The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  The next day everyone gathers at the air lock to watch me go outside. I have covered my face with a cloth and my eyes with goggles.

  The light turns green and I go outside.

  I breathe in. I breathe out. There is no problem. The air is sweet. My lungs fill in a way that they have never been filled before. I feel clearheaded, as though my body is getting something essential into it, something that has been missing from the habitat. I turn back to my father, who is standing by the door, and give him the thumbs up. I begin to walk.

  I have been told that, without the heavy boots or the artificial gravity that we have inside the habitat, walking will be strange. That I will be lighter and less grounded. But everything feels the same. I walk the circle of our habitat. I walk the yard I know so well. And then, light-headed from the crispness of the air, I make my way back inside.

  That night there is a feast. There is excitement and joy.

  I notice a change in everyone toward me. They stare at me. The little ones think I am magical. The adults look at me with envy.

  I will be able to leave the crowded habitat and be alone with my thoughts. I will be able to walk farther than the two hours the oxygen tank allows for. I might be the beginning of the much dreamed-about expansion. They look at me like I am the future.

  Boaz comes to visit me after dinner. He shoos my family out of our room and shuts the door so we can be alone.

  We both sit on the corners of the bed. He has his hands folded in front of him.

  “Being the eldest has its responsibilities and its secrets,” he says. “And being the first that can breathe without a suit has them as well. I have decided that you will be the next elder.”

  “I am too young,” I say. “An elder should be old.”

  “Yes, perhaps,” he says. “But you can answer questions that no one else can.”

  I understand that to him, I am no longer a child. I nod.

  “One question that has been asked by us all since we landed here is why did Earth go dark? It is the eternal question. Are we alone? The last gasp of a once-proud species? Have we been abandoned? Does life still exist on Earth?”

  “It is hard to be alone,” I say. “I often do not know why we try so hard to survive.”

  He puts his hand up to quiet me from saying things that I know nothing about.

  “I have always had a question, and now it looks as though you will be able to answer it,” Boaz says. “Why did our founders lie about the amount of oxygen that a tank can hold? Why did they not want us to walk farther than two hours from here?”

  “The tanks can hold more air?”

  I am stunned.

  “Yes,” he says. “That is one of the secrets that I keep.”

  I shudder at the thought of what other things he might be holding back from us all. I am suddenly uncomfortable with the idea of becoming an elder.

  “I cannot answer that question, Boaz.”

  “But you can breathe outside without a suit. You can walk for more than two hours.”

  I nod. I knew that I was free now, but in this moment it strikes me how free I am. The whole planet is mine to explore. Perhaps there are satellites that fell elsewhere. Perhaps the supply ships crashed on another part of the planet.

  “I want you to go out and walk south for half of the day, and then I want you to return and tell me what you find.”

  “I will find nothing,” I say.

  “Most likely,” Boaz says.

  5.

  We do not tell anyone of the plan. Boaz and I give each other knowing looks before I go out of the air lock. I have packed a bag filled with food. He has given me a compass. I will walk farther than anyone has ever walked. I must turn back in precisely five hours or I will surely be killed by the cold Martian night.

  I walk. Two hours leads to the base of the large rocks. There is no change in the scenery. But I realize that we are situated in a valley. Tall rocks and small mountains surround us.

  We are so wired to return before two hours and to never venture this far that I begin to worry about myself and feel as though my lungs will stop breathing. As though I will collapse. But the dust swirls. The clouds hang. The rocks are orange as they have always been. And I am tired, but fine.

  I begin to climb. It is slow going. Perhaps I should have walked the other way? Perhaps I should have gone east, or west, or north. It takes me two more hours to get to the top. I head down the other side and that is when I see something strange cutting the orange landscape. It is a ribbon of black. I check my clock. I still have an hour before I must turn back. I head for the ribbon as my destination.

  When I get there, it is different from anything I’ve ever seen before. It is almost unnatural. It cuts in a perfect line. Not behaving like the rocks I am so used to. I struggle to remember the ancient word for what it looks like.

  Road.

  There are cracks and buckles everywhere in it, but it goes along a path. I notice something farther down and hike toward it.

  It is a piece of metal on a metal pole laying on the ground. That is lucky. I wonder how heavy it is and I lift it up to see if it’s possible to salvage for the habitat. When I lift it, I see them. The words. And in a sickening instant it hits me. And I know the truth. I know the answer to Boaz’s question.

  Highway 24

  Earth Planetary Society / Mars Research Habitat / UTAH

  Off road site →

  Grand Junction 160 Miles

  We are on Earth. We have always lived on Earth.

  Copyright (C) 2013 by Cecil Castellucci

  Art copyright (C) 2013 by Carl Wiens

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  Contents

  Begin Reading

  Books by Adam-Troy Castro

  At its onset, Barath’s expedition to capture the beast Magrison consisted of one Human Being, one Riirgaan, one Tchi, and Barath himself, who was a Kurth. All were hated outcasts from their respective homeworlds, with nothing in common but their monstrousness in the eyes of their peoples, and their common greed for the bounty on the head of the even greater monster they sought.

  Half the party died within their first few days in the rain forest. The Tchi, an effete disgraced academic of some kind, contracted a lung infection and was inconsiderate enough to confess his sins while writhing with fever. “I was a monster!” he cried. “I betrayed my oaths! I subordinated macrotext! I faked understanding of thematic unity!” It was almost a relief when the Tchi’s spirit left him, midway through another anguished iteration of his transgressions.

  The Human Being lasted only a few days longer. He had been a fugitive serial rapist, who before his sudden illness had enjoyed regaling his companions with detailed descriptions of his attacks on females of his species. Barath had endured these boasts but had trouble understanding why the human’s deeds were crimes. After all, sex for the females of the Kurth was never voluntary the first time; it couldn’t be, as they needed to be stalked and taken by force in order to enter heat. Rape was just part of the Kurthian biological imperative, accepted as necessary by both sexes. Human Beings seemed to have a different biological arrangement. Barath gathered that the species loathed those among their number who violated its spirit, but still couldn’t see why a species as notoriously insane as Human Beings would make such a big deal over a simple breach of etiquette. Given time, and sufficient boredom, he might have pressed the human for further explanation. But then the human ate the wrong thing, or s
tepped in the wrong puddle, or did something else to encourage one of the many diseases that lurked in the jungle, and soon he, too, was gone.

  This left Barath alone, save for his maddening final companion, Mukh’than. The Riirgaan had been sold to him as a learned guide who had been living in the Irkiirish jungle because that was the best way to study its fauna—not as a half-mad, unwashed exile squatting in the bush because no other place would have him. Either way, the lizard-face might have known the terrain and the natives as well as Barath’s sources claimed, but he had all the personality of a pustule about to burst.

  Barath almost killed this last companion the morning he discovered the parasite sucking at the soft meat between the armor plates on his right hind leg. It was a scaleworm, two claws long, glistening with the natural anesthetic the species uses to numb its hosts, and ready to burst after what must have been hours of feeding on him.

  As Barath popped a claw and began to carve the beast from between his armor plates, Mukh’than watched with the unreadable fascination that had always so deeply annoyed Barath about Riirgaans. “You had better hope that’s a female. In that species, the eggs are produced by the female but injected into hosts by the male. If that’s a carrying male and he’s had a chance to unload, you’ll soon have hundreds of the creatures burrowing tunnels through your body. It isn’t pleasant, nor is it quick. Just last year, I came across an infected Bursteeni who lingered an entire rainy season as he was eaten up from the inside.”

  Barath wanted to pop all twelve of his claws and give himself a pleasant little lesson in the finer points of Mukh’than’s anatomy. Instead he just lowered his head and proceeded with his impromptu surgery.

  Mukh’than said, “You should clean that wound.”

  Barath grumbled. “You should mind your own business.”

  “You hired me for my guidance.”

  “And I’m beginning to regret my choice.”

  “If you want to find this village, I’m the only one who can help.”

  “That’s what you say. And yet we seem to be lost.”

  “We are not lost,” Mukh’than said. “We—” Then the skies rumbled, and he said, “Ah.” Before the torrent could begin, he pulled Barath’s sleepcube from his pack. The tent unfolded, expanded, and became a passable shelter for two, though the exterior canvas was already discolored from long exposure to the acidic Irkiirish rain.

  “In terrain like this,” he continued, once they were both inside the shelter, “it can be difficult to judge distances. Rivers change courses; tree cover changes shape. Even hillsides erode, reform, pick and choose their own topography. Too, we are using outdated intelligence, fifteen cycles old; for all we know, the entire village might have died out or migrated elsewhere. You were told this. You should show more patience.”

  The Kurth had a special treatment for people who urged patience at times of great urgency. It involved spikes and the careful placement of weighted stones. But Barath refrained. “I want the Beast. I want Magrison.”

  And Mukh’than nodded: one of several gestures his race shared with the race of the hated fugitive they sought. “So do billions of others.”

  Our Human remains huddled in the simple hut he built in the time of my firstfather’s firstfather’s firstfather, but we would know he was there even if the simple thatch walls were thick enough to muffle his hacking cough or his one-sided arguments with the many imagined ghosts of his past. We would know even if he wasn’t too old and weak to wander far from his place. We would know even if his alien flesh didn’t exude a rancid-fruit perfume subtle enough to tolerate but distinctive enough to serve as a constant reminder of his presence. We would know that our Human lurked inside the hut even without all these other reasons. We would know because the world around him ripples with the weight of the burden he carries.

  Barath and Mukh’than were hours into the next day’s travels, sloshing through a mulch of stagnant water and fallen vegetation, before Barath violated the oath he made to himself every morning and asked the loathsome Mukh’than, “How much further now?”

  “Not far at all,” said Mukh’than.

  “That’s beginning to sound like a fresh name for not knowing.”

  “Only if you have not paid attention,” Mukh’than said. “Have you not seen the natives who have been tracking us for two days?”

  Another trick of the Riirgaan’s ego: withholding this basic intelligence until Barath’s failure to notice emerged at its most humiliating. Barath rose to his full height, craning his neck to lift his armored head off the recess built between his broad, muscular shoulders. He saw nothing: just the stagnant water up to his lower set of knees and a dim hellish landscape littered with heaps of organic refuse. It was the kind of terrain a creature could hack through or burn through, but not see through. So he surrendered some more dignity: “What kind of natives?”

  “The kind we’re looking for,” Mukh’than said. “Trivids.”

  There were three sentient species native to this world known only as Nameless: invertebrate jelly-things who drifted in its oceans, four-winged fliers who frequented the air above its poles, and the rarely-seen Trivids, who were native to this rain forest that dominated this region, Irkiirish. None of the three had technological civilizations, nor did they have much contact with the illegal human mines that represented this world’s only substantial link to interstellar commerce. Before this moment, Barath hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of any of them. But he’d been hoping for Trivids. “Where?”

  “All around us. Throw a rock in any random direction and chances are you’ll hit one. I count at least thirty.”

  Barath turned in a slow, deliberate circle, again seeing nothing but soggy deadfall. Or was he wrong? Over there, to his right: was that a telltale shifting in this place’s damnable patterns of light? “Why are they hiding?”

  “Since I’ve been communicating with them all day long, I would hesitate to call it ‘hiding.’”

  Barath’s claws twitched. “Why don’t they show themselves to me?”

  “Perhaps they don’t like your attitude.”

  “Mukh’than…”

  “They’re empaths. They sense these things.”

  “I can’t turn my emotions on and off like a power switch!”

  “Then look at it this way,” Mukh’than said. “They’re shy people. They’ve dealt with my kind before. They even know me personally. But your people are rarer, here. You’re a mystery to them. And a formidable one: they don’t like your size, or the look of your claws and tusks.”

  Barath sheathed his claws, sought a dry place to sit, and, finding none, lowered his armored rump into the mud. He could almost feel the parasites finding ways to get at the soft meat between his armor plates, but he was willing to put up with the discomfort as long as it tempered first impressions. “Tell them I don’t bite.”

  Mukh’than produced some noises with his mouth and gestured with his fingertips.

  Three Trivids appeared, passing from the unseen to the seen without any obvious transition. Thin, bony bipeds with sad, comical faces that reminded Barath of pie plates with beaks, they were taller than Barath had expected, towering a head and a half above Barath’s height at full neck-extension. They each strode in the precarious manner of bipeds like Human Beings and Riirgaans, and wore body paint designed to blend with the splintered wood around them. But they were less intimidating than they intended—so lean and pale, so hollow-eyed and melancholy—that Barath almost laughed out loud at the fear he had begun to feel. They were worse than Tchi; so malnourished that the sharpened staffs they carried at their sides looked less like spears carried by warriors and more like walking sticks carried by the disabled.

  The three creatures were clearly the same species, but there were gross physical differences between them: a ridge of jagged flesh across the shoulders of one, a gaping maw in the chest of another, an array of tentacles dangling from the jaw of the third. Sexual differentiation, Barath guessed, remembering som
ething Mukh’than had said about the Trivids possessing three genders. If so, this could be a mated group, and the tentacled one, heavy in its lower abdomen, might have been heavy with child.

  None of which interested Barath as much as the rag doll the ridged one wore on a knotted cord around its neck.

  It depicted a biped, like them, and for that matter, like Mukh’than: a head atop four limbs. There was no detail. But the proportions didn’t resemble theirs, or Mukh’than’s. The head was too big, the arms too short.

  As a representation of one of their own, it was pitiful. As a representation of a Riirgaan, it was overly complimentary. As a representative of one of Barath’s people, it was insulting.

  As a caricature of a human being, it was perfect.

  Barath sat up a little straighter. “Mukh’than.”

  “I see it.” The Riirgaan exchanged some pidgin sounds with the natives. “They say it’s a totem.”

  “Where did they get it?”

  More noises. “They say their human made it.”

  Barath might have leaped to his feet at that, but his people, fierce as they could be in battle, had never been graceful risers. “They actually said human?”

  “Clearly not. They don’t speak your tongue, my tongue, or the human tongue, Hom.Sap Mercantile. They said a word of their own invention, which I assume to mean Human. I’m not certain whether they see it as a category, a proper name, or a title. If you wish, I can come up with a subtler translation—”

  “‘Human’s’ good enough. Introduce me. Tell them we’re happy to make their acquaintance and eager to see their human.”

  Mukh’than obliged, listened to the jabber the natives offered in return, spoke some more, then turned his blank mask toward Barath and shook his head.

  Barath’s hearts fell. The Human Being they sought was dead. They’d traveled all this way and the human was dead. The reward for his return would remain in the hands of the creature’s own people; Mukh’than would pocket his guide fee and return to his hovel in the jungle; and Barath would have to slog back up the river to the mine and continue working as beast of burden, trying to pay back the debt that had led him to such unpleasant labor in the first place. All because one human too old to care could not be bothered to keep his worthless heart beating long enough for somebody like Barath to come and claim him. “He’s dead?”