The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I nod my head, and I also look at the clock.

  “Our time’s almost up,” I say, and she agrees with me, then looks over her shoulder again at the green-brown hills beyond San Jose.

  “I have a question,” I say.

  “That’s why I’m here,” Dr. Eleanor Teasdale tells me, imbuing the words with all the false veracity of her craft. Having affected the role of the good patient, I pretend that she isn’t lying, hoping the pretense lends weight to my question.

  “Have they sent a retrieval team yet? To Mars, to the caverns on Arsia Mons?”

  “I wouldn’t know that,” she says. “I’m not privileged to such information. However, if you’d like, I can file an inquiry on your behalf. Someone with the agency might get back to you.”

  “No,” I reply. “I was just curious if you knew,” and I almost ask her another question, about Darwin’s finches, and the tortoises and mockingbirds and iguanas that once populated the Galápagos Islands. But then the black minute hand on the clock ticks forward, deleting another sixty seconds from the future, converting it to the past, and I decide we’ve both had enough for one morning.

  Don’t fret, Dr. T. You’ve done your bit for the cause, swept me off my feet, and now we’re dancing. If you were here, in the hospital room with me, I’d even let you lead. I really don’t care if the nurses mind or not. I’d turn up the jack, find just the right tune, and dance with the ghost you’ve let them make of you. I can never be too haunted, after all. Hush, hush. It’s just, they give me these drugs, you see, so I need to sleep for a while, and then the waltz can continue. Your answers are coming.

  March 24, 2037 (Wednesday)

  It’s raining. I asked one of the nurses to please raise the blinds in my room so I can watch the storm hammering the windowpane, pelting the glass, smudging my view of the diffident sky. I count off the moments between occasional flashes of lightning and the thunderclaps that follow. Storms number among the very few things remaining in all the world that can actually soothe my nerves. They certainly beat the synthetic opiates I’m given, beat them all the way to hell and back. I haven’t ever bothered to tell any of my doctors or the nurses this. I don’t know why; it simply hasn’t occurred to me to do so. I doubt they’d care, anyway.

  I’ve asked to please not be disturbed for a couple of hours, and I’ve been promised my request will be honored. That should give me the time I need to finish this.

  Dr. Teasdale, I will readily confess that one of the reasons it’s taken me so long to reach this point is the fact that words fail. It’s an awful cliché, I know, but also a point I cannot stress strongly enough. There are sights and experiences to which the blunt and finite tool of human language is not equal. I know this, though I’m no poet. But I want that caveat understood. This is not what happened aboard Pilgrimage; this is the sky seen through a window blurred by driving rain. It’s the best I can manage, and it’s the best you’ll ever get. I’ve said all along, if the technology existed to plug in and extract the memories from my brain, I wouldn’t deign to call it rape. Most of the people who’ve spent so much time and energy and money trying to prise from me the truth about the fate of Pilgrimage and its crew, they’re only scientists, after all. They have no other aphrodisiac but curiosity. As for the rest, the spooks and politicians, the bureaucrats and corporate shills, those guys are only along for the ride, and I figure most of them know they’re in over their heads.

  I could make of it a fairy tale. It might begin:

  Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived in New York. She was an anthropologist and shared a tiny apartment in downtown Brooklyn with her lover. And her lover was a woman named Amery Domico, who happened to be a molecular geneticist, exobiologist, and also an astronaut. They had a cat and a tank of tropical fish. They always wanted a dog, but the apartment was too small. They could probably have afforded a better, larger place to live, a loft in midtown Manhattan, perhaps, north and east of the flood zone, but the anthropologist was happy enough with Brooklyn, and her lover was usually on the road, anyway. Besides, walking a dog would have been a lot of trouble.

  No. That’s not working. I’ve never been much good with irony. And I’m better served by the immediacy of present tense. So, instead:

  “Turn around, Merrick,” she says. “You’ve come so far, and there is so little time.”

  And I do as she tells me. I turn towards the voice, towards the airlock’s open inner hatch. There’s no sign of Amery, or anyone else, for that matter. The first thing I notice, stepping from the brightly lit airlock, is that the narrow heptagonal corridor beyond is mostly dark. The second thing I notice is the mist. I know at once that it is mist, not smoke. It fills the hallway from deck to ceiling, and, even with the blue in-floor path lighting, it’s hard to see more than a few feet ahead. The mist swirls thickly around me, like Halloween phantoms, and I’m about to ask Amery where it’s coming from, what it’s doing here, when I notice the walls.

  Or, rather, when I notice what’s growing on the walls. I’m fairly confident I’ve never seen anything with precisely that texture before. It half reminds me (but only half) of the rubbery blades and stipes of kelp. It’s almost the same color as kelp, too, some shade that’s not quite brown, nor green, nor a very dark purple. It also reminds me of tripe. It glimmers wetly, as though it’s sweating, or secreting, mucus. I stop and stare, simultaneously alarmed and amazed and revolted. It is revolting, extremely so, this clinging material covering over and obscuring almost everything. I look up and see that it’s also growing on the ceiling. In places, long tendrils of it hang down like dripping vines. Dr. Teasdale, I want so badly to describe these things, this waking nightmare, in much greater detail. I want to describe it perfectly. But, as I’ve said, words fail. For that matter, memory fades. And there’s so much more to come.

  A few thick drops of the almost colorless mucus drip from the ceiling onto my visor, and I gag reflexively. The sensors in my EVA suit respond by administering a dose of a potent antiemetic. The nausea passes quickly, and I use my left hand to wipe the slime away as best I can.

  I follow the corridor, going very slowly because the mist is only getting denser and, as I move farther away from the airlock, I discover that the stuff growing on the walls and ceiling is also sprouting from the deck plates. It’s slippery and squelches beneath my boots. Worse, most of the path lighting is now buried beneath it, and I switch on the magspots built into either side of my helmet. The beams reach only a short distance into the gloom.

  “You’re almost there,” Amery says, Amery or the AI speaking with her stolen voice. “Ten yards ahead, the corridor forks. Take the right fork. It leads directly to the transhab module.”

  “You want to tell me what’s waiting in there?” I ask, neither expecting, nor actually desiring, an answer.

  “Nothing is waiting,” Amery replies. “But there are many things we would have you see. There’s not much time. You should hurry.”

  And I do try to walk faster, but, despite the suit’s stabilizing exoskeleton and gyros, almost lose my footing on the slick deck. Where the corridor forks, I go right, as instructed. The habitation module is open, the hatch fully dilated, as though I’m expected. Or maybe it’s been left open for days or months or years. I linger a moment on the threshold. It’s so very dark in there. I call out for Amery. I call out for anyone at all, but this time there’s no answer. I try my comms again, and there’s not even static. I fully comprehend that in all my life I have never been so alone as I am at this moment, and, likely, I never will be again. I know, too, with a sudden and unwavering certainty, that Amery Domico is gone from me forever, and that I’m the only human being aboard Pilgrimage.

  I take three or four steps into the transhab, but stop when something pale and big around as my forearm slithers lazily across the floor directly in front of me. If there was a head, I didn’t see it. Watching as it slides past, I think of pythons, boas, anacondas, though, in truth, it bears only a passing similarity to
a snake of any sort.

  “You will not be harmed, Merrick,” Amery says from a speaker somewhere in the darkness. The voice is almost reassuring. “You must trust that you will not be harmed, so long as you do as we say.”

  “What was that?” I ask. “On the floor just now. What was that?”

  “Soon now, you will see,” the voice replies. “We have ten million children. Soon, we will have ten million more. We are pleased that you have come to say goodbye.”

  “They want to know what’s happened,” I say, breathing too hard, much too fast, gasping despite the suit’s ministrations. “At Jupiter, what happened to the ship? Where’s the crew? Why is Pilgrimage in orbit around Mars?”

  I turn my head to the left, and where there were once bunks, I can only make out a great swelling or clot of the kelp-like growth. Its surface swarms with what I briefly mistake for maggots.

  “I didn’t come to say goodbye,” I whisper. “This is a retrieval mission, Amery. We’ve come to take you . . .” and I trail off, unable to complete the sentence, too keenly aware of its irrelevance.

  “Merrick, are you beginning to see?”

  I look away from the not-kelp and the wriggling things that aren’t maggots and take another step into the habitation module.

  “No, Amery. I’m not. Help me to see. Please.”

  “Close your eyes,” she says, and I do. And when I open them again, I’m lying in bed with her. There’s still an hour or so left before dawn, and we’re lying in bed, naked together beneath the blankets, staring up through the apartment’s skylight. It’s snowing. This is the last night before Amery leaves for Cape Canaveral, the last time I see her, because I’ve refused to be present at the launch or even watch it online. She has her arms around me, and one of the big, ungainly hovers is passing low above our building. I do my best to pretend that its complex array of landing beacons are actually stars.

  Amery kisses my right cheek, and then her lips brush lightly against my ear. “We could not understand, Merrick, because we were too far and could not remember,” she says, quoting Joseph Conrad. The words roll from her tongue and palate like the spiraling snowflakes tumbling down from that tangerine sky. “We were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign, and no memories.”

  Once, Dr. Teasdale, when Amery was sick with the flu, I read her most of Heart of Darkness. She always liked when I read to her. When I came to that passage, she had me press highlight, so that she could return to it later.

  “The earth seemed unearthly,” she says, and I blink, dismissing the illusion. I’m standing near the center of the transhab now, and in the stark white light from my helmet I see what I’ve been brought here to see. Around me, the walls leak, and every inch of the module seems alive with organisms too alien for any earthborn vernacular. I’ve spent my adult life describing artifacts and fossil bones, but I will not even attempt to describe the myriad of forms that crawled and skittered and rolled through the ruins of Pilgrimage. I would fail if I did, and I would fail utterly.

  “We want you to know we had a choice,” Amery says. “We want you to know that, Merrick. And what is about to happen, when you leave this ship, we want you to know that is also of our choosing.”

  I see her, then, all that’s left of her, or all that she’s become. The rough outline of her body, squatting near one of the lower bunks. Her damp skin shimmers, all but indistinguishable from the rubbery substance growing throughout the vessel. Only, no, her skin is not so smooth as that, but pocked with countless oozing pores or lesions. Though the finer features of her face have been obliterated—there is no mouth remaining, no eyes, only a faint ridge that was her nose—I recognize her beyond any shadow of a doubt. She is rooted to that spot, her legs below the knees, her arms below the elbow, simply vanishing into the deck. There is constant, eager movement from inside her distended breasts and belly. And where the cleft of her sex once was . . . I don’t have the language to describe what I saw there. But she bleeds life from that impossible wound, and I know that she has become a daughter of the oily black cloud that Pilgrimage encountered near Ganymede, just as she is mother and father to every living thing trapped within the crucible of that ship, every living thing but me.

  “There isn’t any time left,” the voice from the AI says calmly, calmly but sternly. “You must leave now, Merrick. All available resources on this craft have been depleted, and we must seek sanctuary or perish.”

  I nod and turn away from her, because I understand as much as I’m ever going to understand, and I’ve seen more than I can bear to remember. I move as fast as I dare across the transhab and along the corridor leading back to the airlock. In less than five minutes, I’m safely strapped into my seat on the taxi again, decoupling and falling back towards Yastreb-4. A few hours later, while I’m waiting out my time in decon, Commander Yun tells me that Pilgrimage has fired its main engines and broken orbit. In a few moments, it will enter the thin Martian atmosphere and begin to burn. Our AI has plotted a best-guess trajectory, placing the point of impact within the Tharsis Montes, along the flanks of Arsia Mons. He tells me that the exact coordinates, -5.636° N, 241.259° E, correspond to one of the collapsed cavern roofs dotting the flanks of the ancient volcano. The pit named Jeanne, discovered way back in 2007.

  “There’s not much chance of anything surviving the descent,” he says. I don’t reply, and I never tell him, nor anyone else aboard the Yastreb-4, what I saw during my seventeen minutes on Pilgrimage.

  And there’s no need, Dr. Teasdale, for me to tell you what you already know. Or what your handlers know. Which means, I think, that we’ve reached the end of this confession. Here’s the feather in your cap. May you choke on it.

  Outside my hospital window, the rain has stopped. I press the call button and wait on the nurses with their shiny yellow pills and the white pills flecked with grey, their jet sprays and hollow needles filled with nightmares and, sometimes, when I’m very lucky, dreamless sleep.

  FISH BRIDE (1970)

  WE LIE HERE together, naked on her sheets which are always damp, no matter the weather, and she’s still sleeping. I’ve lain next to her, watching the long, cold sunrise, the walls of this dingy room in this dingy house turning so slowly from charcoal to a hundred successively lighter shades of grey. The weak November morning has a hard time at the window, because the glass was knocked out years ago and she chose as a substitute a sheet of tattered and not-quite-clear plastic she found washed up on the shore, now held in place with mismatched nails and a few thumbtacks. But it deters the worst of the wind and rain and snow, and she says there’s nothing out there she wants to see, anyway. I’ve offered to replace the broken glass, a couple of times I’ve said that, but it’s just another of the hundred or so things that I’ve promised I would do for her and haven’t yet gotten around to doing; she doesn’t seem to mind. That’s not why she keeps letting me come here. Whatever she wants from me, it isn’t handouts and pity and someone to fix her broken windows and leaky ceiling. Which is fortunate, as I’ve never fixed anything in my whole life. I can’t even change a flat tire. I’ve only ever been the sort of man who does harm and leaves it for someone else to put right again or simply sweep beneath a rug where no one will have to notice the damage I’ve done. So, why should she be any different? And yet, to my knowledge, I’ve done her no harm so far.

  I come down the hill from the village on those interminable nights and afternoons when I can’t write and don’t feel like getting drunk alone. I leave that other world, that safe and smothering kingdom of clean sheets and typescript, electric lights and indoor plumbing and radio and window frames with windowpanes, and I follow the sandy path through gale-stunted trees and stolen, burned-out automobiles, smoldering trash-barrel fires and suspicious, underlit glances.

  They all know I don’t belong here with them, all the other men and women who share her squalid existence at the edge of the sea, the ones who have come down and never gone back up the h
ill again. When I call them her apostles, she gets sullen and angry.

  “No,” she says, “it’s not like that. They’re nothing of the sort.”

  But I understand well enough that’s exactly what they are, even if she doesn’t want to admit it, either to herself or to me. And so they hold me in contempt, because she’s taken me into her bed—me, an interloper who comes and goes, who has some choice in the matter, who has that option because the world beyond these dunes and shanty walls still imagines it has some use for me. One of these nights, I think, her apostles will do murder against me. One of them alone, or all of them together. It may be stones or sticks or an old filleting knife. It may even be a gun. I wouldn’t put it past them. They are resourceful, and there’s a lot on the line. They’ll bury me in the dog roses, or sink me in some deep place among the tide-worn rocks, or carve me up like a fat sow and have themselves a feast. She’ll likely join them, if they are bold enough and offer her a few scraps of my charred, anonymous flesh to complete the sacrifice. And later, much, much later, she’ll remember and miss me, in her sloppy, indifferent way, and wonder whatever became of the man who brought her beer and whiskey, candles and chocolate bars, the man who said he’d fix the window, but never did. She might recall my name, but I wouldn’t hold it against her if she doesn’t.

  “This used to be someplace,” she’s told me time and time again. “Oh, sure, you’d never know it now. But when my mother was a girl, this used to be a town. When I was little, it was still a town. There were dress shops, and a diner, and a jail. There was a public park with a bandshell and a hundredyear-old oak tree. In the summer, there was music in the park, and picnics. There were even churches, two of them, one Catholic and one Presbyterian. But then the storm came and took it all away.”

  And it’s true, most of what she says. There was a town here once. A decade’s neglect hasn’t quite erased all signs of it. She’s shown me some of what there’s left to see—the stump of a brick chimney, a few broken pilings where the waterfront once stood—and I’ve asked questions around the village. But people up there don’t like to speak openly about this place, or even allow their thoughts to linger on it very long. Every now and then, usually after a burglary or before an election, there’s talk of cleaning it up, pulling down these listing, clapboard shacks and chasing away the vagrants and squatters and winos. So far, the talk has come to nothing.