The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009
Page 60
“Vinnie?” she whispered, when she thought she had a connection. “Vinnie, can you hear me?”
The bioluminescence under Black Alice’s boots pulsed once.
Gods and little fishes, she thought. And then she drew out her laser cutting torch, and started slicing open the case on the console that Wasabi had called the governor. Wasabi was probably dead by now, or dying. Wasabi, and Dogcollar, and. . . well, not dead. If they were lucky, they were dead.
Because the opposite of lucky was those canisters the Mi-Go were carrying.
She hoped Dogcollar was lucky.
“You wanna go out, right?” she whispered to the Lavinia Whateley. “Out into the Big Empty.”
She’d never been sure how much Vinnie understood of what people said, but the light pulsed again.
“And this thing won’t let you.” It wasn’t a question. She had it open now, and she could see that was what it did. Ugly fucking thing. Vinnie shivered underneath her, and there was a sudden pulse of noise in her helmet speakers: screaming. People screaming.
“I know,” Black Alice said. “They’ll come get me in a minute, I guess.” She swallowed hard against the sudden lurch of her stomach. “I’m gonna get this thing off you, though. And when they go, you can go, okay? And I’m sorry. I didn’t know we were keeping you from . . . ” She had to quit talking, or she really was going to puke. Grimly, she fumbled for the tools she needed to disentangle the abomination from Vinnie’s nervous system.
Another pulse of sound, a voice, not a person: flat and buzzing and horrible. “We do not bargain with thieves.” And the scream that time—she’d never heard Captain Song scream before. Black Alice flinched and started counting to slow her breathing. Puking in a suit was the number one badness, but hyperventilating in a suit was a really close second.
Her heads-up display was low-res, and slightly miscalibrated, so that everything had a faint shadow-double. But the thing that flashed up against her own view of her hands was unmistakable: a question mark.
<?>
“Vinnie?”
Another pulse of screaming, and the question mark again.
<?>
“Holy shit, Vinnie! . . . Never mind, never mind. They, um, they collect people’s brains. In canisters. Like the canisters in the third subhold.”
The bioluminescence pulsed once. Black Alice kept working.
Her heads-up pinged again:
“Um, yeah. I figure that’s what they’ll do with me, too. It looked like they had plenty of canisters to go around.”
Vinnie pulsed, and there was a longer pause while Black Alice doggedly severed connections and loosened bolts.
“Want? Do I want . . . ?” Her laughter sounded bad. “um, no. No, I don’t want to be a brain in a jar. But I’m not seeing a lot of choices here. Even if I went cometary, they could catch me. And it kind of sounds like they’re mad enough to do it, too.”
She’d cleared out all the moorings around the edge of the governor; the case lifted off with a shove and went sailing into the dark. Black Alice winced. But then the processor under the cover drifted away from Vinnie’s hide, and there was just the monofilament tethers and the fat cluster of fiber optic and superconductors to go.
“I’m doing my best here, Vinnie,” Black Alice said through her teeth.
That got her a fast double-pulse, and the Lavinia Whateley said,
And then,
“You want to help me?” Black Alice squeaked.
A strong pulse, and the heads-up said,
“That’s really sweet of you, but I’m honestly not sure there’s anything you can
do. I mean, it doesn’t look like the Mi-Go are mad at you, and I really want to keep it that way.”
Black Alice came within a millimeter of taking her own fingers off with the cutting laser. “Um, Vinnie, that’s um . . . well, I guess it’s better than being a brain in a jar.” Or suffocating to death in her suit if she went cometary and the Mi-Go didn’t come after her.
The double-pulse again, but Black Alice didn’t see what she could have missed. As communications went, EAT ALICE was pretty fucking unambiguous.
“By eating me? Look, I know what happens to things you eat, and it’s not . . . ” She bit her tongue. Because she did know what happened to things the Lavinia Whateley ate. Absorbed. Filtered. Recycled. “Vinnie . . . are you saying you can save me from the Mi-Go?”
A pulse of agreement.
“By eating me?” Black Alice pursued, needing to be sure she understood.
Another pulse of agreement.
Black Alice thought about the Lavinia Whateley’s teeth. “How much me are we
talking about here?”
And now she had to decide what to do.
She figured she had two choices, really. One, walk back down the Lavinia Whateley and find out if the Mi-Go believed in surrender. Two, walk around the Lavinia Whateley and into her toothy mouth.
Black Alice didn’t think the Mi-Go believed in surrender.
She tilted her head back for one last clear look at the shining black infinity of space. Really, there wasn’t any choice at all. Because even if she’d misunderstood what Vinnie seemed to be trying to tell her, the worst she’d end up was dead, and that was light-years better than what the Mi-Go had on offer.
Black Alice Bradley loved her ship.
She turned to her left and started walking, and the Lavinia Whateley’s bioluminescence followed her courteously all the way, vanes swaying out of her path. Black Alice skirted each of Vinnie’s eyes as she came to them, and each of them blinked at her. And then she reached Vinnie’s mouth and that magnificent panoply of teeth.
“Make it quick, Vinnie, okay?” said Black Alice, and walked into her leviathan’s maw.
Picking her way delicately between razor-sharp teeth, Black Alice had plenty of time to consider the ridiculousness of worrying about a hole in her suit. Vinnie’s mouth was more like a crystal cave, once you were inside it; there was no tongue, no palate. Just polished, macerating stones. Which did not close on Black Alice, to her surprise. If anything, she got the feeling the Vinnie was holding her . . . breath. Or what passed for it.
The Boojum was lit inside, as well—or was making herself lit, for Black Alice’s benefit. And as Black Alice clambered inward, the teeth got smaller, and fewer, and the tunnel narrowed. Her throat, Alice thought. I’m inside her.
And the walls closed down, and she was swallowed.
Like a pill, enclosed in the tight sarcophagus of her space suit, she felt rippling pressure as peristalsis pushed her along. And then greater pressure, suffocating, savage. One sharp pain. The pop of her ribs as her lungs crushed.
Screaming inside a space suit was contraindicated, too. And with collapsed lungs, she couldn’t even do it properly.
alice.
She floated. In warm darkness. A womb, a bath. She was comfortable. An itchy soreness between her shoulderblades felt like a very mild radiation burn.
alice.
A voice she thought she should know. She tried to speak; her mouth gnashed, her teeth ground.
alice. talk here.
She tried again. Not with her mouth, this time.
Talk. . . here?
The buoyant warmth flickered past her. She was . . . drifting. No, swimming. She could feel currents on her skin. Her vision was confused. She blinked and blinked, a
nd things were shattered.
There was nothing to see anyway, but stars.
alice talk here.
Where am I?
eat alice.
Vinnie. Vinnie’s voice, but not in the flatness of the heads-up display anymore. Vinnie’s voice alive with emotion and nuance and the vastness of her self.
You ate me, she said, and understood abruptly that the numbness she felt was not shock. It was the boundaries of her body erased and redrawn.
!
Agreement. Relief.
I’m. . . in you, Vinnie?
=/=
Not a“no.” More like, this thing is not the same, does not compare, to this other thing. Black Alice felt the warmth of space so near a generous star slipping by her. She felt the swift currents of its gravity, and the gravity of its satellites, and bent them, and tasted them, and surfed them faster and faster away.
I am you.
!
Ecstatic comprehension, which Black Alice echoed with passionate relief. Not dead. Not dead after all. Just, transformed. Accepted. Embraced by her ship, whom she embraced in return.
Vinnie. Where are we going?
out, Vinnie answered. And in her, Black Alice read the whole great naked wonder of space, approaching faster and faster as Vinnie accelerated, reaching for the first great skip that would hurl them into the interstellar darkness of the Big Empty. They were going somewhere.
Out, Black Alice agreed and told herself not to grieve. Not to go mad. This sure beat swampy Hell out of being a brain in a jar.
And it occurred to her, as Vinnie jumped, the brainless bodies of her crew already digesting inside her, that it wouldn’t be long before the loss of the Lavinia Whateley was a tale told to frighten spacers, too.
THE DIFFICULTIES OF EVOLUTION
KAREN HEULER
“I want to save this one,” Franka said, stroking Yagel, her youngest. The child sat in Franka’s lap, her dark eyes following the doctor happily. She chattered and waved her small hands around.
“She’s my second,” Franka added. Her hand rubbed the spot on Yagel’s ribs where it was thickening.
“Ah, yes,” Dr. Bennecort said. “Evan. What was he—ten or so—when it started?”
“Yes. I thought, at her age, it was too early, there should be lots of time.”
“You know it can happen at any point. I had a patient who was sixty . . . ”
“Yes, you told me,” Franka said impatiently, and stopped herself. She took a moment to calm herself, and the doctor waited. He was good—patient, professional—and Franka hoped that he could help. She wanted to say, “I’m imagining the worst,” and have him reply, “The worst won’t happen.” She knew better, but she was hoping to hear it nevertheless.
It had happened suddenly. Franka was bathing her daughter the week before, cooing at the smiling, prattling wonder of her life. After the shock of watching Evan go, she knew she was a little possessive. Franka smoothed the washcloth over the toddler’s skin, gently swirling water over the perfect limbs, the wrinkles at the joints, the plum calves and shoulders. She felt a thickening at the ribs—an area that, surely, just the day before had been soft and pliant.
She automatically talked back as Yagel babbled, but she felt her face freeze and Yagel noticed the difference in her touch and grew concerned, her legs pumping impatiently.
And Franka couldn’t keep her hands off her, touching, touching the spots that were changing, until Yagel began to bruise, and Simyon told her to go to the doctor. He said it coldly. He felt the spots that Franka felt, and he holed himself up deep inside, leaving Franka to find out the truth alone.
“She’s my second,” Franka whispered to the doctor. He’d been highly recommended by Deirdre, who had three emerald beetles tethered to her house, buzzing and smacking the picture window when the family sat down to watch TV. “We know their favorite shows,” Dierdre said. “We know when they’re happy.”
Franka didn’t want Yagel to end up like that, a child-sized insect swooping to her and away, eating from her palm. She wanted Yagel to end up a little girl.
“Time will tell,” Dr. Bennecort said. Time, and blood tests. Yagel screamed when the needle went in, but she forgot it all when given a lollipop. Maybe everything was still all right.
A month to get the results. And packets of information, numbers of people to talk to, a video explaining the process. He forgot she already had all this, from when Evan changed.
She didn’t look at any of it, and neither did Simyon.
“I don’t want this to happen,” Franka whispered to her daughter, day and night. Yagel cooed back.
“Don’t you think you could love her, no matter what?” Deirdre asked cruelly when she came to lend her support. She so seldom left her home; she preferred to stay close to her emerald boys. Some people let their children go when they changed, gave in and released them. Took the ones that swam to the sea, and the ones that flew to the hills. The lucky ones kept the cats and dogs as pets—not such a change, after all—and put the ponies in the yard. You could wish for the higher orders; you could wish for the softer, cuddlier evolutions, but you couldn’t change what was meant to be.
“But whatever they are, you love them, still,” Deirdre said.
The three emerald beetles were about the size of a five-year-old child. They lifted and fluttered up and hit the window sometimes three at a time, with whirring thuds, they pulled to the ends of their cords, their green wings pulsing.
“My dears, my sweets,” Deirdre thought as she stood on the inside of the picture window, her fingertips touching the glass as they swooped towards her, their hard black eyes intent. “My all, my all, my all.”
She put out bowls for them, rotted things mixed with honey and vitamins, her own recipe, and rolled down the awning in case it rained, and went to Franka’s house when she called, where she found her friend with her child in her arms.
“Feel this,” Franka said. She rubbed a spot along Yagel’s ribs. “It’s thicker, isn’t it? Not like the rest of her skin.”
Deirdre took her fingers and delicately felt the spot. It felt like a piece of tape under the skin—less resilient, forming a kind of half-moon. “Yes,” Deirdre said. “Maybe. It could be anything.”
“Evan was ten,” Franka whispered. “And she’s only three. Your boys—did it happen at the same age for each?”
Deirdre shook her head. “Every one was different,” she said, trying to find the right thing to say. “They’re always different.”
Every day, Yagel’s skin thickened, making her arms and legs appear shorter. She no longer tried to stand up: crawling seemed to be more efficient. The first thick spot on her back now had a scale-like or plate-like appearance. Franka went to the library and began to look through books for an animal that matched: armadillo, no; rhino, no. And not elephant skin either. She skipped over whole sections, refusing to look at tortoises, lizards, snakes.
They were taught evolution as children, of course—the intimate, intricate link of the stages of life. Ameba, fish, crawling fish, reptile; pupa, insect; egg, bird; chimp, ape, human; all the wonderful trigonometry of form and function. The beauty of it was startling. However life started, it changed. You were a baby once, then you’re different. Each egg had its own calling; no one stopped.
How beautiful it was to watch as characteristics became form, as the infant with a lithe crawl became a cat; as the toddler with the steady gaze became an owl, as the child who ran became a horse. It was magnificent. Her own brother had soared into the sky finally, a remarkable crow (always attracted to sparkle, rawkishly rowdy). She had envied him—his completion. She had stayed a child.
Still. Maybe it was less than magnificent when it was your own child. Or it was some deficit of her own. Simyon told her gruffly, “Babies grow up, Franka. You know they change. You don’t decide when it’s time for them to go; they do. When it’s right for them. Not for you.”
He was not a sympathetic man—but had that always bee
n true? No. He used to be interested in her worries; he used to want to soothe her rather than lecture. Although—she told herself—he was dealing with it, too. Both children evolving; leaving. So quickly gone. Of course it was hard for him, too.
She remembered her own brother’s meta-morphosis as a magical time—she had leapt up out of bed each morning to see the change in him overnight: a pouty mouth to a beak; dark fuzz on his shoulders into feathers; the way his feet cramped into claws; the tilt of his head and the glitter of his eye. It had been wonderful to see him fly, leaning out the window one minute, through it the next.
Even in the memory of it she heard her mother’s faltering cry. How stodgy her mother had seemed.
She leaned over Yagel. “I will always love you,” she confided to the child’s tender ear. Yagel poked her tongue out, clamped her arms to her side. “Always, Franka repeated. “Always.” She kissed her on the neck and bit her ear tenderly.
Her neighbor Phoebe had two girls, neither of them evolved. She looked pregnant again and Franka went over to talk to her. “I think Yagel is evolving,” she said. “You’re so lucky.” Of course it was wrong not to accept her children as they were, but she felt it in her, a deep reluctance to let go.
Phoebe nodded. “It’s so nice to have them at home for so long, yes. Of course there’s so much beauty in the changes—you know Hildy’s girl?” Franka nodded. “A lunar moth. Elegant, curved wings. Extraordinary. Trembling on the roof. Hildy’s taken photos and made an incredible silkscreen image. It’s haunting. I look at some of the changes and it feels almost religious.”
Phoebe’s face looked dutiful and Franka knew a lie when she heard one: the false sincerity, the false envy. It was always better to have children who stayed children, and not some phenomenal moth. And when they changed, there was always a judgment. No one really said it, but it was there. The mothers of sharks would always weep. Children who didn’t evolve were more of a blessing, no matter how basic it was to evolve.
“You’re too possessive,” Simyon said, hunched over his dinner. He was eating quickly, tearing at his food. “Life is change.” He finished his meal and prowled down the hall, going into his daughter’s room, sniffing and blinking. “Reptile,” he said, coming back. “Cold blood.” He went off to watch his TV.