him.

  After everyone had left, I went back into the woods. I remember standing by a stream and having Lizzie’s voice cut off. A deer stepped out of the trees and bent down to drink. Nothing else stirred except the water and the leaves. After a moment, the deer lifted its head, leaped across the stream, and faded back into the trees. A few minutes later, Lizzie’s voice came back as if we hadn’t stopped talking.

  I don’t know if Johnny lived, or what exactly he was doing with the deer. I don
’t know what his plans were for me. If you had been hoping that I could give you answers to the deer die-off, I’m sorry that I can’t. I don’t even know what happened to me.

  I know that’s frustrating for you, so let me offer you the questions I’ve been asking myself.

  Have you been in the forest? Have you seen deer corpses? Or have you relied on what the net tells you about the die-off?

  Because I don’t think the deer are dying, I think they’re being taken offline, and the nanodrives they were injected with establish a nonhuman network. Changing the deer themselves wouldn’t be enough though, because the smart dust in the region would still report them, right?

  Unless those nanodrives are rewriting everything the deer comes in contact with. I’ve asked about that. It’s possible, and in a lot of ways it makes the fact that Johnny needed to tranquilize them make more sense. A transmitter—he could have just injected that from a distance. But if he needed time to make sure their systems recalibrated before releasing them . . . well.

  But that’s just a guess. It’s like Bashar says in A SYMMETRY FRAMED—“The land has an unwilling connection to us.”

  It makes you wonder doesn’t it?

  I was unconscious for over twenty-four hours, which is plenty of time to recalibrate someone’s system. With the client list I have, what would happen if I were released into the wild like the deer?

  What would happen if I were made an object of curiosity to attract a specific client?

  And my last question: What if they’re looking for you? Or people LIKE you?

  This typewriter is covered in dust. It’s part of its wabi-sabi. If the smart dust around me is mbeing rewritten, what about the dust ont his typweriter? The dust around you?

  Has your connection to the net dropped recently?

  That’s got you wondering, I expect . . . Think of it as a bonus with your purchase. I’ve given you the gift of uncertainty.

  * * *

  Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of historical fantasy novels: The Glamourist Histories series and Ghost Talkers. She has received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, three Hugo awards, the RT Reviews award for Best Fantasy Novel, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. Her stories appear in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and several Year’s Best anthologies. Mary, a professional puppeteer, also performs as a voice actor (SAG/AFTRA), recording fiction for authors including Seanan McGuire, Cory Doctorow, and John Scalzi. She lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters. Visit maryrobinettekowal.com