by Ian Whates
“It’s proscribed for a reason. May I visit you? I want to give you short-term partitioning to proof you against further impact. Not something I can just transmit.”
“Fine.”
The colonel doesn’t ask for a location; she turns up within the hour. In a glance her mouth tightens. “You haven’t eaten or slept enough. You look like hell and smell like burnt plastic. When I said stay safe I also meant stay alive.”
“What’s my name again? I must’ve told you.”
Etiesse’s expression contorts. In another person it might have looked as if she might cry. “Pahayal Rukhim. You’ll remember that in a moment. Come on, we have to establish a link.”
They peel back their secondskin, connect their tertiary sockets. The click of joining, an unpleasant brush of dataspheres pulsing each to the other.
“I can’t imagine what living with this has been like. Exposure to repeated grid stress, abstract trauma, and barely any conditioning to soften it. You’ve held up well.” Etiesse smooths shut her port. “The partitioning expires in a month. By then everything should be resolved.”
“Sujari’s surprised you twice.” Pahayal fingers her own socket. The world is so silent, her sight so clear. No interference, not a whisper of signal that doesn’t belong. She’s grown so accustomed to the mental fog, the instability of her own perception. “You sound very confident.”
“Logic bombs don’t affect our personnel. We’ve been dealing with a light hand and that’s made the Chariot of Sujari cocky. The Wheel and the Lotus tried to steer him away from open warfare, but he consolidated his power a long time ago.”
“Did they send you because you look Jiratar?”
“Did they now?” Etiesse sits down among the grass rising high and glinting like swords between them. “I wonder. There are officers better suited to this, but I doblend in at a glance.”
Pahayal reaches across, sliding her fingers through the colonel’s hair, a gesture as calculated as it is desperate. “This is your forebears’ world; this is the soil you could’ve called your own. Tell me you feel something.”
For half a minute Etiesse cants her cheek into Pahayal’s palm. Then she gently pulls away. “When your system falls under a unified government led by Jiratar, you’ll find doors opening that were always shut. Opportunities you never even thought of. Eligibility as officer candidates.”
“Provided we comply with the Hegemony on every point.”
The colonel’s mouth twists. “Shahari is a pragmatic person.”
Shahari as the planetary governor: her reward for collaboration. They will need a whole new title for her. Perhaps they can crown her empress or goddess. Pahayal almost laughs. “You’ve known for a year what was happening in this system. You delayed taking action because you wanted us to surrender our sovereignty willingly, to ask for Hegemonic intervention.”
“I can’t confirm any of that.” Etiesse passes a hand over her face. “You’d think it wouldn’t get to me.”
“I should have drowned you.”
“I know.”
“I’ll never forgive you.”
“Yes.” The colonel stands. “I know that too.”
AFTERMATH CELEBRATIONS ARE immediate and ubiquitous. Pahayal eschews them all and keeps to the funerals, drifting from one to the next until her mouth tastes of nothing but mourning dishes.
They are mass affairs, too many dead for individual rites. As a sign of newfound unity Jiratar and Sujari bodies lie in state side by side. Hegemonic personnel stand guard in chitin-plated ranks, faces hidden behind helms.
Elector Shahari Udha officiates along with the Wheel and Lotus of Sujari. She wears severe clothes, sharp stiff lines and unpatterned fabrics. Next to the platinum- and gold-threaded robes, Shahari could have been from anywhere, a cultural chameleon. In public addresses, on her own or jointly, she never speaks of Colonel Etiesse.
Despite that omission Etiesse attends, her dress uniform scarab-dark, rank insignia a cold star over her heart. She doesn’t draw attention to herself, doesn’t impose her company. Just one more officer among dozens.
In the end Pahayal makes herself approach the colonel at the pyres. They watch smoke thicken over the bodies and their funeral silks.
“One day,” Pahayal says, “that’ll be you.”
Etiesse inclines her head. “Eventually that will be all of us.”
“Got your promotion?”
“Not yet. After everything settles, I’ll be made brigadier-general.”
“Congratulations.” Pahayal unclinches a twist of cloth from her throat, holding out the shark pendant. “A gift from an important friend, unless I’m wrong. You shouldn’t just pass it around.”
“Keep it.”
They rise, follow the priests down to the riverbank, a gray small procession: too few come to the funerals. The trap-drones and their detritus have been swept away, leaving the Amraste a stark blazing path.
“Keep it.” Etiesse nods at the priests floating ashes down fistful by fistful. “You can be the one to put me in a pyre. Burn the pendant with me, that’s all I ask.”
“I’m not going to tend to your funeral rites. That’ll be the duty of your family and spouses.”
“Oh, no. I was hoping you’d shoot me. You can even pick the gun; tell me the specs and I’ll bring or custom-order one. It’simportant for the balance and grip to be just right.”
Her fingers clench over the shark, its edges biting into skin. “I won’t be your absolution.”
The colonel turns to her. River-light seethes gold on the black of armor, gold on a face like sculpted teak. “One day,” Etiesse says, laughing as if imparting a wonderful joke, “I’ll be sick of what I do; I’ll tire of life and what I am. It won’t be soon, perhaps in a hundred years or hundred fifty, but it’s inevitable. When that day comes I’ll catch a ship here and look for you. I’ll bring a weapon of your choice and you can have, if not justice, then a little satisfaction.”
“And to abet your suicide I’ll have to wait more than a century?”
“What with the implants I will see two hundred plus, and I didn’t say I was in a hurry. Still, a fair enough deal, wouldn’t you agree? I’ll make sure you are provided for – the best medical care, so you can last as long as I do. My life I’m afraid you can’t have, but my death is all yours.” Etiesse’s smile is quick and mischievous, a shared secret. Just like the war.
But this one would be trivial. By any standards, two casualties hardly signify.
“I’ll wait,” Pahayal says. “And I will not forgive you. Not in the next ten years, or fifty, or hundred.”
In the river, the ashes have turned the water gray, a murk of dead eddying toward the sea. Quartz cicadas shine and sing among the whispering grass, the music of a perfect spring day.
“Good.” Etiesse laughs again and fastens the pendant around Pahayal’s neck. “I look forward to it.”
THE GOBLIN HUNTER
CHRIS BECKETT
First published in Interzone in 1990, Chris Beckett’s stories have since appeared regularly in magazines and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in two single-author collections, The Turing Test (winner of the Edge Hill Short Fiction Award in 2009) and The Peacock Cloak. He has also published four novels: The Holy Machine, Marcher (now available in a new revised edition from NewCon Press), Dark Eden, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and its sequel, Mother of Eden (November 2014). Chris lives in Cambridge, England.
SHE WAS ON the far side of the abyss. She was in a truly alien world. She was in Lutania. Here it was, in front of her now, as solid and real as her own hand, trees like giant mushrooms, without the smallest trace of green.
“It’s so quiet!”
Sergei smiled.
“I know. It takes some getting used to. But none of the creatures here use sound to communicate. They don’t need to because...”
“Because of telepathy.”
“Exactly, because of that strange capacity they have that we don�
�t yet understand. And they don’t come out much in the daytime in any case.”
“So right now, they’re...”
“They’re underneath us. We’re standing on a million years-worth of matted lateral roots, and a metre below is a sea. Look, I’ll show you.”
“Oh it’s so lovely of you to take the time to show me around like this, Sergei,” Janet suddenly gushed, as he led her through the trees.
Everything in this world was wonderful, it seemed to her, even her new boss, who was about her own age and surely the most beautiful man she had ever met.
Sergei gave her a little tight smile which told her rather plainly that she was pushing things further than they were ever really going to go. But her enthusiasm was only dampened for a moment. How could she feel anything other than excitement, with this all around her? This silence. This otherness.
“We call these ponds,” Sergei said. “You find them at regular intervals pretty much throughout the forest. Of course they aren’t really ponds at all, they’re openings into the ocean. It’s from them that the creatures emerge every night.”
The pond was an oasis of light. All round it, clumps of fleshy, lichen-like vegetation shone pink and white in the sunshine. The water itself was about five metres deep. She saw a shoal of tiny creatures – they were too small for her to be able to tell if they were anything like terrestrial fish – and then, just for a moment, she spotted something larger moving down at the bottom. It shot away under the roots of the trees before she could get a proper look at it.
“That wasn’t an...”
“An indigene?” Sergei smiled. “No it wasn’t. You’d know, believe me, if it had been. I think that was probably a biggish water dragon, but I really only caught a glimpse.”
“A water dragon. Wow.”
Janet stared down into water.
“I can’t wait to see my first real indigene,” she said.
Her boss straightened up and looked at her.
“Yes, well, you need to bear in mind that it’s not usually a very pleasant experience.”
“Oh I know they mess with your head, Sergei. Of course I do. But I’m well prepared for that, and I’m sure...”
“Prepared for it or not, Janet, the fact remains that when you get close to an indigene, you’re confronted with your own darkness. It’s not a nice feeling, not for most people, and not something you ever get used to: it works at too basic a level. Of course it’s really only a defensive mechanism that they’ve evolved, the telepathic equivalent of a skunk’s smell, but I can sort of understand why the Luto...”
“Oh wow, look at that!”
A strange object was drifting among the shadows of the trees about three metres above the forest floor. It looked a little like a balloon and a little like a jellyfish, with long tendrils trailing beneath. From time to time it bumped against a mushroomy trunk and bounced off again.
Sergei laughed.
“That’s just a floater. You’ll soon get used to those.”
THE SHACK WAS beside a pond, a kilometre or so from the rest of the village. On the far side of the pond was the silent forest, pink and yellow and grey, but here, round the dilapidated shack with its single smoking flue, there were bedraggled plots of maize, a few rows of tobacco plants and some poorly tended beans climbing up ramshackle poles. From the air, Luto settlements resembled patches of green mould.
Anna was sitting on the steps of the rickety veranda. She was a young woman of twenty-three, but a stranger might easily have mistaken her for a ten-year-old boy, for she was less than five foot tall, wore boy’s clothes, and had her hair cropped to within a few millimetres of her scalp. Right now, she was clearly not happy. She was holding her face in her hands, rocking back and forth, and softly muttering to herself.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
She was shivering slightly too, even though the air was warm: the caramel air of the Lutanian forest, with its faint hint of decay.
THE FIRST INDIGENES Janet saw were dead ones; two grey half-dried things, like decapitated frogs, nailed to a gibbet beside a forest track.
“Oh, that’s awful. Who does such a thing? Who could possibly bring themselves to kill an intelligent being that’s lived here peacefully for millions of years? It’s not as if they’re a danger of any kind.”
“I’m afraid that’s not how the locals see things,” said Sergei as he stopped the truck.
There was another protection officer with them called Tom, a quiet man, a generation older than Janet and Sergei, who’d been on Lutania for some years, and it was him that pulled out the nails. Janet tried not to retch as Tom and Sergei pushed the thin shrunken things into plastic body bags.
“They don’t seem to have bones at all.”
“No, they don’t,” Tom said, as they climbed back into the truck. “Their bodies work with hydraulics.”
The truck was painted yellow, the same colour as their uniforms, and had black writing on the side.
Lutanian Development Agency: Indigenous Protection it said, and then the same thing in Luto.
“Well I suppose we have to ask about this in the nearest village,” Sergei said. “God knows they’ve had enough input from us round here about how goblins are harmless and protected by law, but, all the same, I’ll happily give you each a whole week of my pay if anyone admits to knowing the slightest thing about this.”
He looked out for a moment through the silent forest at the ponds shining in the distance, then pressed the starter button. The truck rolled forward with a faint electric whine.
“Our informers tell us that a lot of village councils are paying a bounty on goblin heads these days,” he said. “It seems to be a whole new campaign.”
“Some people think the Agency’s efforts to protect the indigenes have made things worse,” Tom observed. “We’ve tinkered with a balance we didn’t understand, and made the locals think they need to wipe them out altogether while they’ve got the chance, rather than just keep them at bay like they always used to do.”
“‘Some people’ meaning you of course,” Sergei observed acidly. “What do you want us to do? Stand by while the intelligent race of another planet is treated like vermin to be hunted down?”
Tom raised his hands.
“I’m not a policy-maker, Sergei. Don’t ask me. I don’t have that kind of brain, and I don’t get that kind of pay either. I’m just saying that the bounty-hunting is a new thing, and it began soon after we started prosecuting goblin killers.”
“I’d put it down to the fact that we also started paying out development grants to village councils. That’s put a lot more cash into their hands. The intention was to encourage investment in skills, but instead it’s created a market for specialist goblin-killers.”
“It has,” Tom agreed. “Some of them make enough to support a whole family, by all accounts.”
“I don’t see how they can bring themselves to do it,” Janet said. “Okay, I know indigenes make people feel weird when they get too near, but they never kill, they never steal, they don’t stop the settlers from doing anything they want.”
Sergei shrugged.
“Goblins take over your mind, if you let them, that’s what the Luto people think. Give them a chance to get into your head, and before you know it you’ll be a goblin too. Not really human at all, not really even an individual. More like some kind of fungal growth.”
“Weird thing is,” Tom observed, “most of these goblin hunters are young girls.”
“Yes, and social misfits,” Sergei said. “Unmarriageable girls. The lowest of the low. Villagers keep their distance from them because they’re seen as half goblin themselves, but they get a certain amount of respect because of what they do, which they might otherwise not have had.”
“Poor things,” murmured Janet. “How awful they have to commit murder to gain acceptance from their community.”
UP THE STEPS of the shack came Anna’s uncle Paulo. He was a big pear-shaped man with a thick tobacco-stained
moustache and eyes that looked in two different directions, almost at right angles to one another. Now his left eye regarded his niece and took in her agitated state while his right gazed out accusingly at the mushroomy forest.
He squatted down beside her. Absently, he slipped his left hand under her shirt and began to stroke the skin of her back.
“They’re out there again, are they?” he asked. “You can hear them in your head?”
He spoke in Luto. Neither of them had any English.
Anna took her hands away from her face, and nodded. It was a funny little face, wrinkled like an old woman’s.
“Telling you all those bad things again?” Paulo asked, his left hand still stroking his niece’s skin.
Anna, shivering, nodded.
“Well we know what to do about that, don’t we?” said Paulo.
He turned towards the shack and gave a loud whistle.
SERGEI’S MONEY WAS safe. No one in the village knew the slightest thing about the gibbet, and certainly not the headman, Feliso, with his leathery skin, his sparkly eyes and his enormous black moustache.
“I am desolated not to be of more help,” he told them, expressing his regret not only in words but with an expansive gesture that seemed to include not only his arms and his face, but every part of his body.
Sergei had introduced Janet as a new arrival from Earth and now Feliso leaned towards her, so close that she received the full blast of his garlicky breath, and spoke to her personally, as if confiding to her alone an unfortunate episode in his family history, which he’d rather the others didn’t hear.
“We regard the Agency as an older brother, you see, my dear. We’d been all on our own here in Lutania for so long, generations, toiling away with our rough wooden spades in our little plots, and then suddenly – pouf! – the Agency arrives from the home planet we thought had forgotten us. Almost like an angel from heaven. They bring us knowledge, tools, medicines. They bring us roads and schools. How could we not be grateful? How could we not wish to help you? But, alas, we know nothing about these dead goblins. There are so many strangers in these woods these days, you see, since you brought us trucks and cars. They can come from far away and be gone again the next day.”
