Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  “Oh, it’s roomier than you think,” said Jeroon. “Plush and airy, with a well-stocked larder. There’s windows and a fireplace with a clean-drawing chimney. Don’t be frightened, Frek.”

  Jeroon disappeared into the burrow, but Frek stayed outside. A few minutes passed. Frek heard clatters, bumps, and crackling. A warm flickering light appeared within. Peering through the open door, Frek could make out a low, arched hallway with a floor tiled with contrasting square and octagonal stones, nicely polished. The warm light came from a doorway in the right side of the hall. Jeroon peeked out of the lit door, and beckoned with his curled-around tail.

  Frek heard a hooting not very far off. The memory of Okky’s attack flashed back. He took a deep breath and crawled into Jeroon’s burrow, slamming the round door behind him.

  The hallway was gog tight, but once he’d wormed his way down the hall and through that lit-up door at the end, he found himself in a room nearly tall enough to stand in. He rose to a crouch and looked around.

  The room had a smooth redbrick floor and, wonder of wonders, a thick Turkish-style carpet, glowing with patterns of red, blue, and yellow. There was a cozy fire in a hearth on his left and, true to Jeroon’s promise, the smoke was drawing nicely up into the flue. The arched ceiling curved down to merge with walls of hard-packed earth, brightened up with a coat of whitewash. Two barred, round windows were in the right wall, and one was propped open to let in the fresh, cool night air. A door on the far side of the room led to a kitchen, with a door beyond that leading to a bedchamber.

  Jeroon had perched himself on a tall chair with two low arms and no back. His tail dangled behind him, so that his head seemed to sit alone upon the high chair’s cushion like the dot on a letter i. He was sipping at a mug of something that smelled sweet and spicy. “My home is your home, Frek,” said Jeroon, clearly savoring the moment. “Have a seat over there—you’ll be more comfortable. Take off your wet shoes. I’ll be bringing you some food.”

  Frek sat down on a square flat bolster in the corner between the hall door and the open window. For a moment Jeroon stared at him, grinning. And then the little Grulloo clambered down from his chair and ambled hand over hand into the kitchen, slowly beating his tail.

  While Jeroon was gone, Frek looked around the room some more. There wasn’t much furniture besides Jeroon’s chair. Most of the floor was covered by the rich-colored carpet. There was a bowl beside the fireplace holding a dozen little lumps of half-dried—were they meat? They looked too soft and greasy to be please plant seeds, yet too smooth and well-formed to be chunks of meat. Frek wondered if they were to be part of supper. He was quite hungry. He reached out to pick up one of the nuggets of perhaps meat but, unsettlingly, it twitched at his touch. He left it in the bowl.

  His attention kept being drawn back to the rug. The pattern was slowly changing, smoothly cycling from one symmetry to the next. It was gog gripper. He leaned forward and peered at the carpet. It wasn’t turmite-fiber. It was a mat of soft bristles tinted in colors that slowly changed. In a way, the rug was like a house tree’s wallskin, but it was a living colony on its own. Frek had never seen anything like it before. A Grulloo rug. And then his memories drifted off, and he was just staring at the rug’s colors.

  At some point Jeroon reappeared with a cold plate of boiled carrots and roast yams, a thick slice of anymeat on grobread and a cup of cider spiced with nutfungus. He held the plate and the mug balanced over his head with branches of his curled-up tail. Though the tail’s surface resembled bark, the tail was like a set of four tentacles.

  Frek ate and drank, thinking of nothing but the food. The nutfungus had a pleasant scent that tickled the back of his nose. Slowly the ache went out of his arms.

  Jeroon watched him closely, bringing seconds, and then thirds. “I can’t get over it,” he said when Frek was finally done. “I have a Nubby as a guest in my own home. Wait till I tell Ennie and her family.”

  “Ennie?” said Frek. “Is someone else here?” He wondered if he’d forgotten meeting more Grulloos? Had they been in the room while he was watching the rug?

  “Your memory!” exclaimed Jeroon. “We have to set it right. I’ll mix you up a stim cell potion. It’s not to be had amidst your Middleville Nubbies. NuBioCom grows the stim cells special for us Grulloos, useful kritters that we are. And in return we give them our eggs, chock-full of bedazzling proteins, enzymes, hormones, and genomes. It’s the Grulloos who test out what the Nubbies are scared to touch, you know. We’re walking pharma labs. There’s a market for Grulloo cadavers, as well, not that the NuBioCommers harvest us on sight. That’d be killing the golden goose, don’t you know. We give ’em eggs, and they give us stim cells.” Jeroon reached over to the small bowl by the fireplace and picked out a couple of the drier gobbets of meat. “Stim cell grexes fresh from Stim City,” he said. “Colonies of bioactive repair cells. Just the thing to fix your brain! Not that NuBioCommers would have told you about them. Gov much prefers the Three R’s for troublesome lads like you.”

  Frek hadn’t really been following Jeroon’s meandering discourse. But at the last words, he instantly imagined the terrible squeak-clank sound again. He lurched up onto his knees. “The Three R’s?” he choked, looking for a way out. It would be hard to make his escape with the ceiling so low.

  “Don’t startle up,” said Jeroon soothingly. “It’s but a foamy health-drink I’m making you, my boy. I’ll dissolve these grexes into their component cells. You’ll drink it, you’ll sleep, and then you’ll be able to remember again. We Grulloos know firsthand about the beastly things your counselors do. Did you see the Raven when they peeked you?”

  “Yes,” said Frek, slowly lowering back onto his cushion.

  “Gov is kac,” said Jeroon shortly. “A bully and a coward. A parasitic worm. Don’t budge!” He scuttled into the kitchen.

  Gov is kac. Frek had never heard anyone say that before, not even Dad. It was music to his ears. The fact that Jeroon was free to say it made him feel safe. And then Jeroon was back with a mug of something lukewarm. It was cloudy and smelled of rancid meat, and it made Frek’s lips numb, but at Jeroon’s urging he drank every bit of it down. All at once Frek could feel how tired he was from the long day. Jeroon pulled over another cushion. Frek lay down and slept right through the night.

  He was roused by something lightly jumping on his stomach, then hopping off. He heard high little voices all around him, and the burbling of a stream. Light slanted in through a round window nearby, stained green by overhanging bushes of a type Frek had never seen. The voices belonged to five Grulloos, their bodies variations on Jeroon’s, each of them with a head, a pair of legs ending in hands, and some kind of tail. They all wore colorful jackets around their middles. Two of them were quite small. Children.

  “He’s awake!” shouted the littlest Grulloo, the one who’d just woken him by bouncing on his stomach. “The Nubby’s awake!” She had a sweet round face and two pink arms sticking out of the side of her head. Her jacket was little more than a pink sash. The bulge at the back of her head tapered out into a little ponytail that waved about on its own. “Hi Nubby,” she cried, hopping onto Frek’s chest again. “I’m LuHu!” Her ponytail rose into the air like an exclamation point.

  “Roar!” said the other young Grulloo. “Are you scared?” He had short red hair and sharp yellow teeth. His tail resembled a tiger’s, and his jacket was striped to match. He’d been feeling Frek’s belly with one of his black-nailed hands, but when Frek moved, he twitched away.

  Next to him was a mermaidlike Grulloo with a scaly, silver tail and a fair, thoughtful face supported by two well-formed arms. Her jacket was of flowing sea-green cloth. Pressed beside her was an orchid Grulloo, a heavyset woman with white petals upon her legs and tail. Her jacket was of white turmite-silk. She was pressed tight against the male Grulloo at her side, a tough-looking fellow with a green lizard’s tail and a dirty yellow suede jacket. The five of them were shifting back and forth on their legs, torn be
tween curiosity and fear, the little ones alternately darting away beneath the adults and creeping forward for a better view. Though the Grulloos’ tails were like parts of plants or animals, they all had human faces. They looked solid and real, and Frek felt solid himself. He could remember again. Things weren’t sliding away anymore.

  “Hello,” said Frek a little warily, but smiling just the same. Pleasant sounds of cooking came from the kitchen. “I’m Jeroon’s friend,” added Frek, easily visualizing the house’s owner. The stim cells had fixed his brain.

  “Good morning,” said the Grulloos.

  By the time he was twenty-one, Dave Hutchinson had published four short story collections. The years since have seen regrettably few short pieces from the talented Hutchinson, with stories in venues such as Sci Fiction and Interzone. He lives in North London with his wife, Bogna, and their three cats.

  The following story of a future where magic has supplanted technology is set in the same reality as his short story “Scuffle,” which debuted on Sci Fiction in May 2002.

  ALL THE NEWS, ALL THE TIME, FROM EVERYWHERE

  Dave Hutchinson

  On the first of August, Rex killed the pig.

  He didn’t do it willingly, but none of us was really sorry to see it go. It was an enormous, bad-tempered bastard that we’d been keeping in a shed around the back of the office for months, feeding it on an outrageous stinking swill that Harry kept going in a big pot with scraps and garbage begged and borrowed from some of the schools in the area.

  If it had been left to us, the pig would have starved to death, because it smelled like a sewer and attacked anything that moved, but Rex made us draw up a feeding rota, and every four days it fell to me to approach the shed with two buckets of swill, gingerly open the door, and pitch the buckets inside before slamming the door again. For such a big animal, with such little legs, the pig was colossally quick, and it had jaws like boltcutters.

  Rex was ashamed of the pig. It was the living, breathing, grunting embodiment of just how badly the Globe was doing. The yard behind the office was choked with empty cages and wire boxes and wooden stalls, where once there had been a thriving menagerie of goats and sheep and chickens and rabbits and pigeons and even the odd badger or two. Now they were all gone, and all we had was the pig.

  Still, he put off killing it as long as he could. He and Harry went out onto the moors and trapped crows. Local poachers sometimes brought in foxes or rabbits. Ben produced his astrological charts. Lucie examined the interior of everyone’s teacup. And in this way the Globe continued to bring the news to our particular little corner of Derbyshire. It wasn’t very exciting news, but considering what we had to work with, it was a miracle we got a paper out at all.

  But it wasn’t enough. The advertisers started to fall away, leaving us with great gaping holes in the paper, which I was sent out to fill with microscopically nitpicking accounts of Women’s Institute meetings, weddings, and funerals. I went to so many weddings and funerals that the vicar only half-jokingly suggested I might like to stand in for him sometimes.

  And it still wasn’t enough. Rex watched the paper hemorrhaging money, looked bankruptcy in the face, and killed the pig.

  He did it in the afternoon, when the summer heat had built up enough in the newsroom to make the air stand still despite the fans, and the staff members were quietly nodding off over their typewriters.

  My fan had just run down again, and I’d got up to wind its clockwork when there was this incredible unearthly screech from outside, and everyone in the office sat bolt upright.

  We all looked at each other, and that awful noise came again. It was the sound of every nightmare H. P. Lovecraft ever had coming to destroy civilization. It was the sound of a man discovering that his entire family had been wiped out in a gas explosion. It was the sound of a thousand young children being hurled into the whirling blades of a combine harvester.

  It stopped.

  I looked at Ben and raised an eyebrow. He said, “You don’t suppose he’s—” and Lucie shrieked as the back door of the office opened and an awful apparition stepped through.

  Rex was covered in blood from head to toe. It was dripping from his nose and his earlobes and the point of the foot-long butcher’s knife he was holding in his hand. He was breathing hard, but his eyes were shining.

  “Biggest one-day fall in the Dow for two years,” he panted, pointing the knife at me. “Forest fires threaten Malibu. Government troops clash with logging company employees in Borneo. Russia devalues the ruble for the third time this year. Moon Sagan and Buff Rodney say, ‘This time it’s the real thing.’ ” He took a ragged breath. “What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “If we’re going out, we’re going out in style. Type, you bastards!”

  At the desk behind me, Harry heaved a huge sigh. “That’ll be pork chops all round, then,” he said.

  The Globe’s favorite watering hole was The Royal Oak, by virtue of the fact that the paper’s offices were right next door, but I preferred The Duke of York, which was half a mile away on the other side of the village but had the advantage of being half a mile away from the nearest newspaper office.

  This early in the evening, the Duke was almost empty. Before the Crash, it had done a roaring trade in the summer from tourists visiting the local caves and hard-core walkers setting off on the notorious Gilbert Dyke Walk, which managed to take in some of the most inhospitable scenery in northern England between here and Hadrian’s Wall. These days, the pub got by on a deal with a microbrewery in Castleton and some quite staggering customer loyalty among the locals, although tourists were starting to drift back again.

  This evening, however, the only occupants of the place were Seth the landlord, and Liam Goodkind, editor and proprietor of the Chronicle, Belton’s other newspaper.

  I stood in the doorway for a few moments, sensing disaster, but both Seth and Liam noticed me at the same time and nodded hello. Liam waved me over to his corner table, as well, and by then it would just have looked rude to turn round and walk out again, so I went over and sat down.

  “I don’t want any trouble, Liam,” I said.

  “Well, me neither, old son,” he told me. Raising his voice, he said, “Seth, get this boy a drink.” He raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Lager and lime,” I said, feeling miserable.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He slapped me on the knee. “Rex won’t sack you for having a drink with me.”

  “You sacked Robbie Whittaker for having a drink with Rex.”

  “Robbie was a bad lad.” Liam lifted his glass and took a thoughtful sip of whiskey. “He was robbing me blind. And he couldn’t write to save his life. Had to go.”

  Seth came over with my pint glass of lager and lime on a tray. He was a little bald man with a port-wine stain down the right side of his face. He’d been The Duke’s landlord for about twenty years, but most of the locals still regarded him as a newcomer. I hadn’t been in Belton nearly as long as he had, and it was faintly depressing to know that I still had several decades ahead of me before I was regarded as anything but That Bloke From London.

  “Anything else, gents?” Seth asked us, and Liam shooed him back behind the bar with a languid wave of his hand.

  When Seth was more or less out of earshot, Liam said, “I heard about the pig.”

  “I told you, I don’t want any trouble.”

  He looked offended. “How can this be trouble? Two newspapermen discussing business over a drink. How can it be trouble?”

  “It can be trouble in all sorts of ways, Liam. You know that.” I took a mouthful of my drink and became nostalgic for the days of refrigeration, the days when you could just put your hand into one of those plastic bar-top buckets and scoop up a handful of ice cubes and drop them into your lager and lime.

  “You’re too suspicious,” Liam told me. His attire today was Country Gentleman In Summer: white flannels, checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows to show muscular forearms dotted with freck
les and hazed with fine sandy hair, a pair of battered old brogues, and a Guards tie, even though the nearest he had ever been to the military was when he sold fifteen hundred acres of his land to the Ministry of Defense to use as a firing range. He looked every inch the gentleman farmer, but he had once been managing editor of a newspaper in Manchester, until the death of his universally disliked father had brought him back to the village.

  “I’m not going to tell you what we got,” I said. “You’ll have to read it in the paper.”

  “Well, of course I will.” He smiled and took a tin of small cigars and a lighter from the breast pocket of his shirt. “I’m a big fan of the Globe. I’m going to miss it.”

  I shook my head and took another drink.

  He lit a cigar and blew out smoke. “Look, old son.” He put tin and lighter back into his pocket. “Let’s not beat around the bush, eh? The pig’s gone. Now Rex will have to rely on local news.”

  “We’ll manage.”

  “Maybe Rex will be able to get his hands on some scabby sheep off the moors,” he went on. “The odd rabbit. How’s that going to help you? No national or international news, the advertisers are going to abandon ship.”

  It was, unfortunately, a perfectly accurate summing-up of the Globe’s prospects. I drank some more of my lager and lime and wished I’d gone straight home.

  “So how about you come and work for me?”

  I snorted beer down my nose. Liam watched me with detached interest while I coughed and gasped for breath; then he said, “You’re a good lad. I’ve always liked your style. There’s a deputy’s chair waiting for you at the Chronicle.”

  I mopped my face with my hankie. “I’d rather have my balls bitten off by a horse, Liam,” I said, half laughing with surprise at the offer. “I wouldn’t work under you if you were the last editor on Earth.”

  He didn’t get angry. He just became very still. “You won’t remember what you were like when you arrived here,” he told me calmly. “You were lucky we didn’t just take you out onto the Manchester Road and leave you there.”