Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (35 page)

Safety...

You call your home Safety?

Yes... we call it that.

We?

My people, my family. It's a village—

I looked through my mind's eye and shivered.
I can see it. It's big, and it's dark.
And then I felt warmth and familiarity as I looked through
her
mind's eyes.

No, you can see that it's cool and bright.

Unnatural.

Everything's unnatural. It's safe and deep and—

I would have heard of it.

She leaned in closer and mischievously grazed her cheek against my muzzle.
Just as you could smell me when I was following you?

What do you want?

She closed up. Darkness. Separation.

I drew a deep breath and mirrored her psychic walls, covering every chink and peering out like an archer situated behind the crenellations of a keep. But she lay down beside me. I allowed her to pull me close, I was walled up in protective darkness; and she was huge and furless, full and milky-smelling, like a human baby. Although her morphology was hominid and vertical, I'm canid and horizontal by nature: sturdy and steady as a table.

Nevertheless, I felt a distant, albeit slight fecal arousal.

You're not a dog,
I said. A weak and shallow protest.

Neither are you... not completely.
She breathed into my fur, stroked my stomach, and opened herself to me. Seeing myself through Crash was disorienting. I know my true size, weight, and form; but my deep-rooted self-image is altogether different: I'm tiger sized, fast, and silky... not cute, cuddly, and small as an extinct koala. I looked into Crash. I smelled her blond-white milkiness, but I couldn't get past her soft warmth and adrenal pleasure.

I couldn't penetrate her true self.

But I would... I would.

Yes... you will,
she said.

Jarred, I drew into myself.

I like dogs,
Crash said capriciously.

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

I didn't need an explanation: I could smell her green, mischievous smile... and this time I didn't try to protect myself from her telepathic probings.

Five: The Trouble With Truth...

... is that you can't control when you'll discover it.

I looked into the blue ocean that was Crash's eyes and asked,
Why... why did you
track me? And why did you stay with me?

As she stroked me, I watched her teats swaying slightly and wondered why anything more than a bulge and a nipple would be necessary for suckling. Although her camouflage suit bound them tight (when she was wearing it), the evolution of such appendage-like masses did not seem to be conducive to flight and fight. She did not seem concerned that I periodically sniffed at them. Why, then, did she become agitated when I ingratiated myself near her rectilinear expansion? Humans seem to be abnormally fecal-phobic.

She ignored my musings and said,
I stayed to protect you.

That's not the answer.

You mean it's not the entire answer.
She smiled, but I couldn't sense any mirth.
We need you.

We...? Safety.

And why would they need me and—

Why would they send me?
Crash asked, watching me carefully.

For an instant her ice-blue eyes revealed the predator, then softened. My telepathic defenses were up and so were Crash's, yet... humans are so fucking antinomic. They are perpendicular even when horizontal... and they are open even when they're closed. Although she had blanked herself out like the genitalia in a re-education videotect, I could feel her fear, hesitation, and—yes, once again—her love. Impossible, I know, especially the implausible depth of her affection. But there you have it.

I could also sense "wrongness."

Difficult to put a word to it: it's a dog thing.

I've been sent to bring you home,
Crash said.

Cut the bullshit.

A place where you'll be safe... and in return you can help us.

How? We're dying.

From what?

Crash shrugged. It took me an instant to translate the gesture into color and smell.
We don't know, but we're aging earlier.

And dying earlier.

She nodded.
In three years I'll be an old lady. In another two, I'll—How old are you?

Nineteen... going on twenty.

Being a dog, I thought that was a ripe old age for a single lifetime. But a moron could see where she was going; and not being without resources of my own, I had glimpsed the dark edges of her motives when we were, shall we say, experimenting with inter-species rapprochement.
And so you think a little vivisection might help you out.

I was completely unprepared for her immediate, visceral reaction.

She opened herself completely to me, and—truth be told—I'm the guilty one, for I tore her open as surely as if I was wielding a serrated knife; and she flooded me, overwhelmed me, with a tsunami of memory and emotion. In that blinding, storm-forced instant, I saw her whole and complete; remembered as if we were one and the same being; knew her mother and father—both dead; knew her small joys and early awkwardness, her pubescent dreams, adolescent fantasies, and adult fears; I felt her horror of killing and eating (for she was, when necessary, a cannibal). I saw as she saw:: her first "pet," a grey-bellied Alsatian that bled-out on her lap after a well planned and executed raid on her village:: her first lover, a towering stick of a boy who beat her after she refused him—I saw her refracted memories, her repressed memories, and with that terrible, instantaneous knowledge, my hackles lifted in ab ject, sweaty fear until I, too, repressed her memories—and I heard as she heard:: her shadow-master whispering, whispering, whispering to her in her sleep:: the echoes of her footsteps in well-lit, narrow and safe corridors:: echoes:: whispers:: artificial light:: echoes:: death:: whispers:: dog:: love:: hope:: me.

I comforted her as best I could as she squeezed and petted me and tried to catch her breath; but even after that onrush of emotions, even after I saw into her inner vaults, even after she had turned herself into glass for me, I couldn't shake the sense of wrongness. And although I allowed Crash in, although I allowed her to nestle into my fond memories, I sequestered a tiny node in my spinal cord where I could ratiocinate in private. (Again, it's a dog thing; but when a dog tells you he's of two minds... he means it!) She would never know, of course; and it was in there—in that tiny node complete with its own psyche, anima, smell sensorium, and a memory palace as large as the Hazaduri Palace in Murshidabad—that I could sort clues and explore the fractal connections that she had unwittingly revealed to me.

Such as why the mutes were trying to kill her.

Six: Q & A Doggy Style

I'm sorry.

About what?
I asked.

About... what just happened.

You mean telepathically raping a species of the canine persuasion?

She didn't smile, but neither did she turn away from me. (Although dogs don't smile,

I've learned to recognize this odd human expression of mirth, pain, and acceptance.)
I'm sorry I exposed myself so completely,
she said.
I didn't mean to damage your psyche, but I was taken by surprise.
Then, her thoughts raddled with anger,
How could you ever imagine that I would have any part in hurting you? How could you...? I don't necessarily think
you
would hurt me, or allow me to be hurt,
I said
. But perhaps you could be manipulated by those who would. No,
she said,
not in Safety. It's not that kind of place. We're not that kind of people.

Any of us.

But I've only met
you, I said as I tried to calm and placate her with soft images of acceptance and understanding.

And if I had intentions to hurt you, or if my shadow-masters had any intentions to hurt you, we wouldn't be having this conversation. And I wouldn't have done what I did with you.

Ocherous memories of emotional satiation.

And if Safety had such intentions, they wouldn't have sent me to bring you home.

They would have—Would have what?

She just shook her head.

But why would you seek intimacy with me?

She seemed genuinely surprised: surprise mixed with hurt, anger, and spite.
Why...?

Our kinds have been intimate companions for millennia.

Not that way.

Are you so sure?
she asked, finally smiling: her defenses firmly back in place.

But my attention was suddenly directed elsewhere.

I could smell the faraway hint of rust, rust red and smooth as a beetle's carapace, the now-familiar sanguineous smell of the rover pack. Could the mutes have lost Crash's smell so completely... and for so long? Or had they retreated to base to care for their wounded and regroup?

I thought we'd lost them for good,
Crash said, reading me.
How far away are they... how much time do we have?

We have to leave now, I said,
or defend ourselves here.

She shook her head.
I scanned you as best I could when you were regenerating, but I couldn't learn enough to—

You knew enough to be able to save my life and comfort me. The caves offered the best protection... for what I had to do.

And then it happened.

Her final ligation.

The last straw.

The straw that broke the camel's back.

(Ah, how I love human apothegms and tautologies!)

She flooded me with warmth, compassion, and pleasure, as she had done so many times before. She radiated possibility, hope, and trust; but this time I felt an overwhelming cycloramic freshening of memory and experience, an awakening, an apotheosis; and in those kaleidoscopic visions I walked on two paws like a man and stood tall beside Crash in a bright canopied room connected by mirrored corridors to the heaven that was Safety. I was wrapped in a heavenly prison of perfumed gauze, a prison from which I longed never to escape; and in the tiny, secret node that I'd created—my other mind, my doubled dog mind—I
knew
exactly what had happened: Crash had finally captured me so very securely in her anastamosing web... but the divine trap that had been created just for me (undoubtedly created by the kind, well-meaning, vivisectionist shadow-masters of Safety) had unintended consequences. What was meant to instill narcotic love had the opposite effect on the roving mutes.

They picked up her errant signals and were overcome with rage and hatred; and yes, even here, in the womb-stone damp depths of the cave, I could smell their lust-triggered hate and anger. Crash was now my telepathic conduit. What was hidden from her was now visible to me... or rather, to the secret self I had created. Although the mutes felt only rage and hatred, they were drawn to Crash like iron particles to a lodestone. And if I were human, I would have smiled. Ah, the ironies of revelation: it turns out that
I
was the reason the rover gang had temporarily lost Crash's "scent." The spinal node of glia and neuroglia cells that I had created to shield my thoughts from Crash had also shielded her from the mutes. But now that Crash had ensnared, ensorcelled, and subjugated me; now that she had plundered my will (but for my aforementioned sequestered node, my doubled self), she was once again "visible" to the mutes.

And like her, the mutes were telepathic.

They were more than a little like her, or so I had discovered by intercepting her neural action potentials: that treasure of information she didn't even know existed, that repository she wasn't supposed to be able to access. Just as I am an exemplar of canid augmentation, so was she the very picture of
homo augmentum.
And what about the poor dangle-armed, hump-backed, anthropophagous mutes that were tracking us?

Why they were the spawn of the unlucky ones that had been exiled from the subterranean halls of the City of Heaven.

Safety.

Seven: Epiphanies of a Love Slave

Omnia
may
vincit amor
(you know, love conquers all), but as your Bard once wrote, "Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles"; and so, bound by golden chains of
Once we reach that first tor, we will be safe.

She didn't have to point, for I was seeing through her eyes. I was but an appendage; and although she irradiated me with rosy love, she gave no more thought to me than she would the hair that tickled the back of her neck. I was enslaved, or so she thought... but she harbored neither guilt nor malice concerning my state. She loved me and had done what she had to do.

And now she was going to bring me to Safety.

I really did want to go wherever she might goest, for my brainwashed brain was brimming with love and devotion. Whatever eviscerations and vivisections might be in store for me were nothing compared to my new-found religion of love and servitude. I could easily recount ad infinitum the cliffs and valleys, the coves, beaches, dunes, inlets, swamps, and mudflats of my love; but I shall spare you... just as I will spare you an inventory of every footfall of our ill-fated attempt to reach Safety. Although every moment is burned into my mind and shall be forever, I will cut to the chase and tell you only what you need to know of love's labor lost.

Everything else is... mine alone.

So without the interference of grief or moral rationalization, herewith death without a number....

Once we reach that first tor, we will be safe.

Now if you follow Crash's imaginary gesture pointing out the best route to the tor, you'll see jade-rippled water washing over lichen-covered rock cascades. That was the nearest protection perimeter.