3
We are racing, pursuing each other in wide circles around the interior of the dinodrome, beating down the red sand. We crash through the insubstantial ribbons of the third lap, Hummingbird first, then I, then Hyena, and Orca last. You are all cheering, and I hear screams of Hummingbird! and screams of Timberwolf! Timberwolf! and even voices raised in howling and baying, attempting to drown out the humming that has started up now like a lightship’s engines, the humming of those who’ve placed their bets on my competitor. I grin, lost in the noise of it all, the spotlights sweeping about, washing us all in violent colors. Somewhere on screens high above, the Duchess Amy quivers in Leo Archibald’s arms, but I don’t care. I am the center of your universe, not they, I and three other women, more skilled, more swift, more cunning and clever and agile than any others in the universe. It is to the rhythm of our pulse that you stamp your feet, to the rhythm of our breath that you chant. One camera shows you the Duchess and Third Lord whom we honor, but a thousand cameras show us. You have placed extravagant wagers on us; you know our bodies’ measurements, you have speculated about the recipes for our perfumes—perfumes engineered specifically for each of us; you know our sexual fantasies, or what we’ve been told to say those are. They’re nonsensical, of course; every young man among you imagines being wanted by me, but Orca is more lovely and lethal than any of you are.
Anyway boys are forbidden us. Most everything is. Not one thing we’ve told your cameras comes from our hearts. All of it is engineered, shaped, perfumed for your consumption, as we are. Everything that doesn’t please the cameras, that doesn’t please you, has been waxed away. Even our memories. Above Europa they strip away everything they can during training, dressing us in identical leotards (when we’re dressed at all), forbidding us the use of any language but Kartic, mandating attendance at the shrines of the sister goddesses Liberty and Love, forbidding us outside communication, and giving us sedatives early each evening so that we do not own even our dreams.
Yet I remember some things.
I remember bamboo bending in the wind. My mother’s hands holding a cup of tea, lifting it so gently to my lips, the porcelain cool and clean. Letters drawn delicately on synthetic paper as my mother sings softly in my ear. A few stories whispered at bedtime, about a past before men and women could leap between planets. A small window that, when you looked through it, showed you an actual sky. Did I have a father? Siblings? That I can’t remember. Not even the name of my family, only the name Mai that everyone has called me during training.
When I was eleven, I asked Orca to share a memory of hers with me, and I would share one of mine. That was a mistake. My memory became a mockery in the mess, and the others took to chanting “China Girl, China Girl,” whenever I walked in. We were to have one home, one only, in which to take fierce pride: and that home is our little station above Europa, where young women are trained as daughters of the goddesses. Other women look to the stars where we glint in orbit and yearn to be as beautiful, as strong, as desired as we are.
When I was twelve, I rebelled once.
I stood in the mess as they flung “China Girl, China Girl,” at me, and with tears stinging my eyes, I sang a song from my childhood, as though to say in defiance: Look! My memories are beautiful. I like them. They are mine, they are not to be scorned!
When my trainer dragged me back to my cell, she made me kneel and slapped me, back and forth across the face, six times. My ears rang with it. I was crying. “When an eagle leaps into the sky,” she demanded sharply, “does it yearn for the dirt it’s left? Or does it swoop and hunt and stay up high above the weak, showing everyone the sky belongs to it forever?”
I didn’t try again to make friends after that.
I learned to cry silently and without tears, in my room alone, as I waited for sleep. I held tight to my memories; they were a small secret inside me that no one could touch. And when the time came, I chose the timberwolf for my sigil, and tattooed not one on my body but three, together.
Now I imagine the other women and I are a pack in a running hunt through the snow, but the snow is sand, and my blood sings in my veins that I, and only I, must be first to our quarry. Hummingbird’s bull is just ahead of me. Lashing mine’s flanks, I close the distance. I draw alongside her, and however she portrays herself for the cameras and for you, there is nothing innocent or demure in the glance she casts me, only hate hot as the nuclear furnaces that once baked a third of the earth. I grin at her. Then I am past her and she is yipping at her bull, lashing it on, but mine is faster, mine will always be faster. I am the best.
Orca passes her, too. Falling behind has enraged Hummingbird, and she is being too rough with the animal she rides. Orca is calm, focused, as I am. Then Hyena passes Hummingbird, too, and the two of them, Hyena and Orca, are both pounding after me, one to the left, one to the right. We crash into the fourth lap, and I keep my lead all the way to the fifth, but barely. All of you are screaming, my name or the others’, all of you wild with the rush of the chase. As we careen across the sands on our final circuit of the cylinder, Orca and Hyena drive their bulls toward mine from either side, as though to crush me between them.
But I am ready. My hook spins through the air, and the rope coils swiftly about the right horn of Hyena’s bull; a tug at the rope and a cry of dismay from Hyena, and the triceratops digs in its toes, trying to free its horn, but its momentum tumbles it into the sand. At a sharp cry from Hyena, I glance back quickly; a pang of relief as I see her rolling aside in a billow of sand, uncrushed.
Orca slams her bull’s side into mine in that instant of distraction, but my bull keeps his footing. I deliver a hard tap of the metal hook against its snout. Grunting, the bull lowers its frill and drives its scaled cheek against its opponent’s shoulder. Side by side, jostling each other, the two bulls charge through the darkness of disturbed sand filling the air. Orca grabs at my hair but I duck and try to sweep her with a kick. She leaps, too fast for that. I leap to her bull’s back and—watch this—for a few moments we each try to dislodge the other, kicking, striking; then I catch Orca behind the heel and flip her off the bull, but she catches its horn in her hand and flips about it and she is in the air spinning. For an instant I catch my breath, admiring her grace. Then she lands on the other bull, the bull I’d ridden, and I laugh, for she is now without rope or hook. I duck and catch up the rope she’s lost, the hook still caught on this bull’s frill. One hand pushing against the frill, I retrieve the hook, then begin lashing the bull’s flank.
In moments I have left Orca behind. Hummingbird is just behind me, but the cacophony of colored lights is ahead: the end of the race, just a few heartbeats ahead. My back and my thighs itch with sweat and a thousand particles of fine sand are stuck to me, but I barely notice. My head is back and I am baying my joy, as though I am a wolf. I hear the panting of Hummingbird’s bull just behind to my left and I wheel on my bull’s shoulder, bringing the hook scything on its long rope, hoping to dislodge her. Hummingbird ducks low and the hook sweeps through the air just over her head. Then she is in the air, leaping right at me. I spring back onto my hands and my right leg comes up and the kick is so perfect, my foot landing right between her breasts. She crumples, wheezing, and tumbles off the back of my bull into the sand.
There are explosions of color and light all about me, and howling; I rap the triceratops’s cheek repeatedly with the cold hook. He veers to the left and we halt in a skidding plow of sand, just past the lap’s end. Hovers zoom overhead with hundred-faceted cameras, and other bulls charge by, several without a rider, one with Orca, and the last with Hummingbird clinging to its thigh, where she must have leapt up from the sand, digging in her hook. But I laugh as they thunder past, because the race is done. It is done.
All of you erupt in shouts, slamming your feet, and handlers with shock rods rip across the sands on hovercycles, sparks flying as they goad the other triceratops toward gates at the arena’s sides, gates already opening like hungry mouths. In
the dizziness of colored floodlights and smoke from sudden firecrackers, I glimpse Orca and Hummingbird still astride their bulls, their faces red with rage or shame. Orca’s eyes are wet. Then they are through the gates, and the gates are shut and the hovercycles are zipping away, and only I on my triceratops and all of you are left. Above me, a thousand small screens show my face, flushed and sweaty, and one large screen shows the Duchess with her back arched and the Third Lord crouched over her. Her face is flushed, too, and her eyes—for just a second I see her eyes—are bewildered.
Mine are not.
This is my victory. I have won.
I lift my hands high, my head back, letting your applause wash over me. For this one moment, I can close my eyes. I can just stand here on the bull’s back, breathing.
A scream tears through your cheers, and I gasp. No one who has ever heard that scream ever forgets it. It is like no other cry. Like metal shearing. Like a station dying in orbit. Like a rip in time. A scream older and sharper than my cry of elation or your cry of worship. A scream that sent our ancestors trembling to their burrows when our forebears were still furred and quadrupedal and small enough to hold in your hand. The scream of a wounded and lonely thing promising violence and vengeance on whatever has hurt it.
Hearing it, I know the race, the run, was only a preliminary; your thirst for blood, all of you, has yet to be appeased.
I turn to face it.
There he stands, large enough to fill a temple’s interior, his jaws parted in that toothed shriek.
Tyrannosaur.
4
The tyrannosaur’s scent is intense, an acrid musk like things dying on the edge of an ocean. This one is a bull, and the handlers have goaded him to aggression by spraying about him, likely for the past eighteen hours, the pheromones of tyrannosaur does in season.
Yet for all his heavy scent, the animal is beautiful. I find myself staring at him. He is stronger than his prehistoric predecessors, a little taller, his forearms even smaller, his powerful back legs bred for leaping. Fifty generations of revivified tyrannosaurs have preceded him, and selective breeding has made him a fierce giant of his kind.
But he is not beautiful because he is mighty. He is beautiful because he is sad. Look at him, standing there, his head moving in tight little jerks like a bird’s, his feathers lathered in sweat. He keeps glancing about for the does he smelled. Maybe he hasn’t slept in a day. They have toyed with him, his handlers, making him lust and sweat and breathe heavily, preparing him to run or to battle as they wish. When the game is ended, he will probably collapse from exhaustion, docile, drugged by his fatigue, and they will come at him with a sacrificial blade and loose his blood to spill across the sand. Immense as he is, this tyrannosaur, he is more a slave than I or my sisters.
His scream tells me that. See him tilt back his head, hear his screech like metal tearing apart. That is not a mating call; I have heard tyrannosaurs’ mating calls. Nor is it a challenge, this roar that makes you all quiver with delicious fear, all of you who are protected in your high seats. No, that is a panic-cry, a terror-scream. The tyrannosaur is afraid. He is a wolf without a pack, and he is afraid.
A pang of regret, and I slash my hook across the triceratops’s hip, urging it forward. With a recalcitrant bellow it lowers its head, frill like a wall, horns like spears, a mammoth of sinew and muscle and ivory charging toward the tyrannosaur. I will end this quickly. A few moments ago, I had wanted to prolong everything, to make this a night that every one of you, and not only the Duchess about to receive the Third Lord, will remember until your last breath. I may die in the games soon, or be cast aside when I am a year too old, but I would have you remember my name and my sigil.
Yet at this moment, my blood and my bones no longer beat with that fevered need. I long only to stop that tyrannosaur’s scream, to end its pain, keep its aeons-old loneliness from sinking too deep into my heart.
5
I expect the clash to knock me from the triceratops’ back, and I am ready to roll and rise and leap back before either beast can trample me, but no clash comes. The tyrannosaur springs to the left, and though the triceratops bends its head as if to catch a tendon with its horns as it passes, it makes no contact. The tyrannosaur darts in once we are past, osprey-quick, lunging for the soft, unprotected back of the beast I ride—and for me.
My adrenaline is too high for terror. I tug wildly at the rope, and the triceratops veers into a circle, following the pull on its horn. With a bellow it crashes into the tyrannosaur, its right hip against the carnivore’s leg. I have leapt to its other hip, so I am not crushed between them. The tyrannosaur topples under the oncoming weight and he rolls aside in the dust; the triceratops stumbles to one knee.
“Up!” I scream at the bull. “Up!”
But the triceratops is shaking its head. Something has disoriented it. These animals have little vision, and in some the olfactory sense has been artificially impaired. And maybe there are other factors: some chemical soup the handlers injected into it, now reaching the end of its effectiveness and leaving the beast dizzy and sick.
“Up!”
The tyrannosaur gets his powerful legs beneath him and heaves himself back onto his feet, impervious to the bruises that must already be forming beneath the feathers on his leg. I hold my breath. His muscles bunch for a leap. I glimpse his eyes—those dark, dark eyes—and in them no longer any panic, only rage: the need to get to his females, the fury at whatever beast stands in his path. My sorrow for the creature wells up in me.
The triceratops wallows, wheezing, another moment in the sand.
And I make a choice.
As the tyrannosaur leaps, I leap too, springing from one beast to the other, hook in my hand. I sheathe the metal in the tyrannosaur’s hide and dig my heels deeply into his feathers, and I am riding him.
Laughing.
No athlete has ever ridden one of these; we ride the herbivores that do battle with the toothed beasts. But I am riding this one, and truly, not one of you will forget this night.
The tyrannosaur dodges to the side, ignoring the triceratops, his head twisting to snap at me, at this pain on his back. I dance and leap on his shoulders, beveling on the rope, avoiding the snap and close of his jaws. My heart is suddenly full of rightness, a reckless liberty I haven’t ever felt before. You and I are alike, I want to shout to the tyrannosaur. We should run together!
You all know the script for the games tonight: the triceratops gores the tyrannosaur, and a triumphant woman dances on the bull’s back. But I have your script in my hands and I am ripping it in two. Because there will be a tyrannosaur and a woman together on the sand, everything else dead at our feet, and then I will ride this poor bull off the sands and back to wherever he sleeps, so that he may die, when they slay him, away from all your cameras and away from all your screaming faces. The handlers will want me punished for this, but you will all be shrieking my name and pounding your feet against the hull, and not even the gods will punish a woman whose name is in every mouth of every human being on this artificial world. This is how the games will go tonight.
I slash the tyrannosaur’s right flank. Without a roar, with only a huff of breath, he turns, shakes his head, and charges again—right at the triceratops still half-kneeling in the sand.
“Come on!” I cry to the tyrannosaur bull I ride. “Come on! End it your way! Not theirs! Yours!”
6
Thunder in space. We make it, the tyrannosaur and I, his great, taloned feet pounding down the long meters of this arena. I am whooping and laughing on his back, and though dozens of hovercraft flash with camera lights and floodlights of a dozen colors rush about me, no one can stop me. This is my moment. Mine and his.
My bull tears flesh, bleeding and red, from the triceratops’s flank, long strings of sinew, baring white bone to the flare of light. Almost I can taste it between my own teeth. He rips his head back, almost flinging me off, but I dig the hook deep into his shoulder and bevel down his back. The
n he and the triceratops are circling, and I am giddy. Near vomiting, near weeping. My body is being distorted from one second to the next as my nanites multiply desperately, striving to keep pace with my exertion. This must end soon.
In the vid I saw as a child, the wolves veered across the snow as smoothly as petrels over the water. All together, in silent, irrevocable grace. I wish other tyrannosaurs were here with us—that this beast I ride was not alone. He has only me, in this metallic universe that hangs like a jewel in the endless cold. Only me. An upward glance as we circle shows me the rotating screens: a dozen times reflected, myself and my tyrannosaur in a mist of red sand, blood streaming from his open jaw like ocean from the mouth of a whale breaching. On the screen there is no screaming crowd, no space cylinder, just sand and flesh: two wild animals naked—woman and immense, feathered bird. The triceratops offscreen preparing for its next charge. As though we are in a wilderness and are not captives owned and shaped for your cameras. At those screens, I burn hot with anger. Those wolves in the vid—they were the same, bounded within some narrow sanctuary or zoo, though the screen revealed to my childhood eyes neither cameras nor fences. I know this now. They were as severed from European forests as I am severed from China, and their union in a pack was a thing both temporary and fragile. Even on the beaten worlds beneath us, farther down the sun’s gravity well, nothing real remains. Everything is shaped for the cameras. Even you yourselves.
The Jurassic Chronicles (Future Chronicles Book 15) Page 15