The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “There isn’t time now,” she replies and stubs out her cigarette on the wall beside the bed, then drops the butt to the floor, and I think I hear a very faint hiss when it hits the damp tiles. She’s left an ashen smudge on the wall near the plastic headboard, and that, I think, must be how evil enters the world.

  04. The Book (1)

  This is the very first time that she will show me the scrapbook. I call it a scrapbook, because I don’t know what else to call it. Her robotic knees whir and click softly as she leans forward and snaps open the leather attaché case. She takes the scrapbook out and sets it on the counter beside the rust-streaked sink. This is an hour or so after the first time we made love, and I’m still in bed, watching her and thinking how much more beautiful she is without the ungainly chromium-plated prosthetics. The skin around the external fix posts and neural ports is pink and inflamed, and I wonder if she even bothers to keep them clean. I wonder how much it must hurt, being hauled about by those contraptions. She closes the lid of the briefcase, her every move deliberate, somehow calculated without seeming stiff, and the ankle joints purr like a tick-tock cat as she turns towards me. She is still naked, and I marvel again at the pallid thatch of her pubic hair. She retrieves the scrapbook from the sink.

  “You look at the photographs,” she says, “and tell me what you see there. This is what matters now, your impressions. We know the rest already.”

  “I need a hot shower,” I tell her, but she shakes her head, and the robotic legs whir and move her towards the bed on broad tridactyl feet.

  “Later,” she says. “Later, you can have a hot shower, after we’re done here.”

  And so I take the scrapbook from her when she offers it to me—a thick sheaf of yellowed pages held between two sturdy brown pieces of card-stock, the whole thing bound together with a length of brown string. The string has been laced through perforations in the pages and through small silver grommets set into the cardstock covers, and each end of the string is finished with a black aiglet to keep it from fraying. The string has been tied into a sloppy sort of reef knot. There is nothing printed or written on the cover.

  “Open it,” she says, and her prosthetics whine and hiss pneumatic laments as she sits down on the bed near me. The box springs creak.

  “What am I supposed to see?” I ask her.

  “You are not supposed to see anything.”

  I open the scrapbook, and inside each page displays four black-andwhite photographs, held in place by black metal photo corners. And at once I see, as it is plainly obvious, that all the photographs in the book are of the same man. Page after page after page, the same man, though not always the same photograph. They look like mug shots. The man is Caucasian, maybe forty-five years old, maybe fifty. His eyes are dark, and always he is staring directly into the camera lens. There are deep creases in his forehead, and his skin is mottled, large pored, acne-scarred, pockmarked. His lips are very thin, and his nose large and hooked. There are bags beneath his eyes.

  “Who is he?” I ask.

  “That’s not your problem,” she replies. “Just look at the pictures and tell me what you see.”

  I turn another page, and another, and another after that, and on every one that haggard face glares back at up me. “They’re all the same.”

  “They are not,” she says.

  “I mean, they’re all of the same man. Who is he?”

  “I said that’s not your problem. And surely you must know I haven’t brought you here to tell me what I can see for myself.”

  So, I want to ask why she has brought me here, only I cannot recall being brought here. I am not certain I can recall anything before this white dripping room. It seems in this moment to be all I have ever known. I turn more pages, some so brittle they flake at my touch. But there is nothing to see here but the man with the shaved head and the hooked nose.

  “Take your time,” she says and lights another cigarette. “Just don’t take too much of it.”

  “If this is about the syringes—”

  “This isn’t about the syringes. But we’ll come to that later, trust me. And that Taiwanese chap, too, the lieutenant. What’s his name?”

  “The war isn’t going well, is it?” I ask her, and now I look up from the scrapbook lying open in my lap and watch the darkness filling the doorway to our room. Our room or her room or my room, I cannot say which. That darkness seems as sticky and solid as hot asphalt.

  “That depends whose side you’re on,” she says and smiles and flicks ash onto the floor.

  It occurs to me for the first time that someone might be watching from that darkness, getting everything on tape, making notes, waiting and biding their time. I think I might well go mad if I stare too long into that impenetrable black. I look back down at the book, trying to see whatever it is she wants me to see on those pages, whatever it is she needs to know.

  03. The Dream

  The night after I lost the girl who lost the syringe—if any of that did in fact occur—I awoke in the white room on the not-quite-oyster sheets, gasping and squinting at those bare fluorescent tubes. My mouth so dry, my chest hurting, and the dream already beginning to fade. There was a pencil and a legal pad on the table beside the bed, and I wrote this much down:

  This must have been near the end of it all, just before I finally woke. Being on the street of an Asian city, maybe Tokyo, I don’t know. Possibly an amalgam of every Asian city I have ever visited. Night. Flickering neon and cosplay girls and noodle shops. The commingled smells of car exhaust and cooking and garbage. And I’m late for an appointment in a building I can see, an immaculate tower of shimmering steel. I can’t read any of the street signs, because they’re all in Japanese or Mandarin or whatever. I’m lost. Men mutter as they pass me. The cosplay girls laugh and point. There’s an immense animatronic Ganesh-like thing directing traffic (and I suppose this is foreshadowing). I finally find someone who doesn’t speak English, but she speaks German, and she shows me where to cross the street to reach the steel tower.

  There might have been a lobby and an elevator ride, or I may only be filling in a jump cut. But then I was in the examination room of what seemed to be something very like a dentist’s office. Only there wasn’t that dentist-office smell. There was some other smell that only added to my unease and disorientation. I was asked to take a seat, please, in this thing that wasn’t quite a dentist’s chair. There was a woman with a British accent asking me questions, checking off items on a form of some sort.

  She kept asking about my memory, and if I were comfortable. And then the woman with the British accent placed her thumb beneath my jaw, and I began to feel cold and fevery. She said something like, We’ll be as gentle as we can. That’s when I saw that she was holding my detached jaw in her hands. And I could see my tongue and teeth and gums and lower lip and everything else. The sensation of cold grew more intense, and she told me to please remain calm, that it would all be over soon. Then she pressed something like a dental drill to my forehead, and there was a horrible whine and a burring sort of pain. She set the drill aside and plugged a jack into the roof of my mouth, something attached to an assortment of coaxial cables, and there was a suffocating blackness that seemed to rush up all around me.

  I stare for a few moments at what I’ve written, then return the pencil and the pad to the table. My mouth tastes like onions and curry and aluminum foil, a metallic tang like a freshly filled molar, and I lie back down and shut my eyes tightly, wondering if the throbbing in my chest is the beginning of a heart attack or only indigestion. I’m sick to my stomach and dizzy, and I know that lying down and closing my eyes is the worst thing I could do for either. But I cannot bear the white glare of those bulbs. I will vomit, or it will pass without having vomited, but I won’t look up into that cold light. I do not know where I am or how I got here. I cannot recall ever having seen this dingy room before. No, not dingy—squalid. The sound of dripping water is very loud, a leaky ceiling, so at least maybe the damp sheets do n
ot mean that I’ve pissed myself in my sleep. I lie very still, listening to the dripping water and to my pounding heart and to a restless sound that might be automobiles on the street outside.

  05. The White Woman

  She leans close, and her lips brush the lobe of my right ear, her tepid breath on my cheek, breath that smells of tobacco and more faintly of Indian cooking (cardamom, tamarind, fenugreek, cloves). She whispers, and her voice is so soft, so soft that she might in this moment have become someone else entirely.

  “Nothing to be desired anymore,” she whispers. “Nichts gewünscht zu werden.”

  I don’t argue. In this place and time, these are somehow words of kindness, words of absolution, and within them seems to rest the vague hope of release. Her body is warm against mine, her flat belly pressed against mine which is not so flat as it once was, her strong thighs laid against my thighs and her small breasts against my breasts. Together, we have formed an improbable binary opposition, lovers drawn from a deck of cards, my skin so pink and raw and hers so chalky and fine.

  “Gelassen gehen Sie,” she whispers, and I open my eyes and gaze up into hers, those dazzling, broken blue gems. Her beauty is unearthly, and I might almost believe her an exile from another galaxy, a fallen angel, the calculated product of biotech and genetic alchemy. She lifts herself, rising up on those muscular arms, my hips seized firmly and held fast between the stumps of her transfemoral amputations. There was an accident when she was only a child, but that’s all I can now recall. This is how a mouse must feel, I think, in the claws of a cat, or a mouse lost in a laboratory maze. She smiles, and that expression could mean so many different things.

  She leans down again and kisses me, her tongue sliding easily between my teeth.

  The room is filled with music, which I am almost certain wasn’t there only a moment before. The scratchy, brittle tones of a phonograph recording, something to listen to besides the goddamn rain and the leaking ceiling and the creaking bed springs. And then she enters me, and it comes as no surprise that the robotic legs are not the full extent of her prosthetics. She slips her left arm beneath me, pulling me towards her, and I arch my back, finding her rhythm and the more predictable rhythm of the mechanical cock working its way deeper inside me.

  In all the universe, there might be nothing but this room. In all the world, there might only be the two of us.

  She kisses me again, but this time it is not a gentle act. This time, there is force and a violence only half-repressed, and I think of cats again. I do not want to think of cats, but I do. She will suck my breath, will draw my soul from me through my nostrils and lips to get at whatever it is she needs to know. How many souls would a woman like her have swallowed in her lifetime? She must be filled with ghosts, a gypsum alabaster bottle stoppered with two blue stones—lapis lazuli or chalcedony—cleverly shaped to resemble the eyes of a woman and not a cat and not an alabaster bottle filled with devoured souls.

  Our lips part, and if she has taken my soul, it’s nothing I ever needed, anyway.

  My mouth wanders across the smooth expanse above and between her breasts, and then I find her right nipple, and my tongue traces a mandala three times about her areola. Perhaps I have sorceries all my own.

  “No, you don’t,” she says and thrusts her hips hard against mine.

  And maybe I remember something then, so maybe this room is not all there is in all the world. Maybe I recall a train rushing along through long darknesses and brief puddles of mercury-vapour light, barreling forward, floating on old maglev tracks, and all around me are the cement walls of a narrow tunnel carved out deep below a city whose name I cannot recollect. But cities might not have names—I presently have no evidence that they do—and so perhaps this is not exactly forgetfulness or amnesia. I turn my head and look out the window as the train races past a ruined and deserted station. I’m gripping a semi-automatic the way some women would hold onto a rosary or a string of tasbih beads. My forefinger slips through the familiar ring of the trigger guard . . .

  “You still with me, sister?” the albino woman asks, and I nod as the memory of the train and the gun dissolves and is forgotten once again. I am sweating now, even in this cold, dank room on these sodden not-quite-oyster sheets, I am sweating. I could not say if it is from fear or exertion or from something else entirely.

  And she comes then, her head bending back so far I think her neck will snap, the taut V of her clavicles below her delicate throat, and if only I had the teeth to do the job. She comes with a shudder and a gasp and a sudden rush of profanity in some odd, staccato language that I do not speak, have never even heard before, but still I know that those words are profane. I see that she is sweating, too, brilliant drops standing out like nectar on her too-white skin, and I lick away a salty trickle from her chest. So there’s another way that she is in me now. Her body shudders again, and she releases me, withdrawing and rolling away to lie on her back. She is breathing heavily and grinning, and it is a perfectly merciless sort of grin, choked with triumph and bitter guile. I envy her that grin and the callous heart in back of it. Then my eyes go to that space between her legs, that fine white thatch of hair, and for a moment I only imagine the instrument of my seduction was not a prosthesis. For a moment, I watch the writhing, opalescent thing, still glistening and slick with me. Its body bristles with an assortment of fleshy spines, and I cannot help but ponder what venoms or exotic nanorobotic or nubot serums they might contain.

  “Only a fleeting trick of the light, my love,” she says, still grinning that brutal grin of hers. And I blink, and now there is only a dildo there between her legs, four or five inches of beige silicone molded into an erect phallus. I close my eyes again and listen to the music and the rain tapping against the windowpane.

  01. The Train

  The girl is sitting across the aisle and only three rows in front of me, and there’s almost no one else riding the tube this late, just a very old man reading a paperback novel. But he’s seated far away, many rows ahead of us, and only has eyes for his book, which he holds bent double in trembling, liver-spotted hands. The girl is wearing a raincoat made of lavender vinyl, the collar turned up high, so it’s hard for me to get a good look at her face. Her hair is long and black and oily, and her hands are hidden inside snug leather gloves that match her raincoat. She’s younger than I expected, maybe somewhere in her early twenties, maybe younger still, and a few years ago that might have made what I have to do next a lot harder. But running wet dispatch for the Greeks, you get numb to this sort of shit quick or you get into some other line of work. It doesn’t matter how old she is, or that she might still have a mother and a father somewhere who love her, sisters or brothers, or that skimming parcels is the only thing keeping her from a life of whoring or selling herself off bit by bit to the carrion apes. These are most emphatically not my troubles. And soon, they will no longer be hers, either.

  I glance back down the aisle towards the geezer, but he’s still lost in the pages of his paperback.

  The girl in the lavender coat is carrying, concealed somewhere on her person, seven 3/10ths cc syringes, and if I’m real goddamn fortunate, I’ll never find out what’s in them. It is not my job to know. It is my job to retrieve the package with as little fuss and fanfare and bloodshed as possible and then get it back across the border to the spooks in Alexandroupoli.

  She wipes at her nose and then stares out the window at the tube walls hidden in the darkness.

  I take a deep breath and glance back towards the old man. He hasn’t moved a muscle, unless it’s been to flip a page or two.

  Mister, I think, you just stay absolutely goddamn still, and maybe you’ll get to find out how it ends.

  Then I check my gun again, to be double fucking sure the safety’s off. With any sort of half-assed luck, I won’t need the M9 tonight, but you live by better safe than sorry—if you live at all. The girl wipes her nose a second time and sniffles. Then she leans forward, resting her forehead against the back of th
e seat in front of her.

  There’s no time left to worry about whether or not the surveillance wasps are still running, taking it all in from their not-so-secret nooks and crannies, taking it all down. Another six minutes and we’ll be pulling into the next terminal, and I have no intention of chasing this bitch in her lavender mack all over Ankara.

  I stand and move quickly down the aisle towards her, flexing my left wrist to extend the niobium barb implanted beneath my skin. The neurotoxin will stop her heart before she even feels the prick, or so they tell me. Point is, she won’t make a sound. It’ll look like a heart attack, if anyone bothers with an autopsy, which I suspect they won’t. I’ve been up against the Turks enough times now to know they only recruit the sort no one’s ever going to miss.

  But then she turns and looks directly at me, and I’ve never seen eyes so blue. Or I’ve never seen eyes that shade of blue. Eyes that are both so terribly empty and so filled to bursting, and I know that something’s gone very, very goddamn wrong. I know someone somewhere’s lied to me, and this isn’t just some kid plucked from the slums to mule pilfered load. She sits there, staring up at me, and I reach for the 9mm, shit-sure that’s exactly the wrong thing to do, knowing that I’ve panicked even if I can’t quite fathom why I’ve panicked. I’m close enough to get her with the barb, though now there might be a struggle, and then I’d have to deal with the old bookworm up front. I’ve hesitated, allowed myself to be distracted, and there’s no way it’s not gonna go down messy.

  She smiles, a voracious, carnivorous smile.

  “Nothing to be desired anymore,” she says, and I feel the muscles in my hand and wrist relax, feel the barb retracting. I feel the gun slip from my slack fingers and hear it clatter to the floor.

  “Go back to your seat,” she tells me, but I’ve fallen so far into those eyes—those eyes that lead straight down through endless electric blue chasms, and I almost don’t understand what she means. She leans over and picks my gun up off the floor of the maglev and hands it back to me.