The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  The Ship – and one face, revealed to him at last: an elfin face, with distracted eyes. He didn’t know if she was a gift of Pirius or even Andres, if she was outside his own head or inside. None of that seemed to matter when at last she smiled for him, and he felt the easing of a tension twenty-five millennia old, the dissolving of a clot of ancient guilt.

  The Ship forged on into the endless dark, its corridors as clean and bright and empty as his thoughts.

  RIDING THE WHITE BULL

  Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Caitlin R. Kiernan is the author of four novels, The Five of Cups, Silk, Threshold, and Low Red Moon. Her short fiction has appeared in Lethal Kisses, Love in Vein, White of the Moon, High Fantastic, Children of Cthulu, Argosy, Shadows Over Baker Street, Silver Birch, Blood Moon, and elsewhere, and has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder and From Weird and Distant Shores. She has also scripted The Dreaming series for DC Comics/Vertigo. Her most recent book is a chapbook novella, The Dry Salvages. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

  In the harrowing story that follows, she offers us a unique vision of First Contact – which turns out to be nothing like it is on Star Trek.

  YOU’VE BEEN DRINKING again, Mr. Paine,” Sarah said, and I suppose I must have stopped whatever it was I was doing, probably staring at those damned pics again, the ones of the mess the cops had turned up that morning in a nasty little dump on Columbus – or maybe chewing at my fingernails, or thinking about sex. Whatever. Something or another that suddenly didn’t matter anymore because she wasn’t asking me a question. Sarah rarely had time for questions. She just wasn’t that sort of a girl anymore. She spoke with a directness and authority that would never match her pretty artificial face, and that dissonance, that absolute betrayal of expectation, always made people sit up and listen. If I’d been looking at the photos – I honestly can’t remember – I probably laid them down again and looked at her instead.

  “There are worse things,” I replied, which I suppose I thought was some sort of excuse or defense or something, but she only scowled at me and shook her head.

  “Not for you there aren’t,” she whispered, speaking so low that I almost couldn’t make out the words over the faint hum of her metabolic servos and the rumble of traffic down on the street. She blinked and turned away, staring out my hotel window at the dark gray sky hanging low above the Hudson. The snow had finally stopped falling and the clouds had an angry, interrupted intensity to them. Jesus. I can remember the fucking clouds, can even assign them human emotions, but I can’t remember what I was doing when Sarah told me I was drinking again. The bits we save, the bits we throw away. Go figure.

  “The Agency doesn’t need drunks on its payroll, Mr. Paine. The streets of New York are full of drunks and junkies. They’re cheaper than rat shit. The Agency needs men with clear minds.”

  Sarah had a way of enunciating words so that I knew they were capitalized. And she always capitalized Agency. Always. Maybe it was a glitch in one of her language programs, or, then again, maybe she just made me paranoid. Sarah and the booze and the fucking Agency and, while I’m on the subject, February in Manhattan. By that point, I think I’d have given up a couple of fingers and a toe to be on the next flight back to LA.

  “We hired you because Fennimore said you were sober. We checked your records with the Department of – ”

  “Why are you here, Sarah? What do you want? I have work to do,” and I jabbed a thumb at the cluttered desk on the other side of my unmade bed. “Work for you and the Agency.”

  “Work you can’t do drunk.”

  “Yeah, so why don’t you fire my worthless intoxicated ass and put me on the next jump back to Los Angeles? After this morning, I honestly couldn’t give a shit.”

  “You understood, when you took this job, Mr. Paine, that there might be exceptional circumstances.”

  She was still staring out the window towards the sludgy, ice-jammed river and Jersey, an almost expectant expression on her face, the sullen winter light reflecting dull and iridescent off her unaging dermafab skin.

  “We were quite explicit on that point.”

  “Of course you were,” I mumbled, half to myself, even less than half to the cyborg who still bothered to call herself Sarah, and then I stepped around the foot of the bed and sat down on a swivel-topped aluminum stool in front of the desk. I made a show of shuffling papers about, hoping that she’d take the hint and leave. I needed a drink and time alone, time to think about what the hell I was going to do next. After the things I’d seen and heard, the things in the photographs I’d taken, the things they wouldn’t let me photograph, I was beginning to understand why the Agency had decided not to call an alert on this one, why they were keeping the CDC and BioCon and the WHO in the dark. Why they’d called in a scrubber, instead.

  “It’ll snow again before morning,” Sarah said, not turning away from the window.

  “If you can call that crap out there snow,” I replied impatiently. “It’s not even white. It smells like . . . fuck, I don’t know what it smells like, but it doesn’t smell like snow.”

  “You have to learn to let go of the past, Mr. Paine. It’s no good to you here. No good at all.”

  “Is that Agency policy?” I asked and Sarah frowned.

  “No, that’s not what I meant.” She sighed then, and I wondered if it was just habit or if she still needed to breathe, still needed oxygen to drive the patchwork alchemy of her biomechs. I also wondered if she still had sex and, if so, with what. Sarah and I had gone a few rounds, way back in the day, back when she was still one-hundred-percent flesh and blood, water and bone and cartilage. Back when she was still scrubbing freelance, before the Agency gave her a contract and shipped her off to the great frozen dung heap of Manhattan. Back then, if anyone had asked, I’d have said it was her life, her decisions to make, and a girl like Sarah sure as fuck didn’t need someone like me getting in her way.

  “I was trying to say – here, now – we have to live in the present. That’s all we have – ”

  “Forget it,” I told her, glancing up too quickly from the bloody, garish images flickering across the screen of my old Sony-Akamatsu laptop. “Thanks for the ride, though.”

  “No problem,” Sarah whispered. “It’s what I do,” and she finally turned away from the window, the frost on the plexiglass, the wide interrupted sky.

  “If I need anything, I’ll give you or Templeton a ring,” I said and Sarah pretended to smile, nodded her head, and walked across the tiny room to the door. She opened it but paused there, one foot across the threshold, neither in nor out, the heavy, cold air and flat fluorescent lighting from the hallway leaking in around her, swaddling her like a second-rate halo.

  “Try to stay sober,” she said. “Please. Mr. Paine. This one . . . it’s going to be a squeeze.” And her green-brown eyes shimmered faintly, those amazing eight-mill-a-pair spheres of fiberoptic filament and scratch-resistant acrylic, tinted mercury suspension-platinum lenses and the very best circuitry German optimetrics had figured out how to cram into a 6.5 cc socket. I imagined, then or only later on – that’s something else I can’t remember – that the shimmer stood for something Sarah was too afraid to say aloud, or something the Agency’s behavioral inhibitors wouldn’t allow her to say, something in her psyche that had been stamped Code Black, Restricted Access.

  “Please,” she said again.

  “Sure. For old time’s sake,” I replied.

  “Whatever it takes, Mr. Paine,” and she left, pulling the door softly closed behind her, abandoning me to my dingy room and the dingier afternoon light leaking in through the single soot-streaked window. I listened to her footsteps on the tile, growing fainter as she approached the elevator at the other end of the hall, and when I was sure she wasn’t coming back, I reached for the half-empty bottle of scotch tucked into the shadows beneath the edge of the bed.

  Back then, I still dreamed about Europa every fucking night. Years later, after I’d finally been retired by the A
gency and was only Dietrich Paine again, pensioned civilian has-been rotting away day by day by day in East LA or NoHo or San Diego – I moved around a lot for a drunk – a friend of a friend’s croaker hooked me up with some black market head tweaker. And he slipped a tiny silver chip into the base of my skull, right next to my metencephalon, and the bad dreams stopped, just like that. No more night flights, no more cold sweats, no more screaming until the neighbors called the cops.

  But that winter in Manhattan, I was still a long, long decade away from the tweaker and his magic silver chip, and whenever the insomnia failed me and I dozed off for ten or fifteen or twenty minutes I was falling again, tumbling silently through the darkness out beyond Ganymede, falling toward that Great Red Spot, that eternal crimson hurricane, my perfect, vortical Hell of phosphorous-stained clouds. Always praying to whatever dark Jovian gods might be watching my descent that this time I’d sail clear of the moons and the anticyclone’s eye would swallow me at last, dragging me down, burning me, crushing me in that vast abyss of gas and lightning and infinite pressure.

  But I never made it. Not one single goddamn time.

  “Do you believe in sin?” Sarah would ask me, when she was still just Sarah, before the implants and augmentations, and I would lie there in her arms, thinking that I was content, and stare up at the ceiling of our apartment and laugh at her.

  “I’m serious, Deet.”

  “You’re always serious. You’ve got serious down to an exact science.”

  “I think you’re trying to avoid the question.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a pretty silly fucking question.”

  “Answer it anyway. Do you believe in sin?”

  There’s no way to know how fast I’m moving as I plummet toward the hungry, welcoming storm, and then Europa snags me. Maybe next time, I think. Maybe next time.

  “It’s only a question,” Sarah would say. “Stop trying to make it anything more than that.”

  “Most of us get what’s coming to us, sooner or later.”

  “That’s not the same thing. That’s not what I asked you.”

  And the phone would ring, or I’d slip my hand between her unshaven legs, or one of our beepers would go off, and the moment would melt away, releasing me from her scrutiny.

  It never happened exactly that way, of course, but who’s keeping score?

  In my dreams, Europa grows larger and larger, sprouting from the darkness exactly like it did in the fucking orientation vids every scrubber had to sit through in those days if he or she wanted a license. Snippets of video from this or that probe borrowed for my own memories. Endless fractured sheets of ice the color of rust and sandstone, rising up so fast, so fast, and I’m only a very small speck of meat and white EMU suit streaking north and east across the ebony skies above Mael Duín, the Echion Linea, Cilix, the southeastern terminus of the Rhadamanthys Linea. I’m only a shooting star hurtling along above that terrible varicose landscape and I can’t remember how to close my eyes.

  “Man, I was right fucking there when they opened the thing,” Ronnie says again and takes another drag off her cigarette. Her hand trembles and ash falls to the formica tabletop. “I’d asked to go to Turkey, right, to cover the goddamn war, but I pulled the IcePIC assignment instead. I was waiting in the pressroom with everyone else, watching the feed from the quarantine unit when the sirens started.”

  “The Agency denies you were present,” I reply as calmly as I can, and she smiles that nervous, brittle smile she always had, laughs one of her dry, humorless laughs, and gray smoke leaks from her nostrils.

  “Hell, I know that, Deet. The fuckers keep rewriting history so it always comes out the way they want it to, but I was there, man I saw it, before they shut down the cameras. I saw all that shit that ‘never happened,’ ” and she draws quotation marks in the air with her index fingers.

  That was the last time I talked to Ronnie, the last time I visited her out at La Casa Psychiatric, two or three weeks before she hanged herself with an electrical cord. I went to the funeral, of course. The Agency sent a couple of black-suited spooks with carefully worded condolences for her family and I ducked out before the eulogy was finished.

  And here, a few kilometers past the intersection of Tectamus Linea and Harmonia Linea, I see the familiar scatter of black dots laid out helter-skelter on the crosscut plains. “Ice-water volcanism,” Sarah whispers inside my helmet; I know damn well she isn’t there, hasn’t been anywhere near me for years and years and I’m alone and only dreaming her voice to break the deafening weight of silence. I count the convection cells like rosary beads, like I was ever Catholic, like someone who might have once believed in sin. I’m still too far up to see any evidence of the lander, so I don’t know which hole is The Hole, Insertion Point 2071A, the open sore that Emmanuel Weatherby-Jones alternately referred to as “the plague gate” and “the mouth of Sakpata” in his book on the Houston incident and its implications for theoretical and applied astrobiology. I had to look that up, because he never explained who or what Sakpata was. I found it in an old book on voodoo and Afro-Caribbean religions. Sakpata is a god of disease.

  I’m too far up to guess which hole is Sakpata’s mouth and I don’t try.

  I don’t want to know.

  A different sort of god is patiently waiting for me on the horizon.

  “They started screaming,” Ronnie says. “Man, I’ll never forget that sound, no matter how many pills these assholes feed me. We all sat there, too fucking stunned to move, and this skinny little guy from CNN – ”

  “Last time he was from Newsweek,” I say, interrupting her, and she shakes her head and takes another drag, coughs, and rubs at her bloodshot eyes.

  “You think it makes any goddamned difference?”

  “No,” I reply dishonestly, and she stares at me for a while without saying anything else.

  “When’s the last time you got a decent night’s sleep?” she asks me, finally, and I might laugh, or I might shrug, and “Yeah,” she says. “That’s what I thought.”

  She starts rattling on about the hydrobot, then, the towering black smokers, thermal vents, chemosynthesis, those first grainy snatches of video, but I’m not listening. I’m too busy zipping helplessly along above buckled Europan plains and vast stretches of blocky, shattered chaos material; a frozen world caught in the shadow of Big Daddy Jupiter, frozen for ages beyond counting but a long fucking way from dead, and I would wake up screaming or crying or, if I was lucky, too scared to make any sound at all.

  “They’re ready for you now, Mr. Paine,” the cop said, plain old NYPD street blue, and I wondered what the fuck he was doing here, why the Agency was taking chances like that. Probably the same poor bastard who’d found the spooch, I figured. Templeton had told me that someone in the building had complained about the smell and the super buzzed the cops, so this was most likely the guy who answered the call. He might have a partner around somewhere. I nodded at him and he glanced nervously back over his shoulder at the open door to the apartment, the translucent polyurethane iso-seal curtain with its vertical black zipper running right down the middle, all the air hoses snaking in and out of the place, keeping the pressure inside lower than the pressure outside. I doubted he would still be breathing when the sweeper crews were finished with the scene.

  “You see this sort of shit very often?” he asked, and it didn’t take a particularly sensitive son of a bitch to hear the fear in his voice, the fear and confusion and whatever comes after panic. I didn’t respond. I was busy checking the batteries in one of my cameras and, besides, I had the usual orders from Templeton to keep my mouth shut around civvies. And knowing the guy was probably already good as dead, that he’d signed his death warrant just by showing up for work that morning, didn’t make me particularly eager to chat.

  “Well, I don’t mind telling you, I’ve never seen shit like that thing in there,” he said and coughed. “I mean, you see some absolutely fucked-up shit in this city, and I even did my four years
in the army – hell, I was in fucking Damascus after the bomb, but holy Christ Almighty – ”

  “You were in Damascus?” I asked, but didn’t look up from my equipment, too busy double-checking the settings on the portable genetigraph clipped to my belt to make eye contact.

  “Oh yeah, I was there. I got to help clean up the mess when the fires burned out.”

  “Then that’s something we have in common,” I told him and flipped my vidcam’s on switch and the gray LED screen showed me five zeros. I was patched into the portable lab down on the street, a black Chevy van with Maryland plates and a yellow ping-pong ball stuck on the antenna. I knew Sarah would be in the van, waiting for my feed, jacked in, riding the amps, hearing everything I heard, seeing everything I saw through her perfectly calibrated eyes.

  “You were in Syria?” the cop asked me, glad to have something to talk about besides what he’d seen in the apartment.

  “No, I clean up other people’s messes.”

  “Oh,” he said, sounding disappointed. “I see.”

  “Had a good friend in the war, though. But he was stationed in Cyprus, and then the Taurus Mountains.”

  “You ever talk with him? You know, about the war?”

  “Nope. He didn’t make it back,” I said, finally looking up and I winked at the cop and stepped quickly past him to the tech waiting for me at the door. I could see she was sweating inside her hazmat hood, even though it was freezing in the hallway. Scrubbers don’t get hazmat suits. It interferes with the contact, so we settle for a couple of hours in decon afterwards, antibiotics, antitox, purgatives, and hope we don’t come up red somewhere down the line.

  “This is bad, ain’t it?” the cop asked. “I mean, this is something real bad,” and I didn’t turn around, just shrugged my shoulders as the tech unzipped the plastic curtain for me.