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His Master’s Voice

(Editor’s Note: This story first appeared in Interzone #218. It is available in other formats, but Redstone SF is pleased to present the full text of this Sturgeon Award finalist online for the first time.)

Before the concert, we steal the master’s head.

The necropolis is a dark forest of concrete mushrooms in the blue Antarctic night. We huddle inside the utility fog bubble attached to the steep southern wall of the nunatak, the ice valley.

The cat washes itself with a pink tongue. It reeks of infinite confidence.

“Get ready,” I tell it. “We don’t have all night.”

It gives me a mildly offended look and dons its armor. The quantum dot fabric envelopes its striped body like living oil. It purrs faintly and tests the diamond-bladed claws against an icy outcropping of rock. The sound grates my teeth and the razor-winged butterflies in my belly wake up. I look at the bright, impenetrable firewall of the city of the dead. It shimmers like chained northern lights in my AR vision.

I decide that it’s time to ask the Big Dog to bark.My helmet laser casts a one-nanosecond prayer of light at the indigo sky: just enough to deliver one quantum bit up there into the Wild. Then we wait. My tail wags and a low growl builds up in my belly.

Right on schedule, it starts to rain red fractal code. My augmented reality vision goes down, unable to process the dense torrent of information falling upon the necropolis firewall like monsoon rain. The chained aurora borealis flicker and vanish.

“Go!” I shout at the cat, wild joy exploding in me, the joy of running after the Small Animal of my dreams. “Go now!”

The cat leaps into the void. The wings of the armor open and grab the icy wind, and the cat rides the draft down like a grinning Chinese kite.

* * *

It’s difficult to remember the beginning now. There were no words then, just sounds and smells: metal and brine, the steady drumming of waves against pontoons. And there were three perfect things in the world: my bowl, the Ball, and the Master’s firm hand on my neck.

I know now that the Place was an old oil rig that the Master had bought. It smelled bad when we arrived, stinging oil and chemicals. But there were hiding places, secret nooks and crannies. There was a helicopter landing pad where the Master threw the ball for me. It fell into the sea many times, but the Master’s bots — small metal dragonflies — always fetched it when I couldn’t.

The Master was a god. When he was angry, his voice was an invisible whip. His smell was a god-smell that filled the world.

While he worked, I barked at the seagulls or stalked the cat. We fought a few times, and I still have a pale scar on my nose. But we developed an understanding. The dark places of the rig belonged to the cat, and I reigned over the deck and the sky: we were the Hades and Apollo of the Master’s realm.

But at night, when the Master watched old movies or listened to records on his old rattling gramophone we lay at his feet together. Sometimes the Master smelled lonely and let me sleep next to him in his small cabin, curled up in the god-smell and warmth.

It was a small world, but it was all we knew.

The Master spent a lot of time working, fingers dancing on the keyboard projected on his mahogany desk. And every night he went to the Room: the only place on the rig where I wasn’t allowed.

It was then that I started to dream about the Small Animal. I remember its smell even now, alluring and inexplicable: buried bones and fleeing rabbits, irresistible.

In my dreams, I chased it along a sandy beach, a tasty trail of tiny footprints that I followed along bendy pathways and into tall grass. I never lost sight of it for more than a second: it was always a flash of white fur just at the edge of my vision.

One day it spoke to me.

“Come,” it said. “Come and learn.”

The Small Animal’s island was full of lost places. Labyrinthine caves, lines drawn in sand that became words when I looked at them, smells that sang songs from the master’s gramophone. It taught me, and I learned: I was more awake every time I woke up. And when I saw the cat looking at the spiderbots with a new awareness, I knew that it, too, went to a place at night.

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10 comments

1 Galileo Online » Proză scurtă pe net { 10.04.10 at 9:40 am }

[…] În Redstone Science Fiction nr.5/octombrie, sînt publicate povestiri de Vylar Kaftan (Witness) și Hannu Rajaniemi (His Master’s Voice) […]

2 Redstone Science Fiction #5, October 2010 | Redstone Science Fiction { 10.04.10 at 9:50 pm }

[…] His Master’s Voice by Hannu Rajaniemi […]

3 Mitch Glaser { 10.05.10 at 2:54 pm }

The technology and social speculation in this story were great, but I was overwhelmed emotionally by it. That’s really rare for hard SF, particularly for a short story. Bravo! I look forward to The Quantum Thief.

4 Short Story Highlight: “His Master’s Voice” by Hannu Rajaniemi « The World SF Blog { 10.06.10 at 2:23 am }

[…] issue, including Finnish writer Hannu Rajaniemi‘s 2008 story (first published in Interzone) His Master’s Voice. Before the concert, we steal the master’s […]

5 Mike { 10.11.10 at 12:18 am }

This really blew me away. Phenomenal.

6 The Great Geek Manual » Free Fiction: October 12, 2010 { 10.15.10 at 6:02 pm }

[…] “His Master’s Voice” by Hannu Rajaniemi at […]

7 The Great Geek Manual » Free Fiction Round-Up: October 5, 2010 { 10.15.10 at 6:03 pm }

[…] “His Master’s Voice” by Hannu Rajaniemi at Redstone Science […]

8 Merc { 11.05.10 at 11:39 pm }

Fantastic. I’m really looking forward to the novel (and hopefully more short stories).

9 October Fiction Roundup : Escape Pod { 11.06.10 at 12:03 pm }

[…] “His Master’s Voice” by Hannu Rajaniemi in Redstone Science Fiction […]

10 October Fiction Roundup – SciFi Mashup { 11.15.10 at 3:22 am }

[…] “His Master’s Voice” by Hannu Rajaniemi in Redstone Science Fiction […]