Inversion by Aric McBay

Author:Aric McBay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2023-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Char of the Ami

The crashed airboat—what the intruders called a drop-pod—was only a few kilometers away. We followed the high walk there and the Friendly Watchers asked us to stay quiet as we traveled. Warnings had spread along the wires that interlopers had entered the forest and were chasing its residents. The Forest People were retreating from the grassland borders, hiding deeper in the trees and the mountains. Periodically, we heard rattling and rapid bangs in the distance, like fireworks.

The drop-pod had come down through thick foliage, snapping branches as it tumbled to the ground, and finally coming to rest in a dense patch of ferns.

I turned to the Forest conciliator. “Their dialect is like the ceremonial tongue,” I said to prepare him, “with a strange accent.”

He frowned. “Odd that they would speak something so archaic,” he said. “But it is the language we have in common. Using it will be good practice for the next Convergence.”

There had been four people on board the drop-pod. One of them—a soldier—had been seriously injured in the crash and was in the process of dying from a head injury. Forest medics had tried to rush him to the autumn flamewall to send him into the next life—the Forest People believed it would give a child bad memories if the body died before it reached the flamewall—but the other survivors from the drop-pod had objected. So, the soldier lay unconscious on a cloth stretcher, the time between each gasping breath growing longer by the minute.

The other three survivors were in much better shape. The pilot stared silently toward the stretcher, his ashen faced racked with guilt. A servitor in maroon sat among the ferns near the capsule, face turned up in disbelief at the huge trees above. And a white-clad Scitech was talking with a few of the Friendly Watchers and armed Grasslanders who surrounded the site in a loose circle.

The Scitech smiled through his obvious fear, and it struck me that a human being dressed as an owl could seem either very cuddly or very intimidating, depending on the circumstances.

As I approached, the scientist made eye contact with me and called out. “I’m so sorry for what happened to you and your friend,” he said. “That was hard to watch.” He tried to step toward me, but an owl raised a wing to keep him in place.

“He is my uncle,” I corrected him. “Or was.”

“He still is,” the man said. “I watched the servitors load him up and drive him to safety.” Sheepishly, he added, “Well, drive him away somewhere, at least.”

I felt cautious relief then. “I am Char,” I told him. “I am called ‘She Who Seeks Justice.’”

“Uh, I am Doctor Exeter Gustafsen,” he replied, then rattled off a string of letters that meant nothing to me. Perhaps he expected me to be impressed, and when my face showed I wasn’t, he added, “People call me Gus. I study universes.”

The conciliator beside me stepped forward. “Why are you here?”

“I’m here because the People called!” he answered, in an oddly jocular voice.

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