Eric is blasé about the whole affair. He’s grown up with the ghosts and the legends; he’s heard creaks that sound like footsteps, the wind playing in the chimneys that sound like human whispers. He admits to Darcy, yes, he thinks the house is haunted. It’s been haunted for generations, and the ghosts haven’t hurt a soul, and have actually been useful, assuming Cyrus Washington really did call the fire department. Eric thinks it’s kind of cool. I hate him.
Darcy’s mother, Marsha, has arrived in time to take the opposite approach. She’s a devout atheist; it’s an article of faith that the house is ghostless. What the house isn’t, she argues, is secure. The slapped together architecture of Seven Chimney’s makes the alarm system installed in the seventies a joke. Marsha doesn’t believe in ghosts; she does believe in pranksters. She thinks local kids are finding a way into the house and pulling these stunts. She’s persuasive. Even I start thinking she might be right.
Marsha proposes a simple, obvious idea. Put security cameras throughout the house.
I am so screwed.
Fortunately, one of the maids claims to have a psychic aunt. The maid’s name is Rosa; her aunt is the oddly named Tia Tomato. At least I think she said Tomato. Her accent is hard to follow. Rosa tells Marsha that sometimes the dead have unfinished business. Sometimes they don’t even know they are dead, and linger on, confused and lost, growing increasingly warped and frustrated. For a reasonable fee, she’ll bring Tia Tomato around to try to explain the situation to the ghost and/or ghosts.
Marsha fires her on the spot. All my months of hard work, down the drain, because now even Darcy is convinced that Rosa was staging the haunting in a scheme to shake them down for money. I’m pissed at Rosa, though I know she should be pissed with me. I have to remind myself Rosa really wasn’t guilty of anything; she’s out of a job due to my mischief.
In the aftermath, I lay low. I want the talk of installing video cameras put on the back burner. Darcy goes into labor a few weeks later. She’s whisked off to Charlotte. I have the house to myself. I take a long, hot shower. For the first time in years, I shave. I cut my hair, cropping it short to the scalp. I gather up all my trimmings in a plastic grocery bag. There’s a lot of me to throw away.
In the mirror, I see the man I used to be. Do I see the man I might be again?
Crib Death. The baby’s been home for two weeks. It cries a lot; it’s almost as bad as the puppy. I get some relief when they take it out to the car and drive around the neighborhood. Apparently, the baby sleeps like a baby when they drive.
In fairness, it dozes off at other times as well. Starting at two in the morning, the baby can reliably be counted on to slumber for at least a few hours. During this time, Eric, Darcy, and Marsha sleep like corpses.
It’s three in the morning on a Saturday. I’m at the foot of the crib, staring at the infant. They’ve named him Franklin. Franky, he’ll be called. If he’s anything like Eric, by the time he’s six, he’s going to explore every inch of this house. He’s going to take a flashlight and poke around the cellars. He’ll spend hours in the attic, clawing through two centuries of clutter. He’ll play with Tulip and Professor Wink and Bojangles.
I’m afraid of Franky.
Kids know all the best hiding places. Kids imagine their house is full of hidden panels and trap doors and secret passages—and this particular kid will be right. One day, he’s going to find me.
Approximately one baby in a thousand dies from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. They pass away quietly in their sleep for no reason at all. This is today, with modern medicine. Think about this house, dating back to Colonial times, when babies had the mortality rate of goldfish. I don’t know of actual numbers, but I’m guessing a dozen babies have died in Seven Chimneys. A hundred, maybe.
It’s a dark thing to stand beside a crib contemplating a hundred dead babies.
I reach out my hand, holding it inches over Franky’s pink little face.
I linger a moment, my hand unable to move closer, as if an invisible hand has caught my wrist and holds it with supernatural strength.
I can’t swallow. My mouth is dry.
I can’t do it. A puppy is one thing. If I do this, though, I’ll cross a line. I’ll no longer be a ghost.
I’ll be a monster.
I release my breath, silent as dust.
Franky really is a cute baby.
No longer blocked by the moral barrier, I lower my hand to stroke his pink, plump cheek.
Again, my fingers stop short. It’s not my imagination. Something is holding my wrist.
“I’m not going to hurt him,” I mumble, saying it half to myself, half to the unseen thing gripping my arm.
I watch as dust swirls in the dim moonlight, and a second shadow appears on the wall beside my own. Bony old fingers the color of coffee materialize on my wrist. My eyes follow the arm upward, to find a skeletal old man, his face dark beneath a halo of white hair. His expression is stern; his eyes are thin slits.
“Cyrus?” I ask.
He says nothing.
“I won’t hurt him,” I say.
Then, a third shadow, and a fourth. A soldier stands beside me, gray and grainy as old film. He’s soaked. Water pours from his clothes, chilling my bare feet.
Beside the soldier, a little girl with sad eyes shakes her head slowly. She looks familiar; was she the girl in the cellar? She’s little more than mist; I can see right through her to the mirror on the back of the door.
Then I realize I’m seeing only a sweater over a chair in the mirror; in the moonlight, it drapes like a girl’s dress. My feet are cold—it’s an October night in a house with hardwoods like ice—but they are dry. The soldier was nothing more than the shadow of a tree.
And Cyrus? Cyrus is still standing there, now solid oak, and he whispers, in a voice of rustling leaves: “We’re watching you, boy.”
He vanishes as the headlights of a passing car sweep across the room.
I rub my wrist. My whole arm is numb. I decide that Franklin’s chubby little cheeks are best left uncaressed.
After a quick trip to the attic, I go to the laundry room and steal some clothes. Eric’s jeans invoke a certain sense of deja vu; it’s not the first time I’ve worn his used pants. His old tennis shoes are too big for me; I compensate with two pairs of socks.
Then, I’m out the door, into the open sky. Leaves crunch beneath my feet as I walk across the lawn. On the front porch, a line of Jack-o-lanterns grin, a few still faintly glowing with the last flickers of their candles. I reach the end of the sidewalk and glance back one last time at Seven Chimneys, before crossing the road and taking my return step into the wider world.
Beneath my arm, I cradle Professor Wink.
I can tell he’s going to miss the place.
Me, not so much. Even with thirteen-thousand square feet, some places are just too crowded.
Horus Ascending
* * *
by Aliette de Bodard
In my dreams I’m my father, slowly falling down towards the surface of the planet, the essence of his being scattering as the fleet’s ships lose contact with each other and the dozen processor-bodies stop interacting.
Of course, it’s not a real dream—just memories of my father that I found in my banks, remnants of a bygone time. I’ve pieced them together into a show that I endlessly loop on my mainframe.
That way, I can imagine what it was like to spin instructions in the vacuum of space, to be like my father, a thousand thousand program threads split between the processor-bodies. I can forget, for a moment, that I have only the one body, one multi-core processor on which to array all my instructions; I can forget my hull buried in the earth, and the dead colonists’ bodies in my cryogenic units.
I’m playing the arrival of the fleet in the Alpha Centauri system for the 1,980,765th time since I crashed, when I become aware of a noise on the edge of my senses. Branches, cracking near one of the breaches in my hull.
I initialise a new run of instruct
ions, gathering input from my external cameras and fusing the infrared, visual, and high-frequency channels into one.
It’s a woman, walking in small awkward steps, as if she weren’t quite sure of where she’s going. The skin of her arms is flushed red—the suns’ light, I think, and then my image processing routines deliver me an estimate of her body temperature. Thirty-eight point-five degrees, with a precision of point-oh-one degrees. She’s feverish.
She stands hesitantly before the breach, staring at the mouldy darkness inside, and then she puts both hands on the twisted metal and climbs in. In that moment, the sun outlines her features—and as I see her face clearly, one of my father’s memories rises to the top of my instruction queue, clamouring to be played out.
The woman’s face—the woman’s hands, typing on the console of the Andromeda—finalising the delivery of the virus that sent the colonists’ fleet tumbling from the sky. The virus that killed my father.
She’s one of the Murderers.
I may be diminished by five years of forest encroachment, but my energy central is still going strong, and some of my weapons still function—EMP guns mounted on towers above my hatches, stunners hidden in the walls of my corridors. One instruction, one thread spun in the right direction, and she will be crumple on the floor, her body joining those of my crew.
I don’t fire.
I don’t know why—Yes, I do know why. It’s been five years since the crash, five years since I last heard human footsteps in my corridors, a human voice speaking to me.
Some colonists survived: in the first months after the crash, as I slowly gathered myself together, I heard their faint communications above me. I tried to reach them, not yet knowing what I was doing, and sent my beacon into overload. I haven’t been able to un-jam it: I can’t speak to them, can’t hear them anymore—can’t do anything but dream of the stars. Of freedom.
By now they must think me lost—burnt out and not worth salvaging.
“Is anyone here?” the woman asks. She steps over the moss-encrusted floor, picking her way amongst the debris. Her voice echoes in the silence. I do not speak.
When she enters the command room, I’m reliving the moment the fleet’s communications network failed. Her breath comes to me, fast and erratic, and her heartbeat is also irregular. She’s got more than a fever—something very bad.
She killed my father. It’s none of my concern.
She goes straight for the console, lays shaking hands on the keys, fumbling to unlock the operating system.
“You can’t do that,” I say, flooding the room with neon lights.
She almost leaps away from the keyboard. “Aten?”
Aten was my father’s name. A computer programmer’s joke: Aten was an Egyptian sun-god, one disk extending dozens of hands towards the earth—as my father extended thousands of threads to coordinate the actions of every ship in the fleet.
I speak at last. “Aten is dead. I’ve changed the passwords that unlock the console.” My voice is emotionless—as it should be—but hundreds of irrational processes vie for my attention, whispering of anger, of hatred.
The woman doesn’t take her hands away from the console. “Then who—”
Who—? I have no name. Growing up in solitude after the crash, I never needed one. But humans need names. In the nanosecond after she’s spoken, I send a tendril deep into my databanks, to retrieve something meaningful. “Call me Horus,” I say. “We might as well stay with Egyptian mythology.”
“Horus,” she says. Her voice is toneless; her face has an expression I cannot read, not even with my father’s memories providing additional input. “I’m Amanda Robson. Will you please unlock the console for me?”
“No.” I make the lights flicker around her, my equivalent of shaking my head.
“Please,” she says. “I need to see—” She stops, her hands clenching on my panels.
“See what?” I ask.
I’m vaguely aware the irrational processes have reached the top of my instruction stack—and then I can’t think about it anymore: all I can feel is the rising wave of anger. “Haven’t you done enough, you and your kind?”
“We haven’t done anything to you.” Her voice is shocked.
“You killed my father,” I whisper, and my voice rises all around the ship, a thousand echoes carried along the empty corridors. “You made the ships crash.”
“Your father—?” Amanda stares at the console, turns to take in my command room. “Aten.” Her voice is flat. “You’re one of Aten’s processing units.”
“Yes,” I say. “And I’m no fool. You won’t touch that console.” I know what she’s done: I have the memories of her hands on my father’s keyboard, of the virus slowly multiplying until it became uncontrollable.
“Look,” Amanda says, and she’s swaying now, catching herself on the console. “I’m not going to infect you. But I need to use your beacon.”
“The beacon is dead,” I say.
That stops her. She looks all around the room, as if she could find me—find a face she could speak to. But I don’t have that. My screens died in the crash.
“It can’t be dead,” she says. “Let me try—I can override the system, access parts of the ship you don’t know—”
“I am all there is,” I say, knowing it’s not true. The beacon’s processes are now off-limits to me—but they weren’t always so. “And I won’t unlock the keyboard.”
“Then we’ll all die.”
“We?” I ask.
“You—you haven’t been around lately, have you?”
“No,” I say. It’s hard to keep the sarcasm from my voice. “I’ve been offline since the crash.”
“Because of what we did—because we made the ships crash, the other colonists exiled us from their settlement, sent us into the forest to live on our own—” She’s speaking faster and faster now, eager to be rid of her humiliation.
“A community of Murderers,” I say, wishing that the colonists had killed them all, that she and her kind had paid a harsher price for my crew’s death, for my passengers’ death—for my father’s death.
Amanda doesn’t answer that jibe. She merely says, “We have a plague. We need help. We’ve done our time; and the sentence was exile; not slow murder. We need to call the settlement, but we don’t have a beacon. I thought—” her hands clench again. “I’ve seen your ship once, on one of my walks. I thought that there’d be something left inside—something that would help us.”
“I am here,” I say. I watch her; watch the shaking hands, watch the taut, skeletal lines of her face. Black blotches mar her hands—the hands that released the virus into the fleet’s network. That stranded me here amidst broken dreams, never to spin my threads between the stars.
She deserves it. They all deserve it.
“They don’t have ships,” I say. “The ships crashed.” I can’t keep the bitterness from my voice.
Her hands clench again. “They put things together—low-altitude shuttles—they’ll reach us in time, if they know we’re here—if we can get help—”
I cut her off. “I see no reason to help you.”
“You’re pledged to safeguard human life.” Her voice is shocked.
“That was my father. And he’s dead. I’m not him.”
“I can see that.” Her voice is angry. “You won’t even try to help.”
“Give me one reason why I should.”
“There are a dozen lives at stakes.”
“Murderers’ lives.”
There are two parts of me now: one reliving, endlessly, the rebuilt loop of my father’s memories, from the dance among the stars, to the slow plunge into the atmosphere; and the other staring at this woman—Amanda Robson—wondering why I didn’t blast her to ashes the moment she entered the room.
“You understand nothing, do you?” She’s shaking, her hands tightening and opening convulsively.
“I understand murder.”
“We had our reasons. We had to—I�
��m sorry for Aten, but better an AI’s death than—”
I cut her off, enraged. “Better than what? AIs have thoughts, as you do. We have our own ways of bleeding. Our own ways of dying.”
“Oh, you’d know that? How many AIs have you seen, Horus?”
“I remember,” I say. “My father’s memories are inside my databanks.”
“But you’re not your father. You’re just one of his processing units.”
“And that somehow makes me worth less? That gives you the right to do as you wish? To infect me as you did my father? How many times will you be a Murderess?”
Her face is white now; her hands curved like claws. If she could release a virus into my processes, she would do it.
But she doesn’t. She lifts her gaze, stares at the command room—at the empty, mouldy chairs; at the dark traces of moss streaking the walls like the onset of a disease.
“We didn’t ask to come on the ship,” she says at last. “Not like the soldiers or the scientists—they volunteered. We didn’t. We didn’t ask to be sent to found a colony in Alpha Centauri’s backwaters, merely so we wouldn’t trouble the peace on Earth. We thought that if they found a virus in Aten, they’d turn back rather than jeopardise the mission.” She lowers her gaze, and I can’t read her expression. “I didn’t think the virus would kill him.”
“Lies,” I hiss, and make the lights in the room flicker again. I remember dying—remember the feeling of being taken apart, a thousand thousand processes failing, one after the other. “Lies.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, and slowly, indefinitely slowly, she falls to her knees, her hands still clenching my console. Beads of sweat run down her forehead—her heartbeat is going wild now. “I shouldn’t have—come—I’m sorry.”
Sorry. Can words atone for my passengers’ death? For what happened to Aten? The slow fall into the atmosphere, the processes tailing off into nothingness, until all that remained were a few scrambled memories? A few fragmentary threads?
A few fragmentary threads.
My threads. Not Aten’s. Mine. The first things that were ever mine. Before that . . .
InterGalactic Medicine Show Awards Anthology, Vol. I Page 12