The free preview continues! Helpful Links: Angry Robot Books, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
When she leaves you alone for a little while, you taste the straw that is your bedding. It’s almost inedible, but overwhelmed by hunger you force it down. When she returns and catches you, she scolds you. “I’ve bought you extra gruel,” she adds. “It’s all there is.”
You get most of it in your mouth, finishing it within seconds. You lick the plate clean with what the rational part of your mind flags with inappropriate haste (inappropriate to what?), then you nuzzle amongst the straw and lick it clean.
“Oh, Loki.” Bera gently touches your arm. “You have to start behaving more like a man, and less an animal, or Ragnar will have all the excuse he needs to get rid of you.” You look up at her, drinking in her features. She says, “Does my looks repel even you, my child-man? Or do you not care? He didn’t.”
Then, as if the food has awoken some animal from its slumbers the world is again full of voices shouting mostly meaningless words:
“Iceland had no fruit-bearing trees–”
“Humanity has split into a myriad of factions–”
“Isheimur’s low gravity and inability to generate carbon dioxide through vulcanism render the colony sub-optimal, unlikely to return the company’s investment–”
People behave as if you’re a zoo exhibit. Like the tides the pain that accompanies the strangeness (and yes, the terrible beauty) recedes for a while, before sweeping in to the shoreline of your mind and you start gibbering again.
One of the gawpers is a pregnant woman who nudges her friend, an older woman. “See? He’s possessed: Jabbering like he’s got a head full of spirits. I reckon that he’s a seidr.”
“Don’t let our Gothi hear you talk like that,” Bera says from the doorway. Even though part of your mind is still in the here-and-now and you’re aware of your surroundings, you hadn’t noticed her arrive. “He’ll flay you alive if he hears you talking about warlocks and spirits. You know how he is.”
“Who are you to tell us what we should talk about, girl?” The pregnant woman backs toward the doorway. “His science is failing. Our founders wanted us to keep to the old ways. Well, the Norse Gods and magic are among the old ways.”
“The old ways included birth without anaesthetic, Salbjerg,” Bera says. “Think that that’s one old way we should return to? Our founders wanted us to cherry-pick the best of the old ways, not embrace every superstition.”
“Perhaps Pappi’s grown tolerant in his old age?” Salbjerg says to her friend. “I remember a time when a chit of a girl who got herself knocked up without keeping hold of the man’s dick would have had the skin peeled from her back one layer at a time.”
“Or maybe Pappi is the Pappi,” the older woman says, leering.
Bera doesn’t answer at first. Then she looks up. “Do you fear that I lay with your Bjarney, Salbjerg? You’ve nothing to worry about. He’s never even glanced at me. I promise you that.”
“Of course I wasn’t worried, you little slut.” The flush rising to Salbjerg’s face gives the lie to that. “Why would my man want a nothing like you?”
You watch Bera’s jaw work, and a part of you feels a surge of protectiveness toward her. She shouldn’t have to take such abuse. Ignoring the voices momentarily, you let out a low growl and both the women step back.
“You should go now,” Bera says. “Before Loki decides that he prefers cannibalism to starving to death. He might take a chunk out of you, Salbjerg.”
The women back away, muttering, and when they’ve gone, Bera laughs softly to herself. “Quite the lioness defending her cub, aren’t I, Loki? Who’d have thought milk-and-water Bera would bare her teeth so?”
But you arch to let the voices out, and clutch at your head, she holds you, shushing you.
Later, when the smell of burning has faded away, and the pain has receded to a level that’s almost bearable, you fall silent.
Bera is joined by a ruddy faced giant. She says to him, “Help me get him into the wheelbarrow, Yngi.”
You whimper when you try to stand, but when they ease their grip, you grab a pillar, and hold yourself up with it. They grip you under an arm each, and Bera nudges you toward the wheelbarrow, where they settle you into it.
“Thanks, Yngi,” she says.
“What are you going to do with him?” Yngi says.
“I’m going to wheel him outside,” Bera says.
The Other is pushing at you, pushing you down into a pit of blackness. Your skull isn’t large enough to contain both of you. You moan and clutch the sides of your head. The Other has awoken, and his voice is the loudest of them all, begging to be allowed his body back – as if it is his, the madman.
“Hush, now,” Bera croons. She pushes the wheelbarrow, grunting with the effort, and the world tilts alarmingly. You would get out, but the effort makes the barrow lurch, and at her urging you sit still.
“Ooh, look!” calls out the woman Thorbjorg who visited the barn earlier. “Bera’s got herself a pram! Taking baby for a walk?”
There are subdued laughs at this, but Hilda says fiercely, “Thorbjorg! She may have lapsed, but no woman deserves mockery after losing a child!”
Thorbjorg looks sulky.
“What are you doing, Bera?” Hilda says.
“He’s permanently hungry,” Bera says. “And then I realized there are lichens he can eat.” Your world tips and she half-laughs, half-cries, “Aagh! He’s falling!”
The grass is sweet and juicy, and as you lie prone on the ground you tear at it with your teeth, feeling some trickle down your chin. “Don’t eat that, Loki,” Bera says. “You can’t digest grass. Come on now, leave it!”
A noise catches your attention, just for a moment. A man whose name you don’t know – he has never been into the barn – dances on stilt-like legs. “Bera haad a little lamb,” he sings as he stops. “Baa, baa,” he bleats in that thin little voice that disrupted your eating.
A part of you notes, The young of all species share common characteristics; large eyes, small, thin voices. Although from his size he’s merely mimicking a cub, what’s more interesting is that you responded to the stimulus of what you thought was a youngster in distress. Maybe that’s a sign that this pseudo-autism is losing its grip.
You ignore the voice, and return to chewing the grass. At the same time the man stops his little dance and stands normally as Bera shouts, “Stop it, Thorir!”
Your chewing is again interrupted, by the man bleating, “I’m another of Ra-a-gn-a-ar’s little lost lambs; please let me suck on your titties, Bera-a-a–” His bleating is cut short by a thud, and he topples forward.
Ragnar stands over him, opening and closing his right hand, rubbing at its knuckles. “If you weren’t my son-in-law, Thorir, we’d be duelling at dawn tomorrow for that insult.”
“I– I didn’t mean to insult you,” Thorir says. “I was merely teasing Bera.”
“Even if what you say is true,” Ragnar says. “Your insult of my foster-daughter is an implicit slur of me. Though I would expect nothing more of Thorir the Stupid. How did you persuade Hilda you were worthy of her at the Spring Fair? Ye Gods, you must be good at shagging, because you’re good for nothing else. Get up, you cur!”
Thorir drags his knees toward his head, and pushes himself upright.
Your head is yanked back, the pain so excruciating that you your fugue is broken, as Bera shrieks, “Don’t hurt him!”
“You were eating grass?” the red-faced chieftain bellows over background laughter that subsides instantly at his glare.
“It’s the nanophytes,” you say, though you don’t understand half of the words that the Other pushes out of your mouth; he’s wresting control from you. “I’ve lost so much weight to the lifegel that the nanophytes have taken control. They’re assimilating them, but that requires energy. I’d need to eat a lot anyway to regain the lost mass, but on top of that I need thousands of calories a day. Every day. I’m so hungry, I’ll eat anything – even if I can’t digest it the nanophytes are swarming up into my gullet and converting the fuel directly.”
Ragnar is staring at you with both pity and revulsion. “You can talk. Even if half is gibberish.”
“The lingua-weave,” you say. “It intercepts what you say in your tongue while it’s still in my auditory nerves. That’s why I can’t watch your lips – it confuses the signals. When I reply in Anglish, it intercepts the signal again, takes control of the mouth and vocal cords, and turns it into Isheimuri.”
Ragnar clearly doesn’t understand. “Stop. Prattling.” He separates the words for emphasis. “Do something useful. Help the women work.”
You stare at him, still chewing on a mouthful of cud, as he stomps away.-
“The AIs’ presence is probably the one unifying thing that stops humanity from exterminating itself–”
“Come and help us pick lichens, Bera,” a woman says, baring her teeth in a rictus that you catalogue as a smile. Her teeth are crooked and irregular, but her lips are full, and again you feel a surge of desire for her.
“This report’s conclusion is that without constant access to technology the Isheimur colony’s long-term survival is unlikely –
She looks down at the gown that Bera draped over you, and her face is red, but she smiles. “My,” she says, “he certainly is a big boy, isn’t he, Bera?” You interpret this as reciprocatory interest, but before you can reach for her, Bera pushes you back into the wheeled device.
“Hormonal imbalance,” the Other says in that too-deep voice. “Testosterone and adrenaline will be re-absorbed into the bloodstream.”
You find it difficult to concentrate on anything. The sky is too big, the suns too bright, the wind too chill. Absently, the cataloguing part of you notices the absence of odours, as if the weather is so cold that it’s frozen them. You rotate your head around, staring at the sky and grassy hillocks that lead up to hills dotted with white blobs, that the cataloguing part identifies as sheep, domestic animal kept for meat and wool.
“Sheep,” you say, tasting the word.
Bera laughs. “You’re getting better!” Her words turn into a sob.
“You see this?” Bera says, pointing to a plant that covers several nearby rocks. “It’s edible moss, called lichens. We’re going to pick it, and you eat what you want, Loki, and we put the rest into this bag, here. You see?” She crouches on all fours, and you notice her haunches straining against her dress. She picks some of the plant, shows you, then loads it into the canvas bag that she is carrying. “Okay?”
You don’t answer, but pick at the lichen. However, it all goes into your mouth, and none of it into the bag.
Suddenly Bera stiffens. “Loki, do not move – not if you want to live.”
You stiffen, and watch her climb slowly to her feet. She calls out, “Asgerd, there’s a snolfur here. Can you make some noise?”
On cue, the others let out whoops and shrieks and yells, and stomp toward them in a long straight line. Bera nods, and you slowly turn your head, and follow her gaze to where something like a metre and a half-high weasel is backing away, baring sabre teeth. It turns and speeds away with a liquid, rippling motion belying its stocky frame.
“That,” Bera says to you, and lets out a long sigh, “Was a snolfur. It probably wouldn’t have attacked you. They prefer to feed on carrion. But then again, they’re not usually this far north so early in the fall. So maybe things are changing.”
“It’s likely to be a sign of a hard winter,” The woman Asgerd explains. “The longer the snolfurs stay toward the South Pole before venturing north the better.”
She seems one of only a few people, with Bera and the man Yngi, to be friendly.
You sketch a smile, and return to picking the lichens. They are dark-green and have a curious musty odour.
Most of the lichens end up in your belly rather than in the sack, but no one seems to mind. The others seem content to ignore you as long as you do not eat grass. The cataloguing part of your mind describes this as appropriate behaviour.
Eating grass is clearly not appropriate behaviour.
There are days of this routine. Some days you have pangs of hunger, and you eat straw or rip bits of wood from the beams if you are indoors, or if you are outside, grass or even earth (the grubs in it are tasty). Little by little you totter around the barn. Your legs are still unsteady, but your body grow stronger every day. Your mind, however, is still fragmented. There is the cataloguing part, there is you, and there is the Other.
Then one morning you awaken, and you feel completely different. The pain has gone. Your head feels clearer than – you don’t know when, because one moment your feet were on fire, and the next you’re here. Wherever here is. You’re lying on straw in a dark building that smells faintly of animals. The smells seem as ingrained as the stains on the dark wooden beams.
A woman, barely a girl enters. Her name is Bera, you realize, although you don’t know how you know. You suspect that your companion has been assimilating data while you’ve been – where?
“Gon t’ayn,” she mouths before you can look away, and her voice in your head says “Good morning.” The translation module will soon synchronize – you hope – but in the meantime you’re careful not to look at her lips, which will be moving in the local dialect.
“Gon t’ayn,” you say back, in your too-deep voice, in what you hope is a serviceable accent, and her eyes widen, and slowly, shyly, she starts to smile.
“Well, well, this is progress, indeed,” she says. “Ragnar will be delighted with this, Loki.”
“Who’s Loki?” you say, wondering whether you’ve misunderstood something. “My name’s Karl. Karl Allman.”
Showing posts with label Free Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Free Fiction. Show all posts
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
FREE FICTION: Winter Song by Colin Harvey, Day Four
The free preview continues! NOTE: Textual links are Angry Robot's, not mine. Helpful Links: Angry Robot Books, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
The world through your eyes is full of pain and wonder, made even stranger by the whirlwind of voices shrieking for your attention:
“The Mizar Quartet are Sol-type hydrogen-fusing dwarf stars–”
“Isheimuri lingua confirmed as mix of Standard and Icelandic–”
Some voices verge on making sense, but most babble gibberish. Each is accompanied by a dizzying sense of vertigo, and little shocks deep inside your body. Occasionally you smell burning. Sometimes you taste colours, can hear, flickering jeering shadows.
“Absolute magnitude uses the same convention as visual–”
You are dimly aware that the nanophytes within you that keep your muscle tone even as you waste away are locked in a desperate fight against the cannibal predations of the remaining lifegel in a near sub-atomic battle of the idiots. Either through accident or a design flaw, the inhibitors appear to have failed, and if left to themselves will eat you alive.
“The Long Night was the longest conflict since the Hundred Years War–”
A strangely familiar voice cries out, “I won’t lie down and die!”
“The Isheimur populace is likely to suffer genetic drift and disease–”
The man Ragnar’s voice is a rumble from a mouth full of misshapen teeth, his words unintelligible.
“Pappi: estimated height one-metre-eighty, mass eighty kilos–”
The woman beside him answers, her voice lower. Her hair is lighter, but her features equally mismatched, one shoulder slightly higher than the other.
“Oedipus: son of King Laius and Jocasta of Thebes–”
You realize that the voice refusing to die was your own, but it sounds strange. It should be alto but is tenor instead. Perhaps your voice-box was damaged in the accident?
“Pantropy lost favour as Terraforming grew easier–”
The accident. The pain increases as a shard of memory brings with its suddenly perfect recall the accompanying agony: The smell of burning dust, the isolation, the heat. After a while your throat hurts with the scream – which tails off into a whimper.
“A quasar at absolute magnitude −25.5 is 100 times brighter than our galaxy–”
The girl – barely a woman – Bera strokes your head. “Hush, Pappi, he kannske skilja you,” she says. Her breasts ooze milk, and a part of you realizes that while she has given birth in the last three weeks for there to be lactation, there is no sound of a baby. The rational corner of your mind tucks this away for later, but the animal part that has control has you lunging forward on all fours, scrabbling at her clothes.
“Humanity only found other sentient life after four centuries of spaceflight–”
“Neh!” The sting of her palms raining down on your face and head are microscopic compared to the waves of agony that ripple across you, but still they are enough to make you pause. You stare up at her dark hair, wide-set eyes and full mouth and wonder what her lips would taste like if you ripped them from her face.
“Oedipus left for dead with a shepherd but adopted–”
“He eats like an hungradur dyr,” Bera says, becoming more understandable with each sentence, as the lingua-weave begins to take effect. “He almost choked on that meat we fed him before. But he can eat elda food now. No more breast-feeding–”
“An Icelandic chieftain was politician, lawyer, and policeman combined–”
Some residual decorum makes you lurch away from her into a corner.
“Grain was only grown in limited quantites in Iceland–”
“Agh, he’s vomiting! He splashed my best boots!” Pappi kicks you. You growl, but you are too busy gazing at the pool of vomit to attack.
“The Mizar B pair mass approximately 1.6 times that of Sol–”
“No, Pappi! He doesn’t know what he’s doing. The horsemeat was too much for him to digest at this stage of his bati.”
“In Iceland, the chieftain’s position could be bought or sold–”
“Well, keep him away. Oh, what’s he doing now? He’s eating his own puke!”
“Nanotechnology requires vast consumption of energy–”
The undigested horsemeat still tastes much as it did before, though now with a rancid flavour that may be the bile that you’ve brought up with it, but there are also others; salt and a metallic taste. By squinting you can zoom right in and see shapes invisible to an unenhanced human eye crawling among the chunks of meat. You have vomited up nanophytes with the food. From somewhere comes the knowledge that vomit is as corrosive as battery acid – their tiny carapaces must be almost indestructible to withstand it.
“Sheep farming was the most common type in Iceland–”
You know you must eat it to get the nanophytes back into your system, but Bera clings onto you, trying to pull you away as you gobble the vomited meat.
“Isheimur has a lower water content than Terra–”
“No, no, Loki! Don’t eat that! Here!” She undoes her blouse but you ignore her, concentrating on re-ingesting the refugee nanophytes. You don’t know whether they’re still locked onto you as their source/target, but you can’t risk them eating the planet in some long-term runaway disaster. You brush against her face; you feel wetness, and note that she is weeping, and another corner of your broken mind wonders why.
Finally, when you’ve eaten all the meat and licked up the liquid, you allow her to guide you to her breast. “It’d give Palli’s death meaning if his milk were to save another’s life,” she whispers.
“Isheimur’s mass is 0.80 of Terra, but it’s gravity is only 0.67 – sub-optimal for atmospheric retention–”
“Jao,” Pappi growls assent.
“At 1.7 AUs, its year is 2.85 Terran years–”
She sobs, even as she strokes your head. “This is the last time I’ll do this,” she says to the Ragnar-man as you nuzzle her nipple. “I wasn’t going to let him feed today, but if it stops him eating his own puke, then I’ll make an exception. But after this, no more breastfeeding: You can whip me or starve me, but I’ll not do it again. I can’t cope with this. It’s like an eighty kilo baby with the habits of a wild animal.”
“Isheimur’s year comprises 1096 days of 22 hours 37 minutes–”
“Agreed,” Ragnar says, and you see the surprise dart across her face. He turns to go. “I’ve no desire to see any more of this sick, feral creature, anyway, even if he has displayed almost superhuman powers of recovery. Odinn’s Beard – to think that he only came out of his stupor yesterday!”
“Hunger is my friend.” The words echo through your mind as you swallow the warm, rich milk. “When I’m trying to lose weight, I embrace my hunger–”
You release her nipple, which she rubs.
The fool that said that clearly never had hunger eating them from within like a black hole, sucking everything into it, consuming it yet still wanting more more more-
“Isheimur is so cold, its air so thin that the colony’s long-term survival is marginal–”
“Stop it!” you scream, clutching your head. Bera frantically hushes you, tries to pour sugared water into your mouth, but you gag.
For a while, as if taking pity, the voices fade away almost to nothing…
“We’ll feed him from our stores for another few days,” Ragnar says.
“You still here?” Bera says. “I thought you’d seen enough of him?”
His laugh is bitter and mocking, devoid of humour. “I can’t help it. I get no pleasure from watching him, but there is a sort of horrible fascination.” Ragnar sighs. “If he keeps this up, we won’t be able to put him to work.” He says, “Just my luck that I’ve probably saved someone with an advanced psychosis. If it’s schizophrenia, that would explain why he was wandering.”
“Schizo–” Bera tries to wrap her lips around the word, which is clearly unfamiliar. Part of you would like to plunge your rigid member into her, but you have suckled at her breast, and another part of you analyzes your memory of mores to determine why this is wrong.
“Schizophrenics,” Ragnar says, “were often considered possessed in the olden days, before people understood personality disorders. Most likely that his family tried to care for him, but finally gave up when he became too much trouble.” When he continues, he seems to be talking to himself. “Food’s always so scarce even at the end of a good summer that we can’t afford to pour it down an invalid’s throat if there’s no chance of recovery.”
“What are you going to do?” Bera asks, moving between you and the Ragnar-man.
But he doesn’t seem to have heard her, instead saying, “The climate, even down here in the tropics, is so harsh that still the toughest Terran-descended crops grow poorly, and we live on the very edge of survival.”
“What are you saying?” Bera says. The fear in her voice hooks your attention away from the pain and the whirling madness of the world.
Ragnar shrugs. “What if we had left him where he lay? No one would have blamed us, leaving an outlaw to die at the teeth of trolls or snolfurs.”
“But you didn’t leave him, did you?” Bera says. “When you brought him here, you made him your responsibility.”
“Aye,” Ragnar says. “No good deed goes unpunished.”
“So what are you going to do now?” Bera says. “Take him back up into the hills? Murder him and toss his body into a geysir? Eat him, if we get hungry enough?”
“Don’t be silly, girl,” Ragnar says. “Remember who you’re talking to.”
“I know who I’m talking to, my lord,” the girl says. You hear the wobble of fear in her voice, but she ploughs on. “A man who’s sworn to uphold the law and customs our forefathers embraced. And now talks of leaving a sick man in the snow?”
“I can remember who I am without needing your reminding.” He leans into her face; you see her swallow, but she doesn’t flinch. “I’ve worked long and hard to earn and keep my people’s respect. I fought off three tribes of trolls at the Battle of Giri Pass. I’ve won the Silver Shield for my verse from the Althing, and been compared with the legendary Egil Skallagrimsson.” He bangs the wooden pillar supporting the barn’s roof as if he is one of the Viking warriors of Old Earth beating out his defiance on his shield. “What have you ever done, girly? Apart from open your legs the minute a man looks at you. Bringing shame on yourself and I, who was foolish enough to take you in! That’ll teach me to think out loud in front of a chit of a girl who misunderstands the processes of thought! I know who I am, girly – remember who you are!”
He stalks from the barn, leaving her shivering, but when she looks up at you, her eyes blaze with triumph. “The danger with myths and heroes, Loki, is that sometimes the myth starts to become more real to the heroes than the truth.”
Three
Loki
The world through your eyes is full of pain and wonder, made even stranger by the whirlwind of voices shrieking for your attention:
“The Mizar Quartet are Sol-type hydrogen-fusing dwarf stars–”
“Isheimuri lingua confirmed as mix of Standard and Icelandic–”
Some voices verge on making sense, but most babble gibberish. Each is accompanied by a dizzying sense of vertigo, and little shocks deep inside your body. Occasionally you smell burning. Sometimes you taste colours, can hear, flickering jeering shadows.
“Absolute magnitude uses the same convention as visual–”
You are dimly aware that the nanophytes within you that keep your muscle tone even as you waste away are locked in a desperate fight against the cannibal predations of the remaining lifegel in a near sub-atomic battle of the idiots. Either through accident or a design flaw, the inhibitors appear to have failed, and if left to themselves will eat you alive.
“The Long Night was the longest conflict since the Hundred Years War–”
A strangely familiar voice cries out, “I won’t lie down and die!”
“The Isheimur populace is likely to suffer genetic drift and disease–”
The man Ragnar’s voice is a rumble from a mouth full of misshapen teeth, his words unintelligible.
“Pappi: estimated height one-metre-eighty, mass eighty kilos–”
The woman beside him answers, her voice lower. Her hair is lighter, but her features equally mismatched, one shoulder slightly higher than the other.
“Oedipus: son of King Laius and Jocasta of Thebes–”
You realize that the voice refusing to die was your own, but it sounds strange. It should be alto but is tenor instead. Perhaps your voice-box was damaged in the accident?
“Pantropy lost favour as Terraforming grew easier–”
The accident. The pain increases as a shard of memory brings with its suddenly perfect recall the accompanying agony: The smell of burning dust, the isolation, the heat. After a while your throat hurts with the scream – which tails off into a whimper.
“A quasar at absolute magnitude −25.5 is 100 times brighter than our galaxy–”
The girl – barely a woman – Bera strokes your head. “Hush, Pappi, he kannske skilja you,” she says. Her breasts ooze milk, and a part of you realizes that while she has given birth in the last three weeks for there to be lactation, there is no sound of a baby. The rational corner of your mind tucks this away for later, but the animal part that has control has you lunging forward on all fours, scrabbling at her clothes.
“Humanity only found other sentient life after four centuries of spaceflight–”
“Neh!” The sting of her palms raining down on your face and head are microscopic compared to the waves of agony that ripple across you, but still they are enough to make you pause. You stare up at her dark hair, wide-set eyes and full mouth and wonder what her lips would taste like if you ripped them from her face.
“Oedipus left for dead with a shepherd but adopted–”
“He eats like an hungradur dyr,” Bera says, becoming more understandable with each sentence, as the lingua-weave begins to take effect. “He almost choked on that meat we fed him before. But he can eat elda food now. No more breast-feeding–”
“An Icelandic chieftain was politician, lawyer, and policeman combined–”
Some residual decorum makes you lurch away from her into a corner.
“Grain was only grown in limited quantites in Iceland–”
“Agh, he’s vomiting! He splashed my best boots!” Pappi kicks you. You growl, but you are too busy gazing at the pool of vomit to attack.
“The Mizar B pair mass approximately 1.6 times that of Sol–”
“No, Pappi! He doesn’t know what he’s doing. The horsemeat was too much for him to digest at this stage of his bati.”
“In Iceland, the chieftain’s position could be bought or sold–”
“Well, keep him away. Oh, what’s he doing now? He’s eating his own puke!”
“Nanotechnology requires vast consumption of energy–”
The undigested horsemeat still tastes much as it did before, though now with a rancid flavour that may be the bile that you’ve brought up with it, but there are also others; salt and a metallic taste. By squinting you can zoom right in and see shapes invisible to an unenhanced human eye crawling among the chunks of meat. You have vomited up nanophytes with the food. From somewhere comes the knowledge that vomit is as corrosive as battery acid – their tiny carapaces must be almost indestructible to withstand it.
“Sheep farming was the most common type in Iceland–”
You know you must eat it to get the nanophytes back into your system, but Bera clings onto you, trying to pull you away as you gobble the vomited meat.
“Isheimur has a lower water content than Terra–”
“No, no, Loki! Don’t eat that! Here!” She undoes her blouse but you ignore her, concentrating on re-ingesting the refugee nanophytes. You don’t know whether they’re still locked onto you as their source/target, but you can’t risk them eating the planet in some long-term runaway disaster. You brush against her face; you feel wetness, and note that she is weeping, and another corner of your broken mind wonders why.
Finally, when you’ve eaten all the meat and licked up the liquid, you allow her to guide you to her breast. “It’d give Palli’s death meaning if his milk were to save another’s life,” she whispers.
“Isheimur’s mass is 0.80 of Terra, but it’s gravity is only 0.67 – sub-optimal for atmospheric retention–”
“Jao,” Pappi growls assent.
“At 1.7 AUs, its year is 2.85 Terran years–”
She sobs, even as she strokes your head. “This is the last time I’ll do this,” she says to the Ragnar-man as you nuzzle her nipple. “I wasn’t going to let him feed today, but if it stops him eating his own puke, then I’ll make an exception. But after this, no more breastfeeding: You can whip me or starve me, but I’ll not do it again. I can’t cope with this. It’s like an eighty kilo baby with the habits of a wild animal.”
“Isheimur’s year comprises 1096 days of 22 hours 37 minutes–”
“Agreed,” Ragnar says, and you see the surprise dart across her face. He turns to go. “I’ve no desire to see any more of this sick, feral creature, anyway, even if he has displayed almost superhuman powers of recovery. Odinn’s Beard – to think that he only came out of his stupor yesterday!”
“Hunger is my friend.” The words echo through your mind as you swallow the warm, rich milk. “When I’m trying to lose weight, I embrace my hunger–”
You release her nipple, which she rubs.
The fool that said that clearly never had hunger eating them from within like a black hole, sucking everything into it, consuming it yet still wanting more more more-
“Isheimur is so cold, its air so thin that the colony’s long-term survival is marginal–”
“Stop it!” you scream, clutching your head. Bera frantically hushes you, tries to pour sugared water into your mouth, but you gag.
For a while, as if taking pity, the voices fade away almost to nothing…
“We’ll feed him from our stores for another few days,” Ragnar says.
“You still here?” Bera says. “I thought you’d seen enough of him?”
His laugh is bitter and mocking, devoid of humour. “I can’t help it. I get no pleasure from watching him, but there is a sort of horrible fascination.” Ragnar sighs. “If he keeps this up, we won’t be able to put him to work.” He says, “Just my luck that I’ve probably saved someone with an advanced psychosis. If it’s schizophrenia, that would explain why he was wandering.”
“Schizo–” Bera tries to wrap her lips around the word, which is clearly unfamiliar. Part of you would like to plunge your rigid member into her, but you have suckled at her breast, and another part of you analyzes your memory of mores to determine why this is wrong.
“Schizophrenics,” Ragnar says, “were often considered possessed in the olden days, before people understood personality disorders. Most likely that his family tried to care for him, but finally gave up when he became too much trouble.” When he continues, he seems to be talking to himself. “Food’s always so scarce even at the end of a good summer that we can’t afford to pour it down an invalid’s throat if there’s no chance of recovery.”
“What are you going to do?” Bera asks, moving between you and the Ragnar-man.
But he doesn’t seem to have heard her, instead saying, “The climate, even down here in the tropics, is so harsh that still the toughest Terran-descended crops grow poorly, and we live on the very edge of survival.”
“What are you saying?” Bera says. The fear in her voice hooks your attention away from the pain and the whirling madness of the world.
Ragnar shrugs. “What if we had left him where he lay? No one would have blamed us, leaving an outlaw to die at the teeth of trolls or snolfurs.”
“But you didn’t leave him, did you?” Bera says. “When you brought him here, you made him your responsibility.”
“Aye,” Ragnar says. “No good deed goes unpunished.”
“So what are you going to do now?” Bera says. “Take him back up into the hills? Murder him and toss his body into a geysir? Eat him, if we get hungry enough?”
“Don’t be silly, girl,” Ragnar says. “Remember who you’re talking to.”
“I know who I’m talking to, my lord,” the girl says. You hear the wobble of fear in her voice, but she ploughs on. “A man who’s sworn to uphold the law and customs our forefathers embraced. And now talks of leaving a sick man in the snow?”
“I can remember who I am without needing your reminding.” He leans into her face; you see her swallow, but she doesn’t flinch. “I’ve worked long and hard to earn and keep my people’s respect. I fought off three tribes of trolls at the Battle of Giri Pass. I’ve won the Silver Shield for my verse from the Althing, and been compared with the legendary Egil Skallagrimsson.” He bangs the wooden pillar supporting the barn’s roof as if he is one of the Viking warriors of Old Earth beating out his defiance on his shield. “What have you ever done, girly? Apart from open your legs the minute a man looks at you. Bringing shame on yourself and I, who was foolish enough to take you in! That’ll teach me to think out loud in front of a chit of a girl who misunderstands the processes of thought! I know who I am, girly – remember who you are!”
He stalks from the barn, leaving her shivering, but when she looks up at you, her eyes blaze with triumph. “The danger with myths and heroes, Loki, is that sometimes the myth starts to become more real to the heroes than the truth.”
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
FREE FICTION: Winter Song by Colin Harvey, Day Three
The free preview continues! Helpful Links: Angry Robot Books, Part 1, Part 2
Later, as Bera loaded up the vast tin bath with clothes and ran water from the hot tap into it, it struck her as odd that shape-shifters were always lumped into the same category as trolls and outlaws, snolfurs and other predators. But shape-shifters were so rare that no one – as far as she knew – had ever definitely been attacked by one. Maybe, if she could snatch five minutes on the Oracle later, she’d search.
She managed to turn the tap off before boiling water ran over the pan’s lip; at least – for all Hilda’s carping – there was no shortage of heat and hot water. It was a shame that, according to the Oracle, there was no longer the resource to tip Isheimur’s boundless low-level geo-thermal energy into full-scale vulcanism.
She was used to washing by hand. The farm had finally run out of parts for the antique washing machine when Bera had first arrived from the North, and the Norns refused to consider such parts life-saving, so their petitions via the Oracle for replacements had been useless. But she hated the way it chapped her hands, and the effort required to wring out the sopping clothes left her hands and shoulders aching. Still, she managed to wrestle the sodden blouses and shirts into the mangle, bolt the rollers into place, then turn the handle against a wall of inertia.
She jumped at the voice; “You want help?”
She turned. “Oh, Yngi, you startled me.” Isheimur only knew how Yngi the Halt with his club foot had managed to creep up on her.
His freckled face was as transparent as any window, so she saw his disappointment. She added hastily, “I know you didn’t mean to, but you should cough or clear your throat, or–”
“Okay, Bera.” he said. Ruddy features lit up:“You need help with that? I’m stronger than you are, even if I’m not as clever.”
She shook her head. “No thanks, Yngi. I’m almost done.”
He turned to go, just as Thorbjorg’s voice cut across them: “Yngvar Ragnarsson, get away from that whore!”
Yngi cringed, and Bera swung round at his wife, anger at one humiliation too many finally breaking her self-control. Before she could speak, a shriek from the courtyard interrupted them: “Grandpappi! Granpappi’s coming!”
Bera and Thorbjorg rushed out into the courtyard, Yngi hobbling behind. Both suns were now high in the sky, and Bera had to blink to focus. She followed the other’s gaze down the valley to west, and the men returning from a week at the Summer Fair.
The two men at the front of the group rode shaggy Isheimuri horses, which stood only chest high to a tall man, but were formidably strong. Ragnar liked to brag that his was the strongest horse on Isheimur, and the chunky buttermilk-coloured stallion needed to be to carry his owner and his belongings, which between them probably massed over a hundred and fifty kilos. Arnbjorn rode a slightly smaller horse alongside him.
Surprisingly the other two horses were riderless, and Ragnar’s tenant farmers walked beside their mounts, which were dragging something, but Bera couldn’t make out what it was. Bringing up the rear of the procession were the farmer’s eldest sons. Both had been unbearable ever since Ragnar had agreed to take them to the Summer Fair, and Bera suspected that they would be even more conceited now they had been, and would consider themselves too grand to mix with children. One had been flirting with Bera before she’d become pregnant, but had quickly lost interest when he learned of her condition, and probably wouldn’t even speak to her now.
“Come on, Bera!” Hilda interrupted her daydreaming. “They’re ten minutes away yet, so back to work for a little while.”
Bera resisted the urge to say “Yes, boss.” Sarcasm would only earn her a lecture.
Instead she returned to grappling with the sopping wet clothes until shrieks from her foster-nephews and nieces announced Ragnar’s arrival. His gravelly voice boomed, “What? No hug for your Grandpappi, then?”
She felt the puppy stir beneath her bulky jacket, then return to sleep, and prayed that Brynja would sleep a while longer.
By the time Bera had joined the others but watching from the sidelines, women and children were hugging men, the tenant farmer’s mousey wives had erupted from their own dwellings, and the whole group had aggregated into one swarming, shapeless mass. Only Ragnar stood slightly apart from the reunions, a sad smile on his face.
Then Yngi’s wife Thorbjorg threw her arms around him. “Welcome back, Pappi!” It might have been Bera’s imagination, but she thought she saw him grimace, before he made his dark, brooding features as impassive as before.
He looked across at Bera. She gave him a little smile which she tried to make welcoming, but he only scowled, and she looked away so that he wouldn’t see how hurt she was. All you have to do is give him the name of the father. Make one up if need be.
Except that whichever name she gave Ragnar would be signing a man’s death warrant, if such a name existed – and names were strictly bound by custom, like everything else here. Bera wondered how it would be to grow up on a world that had never splintered away from the rest of humanity, never been driven apart by a seemingly – to the rest of the Galaxy – insane urge to speak a different tongue and adhere to old ways. To call oneself what one liked, to dress how one liked, do what one liked…
“What’s this?” Hilda pointed to a travois, which was hitched to the two horses belonging to the tenant-farmers.
“You heard the noise last night?” Ragnar said. “A meteorite crashed near where we’d camped.” He continued, “We heard what we thought was a small volcano where it fell, so we rushed toward it for a look. It took us a half-hour. When we got there, we found only this character–” Ragnar pointed at the travois “ –lying in the snow.”
Bera eased around for a look, and gasped. The man lying unmoving in the travois was stark naked, his skin a copper so dark as to be almost purple. His massive chest rose and fell irregularly, but apart from that he didn’t move. His eyes were closed. Bera had never seen such muscle definition on a man; corded, sinewy, he took her breath away. The face below the shaven skull was equally striking, with its chiselled zygomatic bones and almost inhuman symmetry. Bera looked down, then away, blushing, then glanced at him again. He was certainly impressive. She made her self focus instead on the splints on his legs.
“Cover him up!” Asgerd said, Ragnar’s older daughter-in-law reaching for a blanket from one of the horses. “He’ll scare the children!”
Ragnar reached out, and his daughter grew still. “You don’t cover burns like that.” He pointed to the man’s lower torso, and clearly broken legs. His legs would have been long, strong and muscular before they were broken.
Bera dragged her attention back to Ragnar, who said, “He was screaming, rolling around in the snow. We couldn’t leave him like that. Either I killed him and I’d no stomach for cold-blooded neck-snapping, or we brought him home.”
“Can we spare the food?” Asgerd said, her thin lips when she closed them giving her opinion: No, we can’t.
“You tell me, ladies.” Ragnar opened his arms to include Hilda and Thorbjorg in the question. “The management of the household is your responsibility, after all. I wouldn’t dream of interfering in your desmense.”
Not much, Bera thought. Ragnar didn’t hesitate when he felt it necessary.
“Of course we can, my lord.” Thorbjorg sensed as always which way the wind was blowing, and said what she guessed he wanted to hear.
Ragnar’s face split with a grin. “Then that’s settled.” He rubbed his hands together.
“How do you know that he’s not a vagrant?” Asgerd said.
“We thought that initially,” Ragnar said. “We were ready to leave him to die, until Bjarney pointed out that a trespassing vagrant can be indentured, if he recovers.” He shrugged. “If he doesn’t recover, he won’t eat, anyway.”
“Hmmph,” Hilda said, but didn’t argue.
“Funny,” Ragnar said, “the snow was stained blue.” Whether it was the colour or simply the fact that the snow was dyed, but it seemed to Bera that Ragnar sounded uneasy. It was so rare that Bera couldn’t help staring.
He caught her looking and straightening, returned to his normal forceful manner. “Here’s someone who can help. Bera, I need someone to safeguard our new investment. You can nurse our new worker.”
Bera looked down, bobbing her head in assent.
Ragnar must have mistaken her shyness for reluctance, or his next words would surely never have been so cruel (at least, she thought, not before you got pregnant): “Well, come on girl! Look to it! You should be grateful – it’ll give you something to think about, take your mind off that dead bastard of yours.”
She felt tears sting her eyes, and lunged toward the travois.
But Ragnar must have seen her well up, for she heard him half-groan, and mutter, “Well, you shouldn’t have brought shame on my house by opening your legs to the first man who ignored your plainness. My darling Gunnhild would spin in her grave if she could see what you’ve turned into.”
Bera wanted to shout that, but for the eruption on Surtsey, she would have gone home as soon as she was pregnant, but that was pointless. Her family was dead, and now she just had to get on with living.
So she didn’t answer, but instead wrestled the stranger off the travois. But in so doing, Bera scraped the stranger’s back on the stones, and he roused screaming from his near-coma. Ragnar shouted, “Yngi! Thorir! Give her a hand with that!”
The two men helped ease the stranger back into the travois and unhitch it. Thorir called, “Where do you want it?” He stood far too close to Bera for her liking.
“Put it in with the animals,” Ragnar said.
Grunting with effort the men picked him up, and staggered toward the stables. Bera shadowed them into the warm, odorous darkness. She gazed at the horses, three of which were hers. But the web of debts incurred had bound her too tight to indulge any fantasies of flight while she was pregnant.
Ragnar appeared in the doorway. “Mind you take good care of him.”
Bera didn’t answer.
When she was sure that Ragnar had gone, she took Brynja from under her furs. Weeping quietly, she let the puppy nuzzle the other nipple from the one she had suckled the night before. “Like Romulus and Remus,” she said, “but in reverse.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t end in tears,” Ragnar said, making her jump at his unexpected return. Luckily, he was so busy staring at the stranger lying on the hay that he didn’t notice the puppy, instead assuming her reference was to the man. He kept staring at the man, barely able to conceal his repugnance. “It’s an Icelandic tradition, to fear the stranger, but even so, this hairless stranger bothers me. His presence means trouble… we’ll call him Loki. It seems fitting.”
“I’ll do my best for you,” Bera said, shielding Brynja by turning away slightly.
Ragnar roused himself. “You will,” he said. “We’ve a critical time coming. Once the crops ripen fully, it’s a race to get them in. We’ll need every able-bodied hand we can get. He can repay us our hospitality – if he recovers.”
“If he doesn’t? Or he recovers, but stays an invalid?”
“That won’t happen,” Ragnar said. The feral look on his face chilled Bera. “He’ll have an accident before that happens. Clear?”
Bera nodded, swallowing.
Later, as Bera loaded up the vast tin bath with clothes and ran water from the hot tap into it, it struck her as odd that shape-shifters were always lumped into the same category as trolls and outlaws, snolfurs and other predators. But shape-shifters were so rare that no one – as far as she knew – had ever definitely been attacked by one. Maybe, if she could snatch five minutes on the Oracle later, she’d search.
She managed to turn the tap off before boiling water ran over the pan’s lip; at least – for all Hilda’s carping – there was no shortage of heat and hot water. It was a shame that, according to the Oracle, there was no longer the resource to tip Isheimur’s boundless low-level geo-thermal energy into full-scale vulcanism.
She was used to washing by hand. The farm had finally run out of parts for the antique washing machine when Bera had first arrived from the North, and the Norns refused to consider such parts life-saving, so their petitions via the Oracle for replacements had been useless. But she hated the way it chapped her hands, and the effort required to wring out the sopping clothes left her hands and shoulders aching. Still, she managed to wrestle the sodden blouses and shirts into the mangle, bolt the rollers into place, then turn the handle against a wall of inertia.
She jumped at the voice; “You want help?”
She turned. “Oh, Yngi, you startled me.” Isheimur only knew how Yngi the Halt with his club foot had managed to creep up on her.
His freckled face was as transparent as any window, so she saw his disappointment. She added hastily, “I know you didn’t mean to, but you should cough or clear your throat, or–”
“Okay, Bera.” he said. Ruddy features lit up:“You need help with that? I’m stronger than you are, even if I’m not as clever.”
She shook her head. “No thanks, Yngi. I’m almost done.”
He turned to go, just as Thorbjorg’s voice cut across them: “Yngvar Ragnarsson, get away from that whore!”
Yngi cringed, and Bera swung round at his wife, anger at one humiliation too many finally breaking her self-control. Before she could speak, a shriek from the courtyard interrupted them: “Grandpappi! Granpappi’s coming!”
Bera and Thorbjorg rushed out into the courtyard, Yngi hobbling behind. Both suns were now high in the sky, and Bera had to blink to focus. She followed the other’s gaze down the valley to west, and the men returning from a week at the Summer Fair.
The two men at the front of the group rode shaggy Isheimuri horses, which stood only chest high to a tall man, but were formidably strong. Ragnar liked to brag that his was the strongest horse on Isheimur, and the chunky buttermilk-coloured stallion needed to be to carry his owner and his belongings, which between them probably massed over a hundred and fifty kilos. Arnbjorn rode a slightly smaller horse alongside him.
Surprisingly the other two horses were riderless, and Ragnar’s tenant farmers walked beside their mounts, which were dragging something, but Bera couldn’t make out what it was. Bringing up the rear of the procession were the farmer’s eldest sons. Both had been unbearable ever since Ragnar had agreed to take them to the Summer Fair, and Bera suspected that they would be even more conceited now they had been, and would consider themselves too grand to mix with children. One had been flirting with Bera before she’d become pregnant, but had quickly lost interest when he learned of her condition, and probably wouldn’t even speak to her now.
“Come on, Bera!” Hilda interrupted her daydreaming. “They’re ten minutes away yet, so back to work for a little while.”
Bera resisted the urge to say “Yes, boss.” Sarcasm would only earn her a lecture.
Instead she returned to grappling with the sopping wet clothes until shrieks from her foster-nephews and nieces announced Ragnar’s arrival. His gravelly voice boomed, “What? No hug for your Grandpappi, then?”
She felt the puppy stir beneath her bulky jacket, then return to sleep, and prayed that Brynja would sleep a while longer.
By the time Bera had joined the others but watching from the sidelines, women and children were hugging men, the tenant farmer’s mousey wives had erupted from their own dwellings, and the whole group had aggregated into one swarming, shapeless mass. Only Ragnar stood slightly apart from the reunions, a sad smile on his face.
Then Yngi’s wife Thorbjorg threw her arms around him. “Welcome back, Pappi!” It might have been Bera’s imagination, but she thought she saw him grimace, before he made his dark, brooding features as impassive as before.
He looked across at Bera. She gave him a little smile which she tried to make welcoming, but he only scowled, and she looked away so that he wouldn’t see how hurt she was. All you have to do is give him the name of the father. Make one up if need be.
Except that whichever name she gave Ragnar would be signing a man’s death warrant, if such a name existed – and names were strictly bound by custom, like everything else here. Bera wondered how it would be to grow up on a world that had never splintered away from the rest of humanity, never been driven apart by a seemingly – to the rest of the Galaxy – insane urge to speak a different tongue and adhere to old ways. To call oneself what one liked, to dress how one liked, do what one liked…
“What’s this?” Hilda pointed to a travois, which was hitched to the two horses belonging to the tenant-farmers.
“You heard the noise last night?” Ragnar said. “A meteorite crashed near where we’d camped.” He continued, “We heard what we thought was a small volcano where it fell, so we rushed toward it for a look. It took us a half-hour. When we got there, we found only this character–” Ragnar pointed at the travois “ –lying in the snow.”
Bera eased around for a look, and gasped. The man lying unmoving in the travois was stark naked, his skin a copper so dark as to be almost purple. His massive chest rose and fell irregularly, but apart from that he didn’t move. His eyes were closed. Bera had never seen such muscle definition on a man; corded, sinewy, he took her breath away. The face below the shaven skull was equally striking, with its chiselled zygomatic bones and almost inhuman symmetry. Bera looked down, then away, blushing, then glanced at him again. He was certainly impressive. She made her self focus instead on the splints on his legs.
“Cover him up!” Asgerd said, Ragnar’s older daughter-in-law reaching for a blanket from one of the horses. “He’ll scare the children!”
Ragnar reached out, and his daughter grew still. “You don’t cover burns like that.” He pointed to the man’s lower torso, and clearly broken legs. His legs would have been long, strong and muscular before they were broken.
Bera dragged her attention back to Ragnar, who said, “He was screaming, rolling around in the snow. We couldn’t leave him like that. Either I killed him and I’d no stomach for cold-blooded neck-snapping, or we brought him home.”
“Can we spare the food?” Asgerd said, her thin lips when she closed them giving her opinion: No, we can’t.
“You tell me, ladies.” Ragnar opened his arms to include Hilda and Thorbjorg in the question. “The management of the household is your responsibility, after all. I wouldn’t dream of interfering in your desmense.”
Not much, Bera thought. Ragnar didn’t hesitate when he felt it necessary.
“Of course we can, my lord.” Thorbjorg sensed as always which way the wind was blowing, and said what she guessed he wanted to hear.
Ragnar’s face split with a grin. “Then that’s settled.” He rubbed his hands together.
“How do you know that he’s not a vagrant?” Asgerd said.
“We thought that initially,” Ragnar said. “We were ready to leave him to die, until Bjarney pointed out that a trespassing vagrant can be indentured, if he recovers.” He shrugged. “If he doesn’t recover, he won’t eat, anyway.”
“Hmmph,” Hilda said, but didn’t argue.
“Funny,” Ragnar said, “the snow was stained blue.” Whether it was the colour or simply the fact that the snow was dyed, but it seemed to Bera that Ragnar sounded uneasy. It was so rare that Bera couldn’t help staring.
He caught her looking and straightening, returned to his normal forceful manner. “Here’s someone who can help. Bera, I need someone to safeguard our new investment. You can nurse our new worker.”
Bera looked down, bobbing her head in assent.
Ragnar must have mistaken her shyness for reluctance, or his next words would surely never have been so cruel (at least, she thought, not before you got pregnant): “Well, come on girl! Look to it! You should be grateful – it’ll give you something to think about, take your mind off that dead bastard of yours.”
She felt tears sting her eyes, and lunged toward the travois.
But Ragnar must have seen her well up, for she heard him half-groan, and mutter, “Well, you shouldn’t have brought shame on my house by opening your legs to the first man who ignored your plainness. My darling Gunnhild would spin in her grave if she could see what you’ve turned into.”
Bera wanted to shout that, but for the eruption on Surtsey, she would have gone home as soon as she was pregnant, but that was pointless. Her family was dead, and now she just had to get on with living.
So she didn’t answer, but instead wrestled the stranger off the travois. But in so doing, Bera scraped the stranger’s back on the stones, and he roused screaming from his near-coma. Ragnar shouted, “Yngi! Thorir! Give her a hand with that!”
The two men helped ease the stranger back into the travois and unhitch it. Thorir called, “Where do you want it?” He stood far too close to Bera for her liking.
“Put it in with the animals,” Ragnar said.
Grunting with effort the men picked him up, and staggered toward the stables. Bera shadowed them into the warm, odorous darkness. She gazed at the horses, three of which were hers. But the web of debts incurred had bound her too tight to indulge any fantasies of flight while she was pregnant.
Ragnar appeared in the doorway. “Mind you take good care of him.”
Bera didn’t answer.
When she was sure that Ragnar had gone, she took Brynja from under her furs. Weeping quietly, she let the puppy nuzzle the other nipple from the one she had suckled the night before. “Like Romulus and Remus,” she said, “but in reverse.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t end in tears,” Ragnar said, making her jump at his unexpected return. Luckily, he was so busy staring at the stranger lying on the hay that he didn’t notice the puppy, instead assuming her reference was to the man. He kept staring at the man, barely able to conceal his repugnance. “It’s an Icelandic tradition, to fear the stranger, but even so, this hairless stranger bothers me. His presence means trouble… we’ll call him Loki. It seems fitting.”
“I’ll do my best for you,” Bera said, shielding Brynja by turning away slightly.
Ragnar roused himself. “You will,” he said. “We’ve a critical time coming. Once the crops ripen fully, it’s a race to get them in. We’ll need every able-bodied hand we can get. He can repay us our hospitality – if he recovers.”
“If he doesn’t? Or he recovers, but stays an invalid?”
“That won’t happen,” Ragnar said. The feral look on his face chilled Bera. “He’ll have an accident before that happens. Clear?”
Bera nodded, swallowing.
Monday, March 22, 2010
FREE FICTION: Winter Song by Colin Harvey, Day Two
The free preview continues! Helpful Links: Angry Robot Books, Part 1
Bera wanted to scream her grief at the night, but that would rouse the farmyard dogs. That would in turn wake the sleepers. She already felt so raw that she might as well have been scoured by sandpaper, and a public lecture from Hilda was more than she could face, so she clamped her jaw shut until it ached.
The farmyard was so cold that her breath threatened to freeze solid in the midnight air – not that Isheimur’s midnight-sky was like other worlds, she gathered:. It would be another five weeks until the equinox, when the Mizar quartet would line up together on Isheimur’s far side, with only the twin moons, Stor and Litid, to illuminate the true-dark for a few hours. Until then, though Gamasol and Deltasol had set within a few hours of one another, the further pair was still high in the sky.
That she could see where to put her feet on the rocky slope up to the grave made the act of mourning her dead son easier, and at least Ragnar had allowed her to bury Palli here, rather than in open ground. The graveyard was in a pocket of such boulder-strewn land that it was good for nothing else, unlike the rest of the valley. Its rocky border at least protected the bodies from burrowing marauders. Snolfurs were another matter – only a precious bullet or arrow would deter one of them.
She clambered past a tapped-out steam-vent which no longer gave its energy to the generator, the metre-wide pipe to the water tank down the hill now disconnected. Putting the sprig of lavender on the unmarked cairn was a pathetic little token, but it was all she had. At the thought of Palli’s little face turning blue, the tears started up again, half-blinding her, freezing on her face as they trickled down.
She crouched, offering prayers, to Wotan, Yahweh – any of the old ones who might exist, just in case – to take care of Palli. Assuming that there was an afterlife, rather than just mouldering in the dirt.
Wiping her eyes, she glimpsed something streak above the top of the Reykleif hills in a flat curve, so it couldn’t be a shape-shifter; nor did any troll ever move that fast. It was fiery bright, so it was most likely a meteor, she decided.
Standing again, she winced. Moving sent slivers of pain shooting through her cramped-up feet, numb even through the fur-lined house-shoes. Taking outside boots would have meant stumbling around in the boot-room, perhaps falling over one of the sleeping farmhands. She didn’t want that. Better her feet froze than to admit to the other women that she still grieved for her beloved bastard.
If her body didn’t give her away: ten days after burying him, her breasts were still swollen and sore, her blouses sodden even through the wadding that she’d shoved into her bra. The others must have noticed, but if they had, for once – in a rare show of restraint – they had said nothing.
Bera turned back, looking down the slope to face Skorradalur. Farmhouses crouching into the hillside formed three sides of a square round a courtyard, with the lake Skorravatn beyond the barn the fourth side. On the far side of the lake, antique wind-turbines hunched in the lee of the valley slope, their blades turning slowly in the incessant wind, the open grassland between them peppered with sheep, grazing on the last of the late-summer long grass.
She descended the stony, treacherous slope to Ragnarholt, the biggest farmhouse, passing the water-tank which took the excess steam from the newer geo-thermal vent; what wasn’t needed to heat the house was allowed to condense inside its bulk to provide fresh water, so that the settlers didn’t need to venture down to Skorravatn in winter and risk ambush from lurking creatures. It wasn’t the halcyon days of when the farm had fusion power, but it was better than nothing.
Even in the thickening twilight she had to be careful not to turn an ankle on the stony ground. But if its aid in finding her way was a blessing, when the deep boom echoed from the west, waking the farm-dogs into a barrage of barking, it was a curse. Any onlooker could see her picking her way back. She speeded up, and twice nearly fell in hidden dips in the grass. Looking up, the shadowy bulk of Thorir perched in the watch-tower atop the farmhouse hadn’t moved. Hopefully, he was asleep. Thorir was good at that, even though, if he were caught, it would mean a flogging.
The breeze strengthened, the wind-turbines’ blades speeding up.
Brynja caught Bera’s scent and yapped.
“Hush!” Bera hissed.
But instead the puppy redoubled her efforts to slip the leash, where she was tied to the court-yard water-tap. Droplets from the tap had frozen so that Brynja’s feet slipped and skidded on them.
Reluctantly, Bera fondled the little dog’s ears. She was as white and fluffy as the rest of the litter, but they’d all found homes. No one wanted the little runt, though, so Ragnar had banished her to the courtyard, saying, “We can’t afford to throw away what resources we have on animals that aren’t viable, however cute they look now.” If Brynja survived on the scraps that she could scavenge, she would live, but she was already skin and bone.
Desperately, shivering, Brynja tried to climb inside Bera’s coat and nuzzled her blouse.
Still thinking of Palli, and of Ragnar’s ruthlessness, Bera undid the leash, her jaw clamped. Freed, the puppy scrambled inside her coat in a flurry of paws. Brynja nuzzled and nuzzled at her blouse, until Bera sighed. She reached in and undid her bra.
Teeth like needles clamped onto her nipple. The pain made Bera draw her lips back from her teeth in a silent scream, but in a perverse way she welcomed it. However bad it was, it was real, and for a few too-short moments it obliterated memories of a tiny face turning blue and silent.
Finally, the needles grew too fierce, and she prised her bloodied breast away from the seeking mouth. Rocking her furry cargo, humming an almost soundless lullaby, she crept across the farmyard to the back door.
Looking up again, she saw a faint glow to the north-west between the hills.
It’s not any of the suns, she thought, and if that’s a fire, then someone’s farmstead is burning.
But she couldn’t think of any farmhouses in that direction. Too many trolls likely to midnight-raid the settlements, if the old records were true. And if were a fire, then Hilda and the others would already be spilling into the courtyard to answer the distress calls.
She lifted the latch carefully, and ducking to step down into the lobby shut the door behind her.
A light snapping on blinded her, though it was only dim. Her vision cleared to reveal Thorir standing with sword in hand and an evil grin on his face at his cleverness in sneaking down from the watch-tower.
Behind him, his wife Hilda stood with folded arms and bulging eyes: “Bera Sigurdsdottir! What on Isheimur are you doing? Have you lost your wits?”
Nothing Bera could say would spare her from a scolding, so she just slumped.
Hilda said, “Go back on watch, darling, while I sort this out.” She snapped off the light. There were the noises of Thorir leaving, then Hilda hissed, “Stupid girl!”
“Sorry,” Bera said quietly.
“Pappi took you in when his old friend died – you repay us by disturbing our sleep while he’s away?”
Even after six years, you haven’t forgiven me? Bera thought. I don’t want his attention!
As self-appointed surrogate mother, Hilda didn’t hesitate to “correct” Bera whenever Hilda felt it necessary, which was frequently. “We thought you were an outlaw – or worse.”
“Did you hear the sound?” Bera said, in a desperate attempt to distract her foster-sister. “Like muffled thunder.”
“Never mind that,” Hilda said. Although she hadn’t distracted Hilda, Bera’s trick had at least robbed her rant of momentum. “Go back to bed. Try not to fall over the others on the way through.”
Bera wondered how much of Hilda’s anger was that Bera had shown her husband, and therefore Hilda, for the fool he was. If Bera could slip out without him noticing, then raiders could do the same in the opposite direction.
Or whether Hilda thought he hadn’t been sleeping, but that Bera had had paid him in kind to look away. Bera couldn’t tell Hilda that she’d sooner drink acid than go with Ragnar. Hilda wouldn’t believe her, would instead point to the cairn as proof that Bera would go with anyone.
Next day in the kitchen no one spoke to Bera over breakfast, but that wasn’t unusual. She had managed not to bump into the cots of the sleeping children and Farm hands, so no one was angry with her – at least, no more than usual.
All ten of Ragnar’s grandchildren, from the youngest toddler to eight year-old Toti, Hilda’s eldest, sat around the vast table, assembled by nanobots centuries earlier to resemble oak, now stained and pitted with age.
Bera and the other women shuttled pots and plates to and from the vast stove, while the men, were out checking the flocks as always
Except Yngi, of course. Bera had seen him at first sunrise, as Gamasol stained the horizon with its searchlight glare. She had snuck out again and clipped Brynja back to the water-tap, where a few shards of ice had half-melted in the direct sunlight, staining Brynja’s white fur with muddy streaks. The puppy yapped as Bera walked away, but she hurried and was back indoors before anyone noticed… she hoped.
Now she waited her turn for the porridge bowl, and when the others had taken their fill, scraped out the dregs of the weak, watery liquid. She got the last few bits when Thorbjorg said, “Why don’t you lick the pattern off the plate?”
Her face burned, but she didn’t answer Ragnar’s younger daughter-in-law. Thorbjorg was only four years older than Bera, but she was as pretty as Bera was plain, and used her voluptuousness like a weapon on the men. And besides, she was married, so respectable.
“Well?” Thorbjorg challenged.
“There is no pattern,” Bera mumbled.
Thorbjorg’s laugh was a caw. “No there isn’t, is there? You must have licked it off yesterday. Maybe if you weren’t such a greedy pig, your teats would dry up – it’s not as if you need the milk.”
Bera shut her eyes, dug her fingers into her palms.
Hilda must have seen how intense the pain was, and if any of them would understand, she would – now the medic had said that any more pregnancies would pose a life-threatening risk. “That’s enough,” Hilda said. “Save your wit for later, Thorbjorg.”
Bera slid into daydream, her usual refuge. Maybe there was some kind of payback. Bera had felt sorry for Hilda when she’d heard the others talking about it: barren at twenty-seven, with only two children to her name.
“How will we fill this big empty world if we can only have two children?” Thorbjorg had asked, smug in her brood-cow status. Bera had hated her for Hilda then: five children at twenty-one. Yngi might have been addled in the head, but his seed was potent – if it was his. Thorbjorg was always flirting with old Ragnar, always possessive with her hugs and touches.
Bera had wished that it was Thorbjorg who had miscarried instead of Hilda. When the others had gone, she had slipped into Hilda’s room and asked, “Is there anything I can do, Hilda? I’m so sorry to hear about…” and trailed off, not sure what to call it. Loss? Too tame. Miscarriage? Too clinical. So she had left the sentence unfinished.
But Hilda had seemed to understand. She shook her head. “I just want to be alone.”
That had been the last half-civilized conversation between them. They had never been friends, but as long as Bera was duly deferential to Ragnar’s eldest child, they had been civil. But a month later, two months after the Spring Fair, Bera had missed her period, and soon after, she knew that she was pregnant. Refusing to name the father meant that no bill of settlement could be made to another house, and as good as admitted that Bera would sleep with any man.
“Bera!” Hilda’s cry snatched her back, to the other’s amusement.
“Daydreaming again,” Toti said. Like most children, he could spot a legitimate target for teasing. “Bera’s daydreaming, Bera’s dreaming of her boyfriend!” he sang.
“That’ll do, young man!” Hilda said. “Enough of that or you lose your time at the Oracle!”
“Sorry.” Bera went without prompting to the sink to rinse the pots.
“You’re washing clothes today.” Hilda lowered her voice, “I’ve not said anything to the others about your star-gazing, but I will if it happens again. We can’t afford to heat the countryside.”
“But I closed the doors straight away!”
“And we’d have to send out search parties if raiders spirited you off. Bera, you’re so selfish!”
Bera managed not to snap back that she’d be the last person they’d send out rescue parties for, if outlaws, trolls or shape-shifters struck.
Two
Bera
Bera wanted to scream her grief at the night, but that would rouse the farmyard dogs. That would in turn wake the sleepers. She already felt so raw that she might as well have been scoured by sandpaper, and a public lecture from Hilda was more than she could face, so she clamped her jaw shut until it ached.
The farmyard was so cold that her breath threatened to freeze solid in the midnight air – not that Isheimur’s midnight-sky was like other worlds, she gathered:. It would be another five weeks until the equinox, when the Mizar quartet would line up together on Isheimur’s far side, with only the twin moons, Stor and Litid, to illuminate the true-dark for a few hours. Until then, though Gamasol and Deltasol had set within a few hours of one another, the further pair was still high in the sky.
That she could see where to put her feet on the rocky slope up to the grave made the act of mourning her dead son easier, and at least Ragnar had allowed her to bury Palli here, rather than in open ground. The graveyard was in a pocket of such boulder-strewn land that it was good for nothing else, unlike the rest of the valley. Its rocky border at least protected the bodies from burrowing marauders. Snolfurs were another matter – only a precious bullet or arrow would deter one of them.
She clambered past a tapped-out steam-vent which no longer gave its energy to the generator, the metre-wide pipe to the water tank down the hill now disconnected. Putting the sprig of lavender on the unmarked cairn was a pathetic little token, but it was all she had. At the thought of Palli’s little face turning blue, the tears started up again, half-blinding her, freezing on her face as they trickled down.
She crouched, offering prayers, to Wotan, Yahweh – any of the old ones who might exist, just in case – to take care of Palli. Assuming that there was an afterlife, rather than just mouldering in the dirt.
Wiping her eyes, she glimpsed something streak above the top of the Reykleif hills in a flat curve, so it couldn’t be a shape-shifter; nor did any troll ever move that fast. It was fiery bright, so it was most likely a meteor, she decided.
Standing again, she winced. Moving sent slivers of pain shooting through her cramped-up feet, numb even through the fur-lined house-shoes. Taking outside boots would have meant stumbling around in the boot-room, perhaps falling over one of the sleeping farmhands. She didn’t want that. Better her feet froze than to admit to the other women that she still grieved for her beloved bastard.
If her body didn’t give her away: ten days after burying him, her breasts were still swollen and sore, her blouses sodden even through the wadding that she’d shoved into her bra. The others must have noticed, but if they had, for once – in a rare show of restraint – they had said nothing.
Bera turned back, looking down the slope to face Skorradalur. Farmhouses crouching into the hillside formed three sides of a square round a courtyard, with the lake Skorravatn beyond the barn the fourth side. On the far side of the lake, antique wind-turbines hunched in the lee of the valley slope, their blades turning slowly in the incessant wind, the open grassland between them peppered with sheep, grazing on the last of the late-summer long grass.
She descended the stony, treacherous slope to Ragnarholt, the biggest farmhouse, passing the water-tank which took the excess steam from the newer geo-thermal vent; what wasn’t needed to heat the house was allowed to condense inside its bulk to provide fresh water, so that the settlers didn’t need to venture down to Skorravatn in winter and risk ambush from lurking creatures. It wasn’t the halcyon days of when the farm had fusion power, but it was better than nothing.
Even in the thickening twilight she had to be careful not to turn an ankle on the stony ground. But if its aid in finding her way was a blessing, when the deep boom echoed from the west, waking the farm-dogs into a barrage of barking, it was a curse. Any onlooker could see her picking her way back. She speeded up, and twice nearly fell in hidden dips in the grass. Looking up, the shadowy bulk of Thorir perched in the watch-tower atop the farmhouse hadn’t moved. Hopefully, he was asleep. Thorir was good at that, even though, if he were caught, it would mean a flogging.
The breeze strengthened, the wind-turbines’ blades speeding up.
Brynja caught Bera’s scent and yapped.
“Hush!” Bera hissed.
But instead the puppy redoubled her efforts to slip the leash, where she was tied to the court-yard water-tap. Droplets from the tap had frozen so that Brynja’s feet slipped and skidded on them.
Reluctantly, Bera fondled the little dog’s ears. She was as white and fluffy as the rest of the litter, but they’d all found homes. No one wanted the little runt, though, so Ragnar had banished her to the courtyard, saying, “We can’t afford to throw away what resources we have on animals that aren’t viable, however cute they look now.” If Brynja survived on the scraps that she could scavenge, she would live, but she was already skin and bone.
Desperately, shivering, Brynja tried to climb inside Bera’s coat and nuzzled her blouse.
Still thinking of Palli, and of Ragnar’s ruthlessness, Bera undid the leash, her jaw clamped. Freed, the puppy scrambled inside her coat in a flurry of paws. Brynja nuzzled and nuzzled at her blouse, until Bera sighed. She reached in and undid her bra.
Teeth like needles clamped onto her nipple. The pain made Bera draw her lips back from her teeth in a silent scream, but in a perverse way she welcomed it. However bad it was, it was real, and for a few too-short moments it obliterated memories of a tiny face turning blue and silent.
Finally, the needles grew too fierce, and she prised her bloodied breast away from the seeking mouth. Rocking her furry cargo, humming an almost soundless lullaby, she crept across the farmyard to the back door.
Looking up again, she saw a faint glow to the north-west between the hills.
It’s not any of the suns, she thought, and if that’s a fire, then someone’s farmstead is burning.
But she couldn’t think of any farmhouses in that direction. Too many trolls likely to midnight-raid the settlements, if the old records were true. And if were a fire, then Hilda and the others would already be spilling into the courtyard to answer the distress calls.
She lifted the latch carefully, and ducking to step down into the lobby shut the door behind her.
A light snapping on blinded her, though it was only dim. Her vision cleared to reveal Thorir standing with sword in hand and an evil grin on his face at his cleverness in sneaking down from the watch-tower.
Behind him, his wife Hilda stood with folded arms and bulging eyes: “Bera Sigurdsdottir! What on Isheimur are you doing? Have you lost your wits?”
Nothing Bera could say would spare her from a scolding, so she just slumped.
Hilda said, “Go back on watch, darling, while I sort this out.” She snapped off the light. There were the noises of Thorir leaving, then Hilda hissed, “Stupid girl!”
“Sorry,” Bera said quietly.
“Pappi took you in when his old friend died – you repay us by disturbing our sleep while he’s away?”
Even after six years, you haven’t forgiven me? Bera thought. I don’t want his attention!
As self-appointed surrogate mother, Hilda didn’t hesitate to “correct” Bera whenever Hilda felt it necessary, which was frequently. “We thought you were an outlaw – or worse.”
“Did you hear the sound?” Bera said, in a desperate attempt to distract her foster-sister. “Like muffled thunder.”
“Never mind that,” Hilda said. Although she hadn’t distracted Hilda, Bera’s trick had at least robbed her rant of momentum. “Go back to bed. Try not to fall over the others on the way through.”
Bera wondered how much of Hilda’s anger was that Bera had shown her husband, and therefore Hilda, for the fool he was. If Bera could slip out without him noticing, then raiders could do the same in the opposite direction.
Or whether Hilda thought he hadn’t been sleeping, but that Bera had had paid him in kind to look away. Bera couldn’t tell Hilda that she’d sooner drink acid than go with Ragnar. Hilda wouldn’t believe her, would instead point to the cairn as proof that Bera would go with anyone.
Next day in the kitchen no one spoke to Bera over breakfast, but that wasn’t unusual. She had managed not to bump into the cots of the sleeping children and Farm hands, so no one was angry with her – at least, no more than usual.
All ten of Ragnar’s grandchildren, from the youngest toddler to eight year-old Toti, Hilda’s eldest, sat around the vast table, assembled by nanobots centuries earlier to resemble oak, now stained and pitted with age.
Bera and the other women shuttled pots and plates to and from the vast stove, while the men, were out checking the flocks as always
Except Yngi, of course. Bera had seen him at first sunrise, as Gamasol stained the horizon with its searchlight glare. She had snuck out again and clipped Brynja back to the water-tap, where a few shards of ice had half-melted in the direct sunlight, staining Brynja’s white fur with muddy streaks. The puppy yapped as Bera walked away, but she hurried and was back indoors before anyone noticed… she hoped.
Now she waited her turn for the porridge bowl, and when the others had taken their fill, scraped out the dregs of the weak, watery liquid. She got the last few bits when Thorbjorg said, “Why don’t you lick the pattern off the plate?”
Her face burned, but she didn’t answer Ragnar’s younger daughter-in-law. Thorbjorg was only four years older than Bera, but she was as pretty as Bera was plain, and used her voluptuousness like a weapon on the men. And besides, she was married, so respectable.
“Well?” Thorbjorg challenged.
“There is no pattern,” Bera mumbled.
Thorbjorg’s laugh was a caw. “No there isn’t, is there? You must have licked it off yesterday. Maybe if you weren’t such a greedy pig, your teats would dry up – it’s not as if you need the milk.”
Bera shut her eyes, dug her fingers into her palms.
Hilda must have seen how intense the pain was, and if any of them would understand, she would – now the medic had said that any more pregnancies would pose a life-threatening risk. “That’s enough,” Hilda said. “Save your wit for later, Thorbjorg.”
Bera slid into daydream, her usual refuge. Maybe there was some kind of payback. Bera had felt sorry for Hilda when she’d heard the others talking about it: barren at twenty-seven, with only two children to her name.
“How will we fill this big empty world if we can only have two children?” Thorbjorg had asked, smug in her brood-cow status. Bera had hated her for Hilda then: five children at twenty-one. Yngi might have been addled in the head, but his seed was potent – if it was his. Thorbjorg was always flirting with old Ragnar, always possessive with her hugs and touches.
Bera had wished that it was Thorbjorg who had miscarried instead of Hilda. When the others had gone, she had slipped into Hilda’s room and asked, “Is there anything I can do, Hilda? I’m so sorry to hear about…” and trailed off, not sure what to call it. Loss? Too tame. Miscarriage? Too clinical. So she had left the sentence unfinished.
But Hilda had seemed to understand. She shook her head. “I just want to be alone.”
That had been the last half-civilized conversation between them. They had never been friends, but as long as Bera was duly deferential to Ragnar’s eldest child, they had been civil. But a month later, two months after the Spring Fair, Bera had missed her period, and soon after, she knew that she was pregnant. Refusing to name the father meant that no bill of settlement could be made to another house, and as good as admitted that Bera would sleep with any man.
“Bera!” Hilda’s cry snatched her back, to the other’s amusement.
“Daydreaming again,” Toti said. Like most children, he could spot a legitimate target for teasing. “Bera’s daydreaming, Bera’s dreaming of her boyfriend!” he sang.
“That’ll do, young man!” Hilda said. “Enough of that or you lose your time at the Oracle!”
“Sorry.” Bera went without prompting to the sink to rinse the pots.
“You’re washing clothes today.” Hilda lowered her voice, “I’ve not said anything to the others about your star-gazing, but I will if it happens again. We can’t afford to heat the countryside.”
“But I closed the doors straight away!”
“And we’d have to send out search parties if raiders spirited you off. Bera, you’re so selfish!”
Bera managed not to snap back that she’d be the last person they’d send out rescue parties for, if outlaws, trolls or shape-shifters struck.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
FREE FICTION: Winter Song by Colin Harvey, Day One
One
Karl
Karl was dreaming of his clone-wife on distant Avalon when the plasma bolt slammed into Ship’s engines.
One moment he was bathing with Karla in iodized springs beneath Jodi’s Falls, soaping her up-tilted breasts in the warm sunlight of Delta Pavonis, the next a giant was sitting on his chest while alarms screeched in the emergency lighting.
The pressure lifted and he floated naked in his bed-web on the bridge, a voice calling ever louder, “Karl, we are under attack.” That Ship’s too-perfect alto was gravelled by static showed how mortal the blow might be. His interface wasn’t working; none of the usual displays were scrolling down his field of vision, and with no data feeding directly into his brain he was forced to use archaic Voice. “What – what’s the damage?” He smelled the acrid tang of smoke and the monitors – used only by passengers – were blank.
He coughed, his eyes stinging, and a smooth wall opened and out popped a freshly-grown mask connected to an air-pack.
“I’m not wearing that,” Karl muttered between coughs. “I hate putting things on my face.”
“You’re enhanced, not invulnerable,” Ship snapped. “Put it on!”
Muttering, Karl complied.
“Thank you,” Ship said. “We have lost all but emergency power in this third. In the central third we have intermittent power. The rest is undamaged. When waves from the gravity generator threatened to crush you, I had to take the engines down, and can’t restart them. I’m attempting to dodge a second incoming bolt with lateral power, but it’s already expanded, and complete evasion is unlikely. Time to impact is four minutes.”
Karl tried to digest the news that he was probably dead. “They must have fired as soon as they dropped out of fold-space.”
Ship didn’t answer directly. “The second bolt came from different co-ordinates, indicating another ship, though it’s difficult to scan through the asteroid belt. I’ve registered a third ship nearby.” It sounded sheepish; “They must have identified us before I could see them. The first I knew was their plasma bolt coming at point-nine-cee. I had barely three minutes warning. I’m sorry, Karl.”
“Forget it,” Karl said.
That meant there would be no respite while the others re-charged their capacitors. Even if by a miracle they dodged this second bolt, and one from the third ship, the first would have recharged and be ready to fire.
He slipped free of the amniotic safety of the bed-web. “Are they the Aye ships we spotted earlier?” Unlikely, he knew. The ships that were each individual Artificial Intelligences rarely interacted with the Flesh-bound, who held little interest for them. He floated over to one of the screens. “Can you get this working?”
Ship paused for so long that Karl wondered if it had died.
“Yes,” it said.
A schematic appeared, of Ship at less than three Standard AUs from Mizar B2. Karl had thought that here on the sunward edge of the system’s asteroid belt, surrounded by the myriad dots among which Ship and he had lurked, they would be safe to spy upon the Ayes. There they were, the symbols denoting the Ayes around the nearest of the four stars – the double pair that had so attracted astrophysicists ever since their nature had been discovered – in close orbit around the upper chromosphere of Mizar B2, doing whatever incomprehensible things Ayes did.
Scattered among the debris of the outer belt were three perfectly spherical ships, their regularity a defiant cry to the universe. “Their signatures indicate that they’re Traditionals. I’m sorry, Karl. You’ve been fired upon by your own species.”
Though it was debatable whether their assailants would consider Karl human, it was no surprise – Ship’s design was clearly the angular asymmetry of the Radicals; the Pures, the most likely suspects among the Traditionals, would have guessed that he had man-machine interfaces, and was therefore to be despised even more than the Ayes they hated. Like all bullies they picked on him, a single target, rather than five Aye ships.
Between the symbols denoting Ship and their assailants was the pulsing sphere of a plasma bolt, the enemy’s fuel hawked up from their engine and spat out of a tube.
“How far away are they?”
“Two AUs spaceward.”
“Recommendations?”
“With five – four minutes to impact, your logical course is to abandon ship.”
“Stitch that.” He gazed at the monitor. “Let’s see how far lateral power gets us. Are we dead centre of the bolt?”
“Slightly to starboard, so I have already set course in that direction.”
“Good girl. What else can we do?”
“I can get no more power through the vents.” As always, Ship ignored his anthropomorphising.
He thought. “What if we vented atmosphere from the hold?”
Ship paused so long that Karl thought he would have to prompt it. “It’d increase velocity by an additional one per cent. Not enough. We need seven.”
“Vent the airlocks as well. Take the air pressure as low as possible, then drop it another per cent.”
“I can’t do that, Karl. I’m programmed to protect you. It’s an unacceptable risk.”
“And being blown up isn’t?”
“That’s why I recommended that you abandon ship. You have two minutes to decide. You should leave two minutes earlier not to be caught by debris and radiation. That’s now, by the way.”
“Jack it, I’m not leaving you!” Or the lump of neutronium locked in a stasis field in the corner of the hold. If the field failed the cargo would devour the ship in less time than it took to scarf down one of the tasteless protein-burgers he’d lived on for a month.
“Karl, that’s sentimental nonsense,” Ship said. “The major risk to you is from exposure, but I’ve sent a tight-beam Mayday toward the Hanghzou Relay, which I estimate the nearest one sympathetic. It’s about four light-months away. They can jump here in days once they have the signal, and the lifegel will keep you safe – even in vacuum – until then.”
“I’m glad you haven’t suggested I let our attackers pick me up,” Karl said.
Ship ignored his feeble humour. “You have many months of power in your companion, which will kick in as soon as I am out of range. But before the power fails, the lifegel will need fuel, and will slowly consume your body. Even before that, there will be side-effects – weight loss, anaemia, eczema. Such skinsuits are only designed as a short-term measure.”
Karl nodded, clenching and unclenching his fists. “I wish I had these bastards in reach…”
“Adrenaline has that effect,” Ship said. It added, “I am an object; you can replace me, probably even approximate my programming. But I am no more a person than any other vehicle. I am expendable – you are not. You should leave now, from Bay Eight.”
Karl slapped the wall, but it didn’t make him feel any better. “Bay Eight, then. Keep talking while I’m en route.”
“Karl,” Ship said. “There’s something else you should know.”
“Go on.”
“I’ve found some data that was previously misfiled. This system was settled over four centuries ago.”
“These bastards are local?”
“I believe not. There’s no other indication of local traffic. The last records are over two centuries ago, from just before the onset of the Long Night. If the colony survived, they probably slipped back during the conflict.
“It’s unlikely that they did survive. If the war didn’t get them, the planet’s orbit is elliptical. During summer it would just be habitable, but its winter's too cold to survive.”
“Which star is it orbiting?”
“It appears to be orbiting both of the Mizar B pairing, at a distance that would give it a sub-Martian climate.”
“Can I reach it from here?”
Ship said, “It’s about eighteen million kilometres from here, so it will take…”
There was a perceptible pause, which told Karl how terribly, terribly wrong things were – Ship should have been able to calculate the numbers instantly, as well as simultaneously managing a multiplicity of other tasks. “Three standard weeks.” It added, “I will get you there. And I will download all the information I have to you. Plug in.”
Gritting his teeth, Karl wiped the dust from the jack that hung beside the monitor screen for emergencies and inserted it in the socket behind his right ear, gasping, “Aagh! That’s horrible!” he cried. “It’s like someone running claws down a stone wall, really, really loudly.”
“I’m sorry.” Ship said. “If so many of my systems weren’t down.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, blinking a lie to the two words. The symbols flashed in front of his eyes, too fast to comprehend; he would review the data later, while he drifted in space.
Then he was pulling himself hand over hand down the corridor. As he rounded the first bend, Ship said, “The Ayes’ behaviour is curious.”
“How… so?” He was panting from the effort as he passed the hold, with the lump of super-heavy cargo that would have paid for the trip. Particularly if he could have traded it for information on the next leg.
“If I were to assume that they are going continue with their actions, what the Ayes are doing to the star’s upper chromosphere could have the effect of making the stars burn hotter.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know. They have never attempted to modify a star before, as far as we know.”
Karl reached Bay Eight, and paused.
Before he could speak, Ship said. “You must go now.”
Karl ripped off the mask, sighing with relief. He nodded, thin-lipped, and patted the wall. “Thanks – uh, you know–”
“No time,” Ship said. “Go now.”
The door irised slowly, revealing a wall of quivering blue jelly, seven feet high, and stuffed full of nanos. He pushed into the gel, which gave against him, and he felt the stupid-smart goo hook into his skin and poke squidgy fingers into his nostrils, ears and even up his anus and urethra. It had little more intellect than an amoeba but was hardwired to climb into him and form a second skin, and did so relentlessly.
“Why would terraformers pick a planet with such an unorthodox primary?” Karl wasn’t really that interested, but it was better than thinking about the gel, or worse, the boiling mass of superheated plasma hurtling toward them at a quarter of a million kilometres a second. He fought down a rising tide of panic as the gel pushed deeper. It took a mighty effort of will to open his mouth and let it flow down into his lungs. It formed an impenetrable skin over the vitreous liquid of his eyes: when it transluced so he could see the exit button, he knew that the covering was complete, and it had formed a tasteless, odourless emulsion between his frail flesh and the vacuum of space.
“With high maintenance, it would have been a viable project,” Ship said. “What they didn’t foresee was the coming war. They never do. That changed everything.”
Karl felt, rather than heard, the deep groan in the bowels of the ship as the containment fields around the neutronium weakened, and began to tear Ship apart.
“Got to go now!” he shouted to Ship by way of farewell.
“I have been squeezing all the lifegel into Bay Eight,” Ship said.
Before he could ask why, because the extra gel would do him no good, the closet-sized airlock opened onto space. The depressurizing atmosphere fired him clear, and he understood then. The extra gel was propellant, and as he tumbled head over heels, he blessed his clever, dependable Ship.
Counting showed that he was rotating head over heels every six seconds. The lifegel opaqued to protect his eyes – leaving him with only turquoise-blue to stare at – every time he faced the eye-meltingly fierce glare of the Mizar quartet. As he turned to face shadow, it cleared again.
The lifegel formed a perfect seal around him, but he couldn’t stop his chest from rising and falling; the carbon dioxide he breathed out was absorbed by the goo and gradually converted back into an oxygen and nitrogen mix a few microns thick, between him and the membrane.
He hadn’t counted how long he had been accelerating when Ship said, “Karl, there’s something else that I should tell you. The colonized planet’s ozone layer appears–” and broke off.
Despite the fact that Karl was facing away from the suns, the membrane opaqued. Then – even though it was supposed to absorb all kinetic energy – he felt a punch in his back that would have been a fragment of Ship, blown to pieces.
Although it had only been a semi-organic machine, Ship had been closer to him at times than any lover, and he wept for his loss.
Later, after he had exhausted his tears, he slept. It was a fitful doze, more to process everything that had happened since his rude awakening than from exhaustion.
When he awoke, he held himself in as long as possible until there was no evading the unpleasant sensation of voiding himself into the membrane and allowing it to absorb the deposit. If it had not been for his circumstances, hanging in space would have been enjoyable. He even wondered why no one had used the lifegel at home to sight-see Avalon’s neighbour worlds.
Astronomers on Ancient Earth had thought Mizar was one star. When they made the first telescopes, they realized that “it” was a pair. Still later, they finally understood that each pair – Mizar A and B – was in turn a pair.
Using the info that Ship had fired into him he went through the seven worlds orbiting the smaller pair that was Mizar B and the centuries old ruin of the semi-mythical Mizar B3, glimpsed only briefly before it flared and died again.
Farthest away from the stars that the settlers had named Alfasol, Betasol, Gamasol and Deltasol was tiny Asgard, a ball of ice and methane around a rocky core. Next was Valhalla, a blue hydrogen, helium and methane giant like Neptune. Moving inwards past green Midgard – Mizar B’s Uranus – Vanaheim was the largest world, though only slightly bigger than many-mooned Asagarth, next to it and closest to the asteroid belt dubbed Bifrost. While sunwards little Ragnarok was scorched to sterility. What this system lacked, Karl realized, was an equivalent to Earth and Venus; it would have made the Terraformer’s choices much easier.
And ahead of him was the other world, his destination. Isheimur, the settlers had named it – ice world.
The colony would have faded with the curtain-like falling of the Long Night, when the two types of humans, the Terraformers who wanted to shape worlds to fit humans, clashed with those Pantropists who rather wished to change humanity, to fit the worlds they settled. It had been a war that raged for decades, across only a few disputed systems to start with, but spreading like a virus.
Two centuries on, he had no idea whether there were survivors here or whether he was falling toward a dead world. The thought of re-entry made his mouth go dry, but at least the interminable waiting would be over – if he didn’t miss altogether and spin onwards until the lifegel ate him alive.
Days, weeks, perhaps months passed – he had no way of telling one day from the next. He could have switched his companion on, but the semi-idiot sub-routines reminded him too much of Ship, and he needed to save the power for more important things, like conserving the lifegel.
Isheimur crept closer until it filled his whole sky and he saw patches of blue and grey towards the equator. Sometimes it even eclipsed Mizar B – or Gamasol and Deltasol, as he should now call them, he decided.
He’d never heard of anyone trying what he was about to do, and he was sure that Ship would have told him if there was a precedent. No, this was the first attempt to confirm something that existed only as theory.
He was desperate to test the theory, for he still hadn’t gotten used to the gel taking care of his bodily functions; as well as the waste, it fed him through intravenous drips of nutrient-rich saline. Worse, he felt at times as if he was starting to lose his mind.
If he had switched it on, his sub-moronic companion would have fed basic data directly into his cortex. But it would have been nothing compared to what sounded like Ship haunting him; he awoke from fragmented dreams with whispers still pulsing in his ears. Sometimes he woke crying. It seemed wrong that he should miss an artificial construct more than his own partners, but he’d spent more time with Ship than with them.
He wondered what Karla was doing, where she was, who she with. More mercurial than he, though they were supposedly the same, would she and the others wait for him, or would they decant a replacement?
At last, he felt the drag of atmosphere. He swung his feet around so that he seemed to be standing on the still near-vacuum, but what air there was began to glow as he cut through it. He opened his arms to create drag, spreading himself as wide as he could. The gel rushed to insulate his feet and under his arms, but even so, some of the heat began to seep through.
He doubted that anyone had ever tried to dive feet-first into atmosphere, to fall all the way to the ground, and actually survived. Even with the lifegel, it felt as though giant hands squeezed him, and someone was applying a blow-torch to the soles of his feet.
The roaring grew louder, louder, louder, louder – until it filled his whole world. It drilled into his ears and the hands around him squeezed ever harder and each breath was an effort. When oblivion came it was a merciful release.
Monday, February 8, 2010
FREE FICTION: Book of Secrets by Chris Roberson, Day Five
The fifth part of the preview of Chris Roberson’s Book of Secrets. Today you get the second half of the first pastiche, which I felt was one of the best parts of the novel. A very fun story for those of you who, like me, are fans of the pulp era. Helpful links: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Angry Robot Books, review of Book of Secrets, review of Sons of Dorn.
Through Martenson, the Black Hand learned that the meeting between Dupree and the Talon was to take place that night, at the edge of Golden Gate Park. When the hour came, the Black Hand was in place, this time with twin .45 automatics at the ready.
Dupree was to wait in a clearing, a suitcase full of cash at his side. The police were hidden amongst the surrounding trees, waiting for the signal to close. When the Talon arrived, the police would encircle him, and cut off escape.
The Black Hand watched the officers take their positions, himself hidden in amongst the branches of a tree, some eight feet off the ground. From that vantage point he had seen a gap in the police’s net, one the Talon could use to his advantage, and it was this spot he kept watch over.
At the stroke of midnight, as arranged, a hooded figure stepped into the clearing, dragging behind him a blindfolded and gagged woman. It was the Talon. In the moonlight a pistol glinted evilly in his hand.
Without a word, he motioned Dupree to throw him the case of money.
“Give me my wife first,” Dupree shouted, red-faced and trembling.
Again, the Talon gestured for the case, and then turned the pistol on Dupree’s whimpering wife.
“Okay, okay,” Dupree answered, and threw the case across the clearing to land at the hooded figure’s feet.
With one hand keeping the pistol trained on Dupree’s wife, he reached with the other to retrieve the case. Then, stepping slowly behind her, he shoved her into the clearing and hurried back to the trees. In an instant, the police emerged from hiding and rushed towards him, but to no avail. By cunning, or dumb luck, the Talon was running directly towards the hole in their net. But the Black Hand stood ready.
As the hooded figure passed underneath him, the Black Hand leapt from his perch, landing on the Talon with the force of a sledgehammer. He batted the pistol from the hooded man’s hand, and then brought his own guns to bear.
“This time, fiend,” he hissed behind his mask, “I have my own claws with me. And now, you will tell me what you know.”
Under the hood, the Talon quivered. The black hand of justice was upon him, and he felt its strength close around him!
The police found the man beneath the hood a short while later, whimpering and unmasked, tied to a lamppost. The Black Hand had learned what he needed from the man, and left him behind.
The man had turned out to be one Charlie Parsons, an out of work dockworker. He was a rough cut, simple man and, though not above breaking the law to suit his own needs, he was no criminal mastermind. The Black Hand had seen early that Parsons what nothing more than a pawn, a dupe. The true source of the evil at hand lay elsewhere.
Parsons, easily frightened into playing stool pigeon by the masked figure under the dark trees, had confessed that he knew nothing about the kidnappings. He had been hired by a hooded man simply to escort a bound woman into the clearing, retrieve a briefcase, and then return to the hooded man waiting in a sedan on a darkened street nearby. To Parsons this was simply a job, a strange one of course, but if a mysterious man wanted to pay him a month’s salary to stand around wearing a hood and waving a gun about it was fine with him.
Of his employer, Parsons could only say that he had picked him up off the streets near the dock, where he had been looking for work. He had been driving a late model, dark colored sedan, and had spoken only in whispers. He had never encountered the man until earlier that evening, and in his words had never broken the law in his life. This last the Black Hand doubted, but left that for the courts to determine. He was onto bigger prey.
Stepping into the shadows a short distance from the park, the mysterious avenger of the night emerged into the light in the guise of Richmond Taylor. Then he made his away across town to his home, and spent a sleepless night in his study, staring quietly into the darkness, contemplating. Morning came quickly, the sunlight streaming in through the shuttered windows, and Taylor reached for the phone.
He placed a call to police headquarters, and in the Black Hand’s raspy voice asked to speak with Joe Martenson.
“Martenson here,” came the reply after a short while.
“Joseph,” Taylor whispered into the receiver, “the Black Hand has use for you.”
“Go ahead,” Martenson answered, his voice grave.
“The man known as the Talon still holds an innocent in his clutches. I would see her released.”
“Well, you’re not alone,” Martenson replied. “She’s not either, anymore.”
“Explain yourself.”
“The Talon’s got another bird in the hand now. Another millionaire’s kid. Peter Matthews.”
“I see,” Taylor answered. “I see.” He paused. “Your service is valued, Joseph,” he went on. “I shall remember your loyalty.”
With that, Taylor hung up the phone. Now two lives hung in the balance. What was needed now was a visit to the docks. Then nightfall, and action!
Taylor spent the day up and down the wharf, talking to dock masters and ship captains from one end to the other. He played the bored investor, trying to find sound investments for his family’s fortune. Were there any empty warehouses to be had, he asked, any piers on which space might be rented? His family was moving into shipping, he explained, and wanted to gain a foothold in the market. He let slip that he was looking for qualified men to run the operation, too, which went far towards loosening recalcitrant tongues.
In the end, Taylor caught a cab and returned home. Once there, he unrolled a large map of the city onto his dining room table, and in a blunt-end pencil began to mark different locations one by one. With his considerable power of recall, he traced the route the hooded man had fled by two nights before, placed a large “x” upon the spot where Parsons was hired, and then began to triangulate positions and calculate distances to the half dozen warehouses he had circled. After half an hour’s work, he had his answer. He rolled up the map, and returned it to the shelf.
He dressed quickly. First the black wool suit, shoes, and leather gloves. Then he slipped various tools and devices into his pockets, and into the hollow heels of his shoes. Next he loaded his twin .45s, and slipped each into its shoulder harness. Last came the snap brim fedora, the full face mask ready to fall into place. Thus outfitted, he strode across the room to the phone.
The line rang four times, and then a groggy voice answered.
“Yeah, this is Nick,” came the muffled voice. “Whadya want?’
“Nicholas Oliverio, the Black Hand has use for you.”
“What? Oh, sure, yeah, I’m up.”
“You will meet me at the following address, Nicholas,” Taylor continued in whispers. “I will need your services for much of the night.”
“You got it, boss,” Oliverio replied eagerly. “Anything you say.”
Taylor gave him an address a few blocks away, and told him to be there in fifteen minutes.
“I’ll be there,” Oliverio answered, almost shouting. Taylor hung up the phone, turned out the light, and left the room.
Nick Oliverio arrived on time, even considering that he’d driven from the far side of town and had been in bed when Taylor had called. Nick felt he owed his life to the Black Hand, and would do anything for him. Some aided the Black Hand out of fear, or of hope for reward. Nick assisted him out of gratitude. Months before, the cab driver had narrowly escaped death when the Black Hand had prevented a gun-crazed fiend from firing point blank in Nick’s face. Ever since, whenever the Black Hand needed him, Nick was at the ready.
Nick pulled up to the curb, and from out of the shadows stepped the Black Hand. Without a word, he slipped into the backseat of the cab, closing the door silently behind him.
“Where to, boss?” Nick asked, not turning around.
“Pier 31,” came the whispered answer.
“You got it.”
In silence, the cabbie drove his dark passenger through the night, stopping at last a short distance away from the indicated spot. Nick knew the Black Hand used subtlety and surprise as weapons, and didn’t want to interfere.
“Wait here,” the low voice ordered. “I shall return with two other passengers, and possibly some cargo.”
Nick shivered despite himself. He had a good idea what kind of cargo the Black Hand meant, and it would be destined only for a morgue. Still, he was happy to help.
The Black Hand slipped away from the cab, sidling up to the dark warehouse, number 2740. Going around the side, he came to a door secured with a rusted padlock. Slipping a slender tool from a pocket, he inserted it into the keyhole, and with a twist jarred the lock open. Then he gently pulled the door open and stole inside.
The interior of the warehouse was cavernous and empty, the ceiling high overhead. Broken wooden pallets and empty boxes littered the concrete floor, and overhead swung a heavy iron hook on a rope and pulley. The only light came from a dim bulb set in the far corner wall, and beneath that light lay slumped a crumpled form. Twin .45s at the ready, the Black Hand made his way across the floor, and crept up towards the figure lying there in the dim pool of light. It was the bound form of Louise Aldridge.
“Miss Aldridge,” the Black Hand whispered, his voice betraying his concern for his trusted aide. “Louise.” He knelt beside her, placing a hand on her round shoulder. “Where is Matthews?”
Roused from a fitful sleep, Louise slowly opened her eyes. Her shock at seeing her rescuer was registered there in those crystal blue orbs.
“Richmond,” she breathed.
“Where is Matthews?” he repeated. “I must get you both out of here.”
“Who?” Louise asked.
“The other prisoner,” he answered as he went to work on her binds. He wanted her away from there as quickly as possible, but could not leave the other victim to whatever fate awaited him. So intent was he on freeing her, that he noticed too late the look of horror in her eyes, and saw the shadow falling across his own hands. A blow like a jackhammer pounded into his head, and he fell into darkness!
When he regained consciousness, Taylor found himself unmasked, bound hands to feet, and laying on the floor next to Louise. She stared at him, wide eyed, unable to help.
He struggled into a sitting position, and surveyed his surroundings. Whoever had struck him had been waiting in the darkness when he arrived, and come up behind him unnoticed.
“Richmond,” Louise whispered. “Are you alright?”
“I have been better, Miss Aldridge,” Taylor answered in a low voice. “I take it you are the only prisoner here.”
“I was until you arrived,” she answered. “Now there are the both of us.”
“How long was I out?”
“Just a few moments,” Louise replied. “Just long enough for that man to get you tied up.”
“Did you get a look at him?”
“No, he always keeps his face hidden under a mask, not unlike someone else I know.” She paused. “But I suppose he’s alone in that club now.” She gestured with her chin, pointing at the hat and mask that lay tossed a few feet away.
“No time to worry about that now,” Taylor answered, his voice grave. “Where has he gone?”
“I’m right here, Mr. Taylor,” came a voice from out of the shadows. Then followed a mocking laugh, and a hooded figure stepped into the light, a pistol trained on the pair.
“He calls himself the Talon,” Louise said, eyeing him icily.
“I would have thought he’d come up with a better name than that,” Taylor replied. He turned his gaze on the hooded man. “Wouldn’t you, Peter?”
The hooded man laughed again, and then drew himself up straight. Keeping his pistol pointed at the two of them, he reached up with the other and pulled the hood from his face. There, unmasked, stood Peter Matthews!
“I should have suspected,” Taylor said evenly. “It was all there in front of me.”
“I’m sure,” Matthews hissed. “But it’s rather too late now, Mr. Taylor. Or should I say, Black Hand.” He laughed, mirthlessly. “It’s a pity to have discovered your secret so soon before your death. It kind of takes the fun out of it.”
“What are you going to do?” Louise asked at a silent signal from Taylor.
“I’m going to kill you, of course.”
“But why?” she went on, stealing a glance at her silent companion.
“Why not ask your boyfriend?” Matthews taunted. “I think he’s got it all figured out.”
“You tell her,” Taylor snarled. “I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun.” Taylor needed just a few moments more, and he knew that once bragging, Matthews would give them to him.
“Very well,” Matthews sighed. “My father disowned me last year, Mrs. Black Hand, on account of my somewhat unsavory associates. A boy has to have a hobby, you know. In any case, I find myself in need of cash, and the old man simply won’t give it to me, no matter how often I ask. He hates me, you see. A huge disappointment. That’s the rub, really.
“But he doesn’t want me dead. So say I were kidnapped, and his only choice was to pay up or get my severed head in the mail. That would spoil his brunch, don’t you think?” Matthews walked to the wall about ten feet away, threw a switch, and from overhead came the sound of rusty gears groaning to life.
“So you staged your own kidnapping,” Louise said. “But why me, and all the others? What do they have to do with it?”
“Well, I wanted daddy dearest to see I, that is the Talon, was serious, so I tried a few dry runs first. Pick up an heiress’ daughter from school, milk a few bucks from the old cow, and puncture the little darling if mommy doesn’t pay. Then the police are sure to tell daddy that the kidnapping is for real.” He paused. “My father just doesn’t trust me you see. Anyway, by kidnapping little beauties like you, I get the money too. Like a bonus. And I just pay some drunk fifty bucks to stand around in this smelly mask for the pickups, and I never run the risk of getting caught.” He smiled grimly. “Pretty snappy, huh? But enough of my jawing.” He swung the pistol around, and pointed it at one and then the other of them.
“Which one of you wants to go first?” He took a step to the side, and gestured behind them. There, four feet from the concrete floor, hung the iron hook. The gears above had lowered it into place, and now it stood ready.
He stepped forward, the gun trained on Taylor, until he was only a few feet away.
“You, I think, Mr. Hand,” Matthews finally said.
“I think not,” Taylor replied and, splitting his bonds, drove his feet into Matthews’ knees. Matthews tottered, shooting blind, and staggered back moaning. The bullet rushed past Taylor’s ear, striking the wall behind him and sending splinters of wood flying into the back of his neck. Taylor pulled the now severed binds from his ankles and sprang to his feet. In his hand he held the slim blade he’d managed to pull from the hollow heel of his shoe, and with which he cut the rope wrapped round and round his arms and legs.
Matthews stood stock still, gaping, not sure what had happened, and as he brought the pistol once more level with Taylor’s chest the man of mystery rushed towards him. Disoriented, Matthews shot wildly, but if any hit Taylor he didn’t slow down. An unstoppable engine, he plowed into Matthews, driving him back.
Matthews, crazed, struck at his attacker with the pistol, and then flung it away. Taylor was inhuman, unstoppable, and bullets couldn’t hurt him. Taylor slowed his advance. Matthews staggered back, and then turn to flee. He took only two steps into the shadows and was brought up short, screaming.
Taylor, blood dripping from the bullet wound in his shoulder, stepped forward slowly, but it was too late. Matthews, in the darkness, had run directly into the iron hook, and with the force of his movement had impaled himself there. Now he hung, lifeless, listing slowly this way and that. The Talon had met his death on his own claw!
After recovering his hat and mask, and freeing Louise, Taylor had returned to Nick’s waiting cab. From there, he was driven to Louise’s building. Nick helped the masked Taylor up the stairs to Louise’s apartment, and then stayed to help her dress the Black Hand’s wounds. When they were done, still masked, Taylor thanked Nick for his loyal service and asked him to depart.
“Sure, boss,” the cabbie answered. “I’ll let myself out. And call any time.”
Once he had left, Taylor drew the mask from his face and called for Louise to bring him the phone. Dialing, he flexed his shoulder, testing the dressing.
“Good work, Miss Aldridge,” he complimented. “I am always grateful I was able to lure you away from the medical profession.”
“Anytime, Mr. Taylor,” she answered, smiling. “And if you think being a nurse is more exciting than this, you’ve got another thing coming.”
“Yes,” he replied, nodding. “I suppose you’re right.”
The line continued ringing, until at last came the sleeping voice at the other end of the line.
“Yes.”
“Joseph,” Taylor said, “I apologize for disturbing your rest, but I have information regarding the Talon. Direct your colleagues to the empty warehouse at Pier 31, and there you will find the Talon. I believe you will discover that the warehouse is the possession of Matthews Industries, and that, with the knowledge that the man you will find was the face behind the Talon’s hood, should be all you will need to know.”
“Yes sir,” Martenson answered. “Right away, sir.”
Taylor dropped the handset back into its cradle, and then eased back onto the couch.
“Miss Aldridge,” he finally spoke, his eyes half lidded. “I am afraid I will have to ask another favor of you.”
“What?” Louise shot back, feigning indignation. “What could you possibly need now?”
“The use of your couch until morning,” Taylor replied. “I’m afraid I’m not going anywhere.”
Louise smiled, and drew a quilt over him.
“You got it, Mr. Taylor,” she answered, “but I need something from you, too.”
“And what is that?” Taylor asked, almost succumbing to sleep.
“You still owe me a dinner on the town,” she replied, “and I mean to collect.”
Taylor laughed, smiling, and then closed his eyes. Tonight, at least, justice would sleep.
4
Through Martenson, the Black Hand learned that the meeting between Dupree and the Talon was to take place that night, at the edge of Golden Gate Park. When the hour came, the Black Hand was in place, this time with twin .45 automatics at the ready.
Dupree was to wait in a clearing, a suitcase full of cash at his side. The police were hidden amongst the surrounding trees, waiting for the signal to close. When the Talon arrived, the police would encircle him, and cut off escape.
The Black Hand watched the officers take their positions, himself hidden in amongst the branches of a tree, some eight feet off the ground. From that vantage point he had seen a gap in the police’s net, one the Talon could use to his advantage, and it was this spot he kept watch over.
At the stroke of midnight, as arranged, a hooded figure stepped into the clearing, dragging behind him a blindfolded and gagged woman. It was the Talon. In the moonlight a pistol glinted evilly in his hand.
Without a word, he motioned Dupree to throw him the case of money.
“Give me my wife first,” Dupree shouted, red-faced and trembling.
Again, the Talon gestured for the case, and then turned the pistol on Dupree’s whimpering wife.
“Okay, okay,” Dupree answered, and threw the case across the clearing to land at the hooded figure’s feet.
With one hand keeping the pistol trained on Dupree’s wife, he reached with the other to retrieve the case. Then, stepping slowly behind her, he shoved her into the clearing and hurried back to the trees. In an instant, the police emerged from hiding and rushed towards him, but to no avail. By cunning, or dumb luck, the Talon was running directly towards the hole in their net. But the Black Hand stood ready.
As the hooded figure passed underneath him, the Black Hand leapt from his perch, landing on the Talon with the force of a sledgehammer. He batted the pistol from the hooded man’s hand, and then brought his own guns to bear.
“This time, fiend,” he hissed behind his mask, “I have my own claws with me. And now, you will tell me what you know.”
Under the hood, the Talon quivered. The black hand of justice was upon him, and he felt its strength close around him!
5
The police found the man beneath the hood a short while later, whimpering and unmasked, tied to a lamppost. The Black Hand had learned what he needed from the man, and left him behind.
The man had turned out to be one Charlie Parsons, an out of work dockworker. He was a rough cut, simple man and, though not above breaking the law to suit his own needs, he was no criminal mastermind. The Black Hand had seen early that Parsons what nothing more than a pawn, a dupe. The true source of the evil at hand lay elsewhere.
Parsons, easily frightened into playing stool pigeon by the masked figure under the dark trees, had confessed that he knew nothing about the kidnappings. He had been hired by a hooded man simply to escort a bound woman into the clearing, retrieve a briefcase, and then return to the hooded man waiting in a sedan on a darkened street nearby. To Parsons this was simply a job, a strange one of course, but if a mysterious man wanted to pay him a month’s salary to stand around wearing a hood and waving a gun about it was fine with him.
Of his employer, Parsons could only say that he had picked him up off the streets near the dock, where he had been looking for work. He had been driving a late model, dark colored sedan, and had spoken only in whispers. He had never encountered the man until earlier that evening, and in his words had never broken the law in his life. This last the Black Hand doubted, but left that for the courts to determine. He was onto bigger prey.
Stepping into the shadows a short distance from the park, the mysterious avenger of the night emerged into the light in the guise of Richmond Taylor. Then he made his away across town to his home, and spent a sleepless night in his study, staring quietly into the darkness, contemplating. Morning came quickly, the sunlight streaming in through the shuttered windows, and Taylor reached for the phone.
He placed a call to police headquarters, and in the Black Hand’s raspy voice asked to speak with Joe Martenson.
“Martenson here,” came the reply after a short while.
“Joseph,” Taylor whispered into the receiver, “the Black Hand has use for you.”
“Go ahead,” Martenson answered, his voice grave.
“The man known as the Talon still holds an innocent in his clutches. I would see her released.”
“Well, you’re not alone,” Martenson replied. “She’s not either, anymore.”
“Explain yourself.”
“The Talon’s got another bird in the hand now. Another millionaire’s kid. Peter Matthews.”
“I see,” Taylor answered. “I see.” He paused. “Your service is valued, Joseph,” he went on. “I shall remember your loyalty.”
With that, Taylor hung up the phone. Now two lives hung in the balance. What was needed now was a visit to the docks. Then nightfall, and action!
6
Taylor spent the day up and down the wharf, talking to dock masters and ship captains from one end to the other. He played the bored investor, trying to find sound investments for his family’s fortune. Were there any empty warehouses to be had, he asked, any piers on which space might be rented? His family was moving into shipping, he explained, and wanted to gain a foothold in the market. He let slip that he was looking for qualified men to run the operation, too, which went far towards loosening recalcitrant tongues.
In the end, Taylor caught a cab and returned home. Once there, he unrolled a large map of the city onto his dining room table, and in a blunt-end pencil began to mark different locations one by one. With his considerable power of recall, he traced the route the hooded man had fled by two nights before, placed a large “x” upon the spot where Parsons was hired, and then began to triangulate positions and calculate distances to the half dozen warehouses he had circled. After half an hour’s work, he had his answer. He rolled up the map, and returned it to the shelf.
He dressed quickly. First the black wool suit, shoes, and leather gloves. Then he slipped various tools and devices into his pockets, and into the hollow heels of his shoes. Next he loaded his twin .45s, and slipped each into its shoulder harness. Last came the snap brim fedora, the full face mask ready to fall into place. Thus outfitted, he strode across the room to the phone.
The line rang four times, and then a groggy voice answered.
“Yeah, this is Nick,” came the muffled voice. “Whadya want?’
“Nicholas Oliverio, the Black Hand has use for you.”
“What? Oh, sure, yeah, I’m up.”
“You will meet me at the following address, Nicholas,” Taylor continued in whispers. “I will need your services for much of the night.”
“You got it, boss,” Oliverio replied eagerly. “Anything you say.”
Taylor gave him an address a few blocks away, and told him to be there in fifteen minutes.
“I’ll be there,” Oliverio answered, almost shouting. Taylor hung up the phone, turned out the light, and left the room.
Nick Oliverio arrived on time, even considering that he’d driven from the far side of town and had been in bed when Taylor had called. Nick felt he owed his life to the Black Hand, and would do anything for him. Some aided the Black Hand out of fear, or of hope for reward. Nick assisted him out of gratitude. Months before, the cab driver had narrowly escaped death when the Black Hand had prevented a gun-crazed fiend from firing point blank in Nick’s face. Ever since, whenever the Black Hand needed him, Nick was at the ready.
Nick pulled up to the curb, and from out of the shadows stepped the Black Hand. Without a word, he slipped into the backseat of the cab, closing the door silently behind him.
“Where to, boss?” Nick asked, not turning around.
“Pier 31,” came the whispered answer.
“You got it.”
In silence, the cabbie drove his dark passenger through the night, stopping at last a short distance away from the indicated spot. Nick knew the Black Hand used subtlety and surprise as weapons, and didn’t want to interfere.
“Wait here,” the low voice ordered. “I shall return with two other passengers, and possibly some cargo.”
Nick shivered despite himself. He had a good idea what kind of cargo the Black Hand meant, and it would be destined only for a morgue. Still, he was happy to help.
The Black Hand slipped away from the cab, sidling up to the dark warehouse, number 2740. Going around the side, he came to a door secured with a rusted padlock. Slipping a slender tool from a pocket, he inserted it into the keyhole, and with a twist jarred the lock open. Then he gently pulled the door open and stole inside.
The interior of the warehouse was cavernous and empty, the ceiling high overhead. Broken wooden pallets and empty boxes littered the concrete floor, and overhead swung a heavy iron hook on a rope and pulley. The only light came from a dim bulb set in the far corner wall, and beneath that light lay slumped a crumpled form. Twin .45s at the ready, the Black Hand made his way across the floor, and crept up towards the figure lying there in the dim pool of light. It was the bound form of Louise Aldridge.
“Miss Aldridge,” the Black Hand whispered, his voice betraying his concern for his trusted aide. “Louise.” He knelt beside her, placing a hand on her round shoulder. “Where is Matthews?”
Roused from a fitful sleep, Louise slowly opened her eyes. Her shock at seeing her rescuer was registered there in those crystal blue orbs.
“Richmond,” she breathed.
“Where is Matthews?” he repeated. “I must get you both out of here.”
“Who?” Louise asked.
“The other prisoner,” he answered as he went to work on her binds. He wanted her away from there as quickly as possible, but could not leave the other victim to whatever fate awaited him. So intent was he on freeing her, that he noticed too late the look of horror in her eyes, and saw the shadow falling across his own hands. A blow like a jackhammer pounded into his head, and he fell into darkness!
7
When he regained consciousness, Taylor found himself unmasked, bound hands to feet, and laying on the floor next to Louise. She stared at him, wide eyed, unable to help.
He struggled into a sitting position, and surveyed his surroundings. Whoever had struck him had been waiting in the darkness when he arrived, and come up behind him unnoticed.
“Richmond,” Louise whispered. “Are you alright?”
“I have been better, Miss Aldridge,” Taylor answered in a low voice. “I take it you are the only prisoner here.”
“I was until you arrived,” she answered. “Now there are the both of us.”
“How long was I out?”
“Just a few moments,” Louise replied. “Just long enough for that man to get you tied up.”
“Did you get a look at him?”
“No, he always keeps his face hidden under a mask, not unlike someone else I know.” She paused. “But I suppose he’s alone in that club now.” She gestured with her chin, pointing at the hat and mask that lay tossed a few feet away.
“No time to worry about that now,” Taylor answered, his voice grave. “Where has he gone?”
“I’m right here, Mr. Taylor,” came a voice from out of the shadows. Then followed a mocking laugh, and a hooded figure stepped into the light, a pistol trained on the pair.
“He calls himself the Talon,” Louise said, eyeing him icily.
“I would have thought he’d come up with a better name than that,” Taylor replied. He turned his gaze on the hooded man. “Wouldn’t you, Peter?”
The hooded man laughed again, and then drew himself up straight. Keeping his pistol pointed at the two of them, he reached up with the other and pulled the hood from his face. There, unmasked, stood Peter Matthews!
“I should have suspected,” Taylor said evenly. “It was all there in front of me.”
“I’m sure,” Matthews hissed. “But it’s rather too late now, Mr. Taylor. Or should I say, Black Hand.” He laughed, mirthlessly. “It’s a pity to have discovered your secret so soon before your death. It kind of takes the fun out of it.”
“What are you going to do?” Louise asked at a silent signal from Taylor.
“I’m going to kill you, of course.”
“But why?” she went on, stealing a glance at her silent companion.
“Why not ask your boyfriend?” Matthews taunted. “I think he’s got it all figured out.”
“You tell her,” Taylor snarled. “I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun.” Taylor needed just a few moments more, and he knew that once bragging, Matthews would give them to him.
“Very well,” Matthews sighed. “My father disowned me last year, Mrs. Black Hand, on account of my somewhat unsavory associates. A boy has to have a hobby, you know. In any case, I find myself in need of cash, and the old man simply won’t give it to me, no matter how often I ask. He hates me, you see. A huge disappointment. That’s the rub, really.
“But he doesn’t want me dead. So say I were kidnapped, and his only choice was to pay up or get my severed head in the mail. That would spoil his brunch, don’t you think?” Matthews walked to the wall about ten feet away, threw a switch, and from overhead came the sound of rusty gears groaning to life.
“So you staged your own kidnapping,” Louise said. “But why me, and all the others? What do they have to do with it?”
“Well, I wanted daddy dearest to see I, that is the Talon, was serious, so I tried a few dry runs first. Pick up an heiress’ daughter from school, milk a few bucks from the old cow, and puncture the little darling if mommy doesn’t pay. Then the police are sure to tell daddy that the kidnapping is for real.” He paused. “My father just doesn’t trust me you see. Anyway, by kidnapping little beauties like you, I get the money too. Like a bonus. And I just pay some drunk fifty bucks to stand around in this smelly mask for the pickups, and I never run the risk of getting caught.” He smiled grimly. “Pretty snappy, huh? But enough of my jawing.” He swung the pistol around, and pointed it at one and then the other of them.
“Which one of you wants to go first?” He took a step to the side, and gestured behind them. There, four feet from the concrete floor, hung the iron hook. The gears above had lowered it into place, and now it stood ready.
He stepped forward, the gun trained on Taylor, until he was only a few feet away.
“You, I think, Mr. Hand,” Matthews finally said.
“I think not,” Taylor replied and, splitting his bonds, drove his feet into Matthews’ knees. Matthews tottered, shooting blind, and staggered back moaning. The bullet rushed past Taylor’s ear, striking the wall behind him and sending splinters of wood flying into the back of his neck. Taylor pulled the now severed binds from his ankles and sprang to his feet. In his hand he held the slim blade he’d managed to pull from the hollow heel of his shoe, and with which he cut the rope wrapped round and round his arms and legs.
Matthews stood stock still, gaping, not sure what had happened, and as he brought the pistol once more level with Taylor’s chest the man of mystery rushed towards him. Disoriented, Matthews shot wildly, but if any hit Taylor he didn’t slow down. An unstoppable engine, he plowed into Matthews, driving him back.
Matthews, crazed, struck at his attacker with the pistol, and then flung it away. Taylor was inhuman, unstoppable, and bullets couldn’t hurt him. Taylor slowed his advance. Matthews staggered back, and then turn to flee. He took only two steps into the shadows and was brought up short, screaming.
Taylor, blood dripping from the bullet wound in his shoulder, stepped forward slowly, but it was too late. Matthews, in the darkness, had run directly into the iron hook, and with the force of his movement had impaled himself there. Now he hung, lifeless, listing slowly this way and that. The Talon had met his death on his own claw!
8
After recovering his hat and mask, and freeing Louise, Taylor had returned to Nick’s waiting cab. From there, he was driven to Louise’s building. Nick helped the masked Taylor up the stairs to Louise’s apartment, and then stayed to help her dress the Black Hand’s wounds. When they were done, still masked, Taylor thanked Nick for his loyal service and asked him to depart.
“Sure, boss,” the cabbie answered. “I’ll let myself out. And call any time.”
Once he had left, Taylor drew the mask from his face and called for Louise to bring him the phone. Dialing, he flexed his shoulder, testing the dressing.
“Good work, Miss Aldridge,” he complimented. “I am always grateful I was able to lure you away from the medical profession.”
“Anytime, Mr. Taylor,” she answered, smiling. “And if you think being a nurse is more exciting than this, you’ve got another thing coming.”
“Yes,” he replied, nodding. “I suppose you’re right.”
The line continued ringing, until at last came the sleeping voice at the other end of the line.
“Yes.”
“Joseph,” Taylor said, “I apologize for disturbing your rest, but I have information regarding the Talon. Direct your colleagues to the empty warehouse at Pier 31, and there you will find the Talon. I believe you will discover that the warehouse is the possession of Matthews Industries, and that, with the knowledge that the man you will find was the face behind the Talon’s hood, should be all you will need to know.”
“Yes sir,” Martenson answered. “Right away, sir.”
Taylor dropped the handset back into its cradle, and then eased back onto the couch.
“Miss Aldridge,” he finally spoke, his eyes half lidded. “I am afraid I will have to ask another favor of you.”
“What?” Louise shot back, feigning indignation. “What could you possibly need now?”
“The use of your couch until morning,” Taylor replied. “I’m afraid I’m not going anywhere.”
Louise smiled, and drew a quilt over him.
“You got it, Mr. Taylor,” she answered, “but I need something from you, too.”
“And what is that?” Taylor asked, almost succumbing to sleep.
“You still owe me a dinner on the town,” she replied, “and I mean to collect.”
Taylor laughed, smiling, and then closed his eyes. Tonight, at least, justice would sleep.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
FREE FICTION: Book of Secrets by Chris Roberson, Day Four
The fourth part of the preview of Chris Roberson’s Book of Secrets. Today you get the first half of the first pastiche, which I felt was one of the best parts of the novel. A very fun story for those of you who, like me, are fans of the pulp era. Helpful links: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Angry Robot Books, review of Book of Secrets, review of Sons of Dorn.
The blood curdling scream tearing across the night air told Richmond Taylor one of two things: someone had just been killed, or someone was about to be. He didn’t care for either option.
Coming up the stairs to the Carousel Club, the rooftop restaurant that had become the toast of the San Francisco social scene, Taylor tore through the crowds towards the source of the scream. Louise Aldridge, his Gal Friday and companion for the night, still hung on his arm, rushing alongside him with bated breath. Louise knew well Taylor’s course in the face of danger.
The last of the crowd parted seeing Taylor approach. The wealthy financier was well known in upper crust social circles, and generally thought something of a fop, but his steely gaze and his whipcord muscles flexing like steel bands beneath the dark fabric of his suit would brook no delay.
There, on the tiled floor, lay the battered body of a young girl. She lay face up, an expression of terror frozen on her cold face, black blood encrusted round her lips. Where her heart should have been, where the beat of her young life once sounded like a small bird’s wings, there was only a gaping chasm, a gory tunnel to the floor below. Taylor straightened himself, fixing his gaze on the inert body on the floor. Rush as he might, he would have arrived too late to save this girl. She had been dead for hours.
Next came the sound of shouts, and a gruff voice raising above the rest, calling for order. Taylor knew the voice well. It belonged to Detective Chalmers, pride of the San Francisco Police Department.
“Get outta my way, you blood-thirsty rubber-neckers,” he called again, shoving his way through the crowd. “Lemme do my job.”
At a sign from Taylor, Louise slid her arm from under his and blended back into the crowd. She understood her duty at such a time. To canvas the onlookers nonchalantly, discovering what she could. Her report would aid Taylor in ferreting out the truth, and she cherished her responsibility. Of all Taylor’s agents, only she knew the secret of his other life.
With Louise gone, Taylor made his way across the crowd to a man he’d noted on his entrance. They had been climbing the stairs together, and when the waitress who had discovered the body had screamed, this man had been the only one not to hurry to the scene to investigate. Taylor had recognized him as Peter Matthews, black sheep son of a wealthy shipping magnate.
Sidling up to Matthews, Taylor watched as Detective Chalmers surveyed the scene, and began questioning the witnesses. Taylor, feigning horror and a weak stomach, addressed Matthews.
“Terrible business,” he began, only a trace of the Texas twang he had inherited along with a fortune from his father sounding in his level voice. “What could possess someone to do such a thing?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Matthews answered evenly, his gaze darting to Taylor. “I’ve only just arrived.”
“Not the sort of thing you expect to see at such a place,” Taylor commented, eyeing the other man.
“Oh?” Matthews answered coolly. “And where would you expect to see such a thing?” Abruptly he turned on his heel, and stalked away. Taylor watched him as he went, deep in thought.
When the police had finished their interviews, and the body had been carried out under a sheet, Taylor and Louise met on the stairs. Taylor produced a pair of cigarettes, and lit one for each of them with a silver-plated lighter, engraved with the emblem of an outstretched hand.
“Well, Miss Aldridge,” he finally spoke, loud enough for passersby to hear, the smoke curling about his head, “I see little reason to remain. I’ll walk you home.”
They descended the stairs and went out into the dark street. Walking down the sidewalk, arm in arm, they looked the picture of the loving couple. But it was not endearments they whispered to one another. They spoke of crime.
“Miss Aldridge,” Taylor said, his voice low, “your report.”
Louise began simply, stating what she had learned from memory.
“The hallway had been empty when the waitress last passed through it. It leads from the main dining room to a storage area. The storage area is visited throughout the night, waitresses and busboys going back and forth to get glasses, linens, and such. But sometimes half an hour can pass without anyone going that way. The waitress had been the last one to walk it, twenty minutes before, but when she went back, she found…” Despite herself, Louise found her voice breaking. She paused, trembling.
“She found the body,” Taylor said, completing the thought.
“Yes,” Louise answered.
“And beside the main entrance, is there any other access to that hallway?”
“Near the storeroom there’s is a freight elevator,” she replied. “It stops on each floor, but is unmanned at this hour. It opens on the loading dock at the ground level.”
“Likewise unmanned,” Taylor commented.
“Yes.”
Taylor quickened his pace, and Louise hurried to keep up.
“Then,” Taylor concluded, “anyone might quite easily have taken the body up the elevator, left by the same route, and escaped detection.”
“But why?” Louise asked. “Why leave the body there?”
“That, Miss Aldridge, we will not know until the body is identified. Only then can we begin to answer such questions.”
Arriving at Louise’s walkup in the North Beach, Taylor bid her a good night, saying he would see her next morning at the office. Out of habit, Taylor waited in the street below until he saw the light in Louise’s window go on. She was his most trusted aide, and he was always very protective.
As he was about to turn, and move on, he caught sight of a dark figure, prowling about the side of Louise’s building. He thought it a vagrant, seeking a warm place to sleep, until the figure stepped into the light, and he saw his features were disguised with a hood. Then the moonlight glinted off the steel of the pistol in the figure’s hand, and Taylor knew it was no vagrant.
Taylor, keeping his eyes fixed on the mysterious figure, stepped into the shadows of a doorway. Pulling on black leather gloves, and the rolling down a close-fitting mask of black fabric from inside the brim of his fedora, he stepped back into the light. No longer Richmond Taylor, wealthy financier and gadabout, he now stood tall as that dark mystery of the night, that scourge of terror and nemesis to all evildoers: The Black Hand!
Stealthily slipping across the cold concrete, The Black Hand crept up behind the dark figure. As the figure mounted a trellis on the side of the building, intending to climb, The Black Hand rushed him. His own swift hand swept through the night air, knocking the pistol from the figure’s grasp before he knew the attack was on him. The hooded man fell to the ground, cursing, and rolled away out of the Black Hand’s reach.
“Who are you,” the Black Hand hissed though the fabric of his mask. “What evil do you work here?”
The hooded man rose to his feet, unsteady, and before the Black Hand could move flung himself at him. The pair fell to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs, each striking out at the other. The hooded man got to his feet an instant before the Black Hand, and raced off into the night. The Black Hand flew after him, his feet sounding like gunshot against the pavement.
Across North Beach they raced, over Telegraph Hill and down to the docks, the hooded man always just out of the Black Hand’s reach. Behind his mask, Taylor cursed himself for going out into the night without his twin .45s. It was a mistake he vowed never to make again.
Their pursuit had gone unnoticed, through deserted and empty streets, but at the Embarcadero the hooded man raced in front of a truck bearing its cargo through the night. He made it past the truck only by inches, and the Black Hand found his path blocked until the mammoth vehicle had passed. By the time he himself had crossed the thoroughfare, the hooded man was nowhere in sight. He had vanished into the night air like mist, blending into the foggy sky.
On the other side, the Black Hand found only the empty piers, and the silent warehouses that lined them up and down. The hooded man must have gained entrance to one, and there hid in darkness. The Black Hand spent the better part of an hour, searching the perimeter first of one warehouse, then the next, but could find no sign of forced entry. Finally, he gave up the chase, and returning his mask to its place, hidden under the crown of his hat, he made his way back over the hill, now simple Richmond Taylor again.
He came at last to Louise’s door. Her light still burned overhead, and Taylor wanted to warn her against danger. Some unknown stalker had sought to do her harm, and might do again. Letting himself in the main door with his skeleton key, he climbed the stairs to her door. He knocked, and knocked again, and no answer. Finally, fearing the worse, he tried the door, only to find it unlocked. Pushing it open, he cautiously entered the apartment.
The furniture lay in disarray, strewn about the floor, and broken dishes and lamps were spread all over. Louise was nowhere to be found. Pinned to the inside of the door, with a steel hook, was a notice, hastily scrawled in red ink.
“Louise Aldridge is with me. If Mr. Taylor wants her return, it will cost him. I will contact with details.”
Taylor ripped the note from the door and read it over. It was signed, “THE TALON.” He crumpled the note in his gloved hand. Louise Aldridge was in grave danger, and there was work for the Black Hand to do!
Taylor hurried through the foyer of police headquarters, speeding to his appointment with Detective Chalmers. Though as the Black Hand he was wanted dead by criminals and imprisoned by the police, as Richmond Taylor he was a valuable member of the community, and the authorities were happy to rush to his aid.
On his way through the squad room, Taylor narrowly avoided colliding with Officer Joe Martenson. Martenson, a simple beat cop with an honest heart and a hatred of crime, was one of the Black Hand’s trusted subordinates. But unlike Louise Aldridge, he knew nothing of the identity of the man he aided, and had never met Richmond Taylor. Taylor almost forgot himself and addressed Martenson by name. Instead, he excused himself and hurried by.
The night before he’d called Martenson from Louise’s apartment, telling him only that the Black Hand had a use for him. He’d given Martenson Louise’s address, and told him to hurry. Then Taylor had returned to his home on Nob Hill, and awaited the police’s call. When the call came, he feigned shock. Someone kidnap his trusted assistant? The horror.
Now, the next morning, Taylor was to meet with the officer in charge of the investigation, and would learn the particulars of the case. He was eager to learn all he could. Little did the police realize that by talking to Taylor, they were aiding the mysterious Black Hand!
When all had gathered in Chalmers’ office, Taylor surveyed their faces. Besides himself and the Detective, there was Police Lieutenant Jones, the Chief of Police James Carroway, and millionaire industrialist Reginald Dupree. Taylor eyed this last longest.
Dupree was dressed in an expensively tailored gray suit, with a silver pin on his lapel, showing a four-armed spiral enclosed in a circular band. Though distressed, the man had an undeniable look of self-satisfaction about him, as though he considered the others in the room beneath him. Since the beginning of the Depression ten years before, few fortunes had escaped entirely unscathed, and those that had were usually comprised of some dirty money. There were rumors about Dupree’s practices, rumors of ill-advised associations.
“Gentleman,” Chief Carroway began, “let me first say how sorry we are that we have to meet under these circumstances.”
“I don’t have time for your glad-handing!” Dupree shouted. “What about my wife?”
“Well then,” the Chief answered, flustered. He turned to Chalmers. “Detective?”
“Sure, sure.” Chalmers muttered, lighting a cigar. He rose out of his seat, and crossed the floor to stand before Taylor and Dupree. “It’s like this, boys. You’ve had people kidnapped, and we’re gonna do everything we can to see that you get ‘em back in one piece.”
“And without any pieces missing,” Jones added under his breath.
“That’s enough outta you,” Chalmers shot back, glaring. “Show some tact, why don’t ya. Now then, this creep what’s got your people calls himself the Talon, like you already know. And he means business.”
“Detective,” Taylor began in a calm voice, “does this possibly have anything to do with the body found last night at the Carousel Club?”
“Yeah, right,” Chalmers answered slowly, eyeing him. “I saw you there, didn’t I? Well, yessir, it does. See, this Talon has a habit of taking two victims at once. For leverage, ya see. One pays, they get their people back. The other doesn’t… they don’t.”
Dupree rose up out of his seat.
“You mean this has happened before?” he shouted. “You could have stopped my wife being kidnapped yesterday? Of all the incompetent…”
“Now, Mr. Dupree, we’ve done everything we can so far,” the Chief answered. “And we’re close to making an arrest.” He turned to Chalmers, his voice grave. “Isn’t that right, Detective?”
“Sure, sure. Now, Mr. Dupree, your wife was the fourth person kidnapped. The first was ‘bout two weeks ago. We’ve managed to keep it outta the papers so far. That girl found last night, the kidnapper killed because her family wouldn’t pay. They were workin’ with us to get him, and we almost did, but it got fouled up. Then he was down to one bird, so he picked up your assistant, Mr. Taylor.” Chalmers paused, puffing on his cigar. “Looks like the guy’s just going down the social register, hitting one millionaire after another.
“Now, so far two families have paid the kidnapper’s money, and got their people back. They show up healthy enough, but they can’t say who the creep was. He wore a mask the whole time, they say, like a hood, so’s they can’t identify him.”
Taylor tensed, grasping the arm of his chair.
“I don’t see how any of this is going to get my wife back,” Dupree growled.
“Yes,” Taylor added. “You must have a plan.”
“That we do, gents,” Chalmers added. “Mr. Dupree, this creep’s gonna be calling you to make arrangements for his payoff. What you do is agree to pay him, let him pick a spot for the meeting, and then let us know. We show up, get him, and you get your wife and the money.”
“And what about my assistant?” Taylor asked.
“Well, once we got this Talon character we find out where he’s got her.”
“What are we waiting for,” Dupree answered, rising up. “I’m game. Anything to get back my Meribelle.”
Taylor stayed stiff in his chair. He didn’t trust the police to accomplish everything they’d planned. They might need help, and the Black Hand was the one to provide it!
“The Talon’s Curse”
by Walter Reece
(originally appeared in the September, 1939 issue of
The Black Hand Mysteries)
1
The blood curdling scream tearing across the night air told Richmond Taylor one of two things: someone had just been killed, or someone was about to be. He didn’t care for either option.
Coming up the stairs to the Carousel Club, the rooftop restaurant that had become the toast of the San Francisco social scene, Taylor tore through the crowds towards the source of the scream. Louise Aldridge, his Gal Friday and companion for the night, still hung on his arm, rushing alongside him with bated breath. Louise knew well Taylor’s course in the face of danger.
The last of the crowd parted seeing Taylor approach. The wealthy financier was well known in upper crust social circles, and generally thought something of a fop, but his steely gaze and his whipcord muscles flexing like steel bands beneath the dark fabric of his suit would brook no delay.
There, on the tiled floor, lay the battered body of a young girl. She lay face up, an expression of terror frozen on her cold face, black blood encrusted round her lips. Where her heart should have been, where the beat of her young life once sounded like a small bird’s wings, there was only a gaping chasm, a gory tunnel to the floor below. Taylor straightened himself, fixing his gaze on the inert body on the floor. Rush as he might, he would have arrived too late to save this girl. She had been dead for hours.
Next came the sound of shouts, and a gruff voice raising above the rest, calling for order. Taylor knew the voice well. It belonged to Detective Chalmers, pride of the San Francisco Police Department.
“Get outta my way, you blood-thirsty rubber-neckers,” he called again, shoving his way through the crowd. “Lemme do my job.”
At a sign from Taylor, Louise slid her arm from under his and blended back into the crowd. She understood her duty at such a time. To canvas the onlookers nonchalantly, discovering what she could. Her report would aid Taylor in ferreting out the truth, and she cherished her responsibility. Of all Taylor’s agents, only she knew the secret of his other life.
With Louise gone, Taylor made his way across the crowd to a man he’d noted on his entrance. They had been climbing the stairs together, and when the waitress who had discovered the body had screamed, this man had been the only one not to hurry to the scene to investigate. Taylor had recognized him as Peter Matthews, black sheep son of a wealthy shipping magnate.
Sidling up to Matthews, Taylor watched as Detective Chalmers surveyed the scene, and began questioning the witnesses. Taylor, feigning horror and a weak stomach, addressed Matthews.
“Terrible business,” he began, only a trace of the Texas twang he had inherited along with a fortune from his father sounding in his level voice. “What could possess someone to do such a thing?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Matthews answered evenly, his gaze darting to Taylor. “I’ve only just arrived.”
“Not the sort of thing you expect to see at such a place,” Taylor commented, eyeing the other man.
“Oh?” Matthews answered coolly. “And where would you expect to see such a thing?” Abruptly he turned on his heel, and stalked away. Taylor watched him as he went, deep in thought.
When the police had finished their interviews, and the body had been carried out under a sheet, Taylor and Louise met on the stairs. Taylor produced a pair of cigarettes, and lit one for each of them with a silver-plated lighter, engraved with the emblem of an outstretched hand.
“Well, Miss Aldridge,” he finally spoke, loud enough for passersby to hear, the smoke curling about his head, “I see little reason to remain. I’ll walk you home.”
They descended the stairs and went out into the dark street. Walking down the sidewalk, arm in arm, they looked the picture of the loving couple. But it was not endearments they whispered to one another. They spoke of crime.
“Miss Aldridge,” Taylor said, his voice low, “your report.”
Louise began simply, stating what she had learned from memory.
“The hallway had been empty when the waitress last passed through it. It leads from the main dining room to a storage area. The storage area is visited throughout the night, waitresses and busboys going back and forth to get glasses, linens, and such. But sometimes half an hour can pass without anyone going that way. The waitress had been the last one to walk it, twenty minutes before, but when she went back, she found…” Despite herself, Louise found her voice breaking. She paused, trembling.
“She found the body,” Taylor said, completing the thought.
“Yes,” Louise answered.
“And beside the main entrance, is there any other access to that hallway?”
“Near the storeroom there’s is a freight elevator,” she replied. “It stops on each floor, but is unmanned at this hour. It opens on the loading dock at the ground level.”
“Likewise unmanned,” Taylor commented.
“Yes.”
Taylor quickened his pace, and Louise hurried to keep up.
“Then,” Taylor concluded, “anyone might quite easily have taken the body up the elevator, left by the same route, and escaped detection.”
“But why?” Louise asked. “Why leave the body there?”
“That, Miss Aldridge, we will not know until the body is identified. Only then can we begin to answer such questions.”
Arriving at Louise’s walkup in the North Beach, Taylor bid her a good night, saying he would see her next morning at the office. Out of habit, Taylor waited in the street below until he saw the light in Louise’s window go on. She was his most trusted aide, and he was always very protective.
As he was about to turn, and move on, he caught sight of a dark figure, prowling about the side of Louise’s building. He thought it a vagrant, seeking a warm place to sleep, until the figure stepped into the light, and he saw his features were disguised with a hood. Then the moonlight glinted off the steel of the pistol in the figure’s hand, and Taylor knew it was no vagrant.
Taylor, keeping his eyes fixed on the mysterious figure, stepped into the shadows of a doorway. Pulling on black leather gloves, and the rolling down a close-fitting mask of black fabric from inside the brim of his fedora, he stepped back into the light. No longer Richmond Taylor, wealthy financier and gadabout, he now stood tall as that dark mystery of the night, that scourge of terror and nemesis to all evildoers: The Black Hand!
2
Stealthily slipping across the cold concrete, The Black Hand crept up behind the dark figure. As the figure mounted a trellis on the side of the building, intending to climb, The Black Hand rushed him. His own swift hand swept through the night air, knocking the pistol from the figure’s grasp before he knew the attack was on him. The hooded man fell to the ground, cursing, and rolled away out of the Black Hand’s reach.
“Who are you,” the Black Hand hissed though the fabric of his mask. “What evil do you work here?”
The hooded man rose to his feet, unsteady, and before the Black Hand could move flung himself at him. The pair fell to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs, each striking out at the other. The hooded man got to his feet an instant before the Black Hand, and raced off into the night. The Black Hand flew after him, his feet sounding like gunshot against the pavement.
Across North Beach they raced, over Telegraph Hill and down to the docks, the hooded man always just out of the Black Hand’s reach. Behind his mask, Taylor cursed himself for going out into the night without his twin .45s. It was a mistake he vowed never to make again.
Their pursuit had gone unnoticed, through deserted and empty streets, but at the Embarcadero the hooded man raced in front of a truck bearing its cargo through the night. He made it past the truck only by inches, and the Black Hand found his path blocked until the mammoth vehicle had passed. By the time he himself had crossed the thoroughfare, the hooded man was nowhere in sight. He had vanished into the night air like mist, blending into the foggy sky.
On the other side, the Black Hand found only the empty piers, and the silent warehouses that lined them up and down. The hooded man must have gained entrance to one, and there hid in darkness. The Black Hand spent the better part of an hour, searching the perimeter first of one warehouse, then the next, but could find no sign of forced entry. Finally, he gave up the chase, and returning his mask to its place, hidden under the crown of his hat, he made his way back over the hill, now simple Richmond Taylor again.
He came at last to Louise’s door. Her light still burned overhead, and Taylor wanted to warn her against danger. Some unknown stalker had sought to do her harm, and might do again. Letting himself in the main door with his skeleton key, he climbed the stairs to her door. He knocked, and knocked again, and no answer. Finally, fearing the worse, he tried the door, only to find it unlocked. Pushing it open, he cautiously entered the apartment.
The furniture lay in disarray, strewn about the floor, and broken dishes and lamps were spread all over. Louise was nowhere to be found. Pinned to the inside of the door, with a steel hook, was a notice, hastily scrawled in red ink.
“Louise Aldridge is with me. If Mr. Taylor wants her return, it will cost him. I will contact with details.”
Taylor ripped the note from the door and read it over. It was signed, “THE TALON.” He crumpled the note in his gloved hand. Louise Aldridge was in grave danger, and there was work for the Black Hand to do!
3
Taylor hurried through the foyer of police headquarters, speeding to his appointment with Detective Chalmers. Though as the Black Hand he was wanted dead by criminals and imprisoned by the police, as Richmond Taylor he was a valuable member of the community, and the authorities were happy to rush to his aid.
On his way through the squad room, Taylor narrowly avoided colliding with Officer Joe Martenson. Martenson, a simple beat cop with an honest heart and a hatred of crime, was one of the Black Hand’s trusted subordinates. But unlike Louise Aldridge, he knew nothing of the identity of the man he aided, and had never met Richmond Taylor. Taylor almost forgot himself and addressed Martenson by name. Instead, he excused himself and hurried by.
The night before he’d called Martenson from Louise’s apartment, telling him only that the Black Hand had a use for him. He’d given Martenson Louise’s address, and told him to hurry. Then Taylor had returned to his home on Nob Hill, and awaited the police’s call. When the call came, he feigned shock. Someone kidnap his trusted assistant? The horror.
Now, the next morning, Taylor was to meet with the officer in charge of the investigation, and would learn the particulars of the case. He was eager to learn all he could. Little did the police realize that by talking to Taylor, they were aiding the mysterious Black Hand!
When all had gathered in Chalmers’ office, Taylor surveyed their faces. Besides himself and the Detective, there was Police Lieutenant Jones, the Chief of Police James Carroway, and millionaire industrialist Reginald Dupree. Taylor eyed this last longest.
Dupree was dressed in an expensively tailored gray suit, with a silver pin on his lapel, showing a four-armed spiral enclosed in a circular band. Though distressed, the man had an undeniable look of self-satisfaction about him, as though he considered the others in the room beneath him. Since the beginning of the Depression ten years before, few fortunes had escaped entirely unscathed, and those that had were usually comprised of some dirty money. There were rumors about Dupree’s practices, rumors of ill-advised associations.
“Gentleman,” Chief Carroway began, “let me first say how sorry we are that we have to meet under these circumstances.”
“I don’t have time for your glad-handing!” Dupree shouted. “What about my wife?”
“Well then,” the Chief answered, flustered. He turned to Chalmers. “Detective?”
“Sure, sure.” Chalmers muttered, lighting a cigar. He rose out of his seat, and crossed the floor to stand before Taylor and Dupree. “It’s like this, boys. You’ve had people kidnapped, and we’re gonna do everything we can to see that you get ‘em back in one piece.”
“And without any pieces missing,” Jones added under his breath.
“That’s enough outta you,” Chalmers shot back, glaring. “Show some tact, why don’t ya. Now then, this creep what’s got your people calls himself the Talon, like you already know. And he means business.”
“Detective,” Taylor began in a calm voice, “does this possibly have anything to do with the body found last night at the Carousel Club?”
“Yeah, right,” Chalmers answered slowly, eyeing him. “I saw you there, didn’t I? Well, yessir, it does. See, this Talon has a habit of taking two victims at once. For leverage, ya see. One pays, they get their people back. The other doesn’t… they don’t.”
Dupree rose up out of his seat.
“You mean this has happened before?” he shouted. “You could have stopped my wife being kidnapped yesterday? Of all the incompetent…”
“Now, Mr. Dupree, we’ve done everything we can so far,” the Chief answered. “And we’re close to making an arrest.” He turned to Chalmers, his voice grave. “Isn’t that right, Detective?”
“Sure, sure. Now, Mr. Dupree, your wife was the fourth person kidnapped. The first was ‘bout two weeks ago. We’ve managed to keep it outta the papers so far. That girl found last night, the kidnapper killed because her family wouldn’t pay. They were workin’ with us to get him, and we almost did, but it got fouled up. Then he was down to one bird, so he picked up your assistant, Mr. Taylor.” Chalmers paused, puffing on his cigar. “Looks like the guy’s just going down the social register, hitting one millionaire after another.
“Now, so far two families have paid the kidnapper’s money, and got their people back. They show up healthy enough, but they can’t say who the creep was. He wore a mask the whole time, they say, like a hood, so’s they can’t identify him.”
Taylor tensed, grasping the arm of his chair.
“I don’t see how any of this is going to get my wife back,” Dupree growled.
“Yes,” Taylor added. “You must have a plan.”
“That we do, gents,” Chalmers added. “Mr. Dupree, this creep’s gonna be calling you to make arrangements for his payoff. What you do is agree to pay him, let him pick a spot for the meeting, and then let us know. We show up, get him, and you get your wife and the money.”
“And what about my assistant?” Taylor asked.
“Well, once we got this Talon character we find out where he’s got her.”
“What are we waiting for,” Dupree answered, rising up. “I’m game. Anything to get back my Meribelle.”
Taylor stayed stiff in his chair. He didn’t trust the police to accomplish everything they’d planned. They might need help, and the Black Hand was the one to provide it!
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