InterGalactic Medicine Show Awards Anthology, Vol. I
Page 6
“It would be easier,” he said to Jasmine, “if you would voluntarily think of the information we need. Then there’ll be no need for . . . unpleasantness.”
“Torture, you mean,” Jasmine said. The Daimyo winced. The grim-faced man shot her a look that said if I was in charge, you’d already be on a rack.
“We want the plans to the safe zone’s outer defenses,” the Daimyo said.
Luckily, Jasmine had experience dealing with telepaths. She quickly diverted her mind away from the Daimyo’s question, forcing herself to concentrate on an earlier part of his speech.
“What kind of technology do you think we have?” Even as she asked the question, Jasmine thought of the rows of tiny vials in the convent’s “hot” laboratory, pestilence and plague swirling in frail glass tubes. Those, the convent wouldn’t distribute. From the Daimyo’s sudden change of expression, she knew she’d guessed right.
“If you won’t cooperate, we’ll have no choice but to torture you,” he said uncertainly. He turned away. “I’ll give you an hour to think about it.”
The grim-faced man looked like he wanted to shove both Jasmine and the Daimyo’s head through the wall, but he followed his leader out. The other guard shot Jasmine a murderous look as he exited.
Jasmine sat down on the cold floor of the cave. Someone had left a gourd of water and a plate of food in the corner. She stared at it, then turned away. She couldn’t risk being drugged.
Telepaths, she thought despairingly. How could she escape when her thoughts advertised her plans to whomever was listening? And she was sure there were telepaths listening. She wasn’t sure of their numbers or their strength; it was quite possible that the Daimyo was the only psychic on the premises. Indeed, that would explain why he was nominally in charge.
As far as she could tell, the Daimyo could only pick up on articulated thoughts. That helped. And he was most likely to pick up on her thoughts if he was listening for them, which he probably was.
“Mary, Mother of God, pray for me,” she whispered. “Saint Jude, Patron of Lost Causes, pray for me.”
And there, like a comforting hand on her shoulder, was her solution.
The words of the prayer formed easily in her mind. “O most holy apostle, St. Jude, faithful servant and friend of Jesus,” Jasmine whispered as she crawled over to the bars. “People honor and invoke you universally as the patron of hopeless cases, of things almost despaired of . . .” She let the familiar words of the prayer fill her mind; she concentrated on them, and on the feel of the metal under her hands. “Pray for me, for I am so helpless and alone”—her eyes saw the gaps between the metal and the cave wall—“Please help to bring me visible and speedy assistance. . . .”
It took Jasmine a good forty minutes to jar the metal corner loose enough that she could worm through it. The fence left deep gouges down her back, and at one point her habit got caught on a bent wire. She had to tear the fabric to get free, focusing as she did so on the rhythm of Latin syllables in the Oratio ad angelum custodem. She hoped whatever telepath was listening in was thoroughly bored by this point.
She scuttled down the carved stone passageway, mentally running through the Ava Maria as she did so. It was harder to focus on the prayers now that she needed to make decisions. She didn’t have long before she screwed up, and then whoever was monitoring her—she suspected it was the Daimyo—would realize what she was doing.
Her original mission had been to destroy the Daimyo’s power base, if possible, and return with information if it wasn’t. Jasmine’s personal goal was to find Einstein, but without weapons or psychic shielding, none of her goals seemed like they were achievable.
She stomped down her pain—Saint Anthony, Patron of Lost Things, please help me find Einstein—and studied the dusty, mottled surface under her feet. Apparently the cultists weren’t used to keeping prisoners; she guessed her cell had been constructed in a rarely-used section of the tunnels. Towards the sound of voices, then.
Jasmine saw a metal rod lying free and picked it up. Any weapon was better than none.
She crept from shadowed tunnel to shadowed tunnel. At one point, a cluster of ragged people passed close by her, talking loudly. Jasmine pressed herself into one of the wet crevices in the wall. Luckily, they didn’t see her.
At a certain point, she became aware that she was being hunted. Loud voices echoed through the tunnels. Men rushed by, clattering metal, into tunnels she had just exited. She thought she heard the Daimyo’s voice shrieking orders. The prayers slipped from her mind. Jasmine tried to sink further into animal-logic, thinking only of moving onwards, drifting from shadow to shadow, being one with the darkness.
A clatter ahead of her. Jasmine shrank back against the wall, trying to edge out of view. Men were definitely approaching, and their steps were slow and methodical. They talked in lowered voices. She saw their shadows spill along the wall. She shifted her grip on the metal rod, and changed her stance.
“Hello!” A bright, overly-cheerful voice cut through the darkness. “I am Capers Williams, Girl Detective, and this is my assistant—”
There was a thud and then a scream of pain.
“Well, that was just rude.”
More thuds and screams followed. Jasmine rounded the corner to see the girl detective surrounded by a pile of bodies groaning and writhing on the floor. She looked up as Jasmine approached, and released the man she’d been holding in an arm-lock. He flopped to the ground and lay still.
“Hello, Sister Jasmine!” Capers said, bounding over the carpet of bodies, pig-tails flapping like the wings of a demented bird. “We solved the Mystery of the Mysterious Kidnapping! It turns out there’s this Daimyo guy who wants to rule the wasteland—”
“I got that,” Jasmine said quickly. She delivered a swift blow to the head of a man who was trying to crawl away. “How did you find me?”
“Well, first we had to follow a trail of clues that led to New Tokyo, and from there, we had to infiltrate the Daimyo’s tunnel system by dressing as guards. But I guess we look too short to be guards, so . . . Anyway,” she said, seeing Jasmine’s expression, “Detective Bell finally picked up your thoughts and tracked you here!”
“As did I,” said the Daimyo, in what he obviously hoped was a booming voice. He stood at the end of the tunnel with his hands on his hips, flanked by guards.
“Oh, you again.” Capers made a face. To Jasmine, she stage-whispered, “Bell says he’s been around the corner the whole time, waiting for someone to say something entrance-worthy. What a goofball!” To the Daimyo she called out: “You’re a goofball!”
The guards, however, were definitely not goofballs. Jasmine saw the glistening muzzles of guns pointing in their direction. She also recognized the competent, grim-faced man standing at the Daimyo’s back.
“I’m going to give you one last chance to cooperate,” the Daimyo said. He tried to snap his fingers a few times and then gave up. He gestured to someone standing just out of sight.
A cage rolled into view, pushed by the thin, frail-looking man Jasmine had seen earlier. A familiar metal shape bounced and circled inside the cage, making muffled yelps.
“Einstein!”
“It’s the dog!” Capers shouted excitedly down the tunnel. “We solved the case, Bell! Yay!”
Glancing in the direction Capers was shouting, Jasmine saw a furry black shape in a miniature guard’s uniform edging along the wall towards the Daimyo. She hastily looked away. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccáta mundi, parce nobis, she thought.
“Will you please stop praying all the time!” the Daimyo shouted. “It’s really annoying.”
The psychic spider detective halted its progress along the wall to nod vigorously in agreement. Jasmine gritted her teeth. It was all she could do not to motion Bell along.
Einstein, she thought, looking at her dog. They’d put a muzzle on him, but other than that he looked in good repair.
“Yes . . . Einstein,” the Daimyo said. “If you agree to come with me right now a
nd give us the defense plans of the abbey, you’ll get him back. If not . . .” He trailed off into dramatic silence.
“If not, we’ll shoot this dog,” the grim-faced man said. He evidently valued clarity over dramatic tension. The safety clicked on his gun; he pointed the barrel at Einstein’s cage.
“Well, that’s kinda mean,” Capers said.
The Daimyo smiled.
“Why are you still here?” he asked. “Don’t you have other mysteries to solve? You found the dog. What more do you need?”
The android’s face froze as she ran through her programming. “Er,” she said. “You’re bad guys. . . ?”
“Are we?” the Daimyo said. “We’re trying to bring back technology to the wasteland. That’s a good goal. And even if we were bad guys, sometimes at the end of mysteries, bad guys get away. The important thing is that the mystery gets solved, right?”
Jasmine winced. The last thing she needed was the detectives’ programming working against her. “I think the bad guys should get punished,” she said loudly. Her voice was dry and cracked; she could barely force the words out.
“I think the people in Gary have a mystery that needs solving,” offered the grim-faced man.
Atop Einstein’s cage, the spider turned back towards the girl detective. Its eyes slid sideways in a quizzical expression.
Jasmine could feel the moment slipping away. In a few seconds, her android allies would turn, obedient to their programming, and head out to solve the mysteries of Gary. Without their help, she would almost certainly be recaptured.
The time had come to shift strategies.
Lock, Jasmine thought furiously. Seeing the Daimyo’s expression change, she turned her gaze on the spider, trying to make the words as distinct and psychically “loud” as possible. Pick the lock, Detective Bell.
“I dunno,” said Capers. She looked down at her red sneakers. “I guess solving the mystery is the most important thing. But in Mathnet, Pat Tuesday says . . .”
Jasmine never did get to hear Pat Tuesday’s words of wisdom.
Following Jasmine’s gaze, the Daimyo looked down and saw the string-like legs of Flaminel Bell trying to pick the lock of Einstein’s cage.
“What’s that?” he shrieked.
The thin-faced man leaned over and quickly recoiled. “Spider! Kill it!”
Even as the guards went into motion, Jasmine was already running, already charging towards the guards and hoping to close the distance before they looked up, when a blur of color ran past her, impossibly fast.
Androids did not care about human things, but they were inhabitants of a post-apocalyptic world. However hard things got out on the wasteland, whatever laws might be broken, one thing remained true: a girl loves her spider.
“You leave Flaminel Bell alone!” screamed Capers Williams, kicking the thin-faced man down the length of the tunnel. She turned and clobbered a bearded guard with his own shotgun. “He’s a very nice spider!”
Jasmine plowed into the grim-faced man, carrying him off his feet. The shotgun blast took out part of the wall behind her. She applied a Vatican-approved choke hold and held on for dear life.
“That’s right! Run away!” Capers howled behind her. “You . . . You scaredy-cats!”
The grim-faced man stopped clawing at Jasmine’s arms. He relaxed, unconscious. Jasmine punched him in the face for good measure, then turned back to Capers.
Capers was standing in front of Einstein’s cage, crying. She hugged the spider in her arms.
“He’s had to overcome so much!” She kicked at the Daimyo, who was cowering against the wall. “Do you hear that, you Labrador mutant? How would you like to be an epileptic psychic spider and have nobody understand you, huh?”
“I think Detective Bell has done very well,” Jasmine said as she edged towards Einstein’s cage.
“That’s right!” Capers patted the spider on its furry head. “You’re a great detective!” She glared at the Daimyo, who was trying to move sideways along the wall. “Where do you think you’re going, you big meanie?”
Jasmine shot the lock off Einstein’s cage and released her dog. It took her a while to remove his muzzle: the K9 unit was too busy gamboling excitedly around her feet.
“Ohboyohboyohboy!” Einstein said once she’d got the muzzle off. “I missed you! But now you’re here! Can we hunt zombies now?”
“Soon, Einstein,” Jasmine said. She hauled the Daimyo to his feet and clocked him on the jaw.
Canticle 5: Gloria Patri
“. . . and that’s how we solved the Mystery of the Missing Ice Sculpture.”
Capers’ feet were up on the dashboard of the Silver Stallion. Detective Bell skipped back and forth on her shoes, playing with the laces.
“I never would have thought that memorizing the digits of pi would prove so useful,” Jasmine said, scanning the horizon. Something was up.
“I think there should be more zombies in that story!” Einstein said, perched on the coffin in the back seat and staring out the rear window. He wore a new bandana proudly around his neck.
From inside the coffin, the bound and gagged Daimyo gave a muffled groan. Jasmine smiled, grimly. Without the Daimyo’s psychic abilities, his followers would not be able to control the army of cellular madmen. The threat to the Wasteland was diminished. And the Order of the Serpent would no doubt be interested in the information the Daimyo could provide. All she had to do was deliver him to them.
“We can’t add zombies,” Capers said doubtfully. “That’s not how it happened.”
“But everything’s better with zombies!”
“Quiet, all of you.” Jasmine narrowed her eyes. “This place is dangerous.”
In the silence they could all hear the Daimyo’s nervous breathing. Einstein whispered something about zombies.
“How many more creatures do we need to fight before we get to the abbey?” Capers said. “We’ve already had to fight armies of ninjas and cellular madmen and a giant mechanical anaconda. We need to solve more mysteries! Why—”
The dinosaur attack came out of nowhere, just like they always do. There was a screech of metal as the mutant T-Rex tried to get a purchase on the car.
“Dumb lizard!” Capers rolled down her window and aimed her slingshot at something Jasmine couldn’t see. “We’ve got raptors, too!”
“Zombie raptors?”
Jasmine sighed and reached for her double-barreled Reptile Annihilator. Deliver us from evil, she thought . . . and prepared to bring the pain.
The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived
* * *
by Keffy R. M. Kehrli
I am Sara’s second body.
My first memory is of Sara’s resurrection in a room that smelled of cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide.
“That’s funny,” a man said.
The world felt raw, sore, and new. Under my back, my butt, my fingertips, I could feel every thread in the sheets beneath me. The blanket over my stomach scratched. Padded straps crossed my arms.
“What’s funny?” This voice was a woman’s.
“Got another error message,” the man answered. “Have you ever seen that one before?”
I felt the sheets with Sara’s fingers, and the texture conjured memories I didn’t have. I should have known where I was and what I was there for, but I couldn’t catch hold of the fleeting thoughts. In the dim light of the room I could only see the ceiling.
“Let me see.” I heard a frenzied clicking. “It failed twice?”
“Nothing copied the first time, so I started over. It got about halfway through, and then it gave me this.”
“Error two-one-five-two. Copy error,” the woman said. “I’ve never seen that before. I’ve never even seen an error in the middle of a transplant. Did you check the manual?”
“It didn’t list this one.”
The woman sighed and said, “The only thing I can think of is if we wipe everything out and start over.”
Operating tables, and the
anesthesiologist’s face. Tissue paper examining tables, candles in a church.
“She’s conscious, though,” the man said. “When the machine aborted, it sent the Copy Completed code. Don’t look at me like that! I don’t know if I ought to mess around with it anymore, or . . .”
The woman interrupted, “You know we can’t do that without contacting the parents. Come on, we might as well go see what the damage is.”
They stood over me. The man was the younger of the two, and he looked down at me from behind thick glasses. He held his clipboard tight against his chest like a shield. The woman stood closer to me; her hair was light, either blond or grey. She frowned like it was my fault.
“Can you hear and understand me?” she asked.
The man wrote something on his clipboard. I could hear graphite rubbed free, caught in the paper.
My mouth felt dry, and my lips did too, as though if I tried to speak they would break apart. “Yes,” I managed.
She unhooked the straps on my arms. I lifted my left arm and looked at the fingers, hand, wrist. Clean, and smooth, unmarked.
Cat-scratch scar near my first knuckle, angry red and faded pink.
“Do you know why you’re here?”
I wanted to say the right thing, but I didn’t know what that would be. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t.”
“She’s coherent,” the woman said. “We’ll have to call the parents.”
The man nodded, and he was still writing. Scratch scratch scratch. He didn’t answer her.
The woman disconnected something that slid out from under the skin of my scalp, and I didn’t like how it rubbed against my skull. “Make sure you tell them that we won’t require the final payment until we get this sorted.”
“Copy error,” I said. “Is that why I don’t know where we are?”
“Yes, Sara,” she said. “I think.”
I walk until I find a cabin in the woods, the windows broken out by tree branches, by wind and rain and thrown rocks. The door hangs far on its hinges.
Shotgun shells, wet with rain. Raccoon droppings. These are the things that litter the floor inside. I step over them in Sara’s boots, into a cabin soggy and ruined from disuse. A dirty orange vest hangs on the wall over a stained and rotten mattress.