Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (27 page)

"They're after you, Harold. We have to save you."

"Tell the Harmonizers. Attack. Hit their rear. The Drovils—they're all here."

"We have. They can't. We have to retreat before the Drovils get you."

He turned around. A blurry clump of Drovils crouched behind their shields, a hundred meters down the walkway.

"I and four of my warfriends will hold this spot," the itiji said. "The rest will charge those Drovils with you. And get you back to the river."

It had only been a hammer blow. Nothing was broken. He had only been stunned. His legs were still weak. His head was clearing.

Rally to Harold.

Defend Harold.

Harold must not fall into the snares of his enemies.

A war hammer had been dropped on the walkway two steps in front of him. He stepped forward and picked it up.

"We will die for our friends and kin," the itiji behind him roared. "For what you have done. For what you can do."

Itiji had gathered around him. The hammer was heavier than a sword but he could raise it above his head if he gripped it high on the shaft, just below the pitted sphere that formed its crown.

The Drovils toppled the statue of the Goddess as soon as they knew they had most of the city under control. They hacked at its supports and let it sink through the branches beneath it. Later, they made their captives, Warriors and itiji, wrap it in ropes and pull it flat to the ground, face down.

A sled pursued Harold's party after they crossed the river but it gave up before nightfall. In the middle of the fourth day, Golva determined they could stop for a rest. He had calculated the size of the area Emile would have to search, given the distance they had traveled, and concluded Emile couldn't cover it with the resources he could deploy, given the energy demands of the sleds and the range of the locators embedded in the humans.

They had stopped beside a clear, rocky stream. Itiji began slapping fish out of the water. A small group of itiji and tree people formed a huntband and went looking for larger game. The three humans shoved vegetation into the trays of cheese fungus they had carried in their packs.

Harold found a small pool in the stream and stretched out in it with Joanne beside him. It was a warm stream, by human standards, like most of the rivers on the planet, but that was exactly what he needed. Leza joined them after a brief hesitation. They stared into the overhanging trees and let the water do its work.

Harold counted thirty-eight people in the group when they gathered in the evening. Eleven were tree people, including four women and two children.

"I have been thinking about our future," Harold said.

"We all have," one of the younger itiji said.

"Do we have a future?"

"We're helping you escape. Isn't that enough?"

Harold raised his arms. None of the tree people had said anything, of course. Most of them were eyeing him from low branches, too high up for him to see the expressions on their faces.

Jila-Jen was crouching on a branch at the rear of the group. He had stayed on the perimeter all through their flight, but Harold had always been aware Jila-Jen was watching him.

"I have been thinking about our future. Right now we have to concentrate on escape. But that doesn't mean we can't think about our future. I think we should travel as far as we can from the Great River. I think we should find a place where we can start a new city. A city like Imeten. A city where tree people and itiji and humans can all live together as equals and allies."

Joanne was sitting with two of the itiji children. He gave her a quick glance and she nodded approvingly. Leza was leaning against a tree, a step behind him, with her eyes fixed on the ground. He hadn't told either of them what he was thinking. There had been times when he had just wanted to lie down and let things happen. But there were still possibilities. He had been pushed back like this before. He had always found something he could do.

"I don't know what Emile is planning. But he'll be busy working with the Drovils. I don't think he'll pursue us. Whatever he does, I think there will be Warriors and other tree people who will want to escape it. There will be humans who want to escape it, too—as Leza did. We can offer them a refuge—an alternative to the world Emile and his thugs want to create."

He paused and took in a deep breath. He had been speaking in English with an itiji translating his words into Imeten. Now he threw back his head and switched to Imeten.

"We even have a name for our city. We will name it for the city of the Warriors—for the city where the Three People first stood together against their enemies. We will call it—
Imeten."

He looked up at the figures crouching in the trees.
"The Warriors of Imeten will go on fighting! The city of the Warriors will live again!"

He sucked in another breath. His vocal cords relaxed. He had pictured this moment while he had been lying in the pool. He knew it was bombastic. He knew he was mimicking emotions he didn't really feel. But it was the best he had to offer.

The itiji had burst into a clamor of crisscrossing communication, as he had expected, but it sounded subdued by itiji standards. Three of the older itiji were looking at him with the expression he had seen on their faces when he had rallied them during the struggle with Imeten.

A shriek ripped through the itiji response. "What will you do if Emile attacks your new city with a bigger army than the one we just fought?" Jila-Jen said. "While your city is still growing? Will you let him destroy it? The way he destroyed Imeten?"

"We will get as far away as we can," an itiji said. "We will find some place that is more defensible. On the edge of the mountains. On an island in a lake. We can work all that out. All of us! Working together!
Gliad."

"And while you're hiding there he'll be growing more and more powerful. The Drovils and the humans have defeated the Warriors of Imeten. How many cities will resist them now?"

"Bogdavi the Dreamer has a dream! Listen to Bogdavi's dream!"

An itiji had emerged from the trees. He was advancing on the group as if he assumed everyone would stop what they were doing and pay attention to him.

Harold glanced at Leza. She had covered her mouth with her hand but he could see the gleam in her eyes.

Bogdavi the Dreamer had come to Imeten with Leza. He had gone to her aid when she and Golva had escaped from the plateau and Emile had pursued them through the forest. He had stayed with her after they had arrived and treated her as if she was a romanticized female from his own species. Then he had vanished into the forest.

"Bogdavi has seen an army climbing the cliffs around the plateau where the humans live. Golva the itiji climbed those cliffs alone. Think how the tree people could climb them. But the plateau is flat and almost treeless. A place where itiji can fight better than tree people. Harold has said a small band of humans rule the other humans because the other humans fear them. An army of Warriors and itiji can defeat that small band. And free the humans. And destroy the human allies of the Drovils."

"I thought of that, too," Golva said. "I was going to suggest it, Harold."

The itiji had erupted into simultaneous conversations before Bogdavi was halfway through his speech. Golva had jumped to his feet, with his tail oscillating with the uncontrolled frenzy that made his elders regard him with the same amusement they bestowed on over-excited children.

The voice of one of the older itiji screamed in Imeten above the itiji chatter. "Could you recruit Warriors and other tree people if we did that, Jila-Jen? Would they come if we called?"

"They destroyed our city," Jila-Jen said. "We should destroy them."

"Bogdavi the Dreamer has seen it. Itiji will sing as they race across the plain. Warriors will ride on their backs."

"I thought about an attack on the plateau," Golva blurted. "I was going to suggest it. We would just be fighting some of the humans. We wouldn't be fighting the Drovil army. Four Double Eights of Warriors and eight warbands of itiji could do it. Some of the humans might even help us. You've said they hate these tyrants, Harold. They'll know they don't have to be afraid anymore once they see us coming. They'll know they can join us."

"Emile will know we're coming," Harold said. "Does your dream say anything about that, Bogdavi? They'll detect our locators as soon as we reach the cliffs."

"We can make a wide circle," Golva said. "We don't have to climb where I did. We can find a place where we can climb the cliffs and they can't detect us. I've asked Leza about that. The mountain will block the signal from the implants until we're almost on top."

"We can leave the humans behind if that's a problem," Jila-Jen said. "We can make the attack without them."

Harold froze. He looked at Joanne and Leza and knew they had all had the same thought.

"You'll need us," Leza said. "The humans have to know we're coming to help them." Joanne gave one of the itiji children a quick pat on the neck and pushed herself off the ground. She stepped up to Harold and rested her hand on his arm.

"I'm sorry," Joanne murmured.

Bogdavi had established himself in the center of the itiji. He was sitting on his haunches, tail flat on the ground, observing Harold with the calm, open gaze of someone who was totally relaxed. Someone who was absolutely sure everyone would eventually agree with him.

"It's what they want," Leza said. "It's a workable plan. And it's what they want."

Slash. Stab. Smash. Dodge. Duck.
Fear.

He had thought he could get away from it. They would hide deep in the forest. They would build. They would concentrate on the future.

He had thought of an attack on the settlement when he had been lying in the creek. And dismissed it as soon as the first objection popped into his head.

"You can do it," Leza said.
"We
can do it. Most of the people in the settlement will support us."

"Emile is a dangerous enemy," Harold said. "It won't be as easy as Bogdavi seems to think it is."

"But it can be done," Golva said. "And once it's done, we'll be through with him for good. We won't have to hide. We'll have a place where we can all work together."

"You can kill the man who killed your father," Jila-Jen shrieked.

"We can talk about the details while we travel," Joanne said. "Right now we need to escape and rest."

"Have you agreed?" Jila-Jen demanded. "Are we going to attack the human base?"

Round faces stared at the alien creature standing in front of them—waiting for him to tell them what they wanted to hear.

"We'll climb the cliffs and attack Emile and his followers," Harold said. "You and Golva can start looking for volunteers anytime you want to."

It would have been a good moment to raise his hammer. But he didn't.

Nebula-award-winning author Linda Nagata graduated from the University of Hawaii with a degree in zoology and worked for a time at Haleakala National Park on the island of Maui. She has been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven web-sites, and most recently a publisher and book designer. Linda is the author of multiple novels and short stories including
The Bohr Maker,
winner of the Locus Award for best first novel. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui and more information about her can be found at
MythicIsland.com.
After she wrote her first story for us, Linda tells us she became entranced with the protagonist. She's put together a novel that takes place a few years later and hopes to publish it under her own imprint soon. For now, readers can get to know this scrappy teen of the near future...

It's 4:42 am. I know, because the time is displayed in my overlay. I'm sitting between my dad and my uncle in the backseat of a black sedan hired to take us home through Manhattan's streets. I trade gazes with myself in the car's rearview mirror, watching the city's amber glow flow over my face, shadowing the stubble of my sparse black beard, highlighting my split and puffy lips, and glinting against my swollen left eye. I can't see the transparent screens that float on the surface of my eyes, just above my pupils. They're smaller than contact lenses and so finely made they're nearly invisible, even up close. But everything they saw tonight, everything they recorded, belongs to me.

Saturday night is imminent, but Lissa's leaving me. We're outside her apartment building, waiting for a car service alongside a twilight street jammed with traffic. Lissa doesn't squander our last minutes together. She hasn't put on her lipstick yet, so she kisses me, hard, her tongue in my mouth and her hands on my ass, pressing her belly against my hard-on, making no secret of what we've been doing all afternoon.

"Lissa, darling," the doorman croons with a chuckle in his voice. "Here's your ride."

She pulls back a little, gazing at me with her shining black eyes. "Tomorrow?"

I lean over and, making my voice low and reverberant, I whisper in her ear, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," until I feel the goose bumps rise on her arms.

The doorman is watching us with a smile. He's worked here forever, and he's
known Lissa since she was a little girl. She's twenty-one now, two years older than me, but who's counting?

"Be good, Shelley," she warns me. "Don't forget I'll be looking through your eyes." She laughs as she slides into a sparkling black sedan. The door closes, and her car glides into traffic, taking her away to a formal reception put on by her mom's favorite charity.

"James Shelley," the doorman says to me, "I hope you know you're one lucky son of a bitch."

Strangely enough, I do.

I walk away, though not toward home—it's Saturday evening, after all. I'm not even at the corner when Lissa pops up inside my head. There's a tiny image of her, off to the side of my overlay. She's gazing at the tablet she holds in her hand, where she sees onscreen what I see with my eyes. She says, "I can't believe how many people are out on the sidewalks tonight!"

"It's the first warm night of spring."

"Yeah, I wish I was with you."

Her voice comes to me in soft stereo through the implants in my ear canals. I feel like I should be able to reach out and put my arm around her, but by now she's blocks away.

"Well, I'm here," she says, with a sigh of resignation. "Call you later?"

"I'll be waiting."

Her image winks out and I'm alone, but not for long. I fix my gaze on a phone icon until it gleams, and then I murmur, "Nick Holland."

He links up right away, so I know he was waiting for my call. "Hey, Shelley."

"I'm on my way."

"I'll meet you downstairs. My mom's had a bad day. You know how it is. We'll go out."

"Sure."

Nick's icon goes away.

I've been wired for almost two months and I love it. My cousin is a cybernetics engineer and he set me up with the prototype system I'm wearing, made up of the overlay screens in my eyes, audio input and output in my ears, and a dual antenna of two fine metallic lines tattooed at the back of my jaw. It's like God's vision. Everything annotated if I want it that way, my friends as close as a whisper, and Lissa, with the full access I grant her, looking through my eyes when we can't be together... and no one else knowing what's going on.

A lot of people wear data goggles and most argue it's the same effect, but I don't think so. With the overlay screens, the system is an invisible part of you, it's always with you, you can't lose it, and it never forgets who you are, where you are, or what's happened to you. Never.

The evening air is silky with spring, clean and fresh and warm, bringing people out in droves onto the sidewalk. They chatter on their phones and to each other, voices pitched loud to be heard over the rumbling tires of the electric cabs that pack the street, made noisy on purpose so pedestrians aren't taken by surprise.

My hunch that Nick's tracking me is confirmed when he steps out of the lobby of his building just as I come by. I don't even have to break stride. "Where to?" I ask him.

He shrugs, not meeting my gaze. Something's bothering him, but I don't ask. We walk south for a few blocks, weaving around the elderly, the stoned, and the tourists. I'm scanning my overlay, wondering if anyone I know is around, when Nick decides to tell me what's going on. "Anders got drafted."

That's a shock. I stop in the middle of the sidewalk, making the people behind me sidestep to get past. Nick's brother Anders is older than us, but not by much. He put two years into a cybernetics program, but he wasn't good enough to get a scholarship,
and when his debts piled up, the school dropped him. I guess the government picked him up.

Nick grabs my arm and hurls me back into motion. "Close your mouth, jackass. He's not dead yet."

"Fuck.
You knew this was coming?"

"I got suspicious when my mom started crying herself to sleep every night."

The instructors at the learning center like to threaten us with the draft. They like to tell us that if we don't make ourselves useful in civilian life, a use will be found for us—but it's never happened to anyone in our crew before.

I'm not scared, though, because there's no way I'm failing out of school, and even if I do, I won't be in debt over it. My dad will see to that. Nick will be okay, too. He's smarter than Anders. He'll get a scholarship. And Lissa's thriving in her work-study program. We'll all be fine.

Anders is already becoming a stranger in my mind. I wonder where he'll go. Somalia? Bolivia? The Northwest Passage? Or maybe the war industry is already engineering a new conflict and he'll wind up in a place we've never heard of.

If I were a decent person I'd say something comforting to Nick, tell him that his brother will be fine, but I can't do it. It's a weakness of mine, but lies stick in my throat. So we walk in silence, block after block, waiting passively at the corners for the traffic lights to change and then crossing when we're allowed and not before.

I'm distracted, so I don't notice at first a crowd blocking the sidewalk ahead. They're gathered around something, and when I stand on my toes to get a look I see a guy with neat blond hair, pulled back in a braid, handing out bright yellow rectangles of gossamer fabric imprinted with black graphics. We edge around to the other side of the gathering where people are shaking out and slipping on freshly printed over-vests: light as tissue paper, sheer, sleeveless, and cheap. The black letters on front and back are pieced together out of silhouettes of soldiers in postures of exhaustion, desperation, or death, spelling the slogan that's so common it faded from my consciousness weeks ago:
Stop the War Machine.

"Hey, Nick, that's right. There's a rally tonight."

There've been rallies and marches every Saturday night since the start of spring, each one bigger than the last, with people protesting what the wars cost in money and in lives. I give Nick a grin as night drifts down around us, and the yellow vests begin to glow. "We should do our civic duty and go."

"Bullshit. You think that'll help Anders?"

"No," I concede. "But everybody says it's fun, and it feels like you're making a difference, even if you're not."

"It's just a fucking street party."

"Yeah? So?" I make the decision for us. "We've got nothing better to do."

We fall in with the people wearing their gossamer yellow vests and head toward Battery Park, both of us feeling better, now that we have a destination.

I can't believe how many people are around. The sidewalks are packed, the crowding made worse by street vendors with their shoulder rigs, selling dim sum, popcorn,
nori
loaves, ice cream, and God knows what else. We're all hemmed in by cops looking down on us from the backs of their tall horses as they ride along the curbs, their presence slowing down the already slow traffic and keeping people from spilling into the street. The police love the height and power their horses give them. I don't think they'll give up riding them until someone invents a hover bike that will lift the cops above the crowds.

The regular officers are on foot, like the rest of us. There's one stationed at every corner, making sure the crossings are clear when the lights change. At each intersection,
more and more people are waiting to cross until, at Rector Street and Broadway, the light goes through a full cycle, switching back to red before we can even get started.

I'm not worried. I've got a live feed from the park playing in my overlay. Yellow war-machine banners are blazing in the twilight, with the Statue of Liberty illuminated behind them as the march gets underway. "Let's wait here," I tell Nick. "Let the march come to us."

And it does.

The police aren't stupid and they don't want people hurt, so they stop traffic as the yellow-vested marchers spill out of Battery Park. The marchers are ecstatic. They think it's a sign the cops are on their side, and as they flow across State and into Broadway's narrow canyon, they take over the street, filling it up within seconds. It's an amazing thing to see. Where did they all come from? It's as if legions were waiting in the office towers and now they've come out all in a rush to join in a gentle riot of waving banners and insistent chants.

It occurs to me that Lissa will want to see this, so I cue my overlay to record, just as the cops on horseback make a stand on Broadway, yelling at the crowd to clear the street and stick to the sidewalks. The marchers ignore them, except for a few pretty young women who run up to the police horses and try to hand white flowers to their riders.

More flowers are thrown into the air and the police retreat, disappearing down Morris Street, while my overlay uploads everything I see and hear to secure storage in the cloud.

The chant goes on. As I listen to it over the live feed, it's full of joy, but from where we're standing the sound is different: ominous and incomprehensible as it echoes off the towers. I press my fingers against my ears so I hear only the feed and the words become clear—
No more taxes for the war machine / Peace. Now. / Peace. Now
—over and over again as the march advances toward us.

They're almost on top of us when the live feed pans in a slow circle, and I get a dizzying glimpse of me and Nick, grinning like idiots on a packed street corner with the steeple of Trinity Church rising behind us.

The first ranks of marchers pass us by, and I can't be still any longer. I grab Nick's arm and haul him with me into the street. I don't know where the march is going and I don't really care. The mood of the crowd has got me high. I try holding onto Nick so we don't lose each other, but a thousand more people flood in behind us and we get separated in the crush. I glimpse him dropping back into the swirl behind me and then he's gone from sight.

"Shelley!"

I think I hear him yelling in my ear, but the chanting is so loud I'm not sure.

"Just keep going!"
I yell back, knowing he can't hear me and that we're not going to find each other again until this thing is over.

More people join in as we continue up Broadway and I'm forced back, deeper into the crowd. I see a text message from Nick:
DROP OUT. THIS IS GETTING OUT OF HAND.

He's right, but I don't care. I'm drunk on the intensity, the heat, the power of the crowd, and I scream along with everyone else, my throat quickly going raw.

A few minutes later Nick texts again.
GET OUT! THE COPS ARE SERIOUS. THEY'RE PUTTING UP BARRICADES TO STOP MORE PEOPLE GETTING IN.

What cops?

I haven't seen a cop since the retreat of the mounted police.

People start pointing up at the buildings. Media crews are leaning out of open windows, their cameras aimed down at us. The chant gets louder, angrier. We know the media isn't here to relay messages on behalf of War Machine. They're all just bought-and-paid-for mouthpieces who'll be making fun of us in the news tomorrow morning.

But who still listens to that shit anyway?

Motion catches my eye and I discover it's not just the media watching us. In the muddy darkness above our heads, light from the towers catches on the wingtips of a little glider-shaped drone aircraft, soaring just high enough to put it beyond the reach of bottles or water balloons that might be thrown from the street. As it passes, a trail of mist shimmers behind it, dispersing over the crowd. The overlay annotates, informing me that I'm looking at an aqueous dispersion cloud. I have no idea what that means and I don't really care, because the live feed in the corner of my vision is gone, and where the signal-strength icon ought to be, there's a red circle with an X in it. I stare, recognizing the symbol only because I've seen it in disaster movies: my overlay has lost connectivity. It can't find a signal and I'm cut off. Everyone is.

The chant dies away as people scowl at their phones and search the screens of their data goggles, confirming with their friends that the disaster is shared. A few people try to keep the chant going, but fear is waking up in the faces around me. My heart's hammering too. I'm thinking a terrorist cell has taken out the city's communications, right before the launch of a massive strike. I need to call Lissa, but I can't. So I decide to go look for her, to make sure she's all right.