Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2012 Edition: A Tor.Com Original

by Elizabeth Bear

  The Trivids said no, of course. It was inevitable that they would: few peoples in their position would have surrendered something so familiar to charges they neither understood nor saw any reason to believe. They reported their verdict to Mukh’than, with all due solemnity; Mukh’than reported it to Barath, with the smugness of a being who has just had his brilliant predictions fulfilled; Barath muttered some of the fouler curses known to his people, with the resentment of a starving creature promised but repeatedly denied sustenance. Then the villagers dispersed, but for a single ridgeback who lingered long enough to leave the two off-worlders with one final message.

  Mukh’than rubbed a finger across his cheek as the ridgeback scurried away. “It says they want us to leave. hey say we make them uncomfortable: you with your anger, myself with…”—a pause, rare among the Riirgaan’s usual smooth translations—“something they find just as disreputable.”

  “And yet they keep him. They don’t consider mass murder disreputable?”

  “They do,” Mukh’than said. “But they still consider him theirs. They will let us stay another night, but we will not be safe here if we stay much beyond that.”

  Barath’s claws emerged without his conscious consent. He clicked them together, feeling them scrape against each other, yearning for the warm bubbling reward of blood—though whether he most ached to slice the Trivids, the Riirgaan, or Magrison was something even he did not know. He did know it had less to do with the severity of the Human’s crimes than with his own frustration at being denied. “We have weapons. Can we take Magrison by force?”

  Mukh’than studied him for several seconds, his frozen features hiding a response that might have been anything from horror to enthusiasm. Transparent lids lowered halfway over the great empty blackness of his eyes. “Are you saying you’re prepared to kill them?”

  “If they get in our way….”

  “They’ll get in our way,” Mukh’than said, with absolute certainty. “If not before we take him, then afterward. Or do you think we can outrun the natives while carrying an invalid we’d need to keep alive?”

  “We can keep them at bay. Threaten to kill him if they don’t let us go.”

  “They’ll still follow. And send runners to other villages. The further we run the more surrounded we’ll be.”

  “Then we outfight them first.”

  “Kill one of them in such a fight and you’ll have to kill all of them. Even assuming they don’t manage to bring us down, a lone witness hiding somewhere beyond the tree line would be able to spread word of crimes committed against indigenes—and that’s not all that popular a practice, even in this orifice of a world. Word of it will be up and down the river long before we reach the nearest outpost. We’d wind up retreating to the jungle and spending the rest of our lives dodging spears and living on bugs and worms.”

  It was pretty much how Mukh’than lived now, absent the spears, but Barath’s short glimpse of the filthy lean-to the Riirgaan had constructed for himself had not recommended it as a lifestyle to be actively sought. But the need to suggest something, anything, kept Barath going: “The authorities might forgive us if we had the monster with us.”

  “The humans have a hateful history, but they’re much more bound by the morality of interspecies protocol than you suppose. You can read the annals of their Diplomatic Corps if you doubt me. But let us suppose we take your course. What if we kill them all, take our time getting back, and Magrison still doesn’t survive our journey to the river? How will we be forgiven for filling a village with corpses just so we could produce the one the authorities want?”

  Barath’s claws now fairly throbbed with impotent anger. As much as it galled him to acknowledge that the twisted Riirgaan could be correct about anything, it was all true. Without the consent of the natives, they really did have no recourse grander than bringing the evidence back to what passed for civilization and hoping that the Hom.Saps who followed up played fair when it came to the reward. And yet, the prospect of a lengthy hike back to the river, enduring Mukh’than’s company, without success to make up for it, seemed more nauseating still. “We’ll think of something before we leave.”

  “Do you truly think so?” Mukh’than asked, then added a few sardonic words in his native language.

  Suspecting an insult, Barath said: “What?”

  “It is a couplet from an epic poem beloved of my people, words spoken by a despairing hero who has given up everything in a fruitless quest to find a villain who once committed a great crime against him. He wanders for years, goes hungry more often than not, suffers every indignity a traveler can suffer, becomes a ragged beggar and then an embittered ancient, only to find that all this time the object of his hatred has lived a rich and full life overflowing with bounty. Cheated of the justice he craves, he collapses in physical and moral exhaustion, shouting those words at the night sky. They mean, ‘The Heavens always favor those who would reduce the heavens to ashes.’ It means that circumstances often conspire to free monsters of the consequences for their crimes…while those who hunt monsters destroy themselves by searching for justice. It’s a charming fable that has provided no end of comfort to me through the years.”

  Furious, Barath said: “Because it means your hunters may never find you.”

  “Exactly. I take my victories where can I find them.”

  Once, there was still ample life in our human’s aging bones—enough life, at least, that he still offered conversation to those few of us willing to oblige him. He cursed the bastards who were hunting him with a rage that made his eyes glow bright, and turned his voice into an open flame that would have seared any of them unlucky enough to stand exposed to its terrible heat. “Bastard” was of course a Human word, one of several harsh-sounding terms he used interchangeably with the far more reasonable vocabulary of our people. When I first heard him speak it, and the terrible hate he imbued it with, it conjured up a vague image of a terrible monster, like Our Human, only larger and blacker and better armed with claws and scales and teeth; a creature which could only inhabit the foulest of caves or the most monstrous of afterlives. As a child, the idea filled me with an infinite formless terror, and at night the spirits sent me terrible dreams about slavering Bastards come to get me. It did not make me afraid of Our Human, though. It made me feel sorry for a creature who had lost so much to such monsters. It was several seasons until Ctaas, who would become the Firstmother of my Grouping, but who was then a child as formless as I, heard him curse the bastards. In my presence Ctaas asked the Human the question I had been neither brave nor smart enough to voice: What Is A Bastard? Our Human had made that perverse coughing rasp that for his kind indicated vast amusement, and told us: A Bastard is a Human Being born without a Firstfather. It was even more alien than most of his answers, for we had never imagined that such an unnatural thing could happen, even among a species that only mated in Pairs. Our Human brings so much wonder, so much terrible strangeness, into our lives.

  Barath didn’t want to sleep that night, but as he curled up for what should have been a few hours of alert rest, Mukh’than arranged and set fire to his bowl of precious herbs. The vapor was usually no more than an acrid tang, no fouler than the smell of the Riirgaan himself. But tonight it seemed stronger. Tonight the air around Barath turned as thick as the clouds in a blind thing’s eyes, and something like unconsciousness came to claim him despite his intentions. His limbs grew heavy, his thoughts turned to crippled stumbling things, and his sense of time and place bubbled with contradictions. One part of him knew he was in a tent, among potential hostiles in a wretched village well beyond the few pockets of civilization that dotted this horrid world with no name. He felt the simmering fever at the base of his skull, the maddening itch where the scaleworm had gotten him, and the thousand and one smaller pains that came with any journey into places so inhospitable that the smallest steps exacted their price in blood. He even saw Mukh’than bending over him, murmuring words nothing like the prayers he had spoken eve
ry other night; and he experienced a moment of unease as the Riirgaan left him alone in a sleepcube filling up with intoxicating mist. He noticed, too, when Mukh’than returned with a rag over his face, carrying a knot of wriggling things at the end of a stick…and when Mukh’than left again. But another part of him was parsecs away, in the palace he would have built for himself upon returning home a success—a curtained place where a Kurth of distinction could luxuriate among his sycophants and slaves, inflating the victories of his youth into blessed lies.

  It was such a joyous dream that he might have surrendered to it and died thinking it was his actual fate, but then the palace around him seemed to fill with smoke, and he found himself back in the sleepcube in Irkiirish, tasting his foul dinner of the night before as it burst from his mouth in an explosion of bile.

  That was how he found out, before too late, that he couldn’t breathe.

  The air inside the sleepcube was now a gray mist that scoured his eyes—a lot like the Riirgaan’s ceremonial intoxicants, only worse. Barath’s lung was a burning ball of flame in his belly; his head a drum pounding out a song of imminent suffocation. He spat out the rest of the terrible taste in his mouth, rolled onto all fours, noted with distant rage that Mukh’than was nowhere to be seen, and for one queasy moment almost succumbed to the apathy that afflicts those so close to death that sinking all the way into that darkness seems less trouble than continuing to fight for life. Then anger took over and he drove himself forward, knocking over Mukh’than’s stool and hammock, stumbling over his own pack, and ultimately finding himself trapped against the cube’s flexible wall.

  Once again he almost gave up, thinking gray thoughts of how little he had to live for anyway. He was a pauper. He was dead to his people. He was a friendless alien earning subsistence wages working for human beings on a world so forsaken that even its natives hadn’t bothered to name it. There would never be any future for him, never any glory, never any redemption: just a wretched life and anonymous death.

  Then the distant awareness that this wasn’t just a stupid accident of some kind, but something else, ripped free a last defiant snarl. He popped his claws and punched holes in the soft canvas, carving stripes that his addled mind insisted on interpreting as wounds slashed in the flesh of an implacable enemy. Then he drove himself forward through the fresh exit, falling flat on his face in the mud created by a raging torrential rain. He vomited some more, tasted blood, and lay there hyperventilating as black fires burned at the edges of his consciousness.

  It seemed a long time before his mind blazed with a single-word explanation.

  Mukh’than.

  He must have added something poisonous to his vapors.

  Barath pushed himself off the ground, almost stumbling, but was able to rise to his hind legs, allowing the knuckles at his forelimbs to take the weight since his spine lacked the strength to support the far more awkward bipedal stance. His head lolled. He saw something white pulse between scales on his chest, and recognized it as a scaleworm, already growing fat on his blood. And there, further down, was another. And another.

  Barath remembered the glimpse of squirming things at the end of Mukh’than’s stick. Mukh’than had told him, just a few days earlier, to watch out for the males. Mukh’than would know what the males looked like. A Mukh’than turned malevolent—or, rather, revealing that he’d been malevolent since the beginning—would know just what to look for. How many had he found? Ten? Twenty? How many males in that many? And how long before they laid their eggs?

  Barath’s belly lurched. He spasmed, tried to expel whatever remained in his belly, and failed: there just wasn’t anything left to bring up. For just a moment, thinking of the pain in store for him, he wished he could return to the apathy of near-death that he had just fought off at such cost and once again enjoy freedom from caring. But there was no reclaiming such a lost opportunity. As much as he might wish for death soon, right now he could breathe. He could think. He could hate.

  He could see that the Trivids had been watching all along.

  He sacrificed stability for height and rose on his hind legs, snarling like a beast. The Trivids, gathered in the dark and the rain, reacted not at all. The anger burned in him again, and he stumbled forward, grabbing one of the ridgebacks by its neck. He wanted to shout, but the best he could manage was an explosive whisper. “Where is he?”

  Either the Trivid had no fear, or his kind showed it in a manner Barath did not know how to read. It did nothing.

  Barath wanted to tighten his grip and rip the creature’s head from its shoulders. There was no reason not to. He had no future, and he had no cause to care for his reputation.

  Then he saw the totem the Trivid held in its hand. They all held one: every single Trivid, holding before them all they had to show for Magrison’s presence among them. Some held theirs higher than others, either stressing the object’s power, or answering Barath in the only way they knew how.

  Barath released the ridgeback, dropped to all fours, and moved toward the crowd—not because he wanted any of them, but because they stood between him and his murderer.

  They moved aside.

  And in the hut a few short steps away he found Mukh’than, an ardent lover curled beside the ancient human in his bed.

  Our human described this Ravia as taller than himself, as thin as a reed, with a complexion the color of pebbled sand and sunny hair that descended to her shoulders in spiral ringlets. He said that since she was a Firstmother of his species and not a Firstfather like himself there were serious differences in the proportions of her body and his, but the descriptions themselves used terms that were unfamiliar to us. Once he said that every awful thing he had done, he did out of hate for those who had taken her. It is not a way of thinking we understand. But that is why we’re Trivids. And why he’s human.

  Magrison was a knot of withered flesh with frayed cords for limbs. He gaped at the thatched roof above him, not seeing it, reacting not at all to the presence of the Riirgaan who lay naked beside him, stroking Magrison’s pale white chest. Mukh’than seemed almost as insensate; he had closed both his transparent eyelids and the second layer of opaque ones that complemented them, and let his own mouth hang open, as if in parody of the human’s slack-jawed senility.

  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 armore
d 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.