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

by Various

  The vague similarities between Human and Riirgaan anatomy that made some of the more unpleasant races grumble about not being able to tell those two species apart—similar heights and masses, bipedal posture, faces that arranged their features in approximately the same positions— seemed an obscenity in light of the differences that were visible when they lay side by side. Humans had limbs jointed at their midpoints; Riirgaan limbs had three segments. Humans had torsos a little like cylinders. Riirgaans were something like a prickly plant, with flat surfaces punctuated by spines. The proportions were off, too—especially the longer legs of the Riirgaan and the larger head of the Human. Nor did there seem, at first glance, to be any place where their respective parts could fit together. But that physical obstacle didn’t seem to bother Mukh’than any more than the human’s inability to respond did—and from the impassioned way Mukh’than stroked the collection of enflamed protrusions on his own belly, he didn’t need the human’s conscious involvement at all. Magrison’s mere presence seemed to be enough.

  When Barath charged them, Mukh’than was fast enough to grab his needle-gun and fire one shot, which dug a stinging furrow in the Kurth’s side. But before he could fire a second, Barath’s foreclaws were firmly imbedded in Mukh’than’s wrist. The gun went flying into some dark corner.

  The human clutched for his bed companion and murmured a single word in a voice filled with confusion and dust: “Ravia!”

  Barath lifted Mukh’than off the bed by his impaled wrist. “Ravia? Is that who you are to him?”

  Mukh’than threw a punch with his free hand. But it had no more effect than a single raindrop falling on stone. Without weapons, there was nothing any mere Riirgaan could do to get past a Kurth’s armored hide.

  Barath, feeling nothing but fury, drew Mukh’than closer.

  Magrison reached for open air. “Don’t hurt her! Please!”

  Barath had never been good at reading Hom.Sap facial expressions, even after years of working for representatives of the species. The shifts from smile to frown to sneer and back again, so significant to them, had never struck him as anything more than random shifts of rubbery flesh. But it would have been impossible to miss the pain and desperation on the face of the slack-jawed old man, reaching with strength he no longer had to rescue the creature he thought he loved. Sickened, Barath faced Mukh’than again. “It isn’t the first time he’s begged for you in my hearing. He asked for you the other day too.”

  Mukh’than coughed. “He asked for Ravia…”

  “Meaning you.” Barath impaled Mukh’than’s other wrist with another popped claw.

  Magrison reacted to the Riirgaan’s agony with a soft, weak cry of anguish.

  “He loves you,” Barath said.

  “And I love him. He is the love of my life.”

  “You’re Ravia?”

  Mukh’than’s voice was an agonized, breathless wheeze. “Ravia was…a female of his species. Mother…to his children. She died…as they died… in the war his enemies fought to avenge his crimes…”

  “But he called you Ravia.”

  “When I am beside him, I am Ravia. I am a male of my own species…but I am honored to take the place of a female in his.”

  The arrogance in the Riirgaan’s voice, dripping with satisfaction about his perverse liaison with a genocidal murderer of another species, was so infuriating that Barath couldn’t resist retracting his claws and hurling the sordid little creature to the hut floor. Barath heard cracks indicating that Mukh’than broke bones when he hit but felt no diminution of his rage. He gave up on a clean kill right then and there, and instead decided to prolong his revenge by first shattering as many as the Riirgaan’s remaining bones as he could manage. He lurched forward, ignoring Magrison’s plaintive cries of “Ravia!”, and falling on Mukh’than before the Riirgaan could crawl away into the dark.

  “You killed the others in our party,” Barath spat, grinding the Riirgaan’s wrists for additional pain. “The Human. The Tchi. I don’t know how you arranged it, but you made sure they died on the way here.”

  Mukh’than’s response was a broken trill, distorted by agony, that nevertheless reflected real amusement. “That’s right. You would be surprised how easy it was.”

  “You must have had trouble figuring out how to kill me.”

  “Not at all. I wanted you alive until now.”

  “Liar. I barely escaped the sleepcube.”

  More trills—but, as strained as they were, not frightened trills, but terrible triumphant ones. “If I had really wanted to suffocate you, you would already be dead. Remember the others. I know better jungle poisons than that!”

  “I warned you not to lie to me!”

  “It’s no lie. If I wanted to smother you, why would I also infest you with scaleworms? What would be the point of that? If you suffocated in the cube they would die as fast as you did. I wanted only to incapacitate you for a while…to keep you from noticing the scaleworms I planted until after they laid their eggs and began what’s going to be a much slower death. You will not make it back to the river no matter how quickly you travel. You will grow weak. You will collapse. You will linger. You will be in pain, an invalid, mad with delirium for an entire season, maybe two—something these Trivids can care for and consider theirs, so I can have more time to spend with the precious dying thing I consider mine. I have done it before, with other wanderers in this jungle. My only mistake with you, you vulgar brain-dead animal, was misjudging your metabolism… thinking the fumes would hold you longer, and give me time to get away. But that doesn’t matter, not to you. You’re still a corpse too stupid to realize it’s started to rot.”

  It was far too early for Barath to feel the scaleworm larva digging burrows inside him, but for a moment he imagined the sensation anyway: a pounding, burning agony, multiplied a thousandfold for every second he was riddled with holes. He shook away the image, lowered himself closer to the traitor who had done this to him, and demanded: “Why?”

  “Because I love him. For the same reason they love him.”

  Barath pressed the tip of a claw against the soft underside of Mukh’than’s throat. “And that is?”

  The Riirgaan’s black, inexpressive eyes were pools filled with the knowledge of his own oncoming death. Perhaps that is what permitted him to speak without exhaustion, without fear. “Because in a place like this, where we live without hope, where we live among creatures with no hope…all we really own is the magnitude of our own sins.” He closed the opaque lids over his eyes. “Don’t you see that that’s what makes him such a treasure to them? How much it must comfort such a people, to claim ownership of such a demon? How much it comforts me, to care for one whose own crimes were so much worse than mine? Or how much it should gall you, in the presence of such fallen greatness, to remember that your own life was destroyed by a crime so petty?”

  The crushing silence that followed was thick enough to bury any hope of answer.

  “What I did,” the Riirgaan said, “I would do again. It was a sin that made me proud. Can you say the same of your sin, Barath? Was it as grand?”

  Barath gutted him. Thanks to the temperature differential between Kurth biology and the Riirgaan equivalent, the blood that geysered against Barath’s chest plates was a thin cold soup, as unsatisfying a vengeance-trophy as any enraged Kurth had ever known. His rage unspent, Barath raised his forelimbs above his head and brought them down hard, shattering the Riirgaan’s skull, driving the brains and bone fragments into the dirt. It should have helped. But the traitor’s blood hadn’t warmed any; nor had Barath’s rage cooled. It could never cool. Not when he was still dying, and there was no one left to avenge him.

  Part of him thought he still heard trilling.

  Magrison didn’t seem aware that anything unpleasant had happened; he just stared at the ceiling above him, his mouth agape, his slug of a tongue licking his dry withered lips.

  “Ravia,” the human said. “Ravia.”

  Barath didn’t bo
ther to get up off the floor. He just crawled over to the bed and loomed over the ancient figure, wanting Magrison to see something monstrous in his own tusked, blood-spattered face. He needed that; to achieve monstrousness in the eyes of a monster would have been victory of a sort.

  But the old man didn’t see him, really: was no more aware of Barath’s presence than he was of his beloved Ravia’s absence. If he saw anything, it was just the darkness and the fog comprising an exile far crueler than that which he’d chosen for himself so long ago. Perhaps he still experienced memory-flashes of the people he’d hated, the plans he’d made, the atrocities he’d carried out; perhaps they gave him moments of satisfaction, or raw crushing guilt. Perhaps he could live long enough to be taken from here and condemned to whatever execution his fellow humans wanted for him. But time and decrepitude had already provided a darker sentence.

  “I should kill you,” Barath said. “Do what everybody wants done. Get that much satisfaction out of this, at least.”

  Magrison’s lips curled in an expression that might have been a smile. He whispered something in a language Barath didn’t know, coughed, fought for breath, then whispered the same words again; though whether he spoke to Barath or to some phantom resident of the lost world where he lived was something the Kurth would never know.

  Then the human closed his eyes, and did not move again.

  Barath regarded the empty thing for a long time, thinking of a world filled with familiar shapes and abandoned opportunities. He thought of all the things the human had done and all the other human beings who would have danced if they’d known he was dead. He thought of his own crimes, wondered if anybody would have searched entire worlds to bring him to justice, concluded that in the end nobody would have cared, and wondered if that made him more or less pathetic than a monster fading in twilight. He didn’t wonder whether the monster he contemplated was Magrison or Mukh’than, because in the end it didn’t matter.

  When he left the hut some time later, he wasn’t surprised to find the entire population of the village gathered at a respectful distance. Every Trivid was there: every mated adult, every child. They all carried the human’s totems, and they all faced Barath with the incurious calm of creatures who already knew everything that had happened inside. A few made sounds Barath took to be questions, or possibly invitations. He stared back, expecting them to attack en masse, not caring much whether they did or not. Then one—a ridgeback, who Barath supposed to be the same individual who’d represented them before—stepped away from the crowd, approached Barath, and placed a single gentle hand atop Barath’s head.

  It took Barath a heartbeat to understand that the Trivid was offering welcome.

  Of course.

  As a people, they were so bereft that their greatest dream was the chance to replace one dying monster with another.

  The Trivid approached again, and once again placed its hand on Barath’s head.

  Barath growled the last coherent words he’d ever speak to another sentient being. “I won’t be your next bloody human.”

  The Trivids cocked their heads, trying to understand.

  But by then Barath was leaving the village, on the first step of a journey that he knew he’d never live to complete.

  Maybe if he pushed himself to the limits of his strength he’d at least be able to travel beyond their ability to carry him back.

  The bones of our most recent human sit in an honored place. They are massive things, sculpted in proportions nothing like our own, sitting in a mound of scales we peeled from his form after he breathed his last. He died four days from our village, falling apart as he lumbered away from our offers of hospitality, cursing us, snarling at us, and throwing stones every time we tried to draw near. He was not like our other humans: neither the ancient one who lived with us for so many generations, or the black-eyed lover who so often shared his bed. This human was a giant thing with tusks and scales and claws, who walked on all four limbs instead of the two our previous humans preferred. This human looked so little like the other two, who in turn looked so little like each other, that it’s difficult to see how they could all be creatures born of the same world. And unlike the other two, this human never told us of his crime—though the crimes committed by the other two, which they described to us often, were so beyond imagining to us that the offenses committed by the giant tusked thing must have been just as terrible, just as great.

  It is a powerful thing, indeed, to have the bones of three such humans among us, in this place which has known no such wonders…so powerful a thing that skeptics among us sometimes wonder if all three of these creatures were indeed of the same species. After all, they looked nothing alike. How could all three be human?

  But we see no point in such doubts. We have heard what humans are.

  And we know a human when we see one.

  THE END

  Copyright © 2011 by Adam-Troy Castro

  Art copyright © 2011 by John Jude Palencar

  Books by Adam-Troy Castro

  An Alien Darkness

  Vossoff and Nimmitz

  With Stars in Their Eyes (with Jerry Oltion)

  “My Ox is Broken!”

  Tangled Strings

  The Shallow End of the Pool

  Emissaries from the Dead

  The Third Claw of God

  Z Is for Zombie (with Johnny Atomic)

  V Is for Vampire (with Johnny Atomic)

  Gustav Gloom and the People Taker (forthcoming)

  Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault (forthcoming)

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Copyright

  Tor.com Ad

  The water that falls on you from nowhere when you lie is perfectly ordinary, but perfectly pure. True fact. I tested it myself when the water started falling a few weeks ago. Everyone on Earth did. Everyone with any sense of lab safety anyway. Never assume any liquid is just water. When you say “I always document my experiments as I go along,” enough water falls to test, but not so much that you have to mop up the lab. Which lie doesn’t matter. The liquid tests as distilled water every time.

  Uttering “this sentence is false” or some other paradox leaves you with such a sense of angst, so filled with the sense of an impending doom, that most people don’t last five seconds before blurting something unequivocal. So, of course, holding out for as long as possible has become the latest craze among drunk frat boys and hard men who insist on root canals without an anesthetic. Psychologists are finding the longer you wait, the more unequivocal you need to be to ever find solace.

  Gus is up to a minute now and I wish he’d blurt something unequivocal. He’s neither drunk, nor a frat boy. His shirt, soaked with sweat, clings to a body that has spent twenty-seven too many hours a week at the gym. His knees lock stiff, his jeans stretched across his tensed thighs. His face shrinks as if he were watching someone smash kittens with a hammer. It’s a stupid game. Maybe in a few more weeks the fad will pass.

  I don’t know why he asked me to watch him go through with it this time, and I don’t know why I’m actually doing it. Watching him suffer is like being smashed to death with a hammer myself. At least Gus is asking for it. I know I’m supposed to be rooting for him to hold on for as long as possible, but I just want him to stop. He’s hurting so much and I can’t stand to watch anymore.

  “I love you, Matt.” Gus
’s smile is radiant. He tackles me on the couch and smothers me in a kiss, and at first, I kiss him back.

  Not only does no water fall on him, but all the sweat evaporates from his body. His shirt is warm and dry. A light, spring breeze from nowhere covers us. He smells of flowers and ozone. This makes me uneasier than if he’d been treated to a torrent. That, at least, I’d understand. I’d be sad, but I’d understand.

  He’s unbuttoned and unzipped my jeans when my mind snaps back to the here and now. It’s not that his body doesn’t have more in common with Greek statues than actual humans. It’s not that he can’t explicate Socrates at lengths that leave my jaw unhinged. It’s that not only did “I love you, Matt” pull him out of his angst, but it actually removed water.

  Fundamental laws of physics do that. Profound theorems of mathematics do that. “I love you, Matt” doesn’t count as a powerful statement that holds true for all time and space. Except when Gus says it, apparently.

  “Wait.” I let go of him. My hands reach down to slide to a sit.

  Gus stops instantly. He’s skittered back before my hands have even found the couch cushions. His head tilts up at me. This is the man who seconds ago risked going insane in order to feel soul-rending pain for fun. How can he suddenly look so vulnerable?

  Oh, if there’s anything Gus can do, it’s put up a brave front. He does that stony-faced thing where his mouth is set in a grim, straight line better than anyone I know. But behind his hard, blue eyes, I can see the fear that’s not there even when some paradox rips him apart.

  Best to take the pain now. I’m half-convinced nothing can actually hurt him, even when he’s afraid it might. It’d only hurt him more later.

  “That’s some display you just did there, Gus.” I’m stalling. Stop that. “I don’t love you, not as much as you obviously love me.”