Kitabı oku: «The Book of Dragons», sayfa 5

Three men were eating dinner, served by a woman in a burqa. One of the men wore a Western-style business suit, but except for that, they could have been brothers. Yuli didn’t know what alerted them. Maybe they’d made a sound. Maybe the light from their window had reflected off some piece of equipment. Whatever it was, the enemy caught sight of them as they were crossing the yard, and before they could find cover, the enemy was firing at them. Nowak died, but Yuli and Wrona made it to the side of the shed where the dogs lay motionless.

“This is not good,” Wrona had said as bullets cracked past them, but Yuli took the barrage of fire as a good sign. The enemy was undisciplined, and the undisciplined were weak. Even now, he can remember the calm of those moments. The focus that left no room for fear. They stayed low and held their fire as he murmured orders to Pintador. Yuli’s patience had always been a weapon.

The first came out, circling around to flank them. The urge to shoot back as soon as there was opportunity was hard to resist, but Yuli signaled Wrona to wait. The little pop of the sniper rifle was unmistakable. The woman screamed, and Yuli and Wrona both opened up on the flanking enemy who had been briefly surprised to realize how far out of safety he had drifted. Just like that, two of the men were dead. Killing the last one and the woman took longer.

Afterward, Pintador brought down the Humvee while Yuli and Wrona went through the houses, the shed, the truck, and the cars. The heroin was in the shed, where Yuli had expected it to be. Fifteen bricks wrapped first in plastic and then cloth. It was what they expected to find. The binders in the sedan were a surprise.

Yuli still remembers seeing them: five three-ring binders with blue plastic covers and spines as wide as his hand. They had reminded him of medical records. When he picked one up, it felt too heavy. He remembers his first thought: the paper had gotten waterlogged. When he opened it, each page was a cardboard backing with a grid of clear plastic pockets four across and four high. A gold coin rested in each pocket; some were krugerrands, some American gold eagles. Each was an ounce of gold. Each sheet, a pound. Each binder, between fifteen and twenty pages deep. At the time, it was a little more than half a million dollars. Gold has gone up since then. Now the coins are worth nearly two million.

Yuli had never heard of the target trading in coins. Everything was supposed to be American dollars, if it was anything. This was something new. Yuli had wondered who the man in the suit was and who he had worked for, but there was no identification in his pockets or in his car.

Pintador had loaded Nowak into the Humvee, wrapped in plastic film they’d brought for the purpose. No evidence left behind was the rule, and a dead mercenary was evidence. Wrona went back to the shed and returned with three bricks of heroin. He had tossed one to Yuli.

“Spoils of war,” Wrona said.

Yuli tossed it back. “You take it. I’m keeping these.”

“You sure?” Wrona said. “The shit will vanish. Show up with those, someone will notice.”

Yuli had taken one of the coins out, enjoying its luster in the faint light of the coming dawn. The weight of it on his fingertips. Some part of him had known even then that he wouldn’t sell them.

“I’m keeping these,” he’d said again, and Wrona had shrugged. Then it had been time to finish up.

Wrona and Pintador took cans of gasoline from the Humvee and soaked the compound. Yuli got the flamethrower and, standing outside the fence line, he turned it on everything. The dead men, the woman, houses, truck, Jeep, sedan. The dogs. The earth.

The flames roared, and he had roared back until his breath and the fire were one thing.

The tunnel narrows down. The roots and soil you were going through at the mouth are thinning out, and you can see the carved stone. This is a worked passage. Not just something natural.

Goblin warren. I’m telling you this is a goblin warren. This is bad.

Better than going in the front door.

The tunnel turns to the right. About twenty feet farther down, you can see an opening. Like it comes to a bigger chamber and ends there. No door, it just opens out. There’s light.

Okay, I’m dousing the torch.

Don’t kill the fucking torch! We need to see!

We don’t need to announce ourselves. Anyway, I’m carrying it, so I douse it.

It gets dark.

We wait until our eyes adjust.

Everyone roll perception, and let me know if you miss.

Ah. I’m down by one.

Anyone else miss? No? Okay, you were looking at the torch before it went out, and so you’re taking longer to get your dark vision. Everyone else, you see that the light at the end of the passage is reddish and flickering. Like there’s a fire nearby. And because of the way the light hits the stone, you can catch the shadows where something’s carved into the walls.

Like runes? Something’s written there?

More like there were places for something to be set into the rock. Braces maybe. But they’re gone now.

I use my amulet for detect magic.

You don’t find anything particular to the marks.

I don’t like that. I roll for traps, and … make it by two.

Yeah, that’s the kind of thing you’d see if someone had put in a winch or something. If you had to bet, you’d say one of those stones is a pressure plate, but you can’t tell what the mechanism is that it triggers.

Well, folks, you don’t make something like that unless you’ve got something worth guarding. I’d have to say we’re getting close.

Yuli stands naked in front of his full-length mirror and wonders how he let it get this far. His arms are thin, pale, and grayish. His belly doesn’t pouch out much, but the skin is slack. He has tits like a twelve-year-old girl. He keeps slouching. He’s getting a little bald, a little gray, but that’s just time. His teeth are yellow from cigarettes and coffee, because that’s how it goes. But he’s weak and slow, and that is his fault. Complaisant is another word for stupid, and he is finished with being stupid.

The cigarettes go first. He breaks each one over the toilet, dusting the piss water with tobacco so that he can’t go back and fish one last cigarette out of the trash. Next is the alcohol. Then the sugar. He can’t believe how much shit he’s been eating: frozen pizzas and chocolate candies and bread so white it looks like slices of snow. Now that he sees it all clearly, it’s amazing that he isn’t in worse condition.

Next is the guns. Those, anyway, are still in good condition. Three pistols—two matching Glock 17s and a Sig Sauer P220 that had been given to him as a present by an old girlfriend. He also has a Bushmaster M4 semi-automatic carbine that he has carried for almost a decade. There are people who think more guns are better. Yuli thinks that’s wrong. Someone who has used ten thousand guns once is an amateur. Someone who has used one gun ten thousand times is an expert.

He puts a clean towel over the kitchen table to keep the oil off it, then cleans them, assembling and disassembling them until all the parts find their familiar places in his fingers. He spends hours dry firing them, aiming at the microwave, the kitchen faucet, the people passing by on the street. Click click click, training his hand not to anticipate the kick, practicing like a pianist playing scales.

When the boy sees the guns, his eyes get wide. Yuli doesn’t talk about them, and the boy doesn’t either. When the boy is at school, Yuli runs up and down the stairs, pushing himself. The first time, he only manages four trips down and up and down again before his heart is tapping on his eardrums and he’s shaking. He has to sit on the bottom step and put his head against the wall, a long, slow trickle of Russian profanity dribbling out from his lips. Weak old man. When he gets his breath back, he runs up and down two more times, pushing until he is literally incapable of doing it again. The next day he hurts like someone has beaten him, and he does it again. The third day is worse. The fourth, he does ten rounds before he has to stop. He wants a cigarette. He wants a drink. He feels sick from the pain and the craving, and he revels in his suffering. It is his strength coming back.

He would like to find a boxing club. Someplace he can hit someone and be hit. A way to remind his body what violence is. He should have been doing this all along, and the impulse to do it now is as bad as the nicotine withdrawal. Tactically, going out to a gym is a mistake. He doesn’t know where the enemy is, and every trip out of the house is an exposure. Instead, he strips his bedroom bare and works there. Push-ups, sit-ups, lunges. He finds a couple of old cinder blocks half buried in the alley, and brings them in for weights. He starts getting biceps again. He starts seeing gains, and the gains come faster.

He was a predator for many years, and his body remembers what it was like. Wants to return to that way of being. Is hungry for it. He keeps his suffering constant, and his body rewards him. He loses more weight. His dogshit blood gets worse. The synesthesia and the flashbacks come every few days now, though they are brief. There are a few times he gets dizzy and faints in the morning. He decides to get down to zero percent body fat if he can. Clean away all the drugs. Purge himself of all his old sins.

He leaves the house rarely. When he does, he shifts away from his old habits. He goes to groceries he doesn’t like and has never gone to before. He gets gasoline in his car on corners he has to travel to find. Even taking the boy to school, he varies the routes. Drops the boy off behind the gym one day, a half block away the next. Always, part of his attention is on the street around him. Who is where, what they are looking at, who they are talking to. Where the lines of sight are. Where there is cover, and where there is only concealment. He thinks how to flank the fat customer-service man at the bank, if he should need to. He knows what sidewalks he could drive over, what parks he could cross if he were escaping pursuit. Or if he were pursuing. He is aware of the space around him as if it were part of his body. His hypervigilance is almost paranoia.

At night, when the boy is asleep, he stands naked before the full-length mirror, and he sees the alteration in his flesh. He has bulk in his shoulders. He doesn’t slouch. His skin has color again. His face is sharp.

Part of him knows that the wise move is to vanish. Pack up his things in the back of the car, take the boy, and drive away to a new city, a new name, and a new life. It wouldn’t be his first time, or his second either. He doesn’t do it.

He tells himself that it is better to hold to familiar territory and keep his home-court advantage. They will follow him anyway. The truth is that he wants them to come. He is waiting for them.

He feels better now than he has in years.

Everyone roll your stealth.

I wish I’d kept that heroic action point.

Did you blow it?

No, I’m okay. Made it exactly.

Everyone else good? Okay, you manage to slip past the stone barrier. The hall you’ve stepped into is huge. The cave is bigger than a cathedral. A river of lava is running through it, and the air is really hot. Hurts to breathe kind of hot. And the whole floor, where it’s not lava, is covered in gold. Coins and goblin bars and jewelry. It’s everywhere. And sitting in the middle of all of it is Aufganir. He’s huge. His body’s forty feet long, easy. Green scales and black wings.

Is he awake?

He is. He hasn’t seen you yet, but he’s sniffing at the air like he can tell something’s wrong.

This is it, then. We attack.

Roll initiative.

Yuli is at the Walmart when it happens. The day is warm and pleasant. He drives over after dropping the boy at school and circles the parking lot twice looking for anything suspicious before he parks. He prefers shopping at Target, but at Walmart, he can carry his guns. He has one of the Glocks in an ankle holster, and the other at the small of his back. He doesn’t like the ankle holster. It means he has to wear pants wide enough that they feel like bell-bottoms. It doesn’t look stupid, but it feels like it does.

He walks in, stopping at the store’s mouth to look back. Two young black men walking together. A blond woman with a pink scarf and yellow skirt. An old woman struggling with an ugly oversized purse. He thinks how he would kill each of them, but only as practice. None of them takes notice of him. He turns back. The fingers of his left hand tingle, and he shakes and makes fists until the feeling comes back.

Inside, the air is cool and scentless. Generic air, the same now as it will be at the height of summer or on Christmas Day. Nothing is different in here. Yuli takes a cart and heads in among the other shoppers. He has a list in his head. Chicken breasts and frozen vegetables to make dinner with. Some Muscle Milk to drink after he works out. And he needs socks. He’s thinking about throwing out all the ones he has and buying a dozen identical pairs at the same time he’s noticing all the exits.

Someone coughs, and the sound is wrong. Someone coughs the way you cough when you’re used to speaking Farsi. Yuli turns, and it’s the blond girl with the scarf. Their eyes meet for a fraction of a second. Her eyes widen a millimeter, and he knows.

He takes his hands off the cart, turns, and walks back toward the entrance. He doesn’t run. He doesn’t draw down, not yet. She won’t be alone. There are others. He needs to find them first, and then react. His heart is racing. Yuli thinks the strange feeling in his head is just adrenaline until a cashier closes her drawer as he passes. The sound is vibrant green.

This is not the time for the dogshit in his blood to be kicking in.

This is the only time he has.

The sun is warm against his face as he steps out into the parking lot. He feels the breeze against his cheek, cool and caressing. For a moment, he is aware of everything. The high, thin clouds almost obscured by the city haze. The faint smell of gasoline. The traffic sound of tires against asphalt on the street. If he can just get to his car and out to the street—

He swings around slowly, and he sees them. Two in a pickup truck by the main entrance. Another pair on the far side beside a white Honda with the engine already running, prepared to intercept him if he goes for one of the cutouts on that side. The blond girl behind him. There should be two more, probably at the back in case he went out the loading dock. They will be coming forward now. Yuli considers the civilians. A father and teenage daughter coming out of the store, bickering. A harried old woman pulling into a parking space. They don’t see any of what is unfolding around them.

Yuli walks to his car, watching the hunters as he goes. The back of his neck itches, and he glances back to see the blonde at the entrance of the store. She hasn’t drawn a weapon. She isn’t walking toward him. They’re waiting to see what he does.

If Wrona were here, one could drive while the other put down cover fire. Yuli can’t manage both at the same time. A team of seven against just one man, and one altered by ancient drugs at that. He would give himself one chance in six of reaching the street alive. Or less. Probably less.

He wishes now that he’d told the boy about all of it. He doesn’t want his grandson coming back home and finding the blond woman and her friends there. The boy won’t be able to tell them what they want to know, but they won’t believe that. Not at first. Hopefully, they’ll find what they want and go while the boy is still in his classes.

Yuli reaches his car. The two in the truck have come to their senses. They drive toward him. He opens the hatchback. If he can get his car started, he won’t try to reach the cutout. Straight out over the curb is his best choice. Then, if he doesn’t get into a collision, maybe he makes it home. Or away. Or back around behind them to put bullets in their skulls.

One of the pair from the Honda is running toward him hunched over. Making a break for cover. The blond woman sprints toward him, pulling a pistol from a holster under her skirt. The harried civilian gets out of her car, still oblivious to the kill zone she is in.

Yuli hoists his carbine. His hands are both tingling. The blond woman shoots twice. The second shot shatters the hatch window, and Yuli feels a stab of outrage. That’s his fucking car. And then there is only pleasure. A sense of overwhelming power flows through him, lifting him up like vast wings. The civilian woman screams and dives under her car. The father is pulling his daughter down as she tries to get out her cell phone to film this.

Yuli turns back toward the blond woman. When she sees the Bushmaster in his hands, she tries to change direction. To find some cover.

His gun roars. The sound is like fire: a brightness of yellow and red.

A WHISPER OF BLUE

Ken Liu

Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. His debut novel, The Grace of Kings, is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, the Dandelion Dynasty. It won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and was a Nebula Award finalist. He subsequently published the second volume in the series, The Wall of Storms; two collections of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories; and a Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker. Forthcoming is the conclusion to the Dandelion Dynasty. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

APRIL

Text on screen: Town of Mannaport, Commonwealth of Maine and Massachusetts, population 28,528 (human)

[Montage of a bedroom community on the shore of Massachusetts Bay. Thick cables pulling a train into a commuter-rail station; families in an ice-cream parlor next to an ammo shop; a block of public housing surrounded by single-family homes; a high school football game; a Fourth of July parade; neighbors browsing a yard sale. The scenes are shot on phones, showing the artless application of filters and framing, as well as the unsteady camerawork of amateurs.

Scenes of frozen seas and muddy snowfields. And then, the spring. The sunlight, after the long winter, is timid and soft, but there’s no mistaking the raucous joy of the children as they test out the playground equipment; the blooming forsythias and azaleas—vibrant, living fireworks splashed onto the canvas after a winter in shades of gray; the chitter-chatter of birds, squirrels, baby skunks luxuriating on green lawns in the warm breeze.]

INGRID (71, hair so white it shines)

It started a few weeks ago … Look at me, can’t remember anything anymore—no, it’s not my age. (Laughs.) I’m going to blame my poor memory on the excitement of so many new residents in town. (She turns to her granddaughter, sitting next to her.) Do you remember the date?

ZOE (16, expression tense, hunched as though trying to disappear, quiet)

I … I’m not sure.

INGRID

Just check the date on your video—you know, that first one? (Pridefully to the camera) She was the first to get a sighting! They used her video for the nightly news.

ZOE

Okay. (Fumbles with her phone until she finds it.) Exactly three weeks ago, on the vernal equinox.

LEE (41, town manager)

I tell people: manage this right, and you’ll secure the future of your children and the future of their children.

You’ve read the headlines in the Globe and seen the reports on TV. My days are packed with meetings: the President, Boeing, the Commonwealth Energy Commission, Westinghouse, DRACOGRID, Caterpillar, BaySTAR … everyone wants a piece of Mannaport! This is easily the largest rush in decades.

You’ve seen nothing yet. Just wait till the gigawatt-class ones show up—

INGRID

Right. On the vernal equinox.

It’s not as bad as some people make it sound. I had Ron—that’s my son-in-law—and Zoe put in some heavy curtains on the bedroom window to muffle the noise. I hardly know they are there now.

ZOE

(Takes a deep breath to calm herself.) I … like having them around.

I keep the windows open a crack at night to hear them.

INGRID

All the ones we’ve seen so far are pretty small. (Turns to Zoe.) Not like the ones you used to draw.

ZOE

(Looks away from the camera.)

ALEXANDER (35, eyes so intense they seem to glow on their own)

I want them gone! They’ll have to put me in jail if they expect me to put up with—

HARIVEEN (53, self-described “inventrepreneur,” has an LED clip in her hair that flashes “Free energy isn’t free”)

Nobody knows where they’re from. Or how they came to be here. Or why.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is that no one is even thinking about the right questions.

[Montage of shaky phone footage: silver scales scintillating between docked boats; a serpentine tail disappearing under a thick lilac bush; the crimson clouds of a seaside sunrise interrupted by a loud roar—reptilian, avian, saurian?—the camera swerves to reveal half-glimpsed leathery wings—like kites plunging out of the sky—vanishing behind sandy dunes; a screaming crowd scattering from a baseball field, pursued by dozens of flying creatures swooping low, emitting high-pitched screeches—bats? birds? flying lizards?]

Town of Mannaport, Commonwealth of Maine and Massachusetts, population 7,000 (dragon, estimated)

HARIVEEN

[We are in a garage, something like a modern Da Vinci’s workshop, except messier, dirtier, noisier, and devoid of the patina of romanticized history. Wheels and gears spin; belts rumble; chains rattle; cranks and pistons goose-step in formation.]

These are prototypes, so a bit crude-looking. But I assure you they’re all based on proven, centuries-old designs—like this one, first built by Étienne Lenoir—with lots of patented improvements from me, of course. I’ve got some that run on coal, some on petroleum or gas—the idea that internal-combustion engines require pure alcohol is a shameless lie spread by the energy conglomerates. If I could just get the funding …

Are you still filming?

Never mind. I know how I sound. Even if you shoot everything I show you, they’ll figure out a way to discredit me. Can’t let the public know about real alternatives to the draconic energy monopoly, can we?

More than a century ago, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford teamed up to lock us into electricity as our dominant power source, and we’ve been racing nonstop to generate more electricity from dragon breath. Bit by bit, we have grown to depend on these creatures, and now all our politicians are in the pockets of the draconic energy-industrial complex, with no way out.

No, no, don’t worry; I won’t challenge the orthodoxy that dragons are completely safe—I’ll keep the interview uncontroversial.

So … how do I explain my opposition to our energy policy without …?

It’s like this. Everyone sees that air routes and shipping lanes are planned along dragon migratory routes; metropolises survive and thrive based on their dragon population; countries compete mercilessly to attract the giant beasts that drive GDP.

We speak of university dragon endowments and the national strategic reserve—but the language is designed to make us feel better; it’s misleading. Dragons are free to come and go as they like, and empires rise and fall at the whim of creatures we have no hope to understand or tame. Did you ever read Guns, Germs, and Dragons? The hypothesis is that the rise of the West was largely due to the good fortune of the presence of fire-breathing dragons in Europe. East Asia fell behind in the Industrial Revolution because their dragons breathed cold mist and water, not fire. It wasn’t until Long Ruyuan of Tianjin, inspired by the work of Robert Stirling, invented the yin-yang engine, powered by both fireand mist-breathing dragons, that the shift of the power to Europe stopped. And even today, the prevalence of city-states and small countries has to do more with our dependence on dragons than culture or politics.

(A deep sigh.)

I want to free us from this addiction to cheap energy from dragons. We celebrated when the Warsaw Pact fell as their dragons decided to depart en masse, but how do we know that dragons won’t do the same to us here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and Maine one day? We forget history at our peril.

For my troubles, people call me a crank, a fool.

ZOE

[There’s a fresh lightness of spirit in her—not quite joy, but perhaps a tentative step toward it. She’s still shy and speaks haltingly, but she’s talking a lot more than before.]

The pictures? (Laughs nervously.) No, I don’t think so. Just childish scribbles. I’ve no idea if they’re even around; I didn’t save them.

I want to talk about real dragons.

Some complain about the noise and smell, the droppings everywhere. Some rant about the danger of dragons rampaging through the streets. The first week, there were like twenty accidents over on Route 17, next to the state park, and they had to block off the whole road. Then they had to evacuate and close Astrov Elementary School because all the dragons roosting on the grounds made parents nervous. Just now, on the way here, I saw a dozen lawyer types around the parking lot of the town center, like a cloud of flies around a heap of dragon dung. I don’t know who they’re planning on suing. Dragons aren’t afraid of lawyers.

I hear the gripes. “Mannaport isn’t Boston. We don’t have the infrastructure to handle them!” I guess they mean things like walls and fencing. They want the General Court to declare a state of emergency and maybe send in the minutemen to chase the dragons out.

I’ve been reading up on the history of dragon-rushes … Here’s a summary from Memexpedia: “Most modern dragoncities are at least semi-planned: Boston focused on libraries and universities, attracting dragons with scholarship; the California Republic went with a dual strategy of invention and art, and Silicon Valley and Hollywood are now the two biggest dragon centers in all of North America. Down in New York, they stuck with a most old-fashioned technique: hoarding gold and treasure on Wall Street until the Old World dragons of Europe left their havens in the Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands to settle in Manhattan, curling their bodies around the vaults for weeks at a time before stints in the giant power plants on Long Island.” Oh, that last bit has a “citation needed” question mark.

But the example that spoke to me the most is Titusville, Appalachia. Back in 1859, a spontaneous gathering of dragons descended on the small settlement out of nowhere. Everyone rushed in, trying to make a profit, and the very fortunately named Edwin Drake managed to build the first dragon derrick, harnessing a fifty-foot obsidian scale that powered the cable railway between Lake Erie and Baltimore. For a while, the dragon-boom made Titusville the wealthiest town in the world. The people became addicted to the dragon money and built more cooling ponds, more dragon derricks, more power plants—until the day the dragons suddenly got up and left.

Edwin Drake is my great-great-great-grandfather, on my mother’s side. And my mother—

I’m not ready to talk about that.

Ever since I was little, people would tell me that I have an old soul. I like to read and be by myself. Crowds making speeches make me nervous, but I make it a point to go to the town meetings. To find out what the adults are planning.

They argue about eminent domain and Commonwealth aid, property values and tax credits, isolation walls and safety zones. They want the town manager to make the best deals with the big corporations to guarantee jobs and get every resident a share of the dragon revenues.

But no one seems to be thinking about the meaning of dragons coming here, or how to stop Mannaport from becoming another Titusville.

Mannaport has no natural wonders, no great universities, no money, no art. We’re like a lot of other small towns in the Commonwealth: clean and peaceful on the outside, but full of pain and desolation behind the walls. My high school feels big and empty because people leave, if they can, and don’t come back. Good jobs are hard to find if you want to stick around—all you can look forward to are “gigs.” Drugs are a problem, and late at night, sometimes you hear pop-pop in the distance. I used to think it was drunk teenagers setting off fireworks, until the day I saw the flashing lights of the police cars hurtling down Route 17 and read about the dead body they found.

[We’re on a hill, overlooking a park below. Dragons are slithering, crawling, shambling, gliding, as colorful as the wildflowers dotting the grass. From a distance, they resemble butterflies, birds, bits of living paint swirling to find a shape.]