Asimov's Science Fiction 12/01/10

by Dell Magazines

  “We couldn’t have rescued them even if we’d reached the net,” Jila-Jen said. “The Drovils would have slaughtered us before we got a rope tied to the net.”

  “You didn’t even try to reach the net. You gave up before you’d blown a single dart at the guards.”

  “They had guards everywhere we looked. We could see they’d be swarming all over us as soon as they realized we’d worked our way through them.”

  “The captives hadn’t asked to die, Jila-Jen. You could have left them alone.”

  “They were suffering. They were threatened with mutilation. You would have done the same thing.”

  Jila-Jen had been crouching with his head lowered—as if he had been talking to one of his superiors. He was keeping himself under control but Vigdal could hear the shriek he was holding in his throat.

  “We knew the guards would be all over us as soon as we blew the first dart,” Jila-Jen said. “We would have been killed before we got near the nets. And your friends would still be hanging there.”

  Vigdal stared at the ground between his paws. He had planned every word he would say before he had arranged this meeting. I will say this, he had thought. And he will say that. But it never worked out the way you thought it would.

  Had Jila-Jen known three Warriors couldn’t free the captives when he had made his offer? Had he planned it this way from the start?

  Isn’t that what happens when you obey feelings instead of laws? Doesn’t it mean you can do anything you feel like doing?

  “You felt it was the right thing,” Vigdal said. “You responded to their suffering.”

  “I did what you would have done. If you could have done it. If you could have approached as close as we did. And used our dartblowers as well as we can.”

  Vigdal’s tail twitched. He raised his head and pounced.

  “Don’t you think we could have? Don’t you think we could have worked a crossbow duo close enough to kill them if we wanted to? You told me you could free them. You told me three skilled Warriors could slip through the guards and free them.”

  “They’re free. They got the only freedom anyone could give them. They’re free and you owe me six shares.”

  “I said three if you tried. And six if you succeeded. Am I supposed to tell my wife I gave up my shares so you could kill our friends? And call it success?”

  Vigdal had tensed into a fighting crouch. Jila-Jen had his sword but he was armed, too. Itiji were always armed. Wherever he went, he had teeth in his mouth. And claws at the end of his legs.

  And the ground was his element....

  He raised his right paw. He settled back into a sitting position. He let himself indulge in the little bark another itiji would have interpreted as a wry laugh.

  “You’ll get your six shares. I’ve discussed it with my wife and the Five. We feel we have done more than our share. We have doubts about the way you acted. But we are building a band with your people. You do not build a band by quibbling over the sharing of the kill.”

  “And when will I get it?”

  “You think I don’t have to keep my promises, don’t you? You think I can do anything I want because I don’t believe in the gods?”

  “We aren’t discussing philosophy, Vigdal. I led two young Warriors into danger. Do you know what it took to get that close? Nama-Nanat and twelve of his Double Eight died so you and your friends could escape.”

  Vigdal’s teeth clamped on the retort that quivered in his throat. He had lost three warfriends out of the eight who had walked out with his band. Four children were going to stumble into adulthood without a father to guide them.

  And what did Nama-Nanat’s sacrifice have to do with you, Jila-Jen? You were skulking into dartblower range while Nama-Nanat and his Warriors were fighting to the death.

  He jerked his head. “If you go five hundred paces that way you’ll find the sled I pulled here. With six bags beside it. I think you’ll find every bag will hold a full share.”

  Jila-Jen stared at him. Vigdal couldn’t read all the emotions crossing his face, but he could understand the confusion behind the parade.

  “Then why are we having this conference?”

  “I wanted to hear what you had to say,” Vigdal said. “Every itiji in Imeten knows what you did. Every itiji you encounter will know what you did. And what you have said.”

  He straightened up and tried to capture some of the authority of the elders and harmonizers he had been watching since he had been a child. “They will come to their own conclusions. But it will never be forgotten. They will all think about it when they work with you.”

  “And they will all decide I should have died like a good itiji would.”

  “Some will. Some think you did the right thing and should share what we agreed. Some think you did the right thing and shouldn’t share. Some think you never planned to free the prisoners.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think the Five Masters are right. We should pay you and tell the story.”

  “You don’t have any thoughts of your own?”

  “I think you have decided you can do anything you want to. And I should remember that when we work together.”

  “And I should think you are different?”

  “I’m an itiji, Jila-Jen. Itiji have each other.”

  He nodded at the location of the sled. “Take your share. We made a bargain. And we will keep it.”

  Jila-Jen’s face swelled. He reached for his sword and Vigdal fought back the urge to strike before the blade could leap from its hooks.

  Jila-Jen turned away. He grabbed the rope he had used to descend from the trees and ascended into the leaves hand over hand. He paused on the lowest branch, secure in his element, and looked down on the creature who lived in the world below.

  “I’ll fill the bags till they’re ready to burst. And while I’m doing it, consider this, itiji—if you don’t believe in the gods, why should we believe the Goddess wants you to be our equals?”

  Vigdal watched him as he leaped to the next tree and fell into the rhythmic grace that could carry him to places where no itiji could follow.

  This wasn’t the first time he had been confronted with that question. The Five had pondered it, too.

  The Imetens needed them. They couldn’t defend themselves against Lidris without the itiji. Eventually they would see that.

  The itiji’s efforts might not be enough. Lidris might prevail no matter what they did. They would just have to do their best. And hope they got a little help from luck.

  Or the gods.

  Copyright © 2010 Tom Purdom

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  Michael Swanwick

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  Miles and weeks passed under the wheels of Victor’s motorcycle. Sometime during the day he would stop at a peasant farmstead and buy food to cook over a campfire for supper. At night he slept under the stars with old cowboy movies playing in his head. In no particular hurry he wove through the Urals on twisting backcountry roads, and somewhere along the way crossed over the border out of Europe and into Asia. He made a wide detour around Yekaterinburg, where the density of population brought government interference in the private lives of its citizens up almost to Moscow levels, and then cut back again to regain the laughably primitive transcontinental highway. He was passing through the drab ruins of an industrial district at the edge of the city when a woman in thigh-high boots raised her hand to hail him, the way they did out here in the sticks where every driver was a potential taxi to be bought for small change.

  Ordinarily, Victor wouldn’t have stopped. But in addition to the boots, the woman wore leopard-print hot pants and a fashionably puffy red jacket, tight about the waist and broad at the shoulders, which opened to reveal the tops of her breasts, like two pomegranates proffered on a plate. A vinyl backpack crouched on the ground by her feet. She looked like she’d just stepped down from a billboard. She looked like serious trouble.

  It had been a long time since he’d had any serious trouble. Victor pulled to a stop.

  “Going east?” the woman said.

  “Yeah.”

  She glanced down at the scattering of pins on his kevleather jacket—politicians who never got elected, causes that were never won—and her crimson lips quirked in the smallest of smiles. “Libertarianski, eh? You do realize that there’s no such thing as a libertarian Russian? It’s like a gentle tiger or an honest cop—a contradiction in terms.”

  Victor shrugged. “And yet, here I am.”

  “So you think.” Suddenly all business, the woman said, “I’ll blow you if you take me with you.”

  For a second Victor’s mind went blank. Then he said, “Actually, I might be going a long way. Across Siberia. I might not stop until I reach the Pacific.”

  “Okay, then. Once a day, so long as I’m with you. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  Victor reconfigured the back of his bike to give it a pillion and an extra rack for her backpack and fattened the tires to compensate for her weight. She climbed on behind him, and off they went.

  At sunset, they stopped and made camp in a scrub pine forest, behind the ruins of a Government Auto Inspection station. After they’d set up their poptents (hers was the size of her fist when she took it from her knapsack but assembled itself into something almost palatial; his was no larger than he needed) and built the cookfire, she paid him for the day’s ride. Then, as he cut up the chicken he’d bought earlier, they talked.

  “You never told me your name,” Victor said.

  “Svetlana.”

  “Just Svetlana?”

  “Yes.”

  “No patronymic?”

  “No. Just Svetlana. And you?”

  “Victor Pelevin.”

  Svetlana laughed derisively. “Oh, come on!”

  “He’s my grandfather,” Victor explained. Then, when the scorn failed to leave her face, “Well, spiritually, anyway. I’ve read all his books I don’t know how many times. They shaped me.”

  “I prefer The Master and Margarita. Not the book, of course. The video. But I can’t say it shaped me. So, let me guess. You’re on the great Russian road trip. Looking to find the real Russia, old Russia, Mother Russia, the Russia of the heart. Eh?”

  “Not me. I’ve already found what I’m looking for—Libertarian Russia. Right here, where we are.” Victor finished with the chicken, and began cutting up the vegetables. It would take a while for the fire to die down to coals, but when it was ready, he’d roast the vegetables and chicken together on spits, shish kabob style.

  “Now that you’ve found it, what are you going to do with it?”

  “Nothing. Wander around. Live here. Whatever.” He began assembling the kabobs. “You see, after the Depopulation, there just weren’t the resources anymore for the government to police the largest country in the world with the sort of control they were used to. So instead of easing up on the people, they decided to concentrate their power in a handful of industrial and mercantile centers, port cities, and the like. The rest, with a total population of maybe one or two people per ten square miles, they cut loose. Nobody talks about it, but there’s no law out here except what people agree upon. They’ve got to settle their differences among themselves. When you’ve got enough people to make up a town, they might pool their money to hire a part-time cop or two. But no databases, no spies ... you can do what you like, and so long as you don’t infringe upon somebody else’s freedoms, they’ll leave you alone.”

  Everything Victor said was more or less cut-and-paste from “Free Ivan,” an orphan website he’d stumbled on five years ago. In libertarian circles, Free Ivan was a legend. Victor liked to think “Free Ivan” was out somewhere in Siberia, living the life he’d preached. But since his last entry was posted from St. Petersburg and mentioned no such plans, most likely he was dead. That was what happened to people who dared imagine a world without tyranny.

  “What if somebody else’s idea of freedom involves taking your motorcycle from you?”

  Victor got up and patted the contact plate on his machine. “The lock is coded to my genome. The bike won’t start for anybody else. Anyway, I have a gun.” He showed it, then put it back in his shoulder harness.

  “Somebody could take that thing away from you and shoot you, you know.”

  “No, they couldn’t. It’s a smart gun. It’s like my bike—it answers to nobody but me.”

  Unexpectedly, Svetlana laughed. “I give up! You’ve got all the angles covered.”

  Yet Victor doubted he had convinced her of anything. “We have the technology to make us free,” he said sullenly. “Why not use it? You ought to get a gun yourself.”

  “Trust me, my body is all the weapon I need.”

  There didn’t seem to be any answer for that, so Victor said, “Tell me about yourself. Who are you, why are you on the road, where are you heading?”

  “I’m a whore,” she said. “I got tired of working for others, but Yekaterinburg was too corrupt for me to set up a house of my own there. So I’m looking for someplace large enough to do business in, where the police will settle for a reasonable cut of the take.”

  “You ... mean all that literally, don’t you?”

  Svetlana reached into her
purse and took out a card case. She squirted him her rate sheet, and put the case away again. “If you see anything there you like, I’m open for business.”

  The fire was ready now, so Victor put on the kabobs.

  “How much do I pay for dinner?” Svetlana opened her purse again.

  “It’s my treat.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t accept anything for free. Everybody pays for everything. That’s my philosophy.”

  Before he went to his poptent, Victor disassembled part of his bike and filled the digester tank with water and grass. Then he set it to gently rocking. Enzymes and yeasts were automatically fed into the mixture—and by morning, there would be enough alcohol for another day’s travel. He went into the tent and lay on his back, playing a John Wayne movie in his mind. The Seekers. But after a while he could not help pausing the movie, to call up Svetlana’s rate sheet.

  She offered a surprisingly broad range of services.

  He brooded for a long while before finally falling asleep.

  That night he had an eidetic dream. Possibly his memorandum recorder had been jostled a month earlier and some glitch caused it to replay now. At any rate, he was back in Moscow and he was leaving forever.

  He hit the road at dawn, rush-hour traffic heavy around him and the sun a golden dazzle in the smog. American jazz saxophone played in his head, smooth and cool. Charlie Parker. He hunched low over his motorcycle and when a traffic cop gestured him to the shoulder with a languid wave of his white baton for a random ID check, Victor popped a wheelie and flipped him the finger. Then he opened up the throttle and slalomed away, back and forth across four lanes of madly honking traffic.

  In the rearview mirror, he saw the cop glaring after him, taking a mental snapshot of his license plate. If he ever returned to Moscow, he’d be in a world of trouble. Every cop in the city—and Moscow had more flavors of cops than anywhere—would have his number and a good idea of what he looked like.

  Fuck that noise. Fuck it right up the ass. Victor had spent years grubbing for money, living cheap, saving every kopek he could to buy the gear he needed to get the hell out of Moscow. Why would he ever come back?