Painless: A Tor.com Original

by Rich Larson

Overview

From the science fiction author of Annex and Tomorrow Factory comes Rich Larson's stunning short story, Painless--a Tor.com Original.

A man who can't feel pain has been bioengineered to be a killing machine, but he refuses to give in to his fate.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250224309
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/10/2019
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	32
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in the south of Spain, and now lives in Ottawa, Canada. Since he began writing in 2011, he’s sold over a hundred stories, the majority of them speculative fiction published in magazines like Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. His work also appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies and has been translated into Chinese, Vietnamese, Polish, Czech, French and Italian.

His debut novel, Annex, was released with Orbit Books in July 2018. His debut collection, Tomorrow Factory, followed in October 2018 from Talos Press.

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Spain and Czech Republic, and currently writes from Montreal, Canada. He is the author of the novels Ymir and Annex, as well as the collection Tomorrow Factory. His fiction has been translated into over a dozen languages, including Polish, Italian, Romanian, and Japanese, and adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS. Find him at instagram.com/richlarsonwrites or patreon.com/richlarson.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Mars stands in the middle of the highway, knees locked, head tipped back. The sky overhead is choked with harmattan dust. There is so much dust he can stare directly at the rising sun, a lemon-yellow smear in the dull gray. There is so much dust it looks like everything — the scraggly trees, the sandy fields, the road itself — is disappearing, as he often wishes to disappear.

He used a pirate signal to monitor the progress of the autotrucks coming from the refinery in Zinder, loaded with petroleum. He watched them snake along the digital map. Now he can feel them coming: Their thunder vibrates the blacktop under his feet. They move fast and their avoidance AI is shoddy. In the low light, they will not see him until it is too late.

Mars takes a breath of cold, dry air. He bows his head, shuts his eyes. He can hear the first autotruck now: roaring, squeaking, clatter-clanking. He imagines it as a maelstrom of metal hurtling toward him. His heart thrums fast in his chest.

When the truck flies around the curve, Mars realizes he still wants to live. He tries to dive aside. The impact splits his world in half.

* * *

Dusk falls and Mars is still waiting beneath a twisted baobab for Tsayaba, the old woman who claims she can find anybody in this city, anybody at all. So far only a stray dog he met early this morning has shown up. It sits in front of him, panting expectantly, tail thumping the sand.

"You again."

The animal is gaunt, with fat black ticks studding its neck and shoulders, burrowing deep into matted fur. It has cuts on its backside from wriggling under some jagged fence. But it is luckier than some of the other strays here. Mars saw a man with an infected eye implant roving the streets with three skeletal dogs chained to his waist, intending to sell them down in Nigeria to a tribe that still eats dog meat.

Mars takes out his nanoknife, the last piece of military equipment he carries. The stray recognizes it and starts to salivate.

"I spoil you, dog."

Mars dices up his thumb and then his index, flicking the bloody chunks to the ground. The stray pounces on each one and whines when Mars stops at the gray-white knucklebone of his middle finger.

"I give you any more, you'll throw it all up."

The dog whines a little longer, blood-specked black lips peeled back off its teeth, then finally trots away. Mars is alone again. He inspects his stumps, which are already clotting shut. He inspects the darkening street, mudbrick walls topped with broken glass or razor wire.

A slick-skinned maciyin roba wanders past on its little cilia feet, hunting for the flimsy black shopping bags half-buried in the sand. The plastivores were designed in some Kenyan genelab — for this, Mars feels a certain kinship with them — and were later set loose across the continent. They do their job well and reproduce on their own, but plastic trash has accumulated in the West African dust for nearly a century and it will take a very long time to recycle it all.

The evening prayer call is starting, a distant mumble-hum projected from the mosques. Mars is not Muslim or anything else, but he likes the sound, the ebb and flow of distorted voices. He listens to it with his eyes shut and is nearly lulled to sleep before Tsayaba finally arrives.

"Sannu."

Mars opens his eyes. Tsayaba is old, with a deep-lined face and many missing teeth, but she stands very straight and carries herself how Mars imagines a chief would, with slow, smooth motions, with high gravity. She wears a bright yellow–patterned zani and a puffy winter jacket.

"Sannu," Mars says. "Ina yini? How was the day?"

"Komi lafiya," Tsayaba says. "All is well. Ina sanyi?"

"Sanyi, akwai shi," Mars says, even though he does not feel the cold. "Ina gida?" He wants to know what Tsayaba has found, but he makes himself focus on the greeting. Things are done slowly here.

"Gida lafiya lau. Well, very well." Tsayaba frowns, clicks her tongue. "Ina jiki?" she asks. "The body?"

Mars doesn't understand for a moment, then realizes Tsayaba is looking at his hand. The fingers have grown back — the keratin of his nails is still spongy — but he forgot to wash away the blood.

"Da sauki," Mars says. "Better."

Tsayaba gives a grunt of acknowledgment, then lowers herself to a squat. "I have found who you are searching for," she says. "I am almost certain. Early this morning, six men came with a truck. They paid the gendarmes. Now they are staying in the old hospital. But it is bad."

"What is bad?"

"These men are killers. They have otobindigogi." She makes her finger chatter, mimicking an autogun. "And they are here waiting for worse. They are waiting for a criminal called Musa, who will buy what they have. Musa, he was Boko Haram before the Pacification."

"When will he come?"

"They are not sure. They are anxious. He was meant to come today." Tsayaba shakes her head side to side, side to side. "Wahala," she says. "Wahala, wahala. If your friend was taken by these men, I think he is not a captive. I think he is dead."

Mars does not think so. If what he suspects is true, then Musa is not coming for autoguns. He is coming for something much more valuable.

"Na gode," Mars says. "Na gode sosai."

Tsayaba accepts the thanks with a brief nod of the head. She pulls a sleek black blockphone from the pocket of her coat and looks politely off into the distance. Mars takes out his own phone and taps it against hers, sending a small cascade of code equivalent to five hundred francs.

"Yi hankali," Tsayaba says.

Mars cannot promise to be careful, but he nods and clasps the old woman's hand once more — with his right hand, his clean hand — before he leaves.

He has a busy night ahead of him.

* * *

The kasuwa is busy despite the fierce midday sun that bakes the color out of the sky. Traders lounge under their tarp-roofed stalls, barking prices, rearranging their wares. Heaps of dried beans and grasshoppers, papayas and tomatoes and purple onions, cheap rubber shoes, 3D-printed toys beside wood carvings, bootleg phones and even a few secondhand implants bearing telltale stains. Camels slouch their way through the crowd draped with rugs and solarskin, only their bony knees visible.

"Miracle! Abin al'ajabi! Come see the miracle Allah has done!"

Miracle workers are not uncommon at the market, proselytizing through jury-rigged speakers and selling elixirs from the backs of their trucks in old plastic bottles, but this time there is a new trick that draws eyes. A boy, eleven or twelve with a sleepy smile, is standing on a woven plastic mat. Cables trail from his outstretched arms and hook into a car battery beside him. The electricity hisses and snaps, and the boy twitches but does not cry out. He only stands and smiles.

It is not a trick. Passersby come and touch the boy, certain the battery is dead, and even the slightest brush sends them reeling away in pain. His whole body is crackling with charge, but he feels nothing at all. The man who says he is his father circles through the crowd collecting coins."

Abin al'ajabi! " he calls. "Thing of wonder!"

A hubbub builds from the other end of the kasuwa. An armored jeep, jacked up high off the ground, is bullying its way through the market, maneuvering past donkey carts loaded with metal drums of well-water. It rolls to a stop and two men in sweat-wicking suits climb out. One of them is foreign, too tall and too light-skinned to be Hausa, with a babelpod covering one ear like a spiny white conch. Both of them stare at the boy.

"Turn off the battery," the Hausa man says, in the voice of a man whose orders are done even when given to nobody in particular.

The boy's supposed father scurries back to the battery and switches it off. "It does not harm him," he mutters. "You saw. You saw it does not harm him."

"Who is his family?" the Hausa man demands. "His blood family?"

A shrug. " Ban sani ba. Ban sani ba. He said he had a brother. Dead. But not him. He is a miracle child.""

Il est une aberration génétique, "the foreign man says, and his babelpod turns it into clumsy Hausa. He walks up to the boy and removes the cables. "You feel nothing?"

The boy nods, then shakes his head, uncertain.

The foreign man takes both of his hands and turns them over, inspecting the skin. "And you are not leprous," he says. "You are lucky to have lived this long with no severe burns. No lost limbs. It is difficult to navigate this world without pain. Your name?"

The boy shrugs. "Y aro ," he says — child.

"You are not just a child," the foreign man says. "I think you are a Marsili. A Mars, for short. Your body does not process pain. That makes you very special. It makes you a candidate."

The boy tries to understand the electronic speech coming from the babelpod, but he has never heard these words. He seizes on one he recognizes and makes a spaceship with his hand.

"Mars," he says.

The foreign man laughs. "Yes. Yes. But Mars was something else, too. Mars was a god of war."

* * *

Before he goes to the old hospital, Mars finds a neon-lit restaurant and orders so much food the two Lebanese women who own the place send their son on his moped to beg the butcher to reopen his meat locker. Mars washes his hands in the cracked bathroom sink; then, while the family cooks furiously, he sits down outside with a bottle of Youki. He watches the lime-green holo of the restaurant sign jitter and swirl through the dark, watches moths flock to it in spirals.

The beef kebabs arrive first, steaming on their skewers. Mars slides them onto the plate and wolfs them down, barely chewing; he cannot feel them burning his fingertips or mouth. Pork works better for his purposes, but it is difficult to find here. And there is another meat that works even better than pork, but he did that only once, in the field, and he has nightmares about it still.

Lamb arrives next, only half-cooked — as he ordered it. Time is of the essence. He would eat it raw if he could stand it. Mars falls on the meat, picking the rack apart with his greasy fingers. A few young men rove past, blasting music from an ancient speaker rig, laughing amphetamine-loud. They stare at the mountain of food, but when they see Mars's solemn eyes and the carbon-black nanoknife laid on the metal tabletop beside his tray, they give him a wide berth.

Mars remembers that meat used to make him feel queasy when he was much younger, before the procedures. Now he is a carnivore the way the maciyin roba is a plastivore. He eats until his stomach drags heavy, then eats more. The Lebanese women shift from amusement to disgust to grim professionalism as they feed him, as they watch him crack through the bones and choke down the gristle.

"Shukran," he says, when he is finally ready for them to take the plates away.

"Afwan," they say in faint unison.

Mars's stomach churns when he stands up, but he has trained it to not revolt.

* * *

Three years later, the boy still has no name. He is called by a number: thirteen. He is lying facedown on a geltable, because today is his Birthday, the day all the treatments and drug courses culminate in a final procedure. Other children in the facility have had their Birthdays; he has not seen them since. He supposes they were moved elsewhere, or they died.

The boy knows the procedure is dangerous. He knows even the treatments were too much for trained soldiers to bear — the pain drove them mad. But he finds it hard to feel worried. His stomach is full of shinkafa da wake and oily onions, and there is a screen set up beneath the geltable playing procedurally generated cartoons. Not so different from another life, a vague memory in which he is wedged into the same chair as his older brother in front of a flickering screen.

Above him, hanging from the ceiling like an enormous metal spider, is the surgical unit. It tracks laserlight over his bare back and marks injection points with neat red circles. Pipettes and tubes slither into the boy's body, puncturing his skin with a dozen small flesh sounds. He feels only a dim, worming pressure.

There is a glass tank attached to the surgical unit, and inside it is the organism. The boy has been shown it before, the mass of raw pink putty that writhes and undulates. They told him it is a sort of cancer, reprogrammed by a sort of virus, and that in a way it is human. To him, it looks nothing like a human.

An electronic signal is given and the organism is fed into the boy's body, coursing through the clear tubes into his interstitial spaces, into the artificial pockets prepared by earlier surgeries. The boy does not scream into the geltable. He does not bite through his tongue. He feels no pain, only the strange and unpleasant sensation of a hand entering his body and wriggling its fingers.

Hours later, when he is drowsy and his eyes are bleary from focusing on the cartoons, the gel sluices away and the tubes retract. He hears footsteps.

"Be patient," a woman's voice begs — English. The boy has learned some English in these past three years. "Be patient, be patient. It looks like a successful bond. But we have to wait."

"I have waited for decades," says another voice, and the boy recognizes it. The foreign man who took him away from kasuwar Galmi so long ago. "I have to know."

Suddenly the boy is face-to-face with him. The foreign man has slid underneath the table. His hair is grayer than the boy remembers it and his eyes are more hollow. He has a cigar cutter in his hand.

"Miracle child," he says. "It's very good to see you again. Please stick out your thumb for me."

* * *

Mars can see why they chose the old hospital compound. It has high mudbrick walls on three sides and barbed wire on the fourth, which backs onto an ancient landing strip. The gate is rusty metal crenellated with spikes. The painted letters have long since flaked away. Tsayaba told him that the hospital has been abandoned for years, ever since the surgical wing caught fire and took the rest of the building with it.

Mars feels bloated and heavy as he scales the front wall, but he knows he will be glad for his full stomach later. He pauses at the top to catch his breath and looks back at the old town: a maze of mudbrick, warped by the rainy season, lit by swatches of grainy orange biolamp. It feels almost organic, like it sprang up from the ground. New buildings on the periphery are more geometric, rebar skeletons in concrete sheaths. Mosques tower over everything else, their painted white crescents pushed up into the sky like waning moons.

Most important, the highway is clear. Mars faces forward and peers down into the dark compound. The hospital is a ruin, ash and rubble. But beyond it there are housing units for the doctors and staff that were untouched by the fire. He can see light in one of the windows. That is where they will be keeping their captive.

Almost directly below him, the night guard is boiling tea on a brazier. His face is scarfed against the cold, gaps only for his eyes and a pair of trailing earbud wires. His gun is resting on a woven plastic chair across from him. His blockphone is balanced on top of it, playing yesterday's Ghana-Côte d'Ivoire football match.

Mars drops down off the wall, raising a small puff of dust where he lands. The guard leaps to his feet and right into the nanoknife.

Mars smothers the man's cry with the crook of his arm, yanks the blade free, then spins him around to drive it into the base of his skull. It slides through the bone and gray matter as if they were cow butter. The guard spasms and goes limp. Mars plucks the blockphone off the chair and shoves the man's face up against the screen to unlock it before rigor mortis makes him unrecognizable.

Apart from one blinking number at the top of his screen, the man's contacts are local. He is an extra hire, not one of the six Tsayaba mentioned. Mars feels a twist of guilt when he sees a home screen clip of the man, face uncovered and still young enough to have pockmarks, tossing a little girl into the air and catching her. He lays the body down gently. Blood trickles out from underneath, stretching red fingers through the sand.

Mars silences the phone and pockets it. The husk of the hospital looms before him: a few jagged walls, half of a twisted metal staircase. For an instant Mars thinks he can smell the burning, but it is only wood fires being carried from town on the wind. There is movement in the rubble, first the slow careful motions of more maciyin roba and then a stiff-legged loping.

Hyenas is Mars's first thought — they say the hyenas are coming back now — but it is only a pair of stray dogs. Mars peers at them for a moment, trying to tell if one is his visitor from earlier that day. Then he heads for the housing units. Tonight, the dogs will have plenty to eat.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Painless"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Rich Larson.
Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Begin Reading,
About the Author,
Copyright,