Asimov's SF, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  They turn into the square where a dozen men cheer when they see Merthe. Merthe turns around but she nods at him to go. She's got her arms full of toddler.

  “Do your best.” her face looks pinched. Merthe realizes that if he wins, she will lose her hunter.

  He salutes each of the four metallic pillars that mark the Fighting ground. They are made from the remnants of a ship that brought the People here from the sky. Or so the elders say. It seems impossible that people should sail through air. It is true, however, that bodies may only be exchanged within their embrace and only after Fight. Years ago, Merthe and Ita, like all newlyweds, spent some time trying to game the rules and learned that the only result was temporary impotence and a headache that lasted for hours.

  On a whim, he jumps into the Fighting square and seeks out Ita before combat begins. He stares at the judge, dares him to object, and takes Ita to the side.

  “Are you nervous?” he asks.

  She looks at him suspiciously. He sighs, takes her hand and brings the palm to his lips. Her eyes lighten up.

  “It's just a game, Ita.”

  “Maybe it is to you. That's why you always lose.”

  He lets go of her hand, turns to the crowd. People are coming from villages that he hasn't even been to. He wishes he could confide in Ita, but everything he says will be used against him.

  “I'm worried about Elgir,” he blurts. “Who will hunt for her when I'm a woman?”

  Ita smiles. She thinks it's banter. “I think you'll be able to keep her in meat and gravy for a while yet.”

  “Really? You would not object?”

  “Are you serious?”

  It's no use. He heads towards his corner and starts preparing.

  Roll of drums; the combatants step up to the judge. Merthe wonders whether he should try to imitate Elgir. Maybe he can just take Ita's hits and try to snatch an advantage when he sees it. Surely, it would be a lot less tiresome that fighting. He is so tired of fighting all the time.

  But then he realizes that this is Fight, not just any fight. His verbal skills do not matter and since combatants must remain silent, Ita's wit cannot hurt him inside the ring. Suddenly, he feels protected by those four pillars. He has a good half hour of silence ahead of him, maybe an hour if he can make the fight last. He yearns for intimacy without the burden of words. And there is nothing more intimate than violence.

  The drums are still and the crowd holds their breaths. Ita starts bouncing and jabbing, trying to circle around him and hit him when he blinks. She moves fast—always a good strategy for a woman—and attempts to bring him down with repeated blows.

  Her first hit catches him unawares and he staggers back. No, Elgir's strategy won't work. There is blood in his mouth. He's supposed to hold still, he knows. Maybe feint a bit, watch for patterns and fell her with one decisive blow. Those same muscles that lend force to his blows suck up his energy. Unlike Ita, he cannot jump around forever. He is supposed to preserve his strength, not to commit, strike only when he can win.

  But he is so tired of doing what he's supposed to and maybe Elgir is right and we get caught up in patterns, live life within patterns, pushing ourselves beyond our limits because a man should lift that much, throw that far. And maybe, just maybe, Merthe realizes, we do the opposite and fall pitifully short because we've been told our bodies have less endurance that our wife's.

  Merthe starts bouncing. His feet know the way. Women fight like they dance, his mother taught him, and he was always such a good dancer.

  Ita's rhythm lets up in surprise and he jabs, but she ducks in time and starts bouncing again. He loves her technique and mirrors her as they spin round and round. Merthe is the ugly sibling, echoing heir elder's every move, struggling to copy what can only be born of natural grace.

  Ita doesn't know how to hit a moving target. She hasn't fought with a mobile partner for a long time.

  His breath is labored; she hardly breaks a sweat. She starts sweating; the pain in his chest won't let up. She pants and swerves; his vision clouds but he sees the gap in her defense and punches through.

  She crashes down and he falls right after. For a second, he wonders if she's all right. He put himself in that blow, his loves, his wants, his strengths and weaknesses. He wonders if it was too much for her. But she groans and sits up, spits blood and, of all things, laughs.

  “Well, you got me there.”

  “I'm sorry,” he says.

  “Oh no, you're not. You won.”

  He lies back, head spinning. Yes, he won. His chest still hurts and he wonders how bad it is.

  The bell rings. She crawls up against him, sets her palm against his and they're off into the limbo of joy. Her mind rises up to him. For a second, both of them are in his body and hers hangs, limp, behind. He creeps in, wondering if the beams still hold in this castle which he's left so long ago. Merthe draws a breath which is oh, so sweet. She smells the male sweat of Ita next to her.

  But no. Two women need a hunter and a young androgen needs to learn that being a man isn't so bad. She pushes back into the old body. He regains control and shoves Ita into hers. She was so fond of her female form that it seems a pity to tear her from it. Plus, she made a terrible husband.

  Ita tumbles away from him and he sees disbelief in her eyes.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “You're leaving me! You're leaving with her!”

  It takes a moment for him to understand what she's saying. But, of course, she cannot fathom why anyone would want to be a man. The only explanation that she will consider is that Merthe plans to start a new life with Elgir and that he needs a man's body for that.

  “I'm not going with her.” He doesn't say he's not leaving, though, because he's not quite sure what he'll do. He can support both women, but he doesn't have the strength for either. He needs time, alone, in silence. He knows just the place for that.

  The judge walks up and hesitates before signaling the end of the transition. The elders squirm, then shrug their shoulders. Merthe has won: he may do as he likes.

  That night, there's scratching at the door of the shed.

  “Does your mother know you're here?” he asks a trembling Serga standing by the doorway.

  “No. I think. I don't think so, she was asleep.”

  Merthe lets heir in, moves his quilts to a corner and places a stack of blankets next to the fire for heir to sleep in. Shei stomps heir feet all the way to bed, and Merthe stays awake until the shivering melts into regular breathing and only soft childish hairs peek out from beneath the covers. He'll wake heir before sunrise and make heir go back to bed inside the house. Ita mustn't know that shei's fled to him for comfort after their separation. Merthe may be too confused to know what he wants just yet, but he doesn't want to hurt Ita. Whether he can live with her or not is a different matter.

  Copyright © 2009 Sara Genge

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  Short Story: ANIMUS RIGHTS

  by John Shirley

  John Shirley's many books include City Come A-Walkin', Black Glass: The Lost Cyberpunk Novel, and his newest, Bleak History, from Simon and Schuster. He was a screenwriter for The Crow and has written television scripts for Deep Space Nine and Poltergeist: The Legacy. His first story for us in twenty-one years examines the hu
man cost of an ageless conflict between two utterly alien life forms.

  Near Jamaica Bay, New York, 1887

  “And why should you go shooting again, Andrew?” Wilamina demanded. “You've gone twice this week. You promised me an autumn promenade. The leaves are splendid.”

  “You shall have your autumn promenade, my dear,” Andrew replied, stuffing his coat pockets with shotgun shells. The gun club provided shells but they were not to his liking. “But first I shall go target shooting. They have a new machine that swings feathered bags, does a capital job. The Colonel's servants crank them by—always cringing under the shot though it rarely comes near them...”

  Wilamina was at the oval, silver-framed hall mirror, adjusting her ivory choker, patting the red-brown hair piled luxuriantly on her head, frowning in the gaslight glow—and Andrew thought that he had seen that prim scowl far too often.

  Something emerges in me, he thought, and she will become irrelevant.

  What a strange thought! It had come suddenly, unbidden, as actual words in his mind—and he rarely thought in words.

  But as he picked up his shotgun, carrying it loose under his arm, he realized he'd had more than one such incident, these past few weeks.

  “Seven years of peaceful marriage, and suddenly you're a man of blood,” Wilamina said suddenly, calling after him as he went to the door, its leaded glass panels bluing the dusty late-afternoon sunlight. Something plaintive, worried in her voice. Her anxiety came out in a rush. “You're a man of banking—you're not a hunter. You were always fit, to be sure, but all this running about at dawn of late, huffing and puffing, throwing javelins ... and now shooting. Pheasant hunting. Is it a consequence of turning thirty? Some men become unsure of themselves...”

  “Just a hobby, my darling dear,” he said, hurrying out the door before she should press him on matters he didn't understand himself.

  Andrew inhaled the spicy scent of leaves fallen from the tall, noble elms lining the cobblestoned road, and felt a rising exhilaration, a buoyant freeness, that seemed to sweep him along the wooden walkway, past the gaunt houses.

  He came to the corner and stopped—uncertain. To the left, after a brisk walk, were the streetcars, drawn by teams of horses, that would take him to the club, and his target shooting. To the right...

  It was exactly at that moment that Andrew knew he was not going target shooting at all.

  He was going the opposite way; he was going to the small wood, to the south. He almost knew why. Not quite yet.

  It will come. The game is afoot.

  There, words again, ringing in his mind. Somehow, though, they felt like his own words; his own assertion, coming from some place deep within.

  He broke the double-barreled shotgun open, and thumbed two rounds. Was distantly aware of Old Man Worster watching him disapprovingly from his porch.

  The devil with Old Man Worster.

  The rising lightness, the giddy exuberance made him want to spin on his heel and fire a shot at Worster's porch, perhaps shoot out that gaudy, peacock-shaped front door panel. "Sorry, Worster—out hunting fowl, thought it was a peacock, ha ha!" No: he would need his ammunition.

  He stalked off to the right, the twelve-gauge now at ready in his hands, hurrying to the end of the road, the path that led into the quarter-mile-wide strip of elms and maples, where children played in the day, and sparking couples disported of an evening. Taking a walk, not long ago, he had seen several tow-headed boys playing “War Between the States” here, in this shadowy wood. The sight had struck a chord within him.

  He was not fifty strides into the wood, just within sight of the gray-blue of Jamaica Bay, glimpsed between the trees, when the shot came, hitting a maple trunk just in front of him.

  Too soon, as usual, Andrew thought, crouching behind the tree, chuckling. Typically, you have given away your position...

  As usual? But he'd never been shot at before. And who had fired the shot?

  Adversary.

  He leaned slightly forward, looked up to see the fresh yellow gouge where the bullet had cut the dull-green bark of the young maple, about six feet up. Andrew's height. The shot had come from the southwest.

  He backed away, stood, spun, and, heart hammering with primal delight, sprinted between the trees to the northeast, trying to flank Adversary.

  To flank ... whom? Who was...

  Adversary. As always...

  And then his identity returned, erupting in fullness, like a geyser washing through his mind, hissing away the fearful, mealy mouthed Andrew Chapham, the minor officer of a minor bank—and now he was the one called Animus. That was the game-name of his true self. And he felt not a qualm, not a sputter of regret at letting Andrew go. He had been so many others, these centuries past; they had always seemed feeble, sketchy compared to his fundamental identity.

  But thoughts of Andrew Chapham were fading, becoming shadows at the back of his mind, cast by light from outside a cave; he was rushing toward that light, and emerging fully ... and seeing Adversary grinning at him, currently a stocky blond man in white and black sailor's uniform; a man with a curling yellow mustache and a prominent chin. He stood about twelve yards away, on the other side of a waist-high, mossy boulder, head cocked to aim along the rifle wedged against his shoulder.

  Animus had just time to think, Ah, that's the form he's taken, I've seen him scouting me at—

  They fired almost simultaneously; Adversary was a little faster. Andrew—Animus, now—was forced to fire from his hip, both barrels, and most of the shot went wild, caroming from the outcropping of granite, scoring away moss; but a scattering of pellets struck across Adversary's white, black-trimmed sailor's shirt, rocking him a few steps back, and Animus was staggering back himself, as if they were doing a hornpipe together.

  He felt it, then, just under his sternum—the bullet had struck him a moment before, but he'd not felt the pain till this second; the weakness spreading from the wound, the seizing up of his lungs. That was one problem with choosing this planet—these primate bodies were comparatively fragile.

  Animus felt himself sinking to his knees, hot blood gurgling up in his throat to dribble from the corner of his mouth, as he fumbled the empty shells from his shotgun, thumbed in two more slippery rounds—but Adversary was there, striding up to him, cocking the rifle, blood streaming in thin trickles from a spray of small holes in his shirt, his mouth stretched wide in joy as he prepared for the coup de grace...

  Animus was annoyed, realizing that Adversary was giving him a moment to swing the shotgun around, just to make things more interesting. “I don't need your extra chance...” He couldn't finish, blood choking off the words, and he squeezed the shotgun triggers, but Adversary was within reach, cracking Animus across the head with the rifle barrel, so that the shotgun bellowed harmlessly into the ground, and he fell to his side in a cloud of gunsmoke, sighing ruefully as he waited for the bullet in the back of his head, thinking, I know we agreed this would be a Sudden Confrontation but this abruptness hardly seems—

  Animus never completed the thought, as the rifle bullet shattered his head—and his lightbody was forced out of the cellular mass, the primate form that people had called Andrew Chapman.

  Still embodied in the blond-haired, mustachioed, lantern-jawed man in the sailor's shirt, Adversary gazed triumphantly down at the Andrew body: shattered, still twitching though all intelligence had drained from it.

  Almost as an afterthought, the heart stopped beating.

  Then Adversary looked up at Animus—at the lightbody that had departed the shattered primate body....

  And Adversary's own primate body collapsed, as if its joints had dissolved. No longer occupied, it simply fell; its heart switched off by Adversary on the way out, the way a man switches off a light when he's leaving a house.

  Adversary's lightbody shimmered, golden-green, across from Animus's own, whose colors were more red-purple with flecks of flaring yellow.

  “I knew if I shot at you, early on, from th
at angle, you'd dart to the left and I could cut you off at that boulder," Adversary said, emanating glee. He didn't say it in words, exactly, nothing so simple; it was not a communication that Andrew Chapham would have understood, but that was the general meaning. "You're starting to be too predictable! And yet you think I'm predictable!"

  "You shot me in almost the same way during the Napoleonic wars, you remember? With that musket!"

  "What a feeble redcoat you made! It was better during the Civil War. But this time..."

  “We might have had a bit more tactics before Sudden Confrontation,” Animus interrupted testily. “But the woman I was married to was annoying me. I had to invest so much time in being Chapham..."

  There was a pause; a sense of puzzlement in the air. "You were aware enough to be annoyed? Your Fundamental should have been in full dormancy. You've got to go back and retrain your Focal Point if this keeps up."

  "Nonsense! I can get it back to full dormancy on my own. Now—next time, let's do a broad, tactical conflict."

  "The primates are creating explosive possibilities in Europe. A little time, and I can spark that one. Perhaps an assassination in the right quarter."

  "There are new weapons coming. Let's use them all!"

  "You mean generalships? It's been a while since we were generals, sending armies against one another. The potential ... Even a colonel could do much ... We could use psychic dominance to prod the generals, once we'd gotten close enough..."

  "Much preparation would be needed. We shall need to influence key individuals before nesting. I wish we had the technology to enter adult bodies, instead of nesting in fetal forms, waiting till maturity."

  "That's forbidden technology. And it's not much of a wait, really, for us. A few decades at most. We need the rest."

  A young couple, strolling through the woods in search of privacy, came upon the bloody scene: the two awkwardly sprawled bodies. And they saw the shimmering, vaguely humanoid shapes hovering beside the corpses.