The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “After she took the mark?”

  “Yes. I hit her after she took the mark.”

  “But no charges were ever filed with the magistrate’s office in Herschel. Why do you think that is?”

  I smiled and set my bowl down on the portal ledge. Vibrations through the wall of the airship sent tiny concentric ripples across the surface of the dark liquid.

  “There have been allegations that the Council saw to it that no charges were filed against you,” the journalist said. “Are you aware of that?”

  “Sailor never brought charges against me because she knew if the case went to trial that I’d confess, and if I were in jail, I couldn’t follow her. And, besides, she didn’t have time left to waste on trials, Ms. Vaughn. The clock was ticking. She had more pressing matters to attend to.”

  “You mean the Fenrir?”

  “No, Ms. Vaughn, I mean making a fortune as a whore in Hope VII.”

  She laughed, the comfortable sort of laugh she might have laughed if we were old, close friends and what I’d just said was no more than a joke. Once, not long after I returned to Herschel City from IHF21, one of the members of the Council’s Board of Review and Advancement told me that she was deeply disturbed at my cynicism, my propensity for hatred, and that I was so quick to judge and anger. I admitted the fault and promised to meditate twice daily towards freeing myself of these shortcomings. I might as well have promised to raise the dead or make Mars safe for the XY chromo crowd. And now, sitting there on the Barsoom XI, facing this woman for whom my life and Sailor’s life and the Fenrir contagion were together no more than a chance for early promotion and a fat bonus from the network snigs, I realized that I cherished my ability to hate. I cherished it as surely as I’d cherished Sailor. As surely as I’d once stood in the shadows of docking zeppelins, joyful and dizzy with the bottomless wonder of childhood.

  I could have killed the smiling bitch then and there, could have slammed her head against the aluminum-epoxy alloy wall of the zep’s cabin until there was nothing left to shatter, and my fingers were slick and sticky with her blood and brains and the yellowish lube and cooling fluids of her ruptured optical and superpalatal implants.

  I could have done it in an instant, with no regrets. But there was still Sailor and the Fenrir’s music, that beckoning anglerfish bioluminescence shining brightly through absolute blackness and cold, leading me to a different and more unthinkable end than the sanctuary of a prison cell.

  “Do you really think you’ll find her?” Ariadne Vaughn asked.

  “If I live long enough,” I replied, turning to the portal again. The sun was beginning to set.

  “There are rumors, Councilor, that you’ve already been infected, that the contagion was passed to you by Sailor.”

  I slowly, noncommittally, nodded my head for her, for everyone at MBS studios and everyone who would soon be seeing this footage, and watched as the western sky turned the color of bruises. I didn’t bother telling her what she already knew, repeating data stored in her pretty patchwork skull, that the viroid can only be contracted directly from specialized delivery glands inside the cloaca of a Fenrir drone. The infected aren’t contagious. She knew that.

  “That’s fifteen,” I said instead, glancing from the portal to my watch, even though it had actually been more like twenty minutes since she’d started asking me questions. “Time’s all up.”

  “Well then, we wish you luck,” she said, mock cheerfully, ending the rambling interview, “and Godspeed in your return to Herschel City.”

  “Bullshit,” I said quickly, before she had a chance to blink the o-feed down. She frowned and shook her head.

  “You know that’s going to be edited out,” she said, returning the pad and stylus to her breast pocket. “You know that, Councilor.”

  “Yeah, I know that. But it felt good, anyway. Now, Ms. Vaughn, you tell me where you think she is,” I said and smiled at the flight attendant as she passed our seats.

  “I assume you’ve had a look at the Oryoku Maru’s route db,” she said, rubbing at her itching nose again. I wondered how long it would be before the acidic slake necessitated reconstructive rhinoplasty, or, if perhaps, it already had. “So you know its last refueling stop before the south polar crossing is at Lowell Station.”

  “Yes,” I told her. “I know that. But I don’t think Sailor will go that far. I think she’ll get off before Lowell. I’m guessing Bosporos.”

  “Then you’re guessing wrong, Councilor.”

  “And just what the hell makes you think that?” I asked. Ariadne Vaughn cocked her head ever so slightly to one side, raised her left eyebrow, and I imagined her rehearsing this moment in front of mirrors and prompts and vidloops, working to get that ah-see-this-is-what-I-know-that-you-don’t expression just exactly fucking right. I began to suspect there were other cameras planted in the cabin, that we were still being pixed for MBS. “There’s nothing in Lowell. There hasn’t been since the war.”

  “We have some reliable contacts in the manifest dep and hangar crews down there,” she replied, leaning back in her seat, either putting distance between us or playing out another part of the pantomime. “The last couple of years, Fenrir cultists have been moving in, occupying the old federal complex and some of the adjacent buildings. All the company people stay away from the place, of course, but they’ve seen some things. Some of them even think it’s a temple.”

  There was an excited prickling at the back of my neck, a dull but hopeful flutter deep in my chest and stomach, but I did my best not to give anything away. The journalist knew too much already. She certainly didn’t need me giving her more. “That’s interesting,” I said. “But the Council has a complete catalog of possible temple locations, as does the MCDC, and there’s nothing in either of them about Lowell.”

  “Which means what, Councilor? That the Council’s omniscient now? That it’s infallible? That the MCDC never fucks shit up? I think we both know that none of those things are true.”

  As she talked, I tried to recall what little I knew about Lowell Crater. It was an old settlement, one of the first, but a couple of fusion warheads dropped from orbit just after the start of the war had all but destroyed it. When the dust settled, after treaties had been signed and the plagues had finally burned themselves out, the Transit Authority had decided what was left at Lowell would make a good last stop before the South Pole. And that’s about all that I could recall, and none of it suggested that the Fenrir would choose Lowell as a temple site.

  “Assuming you’re not just yanking this out of your ass, Ms. Vaughn, why hasn’t MBS released this information? Why hasn’t the TA already filed disclosure reports with the MCDC and Offworld Control?”

  “Ask them,” she said, staring up at the ceiling of the cabin now. Maybe that’s where they hid the other cameras, I thought, not caring how paranoid I’d become. “My guess,” she continued, “they’re afraid the military’s gonna come sweeping in to clear the place out, and they’ll lose a base they can’t afford to lose, the economy being what it is. It’d cost them a fortune to relocate.”

  “And what about the network?”

  “The network?” she asked, looking at me again. “Well, we just want to be sure of our sources. No sense broadcasting stories that might cause a panic and have severe pecuniary consequences, if there’s a chance it’s all just something dreamed up by a few bored mechs stuck in some shithole at the bottom of the world. MBS will release the story, when we’re ready. Maybe you’ll be a part of it, Councilor, before this thing is done.”

  And then she stood up, thanked me for my time, and walked back to her assigned seat nearer the front of the passenger cabin. I sat alone, silently repeating all the things she’d said, hearing her voice in my head—But they’ve seen some things. Some of them even think it’s a temple. Outside the airship’s protective womb, night was quickly claiming the high plains of the Sun, and I could just make out the irregular red-orange silhouette of Phobos rising—or so it seemed, th
at illusion of ascension—above the western horizon.

  It took me another two weeks to reach Lowell. The commercial airships don’t run that far south, and I deplaned at Holden (noting that Ariadne Vaughn did not) and then spent four days trying to find someone willing to transport me the two-thousand-plus kilometers south and west to Bosporos City. From there, I hoped to buy a nook on the TA line the rest of the way down to Lowell.

  Finally, I paid a platinum prospector half of what was left in my accounts to make the trip. She grumbled endlessly about pirates and dust sinks, about the wear and mileage the trip would put on her rusted-out crawler. But it was likely more money than she’d see in the next three or four years cracking rocks and tagging cores, and we only broke down once, when the aft sediment filter clogged and the engine overheated. I had a narrow, filthy bunk behind the Laskar coils, and spent much of the trip asleep or watching the monotonous terrain roll by outside the windows. To the east, there were occasional, brief glimpses of shadowed canyonlands which I knew led down to the wide, empty expanse of the Argyre Planitia laid out almost six klicks below the surrounding plains. I considered the possibility that it might be the corpse-strewn crater from my dreams, this monstrous wound carved deep into the face of Mars almost four thousand million years ago during the incessant bombardments of the Noachian Age, when the solar system was still young and hot and violent.

  That thought only made the nightmares worse, of course. I considered asking the prospector to find another route, one not so near the canyons, but I knew she’d only laugh her bitter laugh, start in on dust sinks again, and tell me to go to hell. So I didn’t say anything. Instead, I lay listening to the stones being ground to powder beneath the crawler’s treads, to the wind battering itself against the hull, to the old-womanish wheeze of the failing Laskar coils, trying not to remember the thing Mikaela had shown me beneath Hope VII or what I might yet find in the ruins of Lowell. I slept, and I dreamed.

  And on the final afternoon before we reached Bosporos City, dreaming, I made my way at last to the center of the crater. There was a desperate, lightless crawl through the mummified intestines of some leviathan while the Fenrir’s pipes and strings and drums pounded at my senses. My ears and nose were bleeding when I emerged through a gaping tear in the creature’s gut and stood, half-blind, blinking up at towering ebony spires and soaring arches and stairways that seemed to reach almost all the way to the stars. The music poured from this black city, gushed from every window and open doorway, and I sank to my knees and cried.

  “You weren’t ever meant to come here,” Sailor said, and I realized she was standing over me. “You weren’t invited.”

  “I can’t do this shit anymore,” I sobbed, for once not caring if she saw my weakness. “I can’t.”

  “You never should have started.”

  My tears turned to crystal and fell with a sound like wind chimes. My heart turned to cut glass in my chest.

  “Is this what you were looking for?” I asked her, gazing up at the spires and arches, hating that cruel, singing architecture, even as my soul begged it to open up and swallow me alive.

  “No. This is only a dream, Dorry,” she said, speaking to me as she might a child. “You made this place. You’ve been building it all your life.”

  “No. That’s not true,” I replied, though I understood perfectly well that it was, that it must be. The distance across the corpse-littered crater was only half the diameter of my own damnation, nothing more.

  “If I let you see, will go back?” she asked. “Will you go back and forget me?” She was speaking very softly, but I had no trouble hearing her over the wind and the music and the wheezing Laskar coils. I must have answered, must have said yes, because she took my hand in hers, and the black city before us collapsed and dissolved, taking the music with it, and I stood, instead, on a low platform in what I at first mistook for a room. But then I saw the fleshy, pulsing walls, the purple-green interlace of veins and capillaries, the massive supporting ribs or ridges, blacker than the vanished city, dividing that place into seven unequal crescent chambers. I stood somewhere within a living thing, within something that dwarfed even the fallen giants from the crater.

  And each of the crescent chambers contained the remains of a single gray pilgrim, their bodies metamorphosed over months or years or decades to serve the needs of this incomplete, demonic biology. They were each no more than appendages now, human beings become coalesced obligate parasites or symbiotes, their glinting, chitinous bodies all but lost in a labyrinth of mucosal membranes, buried by the array of connective tissues and tubes that sprouted from them like cancerous umbilical cords.

  Anglerfish. Is it one word or two?

  And there, half buried in the chamber walls, was what remained of Sailor, just enough left of her face that I could be sure it was her. Something oily and red and viscous that wasn’t blood leaked from the hole that had been her mouth, from the wreck of her lips and teeth, her mouth become only one more point of exit or entry for the restless, palpitating cords connecting her with this enormous organism. Her eyes opened partway, those atrophied slits parting to reveal bright, wet orbs like pools of night, and the fat, segmented tube emerging from the gap of her thighs began to quiver violently.

  Can you see me now, Dorry? she whispered, her voice burrowing in behind my eyes, filled with pain and joy and regret beyond all comprehension. Have you seen enough? Or do you need to see more?

  “No,” I told her, waking up, opening my eyes wide and vomiting onto the floor beneath my bunk. The Laskar coils had stopped wheezing, and the crawler was no longer moving. I rolled over and lay very still, cold and sick and sweating, staring up at the dingy, low ceiling until the prospector finally came looking for me.

  When I left home back in Aries, I brought the monk’s book with me, the book from Sailor’s crate of discards. I sit here on my bedroll in one corner of one room inside the concrete and steel husk of a bombed-out federal compound in Lowell. I have come this far, and I am comforted by the knowledge that there’s only a little ways left to go. I open the book and read the words aloud again, the words underlined in red ink, that I might understand how not to lose my way in this tale which is almost all that remains of me: “No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their truer nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a construct of the mind of man.”

  I think this means I can stop when I’m ready.

  I’ve been in Lowell for almost a full week now, writing all this shit down. Today is Monday, Libra 17th. We are so deep in winter, and I have never been this far south.

  There is a silence here, in this dead city, that seems almost as solid as the bare concrete around me. I’m camped far enough in from the transfer station that the hangar noise, the comings and goings of the zeps and spinners, the clockwork opening and closing of the dome, seem little more than a distant, occasional thunder. I’m not sure I’ve ever known such a profound silence as this. Were I sane, it might drive me mad. There are sounds, sounds other than the far-off noise of the station, but they are petty things that only seem to underscore the silence. They’re more like the too-often recollected memory of sound, an ancient woman deaf since childhood remembering what sound was like before she lost it forever.

  Last night, I lay awake, fighting sleep, listening to my heart and all those other petty sounds. I dozed towards dawn, and when I woke there was a woman crouched a few feet from my bedroll. She was reading the monk’s book, flipping the pages in the dark, and, at first, I thought I was dreaming again, that this was another dream of Sailor. But then she closed the book and looked at me. Even in the dark, I could tell she wasn’t as young as Sailor, and I saw that her head was shaved down to the skin. Her eyes were iridescent and flashed blue-green in the gloom.

  “May I switch on the light?” I asked, pointing towards the travel lamp near my pillow.

  “If you wis
h,” she replied and set the book back down among my things. “If you need it.”

  I touched the lamp, and it blinked obediently on, throwing long shadows against the walls and floor and ceiling of the room where I was sleeping. The woman squinted, cursed, and turned her face away. I rubbed at my own eyes and sat up.

  “What do you want?” I asked her.

  “We saw you, yesterday. You were watching.”

  The woman was a Fenrir priest. She wore the signs on her skin and ragged clothing. Her feet were bare, and there was a simple onyx ring on each of her toes. I could tell that she’d been very beautiful once.

  “Yes,” I told her. “I was watching.”

  “But you didn’t come for the mark,” she said, not asking because she already knew the answer. “You came to find someone.”

  “Does that happen very often?”

  She turned her face towards me again, shading her eyes with her left hand. “Do you think you will find her, Dorry? Do you think you’ll take her back?”

  It hadn’t been hard to locate the temple. The old federal complex lies near the center of the dome, what the bombs left of it, anyway, and finding it was really no more than a matter of walking. The day that I arrived in Lowell City, one of the Transfer Authority’s security agents had detained and questioned me for an hour or so, and I’d assured her that I was there as a scholar, looking for records that might have survived the war. I’d shown her the paper map that I’d purchased at a bookshop in Bosporos and pointed out the black X I’d made about half a mile north of the feddy, near one of the old canals. She’d looked at the map two or three times, asked me a few questions about the journey down from Holden, and then made a call to her senior officer before releasing me.

  “You don’t want to go down that way,” she’d told me, tapping the map with an index finger. “I can’t hold you here or deport you, Councilor. But you better trust me on this. You don’t want to go down there.”

  “You’ve been chasing her such a long time,” the woman crouched on the floor before me said, speaking more quietly now and smiling. Her teeth were filed to sharp points, and she licked at them with the tip of her violet tongue. “You must have had a lot of chances to give up. There must have been so much despair.”