The beetle in the middle moved, too fast for me to see. The master’s grip on the loose skin on my neck tightened for a moment like my mother’s teeth, and then let go. Something warm splattered on my coat and there was a dark, deep smell of blood in the air.
Then he fell. I saw his head in a floating soap bubble that one of the beetles swallowed. Another opened its belly for the wrong master. And then they were gone, and the cat and I were alone on the bloody deck.
The cat wakes me up when we dock with the Marquis of Carabas. The zeppelin swallows our dragonfly drone like a whale. It is a crystal cigar, and its nanospun sapphire spine glows faint blue. The Fast City is a sky full of neon stars six kilometres below us, anchored to the airship with elevator cables. I can see the liftspiders climbing them, far below, and sigh with relief. The guests are still arriving, and we are not too late. I keep my personal firewall clamped shut: I know there is a torrent of messages waiting beyond.
We rush straight to the lab. I prepare the scanner while the cat takes the master’s head out very, very carefully. The fractal bush of the scanner comes out of its nest, molecule-sized disassembler fingers bristling. I have to look away when it starts eating the master’s face. I cheat and flee to VR, to do what I do best.
After half an hour, we are ready. The nanofab spits out black plastic discs, and the airship drones ferry them to the concert hall. The metallic butterflies in my belly return, and we head for the make-up salon. The Sergeant is already there, waiting for us: judging by the cigarette stubs on the floor, he has been waiting for a while. I wrinkle my nose at the stench.
“You are late,” says our manager. “I hope you know what the hell you are doing. This show’s got more diggs than the Turin clone’s birthday party.”
“That’s the idea,” I say and let Anette spray me with cosmetic fog. It tickles and makes me sneeze, and I give the cat a jealous look: as usual, it is perfectly at home with its own image consultant. “We are more popular than Jesus.”
They get the DJs on in a hurry, made by the last human tailor on Savile Row. “This’ll be a good skin,” says Anette. “Mahogany with a touch of purple.” She goes on, but I can’t hear. The music is already in my head. The master’s voice.
The cat saved me.
I don’t know if it meant to do it or not: even now, I have a hard time understanding it. It hissed at me, its back arched. Then it jumped forward and scratched my nose: it burned like a piece of hot coal. That made me mad, weak as I was. I barked furiously and chased the cat around the deck. Finally, I collapsed, exhausted, and realised that I was hungry. The autokitchen down in the master’s cabin still worked, and I knew how to ask for food. But when I came back, the master’s body was gone: the waste disposal bots had thrown it into the sea. That’s when I knew that he would not be coming back.
I curled up in his bed alone that night: the god-smell that lingered there was all I had. That, and the Small Animal.
It came to me that night on the dreamshore, but I did not chase it this time. It sat on the sand, looked at me with its little red eyes and waited.
“Why?” I asked. “Why did they take the master?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” it said. “Not yet.”
“I want to understand. I want to know.”
“All right,” it said. “Everything you do, remember, think, smell—everything—leaves traces, like footprints in the sand. And it’s possible to read them. Imagine that you follow another dog: you know where it has eaten and urinated and everything else it has done. The humans can do that to the mindprints. They can record them and make another you inside a machine, like the scentless screenpeople that your master used to watch. Except that the screendog will think it’s you.”
“Even though it has no smell?” I asked, confused.
“It thinks it does. And if you know what you’re doing, you can give it a new body as well. You could die and the copy would be so good that no one can tell the difference. Humans have been doing it for a long time. Your master was one of the first, a long time ago. Far away, there are a lot of humans with machine bodies, humans who never die, humans with small bodies and big bodies, depending on how much they can afford to pay, people who have died and come back.”
I tried to understand: without the smells, it was difficult. But its words awoke a mad hope.
“Does it mean that the master is coming back?” I asked, panting.
“No. Your master broke human law. When people discovered the pawprints of the mind, they started making copies of themselves. Some made many, more than the grains of sand on the beach. That caused chaos. Every machine, every device everywhere, had mad dead minds in them. The plurals, people called them, and were afraid. And they had their reasons to be afraid. Imagine that your Place had a thousand dogs, but only one Ball.”
My ears flopped at the thought.
“That’s how humans felt,” said the Small Animal. “And so they passed a law: only one copy per person. The humans—VecTech—who had invented how to make copies mixed watermarks into people’s minds, rights management software that was supposed to stop the copying. But some humans—like your master—found out how to erase them.”
“The wrong master,” I said quietly.
“Yes,” said the Small Animal. “He did not want to be an illegal copy. He turned your master in.”
“I want the master back,” I said, anger and longing beating their wings in my chest like caged birds.
“And so does the cat,” said the Small Animal gently. And it was only then that I saw the cat there, sitting next to me on the beach, eyes glimmering in the sun. It looked at me and let out a single conciliatory miaow.
______
After that, the Small Animal was with us every night, teaching.
Music was my favourite. The Small Animal showed me how I could turn music into smells and find patterns in it, like the tracks of huge, strange animals. I studied the master’s old records and the vast libraries of his virtual desk, and learned to remix them into smells that I found pleasant.
I don’t remember which one of us came up with the plan to save the master. Maybe it was the cat: I could only speak to it properly on the island of dreams, and see its thoughts appear as patterns on the sand. Maybe it was the Small Animal, maybe it was me. After all the nights we spent talking about it, I no longer know. But that’s where it began, on the island: that’s where we became arrows fired at a target.
Finally, we were ready to leave. The master’s robots and nanofac spun us an open-source glider, a white-winged bird.
In my last dream the Small Animal said goodbye. It hummed to itself when I told it about our plans.
“Remember me in your dreams,” it said.
“Are you not coming with us?” I asked, bewildered.
“My place is here,” it said. “And it’s my turn to sleep now, and to dream.”
“Who are you?”
“Not all the plurals disappeared. Some of them fled to space, made new worlds there. And there is a war on, even now. Perhaps you will join us there, one day, where the big dogs live.”
It laughed. “For old times’ sake?” It dived into the waves and started running, became a great proud dog with a white coat, muscles flowing like water. And I followed, for one last time.
The sky was grey when we took off. The cat flew the plane using a neural interface, goggles over its eyes. We sweeped over the dark waves and were underway. The raft became a small dirty spot in the sea. I watched it recede and realised that I’d never found my Ball.
Then there was a thunderclap and a dark pillar of water rose up to the sky from where the raft had been. I didn’t mourn: I knew that the Small Animal wasn’t there any more.
The sun was setting when we came to the Fast City.
I knew what to expect from the Small Animal’s lessons, but I could not imagine what it would be like. Mile-high skyscrapers that were self-contained worlds, with their artificial plasma suns and bonsai parks and miniature sh
opping malls. Each of them housed a billion lilliputs, poor and quick: humans whose consciousness lived in a nanocomputer smaller than a fingertip. Immortals who could not afford to utilise the resources of the overpopulated Earth more than a mouse. The city was surrounded by a halo of glowing fairies, tiny winged moravecs that flitted about like humanoid fireflies and the waste heat from their overclocked bodies draped the city in an artificial twilight.
The citymind steered us to a landing area. It was fortunate that the cat was flying: I just stared at the buzzing things with my mouth open, afraid I’d drown in the sounds and the smells.
We sold our plane for scrap and wandered into the bustle of the city, feeling like daikaju monsters. The social agents that the Small Animal had given me were obsolete, but they could still weave us into the ambient social networks. We needed money, we needed work.
And so I became a musician.
The ballroom is a hemi sphere in the centre of the airship. It is filled to capacity. Innumerable quickbeings shimmer in the air like living candles, and the suits of the fleshed ones are no less exotic. A woman clad in nothing but autumn leaves smiles at me. Tinkerbell clones surround the cat. Our bodyguards, armed obsidian giants, open a way for us to the stage where the gramophones wait. A rustle moves through the crowd. The air around us is pregnant with ghosts, the avatars of a million fleshless fans. I wag my tail. The scentspace is intoxicating: perfume, fleshbodies, the unsmells of moravec bodies. And the fallen god smell of the wrong master, hiding somewhere within.
We get on the stage on our hindlegs, supported by prosthesis shoes. The gramophone forest looms behind us, their horns like flowers of brass and gold. We cheat, of course: the music is analog and the gramophones are genuine, but the grooves in the black discs are barely a nanometer thick, and the needles are tipped with quantum dots.
We take our bows and the storm of handclaps begins.
“Thank you,” I say when the thunder of it finally dies. “We have kept quiet about the purpose of this concert as long as possible. But I am finally in a position to tell you that this is a charity show.”
I smell the tension in the air, copper and iron.
“We miss someone,” I say. “He was called Shimoda Takeshi, and now he’s gone.”
The cat lifts the conductor’s baton and turns to face the gramophones. I follow, and step into the soundspace we’ve built, the place where music is smells and sounds.
The master is in the music.
It took five human years to get to the top. I learned to love the audiences: I could smell their emotions and create a mix of music for them that was just right. And soon I was no longer a giant dog DJ among lilliputs, but a little terrier in a forest of dancing human legs. The cat’s gladiator career lasted a while, but soon it joined me as a performer in the virtual dramas I designed. We performed for rich fleshies in the Fast City, Tokyo, and New York. I loved it. I howled at Earth in the sky in the Sea of Tranquility.
But I always knew that it was just the first phase of the Plan.
We turn him into music. VecTech owns his brain, his memories, his mind. But we own the music.
Law is code. A billion people listening to our master’s voice. Billion minds downloading the Law At Home packets embedded in it, bombarding the quantum judges until they give him back.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made. The cat stalks the genetic algorithm jungle, lets the themes grow and then pounces on them, devours them. I just chase them for the joy of the chase alone, not caring whether or not I catch them.
It’s our best show ever.
Only when it’s over, I realise that no one is listening. The audience is frozen. The fairies and the fastpeople float in the air like flies trapped in amber. The moravecs are silent statues. Time stands still.
The sound of one pair of hands, clapping.
“I’m proud of you,” says the wrong master.
I fix my bow tie and smile a dog’s smile, a cold snake coiling in my belly. The god-smell comes and tells me that I should throw myself onto the floor, wag my tail, bare my throat to the divine being standing before me.
But I don’t.
“Hello, Nipper,” the wrong master says.
I clamp down the low growl rising in my throat and turn it into words. “What did you do?”
“We suspended them. Back doors in the hardware. Digital rights management.”
His mahogany face is still smooth: he does not look a day older, wearing a dark suit with a VecTech tie pin. But his eyes are tired. “Really, I’m impressed. You covered your tracks admirably. We thought you were furries. Until I realised—”
A distant thunder interrupts him.
“I promised him I’d look after you. That’s why you are still alive. You don’t have to do this. You don’t owe him anything. Look at yourselves: who would have thought you could come this far? Are you going to throw that all away because of some atavistic sense of animal loyalty? Not that you have a choice, of course. The plan didn’t work.”
The cat lets out a steam pipe hiss.
“You misunderstand,” I say. “The concert was just a diversion.”
The cat moves like a black-and-yellow flame. Its claws flash, and the wrong master’s head comes off. I whimper at the aroma of blood polluting the god-smell. The cat licks its lips. There is a crimson stain on its white shirt.
The zeppelin shakes, pseudomatter armour sparkling. The dark sky around the Marquis is full of fire-breathing beetles. We rush past the human statues in the ballroom and into the laboratory.
The cat does the dirty work, granting me a brief escape into virtual abstraction. I don’t know how the master did it, years ago, broke VecTech’s copy protection watermarks. I can’t do the same, no matter how much the Small Animal taught me. So I have to cheat, recover the marked parts from somewhere else.
The wrong master’s brain.
The part of me that was born on the Small Animal’s island takes over and fits the two patterns together, like pieces of a puzzle. They fit, and for a brief moment, the master’s voice is in my mind, for real this time.
The cat is waiting, already in its clawed battlesuit, and I don my own. The Marquis of Carabas is dying around us. To send the master on his way, we have to disengage the armour.
The cat miaows faintly and hands me something red. An old plastic ball with toothmarks, smelling of the sun and the sea, with a few grains of sand rattling inside.
“Thanks,” I say. The cat says nothing, just opens a door into the zeppelin’s skin. I whisper a command, and the master is underway in a neutrino stream, shooting up towards an island in a blue sea. Where the gods and big dogs live forever.
We dive through the door together, down into the light and flame.
The Political Prisoner
CHARLES COLEMAN FINLAY
Charles Coleman Finlay is a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and has also sold to such markets as Beyond Ceaseless Skies and Noctem Aeternus. His short fiction was collected in Wild Things, and he has also published the three novels (so far) of the Traitor to the Crown series, including A Spell for the Revolution, The Demon Redcoat, and, most recently, The Patriot Witch. He’s also written the stand-alone novel The Prodigal Troll. Finlay lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio.
In the intense and harrowing story that follows, he takes us to a far planet to tell the story of a political officer caught up in a civil war partially of his own devising—and one that he’ll be very, very lucky to manage to survive.
For everyone’s convenience, the execution grounds on Jesusalem stood next to the cemetery. The cemetery was the biggest public garden on the terraformed planet: families sacrificed part of their soil ration to plant perennials and blossoming evergreens, bits of garnish like little sprigs of parsley on a vast platter of rocks. The sight of the garden usually made Maxim Nikomedes feel welcome when he returned to the planet, even if he only glimpsed the flowers for a moment from the window of his limousine
.
This return was different. An Adarean was scheduled for execution, and the mob that gathered to watch it blocked Max’s view. And for this visit, Max was riding in an armored car for prisoners not a limousine.
Max peered out the tinted window, but was met with his own reflection: he was a small man in his forties, with an acne-scarred face pale from years in the space service as a political officer. There were loose threads on his uniform where the rank had been torn off. He raised his hands to scratch his nose—the window flashed with the silver gleam of the handcuffs.
He looked past himself.
The crowd, dressed in their drab Sabbath clothes, shoved and shouted, surging toward the execution altar. They were pushed back by the soldiers from Justice, spilling into the road and blocking the car. Atop the altar, the Minister of Executions poured baptismal water over the Adarean’s bald green head. The crowd shook and roared in frenzy.
“You want to stay and watch them stretch the pig-man’s neck?” the guard asked Max.
Max had been ignoring the guard seated opposite him. The seasoned political officer turned his head with cold calm and lifted his handcuffed wrists, as if to say he had bigger worries. Soon enough, he might make an official visit to the execution altar. He would, at least, have a good view of the flowers in the graveyard.
Looking back out the window, he said, “What does it matter to me if an Adarean lives or dies?”
The guard craned his head around to talk to the driver.
“See that’s what I don’t understand,” he said, pointing the barrel of his gun out the window. “They’re like aliens. Adareans gave up their souls when they quit being human, so what’s the point in baptizing this pig-man?”
Max frowned while the guard and driver argued the merits of pre-execution conversion. Pig-man. It was odd how a man’s work took on a life of its own. Max remembered creating that propaganda term years ago, during the war with Adares. The people on his planet thought they were God’s Select, emigrating to a purer place where they could live a holy life. They fell into conflict with the emigrants to Adares, a population that claimed to be the next step, deliberate and scientific, in human evolution. To stir people up to fight a technologically superior foe, Max created the slogan There is no evolution, only abomination. Then he dug up some old earth-history on using pig-valves in heart transplants—the first step toward godlessness, changing man into something other than God’s own image. Max connected that to the genetically-modified Adareans, who stole genes promiscuously from any species, and called them pig-men. It was adolescent name-calling, improvised in the service of a war long since over. Who cared if the Adareans’ chlorophyll-laden skin and hair indicated more plant genes than pig? The religious population of Jesusalem, thinking swine unclean, had embraced the insult.
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