Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

He was glad they had masks, especially as his doppel seemed to look right at him for a moment. He reminded himself that the doppels weren’t human. He knew that from his tutor. They were quick and shoddy copies, with blunted brains that couldn’t do much more than keep them breathing and moving.

Their only developed faculty was fear—they were drugged with a bliss chemical before they were dressed and paraded through the banquet hall, but as soon as it wore off they would turn skittish and eager for hiding places.

Just then, Mortice reappeared to slide himself back in beside Orry. His skin was flushed and he wore a wolfish grin. He whispered something to his cousin and both of them laughed. Burgewick looked away. He thought he knew why Mortice and Breesha had disappeared at the same time. Mortice talked about it often enough.

The doppels were led back out of the hall, out to the lawn, and the older relatives who were still hunting stood up and started massaging their stomachs, grumbling about having eaten too much. The cousins all got up from the table—Breesha had rejoined them now, without so much as glancing at Mortice—and Burgewick trailed after them.

Mortice seemed to have been distracted from his promise of retribution, but Burgewick still had the uncomfortable thought that he was Eddard, and Mortice was Wendell following him out into the moonlit wood.

Burgewick had forgotten about Cluny, adrift and glass-eyed in the drowning tank, but now servants were draining the water and one of them, who Burgewick thought might be Cluny’s wife, was softly weeping. It added another needle to the dozens he felt sticking into his spine. The doppel seeming to look at him, Breesha, and smirking Mortice, the worm in Aunt Violetta’s stomach, the game of spitters and its abrupt ending.

Everything felt topsy-turvy again; he knew it could be partly blamed on the watery bacteria beer, but not entirely. Servants were readying the hunting gear on the lawn: rifles and trackers, tailored to sensors in each doppel’s costume to prevent robbing a kill by accident, nimble quadruped drones to flush the doppels out with subsonics, and the flying sort that followed the hunt to beam it back to the warm banquet hall, where it played out in hardlight.

And of course there were the capcutters—a servant decided to test one’s trigger right as Burgewick walked past and he couldn’t hide his flinch at the gnash and snap.

“Nervous?”

It was Breesha, casually checking down the sight of her rifle. Burgewick didn’t reply for a moment. He wanted to tell her that he felt betrayed, that he’d always thought she was on his side against Mortice, but maybe it had only been that way when they were little and she would tell him it wasn’t his business, anyways.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I practiced,” Breesha admitted. “With some servants and a paint gun. It’s easy. Don’t be nervous.” She gave a rueful shrug. “Hardly anyone actually watches it, anyway. They’re busy getting drunk or sneaking off to fuck.”

Burgewick felt his ears go lava hot. “You and Mortice?” he blurted, before he could stop himself.

“What?” Breesha’s voice was flat. “Is that what he’s saying?”

“You were both gone. At the banquet.”

“I was throwing up the bacteria beer,” Breesha said hotly. “I don’t know where he was.”

With that, she strode off to get her capcutter, and Burgewick regretted saying anything at all. Maybe he was wrong, or maybe he was right and Breesha was embarrassed.

The doppels were now assembled at the edge of the forest, tied to each other and to a post in the ground by tendon rope. The bliss drug was wearing off and some were straining against their bonds, grunting.

Burgewick had a strange and improper thought, one he hadn’t had last year or any of the years before it: what it would be like to be a doppel. To be born scared, then drugged and dressed and shoved out into the forest to be hunted. It was lucky they couldn’t think.

“Your rifle, Master Burgewick.”

Burgewick lifted it from the servant’s outstretched arms. It was the old sort, mostly wood components, but he knew it was loaded with the same smart bullets as Mortice’s new rifle. It wouldn’t miss easily. There was a lantern fixed underneath the barrel, and a tracker attached to the sight showed a swarm of moving yellow blobs—the doppels in their sensor-sewn costumes—and one red one, which was Burgewick’s. The servant handed him a capcutter next; Burgewick took it gingerly and let his hyde sprout a loop to hold it at his hip.

The hunting drones were on their feet now, joints whirring and clicking. The flying drones drifted skyward, disappearing into the blackness. Everyone was making their way to the forest. One of the uncles was red-mouthed and unsteady on his feet from too much wine; the others were slapping him on the back and laughing; Mortice was betting with Orry that he would bag his doppel in twenty minutes or under.

As they neared the tethered doppels, Burgewick felt as if his heart were pounding its fists against the inside of his ribcage. The night air was cold enough to make his breath a frosty cloud. Servants with injectors were going from doppel to doppel, shooting them with adrenaline and fear-o-mone. They bucked and twitched against the rope. Burgewick saw his doppel at the end of the row, wriggling and stomping its feet as a servant plugged its thigh with the needle. It made him feel slightly ill.

Mortice suddenly turned to him and gave his wide white smile. “Well, here we are, little brother,” he said. “Your first Doppelhunt is always the most memorable one, I think.”

The red-mouthed uncle gave a rumble of agreement. “Never forget the first one,” he said. “Now let’s loose the damn things already.”

“I bet you’ll be the last back,” Mortice said, in a whisper so the uncle wouldn’t hear. “Everyone knows you’re a coward in the dark.”

He pushed past him to the front before Burgewick could respond. He only clutched his rifle more tightly. His throat was dry as bone, but there was anger down there, too, throbbing as he took up position between Breesha and Orry. He wasn’t a coward. If he was a coward, he wouldn’t be following Mortice out into the woods, away from Father’s roving black eyes.

Once all the doppels had been prepped, a servant used a spray to dissolve the tendon rope, pulling apart the last of it with his bare hands. The doppels hesitated, unsure of their sudden freedom. Then the drones stalked forward, wailing, corralling them toward the forest, and the doppels fled. A few of the hunters whooped and feinted at them as they loped off into the trees. Burgewick felt a shiver run through his whole body.

He had been in the woods plenty of times, out among the dead trees that had seemed endless when he was a little child, but they seemed different now as they swallowed up the doppels. More menacing. When he shone his rifle’s lantern over the spindly trunks and rippling branches, they glistened the same silver as Mortice’s hunting cloak.

There was a countdown that Burgewick knew the spectators were watching inside the banquet hall, but after only a few minutes the inebriated uncle snarled something about having waited long enough, and fired his rifle skyward. The shot seemed to shatter the night. All the hunters and the drones surged forward into the woods and Burgewick let himself be carried along with them.

At first they walked in one group, but Mortice and Orry darted ahead and everyone else peeled off one by one as their trackers called them in separate directions. Burgewick and Breesha were the last to split up, and for a moment he wanted to tell her to stay with him.

“Mine’s heading north,” she announced, peering down at her tracker. “Good hunting, Burgewick. See you back at the House.”