Ragamuffin

by Tobias S. Buckell

  A tentacle stirred. Pepper raised a hand. “Give me the collar.”

  “Here.” John handed it over and Pepper snapped the ring of material on the creature in the basket.

  Pepper leaned back, as if admiring his handiwork. “It was meant for whoever they talking into being an emissary. Now we put it on one of them.”

  The creature stirred and coughed up phlegm. Pepper grabbed the rim of the basket and flipped it to dump the Teotl out onto the ground. It tumbled and flailed until Pepper stopped it with a swift kick.

  It looked like something that belonged underwater, John thought. More octopus than biped. Its skin shone in the low light of the ceiling’s bioluminescent rock glow. Capitol City had been designed using some incredible tricks, most of them taught to the Nanagadans by aliens like this three hundred years ago.

  Lidded eyes blinked, and it spat a series of syllables at them in a whistle.

  “You can do better,” Pepper said in a soft voice. “I know you understand, I know you speak Anglic.”

  It stared at them. Then from within the beaklike mouth it said, “You are insane.”

  “Excellent. It speaks.” Pepper crouched in front of the creature and pulled a simple leather belt from inside the raincoat he now wore. “Come here, John.”

  John walked over.

  “I’m thinking that collar is certainly evidence of bad faith.” Pepper sniffed. “A sign that, even if they may speak the truth about needing our help, we’d be stupid to trust them.”

  “We have fifteen years to wait before our own ship could get us out there.” John looked around at the green-stoned room. “We could lay low, wait for the Ma Wi Jung to heal. We don’t have to get mixed up with all this.”

  “I’m not waiting fifteen years for anything.” Pepper gave John the belt. It felt rough in his hands. The buckle made a tink sound. “They’re Teotl. They can fix the Ma Wi Jung in exchange for our help. We just need to make sure we’re not pushed around.”

  “The jungle would be almost impossible for even the Teotl to penetrate. We could hide well outside Capitol City.” John looked at Jerome. His son had left his house a few years ago, but he couldn’t help but want to choose the safest option for Jerome.

  “We can’t erase ourselves like that.” Pepper pointed at the Teotl with a long knife that he pulled from his boots. “Besides, we already have this one now. I’ve committed us to a course.”

  “This Teotl, it’s from orbit?” John asked. He felt weary.

  Pepper turned and looked at it. “Oh, yes. This Teotl seems to be an important one. It had lots of guards.”

  This was Pepper’s way. Direct. And John owed him for his son’s life. He turned to Jerome. “Jerome, what we’re going to do will be extremely dangerous.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “We could help you get out into the jungle. You could stay out there and stay low.”

  Jerome shook his head. “Anything you two doing, I want be there.”

  “It’ll get ugly.”

  “Ugly like loosing people you had love to the Azteca? Like losing Mother?” Jerome snapped. “I seen ugly. I ready for ugly.”

  John nodded, reached over, and tied the belt around the middle of the Teotl’s nearest tentacle. “I take it we’re showing them we’re quite serious? No messing around with us?”

  He cinched it tight over the smooth, rubbery skin. It felt familiar to be falling into this pattern with Pepper.

  “It’ll be your turn to talk to the Teotl when this is done,” Pepper said.

  John nodded. “I figured.”

  “What are you doing?” the Teotl asked.

  “Proving we have you captive.” Pepper ran a thumb over the knife’s edge. “And making a point about what I’m capable of doing when I suspect people might be lying to me.”

  John flinched as the Teotl screamed.

  Over the night more Azteca had come into the city. They filled the streets, breaking down doors and rushing into houses.

  “Please be calm. Please do as they say and you will not be hurt.” A small man in beige pants and a red shirt stood with the Azteca, translating for them. “They want information about one of their own that is missing. A god. They say a god is missing.”

  John walked down the street, watching whole families forced out onto the street with their hands tied behind them by rope.

  The Azteca were pissed.

  “If you know anything, please tell us.” The translator’s voice quavered.

  The translator was a man in a hard place, John thought as he shifted the canvas bag slung over his shoulder into a more comfortable position. The man had probably fled the Azteca years ago to settle in Capitol City. Fled the sacrifices and blood because he didn’t believe in it. But he didn’t fit in well in the city. He might have struggled to live and suffered some injustices based on who and what he was, except for when he was in Tolteca-town, where all the other Azteca refugees settled in the city. And now he faced his worst nightmare. The Azteca had caught back up to him.

  A child burst into tears and his mother shushed him.

  A Jaguar scout walked over to John. He pointed at the ground. John looked at the translator, who turned to see what the commotion was.

  “Sir, please get to your knees,” the translator said.

  John reached into his bag. The scout shouted, then screamed when John dropped a whole foot-long piece of tentacle on the cobblestones between them.

  “Tell him their missing god is not dead, and only I know where he is,” John said to the translator.

  The Toltecan shivered and did as John asked.

  Silence fell across the entire street. Warriors walked away from their prisoners toward John. John looked up reflexively, for the rooftops. He caught the quick flutter of a raincoat and smiled. Pepper was waiting. He’d come down off the rooftops once John got the Teotl to agree to a meeting.

  “Stay with me, translator,” John said. “I’m scared too. But tell him I need to talk to the new gods. I have an offer for them.”

  The man nodded, then broke into a shy smile. “You’re John deBrun, aren’t you? You’re back.”

  “It would seem so.” John held up the bag. “Tell them I’d like to go now.”

  Behind him he could hear muttering as the word spread. For some reason it seemed to have changed the mood.

  Not John’s mood. It felt as if a great weight had been shackled to him again. He’d rescued them all once before from the hell of the Azteca; no doubt they found hope in seeing him again.

  But some holes were deep enough there wasn’t even a ray of light, and John felt as if he’d fallen farther into one than ever before.

  Fifty Azteca warriors surrounded him, rifles and macuahuitl held ready, as Capitol City watched him be marched down the road toward the city’s gardens.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Before Pepper left, he slipped a small oval disk into Jerome’s hand. Jerome turned it over. A red button glowed in the center of it.

  “Trigger the button, the noose tightens.” Jerome looked over at the Teotl, which had grunted and flopped its way across the room to the far corner, dripping clear ichor all the way.

  “The necklace?”

  “It’ll slice the alien’s head from its trunk. So don’t press it unless you really, really need to.”

  Then Pepper slipped out of the door after John.

  Jerome sat holding his knees now, just watching the creature.

  It remained in the corner, cradling the cut tentacle with its others, keening. Clear ichor still dribbled from the stump, a steady dripping that alarmed Jerome. Pepper had made it clear that they needed the Teotl alive as a bargaining chip. Would the slow-leaking wound kill it?

  Pepper wouldn’t have left it to die if that was the case.

  Still.

  “You understand me, right?” Jerome walked over. He kept the disk in his hand and his thumb ready to trigger the noose in case the living god attacked him.

  It hissed. Jerome tig
htened his grip on the disk.

  “Is there anything I can do to stop the bleeding?” His voice quavered, and he hated himself for being scared of it.

  Just a brain on tentacles. His dad had explained it once. Highly developed and modified to plan, and think, a Teotl ruler.

  Jerome stepped closer; a tentacle stirred. The creature backed away from him, scrunching itself into the corner.

  It was scared.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Jerome said, slow and clear. “I promise.”

  The Teotl regarded him with its large eyes and blinked. “Bandage. Something to wrap . . .”

  Jerome turned to the mess his dad had left behind when he’d dumped the canvas bag out and put the alien’s tentacle in it. Jerome found several changes of clothes and food.

  “Here.” He walked back and tossed the shirt over. It puffed out, floated slowly down, and the Teotl caught it with a grunt. Jerome watched the Teotl carefully wrap the shirt around its stump.

  “Thank you.” It leaned against the wall again and looked up at the ceiling.

  Jerome sat down and pulled an apple out of the pile. He used a penknife to cut it into sections and core out the seeds.

  “What is your name?” the Teotl asked.

  “Why?” Jerome bit into a quarter of an apple. It tasted sweet. He hadn’t eaten all night.

  “Every bit of civility in such situations is needed,” it gasped.

  The creature was, Jerome decided, too calm despite all this. It made him more suspicious. “I prefer you scared.”

  “My name is Metztli.”

  “I don’t care.” He cut another piece of apple, removed the skin with three careful jabs of the knife.

  The Teotl continued, “You are called Jerome.”

  Jerome looked over at it. “So?”

  “So now we know who we are.” The Teotl had stopped bleeding. It looked down at its bandaged stump.

  “You heal quick.” Jerome pocketed the knife.

  “One of our many gifts. And weaknesses.” It sighed again.

  Jerome cocked his head to the left. “Weakness?” Unusual that it would admit to anything like that.

  “Maybe.” Two sets of eyelids, the inner moist and transparent, flicked. “We specialize. Specialization offers many benefits, but during cataclysmic events renders a species vulnerable, and we are vulnerable, Jerome. Very vulnerable.”

  “You specialize in what?” Despite himself Jerome was curious.

  The Teotl stirred. “Look at my current form. I’m useless, captured so easily, utterly unable to defend myself.”

  “If you had had a gun you could have shoot back.”

  “My only useful function is an ability to communicate.”

  “That it?”

  The Teotl twisted the fat mass of its translucent head. Jerome saw small metal plugs glint. “That is all.”

  A life plugged into machines to feed itself, working only to learn languages and how they worked.

  Then Jerome nodded. “You the most dangerous.” This one in particular, talking to them. Its words were its weapons. Just because it could not physically attack him didn’t mean it couldn’t cause harm in other manners.

  It cradled its arm and shrank. “What do you mean?”

  “You manipulate me. Try to get me understanding you side of the story, get inside me head.” Jerome held up the remote to the necklace on the creature’s neck. “You go shut up now.”

  “But—”

  Jerome threw the pocketknife at it. The Teotl flinched as the knife struck the side of the wall and clattered back toward Jerome.

  “Shut up.” Jerome stood up. “You poisoning me head with you ‘communication.’ Language you weapon. I see you now, Metztli, I see you now.”

  He paced the room. Working up that deep anger, thinking about his mother’s bones lying in an anonymous Azteca mass grave somewhere outside Brungstun.

  Here he was standing next to the very thing that had commanded the Azteca. “From now,” he shouted, “I go ask the questions, you tell me the answer. That all.”

  Deep breaths, he told himself. Pepper needed him. Needed him to keep his calm and pull this all off. For Pepper.

  “What you doing here?” Jerome asked the Metztli.

  “You need the history if you are to understand,” it complained. “You need grounded.”

  “Get on with it all,” Jerome warned.

  Metztli looked at him, eyelids flickering up, breathing heavily. “This was supposed to be where we gained our independence. Instead, your kind came as well.”

  “Why again?” Jerome crouched and stared across at it with fire in his eyes. “What you doing this time?”

  “We run from our parasitic masters. We run from destruction of our entire race. We need your help. If we did strange things before, it was because we were arrogant enough to assume this planet would be ours. We no longer want it, we’re refugees, running for our lives. If we do anything strange now, it is out of desperation.”

  They stared at each other.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  John watched the fluid lines of the Teotls’ shuttle with an outwardly disinterested eye. He’d been taken there almost straightaway.

  The curves reminded him of the Ma Wi Jung, still lying under the water, resting easy on the rocky bottom several miles from the city’s walls.

  They shared a history. Somewhere, long ago, maybe even a line of design. The Ma Wi Jung had been a collaborative project between the Loa and the brightest minds in Nanagada’s orbit so many hundreds of years past.

  A chance, John had thought at that time, for humanity to leapfrog itself into a strong technological position.

  A Teotl, bred for military prowess, cartilage-ribbed and edged razor sharp, stared him down. Fifty Azteca warriors with rifles casually cradled in their arms stood by, waiting for any trouble.

  “We absolutely refuse.” The pilot, plugged into a massive life-support sedan, ichor dripping around the edges of tubes that pulsed liquid life into its body, regarded him with milky eyecaps. It spit as it spoke. “You cannot expect a position of trust to be formed by kidnappers and terrorists like yourselves.” The words, as usual, issued from somewhere deep in the Teotl’s throat, but not from its mouth. A mechanical voice box.

  Five warrior Teotl formed a guard between the pilot and John. All of them held long, large, deadly looking weapons aimed unerringly at him.

  John held out one of the pamphlets from the Teotl that claimed they needed human emissaries. “You do not need us anymore?”

  “We choose how this conversation flies on, not you,” the pilot said after a long pause.

  John would bet anything by the way it waited so long before each sentence that something, somewhere in orbit, was whispering translations into the pilot’s head. He had someone else in on the conversation. And that suggested that translators were in short supply.

  Pepper had chosen his prey well.

  “That’s true, but have you looked at the DNA of the specimen I carried with me?” John leaned forward. The hologram over the pilot’s belly fluttered slightly. Loss of concentration on its part?

  It hissed at him. John felt something flicker in the back of his mind. The Teotl was testing to see if his personal implants could be hacked. His navigation senses tapped directly into the cortex. They could have themselves a zombie to play with.

  If they were good enough. John’s ability to tie into lamina had been hand-rolled by Nanagadans in orbit; it was unfamiliar enough that the Teotl should have trouble. The Teotl, much to everyone’s amazement, used the same protocols for mind-computer interfaces as the Gahe, and Maatan. It seemed as if a standard piece of technology got passed around. And only the humans were usually obstinate enough to try to reinvent the wheel.

  “So you know we have a valuable resource of yours.” John ignored the chills going up and down his spine, the tiny tremors.

  “Yes. Does it remain alive?”

  “Yes.”

  More w
aiting. “What is your price?”

  “We want you to repair a ship of our own.”

  “It will be considered.”

  “Thank you.” John folded his arms and stared straight ahead. The attempts to hack into his very mind finally stopped, frustrated by the nonstandard equipment in John’s head.

  The pilot labored itself into a semi-sitting postion. “You are accepted within us. Your role will be laid out in contract. That is your preferred form?”

  “Yes.”

  The pilot shifted and the divan slowly raised itself on a single flowing leg that oozed out from under the rim and turned toward the flowing-teardrop-shaped shuttle.

  “We make for orbit in one hour,” the pilot boomed back at him. “Bring the translator to us with yourselves by then.”

  That soon?

  “We’ll all be ready,” John said. The divan squeaked to a halt and the warrior Teotl shifted. John bit his lip and his fingers itched to dance across an imaginary control set to blast him the hell out of this situation.

  “All?” the pilot repeated after several heaved breaths.

  “My son and Pepper. They will come with the translator.”

  An explosion of random geometry flowed out of the divan’s holographic display. The pilot almost disappeared under a hail of blue cubes, then the display shut down.

  “That one called Pepper will not attend you. We forbid it. We have seen it attack, it is dangerous.”

  “You have your own protections. I need mine. If you do anything stupid, so will Pepper.” John stood up in front of the advancing divan, daring the pilot to run him down. It was waiting for orders. Then the divan began to inch forward again.

  “Yes. Yes, do so. Do bring the aggressive one.”

  The pilot moved the divan slowly up to the shuttle. John walked forward and closed his eyes as a warrior Teotl stepped out from underneath, obviously warning him to stop.

  He did.

  Somewhere deep in John’s mind a single point of light blossomed, then unpacked itself further into a sliver of paper with a question mark on it.