The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Thanks, but—”

  “—she took your huevos with her when she left.”

  “I suppose that’s one way of putting it,” I replied, and she laughed again and began refilling her pipe.

  “That’s a goddamn shame,” Jun’ko said and struck a match. “But you watch yourself out there. Way I hear it told, the Fenrir got more eyes than God. And they say the wolf, he never sleeps.”

  When I stood up, she pointed at the two girls again. They were both watching me now, and one of them raised her skirt to show me that she had a dick. Jun’ko Valenzuela puffed at her pipe and shook her head. When she talked, smoke leaked from her mouth and from the jaws of the dragon tattoo. “Things ain’t always what they seem. You don’t forget that, Dorry. Not if you want to find this little coño and live to regret it.”

  The sun was already starting to slip behind Tharsis Tholus by the time I got back to the dingy, dusty sleeper that I’d rented near the eastern locks. The storm that had begun just before dawn still howled down the slopes of the great volcano, extinct two billion years if you trust the geologists, and battered the walls of Hope’s Heaven, hammering the thin foil skin of the dome. I’ve always hated the western highlands, and part of me wanted nothing more than to take the mechanic’s advice and go home. I imagined hauling the crate full of Sailor’s belongings down the hall to the lift, pictured myself leaving it all piled in the street. It’d be easy, I told myself. It would be the easiest thing I’d ever done.

  I ate, and, when the night came, I sat a little while in the darkness—I hadn’t paid for electric—gazing out the sleeper’s tiny window at the yellow runner lights dotting the avenue below, the street that led back up to Jun’ko’s whorehouse or down to the docks, depending whether you turned left or turned right, north or south. When I finally went to bed, the nightmares found me, as they almost always do, and for a while, at least, I wasn’t alone.

  Just before dawn, I was awakened by a knock at the door, and I lay staring up into the gloom, looking for the ceiling, trying to recall where the hell I was and how I’d gotten myself there. Then I remembered smirking Jun’ko and her kinetitatts, and I remembered Hope VII, and then I remembered everything else. Whoever was out in the corridor knocked again, harder than before. I reached for my pants and vest, lying together on the floor near the foot of the cot.

  “Who’s there?” I shouted, hoping it was nothing more than someone banging on the wrong door, a drunk or an honest mistake. The only person in town whom I’d had business with was the mechanic, and as far as I was concerned, that business was finished.

  “My name is Mikaela,” the woman on the other side of the door called back. “I have information about Sailor. I may be able to help you find her. Please, open the door.”

  I paused, my vest still unfastened, my pants half on, half off. I realized that my mouth had gone dry, and my heart was racing. Maybe I’d pissed old Jun’ko off just a little more than I’d thought. Perhaps, in return, I was about to get the worst beating of my life, or perhaps word had gotten around the dome that the stranger from the east was an easy mark.

  “Is that so?” I asked. “Who sent you?” And when she didn’t answer, I asked again. “Mikaela, who sent you here?”

  “This would be easier, Councilor, if you’d open the door. I might have been followed.”

  “All the more reason for me to keep it shut,” I told her, groping about in the dark for anything substantial enough to serve as a weapon, cursing myself for being too cheap to pay the five credits extra for electric.

  “I’m one of the mechanic’s girls,” she said, almost whispering now, “but I swear she didn’t send me. Please, there isn’t time for this.”

  My right hand closed around an aluminum juice flask I’d bought in one of Heaven’s market plazas the day before. It wasn’t much, hardly better than nothing, but it’d have to do. I finished dressing, then crossed the tiny room and stood with my hand on the lockpad.

  “I have a gun,” I lied, just loud enough I was sure the woman would hear me.

  “I don’t,” she replied. “Open the door. Please.”

  I gripped the flask a little more tightly, took a deep breath, and punched in the twelve-digit security code. The door slid open immediately, whining on its rusty tracks, and the woman slipped past me while I was still half-blind and blinking at the flickering lamps set into the walls of the corridor.

  “Shut the door,” she said, and I did, then turned back to the darkened room, to the place where her voice was coming from. Yellow and white splotches drifted to and fro before my eyes, abstract fish in a lightless sea.

  “Why is it so dark in here?” she asked, impatiently.

  “Same reason I opened the door for you. I’m an idiot.”

  “Isn’t there a window? All these nooks have windows,” and I remembered that I’d closed and locked the shutters before going to bed, so the morning sun wouldn’t wake me.

  “There’s a window, but you don’t need to see me to explain why you’re here,” I said, figuring the darkness might at least even the odds if she were lying.

  “Christ, you’re a nervous nit.”

  “Why are you here?” I asked, trying to sound angry when I was mostly scared and disoriented, and I took a step backwards, setting my shoulders squarely against the door.

  “I told you. Sailor and me, we was sheba, until she paid off Jun’ko and headed south.”

  “South?” I asked. “The freighter was traveling south?”

  “That’s what she told me. Sailor, I mean. But, look here, Councilor, before I say any more, that quiff left owing me forty creds, and I’m not exactly in a position to play grace and let it slip.”

  “And what makes you think I’m in a position to pay off her debts, Mikaela? What makes you think I would?”

  “You’re a titled woman,” she replied, and the tone in her voice made her feelings about the Council perfectly clear. “You’ve got it. And if you don’t, you can get it. And you’ll pay me, because nobody comes all the way the hell to Hope’s Heaven looking for someone unless they want to find that someone awfully fucking bad. Am I wrong?”

  “No,” I sighed, because I didn’t feel like arguing with her. “You’re not wrong. But that doesn’t mean you’re telling the truth, either.”

  “About Sailor?”

  “About anything.”

  “She told me about the Fenrir,” the woman named Mikaela said. “It’s almost all she ever talked about.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything. That’s nothing you couldn’t have overheard at Jun’ko’s yesterday evening.”

  Mikaela sighed. “I’m going to open the damned window,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind,” and a moment later I heard her struggling with the bolt, heard it turning, and then the shutters spiraled open to reveal the easy, pinkish light of false dawn. Mikaela was prettier than I’d expected, and a little older. Her hair was pulled back in a long braid, and the light through the window revealed tiny wrinkles around her eyes. The face seemed familiar, and then I realized she was one of the women who’d been standing at the bar in Jun’ko’s, the one who’d shown me that she had a penis. She sat down on the cot and pointed at the flask in my hand.

  “Is that your gun?” she asked.

  “I need to know whether or not you’re telling me the truth,” I said. “I don’t think that’s unreasonable, considering the circumstances.”

  “I’m a whore. That doesn’t necessarily make me a thief and a liar.”

  “I need something, Mikaela. More than your word.”

  “I’m actually a pretty good fuck,” she said, as though it was exactly what I was waiting for her to say, and lay down on the cot. “You know, I’d wager I’m a skid better fuck than Sailor Li ever was. We could be sheba, you and me, Councilor. I’d go back to Herschel City with you, and you could forget all about her. If she wants to commit suicide, then, hell—”

  “Something you couldn’t have gotten from Jun’ko,” I pressed. She ro
lled her eyes, which I could see were blue. There aren’t many women on Mars with blue eyes.

  “Yeah,” she said, almost managing to sound disappointed, and clicked her tongue once against the roof of her mouth. “How’s this? Sailor was with you for five years, if you count the three months after you started fucking her before you asked her to move into your flat. You lost two teeth in a fight when you were still just a kid, because someone called your birth mother an offworlder bitch, and sometimes the implants ache before a storm. The first time Sailor brought up the Fenrir, you showed her a stick from one of the containment crews and told her if she ever mentioned the temples again, you’d ask her to leave. When she did mention them again, you hit her so hard you almost—”

  “You’ve made your point,” I said, cutting her off. She smiled, a smug, satisfied smile, and nodded her head.

  “I usually do, Dorry.” She patted the edge of the cot with her left hand. “Why don’t you come back to bed.”

  “I’m not going to fuck you,” I replied and set the aluminum flask down on a shelf near the door. “I’ll pay off whatever she owes you. You’ll tell me what you know. But that’s as far as it goes.”

  “Sure, if that’s the way you want it.” Mikaela shut her eyes. “Just thought I’d be polite and offer you a poke.”

  “You said the freighter was headed south.”

  “No. I said Sailor said it was headed south. And before I say more, I want half what I’m owed.”

  My eyes were beginning to adjust to the dim light getting in through the window, and I had no trouble locating the hook where I’d left my jacket hanging the night before. I removed my purse from an inside pocket, unfastened the clasp, and took out my credit tab. “How do you want to do this?” I asked, checking my balance, wondering how many more months I could make the dwindling sum last.

  “Subdermal,” she said. “Nobody out here carries around tabs, especially not whores.”

  I keyed in the amount, setting the exchange limit at twenty, and handed Mikaela the tab. She pressed it lightly to the inside of her left forearm, and the chip beneath her flesh subtracted twenty credits from my account. Then she handed the tab back to me, and I tried not to notice how warm it was.

  “So, she told you the freighter was headed south,” I said, anxious to have this over and done with and get this girl out of the sleeper.

  “Yeah, that’s what she said.” Mikaela rolled over onto her right side, and her face was lost in the shadows. “The freighter’s a Shimizu-Mochizuki ship, one of the old 500-meter ore buckets. You don’t see many of those anymore. This one was hauling ice from a mine in the Chas Boreale to a refinery in Dry Lake, way the hell out on the Solis Planum.”

  “I know where Dry Lake is,” I said, wondering how much of this she was inventing, and I sat down on the floor by the sleeper’s door. “You’ve got an awfully good memory.”

  “Yes,” she replied. “I do, don’t I?”

  “Do you also remember the freighter’s name?”

  “The Oryoku Maru, as a matter of fact.”

  “I can check these things out.”

  “I fully expect you to.”

  I watched her a minute or more, the angles and curves of her silhouette, wishing I had a pipe full of something strong, though I hadn’t smoked in years. The shadows and thin wash of dawn between us seemed thicker than mere light and the absence of light.

  “Does she know where she’s going?” I asked, wishing I could have kept those words back.

  “She thinks so. Anyhow, she heard there’d be a Fenrir priest on the freighter. She thought she could get it to talk with her.”

  “Why did she think that?”

  “Sailor can be a very persuasive woman,” Mikaela said, and laughed. “Hell, I don’t know. Ask her that when you find her.”

  “She thinks there’s a temple somewhere on the Solis?”

  “She wouldn’t have told me that, and I never bothered to ask. I don’t have the mark,” and Mikaela held out her left arm for me to see. “She fucked me, and she liked to talk, but she’s a pilgrim now, and I’m not.”

  “Did you try to stop her?”

  “Not really. I told her she was fucking gowed, looking for salvation with that bunch of devils, but we’re all free out here, Councilor. We choose our own fates.”

  Down on the street, something big roared and rattled past, its engines sounding just about ready for the scrapyard. Probably a harvester drone on its way to the locks and the fields beyond the dome. The sun was rising, and Hope VII was waking up around us.

  “There’s something else,” Mikaela said, “something she wanted me to show you.”

  “She knew that I was coming?”

  “She hoped you were coming. I should have hated her for that, but, like I said—”

  “—you’re all free out here.”

  “Bloody straight. Free as the goddamned dust,” she replied. There was a little more light coming in the window now, morning starting to clear away the dregs of night, and I could see that Mikaela was smiling despite the bitterness in her voice.

  “Did you want to go with her?”

  “Are you fucking cocked? I wouldn’t have gotten on that freighter with her for a million creds, not if she was right about there being a fucking Fenny priest aboard.”

  “So, what did she want you to show me?”

  “Are you going after her?” Mikaela asked, ignoring my question, offering her own instead, and she sat up and turned her face towards the open window.

  “Yes,” I told her. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Then you must be cocked. You must be mad as a wind shrake.”

  “I’m starting to think so. What did she want you to show me, Mikaela?”

  “Most people call me Mickie,” she said.

  And I thought about paying her the other twenty and letting her go back to Jun’ko’s or wherever it was she slept. There wasn’t much of her street-smart bluster left, and it was easy enough to see that she was scared. It was just as easy to figure out why.

  “My mum, she was a good left-footer,” Mikaela said. “God, Baby Jesus, the Pope, and St. Teresa, all that tieg crap. And she used to tell me and my sisters that only the evil people have any cause to fear evil, but what’d she know? She never even left the dome where she was born. She never spent time out on the frontiers, never saw the crazy shit goes off out here. All the evil she ever imagined could be chased away with rosary beads and a few Hail Marys.”

  “Is it something you’re afraid to show me, Mickie?” I asked, and she laughed and quickly hid her face in her hands. I didn’t say anything else for a while, just sat there with my back to the door of the sleeper, watching the world outside the window grow brighter by slow degrees, waiting until she stopped crying.

  I wish I could say that Sailor had lied, or at least exaggerated, when she told Mikaela that I’d beaten her. I wish it with the last, stingy speck of my dignity, the last vestiges of my sense of self-loathing. But if what I’m writing down here is to be the truth, the truth as complete as I might render it, then that’s one of the things I have to admit, to myself, to whoever might someday read this. To God, if I’m so unfortunate and the universe so dicked over that she or he or it actually exists.

  So, yes, I beat Sailor.

  She’d been gone for several days, which wasn’t unusual. She would do that sometimes, if we seemed to be wearing on one another. And it was mid-Pisces, deep into the long season of dust storms and endless wind, and we were both on edge. That time of year, just past the summer solstice, all of Herschel seems set on edge, the air ripe with static and raw nerves. I was busy with my duties at the university and, of course, with council business, and I doubt that I even took particular notice of her absence. I’ve never minded sleeping alone or taking my meals by myself. If I missed her, then I missed the conversation, the sex, the simple contact with another human body.

  She showed up just after dark one evening, and I could tell from the way she was dressed
that she hadn’t been at her mothers’ or at the scholars’ hostel near the north gate, the two places she usually went when we needed time apart. She was dirty, her hair coppery and stiff with dust, and she was wearing her long coat and heavy boots. So I guessed she’d been traveling outside the dome; maybe she’d taken the tunnel sled up to Gale or all the way down to Molesworth. I was in my study, going over notes for the next day’s lectures, and she came in and kissed me. Her lips were chapped and rough, faintly gritty, and I told her she needed a shower.

  “Yeah, that’d be nice,” she said. “If you stuck me right now, I think I’d bleed fucking dust.”

  “You were outside?” I asked, turning back to my desk. “That’s very adventuresome of you.”

  “Did you miss me?”

  “They’ve had me so busy, I hardly even noticed you were gone.”

  She laughed, the way she laughed whenever she wasn’t sure that I was joking. Then I heard her unbuckling her boots, and afterwards she was quiet for a bit. Two or three minutes, maybe. When I glanced up, she’d taken off her coat and gloves and rolled her right shirt sleeve up past the elbow.

  “Don’t be angry,” she said. “Please.”

  “What are you on about now?” I asked, and then I saw the fevery red marks on the soft underside of her forearm. It might have only been a rash, except for the almost perfect octagon formed by the intersection of welts or the three violet pustules at the center of it all. I’d seen the mark before, and I knew exactly what it meant.

  “At least hear me out,” she said. “I had to know—”

  “What?” I demanded, getting to my feet, pushing the chair roughly across the floor. “What precisely did you have to fucking know, Sailor?”

  “If it’s true. If there’s something more—”

  “More than what? Jesus fucking Christ. You let them touch you. You let those sick fucks inside of you.”

  “More than this,” she said, retreating a step or two towards the doorway and the hall, retreating from me. “More than night and goddamn day. More than getting old and dying and no one even giving a shit that I was ever alive.”