The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes Read online

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  The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes

  by Adam-Troy Castro

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  Classic Literature

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  Fictionwise, Inc.

  www.Fictionwise.com

  Copyright ©2003 by Adam-Troy Castro

  First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 2003

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  1.

  Travel to a certain plateau in the southern hemisphere of the planet Vlhan. It's a stark windswept place, far from the hives or migration routes of the native Vlhani, and well-hidden from the many offworlders who have come to this world.

  That's where you'll find the statue.

  Its center is a mirrored black sphere, one meter in diameter, radiating eight long, serpentine cables in a frozen explosion of loops and spirals and helixes. Three of those cables are supports, holding the sphere two meters off the ground. The other five curl about in no obvious pattern, extending twenty meters at their greatest extension. They curl with such elegance that only a blind man would consider their positions random.

  You'll no doubt recognize the statue as a realistic life-sized representation of a typical adult Vlhani, waving its prehensile whips in the sophisticated choreography of the all-dance language that distinguishes the species. They were called Vlhani by those who discovered them first, but you might prefer the many competing names other offworlders have given its kind: Spiders. Marionettes. Whipdancers. Even Buggies: Isadora, the first human being to achieve fluency in Vlhani, is said to have called them that.

  You might even imagine yourself able to determine the significance of this particular tableau, but that's impossible. The species expresses meaning through movement, not static poses. An isolated instant like this, shorn of context, would be as meaningless to the Vlhani as the ultimate significance of their epic annual Ballet is to those of us who come to this world to watch their hundred thousand Chosen gather and perform and die. No Vlhani could make much of this artifact. Nor would you, unless you knew what it's doing here. You might assume it a monument, but you won't guess which kind.

  My name's Paul Royko. I first travelled to Vlhan at the height of the Pre-War Era, a few short years after Isadora became the first human being to join the hundred thousand Vlhani who perform and die in their annual Great Ballet. The holos of her final moments had already been distributed throughout inhabited space, establishing her in the popular imagination as a tragic cult heroine. Thousands of similarly enhanced youths had already arrived on Vlhan, intent on following her example. But it was early yet. The humans who had not only passed through the various levels of selection, but been chosen for the fatal ceremony, still numbered only four. It was big news throughout human space whenever the Vlhani accepted another Hom.Sap applicant, bigger news when one performed. I came on assignment from a neural linkcaster no longer extant, to interview the latest: a young lady named Shalakan who was reported to be a dancer as brilliant as Isadora herself, and who was scheduled to perform and die in one week's time.

  I thought she was the story.

  The monument provides vivid testament that I was wrong.

  * * *

  2.

  Ambassador Walster Croyd didn't want to see me at all; then when the proper strings got pulled he claimed an emergency and kept me waiting outside his office for ninety minutes past our original appointment time. I spent the time sitting on an uncomfortable chair in an anteroom with a temperature set to raise goosebumps on stone, recording every ache, every distant sound, and every overheard scrap of bureaucratic conversation that kept me company during the wait, letting my future audience know how I was treated, certain that my future audience would infer from all this the desperation of that sad species, the bureaucrat with no other way to demonstrate his own importance.

  Then an aide waved me in and I found myself in the presence of Croyd himself. He was a white-haired, gray-eyed functionary, installed behind a desk that served no purpose grander than a place to rest his hands. That, and provide some cover: for Croyd also happened to be stark naked, with a sagging chest the texture of dry riverbeds.

  There's always been a certain sad defiance that afflicts those who appreciate their own irrelevance. Even when their conduct is professional and their work is conscientious, even when they began with a passion for the job, the taste of failure remains all around them, rendering everything they do joyless and stale. I'd tasted that flavor in other Dip Corps outposts, when those were places where the natives bore special contempt for human beings. But it was pungent here. Ever since the Dance Pilgrims began to arrive on Vlhan, first in the hundreds and then in the thousands, the Confederate Embassy here had become little more than a shrill voice shouting itself hoarse as it struggled to make itself heard over the voices of thousands of amateurs whose own rapport with the natives was far more intimate than anything the diplomatic professionals could manage. For better or worse, the Dance Pilgrims had become humanity's embassy to Vlhan. The official Dip Corps facility, as represented by Croyd, was only there to maintain symbolic opposition to a thriving civilian movement they possessed no local authority to stop.

  I saw at once that Croyd hated the very idea of me. He tapped a wooden implement of some kind against the desktop and said: “You're a vampire, you know that?"

  “I'm a neurec slinger. Not the same thing."

  “Sure as hell is. You both live off blood."

  It was an ancient accusation against the reporters of news. And a facile one. I said nothing.

  “People die here,” he said.

  “People die everywhere,” I told him.

  “Except that here, it's a good story."

  Again I said nothing.

  “You don't have the slightest idea,” he told me. “You don't live here. You don't work here. Do you even appreciate what it's like for us, to be damned to a place where children line up to commit suicide?"

  I considered saying something glib about war. At that point in my career I'd already covered several. But it wasn't exactly appropriate to the present circumstances, so I just stood opposite the naked man, waiting.

  “That's what the Ballet is,” he said. “You can defend Vlhani culture, you can praise its artistic worth, you can dress it up in any justification you want, but it's still a bloody ritual suicide—and any human beings the spiders allow into the ceremony are just misguided children, destroying themselves in the service of a ritual that for all we know might not even have a bloody point."

  The Dip Corps, and the Confederacy behind it, had maintained this position since the first day human beings found a place in the Vlhani Ballet. It failed to impress me. “I can name a hundred respected authorities who feel otherwise."

  “Alien authorities. Riirgaans, AIsource, Bursteeni. They have an excuse. They can afford to be generous when it comes to human lives. It gives them more to study.” His voice burned with venom now. “But you, Mr. Royko—you're actually here to encourage this madness. Spread its gospel throughout Hom.Sap space. Reward the sickness of these cultists with notoriety, make them heroes to the next misguided children looking for some stupid way to waste their lives."

  I could have said that the dance pilgrims were notorious already and that I couldn't h
elp it if people were fascinated with them. But that would have only encouraged him to continue the debate, and I had neither the time or the patience for that. So I said: “I'm here to interview a dancer."

  “A misguided suicide."

  “An artist,” I said. “Who wants to give her life for her art."

  Croyd was almost purple with frustration. “It's still death."

  “That's right,” I said.

  My easy agreement infuriated Croyd more. His hands clenched and he rose from his seat, revealing more fatty sag than any human being should have to possess in the age of genomod and AIsource Medical. It might have been an affectation all its own, useful for an Ambassador desperate to establish a personal style in a service otherwise inhabited by a limited variety of functional types; in that event, the pale blue veins that lined the softer spots struck me as a particularly nice touch. Either way, he lurched across the spongy floor like a man who had never felt such a surface beneath his bare feet before. “I don't know why I even bother arguing with somebody like you. You're not here to have a conscience."

  “How do you intend to stop me?"

  He emitted a bitter laugh. “Stop you? I can't stop you. This is Vlhan. These aren't my laws to enforce."

  “But you're not going to help me find her, either."

  He said: “There are other people on-world equipped to do that. The Riirgaans, maybe. No, I just want to provide you a little warning."

  A warning. Good. There was little my audience liked more than the whiff of danger. I turned up the gains and concentrated on one particularly ugly pockmark, right below his eye, as he leaned in close, attempting intimidation.

  He used his index finger to jab my shoulder at every possible point of emphasis. “I say this to every human being I find trying to do business with the Pilgrim movement. I can't stop you from aiding and abetting this atrocity, but the Confederacy wants to shut down whoever's responsible for bringing these poor souls to Vlhan. We want to know who finds them. Who recruits them. Who installs their Enhancements, and who brings them here.” That last was accompanied by an especially sharp jab, intended to hurt. “I warn you. If you ever find out any of this, in the course of producing your recording, you are to bring it to me. If I ever find out that you withheld such information, the authorities will consider you aligned with these crimes against the human species and place you under arrest the second you set foot back inside our jurisdiction. Is that clear, Mr. Royko?"

  I seized his finger in mid-jab and held it, motionless, in my clenched fist. “Clear, Mr. Croyd."

  He yanked his finger free and blasted me with a faceful of breath so awful that it must have reflected deep inner rot. “Good. And I hope you got that on your precious recording."

  * * *

  3.

  The Hom.Saps refused to offer any other assistance, so I followed Croyd's suggestion and went to the Riirgaans. Unlike our own officialdom, they actually believed in claims of a deep meaning behind the Vlhani Ballet, and were more than willing to help a lowly slinger intent on spreading the word. They set up the meet and loaded me aboard a remote skimmer bound for Shalakan's desert retreat.

  It was dry country, colored in subtle variations of brown dirt. But the air was cool and the breeze was light and the angle of the sun cast a pleasant pink glow over the approaching night. It was the kind of place I might have chosen for a camping trip, had there ever been any chance of me ever taking a camping trip. A lone marionette grazed on scrub in the distance. Since its big round photoreceptor head was essentially one big 360 degree eye, I couldn't tell whether it took any particular notice of my arrival. I paid particularly close attention to it anyway, acquiring exotic detail, the chief skill of a good neurec slinger being constant awareness of which sensations needed to be nurtured for the playback.

  The only other sign of life in the neighborhood was a sleepcube inflated beside a dry riverbed. It didn't look like a two-man model, designed for long treks into barren country, but a semi-permanent installation, big enough for entertaining visitors. I knew worlds where entire families lived in worse. If that was Shalakan's home, she was well-funded, though I'd have to ask whether that was by patrons or personal savings.

  A woman emerged from the cube as my skimmer landed a short walk away. She was lithe and round-faced: the kind of combination that might have tempted me to call her pixie if I'd been willing to get slapped for it. She had the kind of eyebrows that knit together at the bridge of her nose, which might have given her a permanent frown if the metal disk affixed to the center of her forehead hadn't compensated. She wore a Riirgaan caste pendant on a chain over a green jumpsuit.

  There was no chance of mistaking her for Shalakan herself, or for any of our own Dip Corps—not in that ensemble. She didn't seem to move like one of Shalkan's fellow dance pilgrims either. They had a liquid way about them. She was something else. Graceful, but something else.

  Showing off for the pretty lady, I hopped from the skimmer and onto the dirt. Big mistake. My ankles felt like they'd just been riven with spikes. (Probably not a good detail to keep for the playback.) I managed to approach without limping. “Ow. Hello."

  She covered her smile with one hand. “Ow yourself. Are you all right?"

  “Just temporarily crippled."

  “I can see that. Is this your way of establishing rapport with your subjects, Mr. Royko? Major muscle sprains?"

  The language was Hom.Sap Mercantile, the accent Riirgaan, complete with their characteristic epic slurred r's. Whoever she was, she'd spent more time with the lizards than with other human beings. An exile?

  I slapped the side of the kimmer, sending it back into the sky and from there back to its Riirgaan masters. “Naaah. Sometimes, with the tough ones, I go for compound fractures. And you're...?"

  “Deeply amused,” she said. Then she relented: “Need any help?"

  I took another step and discovered that my leg could take the weight with only a minimal degree of resentment. “No, I can make it. You can call me Paul, if you want."

  “My name's Ch'tpok.” That was a good accent all right. She managed that central hiccup better than any non-Riirgaan I'd ever heard.

  I wasn't nearly as good. I almost choked on it. “Chuppock?"

  “Don't worry if you can't get it on the first try,” she said, providing an extra-careful pronunciation: “Ch'tpok."

  I tried Chitpock, Cheatpock and Chatpock before establishing to our mutual satisfaction that Chuppock was as close as I was likely to get. She didn't take it seriously: I gathered that correct pronunciations from her fellow humans were as rare as generous compliments from the Tchi. By then we'd also established that she was an exolinguist, third grade, trained by the Riirgaans to specialize in Vlhani Dance. She said that she'd been a citizen of the Riirgaan republic since the age of four years Mercantile.

  Still working out the limp, I asked: “How did that happen?"

  “How else? Crazy idealist parents who thought renouncing their species made some kind of point about an issue long since forgotten.” That really was an insistent smile she had, but anybody who grew up among the stony-faced Riirgaans probably had cause to overcompensate. “I'm not bigoted against Hom.Saps, if that's what you're thinking. It was all political, and I never bought into it."

  “Parents happy about that?"

  “Parents defected again a couple of years later, this time to some kind of sentient spore-colony. Last I heard they were still growing underground somewhere. They were pretty insane, really.” She noted this with a friendly wink, establishing, or at least trying to establish, that nothing about these experiences had left her bitter. “Naaah, I recognize my species. I know my biological roots. I just don't use them for legal purposes. I stay Riirgaan because that's where my credentials are."

  The phenomenon wasn't unheard-of; I knew of three wealthy Hom.Saps who had aligned themselves with the software intelligences known as the AIsource just to avoid the Confederacy's ruinous taxes. And the entire Dance Pilgrim movemen
t, here on Vlhan, was about human beings altering themselves to fit into an alien ritual. But it was still discomfiting. Despite being a fine model of her birth species, Ch'tpok's citizenship still rendered her legally not human ... a status which would have kept her from being recognized as a human being in any Hom.Sap court. Without defecting back to her birth species, she would not be able to own Hom.Sap property, enjoy the protection of Hom.Sap laws, or even enjoy a legal partnership with another human being. I wondered if she'd ever travelled in human space, and just how much inconvenience she must have suffered along the way—questions that rendered her an excellent possible future neurec subject, once I was finished with the story at hand. But right now Shalakan took precedence. I asked, “Did your Embassy send you here to meet me?"

  “No. Dalmo and Shalakan have been letting me observe her last few months of training."

  “Dalmo?"

  “Shalakan's husband."

  Nobody had mentioned a husband. It disturbed me. Who would get married when their greatest ambition in life was to die violently as soon as possible? “Where are they?"

  “Shal's out communing with the Vlhani; she'll be back later. Dalmo's inside. He would greet you himself, but he's not feeling well today."

  Ch'tpok lifted the flap of the sleepcube and we went in. The interior was bright, mostly from sunlight filtering through the cloth. It was sparse, too; a couple of hammocks, a food chest, a few instruments likely belonging to Ch'tpok, and one or two other boxes too small to provide much in the way of civilized amenities. The light came from a single hoverglobe. There was soft music playing: not human, as far as I could tell, but something a human being could listen to without retching. Shalakan's ailing husband was not lying in bed, as I'd expected, but standing on one leg. The other leg and everything from the waist up extended parallel to the ground, facing downward, like a body lying on an invisible mattress. Thin, sunken-cheeked, sweaty, and hollow-eyed, he bore the look of a man whose ailments had set in a lot earlier than just today, but he seemed comfortable enough, even if, like me, he belonged to that unfortunate subspecies of sleeper afflicted with terminal drool-mouth. He wore only a thin gray cloth around his waist. His arms, spread out at his sides like wings, each displayed several joints too many; they undulated gently as he slept, the contractions moving from shoulders to fingertips in waves.