Analog SFF, July-August 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Still, that didn't quite prepare me for stepping out into the middle of a grassy field and having a red-faced demon coming straight at me, screaming bloody murder and waving a sword.

  I let out a yell—a glass-cracking shriek, actually—and dodged to the side, tripping over my feet, going down and eating turf.

  The demon swept past me, slamming into another demon, this one with a horrible blue face. As they went at each other with their swords I realized that they were people in bamboo armor, wearing masks, and wielding rattan swords. I'd landed in the middle of a small but frenzied battle, over two dozen of the demons whirling and screaming and trading blows.

  “What the fu—” I began, swallowing the rest of my query and almost my tongue at the sound of a huge gong. The battling demons disengaged and stepped back, bowing formally to each other.

  The demon warrior who had nearly run me over strode back to where I sprawled. Offered a gloved hand.

  After a moment I took it, letting the demon help me to my feet. “Thanks,” I mumbled. As I dusted off my clothes the demon pulled off his bamboo helmet, dropped it to the ground, and pulled off his mask.

  I took a step back, not so much reality-slapped that the warrior was a woman, but at the face behind the mask. Her face, like mine, was the creamed coffee color of mixed race, except in the places where it was the pink of scar tissue. The scars mapped out the left side of her face in thin twisting forks and dead ends, several of them disappearing under the black patch covering one eye. Her hair was a close-cropped brown burr broken by more scarring.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. “Didn't break anything when you fell?”

  I shook my head, staring even more now. “Uh, no.”

  Her smile turned fierce and faintly mocking. “Not used to seeing anyone as pretty as me?” Her voice was soft, but held a dangerous edge, like velvet wrapped around a straight razor.

  I lost my battle with a second growing impulse and started to giggle. “It's, I mean, you look—” Giggling dissolved into helpless laughter.

  The woman's face went smooth and still, all warmth frozen away.

  I held up my hands, struggling to get a handle on myself. “Sorry,” I gasped. “It's just that—” I wheezed for breath. “It's just that you look like a really badly dubbed movie.”

  Her expression thawed. “Oh, that.” Her voice began to synch with the movements of her mouth. “Better? I was speaking Chinese—bad Mandarin to be exact—until you popped up. Our hosts provide the translation.”

  “Hosts? You mean the Bugs?”

  Her gaze was cool, and more than a little intimidating. Then she gave a slight shake of her head, as if deciding to let something go, turning her back to me. “Help me get this stuff off, will you?”

  There were wooden clasps holding the back of the armor shut. I started working on them. All around us the other warriors were helping each other shed their armor. “So what was the battle about?” I asked.

  “Exercise. Blowing off steam. Fun.”

  It hadn't looked like fun to me. “The Bugs don't mind you fighting wars?”

  “This wasn't a war, just violent choreography. Dance for non-sissies.”

  Which presumably meant me, who had somehow ended up playing lady in waiting. I got the last clasp loose, stepped back. “There you go.” She shucked off the armored top, began removing the stuff protecting her legs. When she turned back to face me I was staring again.

  I pegged her age at somewhere in her late thirties. Her body was that of an athlete, trim and muscular. In great shape. Except that her left arm beyond her elbow was clearly artificial, one of the newer generation of smart prosthetics. Her left leg was also tan nanolastic from the knee on down. The tight black tee and baggy gray shorts she wore did nothing to hide any of that, or more scars, mostly on her left side. On her feet, both of them, were sturdy hiking boots.

  “You just out?” she said.

  I tried to pretend I hadn't been gaping like an Iowa tourist in Times Square. “Uh, from Earth?”

  She cocked her head quizzically. “Is there someplace else to come out from I should know about?”

  “Any—” I shook my head. Managed an unconvincing smile. “Sorry. I'm still a little, you know, disoriented.”

  She smiled back as if she believed me, but her smile looked slightly forced and wore a shadowing of tiredness. Like I presented a problem she would have preferred to duck.

  I felt like I should apologize—though I wasn't sure what for. Before I could think of something to say she clapped me on the shoulder, hard enough to make me stagger.

  “Okay, kid, let's get your ass oriented. You got a name?”

  “Glyph.” I bit back the urge to tell her not to call me kid.

  “Posto handle?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Cute. You can call me Trub.”

  * * * *

  The door had dumped me in an open field surrounded by low vegetation on two sides, jungle on the others, grass underfoot, and the air clean and fresh. In the distance I could see several widely scattered clusters of low broad white cylinders, some with thatched roofs. People moved between the buildings. There were trees and birds and a gaggle of kids running around. It was like something out of a movie shot somewhere oriental and rural.

  Except that the sky was white instead of blue, and it seemed to be only a mile overhead. Way off I could see curving white walls that swept up to become sky. Ahead and behind the world seemed to curve down and away, like now I was inside a terrarium under an overturned bathtub.

  And it was warm, far warmer than it had been back in New York. But I was reluctant to take my coat off. Several of my things, and consequently several parts of my identity, were in its pockets. I felt a powerful need to hold on to that. The decidedly non-urban surroundings weren't in my comfort zone. When you feel out of place it helps to at least feel like you're ready to bug out at a moment's notice.

  Several of the warriors had gone to hang their armor on wooden racks along one side of the field, then begun drifting away on a path leading into a cluster of heavier vegetation. Trub told me to follow her as she parked her own armor, then led us onto that same path. It wound through the trees as aimlessly as I felt tagging along, listening to Trub talk to one of the male warriors about some obscure technique used in their battle.

  We emerged into another clearing. What looked like a mutant Tiki bar stood at one end, and there were wood and bamboo tables and chairs scattered about, several already in use.

  Trub lifted an arm, catching the eye of the happily busy Japanese man behind the counter. She held up two fingers. He nodded and shouted, "Hai!"

  She claimed an unoccupied table. “Take a load off, kid,” she said, dropping heavily into one chair. I sat down more cautiously, checking out the surroundings. I smelled hot grease and food, saw men and women gabbing as they ate and drank. So they had diners on Venus. I guessed that made sense.

  A young Korean boy hustled over to our table, balancing an overloaded tray. Smiling shyly, he put down two big ceramic mugs and a leaf-covered bamboo platter heaped high with what looked like deep-fried rice balls. They smelled good enough to start my mouth watering, making me realize I hadn't eaten in hours.

  “Thanks, Kim,” Trub said as the boy bowed, then hurried off to serve other customers. She pushed one of the mugs in front of me, keeping the other for herself.

  “What is it?” I said, watching her take a slug and then peering into my mug.

  Trub wiped her mouth with the back of her artificial hand. “Rice beer. Brewed right here in Rice City.”

  I took a cautious sip. It tasted weird, like a mix of ginger ale and sake. “Rice City is what, a village? I mean, be real, this doesn't look like much of a city.”

  This seemed to amuse Trub. “Oh, so you're in charge of defining what a city is?” She popped a rice ball in her mouth, her one good eye hooding in pleasure as she chewed.

  “I just meant, you know, there aren't any big buildings. No conc
rete. Not that many people.”

  She swallowed, took another sip of beer. “Tell you what, kid. You're new here, so let me give you the basics. Venus 101. Then you can ask questions and I'll try to answer them. That work for you?”

  I shrugged. “Sure. I guess.” I didn't like being treated like a gomer, but as far as this place was concerned, I was one.

  “Then eat and listen. But watch for the red balls. Don't try them unless you got balls. Now, Venus is a planet. A globe. You know latitude from longitude?”

  There were three kinds of rice balls, the size of doughnut holes, each with a different colored dot on it. Red, green, and black. “Doesn't everybody? Longitude lines run from pole to pole. Latitude is around the globe, like the equator.”

  “You got it. Now imagine two latitudinal lines, one per hemisphere, each one a few degrees away from the equator. With me so far?”

  “I'm trying to keep up.” I picked out one of the red-marked rice balls. I had balls, after all.

  “Now imagine those lines as actual artifacts, shaped like bicycle inner tubes or hula hoops. Each one a hollow torus about five klicks across and roughly 30,000 klicks in circumference.”

  I scowled at her. “Wait a minute, you're telling me each tube is, uh, around two miles across, and, um, nearly nineteen thousand miles long?” I popped the rice ball in my mouth, then froze mid-chew as nuclear heat exploded on my tongue.

  Trub grinned. “More or less. Drink some beer. The reds are kinda spicy. Black and green are milder.”

  “No fuckin’ way,” I croaked, spitting the burning coal out before it could melt my teeth.

  “Okay, somewhat milder.”

  “I mean nobody can make something that big.”

  “Our hosts can. Took them a week. We're in the northern Hoop; they've reserved the southern one for their own use. Our Hoop is broken into twelve hundred individual segments, each segment not quite sixteen miles long. That's plenty big enough for each segment to hold several different small communities. Rice City is bigger than most and kind of spread out, with a couple thousand citizens. There are three other towns in this segment, but Rice City is the largest. A lot of segments are still empty at this point. People tend to cluster, and a lot of them stay near the place where they first arrive.”

  I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around that. Rather than argue the improbability of an artifact as humongous as she was describing, and my argument would have been crippled by the fact that I obviously wasn't in Kansas anymore, I jumped on another point.

  “By arrived you mean where they get put. Or dumped.” I'd sure been dumped.

  Trub ate a couple more of the red marked rice balls, studying me thoughtfully as she chewed. Thoughtfully enough to make me antsy. That one good eye of hers had something of the security camera lens about it, like you're being watched as a shoplifter when you are only shopping. I tried to act unconcerned and sampled one of the black rice balls. It was pretty good. Spicy, but not insanely so.

  “Placed is really the best way to describe it,” she said at last. “You see, our hosts are pretty damn good at reading affinity and intention.”

  I didn't like the sound of that. “You're saying they can read our minds?”

  “Not really. They're just good at sensing the ways people lean, and what they might do and like. Why, is mind-reading a problem?”

  I stared at her in disbelief. “You don't mind having aliens in your head?”

  She laughed. “Let me tell you, after having a fist full of shrapnel in your skull, anything less hardly counts.”

  I shook my head, dissatisfied with her answer. And, truth be told, a little freaked. This was too much weirdness to scarf down at a single sitting. It was nearly as indigestible as one of those red rice balls.

  “I can't believe any of this,” I said, then managed to damp down the shrill edge in my voice. “Giant tubes as gerbil runs for humans. Friendly brain-sucking. Sorting people like change or recyclables. I mean, if they're such hot shit, then why am I here in Crouching Tiger land with you?”

  The one-eyed woman seemed more amused by my attitude than put off by it. She helped herself to a couple more rice balls, then drained her mug.

  “Kind of a hard case, aren't you?”

  “I'm not a chump,” I said stiffly.

  “Good for you. So tell me, are you tough?”

  I almost snapped back a glib answer, but looking at this woman who had survived such terrible injuries made me think twice.

  “Tough enough, I guess,” I said at last. “I've spent ten years as a posto in New York.”

  “Good for you.” She stood up. “I'll be back in a minute. Eat a bit more. Finish your beer. You'll need it.”

  “For what?”

  Instead of answering, she strolled toward the bar, detouring a couple times to trade complicated handshakes with fellow combatants. They all seemed to know and like her.

  I glommed a handful of rice balls, picked out the dangerous ones and put them aside, then ate some of the ones left. As I munched I studied Trub. Being a guy, and so far unable to get any other sort of handle on her, I focused on her ass.

  It was a fine example of that perennial favorite. Shapely but, I suspected, far firmer than average. There was a serious jock vibe in the way she moved, a centeredness and easy physicality that didn't seem the slightest bit hampered by her fake arm and leg, and one missing eye. In spite of the scars there was something off my normal charts hot about her.

  It was a surprise to be getting dicksignal from a woman who had to be a decade older than me and looked like she'd lost a hatchet fight. I figured maybe it was my near death experience giving me a taste for Corpse Bride.

  Much as I hated to admit it—even to myself—I was totally lost, stuck in a place where the turf was nothing like the kind I was used to and the rules weren't the ones I was used to bending. Trub seemed to be inviting me to tag along with her for a while. That offer had its attractions. In spite of her ball-busting attitude she was interesting, and even able to shake my spray can a bit. She seemed to know her way around.

  Trub reached the Tiki bar counter and leaned against it, chatting with the Japanese man behind it. Having grown up in a part of the city with a substantial Asian population, I had no problem telling Japanese from Chinese, Korean from Vietnamese, Thai from Cambodian. Half the people around me were ethnically Chinese. Most of the rest were an Asian medley, except for two men whose tattooed faces marked them as Maori, and a scattering of whites.

  All living in a village called Rice City. Put here on purpose? Why? I had serious issues with the concept of some higher power deciding where people would live, and who they would live with, stacking them like blocks of ghetto Lego. Though I had to admit that nobody I could see looked or acted like a prisoner or internee.

  The man behind the counter passed Trub a battered leather and canvas bag. She slung the strap over her shoulder, bowed deeply toward him, then sauntered back over to where I waited.

  I almost got up but didn't. Then wished I had as she stood there staring down at me, looking amused.

  “You see something funny?” I said.

  She shook her head. “No more than I see in a mirror.”

  “Riddles for dessert?”

  “We're done eating. I've got places to go and things to do. You game for riding shotgun?”

  “What sort of things have you got in mind?”

  “Oh, this and that. The usual.”

  I knew I was being challenged. She was basically saying, Think you can keep up? And of course adding, kid.

  I couldn't help be aware that the people at the tables around us were grinning and nudging each other like they all shared a joke. One in which I was surely the punch line. But it was too late to back down.

  I stood up. Knocked back the dregs of my beer. “I got no other plans.”

  “Glad to hear it.” I noticed that she was wearing a plain white ring when she lifted her hand and touched the ring to her neck. A thin pearly disc a
bout as big around as a donut appeared on her breastbone, just below the hollow of her throat. The disk clung there, shining softly.

  “Break's over,” she said to no one in particular.

  What sounded like heavily sampled classical music featuring alien instruments and a chorus singing in Martian came out of nowhere. Trub listened intently, nodding.

  I realized that she was talking to the Bugs—or at least listening to them. Which seemed to mean that she had a direct line to them, and had just told them her break was over. That led to the conclusion that she was some sort of agent of the Bugs. Or maybe a collaborator. It might even be possible she was one herself, whirled up into banged-up girl form.

  The space opera soundtrack ended.

  “Check,” Trub said. She gave me the eye. “You ready, kid?”

  “For what?”

  “For whatever happens next.”

  “What's that mean?”

  “You know Alice In Wonderland?"

  “Sure.”

  “We're about to go for a cruise down the rabbit hole.”

  Before I could ask what that meant, she raised her voice and said, “Transport.”

  I jumped as a black doorway came out of nowhere in front of us, connected to nothing and hanging in the air like a black velvet sheet pinned to an invisible clothesline.

  “Let's go,” Trub said, starting toward it.

  “Where?” That came out as more of a plea than the demand I'd planned.

  “I don't want to spoil the surprise.”

  I took a last look around, and with all eyes on me, followed her to and through the door.

  We stepped through into a gloomy space lit by narrow shafts of light coming through the leaf-thatched lattice roof overhead. The air was even warmer than it had been in Rice City, and it carried a sweet, heavy scent, dark and mysterious.

  I barely had time to take all that in before a linebacker-sized no-neck dressed in a loincloth and armed with an enormous wooden club came at me, snaggle teeth bared in what was definitely not a welcoming smile.

  I let out a crack-voiced curse and stumbled backward, hoping the door was still behind me and would take me back to Rice City.