Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017 Read online

  She had done this before, and the memory was so strong in her that for an instant, a circle of vans wavered into being in his mind’s eye. Once, long ago, this woman had led Yolanda down to the vans, he realized.

  They crested a low ridge and moved slowly down into a wide, flat channel that faintly remembered long-gone flowing water. A dusty scent of slow-living plants and small furry and scaled lives colored the wind. Jesse showed him a circle of colorful wooden vans, topped by canopies of neon-bright kite fabric. Sails, he thought. The roof could be raised to the wind, to drive the vans. Carvings of leaves and kite shapes decorated the painted sides. A cluster of small, wiry children watched from the shadow of the vans, their curiosity a brightness pricking at his senses. None of them were older than ten or eleven, Tracker guessed, and wondered where the older children were. Everyone scattered to a van, in small groups of three or four, stooping to greet the children who ran to them, glancing over their shoulders at Tracker and Jesse. They did not point, Tracker noticed. One did not point, among this tribe of creations. The Center, Karin, had joined them, his hostility a low simmer now, as the woman guided him toward a yellow van with a green and orange canopy/sail.

  He gestured to Jesse to remain outside, and felt his way up the broad steps and into the close, life-scented interior. He felt a bench beneath his groping hands, eased himself onto it. It felt good to sit like this. The edge of a table or counter brushed his arm and he listened to the disciplined choreography of the three creations moving within the confined space. They had shared this space for a long time to move with such comfort. Small thumps told of containers being set onto the table top beside him. He smelled water and cooking food. He groped for them, aware of the man, Karin’s, sudden intense scrutiny, closed his hand around an earthenware mug full of sweet water. He drained it, thirsty.

  “You are blind?” Karin’s surprise brightened the space.

  “The dog is his eyes.” Yolanda’s voice, rich with certainty.

  “Is that true?” Sairee, concerned. “You can bring it in here.”

  Tracker shook his head. “It’s not important.” The van’s interior was taking shape around him, the dimensions defined by scent, the bounce of sound, pockets of stagnant air, and the casual movements of the three. Bed over there and another above. Food space beyond where he sat. All else would be cupboards for storage. He felt a finely crafted cabinet door behind his legs. The kiters had skill with wood, too. Sairee pushed an earthenware bowl gently into his hands. He found a carved wooden spoon, scooped up some kind of cooked grain, sweetened with berries that tasted of summer sun. For a time they ate silently, the sound of spoon against bowl and the warm comfort of swallowed food filling the van. Tracker finished the grain and set the bowl down on the table.

  “You understand that if Yolanda doesn’t want to go back with you, you can’t force her.” Karin spoke immediately, as if he had been waiting for Tracker to finish, his voice edged with challenge and threat.

  He had been in love with her. Tracker tilted his head, savoring the subtle play of chemical conversation. Not any more, but the echo was there, a duet with Sairee’s gentle sadness. She knew that Yolanda would choose to leave, he thought. As she had known immediately that he was blind. Aware, these creations, yes. Very.

  “I’m going to go with him.” The air rippled as Yolanda reached to touch Karin. “It’s time.”

  Karin didn’t speak, but the air moved with his abrupt gesture of denial. Sairee said nothing, but her sadness deepened. Tracker expected Karin to argue and protest, but it was Sairee who spoke, thoughtful. “How does your dog see for you?”

  Tracker frowned, wondering what would make sense to these people with their kites and carved wood. “City Man engineered her,” he said slowly. “He changed the part of her brain that sees. It talks to me.”

  A small, hot brightness woke in Sairee, like a tiny bright flower unfolding. “You know about City tech,” she said. “Is there a … disease that kills children?”

  Tracker frowned, feeling the depth of their listening, and the bright desperate flower of Sairee’s hope.

  “I mean … our children have begun to die. By their thirteenth summer. You saw them outside. It’s a sickness. Maybe City people know how to cure it.”

  “Hush, Sairee.” Karin’s voice was rough and hard with old anger. “They wouldn’t share a cure with us anyway.”

  How to say to these people that disease did not exist, not even out here? “I’m sorry,” Tracker said at last. “I don’t know.”

  “Ah well.” The hope flower withered, leaving grayness in its wake. “I’m sorry.”

  Tracker felt the stir of her rising. “We’ll let you rest, stranger.” She paused for an instant. “Will you share your name with us?”

  Names were important here. “Tracker,” he said and felt their instant of hesitation. “That is my name,” he said.

  They didn’t believe him, but they were polite about it and left, taking Sairee’s grief and Karin’s anger with them. He turned to face Yolanda, feeling the glow of her like sunlight on his flesh.

  “These are gentle people, Tracker.” Yolanda touched his face with her fingertips. “Someone created them to be finite and this is how they are ending.”

  “City Man—Donai—created them.”

  She took her fingers away, her sudden anger like the flick of a sharp nail against his cheek. “How do you know that?”

  He shrugged, because the silver music of their origin was written in their scent. “I just do.”

  “He never told me that. I don’t believe you.”

  She was lying and angry grief edged the lie. Tracker shrugged and stood. He went outside to the nervously waiting Jesse and squatted beside her, squeezing one silken ear, sorry for her anxiety. She thumped her tail and licked his face, telling him it was okay, even though it wasn’t. Climbing back into the van, he followed water-scent to a clay pitcher and returned to fill her small bowl and open a package of dried meat from his pack for her.

  “Welcome to The Caravan.” One of the children, a bright flare of life and youthful joy-in-living squatted beside him, earning a wary stare from Jesse. Her eyes showed him red hair and freckles, and long legs like a horse-colt. “Did you have something to eat and drink?” she asked with a grownup reserve and a carefully restrained impatience that suggested the words were important custom.

  Tracker nodded as he set the full water bowl down for Jesse. “Thank you.”

  “Are you really from City?” Social necessity taken care of, the words burst forth, gleaming silver with curiosity. “What’s it like? Are there really all kinds of weird monsters there? And are the streets really paved with gems and polished agate? What is so awful there that Karin won’t talk about it?”

  Tracker smiled, amused at the girl’s burning enthusiasm. “I don’t know why your Center won’t talk about it.”

  “Silly not to.” The girl made a face. “It just makes me wonder about it more than if he told me everything.”

  Wise child. Tracker smiled. “My name is Tracker.”

  “Is that really a name?” Doubting.

  “I don’t have any other.” He poured the dried meat out for Jesse. The girl burned like Yolanda, in a different way. Like a spring sun versus a summer sun, he thought.

  She had been considering his statement. “My name is Karda.” She had decided he was telling the truth.

  Karin’s daughter. Tracker scented it. And Sairee’s? “Do you want to go see City?” he asked, his hand on Jesse’s silken coat.

  “Yes.” Her nod stirred the air. “Just to see why Karin won’t say anything. It can’t be that horrible. But I don’t think I want to live there.” Thoughtful. “I like this life. What does City have? I mean, all those people stuck in one place. Do they Fly?”

  She meant kites. Tracker shrugged. “Perhaps some. I’ve never heard of it, but anything can be done.” People with millennia to live did everything eventually.

  “Are you going to take Yolanda awa
y?” Hard tone this time, warning him that she didn’t want to be lied to.

  “She chooses to come with me.”

  The girl’s sudden stabbing grief surprised him. He turned toward her, but Jesse’s attention was on her food, so he groped toward her spring-sun warmth, his fingers finding her shoulder, sensing the quivering control that kept back the tears. “I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it, because it was such an intense pain for something this young. “I’m not forcing her,” he said gently.

  “I know.” Karda swallowed, fighting with her pain and her tears. “She said she wouldn’t, but I knew she would someday. She … lies about things like that. Sometimes … she lies to herself, I think.”

  Tracker frowned, feeling truth in the texture of her words. She knew that Yolanda lied. He wondered if the kiters had been created to know truth. He had thought that he was the only one. Perhaps City Man had sculpted it into other creations, too. Not Yolanda. Jesse had finished, and now looked up into the girl’s face, her tail wagging, not worried about this one. Tracker saw the gleam of tears on her tawny cheeks, watched his fingers brush them away. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m not angry at you.” Karda rose gracefully to her feet. “She would have gone when she was ready anyway.”

  Eleven, he thought. If the kiter children were dying at puberty … He sensed it ripening in her, that rich change from child to woman, felt a sudden deep pang of regret. Jesse whined and nudged his hand.

  “Tracker, I’m ready to go.” Yolanda’s shadow fell across Jesse, the curve of her hip-spurs elongated curves on the ochre soil, the shadow of her head crowed with twin curves.

  “Right now?” Karda’s voice quivered.

  Through Jesse’s eyes, Tracker watched Yolanda cross swiftly to the girl, cup her face in her long-fingered hands, and kiss her gently on the forehead and cheeks. “Right now, my love,” she said softly. For a moment her fingers lingered on the girl’s golden hair, then she turned swiftly away to face Tracker. “I brought food and water.”

  Tracker hesitated. Now that he had found her, he had only to speak to City Man and he would send a flyer for them. He felt oddly reluctant to do so, and wasn’t sure why.

  “Give me your water bottles.” Karda held her sorrow in a tight net of anger now. She seized them and hurried off, toward a distant van. Jesse growled and swung her head to show him Karin approaching, his expression grim.

  Oh, yes, Karda’s father. You could see it in the shape of his face.

  “Catch up with me,” Yolanda said. Fabric rustled as she swung a pack lightly to her shoulder and strode way, her scent trailing behind her.

  Karin stopped, all churning emotion. “How did you know I was in City?” His voice was harsh.

  Tracker shrugged. “It changes you. I felt it.”

  “I went back with him—the man who came for Yolanda. He let her stay here. I … didn’t belong there.” Karin’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment a hint of fear gleamed on their surface. “What else do you feel?” he asked softly.

  Your fear for your daughter, Tracker thought and didn’t say. The death that waits in her with her womanhood. Your knowledge of the twisted sculpture in your cells that sends your kites into the sky. Yes, kite-flyer, you felt it when you walked through those City gates. That you are a sculpture and not a human. “Many things,” he said aloud. He felt Karda approaching with the filled bottles. Again Karin’s fear surfaced, bright as the flash of an ocean fish. He heard the kiter get heavily to his feet and move to take the dripping water bottles from his daughter and send her brusquely away. He thrust the bottles, cool and dripping, against Tracker’s chest.

  “Goodbye, stranger,” he said, his voice hard. “I don’t think we’ll meet again.”

  In a small handful of years, they would all be dead, with no children to replace them. Tracker bowed his head, seeing the vans in the old woman’s memory, bright and beautiful, their sails fluttering in the hot breeze. He turned away and Jesse bounded along next to him, very happy to be leaving this place. Yolanda had covered a lot of ground and led him now, a beacon far ahead, against the distant murmur of City and sea. He didn’t try to catch up to her, content to follow, not needing Jesse’s eyes to follow her trail in the breeze. He could open his link to City Man any time and the flyer would come.

  He didn’t open it.

  They walked, separated by a space that grew neither wider nor narrower, until the sun’s heat faded from his face and small creatures began to stir in their hiding places from the sun. As the last of the sun’s heat faded, replaced by night’s chill, Yolanda halted finally. Her eyes on the scatter of diamond stars overhead, she didn’t move as Jesse led Tracker up to her. The moon was up, the red stain like a rose on its pale face as Jesse lifted her nose to it. She wanted to howl, but did not. Yolanda took Jesse’s face in her hands, her face large in Tracker’s shared sight. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, stroking the dog’s ears. “We were both cruel to you today.”

  Jesse thumped her tail wearily and flopped onto the still-warm sand, her tongue lolling. It was all sand here, white as snow beneath their feet, radiating away the day’s heat as the air cooled. Water scented the air sweetly, and Yolanda pressed a bottle into Tracker’s hand. The water had been flavored by her mouth, and he tasted her as he drank. Thick fabric whispered, and Tracker guessed that she had pulled a blanket from her pack. It popped softly as she shook it out, then hissed against the sand. “Look at me.” She spoke to Jesse, and they both looked.

  She lay back on a yellow quilt made of kite fabric filled with soft plant fibers. Her shift slid up her long thigh, baring it to the polished curve of her hip-spur as she tilted her head to the sky. Her hair tumbled down over her shoulders, parted by the horns springing from her forehead. Silver moonlight gleamed like water on the polished curve of those horns.

  “Do you know why Donai made me?” she asked at last, her voice dreamy.

  Tracker, squatting by his pack, feeding meat to Jesse, didn’t answer.

  “He made me to love him. He made me to kill him one day.”

  She was speaking truth. Tracker looked up, his eyes narrowing. City people could die. It didn’t happen often, but they could. No disease could touch them, they did not age. They could heal nearly any injury.

  But … they could die.

  If they chose to.

  “I don’t want to go back.” Sorrow shivered in her words like the silver light, cold and beautiful. “But I have to.” She rose to her feet suddenly, the twin moons above her head like a crown of light as she came to stand over him. Jesse whined, and lowered her head to her paws, tail thumping uncertainly as she banished Yolanda’s face. “Do you know why I’m leaving, Tracker?”

  “No.” He didn’t need Jesse’s eyes. She filled his senses, as if the moon hovered before him, blazing with silver light and animal heat.

  “I’m killing them. The children.” Her voice was low and full of pain. “He must have done it when he came to get me and I wouldn’t go. He changed me so that I poisoned them.” Her resignation held a bitter note. “He always gets what he wants.” She reached down, taking his hands and pulling him to his feet. His toe caught the kite fabric quilt. “Come sit with me,” she said, a mix of command and plea.

  He sat on the soft slickness of the quilt that smelled of her. And of Karin. She knelt beside him to unlace his boots, burning like the spring sun, warming him, filling his senses with images of sun on bright fabric and clouds and blue sky. He felt her gaze on his face and suddenly, he understood. It was there, written like a silvery thread in the scent of her. Karda. Karin’s daughter, but not Sairee’s.

  Yolanda’s.

  She stood suddenly and kite fabric rustled. Her shift pooled on the quilt beside him and he felt her spring-sun heat as her leg slid across his waist to straddle him. He wanted to protest, but her heat drowned him, and as she pushed him back, he groped for memory of another moment like this, found shadows like slippery fish in the depths of his memory. Her mouth found his and
her taut muscular body moved against his and the shadow fish of memory fled.

  He woke to the faint, chill whisper of breeze that presaged the sun’s warmth. The scent of dew on dry leaves and stone filled his nostrils and the night-scurry of tiny lives all around. For a moment he had no idea of where he was or when, simply floated in a limbo of cool air and scent. Jesse was a furry warmth against his leg, and, head on his chest, Yolanda slept deeply. He felt the polished curve of her hip-spur against his side. A small pain drew his fingers and he felt a crust of dried blood scabbing a shallow gash in his thigh. He had no memory of her spur tearing his skin.

  A small uneasiness crept through him, something … wrong. He sharpened his senses, gathering them, shutting out the scurrying insect lives that filled the space around him and opening himself to the rush of blood through her veins, the spiral dance of her cells. Yes. His skin tightened, although not from the morning chill. As Yolanda stirred, he sat up, newly aware, feeling Jesse’s flicker of wakening, her tail-thump of inquiry. He looked through her eyes to watch Yolanda toss the tangled gold of her hair back from her face, her eyes full of sleep and the memories of pleasure. Tracker swallowed against a sudden sharp ache in his chest.

  “What’s wrong?” She touched his face. “Your skin is the color of desert flower honey when the sun hits it, you know.”

  The invitation in her touch made him shiver again, and Jesse whined. Yolanda withdrew her hand. “Something is wrong.”

  “You’re City.” The words came out in a hushed tone, almost a whisper. He couldn’t speak them aloud out here.

  “I was born there.” Yolanda considered, thoughtful. “The woman I called Mother lived with me in a garden. There were huge flowers and some of them moved their petals, like butterflies bound to a vine. That was his hobby then. Plants. But that’s not what you mean.”

  “No.” His throat was too dry; he had to swallow again to get the words out. “You are City. Like him. City Man. Donai. I can … I know it.” It was there, that bright absence of Death.