Complete Short Fiction, page 146
“We’ll have to take a chance. Hey, you! Stop the train. Stop now!”
The rest of the Remediators had made it to the head of the tunnel, and were starting up the last slope. The Remediator leader said something to them, and they stopped.
“Get it in there,” Mirquell pointed at a pod. “Just get him in, and get it up. It’s dead if you can’t. Come on! Give me a bolt, right now, and it’ll follow.”
The Remediators opened the last pod. I immediately felt a burning in my eyes and lungs. Mirquell coughed beside me.
But the leader shot his last laser, the lightning hit the stacked Brune clothing, and the Soot jumped after it. They slammed the lid onto it, and all set off, desperate to get to the top before the storm stopped.
Just as they did that, an outcrop nearby exploded, showering us all with rock slivers. I turned. Was that a glint, somewhere off in Mesklitchtown? Maybe not, but Proffur was certainly there. Too far away to be effective, he had still wanted me to know that he understood that he had been decoyed and scooped.
A detonation like that might have been regarded as hostile, and maybe it was. Still, from Proffur, I thought it was kind of a gesture of respect.
“No sense . . . in . . . crossing,” I managed between gasps. “It’s too dangerous.” So we stayed on the far side of the chasm, well away from the lightning strikes on the butte.
The Remediators had been too desperate to get to things to remove their temporary bridge. They had swarmed across, into the teeth of the storm, and thrown the last garments on the frames with frantic haste.
Mirquell was breathing so hard she couldn’t speak, and just slumped down at my feet. Still, out of shape or not, the woman had kept going, all the way up after the Remediators. She wanted to keep an eye on the Soot. Her Soot, she thought. And I guessed it really was.
The beast had only just managed to flop itself out of the pod it had ridden in. At least it hadn’t suffocated or been poisoned, though I suppose either of those outcomes would have been fine with Mirquell.
Now it lumbered into the midst of the Remediators. Desperate to use as much of the lightning storm as remained, they paid it no attention.
The lightning found it immediately, and a quick succession of three bolts hit it. For a moment it stood stock still, as if it had been killed, and was staying up solely because of the eddy currents in its nervous system. Then it shook itself all over, a startlingly sinuous movement, and rolled across the rocks.
Remediators dodged it, sometimes moving into a group to protect a clothing frame. Their leader monitored the Soot carefully. Gusts of wind ruffled the heavy garments, and sheets of rain raised beads on them.
I kept my eyes on it.
When the Soot stood up, it had changed. Not that the lightning had instantly healed it. It was still clearly weak and unable to muster much energy. But it moved like someone who had seen a destination, long anticipated, long deferred. Could you detect optimism in something so different? I thought I could.
At last it stood at a point that stuck out slightly above the surrounding slope and let the lightning strike it repeatedly. Every so often it turned, like someone letting a hot shower hit a particular point of tension, then shook itself, hard. The Remediators rearranged their clothes around it, picking things out of the fabric as the lightning struck.
Then it wriggled and moved various combinations of its many legs. As the lightning hit it, the beast danced.
The rain had almost dried, though puddles still glimmered here and there in the late Umber-light. The temperature had dropped with the setting of Actin. Mirquell had packed the still-weak Soot into a pod and had the reluctant Remediators haul it down. She would be trying to make a deal with the Case before the thing regained its strength enough to kill her.
I’d stayed behind. The butte stood alone again. With the Remediator bridge gone, there was no way for me to reach it. I looked out over the City of Storms. Its many neighborhoods, full of dozens of nations, flickered into light as the sky darkened.
There was a slight creak, and the immensely tall figure of Proffur folded itself into approximation of a sitting human next to me.
“Mesklitchtown,” he said. “Nice.”
“It was the best I could do on short notice.”
“Good enough.”
We sat next to each other, watching Umber swell out into a vast red blob as it approached the horizon. How long had he been underground listening to whatever he thought might destroy them all? Was he just going to abandon it?
“She’ll have more trouble with the Case than she anticipates,” he said. “Still, that was a clever move, letting it cure itself that way. Yours?”
“I like to think so,” I said.
“Don’t regret not being able to follow up on the idea yourself. If you’ve captured something too big to handle, whether it’s a predator or an idea, it’s perfectly reasonable to get help or trade it. Things like that take way more skill and effort to subdue than people think. Sometimes trying to hold on to it yourself is the worst thing you could do.”
I was startled by how much of a relief that was. Because, yes, Mirquell would realize the vast bulk of whatever profit there was from capturing the Soot. And I had been wondering if I had been a fool not to try to grab it for myself.
He was right, of course. I didn’t have what it took. Not the resources, not the capabilities. Not yet. And Mirquell owed me the escalator fee for figuring out Zinter. She’d tried to scoop me. But she’d been wrong. I’d been right. Profitably right. And I knew she would pay me. Even if it bankrupted her, she would pay.
And we’d be working together again. She was annoying, no doubt. But real opportunities often were.
I felt good, better than I had in a long time. Oh, my body was a wreck, bruised and bleeding. Still, like the Soot, I felt like I had been cleansed with lightning.
“If I ever run into a job that would benefit from someone of your skills, I’ll be sure to let you know,” I said.
Hanten don’t really laugh, but they have a kind of wide-eyed moon face they make when something is instructively contradictory. He made it now. “I was going to make you the same offer. But it seems you know your role better than I know mine.”
“Good, good.” I had to build a strong network of subcontractors and partners. He was a great start.
Without another word, Proffur got up and vanished down the path. I waited just a bit longer, until Umber was swelling out just at the ridges, and I was shivering with cold, then followed him down.
2019
How Sere Looked for a Pair of Boots
From his day job as a freelance marketing content writer, Alex has learned to question his clients about what, really, they are after. His detective in this story. Sere Glagolit, is still learning the ropes, though her business is a bit more fraught than producing white papers. She first appeared in “How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry” (Asimov’s, July/August 2017). Alex enjoys Sere, her cases, and her environmentally complex home city of Tempest so much that he has several more stories planned for this world. He is also currently at work on a novel that grows out of the events of “The Forgotten Taste of Honey,” which was first published in our October/November 2017 issue.
“Why does Aunt Tirsunah want this closet empty all of a sudden?” I’m afraid I pushed my hand against the door, as if Nurri was about to tear it open and start tossing the contents onto the hallway floor.
“Oh, come on, Sere.” My cousin flopped herself onto the couch. “Organization. Order. ‘Holding back chaos.’ You know moms.”
The “chaos” being held back was Tirsunah’s houseguest/tenant/rehab project/niece: me, Sere Glagolit. She’d saved my ass, and torturing me was her way of making sure I didn’t feel obliged to feel grateful for it.
“Besides,” Nurri said. “Isn’t that just crap from your old Bik discard business? I’d think you’d want to get rid of it. You seem to like this private inquiries business better.” The new business paid better, too, though I was nowhere near up on my rent, something else this closet thing was telling me. And Nurri was right. Why was I holding onto this last memory of defeat?
I opened the closet to reveal obsolete business inventory: molted Bik eyeballs, each the size of a large fist, dangling from integration cables, neat and ready to be sold for low-end surveillance setups.
No one would buy them. I’d pretty much thought up this business of finding and repurposing centuries-old molts from long-forgotten Bik morphs, but my former business partner, my former boyfriend, Lemuel, had now frozen me out of those markets. Besides, he’d always been better at maintaining the nerve-activating rust fungus, and from the looks of things, what had been left of it had flaked off. I’d need to sweep it out before I turned it over.
If Aunt Tirsunah wanted to pack the closet with party decorations, I couldn’t say that made less sense. I was reaching in to gather up the hard-shelled eyeballs, shed by long-ago Biks as they grew and developed, wondering if they could maybe be a kind of peace offering to Greng, our old Bik opponent in finding body parts caches, when I heard Nurri sniff behind me.
I turned. My little cousin was curled up on the couch in the alcove, dark and velvety. You’d want to pet her. Oh, you might want to pet me, too. You’d just be careful not to make any sudden movements. She wasn’t crying, but her big eyes gleamed.
I was happy enough to leave the eyeballs and their pain for later. I closed the closet and slid onto the couch next to her. My hips are wider than hers, and I almost checked her onto the floor. I rescued her, let her lay her head on my shoulder, and waited.
It took her a minute. Panetto grumbled around us. There was a slideway just beyond the back wall, carrying people of every nation from one part of Tempest to another. Dozens of nations bumped against each other in the City of Storms, from dozens of planets, and us Oms—humans, if we’re at home—are only one of them, and far from the most important. We’re pretty much everywhere in the City of Storms, but Panetto has more of us than most districts.
“You’re going to think it’s stupid,” she said.
“Let me decide what’s stupid.”
She took a breath. “It’s about Dothanial.”
Okay, stupid. Her boyfriend was cocky, came up with elaborate schemes that never panned out, and often neglected her . . . most recently when he ended up in a Mimnurm excavation prison for taking a stupid chance. That his being out of the way for a while was good for Nurri was one thing Tirsunah and I agreed on.
“What about Dothanial?” I’m pretty sure I kept any weariness out of my tone.
I’ve been informed that I have a problem with tone.
“Oh, Sere! I was so mad at him. Climbing up that Lorani incubator in the middle of the night, for whatever reason, even if it was to get me some of that fluff. . . it messed up all our plans, all of what we wanted to do. So . . .” She crossed her arms. “I haven’t been to visit him, not once. He’s down there digging for months, and he hasn’t seen me.”
“Almost anyone can get in to talk,” I said. “Mimnurms will strip you bare and cover you with spit, but they don’t see words as contraband.”
“That’s not the point! I don’t want to see him. Not in there. I want to get him out. And I just heard something that might be a lead to doing that.”
I hate working for family. The only coin they have to pay with is gratitude, and, being family, they’re always bankrupt. And Tirsunah wouldn’t thank me for helping Dothanial and Nurri work on their “plans.” Still, this was Nurri, and I couldn’t say no.
“Don’t sigh like that, Sere.”
“I was just relaxing myself so I could focus on what you have to say. It’s a discipline. What did you hear? And who from?”
“I was at the market over in upper Seghast, right by the farms, picking stuff up for Moms. A vendor was telling me a story about how Dothanial climbed the Architon tower at the edge of Seghast to get some glider some kid had lost up there. People are always telling me stories like that about Doth, him showing off, like I haven’t heard enough of them. . . .”
That was Dothanial’s reputation in the neighborhood, and he’d earned it. I remembered him climbing up on a roof to get something, I think it was a balloon, the first time I had had the nerve to bring Lemuel to a family party. Doth had been quite the center of attention, and I think Lemuel was a bit miffed. He’d wanted to make a noticeable first impression, and no one was paying attention. For me, that had been the best possible outcome.
“He got the glider.” Despite herself, Nurri sounded proud. “Just then, a flock of Sosh flew by. And they mobbed him, the way they do. They flew by him, inches away, yelling, making fun of him. They never touched him, they’re good at that, but he must have been completely disoriented.”
“I know Sosh.” I’d had my own run in with the Sosh on an earlier case. They mostly hide out in inaccessible high spots and gossip about what idiots the other nations of Tempest are, and then come out and show off. I have a vivid memory of vertigo and terror as that flying nation pursued me across the sky until I crashed. Bruises, but no broken bones. It helped me solve the case. I liked to think we’re friends now. “What happened?”
“He slipped and slid down maybe ten feet. He managed to grab something. And then he dangled there. People below were screaming. After what seemed a long time the Sosh came back with a length of rope. Maybe they’d realized they’d gone too far. He grabbed on and they lifted him up. Everyone was expecting them to somehow lower him slowly to the ground. Instead, they flew around fast and then dropped him in the river. Sere, that’s not funny.”
I took a breath. “You’re right. It’s not. But he was okay.”
“I guess so, because I never learned about it. Until the vendor told me the story, and the Iflfin—”
“Wait,” I said. “What Iflfin?”
“Sere, keep up. I was at the market, the vendor told me this story, and there was an Iflfin right next to us, digging in a sludge tank for tubers, and, I guess, eavesdropping. Because it dropped its tubers back in the muck and, right there, told us that now it understood that Dothanial had never gone up to the incubator, that he was a complete fake, and that he’d left everyone else to pay the price for his lies. Then it left, without buying anything, and leaving the vendor to clean everything up.”
I waited, then said, “So that’s what you heard?”
“Sere, don’t you see? That Iflfin must know something about Doth’s attempt. And how it failed. It makes sense! The Sosh thing had left him nervous. And you need all your nerves to do those climbs. Dothanial didn’t do it. He couldn’t have climbed up to that Lorani incubator to grab that fluff. He wasn’t able to anymore.”
I spoke cautiously. “Even if it’s true, and he didn’t actually climb the Lorani incubator, it probably won’t affect his sentence. That’s based on violating the Mimnurm security zone below the incubator. The Lorani turned all enforcement rights over to the Mimnurms. And that’s where he got caught.”
“Oh, Sere, you’re always so technical.” She sounded genuinely irritated with me. “Can’t you see that there has to be something more to this? When they caught him, Dothanial was alone. But it seems that this Iflfin, at least, was involved. Maybe others. We don’t know the real story.”
“And you want me to learn it.”
“Or at least confirm that we already know what actually happened, so I can let Dothanial rot down there in that Mimnurm excavation and not worry that there’s no good reason for him to be there. Because, right now, it’s just stupid, what he did.”
I wasn’t going to argue.
“I’m going to need something from you,” I said.
“So you’re going to do it?” Nurri hugged me. “Thank you, thank you. What? What do you need?”
“That new jacket of yours. The one from Rokko.”
“What? How did you . . .” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Moms doesn’t even know I bought that.”
She had been pretty stealthy about it. “Yeah, but I do. There’s a real reason I need it, Nurri.”
“Um. It fits pretty tight.”
I’m bigger overall, and carry twenty pounds on my cousin. Thirty. Whatever. She’d saved up for a while to get that trendy short thing with the soft sleeves and hadn’t even worn it out yet.
“There are ways with those things. I’ll show you. It’ll be reversible, swear. But someone significant along the way will only answer to something as stylish as that. Don’t ask questions, Nurri. You want me to do the job, give me the tools I need.”
She didn’t entirely believe me, thinking that maybe I was taking advantage of her situation to go out on the town looking sharper than I could afford on my own. There was a not-too-long-in-the-past Sere who might actually have done something like that. I was sure she remembered incidents. But in this case I needed it as a tool in the investigation, not in my social life, and one I did not look forward to using.
The glassy fronts of the growhouses loomed above the market in Upper Seghast. Most of their best products actually went down to the hungry restaurants on the famous Seghast terraces that swept down to my left, to end above Onkmire, where Dothanial had been captured. A few overpriced products did get sold from the market’s colorful booths.
The Iffirin managed a farm in here, though I suspected that, like most Iffrins, most of its income came from the produce of its own body. The growhouses were a well-known place for private deals. And they backed up to a cliff above the glacis of the Lorani hive, which definitely raised the odds that the Iffrin knew something about Dothanial’s failed operation.
Inside, each growhouse glowed with the spectrum of a different lost sun, depending on the planetary origin of what was being grown inside. The Iffrin’s glowed a barely perceptible deep red. The moist air smelled of a dozen kinds of decay. I walked carefully, trying not to touch the translucent pods of the various farms. The floor was soft with their shed membranes and the slime on which they slid as they moved around in the growhouse. In the alcoves between them, business got done. I saw the shadowed figures of various nations in deep negotiation. In a particularly large gap I glimpsed a bipedal figure with a thick head. It stood still, surrounded by low, moving shapes. As they swarmed over it I heard a scraping sound, of feeding or covert combat. Was that my Iffrin? I hoped it lived long enough to answer my questions. These particular customers seemed desperate.
