Neal Asher - The Engineer Reconditioned

“Put it on and shift to another time. Escape it, Marten,” said Hallack. It was thorned glass and silver; a perilous thing to slip onto my forearm. I took it up. It was heavy and it cut my hands. The pain seemed distant. I gazed up at Hallack and Bellan. They were backing away up the dune face. Behind them flowing irises were opening in the air as they returned to their machines. I slid the tor over my right forearm. Skin peeled and flesh parted like earth before the plough. I groaned at the sudden increase in pain as blood jetted from slitted arteries. The pain was intense, but it seemed to promise something else. Very quickly the blood ceased to flow. I studied the thing. It was bonding to my flesh, and the bones beneath, just as I knew it would. Then the tor, parasitic form that it was, cleaned my blood for me, scrubbed my mind, made me a more wholesome beast on which it could feed. And memory returned like falling wall.

Oh Hallack my brother. Dear friend Bellan. Below me the muttering from the sphere became a raging scream. I shifted as it shifted Earthward and tried to snatch me up. Suddenly I was falling into the grey abyss, through a tunnel of bones. Someone fell past me screaming my name, then the sphere was falling upon me. I shifted sideways and saw the Earth as through a distorting lens; its continents on fire. I felt something groping for me, unable to find me, but well able to find the tor. I shifted again and hurled myself for the world. All my will was concentrated on this act. All its will was exerted to hold me back. Something had to give and what gave was my arm. I felt it snap and tear, and I felt the tendon rip away from somewhere inside my shoulder. There was no pain at first. I felt and heard its muttering and raging as it receded from me, lost me, and I lay my head upon a flat rock while my arm stump bled into the matted grass all around.

“Marten!”

Hallack, my brother. I regained a delirious consciousness, watched him shooting some sort of weapon into the air to scare-off a hunting smilodon. He bound my arm and talked all the while. He said how we must move quickly to find Bellan, before her field loci went beyond the detection of his own.

“The late twenty-first,” I managed and he stared at me in a puzzled way. “That’s where she is.”

“How do you know, Marten?” he asked.

“Because that’s where I killed her.”

Perhaps we can get there… in time.

Honest, I didn’t know of the Alfred Bester one of the same name until long after I’d written this (which is surprising with the amount of SF I’ve read), but then probably Mr Bester was not the first to snitch those two words as a title, and I certainly won’t be the last. In this story the tigers came first, then the title, and it being an ‘Owner’ story it seemed almost inevitable that I had to put in that line from the poem at the start. The Owner is like the Old Testament God, who is, I suppose, everyone’s expression of the ultimate power fantasy. And that’s his appeal. No matter how liberal or well-meaning any of us is, we want that power, though many of us would never admit that.

A tiger had taken the orphan Jeleel Welder down by the Wishpool. Her blood speckled the Rhode’s dark green leaves and they found her soul, on its unbreakable silver chain, depending from its roots. Sapher found tracks near the pool and told their story to the villagers.

“It took her here while she washed Baum’s shirts. She fought it here and it dragged her to here and this blood is where it bit her. It is arterial blood and there is much of it. She probably died before it took her deep into the Rhode and ate her,” he said.

He was very matter of fact about it all and Tamsin felt sorrow for his brother. He knew how much Sapher had loved Jeleel. How intensely he had courted her. The villagers peered to the Rhode. The dendrons were in flower and deep in them was all perfumed shadow.

“This cannot be,” said Baum, the Elder, pointing the grey spade of his beard at Sapher. “The Agreement. He does not allow this.”

“The Agreement,” spat Sapher. He stabbed his spear into the earth to demonstrate how he felt about the Agreement.

Baum continued, “I know your thoughts on this, but there has to be some other explanation. ‘Man must not kill tiger and tiger will not kill man.’ The Owner was very specific.” As he mentioned the Owner, he touched his pendant with his forefinger then made the sign: his hand held out flat, parallel with the ground.

“The Agreement is just that. It does not bind. What about Temron Drivetech? He killed a tiger. Who is to say that tigers may not break the Agreement as did he? Perhaps this is their vengeance,” said Sapher.

“Vengeance was done upon Temron,” said Baum.

They all nodded and remembered. After his sister had died of the ague Temron had denied the Agreement and vehemently claimed that there could be no Owner. He had then, in the madness of his grief, told the village that his sister would be buried in a tiger-skin burial robe. He had killed a tiger and done this thing; his sister wrapped in skin that was still bloody. The following night Temron had disappeared.

“You say vengeance was done upon him. I saw no evidence of it. I saw only his footprints leading into the Rhode. I saw only that he left us,” said Sapher.

“What Temron’s fate may have been is irrelevant. What do we do now?” said Tamsin. He watched his brother. He needed to hear this, though he did not want to.

“We go after the tiger and we kill it,” said Sapher.

“I cannot allow that,” said Baum.

Sapher ignored him and turned to the villagers. “Who will come with me? This must be done. Too long we have been bound by superstition and fear. We are stronger and more cunning than the tigers. We should rule here, as is right!”

Some stepped forwards, but others shook their heads and turned away — returned to the village. Ephis came up and stood beside Tamsin.

“You will go with him?” she asked, frightened that she might lose this newly found love.

“I must,” said Tamsin, placing his hand against the side of her face. “He is my brother.”

“This is madness,” she said. “The Owner will punish us.”

“Your father has faith so you must have faith,” he said.

She pushed his hand away. “Can you doubt the truth of the Agreement?” He smiled at her. She was like so many of the villagers; she never questioned the old teachings, never wondered what might or might not be true. He loved her but sometimes her beliefs caused painful argument. If only her father had not been Baum. This, he decided, was not the time for argument — his brother needed him.

“I have to go,” he said.

She regarded him for a long moment.

“Then I will go with you,” she said.

Though half the village agreed to go with him, Sapher was livid at the rest.

“Yes, crawl back to your huts and sleep untroubled. When the tigers come in the night to eat you I will laugh and climb a tree to watch,” he sneered at those who departed. Amongst those who remained were Tamsin, Sapher and Ephis, Torril and Chand — husband and wife who had always been closest to Sapher, and who hunted with him all the time. The surprise members were Baum and Ghort.

“My daughter is all I have now. I will come with you. I will interfere in no way. I will not stop you killing the tiger, nor will I help you,” said Baum.

“I will come,” said Ghort.

They all looked around. The huge man was sitting on a boulder with his elbow on his knee and his chin resting on the palm of his hand. He blinked blue eyes at them and said no more. That was the thing about Ghort: no one noticed he was there until he let them know. When they did know they were again awakened to the fact that this was the man who had lifted a fallen coral ash from his hunting partner Dorlis, and who had, at a run, carried Dorlis the ten kilometres back to the village. A vain rescue though, for Dorlis had taken poison rather than spend the rest of his life a cripple.