The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  I leapt and struck again and we conducted a kind of crazy ballet across the four walls, the ceiling, and the floor of the room. Anyone watching would have got motion sickness or eyeball fatigue, trying to catch blurs of movement.

  At 2.350 seconds in, it got a forearm around my left elbow and gave it a good hard pull, dislocating my arm at the shoulder. I knew then it really was ancient and had retained the programming needed to fight me. My joints have always been a weak point.

  It hurt. A lot. And it kept on hurting through several microseconds as the vamp tried to actually pull my arm off and at the same time twist itself around to start chewing on my leg.

  The tau field was discouraging the vamp, making it dump some of its internal nanoware, so that blood started geysering out of pin-holes all over its body, but this was more of a nuisance for me than any major hindrance to it.

  In midsomersault, somewhere near the ceiling, with the thing trying to wrap itself around me, I dropped the silver knife. It wasn’t a real weapon, not like the splinter. I kept it for sentimental reasons, as much as anything, though silver did have a deleterious effect on younger vamps. Since it was pure sentiment, I suppose I could have left it in the form of coins, but then I’d probably be forever dropping some in combat and having to waste time later picking them up. Besides, when silver was still the usual currency and they were still coins, I’d got drunk a few times and spent them, and it was way too big a hassle getting them back.

  The vamp took the knife-dropping as more significant than it was, which was one of the reasons I’d let it go. In the old days, I would have held something serious in my left hand, like a de-weaving wand, which the vampire probably thought the knife was—and it wanted to get it and use it on me. It partially let go of my arm as it tried to catch the weapon, and at that precise moment, second 2.355, I feinted with the splinter, slid it along the thing’s attempted forearm block, and reversing my elbow joint, stuck it right in the forehead.

  With the smart matter already at work from its previous scratch, internal explosion occurred immediately. I had shut my eyes in preparation, so I was only blown against the wall and not temporarily blinded as well.

  I assessed the damage as I wearily got back up. My left arm was fully dislocated, with the tendons ripped away, so I couldn’t put it back. It was going to have to hang for a day or two, hurting like crazy till it self-healed. Besides that, I had severe bruising to my lower back and ribs, which would also deliver some serious pain.

  I hadn’t been hurt as seriously by a vamp for a long, long time, so I spent a few minutes searching through the scraps of mostly disintegrated vampire to find a piece big enough to meaningfully scan. Once I got it back to the jumper, I’d be able to pick it apart on the atomic level to find the serial number on some of its defunct nanoware.

  I put the scrap of what was probably skeleton in my flight bag, with the splinter and the silver knife, and wandered downstairs. I left it unzipped, because I hadn’t heard any firing for a while, which meant either Susan and Karl had cleaned up, or the vamps had cleaned up Susan and Karl. But I put my T-shirt back on. No need to scare the locals. It was surprisingly clean, considering. My skin and hair shed vampire blood, so the rest of me looked quite respectable as well. Apart from the arm hanging down like an orangutan’s, that is.

  I’d calculated the odds at about five to two that Susan and Karl would win, so I was pleased to see them in the entrance lobby. They both jumped when I came down the stairs. I was ready to move if they shot at me, but they managed to control themselves.

  “Did you get them all?” I asked. I didn’t move any closer.

  “Nine,” said Karl. “Like you said. Nine holes in the ground, nine burned vampires.”

  “You didn’t get bitten?”

  “Does it look like we did?” asked Susan, with a shudder. She was clearly thinking about Mike.

  “Vampires can infect with a small, tidy bite,” I said. “Or even about half a cup of their saliva, via a kiss.”

  Susan did throw up then, which is what I wanted. She wouldn’t have if she’d been bitten. I was also telling the truth. While they were designed to be soldiers, the vampires were also made to be guerilla fighters, working among the human population, infecting as many as possible in small, subtle ways. They only went for the big chow-down in full combat.

  “What about you?” asked Karl. “You okay?”

  “You mean this?” I asked, threshing my arm about like a tentacle, wincing as it made the pain ten times worse. “Dislocated. But I didn’t get bitten.”

  Neither had Karl, I was now sure. Even newly infected humans have something about them that gives their condition away, and I can always pick it up.

  “Which means we can go and sit by the fence and wait till morning,” I said cheerily. “You’ve done well.”

  Karl nodded wearily and got his hand under Susan’s elbow, lifting her up. She wiped her mouth and the two of them walked slowly to the door.

  I let them go first, which was kind of mean, because the VET have been known to harbor trigger-happy snipers. But there was no sudden death from above, so we walked over to the fence and then the two of them flopped down on the ground, and Karl began to laugh hysterically.

  I left them to it and wandered over to the gate.

  “You can let me out now,” I called to the sergeant. “My work here is almost done.”

  “No one comes out till after dawn,” replied the guardian of the city.

  “Except me,” I agreed. “Check with Lieutenant Harman.”

  Which goes to show that I can read ID labels, even little ones on metal-mesh skinsuits.

  The sergeant didn’t need to check. Lieutenant Harman was already looming up behind him. They had a short but spirited conversation, the sergeant told Karl and Susan to stay where they were, which was still lying on the ground essentially in severe shock, and they powered down the gate for about thirty seconds and I came out.

  Two medics came over to help me. Fortunately they were VET, not locals, so we didn’t waste time arguing about me going to the hospital, getting lots of drugs injected, having scans, et cetera. They fixed me up with a collar and cuff sling so my arm wasn’t dragging about the place, I said thank you, and they retired to their unmarked ambulance.

  Then I wandered over to where Jenny was sitting on the far side of the silver truck, her back against the rear wheel. She’d taken off her helmet and balaclava, letting her bobbed brown hair spring back out into shape. She looked about eighteen, maybe even younger, maybe a little older. A pretty young woman, her face made no worse by evidence of tears, though she was very pale.

  She jumped as I tapped a little rhythm on the side of the truck.

  “Oh . . . I thought . . . aren’t you meant to stay inside the . . . the cordon?”

  I hunkered down next to her.

  “Yeah, most of the time they enforce that, but it depends,” I said. “How are you doing?”

  “Me? I’m . . . I’m okay. So you got them?”

  “We did,” I confirmed. I didn’t mention Mike. She didn’t need to know that, not now.

  “Good,” she said. “I’m sorry . . . I thought I would be braver. Only, when the time came . . .”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I don’t see how you can,” she said. “I mean, you went in, and you said you fight vampires all the time. You must be incredibly brave.”

  “No,” I replied. “Bravery is about overcoming fear, not about not having it. There’s plenty I’m afraid of. Just not vampires.”

  “We fear the unknown,” she said. “You must know a lot about vampires.”

  I nodded and moved my flight bag around to get more comfortable. It was still unzipped, but the sides were pushed together at the top.

  “How to fight them, I mean,” she added. “Since no one really knows anything else. That’s the worst thing. When my sister was in-infected and then later, when she was . . . was killed, I really wanted to know, and there was no one to
tell me anything.”

  “What did you want to know?” I asked. I’ve always been prone to show off to pretty girls. If it isn’t surfing, it’s secret knowledge. Though sharing the secret knowledge only occurred in special cases, when I knew it would go no further.

  “Everything we don’t know,” sighed Jenny. “What are they, really? Why have they suddenly appeared all over the place in the last ten years, when we all thought they were just . . . just made up.”

  “They’re killing machines,” I explained. “Bioengineered self-replicating guerilla soldiers, dropped here kind of by mistake a long time ago. They’ve been in hiding mostly, waiting for a signal or other stimuli to activate. Certain frequencies of radio waves will do it, and the growth of cell phone use . . .”

  “So what, vampires get irritated by cell phones?”

  A smile started to curl up one side of her mouth. I smiled too, and kept talking.

  “You see, way back when, there were these good aliens and these bad aliens, and there was a gigantic space battle—”

  Jenny started laughing.

  “Do you want me to do a personality test before I can hear the rest of the story?”

  “I think you’d pass,” I said. I had tried to make her laugh, even though it was kind of true about the aliens and the space battle. Only there were just bad aliens and even worse aliens, and the vampires had been dropped on Earth by mistake. They had been meant for a world where the nights were very long.

  Jenny kept laughing and looked down, just for an instant. I moved at my highest speed—and she died laughing, the splinter working instantly on both human nervous system and the twenty-four-hours-old infestation of vampire nanoware.

  We had lost the war, which was why I was there, cleaning up one of our mistakes. Why I would be on Earth for countless years to come.

  I felt glad to have my straightforward purpose, my assigned task. It is too easy to become involved with humans, to want more for them, to interfere with their lives. I didn’t want to make the boss’s mistake. I’m not human, and I don’t want to become human or make them better people. I was just going to follow orders, keep cleaning out the infestation, and that was that.

  The bite was low on Jenny’s neck, almost at the shoulder. I showed it to the VET people and asked them to do the rest.

  I didn’t stay to watch. My arm hurt, and I could hear a girl laughing, somewhere deep within my head.

  GARTH NIX was born in 1963 in Melbourne, Australia, and grew up in Canberra. When he turned nineteen, he left to drive around the UK in a beat-up Austin with a boot full of books and a Silver-Reed typewriter. Despite a wheel literally falling off the car, he survived to return to Australia and study at the University of Canberra. He has since worked in a bookshop, as a book publicist, a publisher’s sales representative, an editor, a literary agent, and a public relations and marketing consultant. He was also a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve, but now writes full-time.

  His first story was published in 1984 and was followed by novels The Ragwitch, Sabriel, Shade’s Children, Lirael, Abhorsen, the six-book YA fantasy series The Seventh Tower, and most recently, the seven-book Keys to the Kingdom series. He lives in Sydney with his wife and their two children.

  His Web site is www.garthnix.com.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I tend to write short stories when I should be working on a novel. “Infestation” was written when I was supposed to be checking page proofs of my novel Sir Thursday, so I guess this story can also be classified as the product of an avoidance technique. At least it is a more productive technique than making a cup of tea or reading the newspaper, two activities that often occur when I am supposed to be working on a book.

  The image of the out-of-place surfer dude vampire hunter came first with this story. He was all alone, without any context, and the rest came into focus around him as I worked out who (and what) he actually was. Because I wanted to write a story specifically for this collection, it had to be SF, not fantasy (though it could have gone down that road). As Jonathan Strahan was reminding me to hurry up with it, the various elements that were floating around in my head went into a kind of pressure cooker. I had the ingredients, the customer was demanding science fiction, and I just had to cook it right.

  As befits the pressure-cooker analogy, I wrote the first draft of the story very quickly, in just a couple of days. Then I spent rather more time spread over several months fine-tuning it and ended up (as I usually do) delivering the final version later rather than sooner.

  It’s not the first “vampires as aliens” story, nor is it the first story to depict major religious figures as interfering aliens, but while it is not particularly original in its big ideas, I hope the smaller ideas and details, the mood, and the style will all make it work for the reader.

  PINOCCHIO

  Walter Jon Williams

  Errol has the kind of eagerness that you only see when someone can’t wait to tell you the bad news. I can see this even though his hologram, appearing in the corner of my room, is a quarter real size.

  “Have you seen Kimmie’s flash?” he asks. “It’s all about you. And it’s, uh—well, you should look at it.”

  I’m changing clothes and sort of distracted.

  “What does she say?” I ask. Because I figure it’s going to be, Oh, Sanson didn’t pay enough attention to me at the dance, or something.

  “She says that you took money for wearing the Silverback body,” Errol says. “She says you’re a sellout.”

  Which stops me dead, right in the middle of putting on my new shorts.

  “Well,” I say as I hop on one foot. “That’s interesting.”

  I can tell that Errol is very eager to know whether Kimmie’s little factoid is true.

  “Should I get the Pack together?” he asks.

  I stop hopping and put my foot on the floor. My shorts hang abandoned around one ankle.

  “Maybe,” I said, and then decide against it. “No. We’re meeting tomorrow anyway.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.” Because right now I want a little time to myself. I’ve got to think.

  THINGS TO DO IF YOU’RE A GORILLA

  • Make a drum out of a hollow log.

  • Look under the log for tasty grubs and eat them.

  • Pound the drum while your friends do a joyful thumping dance.

  • Play poker.

  • Make a hut out of branches and native grasses. Demolish it. Repeat.

  • Groom your steady.

  • Learn sign language. (It’s traditional.)

  • Do exhibition ballroom dancing.

  • Go to the woods with your friends. Lie in a pile in the sun. Repeat.

  • Intimidate your friends who are gibbons or chimps.

  • Attend a costume party wearing eighteenth-century French court dress.

  • Race up and down the exteriors of tall buildings. Extra points for carrying an attractive blonde on your shoulder, but in that case beware of biplanes.

  • Join a league and play gorillaball. (Rules follow.)

  I pull on my shorts and knuckle-walk over to my comm corner. My rig is an eight-year-old San Simeon, assembled during the fortnight or so when Peru was the place to go for things electronic—it’s old, but it’s all I need considering that I hardly ever flashcast from my room anyway. I mostly use it for school, and sometimes for editing flashcast material when I’m tired of wearing my headset.

  I squat down on a little stool—being gorilloid, I don’t sit like normal people—and then turn on the cameras so I can record myself watching Kimmie’s broadcast.

  I don’t think about the cameras much. I’m used to them. I scratch myself as I tell the San Simeon to find Kimmie’s flash and show it to me.

  Kimmie looks good. She’s traded in the gorilloid form for an appealing human body, all big eyes and freckles and sunbleached hair. She’s never been blonde before. The hair is in braids.

  She seems completely who
lesome, like someone in a milk ad. You’d never know that sometime in the last ten days she came out of a vat.

  I watch and listen while my former girlfriend tells the world I’m slime. Vacant, useless, greedy slime.

  “He’s a lot angrier than people think,” Kimmie says. “He always hides that.”

  Unlike someone, I think, who isn’t hiding her anger at all.

  For a while this doesn’t much bother me. Kimmie’s body is new and it’s like being attacked by a clueless stranger. But then I start seeing things I recognize—the expressions on her face, the way she phrases her words, the body language—and the horror begins to sink in.

  It’s Kimmie. It’s the girl I love. And she hates me now, and she’ll be telling the whole world why.

  Kimmie lists several more of my deficiencies, then gets to the issue I’ve been dreading.

  “There was a point where I realized I couldn’t trust him anymore. He was taking money for the things he used to do for fun. That’s when I stopped being in love.”

  No, I think, you’ve got the sequence wrong. Because it was when you started pulling away that I got insecure, and in order to restore the kind of intimacy we’d had, I started telling you the things I should have kept to myself.

  THINGS TO DO WHEN YOU’VE JUST BEEN DUMPED

  • Lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.

  • Feel as if your heart has been ripped out of your chest by a giant claw.

  • Find the big picture of her you kept by your bed and rip it into bits.

  • Wonder why she hates you now.

  • Beat your chest.

  • Try to put the picture back together with tape. Fail.

  • Cry.

  • Beat your chest.

  • Run up into the hills and demolish a tree with your bare hands.

  • Watch her flashcast again and again.

  When I watch Kimmie’s flashcast for the third or fourth time I notice her braids.

  Braids. She’s never worn braids before. So I watch the image carefully and I see that the braids are woven with some kind of fluorescent thread that glows very subtly through the cooler colors, violet, blue, and green.