Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories Read online

  Barath wanted to pop all twelve of his claws and give himself a pleasant little lesson in the finer points of Mukh’than’s anatomy. Instead he just lowered his head and proceeded with his impromptu surgery.

  Mukh’than said, “You should clean that wound.”

  Barath grumbled. “You should mind your own business.”

  “You hired me for my guidance.”

  “And I’m beginning to regret my choice.”

  “If you want to find this village, I’m the only one who can help.”

  “That’s what you say. And yet we seem to be lost.”

  “We are not lost,” Mukh’than said. “We—” Then the skies rumbled, and he said, “Ah.” Before the torrent could begin, he pulled Barath’s sleepcube from his pack. The tent unfolded, expanded, and became a passable shelter for two, though the exterior canvas was already discolored from long exposure to the acidic Irkiirish rain.

  “In terrain like this,” he continued, once they were both inside the shelter, “it can be difficult to judge distances. Rivers change courses; tree cover changes shape. Even hillsides erode, reform, pick and choose their own topography. Too, we are using outdated intelligence, fifteen cycles old; for all we know, the entire village might have died out or migrated elsewhere. You were told this. You should show more patience.”

  The Kurth had a special treatment for people who urged patience at times of great urgency. It involved spikes and the careful placement of weighted stones. But Barath refrained. “I want the Beast. I want Magrison.”

  And Mukh’than nodded: one of several gestures his race shared with the race of the hated fugitive they sought. “So do billions of others.”

  Our Human remains huddled in the simple hut he built in the time of my firstfather’s firstfather’s firstfather, but we would know he was there even if the simple thatch walls were thick enough to muffle his hacking cough or his one-sided arguments with the many imagined ghosts of his past. We would know even if he wasn’t too old and weak to wander far from his place. We would know even if his alien flesh didn’t exude a rancid-fruit perfume subtle enough to tolerate but distinctive enough to serve as a constant reminder of his presence. We would know that our Human lurked inside the hut even without all these other reasons. We would know because the world around him ripples with the weight of the burden he carries.

  Barath and Mukh’than were hours into the next day’s travels, sloshing through a mulch of stagnant water and fallen vegetation, before Barath violated the oath he made to himself every morning and asked the loathsome Mukh’than, “How much further now?”

  “Not far at all,” said Mukh’than.

  “That’s beginning to sound like a fresh name for not knowing.”

  “Only if you have not paid attention,” Mukh’than said. “Have you not seen the natives who have been tracking us for two days?”

  Another trick of the Riirgaan’s ego: withholding this basic intelligence until Barath’s failure to notice emerged at its most humiliating. Barath rose to his full height, craning his neck to lift his armored head off the recess built between his broad, muscular shoulders. He saw nothing: just the stagnant water up to his lower set of knees and a dim hellish landscape littered with heaps of organic refuse. It was the kind of terrain a creature could hack through or burn through, but not see through. So he surrendered some more dignity: “What kind of natives?”

  “The kind we’re looking for,” Mukh’than said. “Trivids.”

  There were three sentient species native to this world known only as Nameless: invertebrate jelly-things who drifted in its oceans, four-winged fliers who frequented the air above its poles, and the rarely-seen Trivids, who were native to this rain forest that dominated this region Irkiirish. None of the three had technological civilizations; nor did they have much contact with the illegal human mines that represented this sorld’s only substantial link to interstellar commerce. Before this moment, Barath hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of any of them. But he’d been hoping for Trivids. “Where?”

  “All around us. Throw a rock in any random direction and chances are you’ll hit one. I count at least thirty.”

  Barath turned in a slow, deliberate circle, again seeing nothing but soggy deadfall. Or was he wrong? Over there, to his right: was that a telltale shifting in this place’s damnable patterns of light? “Why are they hiding?”

  “Since I’ve been communicating with them all day long, I would hesitate to call it ‘hiding.’ ”

  Barath’s claws twitched. “Why don’t they show themselves to me?”

  “Perhaps they don’t like your attitude.”

  “Mukh’than . . . ”

  “They’re empaths. They sense these things.”

  “I can’t turn my emotions on and off like a power switch!”

  “Then look at it this way,” Mukh’than said. “They’re shy people. They’ve dealt with my kind before. They even know me personally. But your people are rarer, here. You’re a mystery to them. And a formidable one: they don’t like your size, or the look of your claws and tusks.”

  Barath sheathed his claws, sought a dry place to sit, and, finding none, lowered his armored rump into the mud. He could almost feel the parasites finding ways to get at the soft meat between his armor plates, but he was willing to put up with the discomfort as long as it tempered first impressions. “Tell them I don’t bite.”

  Mukh’than produced some noises with his mouth and gestured with his fingertips.

  Three Trivids appeared, passing from the unseen to the seen without any obvious transition. Thin, bony bipeds with sad, comical faces that reminded Barath of pie plates with beaks, they were taller than Barath had expected, towering a head and a half above Barath’s height at full neck-extension. They each strode in the precarious manner of bipeds like Human Beings and Riirgaans, and wore body paint designed to blend with the splintered wood around them. But they were less intimidating than they intended—so lean and pale, so hollow-eyed and melancholy—that Barath almost laughed out loud at the fear he had begun to feel. They were worse than Tchi; so malnourished that the sharpened staffs they carried at their sides looked less like spears carried by warriors and more like walking sticks carried by the disabled.

  The three creatures were clearly the same species, but there were gross physical differences between them: a ridge of jagged flesh across the shoulders of one, a gaping maw in the chest of another, an array of tentacles dangling from the jaw of the third. Sexual differentiation, Barath guessed, remembering something Mukh’than had said about the Trivids possessing three genders. If so, this could be a mated group, and the tentacled one, heavy in its lower abdomen, might have been heavy with child.

  None of which interested Barath as much as the rag doll the ridged one wore on a knotted cord around its neck.

  It depicted a biped, like them, and for that matter, like Mukh’than: a head atop four limbs. There was no detail. But the proportions didn’t resemble theirs, or Mukh’than’s. The head was too big, the arms too short.

  As a representation of one of their own, it was pitiful. As a representation of a Riirgaan, it was complimentary. As a representative of one of Barath’s people, it was insulting.

  As a caricature of a human being, it was perfect.

  Barath sat up a little straighter. “Mukh’than.”

  “I see it.” The Riirgaan exchanged some pidgin sounds with the natives. “They say it’s a totem.”

  “Where did they get it?”

  More noises. “They say their human made it.”

  Barath might have leaped to his feet at that, but his people, fierce as they could be in battle, had never been graceful risers. “They actually said human?”

  “Clearly not. They don’t speak your tongue, my tongue, or the human tongue, Hom.Sap Mercantile. They said a word of their own invention, which I assume to mean Human. I’m not certain whether they see it as a category, a proper name, or a title. If you wish, I can come up with a subtler translation—�
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  “ ‘Human’s’ good enough. Introduce me. Tell them we’re happy to make their acquaintance and eager to see their human.”

  Mukh’than obliged, listened to the jabber the natives offered in return, spoke some more, then turned his blank mask toward Barath and shook his head.

  Barath’s hearts fell. The Human Being they sought was dead. They’d traveled all this way and the human was dead. The reward for his return would remain in the hands of the creature’s own people; Mukh’than would pocket his guide fee and return to his hovel in the jungle; and Barath would have to slog back up the river to the mine and continue working as beast of burden, trying to pay back the debt that had led him to such unpleasant labor in the first place. All because one human too old to care could not be bothered to keep his worthless heart beating long enough for somebody like Barath to come and claim him. “He’s dead?”

  “He’s alive,” Mukh’than said. “And they say you can see him. But they also say they will not let us take him away.”

  Our human has emotions and feelings that do not resonate to the same rhythm as our own. His feelings may not be outright painful to us—they do not prevent us from growing our food or raising our families; they do not make existence in his presence a torment—but they are, unmistakably, Other.

  The Trivid village was a collection of mud and grass huts arrayed on an artificial island made of the same mud and dirt, supplemented with crisscrossed strips of cured frond. It was inhabited by maybe a hundred of the frail bipeds, including the thirty who had met Barath and Mukh’than in the jungle. At least a third of those who had stayed home were solemn-eyed young, who watched the off-worlders with a silence that could have indicated anything from awe to defiance. Few seemed to be doing work of any consequence. Several wore the human’s rag-doll image on knotted cords around their necks. All stood by and watched as the party from the woods led Barath and Mukh’than to a straw hut at the heart of the tiny community.

  The villager guiding them jabbered at Mukh’than until the Riirgaan translated: “He says their human lives here. He says that their human is very old and very frail and doesn’t leave his hut very often. He hopes we will be kind to their human and understand his limitations.”

  “Tell the Trivid whatever he wants to hear.”

  After a few more moments of negotiation, the villager handed Mukh’than the handmade human totem from around his neck. The way was cleared, and both Barath and Mukh’than went inside.

  The interior of the hut was dim and redolent with the stench of sickness and death. The dominant sound was the tortured wheezing of the emaciated figure lying on a wooden platform opposite the shrouded entranceway. The figure was indeed a human being, but not a human being of the sort Barath had encountered. Most of those had been young and robust, living on minimal sleep with maximum enthusiasm, enjoying exceptional health and vigor thanks to the treatments the mine owners leased from AIsource Medical. By contrast, this creature was even thinner than the natives outside and lacked even their vitality: he lay curled in a circle, one hand twitching, both eyes uncomprehending, his every breath a painful gasp, his skin disfigured by some kind of ugly skin-creases that seemed to have turned his face into a relief map of hilly terrain.

  Barath felt repelled. “What are those?”

  “Wrinkles. They happen to older humans. Their flesh starts to sag.”

  It was one of the most alien things Barath had ever been told about the Hom.Saps, who he’d considered pretty disagreeable already. “I’ve seen hundreds of humans and never encountered this before.”

  “Most of those who travel off-world get regular rejuvenation treatments. This human must have been deprived long enough for natural processes to come back into play.”

  “They’re disgusting.”

  “I’ve seen worse. There is a small furry creature, native to a plateau on my world, which becomes a delicacy if it dies in sufficient pain. The natives of the region like to place a young one in a cage just large enough for its own body and feed it enough to make it swell to twice its natural size. As it fattens, the cage bars slice it in—”

  Barath had endured more than his share of Mukh’than’s enthusiasm for shocking details. “Enough. Let’s confirm that he’s the correct human.”

  The Human Being coughed twice, raised his head off the ancient pillow, and murmured a few words in Hom.Sap Mercantile. “I want Ravia.”

  “What is that?” Barath asked, as he removed the skin taster from his pack. “A refreshment?”

  “A female of his kind,” Mukh’than said. “A loved one, absent or long dead.”

  The skin taster was a flimsy thing, made for human hands, but Barath managed. He brushed the tip of the device across the old man’s arm, withdrew, then projected a genetic analysis for Mukh’than’s perusal. Mukh’than took longer than he needed to read the results, which was inconsiderate indeed, given that Barath couldn’t read the only alphabet the reader could display, the overcomplicated squiggles of Hom.Sap Mercantile.

  The special tilt of Mukh’than’s head more than compensated for the inadequate expressiveness of the Riirgaan face.

  Barath didn’t even need to ask the question. “It’s him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Magrison? That’s what it says?”

  “Full positive,” Mukh’than said. “It’s the beast Magrison. There’s no margin for error.”

  So shaken he didn’t know whether to feel triumph or horror, Barath muttered a word he hadn’t spoken since renouncing his faith. Magrison was that infamous. “All this time. All those people looking for him . . . ”

  “He had to be under a rock, to hide from the Humans. They have always raised so many monsters among their general population that they’ve grown very talented at finding those who choose to hide.”

  Barath grunted. “You probably consider yourself lucky your kind is less talented in that regard.”

  “Yes. And so must you. But what do you want to do with this one?”

  Barath shuffled back and contemplated the figure. Sixty years, by the Hom.Sap Mercantile calendar, of hiding with people not his own, in squalor that must have reminded him of his fugitive status every day. Sixty years of knowing that the majority of his species fell into those who would have killed him right away and those who would have preferred to make his execution a neverending ordeal. Sixty years of evading the consequences of being a legendary monster . . . only to be revealed as a pathetic, senile invalid.

  Barath, who didn’t often feel sorry for anybody, would have felt pity for this man, were it not for the magnitude of his crimes against his own people . . . and the size of the bounty for his capture. “Do you know how many sentients would want to stand where we stand now? How many would kill to be here with a knife, a thresher, or even their own bare fists—just to do what this creature here deserves?”

  “I hesitate to count,” said Mukh’than. “But as for us?”

  “We see whoever makes the decisions around here. We tell them who he is. We see if they’re still so anxious to shelter him then.”

  “They will be,” Mukh’than said. “If anything, more so.”

  The ancient Human Being spasmed, his coughs weak things barely audible beyond his pallet. “Where’s Ravia?” he murmured. “I want Ravia.”

  Barath glowered at the emaciated figure sweating out his last days on the pallet. So many ways to retort to that. So few likely to get past the fog.

  Our human is a creature who has had his life ripped from him, and who now leads a life he would not have chosen, among people who would not have chosen his company.

  Alas, the Trivids had little sense of history and no sense of obligation to justice beyond their little swamp. Barath made Mukh’than translate at the start, but the constant repetitions of “You can’t have him” grew so wearying he just left the Riirgaan to his work. The more Mukh’than wheedled with them the more obstinate they became, jabbering away in the pidgin that Barath could barely stand to consider a language, sw
eeping their arms in gestures he didn’t need a translator to recognize as abject refusal.

  The shadows cast by the forest canopy had grown considerably longer by the time the villagers dispersed, leaving Barath and Mukh’than alone in a village that seemed to have dismissed them.

  Barath was so tired by then that he was almost happy for the chance to table the negotiations for the night. “No progress?”

  Mukh’than touched a forefinger to his chin in the Riirgaan gesture of negation. “None.”

  “What’s their problem? Do they worship him?”

  “Venerate is probably more like it. They live only a quarter as long as untreated Human Beings, and therefore see him as a creature who has been part of their village life for generations. They consider any crimes Magrison committed before he came here ancient history.”

  “Do they even know what he did?”

  “They know he did something bad, once upon a time. He has admitted this much to them. Sometime before he lost his faculties he even warned them that outsiders might try to take him into custody. But they don’t know the specifics, and they don’t care. He is too much a part of their lives for them to care.”

  “Maybe if you gave him the details,” Barath said.

  “Perhaps. I need to rest anyway. Maybe, in the morning, I will know the best way to make our case.”

  Barath could think of few things he desired less than sleep, as his people had minimal need for that condition. He desired another exposure to the prayers Mukh’than mumbled at night even less. But he knew the Riirgaan’s needs were different from his own, so he assented.

  They inflated the sleepcube and went inside for a few hours of protection from the insects and the muggy swamp-stench that saturated everything around the Trivid village. The air inside was not much better, given the olfactory consequences of a Riirgaan and a Kurth curled grubby and unwashed in close quarters.

  It was a long night. Every few minutes in Barath’s imagination, he leaped from the cube, batted the obstinate Trivids aside, seized the withered human from his bed, and collected the bounty. Then every few minutes he came back to himself, still curled beside his noisome guide, and still grimacing from his own dismay at not having done anything at all. It was intolerable for a sentient like Barath who had never seen the value of waiting.