HARVESTING by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
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STEPPED OUT of the dimension gate at the forest’s edge. The sun was high overhead. It always disconcerted me when I wound up in a different time zone, which was ridiculous, because I always did. At home, it was the hour before the evening rush at the restaurant; here it was before noon, a good time to harvest.
It was hot and humid in the half-dark below the trees. Unfamiliar, sparkling bugs whined. The air smelled swampy. Sweat started all over me. I shifted the packstraps on my shoulders.
A small dirt-brown boy with only two arms and legs stooped among low, light-green plants in a clearing nearby. He had a string bag in his hand. He was picking wild lettuce. On his back was another string bag, with three glass balls the sizes of fists in it, separated from each other with moss, each visible in subtle, glowing colors, gleaming in the green-filtered forest sunlight through the meshes of the string. I had never seen anything like those globes before, but I could tell just from their sight and scent that they were valuable, full of promises.
Anger rose in my throat. I wanted to kill someone. I drew my big knife.
“Hey,” I said to the boy. He looked up, startled, then thumped back on his heels. “Let me help you.” I sliced through the stems of many baby lettuces at once, angling my blade so that the severed plants flew toward the boy.
“What?” His eyes were wide, his eyebrows up.
“Pick fast. You shouldn’t be here. It’s too dangerous.” Who would send a boy alone into a demon wood with such globes strapped to his back? Home in my hive, we wouldn’t let such little ones out at all. His skin wasn’t thick enough to survive brushes with reality.
What if I were hunting meat instead of fungus? Such a young, soft creature, tender and tasty. I wasn’t the only one who came to gather in these woods. Node pull was strong here.
He put the sheared lettuce into his bag, glanced at me and away, his face flushed. I squatted nearby, the blade dangling between my foreknees. “Who sent you here?” I asked.
I could hardly concentrate on my own words. The globes on his back glistened and called to me. “Own us,” they whispered. “Caress us. If you have us, everything snarled in your life will straighten out. All you need is us.”
“Who sent you here with those things on your back? Don’t they know you’re in danger?” I scythed more lettuce for him.
He licked his lips. He placed the lettuce in his bag one small plant at a time. Why wasn’t he picking them in armfuls? He had to be quick.
“We want to be with you,” the globes whispered. “We don’t like it where we are now. We’ll make all your heart’s dreams come true. Take us.”
I grabbed the bag out of the boy’s hand and stuffed it full of lettuce. I handed it back. “Go home,” I told him. Why was I bothering with this boy? I was only on this world to get swamp truffles for tonight’s special dish at the most expensive restaurant on my world.
All ingredients guaranteed fresh and organic, but don’t ask where they come from. My leash was pretty tight. If I didn’t return in the next hour with the truffles, someone would tug it, and I would suffer.
“Take us,” sang the globes. “We will free you of everything that binds you. That Over who plagues you in unfair tasks and orders? Become an Over yourself. That Other you’ve had your eye on? Show her only one of us and she will come to you.”
Swamp truffles! I’d forgotten my mission. I’d visited this world often to gather produce. There wasn’t much heavy industry here; everything from this world tasted wonderful and fresh. I knew where I was. There was a truffle patch only a little way from here under some ancient oaks.
I took the boy’s arm and pulled him to his feet. “Go home,” I said again. I shoved him toward the edge of the forest.
A flood of people came out of the trees. One tossed a leather rope-thing with weights on its three ends. It wrapped around my upper arms and torso. One of the spinning weights hit a globe on the boy’s back, shattering it. It screamed as it broke. Its despair at its own wasting filled me with echoing despair. I had resisted the call of the globes, and for what?
The stones at the ends of the rope slapped into my sides with bruising force. Pain burst through me. Once my upper arms were immobilized, the weights dangled, swaying.
“You don’t want to do this,” I said to the people who gathered around me. One darted forward and tugged the big knife from my upper right hand. Another made a loop in some rope he held, and reached for my lower right hand. I tucked my lower hands inside my shirt, gripped the handles of the little harvesting knives in their sheaths.
A woman broke from the line of people and ran to the boy, hugged him to her.
“It didn’t hurt me,” he said. “It only helped me.”
“You caught it for us, Kutu,” said one of the men. “Good work.”
There were provisions for gatherers who encountered disaster on harvesting forays. In the best-case scenarios, gatherers were abandoned. There were too many of my people on my world, and we were too easily trained for us to be very valuable as individuals.
Worse-case scenarios involved self-destruction. I wasn’t important enough to rate a bite-down poison, though. Worst-of-all-case scenarios meant that the gatherers were gathered for something unpleasant.
I had worked my way up from fuel gatherer to fungus hunter. My masters valued my special sense of smell; I could find funguses others missed. But I wasn’t the only one like me.
If only I’d gone for the truffles and left the boy alone.
I slid a knife free and slipped my hand up under my upper arms. I sawed on the rope thing that had caught me. Even though I kept my knives super sharp, they couldn’t saw through the ropes that bound me.
Who were these people? Where did they get their ropes? Usually on this world I avoided contact with the natives. Wrong-shaped people in other dimensions got upset when they saw me, so I had made stealth my practice.
I had no interest in being a meat-hunter. Fungus was what I liked to harvest. It didn’t fight back, and I could snack on it while I gathered. I had finally gotten the job I had always wanted.
A line of fire striped the backs of my legs, then another. My homeworld handlers were jerking my leash a little early.
Some of the people around me stirred. They brought out more ropes, made loops, dropped them over my upper parts. Many of these few-limbed people spread out around me, gripping ropes that ended in loops that restrained me, tugging from different directions.
When there were enough ropes, they dragged me out of the forest into the hot wet daylight
“But it didn’t bite me,” Kutu said.”
“You were lucky,” someone told him.
“You told me it would eat .me or kill me for the wishballs. It just cut leaves for me and told me to go home. It didn’t even try to get the balls.”
“You were lucky.”
He pushed away from his mother and came back to where I walked along, responding to the tugs of eight different people with ropes on me, all going in more or less the same direction.
“I’m sorry, Monster,” he said.
“Me too.”
“Kutu, get away from that thing!” said someone.
He pulled one of the globes out of the bag on his back. I saw where the first one had cut him when it broke. Black blood.
“Would you like this?”
I sheathed my useless knives and grabbed the ball from him with one of my lower hands.
“Yes,” the globe told me. “I want to belong to you. I want to serve you.” It felt warm in my hands.
“Kutu!”
What to wish for?
Six more lashes hit my legs. I stumbled. I felt the hot green blood flowing down my calves toward my ankles.
I didn’t know what the people who had captured me wanted with me. I couldn’t do anything to satisfy my handlers. Even if they pulled me home, I wouldn’t have the truffles, and that meant punishment, maybe becoming an entree.
I held the globe tight in my lower hands and wished for freedom.
Nothing changed, and everything changed. Part of me still walked along in the grip of ropes between these villagers, suffering from cuts to my back and legs from the handlers on my home world. Part of me lifted out of my body and rode up into the sky, free of everything. The sky part almost let go of the body part, but not quite. The sky part watched everything below.
The globe didn’t work. Or only a little. Not enough.
I threw it on a rock, where it broke wide open. It screamed. My sky part flew back down to become trapped inside my body part. I shuffled on toward the village with my captors.
Entree at home, if they jerked me back? Or entree here, where the natives had ropes that could withstand my best knives, and wishballs nobody in the gathering community had ever mentioned?
Either way, entree, I guessed. I hoped I would meet a chef with skill and go to the shadow hive in glory.