Alysin watched the shadows near the burgeoning tomato plants, watched for the telltale signs of Yasuo’s shape among the leaves. It was subtle. The half-man, half-wolf shadow was just one more irregular darkness on a field of irregular darkness. The dim light flowing from the kitchen window from which she watched only added more shadows and twisted shapes.
He was utterly still and she knew the artificial chromatophores in his skin were painting him in shades of black and green, though they hardly need bother. His stillness and the shadows of the garden were enough, he assumed the camouflage not out of necessity but out of habit.
Dawn would begin to lighten the horizon soon. Perhaps his quarry would arrive in the morning light, or perhaps it didn’t matter – the solitary vigil may have been its own purpose. Neither of them had slept all the way through the night, both of them still running on alert and ready for battle, but had he slept at all? It had only been two days since they had arrived here, the harried flight from the City was still fresh, true relaxation would take far longer. She worried about him, about his still healing wounds, his unsleeping vigilance.
The implants inside his body, as in hers, had cleaned and closed the bullet holes and ragged lacerations while microscopic machines in the blood rebuilt muscle and bone from within. The original modifications in both their bodies had been military in nature, they had been designed for strength and power, to heal quickly and to never stop. They had not been designed for relaxation, nor were the healing systems intended to be gentle.
He waited, she watched, both as still and as silent as stones. Her enhanced optics were tuned to the infra-red, as his would be, watching the cool blues of the plants and the gentle warmth of yesterday’s sun seeping slowly from the moist soil. The world around them was alien, a world of verdant life and growth very unlike the City they had grown accustomed to. This was a world in which food was gathered from living things. She had known that in the past, most food had been harvested, not synthesized, and that people had manually gathered the natural products of plants and animals for delivery to the hungry masses. Knowing this did not make the reality any less shocking.
That first night, when they had stumbled across the fallow field and into the big old farmhouse, it was like walking into a historical video. The old woman who had greeted them, shotgun in hand, had seemed an artifact from some forgotten era. The weapon had set off deep battle instincts in Yasuo, stayed barely in time by Alisyn’s hand on his shoulder, but so close to the surface that woman would not have survived any incautious sudden moves. And then she had smiled.
The Cat Lady, who had sent them here, had also sent word somehow out to this godforsaken green landscape ahead of them. The old woman, Jan, shotgun held lightly in the crook of her arm, seemed to have brought it to the door merely to make a point. She had looked down on the bloodied and haggard crew, and had smiled at them.
“Oh, if the Cat isn’t dragging it in, she’s sending it out to the Farm for me to deal with. Well, you all look half dead, come in and eat something.”
And that had been it, introduction, negotiation, and settlement, all in one go. Jan hadn’t asked for details of their flight, nor who they had fought to escape the City, nor how long they intended to stay here. Perhaps the Cat Lady had explained their desperate situation, or perhaps Jan simply took these things in stride. One thing, however, was clear after those first few hours of cleaning and bandaging wounds and sitting blissfully still in large comfortable chairs – they had come wearing no insignia of authority, no NatSec creds, no City badges, no Fed warrants. They had come with guns and grenades and bodies engineered for battle and stealth, but they were not Authority, and that seemed good enough.
The big house, with its high ceilings and broad rooms, was unsettling. Too open, too well lit. The air was too fresh, the worn wooden floors too… natural. She was a creature of darkness and cramped fetid warrens, a creature of the all-pervasive datasphere and the thrumming rhythm of the City. She felt out of place here, they all did. This was not a place where the pain of her body modifications felt comforting and sweet, it was not a place where she could take Yasuo to the floor and sink her claws and teeth and body into him and let the passion flow out in screams.
It was not a place where she was in control. It was a haven, a place of rest, a necessary rallying point for the Crew, but it was not her world.
Then there was the food. Jan had cooked, by hand and with ancient tools, enough food to feed them all several times over. Twenty of Alysin’s crew had made it out of the City alive, Jan sat them down in strange straight-backed wooden chairs on either side of a long heavy table made of thick wooden planks. The food was repulsive. Jan had roasted large plump birds, chunks of cattle and thick fleshy sausages. She had pulped starchy root vegetables and baked big brown loaves of bread. There were soups and sauces, bowls of vegetable matter baked or stewed or simply chopped up raw. Greasy yellow cakes of fat sat on little plates, looking almost painfully like the food bars the City would have provided them.
The cooked animals were the worst. She had seen men eviscerated, sliced open, blown into pieces by explosives, and the sight of exposed muscle and bone dripping with juices and scorched by the flames of Jan’s ancient oven, were almost too much to even look at, much less eat. All the crew looked queasy, but Jan seemed oblivious.
“Dig in, you’ll be needing the protein, if I’m any judge. Plenty of potatoes, too, carbohydrates to push your blood sugar back up. Spinach, broccoli, salad, full of minerals and vitamins you’ll be needing. There’s titanium and selenium in the sour cream, not naturally, of course, but I thought you might need it.” She was looking at Alysin when she said this.
After more stern cajoling, she had taken a piece of bread, the least disgustingly alien dish available, and others of the crew chose their own pieces of bizarre foodstuff to try. The bread was startling. In the city, where food was a uniform bar of chewy or crunchy or soft calories, there had been ‘bread’ flavored rations. How they related to this warm brown stuff was anyone’s guess. It was crunchy on the outside edges, soft and sponge-like inside, filled with air bubbles and tiny bits of crunchy grain. The flavor was like nothing she could remember, though it reminded her of the air in the fields they had passed on their way here.
She had looked up exactly in time to see Yasuo put a slice of some juicy red plant into his mouth. She watched his eyes widen, watched his jaw stop in mid bite, and then very slowly close down on the stuff. Tomatoes. Actual tomatoes, the fruit itself, the parent of the thick red paste they all knew. She expected him to spit it out, for her nausea to show on his face, but instead, he pushed more of it into his mouth and chewed very carefully.
Something about the bread compelled her to take another bite.
“Put some butter on it, dear.” Jan pushed the little cake of yellow fat across the table to her.
The meal lasted a long time, though when each of them had made their excuses and left the table, it was with a thoughtful expression and the remains of half a dozen tentative experiments left behind on a plate. The bulk of the food remained behind when it was all over, but the bread and butter had gone, as had the mashed potatoes and sour cream.
Yasuo had eaten five entire tomatoes, a slice of soft white cheese and, tentatively, a green leaf Jan referred to as Basil. Jan seemed to take particular care to make sure he ate something. He had taken the worst wounds in the firefight, and looked pale and bloodless under the cheerful yellow lights of the dining room. Jan brought him water, encouraged him to eat more tomato, suggested other items he might like. She seemed distressed that he would not eat any of the cooked animals. After the meal, she hovered over all of them, handing out blankets, showing them to the bedrooms – and holding her hand to Yasuo’s broad forehead as if she could feel his internal state through that imperturbable brow. She smoothed his hair as if he were a boy.
His modified body seemed to make no impression on her as he sat before her like a dog, looking too human to be canine and too canine to be human. The designer that had cut and reassembled him had sculpted a powerful running beast, able to move fast and close to the ground, then stand and fight like a man. A wolf-man, able to pull muscles and bones into different configurations at will, to become four-legged beast with a man-like face, or a powerfully built man with a loping vulpine grace. Long after that designer had done his work, alone together in the City they had further modified their bodies. Alysin had taken on the bulk surface mods that allowed her virtually any coloration and surface texture, Yasuo had installed claws, teeth, retractable fur – the affectations of a werewolf.
That he was silent and unreadable made him all the more intimidating to most, but Jan seemed to take him entirely in stride, ministering to him with kindness and without hesitation.
That first night, none of them slept. The following day Jan had assaulted them once again with the products of her kitchen, though in consideration of her guests’ tastes, she had not cooked any animals. After a breakfast in which she had urged flat round cakes onto them, and especially onto Yasuo, Jan walked with Alysin in the painfully bright summer sunlight.
“I think you are a more advanced model than Yasuo, young lady. How much of you is original, I wonder?”
It was sheer effrontery, and Jan seemed aware that this was not a question that had a high survival rate among most people. Ah, but Jan was not most people, was she? Alysin did not know what she was, but she was far more than a rebel homesteader living off the grid and helping the occasional stray.
“My nervous system is my own, most of the musculature is based on my own dna.”
Jan looked very mildly surprised. “All your own nerves, and with bulk shifters. That must be very painful.”
Alysin didn’t ask how she knew about the shifters, there were deep waters under that kind old face, and she suspected she wouldn’t get many answers by trying to rip them out. “Yes. Pain can be… nice.”
They walked on in silence for a bit.
“Now Yasuo, there is an interesting one. Simple mods, built for power. Two shapes, but both of them damn good. You two take care of each other, I can see that. He hurts inside, though, poor boy.”
“I do take care of him, he has been my partner for a long time,” Alysin said coldly. Jan seemed not to notice the words nor the temperature.
“Technology moves on so fast. But I don’t think anyone has made anything quite like you in a long time. The science has advanced, but there are some paths we chose not to advance down. I wonder sometimes if we chose the right paths.” Who -was- this old woman?
Alysin would have pursued the issue, but Jan stopped short, put her hands on her hips and glared at the little garden that abutted the house. “Will you look at that! Damn deer, they wait until the day before you want to pick tomatoes, and then they decide to sneak in and have lunch. Damn it!” She looked genuinely angry, and it was an unsettling emotion on her round friendly face. Yasuo trotted silently up to them, and looked at the stricken plants.
“Deer?” he asked.
“Deer. The bastards will eat anything, they don’t seem bothered by the sonic fence anymore. I swear they’ll eat me out of house and home. Yasuo, those tomatoes were going to be your lunch, poor boy. Oh well. Feel like trying a cucumber?”
Jan may have been oblivious to it, or perhaps she was simply very good at seeming oblivious, but Alysin saw the reaction in Yasuo. Saw and felt the tension in him, could virtually see his protective instincts swing into action. Jan had an enemy, even if it was merely a garden pest, and she had been so kind to Yasuo. The deer was now Yasuo’s enemy.
As she watched him from the window in the slowly rising dawn, she wondered if anyone had ever been kind to Yasuo before. She had been his lover for a long time now, they had fought together, back to back, many times. She had saved his life, and he hers, on countless occasions. She loved him, deeply, and he loved her, it was perhaps the most solid and irrefutable fact in either of their lives. She had taken care of him, provided for him, made love to him. Had she ever been kind? Kindness was a concept that seemed ill suited to their relationship, it was hard to see precisely where it applied.
In the garden, glowing warm red, the beast walked cautiously into the garden. It was larger than she expected, but its air of fear and caution made it seem almost pitiful. It bent to nibble on some low plant, and then raised its head to peer around. Another few steps brought it within a meter of the hidden Yasuo. He crouched behind a tomato plant, utterly still, watching the big animal. The deer sniffed the air but seemed to find nothing amiss with it. It stepped up to the tomato plant and brought its black nose to one of the few remaining red fruits. Yasuo must have been practically staring it in the eye. He was inches away from its head when he sprang.
The deer leapt backwards faster than Alysin would have expected, but Yasou was faster, he was at it’s haunch when its feet touched the earth again. It sprang up as if bitten and Yasuo sprang after it, his claws raking across its rump. She expected it to scream or cry out in some way, its obvious but silent terror seemed eerie in the soft morning quiet. It ran hard for the tree line, but Yasuo kept on its heels and slapped his titanium claws across its haunch again, sending it into an even more panicked leap. It went sideways, then back, trying to shake the wolf-beast, but Yasuo was there every time it landed. He could have killed it at any point, she could see that, but he merely gave chase.
He howled at it, a long bellowing animal yell, more sound than she had heard out of his mouth in many years. The deer staggered under another powerful swipe, went down on the wet grass and rolled wildly. It managed to regain its feet and ran again for the trees, Yasuo howling behind it. When it reached the trees, he split off from its trail, letting it disappear into the shadows, and loped back to the farmhouse. His face was, as ever, impassive, but to her eyes he glowed with satisfaction.
The day was filled again with strange foods from the garden and the big fields around the farmhouse. Men came, Jan’s field hands, to finish off with considerable gusto the meats and other dishes Alysin’s crew found unpalatable. There was, finally, the beginnings of relaxation. they would have to leave soon, she knew, before their pursuers gathered their resources and came after them, but for a little while, the Farm was a reprieve. She didn’t know where they would go from here, but the Cat Lady had said here was a network of people out here in the countryside, off the grid but not disconnected from each other. There would be help, she had said. Maybe. For now, there was rest.
The morning after, Jan found Yasuo and Alysin in the kitchen, experimenting with something called ‘tea’, which Jan had assured them, against all evidence, was both potable and pleasant.
“You two, come with me.” Her face was grim. They went out into the warmth of the rising sun and walked through the garden, then out the other side and towards the trees, and then into them. They walked in silence until they came to the deer. It lay on the ground as if its legs had simply collapsed beneath it. Four parallel lines of clotted blood ran across its rear, flies buzzed around the wounds. Jan looked from the dead animal to Yasuo.
Yasuo went to his knees, staring at the deer. “I didn’t mean for it to die.” His voice was quiet, hollow.
“You wanted to protect my garden, didn’t you?”
“I wanted only to frighten it, wished it to fear tomatoes. I…” He stared at it. How many humans had Yasuo killed? She had seen him pull the guts from still-breathing enemies, had seen him bite the neck of a man whose head had remained on afterward only by the strength of a thin strip of skin. A man who had jumped her in an alley that first year int he City, had died before she had even registered his presence. He looked at the deer as if it were his child.
“I didn’t wish it to die. It was only an animal.” He looked up at Jan, and Alysin saw moisture around his eyes.
“There aren’t a lot of them around now, with so many old engineered pathogens floating around. The few that are often have defects, it must have had a weak heart to have been frightened literally to death. I’m sorry Yasuo, I know you didn’t mean to kill it. You were doing a great kindness, sometimes there are unforeseen consequences.”
“Yasuo,” Alysin began, but stopped when she saw his face. The moisture was still there, tears, the only tears she had ever seen him shed. The look of pleading he had given Jan was not in his face now, there was only Yasuo, the wolf, the stone. Her Yasuo, the only Yasuo she had ever known.
“Well, we can’t afford to waste food. Lets bring it back and I’ll have Jack dress it.” Alysin fought back a wave of nausea at the idea of eating this carcass, but Yasuo was almost reverent as he picked it up and slung it over his shoulders. They walked slowly back to the farmhouse.
The Deer by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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