Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  The fresher had mirrors, too. Hoffnungshaus didn’t. He’d seen himself before, of course, on darkened windows and other surfaces. But he’d never seen himself this clearly: too-thin freckled face, wide green eyes and his hair... He saw what Jane had meant. His hair was a wild straggle all around his face. He could not cut it – but after bathing – in a real tub, immersed in water, and with all the time in the world, he found an elastic strip and tied it back. Then he found a suit that fit him in the drawers in the dresser in his room. It was royal blue, and the type of clothes he saw teenagers wearing in holos – almost shapeless and stretchy. But it felt comfortable, it was not too thin or too tight or too small, and it looked like something he might have worn if he’d been one of the normal people out there, or their children.

  There were slippers too, that looked even less substantial than the ones Hoffnungshaus gave him, but which felt warmer and more protective on the feet.

  Then he roamed the room, restlessly for a while, and started reading a couple of gems, but couldn’t concentrate on them. The softness of the bed called to him. The bedside clock said it was mid-afternoon on the 24th of December when he gave up resisting and went to lie down. It would pass the time, and then Carl and Jane would be back, and then he would find out what they meant. What kind of place could there be, where Jarl wouldn’t be caught? And where he would be free, like normal people?

  Despite his curiosity, the comfort of the bed made him fall asleep, and he woke up with someone pounding on the door. The pounding was followed by a voice saying, “They’re not inside, sir. I told you that. They left this afternoon to go sightseeing.”

  A voice sounded, sarcastic, clearly mocking the very idea of sightseeing, though Jarl couldn’t understand what it said.

  “They got a map from the concierge. Here, sir, let me open the door.”

  There was the sound of someone fumbling with the lock. Jarl wasn’t even fully awake, but he reacted the way he would have reacted to a similar situation at Hoffnungshaus. He rolled off the other side of the bed, then edged under it, finding that at least maid service was much better than at Hoffnungshaus, since there was hardly any dust.

  He made it just in time. The door opened. The light came on. It shone reflected under the sides of the bed, and Jarl bit his lip and hoped that no one would feel the bed to see if it was warm. They would have at Hoffnungshaus.

  But the voices came from near the door. “As you see, they’re not in. They said they were going sightseeing and their son would be out exploring the resort.”

  There was a long silence, then a male voice with a raspy, dismayed tone said, “I don’t think that was their son. It was probably one of the escaped mules. Did you check?”

  “Sir! We don’t make it a habit of checking guests.”

  “Well, let me tell you who your guests are, then. These people are part of a notorious ring of mule smugglers.”

  “Mule–” the man sounded as though he choked on the word and was, thereafter, incapable of speech.

  “They call themselves Rescuers, or something equally ridiculous. The freedom network. They’re part of a radical sect that considers mules as humans and try to rehabilitate them. They often take the more functional ones, the foremen, and make them... pass. They let them infiltrate humanity.”

  “Sir!” There was now true horror in the man’s voice. “I take it... that is, you have captured them?”

  “No. We got their flyer, but they seem to have gotten hold of another. They abandoned their flyer and were seen to leave in a sky blue Gryphon, but when we tried to find it, it didn’t exist, not that by transponder number.” He made a sound that might have been the click of his tongue on the roof of his mouth. “Well. We shall lock this, and get the investigators assigned to this task force to come and look through the luggage. And meanwhile, I suggest you make an announcement to have their so called son picked up anywhere he’s seen on the resort.”

  “I can... I can tell our personnel. An announcement...”

  “Do as you will, but get moving with it.”

  Then Jarl heard the door close and lock. He still stayed for a while, under the bed, with his cheek flat against the floor which appeared to be made of real wood, thinking. They were mule... rescuers. They believed mules were real humans.

  Though Jarl doubted the similarity would impress those mules who’d escaped from Freistadt, he was too well aware that those mules – those poor unfortunates created in labs and gestated in large animals, even if the animals had been bioed for the purpose – were in a way kin to him and his kind.

  Oh, yes, the unfortunates had been made more or less haphazardly from nationalized stores of ova and sperm. Sometimes they’d been grown from frozen embryos. At best there was nothing special about them but the markers that showed them as artifacts. At worst, the conditions under which they’d been gestated – even if the animals had been changed to supposedly secrete human pregnancy hormones and enzymes at the right time – left them mentally deficient and physically deformed. In fact, the news holos made it sound like all of them were deformed and mentally slow. And Jarl didn’t doubt that even the best of them were damaged. After all, they were raised in very large groups and taught only the absolute minimum to survive and to be able to work at manual labor.

  They were all male, and many were strong, and a tight discipline was maintained over the them to keep them quiescent and well behaved. Only now and then they boiled over in riot and escaped.

  Jarl and his... Kind, back at Hoffnungshaus, were not mentally deficient. Rather the opposite. They hadn’t been haphazardly brought to life from stored genetic materials. They had been carefully assembled, DNA strand by DNA strand, and characteristic by characteristic, designed to be the best of their kind, the best of their sub-race, the best of their nationality. Their designers had proudly given them their own names.

  They were supposed to help manage the increasingly more complex state. Since it had been realized that the planned economy, the planned society couldn’t work unless something better than humans could be found to lead it, something better than humans had been created. They were supposed to shepherd humanity into a new age.

  Because each nation feared that the other’s creation would have no feel for them, it had been decided, by treaty, that they’d be brought up at Hoffnungshaus, all together, no matter where they came from in the world. Most of them had only ever known Hoffnungshaus. Jarl, because he was one of the older ones, remembered his first three years, hazily. There had been a family and a woman he called “mother” – he remembered being hugged and kissed.

  In Hoffnungshaus he was never kissed or hugged, or touched, at least not by the caretakers and not unless he was being punished. He wasn’t stupid enough, he thought, pressing his cheek harder against the floor board, to think that he had it as bad as the mules, and he was sure most mules would think Hoffnungshaus was a resort, as nice as this one. But he also wasn’t stupid enough not to see the resemblances. They were all male, kept isolated. They were brought up by males only, probably because mule riots always involved rapes of females nearby, and the caretakers saw the resemblance between the people in Hoffnungshaus and mules. And they were disciplined somewhere in a way resembling historical prisons and reform houses – possibly because while they were needed, as the mules were needed, if for different things, they were also feared. The mules were feared for their strength. Jarl and his kind were feared for their intelligence. There was always around their caretakers the faint suspicion that their charges could outwit them without effort, and that the only protection was to keep the young bio-improved boys terrified.

  All that Jarl could understand – had understood for a long time, without much thinking – that he was both more and less than normal humans. His mind was more powerful than theirs, but there were things he’d never know: what it was like having a family or growing up in the midst of his equals, freely. He watched enough holos – because Xander was really good at hacking link units – to know ho
w other people lived and how odd and stilted his life would appear to them.

  He also knew that most normal humans would be just as horrified at having one of Jarl’s kind in their midst as at having a mule.

  And yet there were normal humans, free humans – Mr. Alterman and this woman, Jane, whom he’d heard but never yet seen clearly – who would risk everything including arrest and possibly summary justice to free mules.

  Jarl never made a decision. Not consciously. But his body knew what to do. Once he was sure the men had really left and weren’t trying to trick him into showing himself, he crawled out from under the bed.

  He was going through the Alterman’s bags before he was sure what he meant to do. But by the time he found a small bag and started throwing into it gems, id gems, anything even vaguely identifiable, plus two bottles of odd serum and a row of empty injectors, he knew. He was going to get out of here, find them, and take them the things they might need to execute their mission and leave. They’d risked everything for others, and he’d risk everything for them.

  At the bottom of Jane’s bag – he presumed hers, because it contained both a small flask of perfume and what looked like a hairstyling brush – there was a small black book embossed with the words “Holy Bible.” It was an old style book, made of paper and probably expensive, and though it had nothing written on it that might identify her, it looked well thumbed through, and he thought she might very well be upset if it went missing. So he put it in his bag, too.

  Finding the burner was harder. It took his almost taking apart their big suitcase. But he thought that they wouldn’t be able to come back here anyway. The burner – burners, actually as there were two besides his own – were in a false bottom which took him quite a while to work out how to open, even though it was obvious from the dimensions it must be there.

  He took the belt and holsters there, and put all three burners around his waist.

  Things were barely packed, when he heard the murmur of voices outside the room. Time to go. He’d heard the sound of birds outside the window, so there must be an outside to the resort. However, he remembered he was supposed to be exploring, and that resort employees were supposed to be on the lookout for him.

  Better leave through the window than through the corridors, where people would spot him. He knew enough of human nature, from Hoffnungshaus, to know most resort employees would prefer to patrol in the cozy inner halls than outside.

  The window opened easily and he almost suspected a trap when he realized how close the tree branches were. They’d never allow that at Hoffnungshaus. But he didn’t hesitate, because he could hear people right outside the door. He jumped to the tree, then leaned over and closed the window, so as not to leave any sign of his departure. As he did, he could see the door open, but no people yet. Right. He’d left just in time.

  And he truly couldn’t believe his luck. He found himself in what might have been a primeval forest, if primeval forests had the sort of gardener that made sure everything grew in the most aesthetically pleasing way. Where he’d jumped onto the tree, there were many trees, clustered together, so that he could move from one to the other, without ever touching ground.

  As he ran, he caught glimpses of guests. Men and women walking together. Children running around, playing. A little girl crying at the top of her voice. Something like longing swelled in him. The Altermans had said they’d help him become just a normal human among normal humans. He could have this. He could have a family – maybe not natural children, but a family. He was smart enough that he could have wealth and ... and come back to this resort, and be like these people, just enjoying themselves, with no supervisors, with no restrictions.

  He didn’t let it delay him. He moved fast, from tree to tree, away from people as possible, till he glimpsed the entrance to the resort. And then he stopped, clutching at the branches of the tree he stood in. He couldn’t go out that way. There were guards. Or maybe it wasn’t guards. Resorts probably didn’t have guards, even if they were dressed in uniforms. Colorful ones. Porters or valets or whatever they were called.

  Then he noticed that on the other side of the little massif of trees there was a river, and that the river flowed out of the resort. Right.

  Making it to the edge of the river was not very difficult, dropping into the river without making a sound was. First he closed the bag he had on him. The material looked impermeable, and he hoped it was. The gems would survive a dunking, but the book wouldn’t. He closed it, tying the top to increase the chances it would not let in water. And then he climbed down from the tree, ran along very soft grass to the river side and dropped in.

  They’d taught him to swim as a matter of course. They’d taught all of them to swim. He swam in the same direction the river was flowing. There was no one here, this near to the outer wall of the cave from which this resort had been made. Probably an artificial cave, and the daylight and the sky above would of course be artificial lighting and an holo. No. There was someone near the entrance. Two someones. But from the soft sounds emanating from the green shadows under the trees, Jarl thought he would be the last thing on their minds. He grinned to himself, then held his breath and dove under, going into the tunnel under the wall, into which the creek disappeared.

  There was a moment of panic, a moment of darkness, the certainty that this tunnel would go on forever, that he could never surface, never breathe. Then he glimpsed light ahead. That was just a moment before he realized the creek was outfitted with a bio-barrier. That meant no fish or plants imported into the idyllic stretch of river inside the resort could make it outside.

  Most bio-barriers had a size limit. And, Jarl thought, this one could not be set to kill people swimming out. It could not because people, or children, could fall into the river. And once you were in the tunnel there was no way out but through. It would take more strength than Jarl could muster to swim up-current, back into the resort.

  He closed his eyes and let the current carry him. On the other side, he told himself that he was not – not even a little – surprised to be alive. But he scrambled out of the river and away from the resort, following no road, as fast as he could make it, which was faster than most normal humans.

  First, the Altermans had taken a flyer, so he needed a flyer. Second, he must figure out where they had gone. The Peace Keepers believed there was a clue in their possessions, and Jarl had to hope that he had got everything that could give him that clue.

  The flyer was a matter of finding a large, public lot. He’d never quite got in as hair raising an adventure as this one, but he’d been in trouble before, and once or twice it had involved stealing a flyer. He passed a few individual houses but ignored the flyers by them. If those went missing it would be discovered far too quickly.

  So he trotted along until he came to a large building – probably an administrative building of some sort – with many flyers parked around it. He chose one of the cheapest flyers, both because it would raise less outcry and because it would have less secure locks and transponder.

  He still had to fry the locks, and when he got in he fried the transponder, too, but carefully, making sure the rest of the link still worked. There was a reason for this.

  He’d noticed certain marks in the Holy Bible book, and he thought he might be able to use them to figure out where Jane and Carl Alterman had gone. But there was another chance. Peacekeepers communicated via links. One of the things that Xander often did, and that Jarl had learned to do by watching it, was alter links so they got the Peace Keepers communication wave.’

  Jarl would try to figure the codes and find the Altermans, but if the Peace Keepers found them first, Jarl wanted to know.

  He set the link to scan Peace Keeper’s communications, then piloted the flyer out of the parking lot, first on a low flying pattern, so that if the owner looked out the window, he or she wouldn’t see his own flyer going by.

  When he was a good distance from the building, he gained altitude, merging with and feigning
tower control, so that it would look to anyone outside as though he’d turned direction of his vehicle to the local traffic stream.

  The Peace Keeper’s bandwidth kept quiet save for a report of a flyer collision, and reports of catching a local thief.

  Then suddenly, just as Jarl headed down to the shelter of a nearby wood, to try to park and figure out the code in the Holy Bible book, it crackled to life in an exciting way.

  “... Have the smugglers surrounded. I repeat, have the smugglers surrounded. Need backup with all possible urgency.”

  There could be other smugglers in the area. Given the vast amount of goods that were forbidden to trade or buy – mostly for the public’s own good – there certainly were. But Jarl felt his hair rising at the back of his neck and, almost instinctively, programmed in the coordinates the Peace Keepers called out.

  It wasn’t so far. Less than twenty miles. From the air he could see them. A dark blue flyer – did they have color altering abilities? – backed up against a cliff face and surrounded by orange flyers in a semi-circle.

  Jane and Carl stood, in poses that indicated they had weapons trained on the police. Behind them, three mu– three people were crouched, next to the flyer. By the light of sunset, which gilded the Peace Keepers flyers to a color that did justice to the popular nickname of pumpkins, it looked like a hopeless situation.

  But his situation had been hopeless on the night they’d rescued him.

  Jarl flew wide of the gathering, and up behind where the cliff was. By the time he found a treed area in which to hide his stolen flyer, it was full dark. He trotted back to the top of the cliff, overlooking the peace keepers and the Altermans. The Altermans had very powerful beams tracked on them, so they stood in relief, illuminated, like statues. He’d like, Jarl realized, to make a statue of them like that, defending the defenseless.

  It was the first time he saw Jane clearly. She was young, younger than her husband – was he her husband? – blond, and very pretty. But on her face, as on her husband’s there were the marks of strain, and a certain resigned expression as though, at heart, they didn’t expect to escape with their lives. They were holding hands, Jarl noted, with the hands free from the burners.