Asimov's SF, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  Hobs are everywhere in our world, but those which do not belong to our retinues are generally shy as fauns. They slink back along corridors or hide in the vegetation as soon they sense our approach. So quickly and efficiently do they vanish that it barely ever occurs to us humans that they are there. If we were to consider this trick at all—which I then never did—it seems almost magical. But the fact is that hobs hear and scent us long before we are seen. To put it bluntly, we smell as strongly to them as they do to us, and they have trained themselves to notice our presence just as rigorously as we have trained ourselves not to notice theirs. Hob, or human. Ignored, or noticed. That, it sometimes seems to me now, is where the true distinction ultimately lies.

  Even if I was unconcerned by such questions, I was a busy and inquisitive child, and my parents saw to it that I was provided with academics and priests to keep me occupied and out of their sight. A restless learner, I much preferred to stride around the grounds and hallways of our homestead than to be confined to the single high room in which I was supposed to study. My tutors, being in the main sensible, intelligent men and women—and, for academics, quick on their legs—were generally happy to walk with me.

  Once I had mastered the basics of calligraphy and numerology, I became a child of endlessly changing enthusiasms and fascinations. Why do the petals of a flower only come in certain numbers? Why is the sky blue, and why are the stars only visible at night? And what, exactly, is the mechanism by which the seasons come and go? Later, I came to ask even more imponderable questions, such as how it is, if the Gods are endlessly wise, that people receive different answers when they pray to them. And why do hobs look so nearly like us, and yet remain so different...? Perhaps I asked that last question as well as I strode along the florid avenues and golden-paved battlements with some flustered tutor. And, as always, the garden hobs retreated as they sensed our approach, and the domestic ones who followed with their fans and awnings waited until they were summoned by a gesture, and our debate continued as we took our ease on cushions laid across their bent backs and were silently served with refreshments by their unnoticed hands.

  In winter, Dhiol became a less favored place. Although trade continued and the river never iced itself over in those days, it was customary for families of our class to travel downstream through the mountains and lowlands to escape the worst of the cold. Sometimes we crossed the Bounded Sea to sample the delights of the cities of Ulan Dor or Thris. Long before my age reached a century of Moons, I had stood on the Glass Pinnacle and counted—or tried to count—the sacred flamingos. I rode an elephant along the Parade of the Gods and blew the sacred horn to celebrate the flooding of the God River. I witnessed priests, crimsonly enrobed with the skins of their sacrifices, moving down the steps of the great temple of Thlug. But it was always the journey rather than the arrival that most appealed to me; the procession of landscapes as we headed down the Great North Water, then the glimpsed islands and broad horizons and all the changing moods of the sea. Being merchants, my family had their pick of the best vessels. No matter how rough the weather, they always felt like places of safety to me. Ships were places of exploration as well. After the endless avenues of our homestead, it was liberating to live aboard spaces so confined, yet within which—along gangways and inside storage spaces and beneath endless levels of deck—there was always some new surprise.

  Afloat, the proximity of the hobs was unavoidable. Look up at the sails, and you would see dozens of them climbing like apes in a jungle. Look toward the waters, and there was the endless plash of the oars; a ship's heartbeat is the beating of its engine room drum. On the decks themselves, ropes were always being fed through pulleys, as woods and irons and brasses were polished. I stepped around these activities much as you might step around a lamp-pillar in the street, but I also studied their processes in the abstract sort of way that seems to typify my intellect. I came to enjoy analyzing the configuration of the sails, and quizzed the mariners about their differing functions. Occasionally, one of the figures that moved with such acrobatic abandon along the spars and ropes would misjudge a leap and tumble into the sea. They never made a sound as they fell. The vessel pushed on without pause. I was reminded, I remember, of apples dropping from a tree. I even considered producing a poem on the subject, although, if I had ever written it, it would have been more about orchards than about hobs.

  The masters, navigators and gangsmen were enormously proud of their vessels, and were as keen to show me their engine rooms, for all their stink and noise, as they were to demonstrate their understanding of the stars. Down at the waterline, the sustained beat of the motive drum, and the movement that came with it—the slide and creak of wood, the tensing of hob muscle, the huge combined intakes and outtakes of hob breath—became a solid presence that thrummed within your chest. Striding down the gangways, the captain or master would explain in great detail the length of the oars and the mechanisms of the rowlocks and the number of arms—they never talked of whole hob bodies—that serviced them. The squeamish might find such scenes hellish, but as I was told about stroke speeds and sweeps of arc and shift times, I saw the hobs as these mariners saw them; as one combined mass of muscle. The stink and effluent, the shortage of good air, the bodies—components—that failed during shifts and had to be swiftly hoisted out, disposed of and replaced without loss of the rhythm, were all mere technicalities; the equivalents of how a drainage engineer might discuss rates of inundation and flow.

  The first time I came consciously into closer contact with a hob beyond my thoughtless encounters with our domestic retinue was on one of these ocean journeys. It was a pale morning, and our vessel was surrounded by nothing but sea. I had risen early to discover everything misted, shining and slippery, and greyly dark. I was still in the phase of inwardly composing poems that I never actually wrote, and I recollect as I stood at the rail and looked out into the fading nothingness that I was thinking how the ship itself, in its stealth and greyness, seemed to be made of little more than mist. Doubtless, the engine-room drum was still beating and the oars were thrashing as they drove us on—the entire ship would have thrummed and creaked as all such vessels do—but we had been at our journey for a few days, and all I felt was silence, all I breathed was stillness and fog.

  The next thing I remember is a spinning whooshing, and being knocked sideways across the deck. When I recovered my senses, I discovered the weight of some other living thing lying on top of me, and a face briefly peering down into my own. What I saw, before it clambered off and loped into the mist, was nothing but the generalized features of a typical hob—beetle-browed, chinless, broad-nosed, pale-skinned and set with a wild spew of reddish hair. Several mariners were already running over to me as I got up. Even as I attempted to explain what had happened, it seemed impossible that I could have been touched—assaulted—by such a beast. Then one of the men grinned and pointed to the spew of rope and metal that had gouged itself across the deck. A pulley must have broken somewhere high up in the masts and come swinging toward me out of the mist. If it hadn't been for the intervention of that hob, I would have been killed.

  * * * *

  Another winter faded, and my family returned with the birds toward the mountains and forests of the cooler north, to find our gardens emerging from their winter swaddlings, and the house perfectly clean, and our beds warmed and aired, and fresh fruits and sweetmeats laid in bowls on the tables, and fires crackling in every hearth. The gardens, in particular, were delight in this coming season of growth. In response to my endless questions about the purposes of insects and the mechanisms of fruiting and growth, my parents placed me in the company of Karik, the most senior garden gangmaster.

  Everything that's ever said about hob gangmasters is true. Karik was tall and unstooped. His face was broadly handsome. His skin was aristocratically dark. All in all, he was about as far from the near-hobbish caricature of his type as you could possibly get. But in every other way he fitted the bill. A
s he promenaded the fields and gardens, he would pause in his explanations of when the soil should be turned, or a tree pruned, and call over some creature that I, in my absorption, had not even noticed, and strike them hard and efficiently with the cane he always carried. No explanation was ever given. Glancing back as he and I strode on, I noticed how other nearby hobs ceased their tasks and scurried over to see to the needs of their—what was the term, comrade, fellow, friend, colleague? Perhaps it's a sign of the beginnings of my obsession that I was starting to wonder about such things. Karik was as skilled with his cane as he was with the other aspects of his craft, and I'm sure that some of the hobs had their limbs broken, although others remained capable of getting up and continuing working. I suspect a few were actually killed. Karik knew what he was doing, and I suppose the hobs understood as well.

  As well as a cane, Karik carried several gardening implements slung around his hips on a belt. An eccentricity of his was that he would sometimes stoop down toward the earth and actually snip a shoot, or even dig out a weed, with his own bare hands. In that busy season for new planting, he would sometimes take the pointed wooden object he called his dibber, and work it into the soil, and physically plant a tuber or seed. I watched this activity with amazement. It seemed as unlikely a thing as a human cook peeling a vegetable, a sweep personally climbing up a chimney, or a dressmaker physically sewing the fabric of a dress. But when Karik encouraged me to try, I discovered that I actually liked the grainy feel of the earth and the dark scent it left upon my hands. I like it still.

  As a student of horticulture, I also became a student of the work of the hobs. I felt by now that I knew our entire homestead. But, wandering with Karik and then on my own, I discovered new landscapes hilled with piles of mulching vegetation, and low arches which I'd long passed without noticing within the house itself, which led down narrow stairways into smoky caverns. The hobs were endlessly busy. They were always carrying things away, or bearing them in, or wading ditches, or bearing laundry, or scooping out sludge. Pushing my way around unlikely corners, I would emerge into storerooms and potting sheds. There were cavernous kitchens and huge glasshouses and busy workshops and subterranean acreages of dusty furniture waiting for their fashion's return.

  Once when I was exploring the gardens, I re-found a turn along which Karik had shown me several Moons earlier. The potting sheds, I reckoned with my newly acquired knowledge, would be already busy with the planting for the following spring, but, contrary to my expectations, they seemed to be deserted. I hunched along the dark passages, curious as ever, and enjoying the feel and the taste—it was too intense to be called merely a smell—of the rich, loamy earth. Here and there were set rooflights, emblazoning the blackness with gilded veins of Sun. The roots and shoots exposed by my exploring fingers could have been formed of the finest coral. When I sensed something ahead of me, I moved softly on. I had learned that, if I kept downwind of them and moved quietly enough, I could sometimes catch working hobs unawares.

  Ribboned in a dazzling fall of light, Karik and a hob were engaged in some strange mutual contortion. The scene was oddly beautiful. They were both making sounds and their voices, hob grunt and human cry, intermingled in a way that could have been a sacred chant. Their gleaming bodies rose and fell. The hob, who was bending, shook her mane of hair in a spray of gold. Karik was bucking and baring his teeth. He was rivered with sweat. And his penis, which was at least as long and thick as his dibber, thrust and emerged from the hob's nether regions, and she thrust and bucked back. Then, with a rising bellow that began in the depths of Karik's lungs and which the higher scream of the hob's voice almost extinguished at its peak, the business that they were engaged in reached some kind of conclusion.

  The two creatures, human and hob, fell back from each other toward the soft earth. Karik muttered something, and the hob replied in a growl as she climbed from her knees. Her gaze shifted along the tunnel to where I was standing as she swiped the dirt from her breasts, and she stepped back into the blackness, and was instantly gone. Karik turned to look in the same direction, his still erect penis trailing a glistening blob. When he saw me hunched there in the shadows, he tossed back his head and laughed like a God.

  * * * *

  Hobs are born male or female. They do not lay eggs or have beaks or scales. They do not dwell in eyries or the depths of the ocean. Neither do they produce flowers or send out roots. They may have oddly pale skins and those masses of russet hair, and be broader and shorter than we humans are, but they are the only species I know of that chooses to walk on two legs just as we do. Their faces may be somewhat flatter than ours, but their eyes and mouths and ears and noses are arranged much like our own. In fact, their bodies are like ours in almost every significant detail. And they possess penises and vaginas—unless, that is, they have been physically removed.

  As outdoor hobs routinely work naked, even a child far younger and less curious than I should long have been acquainted with these facts. Even you, patient reader, will be aware of the similarities of fleshy geometry that humans and hobs share. We are alike in ways that horses and dogs and sheep and cattle and all the other creatures that serve us are not. That, I believe now, is why we keep ourselves so far apart.

  What I saw happening between Karik and that hob left me puzzled, and it was a quieter and less exploratory child who inhabited our homestead for the rest of that summer. One who, much to the relief of his parents and tutors, was happy to sit up in his room in the high tower and seek knowledge within ancient scrolls.

  After its uncertain start, the weather that year turned hotter than anyone could remember this far north. People walked beneath fans and awnings when they walked at all, and received their guests seated in cool, lily-adorned baths. Carpets were taken up. Beds were placed on balconies. Gangs of hobs were diverted from their usual tasks to fan air along complex systems of vents. The gardens beyond my windows shimmered and blazed. Then, just a few days before my family was planning to flee this furnace for the cooler Winds of the coast, the skies above Dhiol finally darkened. I looked up from my work to silently urge the Gods to break their thunder overhead. And, like the opening of a sluicegate, they did. For all my newfound seriousness, I couldn't help but rush down the stairways and out into the lightning-split torrent like the excited child I still almost was. I spread my arms and tilted back my head. Jumping from the lip of an overflowing fishpond, I felt my right leg slip out, and twist and buckle with a grating snap.

  * * * *

  It was a bad break. I was delirious for several days with medicines and pain. When I finally awoke, I found myself immobile in a vast, strange bed. Looking up at the ornate drapes, painted wooden arches and door-sized cushions of which the boat-like structure was composed, I felt an odd flash of recognition. An echo of my fever came back over me, and I cried out. I feared for a moment that I had actually died, and was lying in my own tomb. Or, worse still, that I had been interred while still living. Pale and quick as a ghost, a hob face came and went amid the turbulent decorations. Intense pain shot through me. I cried out again, and struggled to fight my way out of this gilded tomb.

  Footsteps came, followed by a flutter of hunting scenes and forests amid the fabrics. I cringed, expecting some ebony guardian of the Afterworld to emerge. But it was only my mother. I say only, but she was surrounded as always by a large retinue of personal hobs dressed in silks that complemented and blended with her own attire. They were bearing the golden poles of the great crimson canopy that evolved into a hat as it neared her head, and wafting the dyed and silvered ostrich feathers and incense burners that fanned her air, and laying down the rose petals upon which she habitually walked, and sweeping them up in her wake, and carrying her enormous silk train like some great living fishtail, and plucking the small instruments from which emerged the aura of sound that she always bore with her. Smiling down at me, actually taking my bare hand in her own gloved one for a few moments, she asked if I was feeling better. Despite the obvious stupidity
of my accident, she was in a forgiving mood. She told me how she had briefly feared for the worst, and had had the family tombs re-surveyed and this ancestral bed restored in case the journey of my fever should take me further than this earth. I nodded and smiled as pain and surprise receded. Looking up at the tumbling, fruited carvings, I realized why I had dimly recognized this structure; I had come across it in on my wanderings through the vast storerooms which formed part of the hidden landscape of this house.

  “The arrangements for our journey south,” she told me, “are too far advanced to be postponed. Contracts have been set. Visits have been promised. Sacrifices have been made. Feasts and entertainments have been agreed. Money, above all, has been paid. Your father and I will be traveling downriver as usual, but we have discussed the matter and decided that it would be impossible for you to come with us in your current state. You will remain here through the winter in our homestead, and your body will heal. Everything has been arranged.”