Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 107 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: chinese, clarkesworld, fantasy, fantasy magazine, magazine, novelette, science fiction, science fiction magazine, short stories, short story
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2015-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

First published in Eclipse Four, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2011.

About the Author

Peter M. Ball is the author of Horn, Bleed, and the Flotsam novella series from Apocalypse Ink Productions. His short stories have appeared in venues such as Weird Tales, Electric Velocipede, Eclipse 4, and Daily Science Fiction.

Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck

Neal Asher

Lost in some perverse fantasy, Tameera lovingly inspected the displays of her Optek rifle. For me, what happened next proceeded with the unstoppable nightmare slowness of an accident. She brought the butt of the rifle up to her shoulder, took careful aim, and squeezed off a single shot. One of the sheq slammed back against a rock face then tumbled down through vegetation to land in the white water of a stream.

Some creatures seem to attain the status of myth even though proven to be little different from other apparently prosaic species. On Earth the lion contends with the unicorn, the wise old elephant never forgets, and gentle whales sing haunting ballads in the deeps. It stems from anthropomorphism, is fed by both truth and lies, and over time firmly embeds itself in human culture. On Myral, where I had spent the last ten years, only a little of such status attached to the largest autochthon—not surprising for a creature whose name is a contraction of “shit-eating quadruped.” But rumors of something else in the wilderness, something that had no right to be there, had really set the myth-engines of the human mind into motion, and brought hunters to this world.

There was no sign of any sheq on the way out over the narrow vegetation-cloaked mounts. They only put in an appearance after I finally moored my blimp to a peak, above a horizontal slab on which blister tents could be pitched. My passengers noticed straight away that the slab had been used many times before, and that my mooring was an iron ring long set into the rock, but then, campsites were a rarity amid the steep slopes, cliffs, and streams of this area. It wasn’t a place humans were built for. Sheq country.

Soon after he disembarked, Tholan went over to the edge to try out one of his disposable vidcams. The cam itself was about the size of his forefinger, and he was pointing it out over the terrain while inspecting a palm com he held in his other hand. He had unloaded a whole case of these cams, which he intended to position in likely locations, or dangle into mist pockets on a line—a hunter’s additional eyes. He called me over. Tameera and Anders followed.

“There.” He nodded downwards.

A seven of sheq was making its way across the impossible terrain—finding handholds amid the lush vertical vegetation and traveling with the assurance of spiders on a wall. They were disconcertingly simian, about the size of a man, and quadruped—each limb jointed like a human arm but ending in hands bearing eight long prehensile fingers. Their heads, though, were anything but simian, being small, insectile, like the head of a mosquito but with two wide trumpet-like probosces.

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