“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 bother 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)
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Books by Elizabeth Bear
2.
Doc Holliday leaned his head way back, tilting his hat to shade his eyes from the glare of the November sun and said, “Well, that still looks like some Jules Verne shit to me.”
The hulk that loomed over, curving gently outward to a stalklike prow, could have been the rust-laceworked, rust-orange hulk of any derelict ironclad. Except it was hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, and a hundred times too big to be a ship. It was too big, in fact, to be an opera hall, and that was where Doc’s imagination failed him.
Behind him, four women and a man shifted in their saddles, leather creaking. None of them spoke. Doc figured they were just as awed as he was. More, maybe: he’d stopped here once before, when he rode into Tombstone the previous year. None of them had ever seen it.
One of the horses whuffed, stamping baked caliche. A puff of dust must have risen from the impact. Doc could smell it, iron and salt and grit. His own mount picked its way between crumbling chunks of metal and some melted, scorched substance with the look of resin or tortoiseshell.
One of the women said something pleased and indistinct to her companions. Doc didn’t strain too hard to overhear.
A hot wind dried the sweat on his face beneath the scruff of a three-day beard as his own bay gelding fidgeted. Doc settled it with a touch of his leg. The gelding’s sweat soaked the inseam of his trousers between saddle-skirt and boot-top.
Doc let the silence drag, contemplating the great plates and icicles of rust armoring the surface of the whatever-it-was. Its broken spine zig-zagged off into the heat shimmer. A long furrowed scrape marred the desert behind the hulk. That impact—or just the desert—had gnawed several holes in its flanks, revealing buckled decks, dangling pipe and wiring, stretched and twisted structural members.
Here and there in its shadowed depths, blue-white lights still burned, as they had when Doc first saw it.
The other five came up alongside Doc, their horses indolent in the heat. In all honesty, he hadn’t been sanguine about bringing four ladies into the trackless desert—even the kind of ladies that wore trousers and went heeled and rode astride like men—but they had been determined on riding out with him or without. He figured “without” was a hell of a lot less safe than “with,” and in the end chivalry had won. Chivalry, and the need for some ready cash to settle at the faro table, where he owed a debt to that damned John Ringo.
Ringo—and not just the debt—was another reason. Because if Doc hadn’t taken the job as a ladies’ touring guide, Ringo in his yellow-and-black check shirt sure as hell would have. And then Doc might as well have these tenderfoots’ deaths on his conscience, as if he had shot them with his own gun. Ringo would have no qualms about relieving them of their horses and cash by any means possible…shy of earning it fairly.
The horses drifted to a stop again, scuffing and shuffling in a ragged arc: one chestnut, one gray, one dun, and three assorted browns and bays. For now, Doc’s charges—he wasn’t sure yet if you could call them companions—were content to stare up at the wreck in silence and awe. Which suited Doc just fine. The dust was making his chest ache, and he didn’t feel like talking.
He reached into his pocket for a stick of horehound, peeled the waxed paper back, and bit off a chip to suck on. The last thing he needed now was a goddamned coughing fit.
On Doc’s left, the lone other man lifted his hat off a grizzled head. He mopped the sweat from his bald spot with a once-red kerchief that had faded to the color of the dull yellow earth. His name was Bill. He was quiet and needed a shave. Doc hadn’t learned too much else about him.
Bill said, “I reckon we should ride around it first?”
“Before we dismount?” The woman who gave him a sideways nod was tall, skinny. Doc thought she might be his wife, but he and all the others called her Missus Shutt. She had long wrists and long hands, and her steel-colored hair was clipped shorter at her nape than most men’s. Her gray eyes snapped with charisma and intelligence. She would have been beautiful, Doc thought, but her nose was too small.
The little blonde on her left almost got lost under a wavy, ill-contained billow of caramel-colored hair—the kind of hair that belonged spread out on a man’s pillow. Pigeon-breasted, with a rump like a punching pony poured into her shiny-seated trousers, she sat her red gelding with the erect spine and lifted chin of one of Doc’s girl cousins back home, as if she was not accustomed to the relaxed Western seat. Her name was Missus Jorgensen.
Beyond her was Miss Lil, the big one who looked to have some Mexican in her. Or maybe some Indian. Or maybe both. It wasn’t so different. Miss Lil wasn’t just big for a woman—she was broad shouldered and had about a half foot on Doc’s five-ten. Her hair twisted in a black braid that snaked out from under her chapeau fat as a well-fed rattler.
The sixth person—and fourth woman—in their little group of adventurers was a beautiful quadroon with a long, elegant jaw and crooked teeth. The Negress’s name was Flora. Despite the heat, she wore a fringed suede jacket. It matched the sheath on the saddle by her knee that held the coach gun she seemed to prefer to the pistols all the others carried.
Doc—no fool—was heeled with both.
“By the time we get around this thing the shade will have shifted,” Doc said. “We can tether the horses in it.”
Bill asked, “Is it safe to leave them so close to the wreck?”
Doc rattled that bit of horehound against the backs of his top teeth with the tip of his tongue. “It’s what we’ve got for shelter.”
The big woman leaned out of her saddle, making her horse sidle and fret. “There’s no tracks around it,” she said, after a mome
nt’s inspection. “Nothing to show anything might have crawled out, anyway. Or dragged anything back in again.”
Heads swiveled. Doc might be the guide, the local—laughably speaking—expert. But it didn’t take much to see the quadroon woman was the leader of the group that had hired him. And none of them seemed to find anything strange about it.
Doc washed the lingering bitterness of the horehound down with a swig from his canteen. None of his concern how people ran their lives. His job was getting them all into the wreck, and all out safe again with whatever it was they thought so worth risking money, bullets, and their lives to find.
* * *
Their slow circuit took the better part of an hour, and while it did reveal some tracks, they were those of coyote, lizard, javelina, and hare. Condensation formed inside the rusting hulk when the temperature dropped at night—a resource no desert creature would ignore.
Doc, with Miss Lil, was riding slightly ahead of the others—both of them leaning down silent and intent as they surveyed the scarred earth—when she cleared her throat, reined in the heavy-boned, bald-faced brown mare that bore up under her weight with ease, and murmured, “Doc?”
He turned, followed the gesture of her large, graceful hand, and frowned down at some rows of wavering, parallel scratches in the dust. When he looked up again, Miss Lil was regarding him levelly out of eyes brown and intelligent as her mare’s. Her eyebrows rose in a question.
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2012 Edition: A Tor.Com Original Page 22
