Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories Read online

  Barath didn’t want to sleep that night, but as he curled up for what should have been a few hours of alert rest, Mukh’than arranged and set fire to his bowl of precious herbs. The vapor was usually no more than an acrid tang, no fouler than the smell of the Riirgaan himself. But tonight it seemed stronger. Tonight the air around Barath turned as thick as the clouds in a blind thing’s eyes, and something like unconsciousness came to claim him despite his intentions. His limbs grew heavy, his thoughts turned to crippled stumbling things, and his sense of time and place bubbled with contradictions. One part of him knew he was in a tent, among potential hostiles in a wretched village well beyond the few pockets of civilization that dotted this horrid world with no name. He felt the simmering fever at the base of his skull, the maddening itch where the scaleworm had gotten him, and the thousand and one smaller pains that came with any journey into places so inhospitable that the smallest steps exacted their price in blood. He even saw Mukh’than bending over him, murmuring words nothing like the prayers he had spoken every other night; and he experienced a moment of unease as the Riirgaan left him alone in a sleepcube filling up with intoxicating mist. He noticed, too, when Mukh’than returned with a rag over his face, carrying a knot of wriggling things at the end of a stick . . . and when Mukh’than left again. But another part of him was parsecs away, in the palace he would have built for himself upon returning home a success—a curtained place where a Kurth of distinction could luxuriate among his sycophants and slaves, inflating the victories of his youth into blessed lies.

  It was such a joyous dream that he might have surrendered to it and died thinking it was his actual fate, but then the palace around him seemed to fill with smoke, and he found himself back in the sleepcube in Irkiirish, tasting his foul dinner of the night before as it burst from his mouth in an explosion of bile.

  That was how he found out, before too late, that he couldn’t breathe.

  The air inside the sleepcube was now a gray mist that scoured his eyes—a lot like the Riirgaan’s ceremonial intoxicants, only worse. Barath’s lung was a burning ball of flame in his belly; his head a drum pounding out a song of imminent suffocation. He spat out the rest of the terrible taste in his mouth, rolled onto all fours, noted with distant rage that Mukh’than was nowhere to be seen, and for one queasy moment almost succumbed to the apathy that afflicts those so close to death that sinking all the way into that darkness seems less trouble than continuing to fight for life. Then anger took over and he drove himself forward, knocking over Mukh’than’s stool and hammock, stumbling over his own pack, and ultimately finding himself trapped against the cube’s flexible wall.

  Once again he almost gave up, thinking gray thoughts of how little he had to live for anyway. He was a pauper. He was dead to his people. He was a friendless alien working subsistence wages for human beings on a world so forsaken that even its natives hadn’t bothered to name it. There would never be any future for him, never any glory, never any redemption: just a wretched life and anonymous death.

  Then the distant awareness that this wasn’t just a stupid accident of some kind, but something else, ripped free a last defiant snarl. He popped his claws and punched holes in the soft canvas, carving stripes that his addled mind insisted on interpreting as wounds slashed in the flesh of an implacable enemy. Then he drove himself forward through the fresh exit, falling flat on his face in the mud created by a raging torrential rain. He vomited some more, tasted blood, and lay there hyperventilating as black fires burned at the edges of his consciousness.

  It seemed a long time before his mind blazed with a single-word explanation.

  Mukh’than.

  He must have added something poisonous to his vapors.

  Barath pushed himself off the ground, almost stumbling, but was able to rise to his hind legs, allowing the knuckles at his forelimbs to take the weight since his spine lacked the strength to support the far more awkward bipedal stance. His head lolled. He saw something white pulse between scales on his chest, and recognized it as a scaleworm, already growing fat on his blood. And there, further down, was another. And another.

  Barath remembered the glimpse of squirming things at the end of Mukh’than’s stick. Mukh’than had told him, just a few days earlier, to watch out for the males. Mukh’than would know what the males looked like. A Mukh’than turned malevolent—or, rather, revealing that he’d been malevolent since the beginning—would know just what to look for. How many had he found? Ten? Twenty? How many males in that many? And how long before they laid their eggs?

  Barath’s belly lurched. He spasmed, tried to expel whatever remained in his belly, and failed: there just wasn’t anything left to bring up. For just a moment, thinking of the pain in store for him, he wished he could return to the apathy of near-death that he had just fought off at such cost and once again enjoy freedom from caring. But there was no reclaiming such a lost opportunity. As much as he might wish for death soon, right now he could breathe. He could think. He could hate.

  He could see that the Trivids had been watching all along.

  He sacrificed stability for height and rose on his hind legs, snarling like a beast as he did. The Trivids, gathered in the dark and the rain, reacted not at all. The anger burned in him again, and he stumbled forward, grabbing one of the ridgebacks by its neck. He wanted to shout, but the best he could manage was an explosive whisper. “Where is he?”

  Either the Trivid had no fear, or his kind showed it in a manner Barath did not know how to read. It did nothing.

  Barath wanted to tighten his grip and rip the creature’s head from its shoulders. There was no reason not to. He had no future, and he had no cause to care for his reputation.

  Then he saw the totem the Trivid held in its hand. They all held one: every single Trivid, holding before them all they had to show for Magrison’s presence among them. Some held theirs higher than others, either stressing the object’s power, or answering Barath in the only way they knew how.

  Barath released the ridgeback, dropped to all fours, and moved toward the crowd—not because he wanted any of them, but because they stood between him and his murderer.

  They moved aside.

  And in the hut a few short steps away he found Mukh’than, an ardent lover curled beside the ancient human in his bed.

  Our human described this Ravia as taller than himself, as thin as a reed, with a complexion the color of pebbled sand and sunny hair that descended to her shoulders in spiral ringlets. He said that since she was a Firstmother of his species and not a Firstfather like himself there were serious differences in the proportions of her body and his, but the descriptions themselves used terms that were unfamiliar to us. Once he said that every awful thing he had done, he did out of hate for those who had taken her. It is not a way of thinking we understand. But that is why we’re Trivids. And why he’s human.

  Magrison was a knot of withered flesh with frayed cords for limbs. He gaped at the thatched roof above him, not seeing it, reacting not at all to the presence of the Riirgaan who lay naked beside him, stroking Magrison’s pale white chest. Mukh’than seemed almost as insensate; he had closed both his transparent eyelids and the second layer of opaque ones that complemented them, and let his own mouth hang open, as if in parody of the human’s slack-jawed senility.

  The vague similarities between Human and Riirgaan anatomy that made some of the more unpleasant races grumble about not being able to tell those two species apart—similar heights and masses, bipedal posture, faces that arranged their features in approximately the same positions—seemed an obscenity in light of the differences that were visible when they lay side by side. Humans had limbs jointed at their midpoints; Riirgaan limbs had three segments. Humans had torsos a little like cylinders. Riirgaans were something like a prickly plant, with flat surfaces punctuated by spines. The proportions were off, too—especially the longer legs of the Riirgaan and the larger head of the Human. Nor did there seem, at first glance, to be any place where their resp
ective parts could fit together. But that physical obstacle didn’t seem to bother Mukh’than any more than the human’s inability to respond did—and from the impassioned way Mukh’than stroked the collection of enflamed protrusions on his own belly, he didn’t need the human’s conscious involvement at all. Magrison’s mere presence seemed to be enough.

  When Barath charged them, Mukh’than was fast enough to grab his needle-gun and fire one shot, which dug a stinging furrow in the Kurth’s side. But before he could fire a second, Barath’s foreclaws were firmly imbedded in Mukh’than’s wrist. The gun went flying into some dark corner.

  The human clutched for his bed companion and murmured a single word in a voice filled with confusion and dust: “Ravia!”

  Barath lifted Mukh’than off the bed by his impaled wrist. “Ravia? Is that who you are to him?”

  Mukh’than threw a punch with his free hand. But it had no more effect than a single raindrop falling on stone. Without weapons, there was nothing any mere Riirgaan could do to get past a Kurth’s armored hide.

  Barath, feeling nothing but fury, drew Mukh’than closer.

  Magrison reached for open air. “Don’t hurt her! Please!”

  Barath had never been good at reading Hom.Sap facial expressions, even after years of working for representatives of the species. The shifts from smile to frown to sneer and back again, so significant to them, had never struck him as anything more than random shifts of rubbery flesh. But it would have been impossible to miss the pain and desperation on the face of the slack-jawed old man, reaching with strength he no longer had to rescue the creature he thought he loved. Sickened, Barath faced Mukh’than again. “It isn’t the first time he’s begged for you in my hearing. He asked for you the other day too.”

  Mukh’than coughed. “He asked for Ravia . . . ”

  “Meaning you.” Barath impaled Mukh’than’s other wrist with another popped claw.

  Magrison reacted to the Riirgaan’s agony with a soft, weak cry of anguish.

  “He loves you,” Barath said.

  “And I love him. He is the love of my life.”

  “You’re Ravia?”

  Mukh’than’s voice was an agonized, breathless wheeze. “Ravia was . . . a female of his species. Mother . . . to his children. She died . . . as they died . . . in the war his enemies fought to avenge his crimes . . . ”

  “But he called you Ravia.”

  “When I am beside him, I am Ravia. I am a male of my own species . . . but I am honored to take the place of a female in his.”

  The arrogance in the Riirgaan’s voice, dripping with satisfaction about his perverse liaison with a genocidal murderer of another species, was so infuriating that Barath couldn’t resist retracting his claws and hurling the sordid little creature to the hut floor. Barath heard cracks indicating that Mukh’than broke bones when he hit but felt no diminution of his rage. He gave up on a clean kill right then and there, and instead decided to prolong his revenge by first shattering as many as the Riirgaan’s remaining bones as he could manage. He lurched forward, ignoring Magrison’s plaintive cries of “Ravia!”, and falling on Mukh’than before the Riirgaan could crawl away into the dark.

  “You killed the others in our party,” Barath spat, grinding the Riirgaan’s wrists for additional pain. “The Human. The Tchi. I don’t know how you arranged it, but you made sure they died on the way here.”

  Mukh’than’s response was a broken trill, distorted by agony, that nevertheless reflected real amusement. “That’s right. You would be surprised how easy it was.”

  “You must have had trouble figuring out how to kill me.”

  “Not at all. I wanted you alive until now.”

  “Liar. I barely escaped the sleepcube.”

  More trills—but, as strained as they were, not frightened trills, but terrible triumphant ones. “If I had really wanted to suffocate you, you would already be dead. Remember the others. I know better jungle poisons than that!”

  “I warned you not to lie to me!”

  “It’s no lie. If I wanted to smother you, why would I also infest you with scaleworms? What would be the point of that? If you suffocated in the cube they would die as fast as you did. I wanted only to incapacitate you for a while . . . to keep you from noticing the scaleworms I planted until after they laid their eggs and began what’s going to be a much slower death. You will not make it back to the river no matter how quickly you travel. You will grow weak. You will collapse. You will linger. You will be in pain, an invalid, mad with delirium for an entire season, maybe two—something these Trivids can care for and consider theirs, so I can have more time to spend with the precious dying thing I consider mine. I have done it before, with other wanderers in this jungle. My only mistake with you, you vulgar brain-dead animal, was misjudging your metabolism . . . thinking the fumes would hold you longer, and give me time to get away. But that doesn’t matter, not to you. You’re still a corpse too stupid to realize it’s started to rot.”

  It was far too early for Barath to feel the scaleworm larva digging burrows inside him, but for a moment he imagined the sensation anyway: a pounding, burning agony, multiplied a thousandfold for every second he was riddled with holes. He shook away the image, lowered himself closer to the traitor who had done this to him, and demanded: “Why?”

  “Because I love him. For the same reason they love him.”

  Barath pressed the tip of a claw against the soft underside of Mukh’than’s throat. “And that is?”

  The Riirgaan’s black, inexpressive eyes were pools filled with the knowledge of his own oncoming death. Perhaps that is what permitted him to speak without exhaustion, without fear. “Because in a place like this, where we live without hope, where we live among creatures with no hope . . . all we really own is the magnitude of our own sins.” He closed the opaque lids over his eyes. “Don’t you see that that’s what makes him such a treasure to them? How much it must comfort such a people, to claim ownership of such a demon? How much it comforts me, to care for one whose own crimes were so much worse than mine? Or how much it should gall you, in the presence of such fallen greatness, to remember that your own life was destroyed by a crime so petty?”

  The crushing silence that followed was thick enough to bury any hope of answer.

  “What I did,” the Riirgaan said, “I would do again. It was a sin that made me proud. Can you say the same of your sin, Barath? Was it as grand?”

  Barath gutted him. Thanks to the temperature differential between Kurth biology and the Riirgaan equivalent, the blood that geysered against Barath’s chest plates was a thin cold soup, as unsatisfying a vengeance-trophy as any enraged Kurth had ever known. His rage unspent, Barath raised his forelimbs above his head and brought them down hard, shattering the Riirgaan’s skull, driving the brains and bone fragments into the dirt. It should have helped. But the traitor’s blood hadn’t warmed any; nor had Barath’s rage cooled. It could never cool. Not when he was still dying, and there was no one left to avenge him.

  Part of him thought he still heard trilling.

  Magrison didn’t seem aware that anything unpleasant had happened; he just stared at the ceiling above him, his mouth agape, his slug of a tongue licking his dry withered lips.

  “Ravia,” the human said. “Ravia.”

  Barath didn’t bother to get up off the floor. He just crawled over to the bed and loomed over the ancient figure, wanting Magrison to see something monstrous in his own tusked, blood-spattered face. He needed that; to achieve monstrousness in the eyes of a monster would have been victory of a sort.

  But the old man didn’t see him, really: was no more aware of Barath’s presence than he was of his beloved Ravia’s absence. If he saw anything, it was just the darkness and the fog comprising an exile far crueler than that which he’d chosen for himself so long ago. Perhaps he still experienced memory-flashes of the people he’d hated, the plans he’d made, the atrocities he’d carried out; perhaps they gave him moments of satisfacti
on, or raw crushing guilt. Perhaps he could live long enough to be taken from here and condemned to whatever execution his fellow humans wanted for him. But time and decrepitude had already provided a darker sentence.

  “I should kill you,” Barath said. “Do what everybody wants done. Get that much satisfaction out of this, at least.”

  Magrison’s lips curled in an expression that might have been a smile. He whispered something in a language Barath didn’t know, coughed, fought for breath, then whispered the same words again; though whether he spoke to Barath or to some phantom resident of the lost world where he lived was something the Kurth would never know.

  Then the human closed his eyes, and did not move again.

  Barath regarded the empty thing for a long time, thinking of a world filled with familiar shapes and abandoned opportunities. He thought of all the things the human had done and all the other human beings who would have danced if they’d known he was dead. He thought of his own crimes, wondered if anybody would have searched entire worlds to bring him to justice, concluded that in the end nobody would have cared, and wondered if that made him more or less pathetic than a monster fading in twilight. He didn’t wonder whether the monster he contemplated was Magrison or Mukh’than, because in the end it didn’t matter.