Wilde Stories 2018

by Steve Berman

  “What do you want?” he asked, trying to sound brave, bored, maybe a little mysterious. The tremor in his voice gave him dead away.

  “I’m Pepe,” the wilder said. “Who’re you?”

  “What do you want?” Valentin repeated, and this time with no quaver.

  The wilder shrugged. “To do what prophets do, Prophet,” he said. “Get a stubborn fucking god to care about us for a change. You help me, I won’t cut your toes off.” He patted his rucksack. “And maybe I’ll even let you have your shadow back,” he added.

  The campo didn’t look like freedom anymore. Pepe set the pace and set it fast, leaving Valentin to stumble along behind him, watching for the telltale skitter of scorpions in the cracked mud. His skin ached for his nanoshadow. A few times he probed hard for it and managed to elicit a sluggish twitch from inside Pepe’s rucksack, which in turn made Pepe shoot him a suspicious look from under his eyelids. But without sunshine or Valentin’s bioelectricity, the inert nanoshadow was nothing but a lump of gritty black gelatin.

  They walked and walked and only paused to eat—a slab of cold tortilla comfortingly similar to what they had in the Town—before they walked again. Valentin spent the time trying to think of a way to escape. The wilder had them heading west, toward his tribe’s derelict autofab, farther and farther away from the Town. Pepe thought Valentin was going to interface with whatever god was controlling it and set it working again. As if it was that simple.

  And when Pepe found out that Valentin couldn’t do it, he figured the wilder would use his sawtoothed knife to cut out his implant as a keepsake, then let him bleed out in the dust. He shivered, half from the thought and half from the Andalusian winter, as they walked in silence across another barren field. The soil underfoot was pallid gray.

  Another god, this one alone, hummed through the sky overhead, moving like the whales Valentin had seen clips of, the ones that used to inhabit the oceans. Pepe stopped where he was, pulled down his scarf, and craned his neck to watch its passage. The yellow lights bathing his face made the scar glisten wetly.

  “Can you talk to them, then?” Pepe asked.

  “When they want to talk,” Valentin lied, feeling Pepe’s dark eyes go to the crest of his head, where he had scar tissue of his own. Valentin pulled up his hood and glowered. He didn’t like people staring at the implant.

  “Should tell them to give us a lift,” Pepe said, with his macabre grin, and started to walk again. They passed the husk of an old harvester stripped for parts. “There used to be olive trees here,” he said. “Far as the unaugmented eye could see, my grandfather says his grandfather said. The harvesters rolled up and down the campo all day long. Back when more things grew. Back when machines listened to anybody, not just prophets.”

  Valentin probed the harvester as they passed by, wishing he could swing its clawed arm and knock Pepe to the ground, grind him into the dirt, but the farm equipment was long-dead. He didn’t feel so much as a flicker from his implant.

  Before long the moon was rising overhead, fat and yellow, and the air was turning cold enough to bite. Valentin missed the slick warmth of his nanoshadow again, pulling his scarf snug against the chill. He could see Pepe’s exposed hands turning purple in the night air, and after a few more minutes his captor pointed to a crumbling stone derelict up ahead.

  “We’ll hunker down in there for night,” he said, tongue flicking distractedly against his scar. “Start early in the morning, get to the autofab by noon. Make sure you have enough daylight to work.”

  Valentin gave the ruins a dubious once-over. The sagging stone and twists of old rebar looked like something out of a scarestory. As they approached, Pepe found a torch and thumped it to life with the heel of his hand. The lance of harsh white light strobed damp ground and what was left of the walls. Following Pepe inside, Valentin felt immensely far from the gated pueblo he’d called home only a day ago.

  “Wait here, Prophet,” Pepe said. “I’ll make a sweep for lobos.”

  “Funny,” Valentin muttered. The spidery machines that once hunted down the survivors of satbombed Seville and the other ruined cities had been recycled decades since. Humans knew better than to make war with the gods now, and the gods were otherwise occupied.

  His captor bounced off into the dark, and Valentin considered running yet again. The same counterweight held him fast: Pepe had his nanoshadow, and even if Valentin could make it back to the Town without being overtaken—not likely—he couldn’t return without his shadow. At that point, he was better off bleeding out in the dust.

  A beetle scuttled past Valentin’s toe; he stomped it dead and when he looked up he found himself face to face with empty eye sockets and a ghoulish grin. He flinched.

  “Boo,” Pepe said, waggling the dog skull on its jagged spinal column. He tossed it away. “Found us a nice corner. Venga.”

  Valentin helped Pepe clear away a few ancient syringes and typically inscrutable bits of plastic, things from the old days. There was space for the blankets and the portable estufa that Pepe said had enough solar charge to keep them warm for at least a couple hours. Valentin had to admit that Pepe was far better equipped to wander the campo than he was. But then, Valentin had been counting on his nanoshadow.

  “Could keep the heat longer if we use my shadow,” he said, watching Pepe strip down to sleep, uncovering the swathes of lean muscle Valentin had yet to develop—if he ever would. He spent his days sitting in the shade, learning his implant from Javier instead of boxing or playing in brutal games of barefooted football. Suddenly he remembered how Pepe must have touched him to take his nanoshadow in the first place. Suddenly he couldn’t help but imagine what the wilder’s sinewy body might feel like wrapping around his.

  “Right, right,” Pepe said, sliding on his stomach under the blankets, clamping his arm over the rucksack with knife held loosely in hand. “So it can smother me in my sleep and then whisk you back home.”

  “Something like that.”

  Pepe shifted, showing the unscarred side of his face, blinking soot-black lashes. “What were you doing over the wall, anyway?” the wilder asked.

  “What were you doing skulking around outside it?” Valentin parried.

  The wilder looked at him full-on, exposing his scar. “Was looking for a way to set things right,” he said. His black eyes bored hard into Valentin’s, then he blinked, and what might have been a smirk tugged at the scarred side of his mouth. “Your ears are red.”

  “I’m getting fucking frostbite,” Valentin said.

  “Soft little Townie.” Pepe squinted at him. “Did it hurt when they put the godchip in you?”

  Valentin’s hand went reflexively to his implant. The truth was that he barely remembered his seventh birthday, the scraping caul and needle, the incense-smothered fire. But he wanted an answer Pepe would respect. “They give you something to chew,” he said. “But yeah. It hurt.” He paused. “It’s only successful half the time, you know. There can be bad infection, or they can bore too deep. The two tries before me, one ended up dead, the other one damaged.”

  Pepe nodded, spinning his knife idly in one hand, not as impressed as Valentin had hoped.

  “How about that?” Valentin dragged a finger along the curve of his mouth. “Did that hurt?” Pepe clenched the knife hard and Valentin froze, realizing with a sick drop in his stomach that he’d overstepped, that the wilder was about to stab him in a fit of anger.

  Then Pepe’s ruined smile returned and he pressed the gleaming flat of his blade against it. “He gave me something to chew.”

  Valentin turned away to hide his shudder. Everything about Pepe unbalanced him. Even as he’d calculated escapes all day, he also catalogued the looks held too long, the brief moments when the space between them seemed to simmer, trying to decide if it was his imagination or not. Deciding what Pepe would do if he knew. Prophets were meant to be different and the Town didn’t care one way or another. But wilders were another breed entirely. Superstitious, hard. Dangerou
s.

  As soon as Pepe was asleep or faking it well, Valentin tugged off as quietly as he could to an anonymous body, trying not to put deep, dark eyes on the face. He didn’t think he would be able to sleep tonight.

  In the morning, when Valentin crawled out of his blankets massaging night-numbed fingers, he could smell oil and electricity in the air. Pepe was pulling food out of the rucksack. He handed Valentin a piece of tortilla smaller than yesterday’s.

  “The gods were working in the night,” he said, tapping his nostril.

  “They do that.”

  “You ever ask them why?”

  “It’s colder at night,” Valentin said, cobbling an answer from half-remembered lessons. “Machines think faster in the cold.” It was flimsy, even to his own ears, but Pepe nodded solemnly and went back to chewing with the unscarred side of his mouth.

  When they stepped outside, a thick winter fog prickled Valentin’s eyes. Pepe took a moment to get his bearings then set off into it, not even bothering to check his captive was following. Valentin was, of course. The nanoshadow puddled in the bottom of Pepe’s rucksack was effective as any tether.

  The gradient sloped upward, and gradually the dead soil turned to slippery shale under their feet. Pepe picked his way among the rocks as nimble as a lizard while Valentin labored behind, trying to hide his heavy breathing. The rucksack always bobbed just ahead of him, mockingly, he thought. With his shadow, he could scale a slope like this as easily as he’d slithered up and over the outer wall of the Town.

  “Who’ll they send to look for you?” Pepe asked over his shoulder. “Will they have a shadow, too?”

  Valentin thought of Javier setting out to find him, easing his creaking bones through the Town’s gate. No. Javier was sitting in his quickfabbed piso at the edge of housing, sipping anise and staring at the blacked window, murmuring to the gods in the dark. As far as he was concerned, whether Valentin came back or not was up to them.

  “Nobody,” he admitted. “Nobody goes over the wall.”

  “Your family, though.”

  Valentin stiffened instinctively at the word, at the reminder of his mother, who caught the last kick of the bleeding virus when he was six, and of the fact no father ever claimed him.

  “Don’t have one,” Valentin said. “That’s why I’m a prophet.”

  “Ah. You came out an autofab full-formed.” Pepe gave another solemn nod. “That’s why your skin is all…” His hand looped in the air for the missing word.

  “All what?” Valentin asked, trying not to sound too curious.

  “Smooth.” Pepe shrugged. “I was joking,” he said. “You didn’t come out an autofab.”

  “No,” Valentin said. “I didn’t.”

  By the time they reached the crest, the sun was rising red and smeary like someone had rubbed their thumb across it. Pepe offered a hand for the last lift, and Valentin was tempted but struggled up without it. Pepe didn’t appear to notice the slight. He was peering down the other side with an unreadable expression. Valentin clambered up beside him, heart still thudding hard, and wiped the grime of the climb off on his knees. He took a deep breath and smelled overturned earth, and the machine fumes again, sooty and sharp.

  “Look,” Pepe said.

  Valentin looked. Down below, the barren field was no longer empty. Thrusting out from the mist, glistening the biomechanical black of godwork, were rows and rows of man-high carved shapes.

  “Heads.” Pepe turned to Valentin with an almost pleading look. “A field of giant fucking heads. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Valentin said. “They might not, either. The gods don’t think how we do.”

  “Straight through is still quickest to the autofab,” Pepe said, more to himself, tongue flicking at his scar. “Come on, Prophet. Maybe they’ll talk to you.”

  Valentin imagined the mouths opening wide to swallow him and shuddered. But then he saw the rucksack strap had loosened on Pepe’s shoulder, saw how the wilder’s eyes were glued to the sculptures. When Pepe started down the slope, Valentin followed.

  The fog thickened again as they descended, and at the bottom they found the field had been smoothed and leveled, with uncanny precision, into a flat, gray plane veined by darker streaks of clay. It looked unreal, and Valentin was almost surprised Pepe’s boots left prints. Pale vapor roiled back and forth in waves as they approached the heads.

  They were taller than they’d looked from above, each at least twice Valentin’s height, looming out of the fog. Their enormous faces were cut symmetrical but the features themselves were crude, disproportionate, and with the mist creeping up past their wide mouths they looked like drowning men. Valentin probed. He felt a faint drone of machinery at work, but no god was inside. He couldn’t begin to guess the heads’ purpose.

  “Is there a god here?” Pepe asked.

  Valentin turned and realized the wilder had rooted to the spot, his dark eyes roving from one head to the next. “No,” he said. “They’re just sculptures. You coming, or what?”

  Pepe shook himself, then stalked past to lead the way. Silence swallowed up their footsteps as they walked the row. The heads were coated in a glistening, raw black material that sometimes looked as if it was moving—the same material that the autofab in the center of the Town used to make tools and cables and brick molds. As always, Valentin wondered if it was somehow alive.

  The strap on Pepe’s shoulder slid a bit.

  “Tell me about your autofab,” Valentin said. “If I’m going to get it running, I need to know details. How old it is. Last it was used. All that.”

  Pepe shot a shrewd look backward. “Old,” he said. “And it stopped working back when my grandfather was young. A few years after our last prophet died. The gods drove him insane, so he pushed his forehead into a spinning drill to get them out.”

  “He wasn’t calibrating enough,” Valentin said, to hide the sudden lurch in his stomach. “He was careless.”

  Pepe shrugged. The strap slipped lower.

  “And the implant?” Valentin asked. “The godchip? Nobody else had the surgery?”

  “Hombre.” Pepe stopped walking and stared at him with something like revulsion. “It was buried with the rest of him. Our band, we respect the dead.”

  Valentin was equally perturbed. “You have any idea how valuable that implant was?” he demanded. “No autofab will make them anymore. Ever.” He frowned. “I mean, if he’d already shattered his skull on a drill bit, how hard would it have been to—”

  “I thought everyone in the Town had a godchip,” Pepe cut across, starting to walk again. “In the stories you’ve all got a godchip.”

  “No. We only have two.” Valentin wished he hadn’t said it. He felt the crushing weight again, the knowledge that had driven him over the wall. Two godchips in all of the Town—one in Javier’s graying head, and one in his own, and if he couldn’t learn to interface they would be better off prying it out of his skull and trying again with someone else.

  “Guess I’m lucky I found you, Prophet.” Pepe flashed his warped grin. “The gods must have wanted—” He froze, head cocked. Valentin stopped, watching the sway of the rucksack. “D’you hear that?” Pepe asked.

  Valentin pretended to listen, but he was coiling his legs, running his tongue around his dry mouth. As Pepe lifted the strap of the rucksack to readjust it, still peering into the mist, Valentin lunged. He ripped the bag free and hurtled past. Down the row, a dead sprint, clutching the rucksack to his chest and fumbling for the clasp as he gasped hot air. His pulse foamed in his ears. He could feel Pepe behind him, not bothering to curse or shout, just running him down like a hunting dog. Valentin’s cold, stiff fingers bounced off the clasp.

  He hooked left at the next head, veering into the fog. He had a grip on the clasp now, thought he could feel his nanoshadow writhing under the fabric. He tore the rucksack open and plunged his hand inside at the very instant Pepe slammed him to the damp ground. Valentin scrabbled desperately for the slippery gri
t of his shadow, and for the barest slice of a second his fingers brushed against it with an electric tingle.

  Then Pepe seized his wrist and pried his hand slowly, almost tenderly, out of the rucksack. Valentin probed hard, trying to make the nanoshadow leap, make it stream up his arm and turn into corded black muscle, make it wrap around the wilder’s neck like a noose. There was nothing but a weak ripple in response.

  Pepe’s dead weight pressed him into the earth, and it was not as comfortable as he’d fantasized it. Valentin could feel his bony knee, his chest, his hot breath at the nape of his neck. He wanted to sink into the mud. His best chance, maybe the only one he would get, gone and wasted.

  Pepe refastened the clasp of his rucksack and stood up. “Fucking Townies,” he said, breathing harder from the chase than Valentin would have expected. “I was getting to like you, Prophet.”

  Valentin didn’t reply. He rolled over onto his back, getting his lungs back, then slowly sat up. The wilder was sitting cross-legged in front of the head closest to him, tightening the straps of the rucksack across his shoulders. His dark eyes looked almost hurt.

  “My brother told me you Townies were snakes,” Pepe said. “Said I was going to give you it back, didn’t I? Said after you get the autofab working.” He spat a glob of saliva. “I should fucking stick you for that.”

  “Sorry,” Valentin said dully. In the moment, he felt like he already had a knife in the gut and one more wouldn’t make much difference. They sat across from each other in silence, tendrils of fog creeping around their waists. Scowling, the wilder’s scar seemed to distort his whole face, making his mouth one wide gash. Almost as ugly as the sculpture behind him.

  Valentin’s eyes trailed up the crude face. This head was different. There was a sort of topknot glinting at the peak of its carved skull.

  “Did you not hear it, then?” Pepe said.

  “Hear what?” Valentin said. His implant gave him a sharp prick of random static. He needed to calibrate again soon.