The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  I started walking north, the gray-blue snow crunching loudly beneath my boots, the collar of my coat turned up against the wind whistling raw between the empty, burned-out buildings. I’d heard security was running slack around the Sixty-third Street entrance. I might get lucky. It had happened before.

  “Yes, but what exactly did you think you’d find on the island?” Buddhadev Krishnamurthy asked when he interviewed me for his second book on technoshamanism and the Roosevelt posthumanists, the one that won him a Pulitzer.

  “Missing pieces, maybe,” I replied. “I was just following my nose. The Miyake girl turned up during the contact.”

  “But, going to the island alone, wasn’t that rather above and beyond? I mean, if you hated Templeton and the Agency so much, why stick your neck out like that?”

  “Old habits,” I said, sipping at my tequila and trying hard to remember how long it had taken me to find a way past the guards and up onto the bridge. “Old habits and bad dreams,” I added, and then, “But I never said I was doing it for the Agency.” I knew I was telling him more than I’d intended. Not that it mattered. None of my interview made it past the censors and into print.

  I kept to the center lanes, except for a couple of times when rusted and fire-blackened tangles of wrecked automobiles and police riot-rollers forced me to the edges of the bridge. The West Channel glimmered dark and iridescent beneath the late February clouds, a million shifting colors dancing lazily across the oily surface of the river. The wind shrieked through the cantilever spans, like angry sirens announcing my trespass to anyone who would listen. I kept waiting for the sound of helicopter rotors or a foot patrol on its way back from Queens, for some sharpshooter’s bullet to drop me dead in my tracks. Maybe it was wishful thinking.

  Halfway across I found the access stairs leading down to the island, right where my contact in Street and Sanitation had said they would be. I checked my watch. It was five minutes until noon.

  “Will you tell me about the dreams, Mr. Paine?” Krishnamurthy asked, after he’d ordered me another beer and another shot of tequila. His voice was like silk and cream, the sort of voice that seduced, that tricked you into lowering your defenses just long enough for him to get a good peek at all the nasty nooks and crannies. “I hear lots of scrubbers had trouble with nightmares back then, before the new neural-drag sieves were available. The suicide rate’s dropped almost fifty percent since they became standard issue. Did you know that, Mr. Paine?”

  “No,” I told him. “Guess I missed the memo. I’m kind of outside the flow these days.”

  “You’re a lucky man,” he said. “You should count your blessings. At least you made it out in one piece. At least you made it out sane.”

  I think I told him to fuck off then. I know I didn’t tell him about the dreams.

  “What do you see down there, Deet? The sensors are getting a little hinky on me,” Sarah said and, in the dreams, back when, in the day, before the tweaker’s silver chip, I took another clumsy step toward the edge of the chasm created by hot water welling up from the deep-sea vents along the Great Charon Ridge. A white plume of salty steam rose high into the thin Europan atmosphere, blotting out the western horizon, boiling off into the indifferent blackness of space. I knew I didn’t want to look over the edge again. I’d been there enough times already and it was always the same, and I reminded myself that no one had ever walked on Europa, no one human, and it was only a dream. Shit. Listen to me. Only a dream. There’s a contradiction to live by.

  “Am I coming through?” Sarah asked. “Can you hear me?”

  I didn’t answer her. My mouth was too dry to speak, bone dry from fear and doubt and the desiccated air circulating through the helmet of my EMU suit.

  “I need you to acknowledge, Deet. Can you hear me?”

  The mouth of Sakpata, the plague gate, yawning toothless and insatiable before me, almost nine kilometers from one side to the other, more than five miles from the edge of the hole down to the water. I was standing near the center of the vast field of cryo-volcanic lenticulae first photographed by the Gallileo probe in 1998, on its fifteenth trip around Jupiter. Convection currents pushed the crust into gigantic pressure domes that finally cracked and collapsed under their own weight, exposing the ocean below. I took another step, almost slipping on the ice, and wondered how far I was from the spot where IcePIC had made landfall.

  “Deet, do you copy?”

  “Do you believe in sin, Deet?”

  Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken –

  The ice was all between.

  Sarah sets her coffee cup down and watches me from the other side of our apartment on Cahuenga. Her eyes are still her eyes, full of impatience and secrets. She reaches for a cigarette and I wish this part wasn’t a dream, that I could go back to here and start again. This sunny LA morning, Sarah wearing nothing but her bra and panties, and me still curled up in the warm spot she left in the sheets. Go back and change the words. Change every goddamn day that’s come between now and then.

  “They want my decision by tomorrow morning,” she says and lights her cigarette. The smoke hangs like a caul about her face.

  “Tell them you need more time,” I reply. “Tell them you have to think about it.”

  “This is the fucking Agency,” she says and shakes her head. “You don’t ask them for more time. You don’t ask them shit.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say, Sarah.”

  “It’s everything I’ve always wanted,” she says and flicks ash into an empty soft drink can.

  Are those her ribs through which the Sun

  Did peer, as through a grate?

  I took another step nearer the chasm and wished that this would end and I would wake up. If I could wake up I wouldn’t have to see. If I could wake up, there’d be a bottle of scotch or bourbon or tequila waiting for me, a drink of something to take the edge off the dryness in my mouth. The sun was rising behind me, a distant, pale thing lost among the stars, and the commlink buzzed and crackled in my ears.

  “If it’s what you want, take it,” I say, the same thing I always say, the same words I can never take back. “I’m not going to stand in your way.” I could tell it was the last thing that Sarah wanted to hear. The End. The curtain falls and everyone takes a bow. The next day, Wednesday, I’ll drive her to LAX-1 and she’ll take the 4:15 jump to D.C.

  We are more alone than ever.

  Ronnie used her own blood to write those six words on the wall of her room at La Casa, the night she killed herself.

  My boots left no trace whatsoever on the slick, blue-white ice. A few more steps and I was finally standing at the edge, walking cautiously onto the wide shelf formed by an angular chaos block jutting a few meters out over the pit. The constant steam had long since worn the edges of the block smooth. Eventually, it would melt free, undercut by ages of heat and water vapor, and plunge into the churning abyss far below. I took a deep breath of the dry, stale air inside my helmet and peered into the throat of Sakpata.

  “Tell me, what the hell did we expect to find out there, Deet?” Ronnie asked me. “What did we think it would be? Little gray men with the answers to all the mysteries of the universe, free for the asking? A few benign extremophiles clinging stubbornly to the bottom of a lifeless sea? I can’t remember anymore. I try, but I can’t. I lay awake at night trying to remember.”

  “I don’t think it much matters,” I told her and she started crying again.

  “It was waiting for us, Deet,” she sobbed. “It was waiting for us all along, a million fucking years alone out there in the dark. It knew we’d come, sooner or later.”

  Sarah was standing on the ice behind me, naked, the wind tearing at her plastic skin.

  “Why do you keep coming here?” she asked. “What do you think you’ll find?”

  “Why do you keep following me?”

  “You turned off your comms. I wasn’t getting a signal. You didn’t leave me much choice.”

  I turned
to face her, turning my back on the hole, but the wind had already pulled her apart and scattered the pieces across the plain.

  We are more alone than ever.

  And then I’m in the pipe, slipping along the Scrubber’s Road, no friction, no resistance, rushing by high above the frozen moon, waiting for that blinding, twinkling moment of perfect agony when my mind brushes up against that other mind. That instant when it tries to hide, tries to withdraw, and I dig in and hang on and drag it screaming into the light. I hear the whir of unseen machineries as the techs on the outside try to keep up with me, with it.

  I stand alone at the edge of Sakpata’s mouth, where no man has ever stood, at the foot of the bed on Columbus, in the airport lobby saying goodbye to Sarah. I have all my cameras, my instruments, because I’ll need all that later on, when the spin is over and I’m drunk and there’s nothing left but the footwork.

  When I have nothing left to do but track down the carrier and put a bullet or two in his or her or its head.

  Cut the cord. Tie off the loose ends.

  “Do you believe in sin, Deet?”

  Instead of the cross, the Albatross . . .

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

  “Do you copy?” Sarah asks again. “Global can’t get a fix on you.” I take another step closer to the hole, and it slips a few feet farther away from me. The sky is steam and stars and infinite night.

  I followed East Road north to Main Street, walking as quickly as the snow and black ice and wrecks littering the way would allow. I passed through decaying canyons of brick and steel, broken windows and gray concrete, the tattered ruins of the mess left after the Feds gave Roosevelt Island up for lost, built their high barricades and washed their hands of the place. I kept my eyes on the road at my feet, but I could feel them watching me, following me, asking each other if this one was trouble or just some fool out looking for his funeral. I might have been either. I still wasn’t sure myself. There were tracks in the snow and frozen mud, here and there, some of them more human than others.

  Near the wild place that had once been Blackwell Park, I heard something call out across the island. It was a lonely, frightened sound, and I walked a little faster.

  I wondered if Sarah would try to send an extraction team in after me, if she was in deep sharn with Templeton and the boys for letting me scoot. I wondered if maybe Temp was already counting me among the dead and kicking himself for not putting me under surveillance, trying to figure out how the hell he was going to lay it all out for the bastards in Washington. It took me the better part of an hour to reach the northern tip of the island and the charred and crumbling corpse of Coler Goldwater Hospital. The ragtag militia of genetic anarchists that had converged on Manhattan in the autumn of ’sixty-nine taking orders from a schizo ex-movie star who called herself Circe Nineteen, had claimed the old hospital as their headquarters. When the army decided to start shelling, Coler had taken the worst of the mortars. Circe Nineteen had been killed by a sniper, but there’d been plenty of freaks on hand to fill her shoes, so to speak.

  Beneath the sleeting February sky, the hospital looked as dead as the day after Armageddon. I tried not to think about the spooch, all the things I’d seen and heard the day before, the things I’d felt, the desperate stream of threats and promises and prayers the crit had spewed at me when I’d finally come to the end of the shimmering aether pipeline and we’d started the dance.

  Inside, the hospital stunk like a zoo, a dying, forgotten zoo, but at least I was out of the wind. My face and hands had gone numb. How would the Agency feel about a scrubber without his fingers? Would they toss me on the scrap heap, or would they just give me a shiny new set made in Osaka, better than the originals? Maybe work a little of the biomech magic they’d worked on Sarah? I followed a long ground-floor hallway past doors and doorways without doors, pitch dark rooms and chiaroscuro rooms ruled by the disorienting interplay of shadow and light, until I came to a row of elevators. All the doors had been jammed more or less open at some point, exposing shafts filled with dust and gears and rusted cables. I stood there a while, as my fingers and lips began to tingle, the slow pins-and-needles thaw, and listened to the building whispering around me.

  “They’re all animals,” Sarah had sneered the day before. But they weren’t, of course, no more than she was truly a machine. I knew Sarah was bright enough to see the truth, even before they’d squeezed all that hardware into her skull. Even if she could never admit it to herself or anyone else. The cyborgs and stitches were merely opposing poles in the same rebellion against the flesh – black pawn, white pawn – north and south on the same twisted postevolutionary road. Not that it made much difference to me. It still doesn’t. But standing there, my breath fogging and the feeling slowly returning to my hands, her arrogance was pissing me off more than usual. Near as I could tell, the biggest difference between Sarah and whatever was waiting for me in the bombed-out hospital that afternoon – maybe the only difference that actually mattered – was that the men and women in power had found a use for her kind, while the stitches and changelings had never been anything to them but a nuisance. It might have gone a different way. It might yet.

  There was a stairwell near the elevators and I climbed it to the third floor. I hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight with me, so I stayed close to the wall, feeling my way through the gloom, stumbling more than once when my feet encountered chunks of rubble that had fallen from somewhere overhead.

  On the third floor, the child was waiting for me.

  “What do you want here?” he barked and blinked at me with the golden eyes of a predatory bird. He was naked, his skin hidden beneath a coat of fine yellow-brown fur.

  “Who are you?” I asked him.

  “The manticore said you were coming. She saw you on the bridge. What do you want?”

  “I’m looking for a girl named Jet.”

  The child laughed, a strange, hitching laugh, and rolled his eyes. He leaned forward, staring at me intently, expectantly, and the vertical pupils of those big golden eyes dilated slightly.

  “Ain’t no girls here, Mister,” he chuckled. “Not anymore. You skizzled or what?”

  “Is there anyone here named Jet? I’ve come a long way to talk to her.”

  “You got a gun, maybe?” he asked. “You got a knife?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t. I just want to talk.”

  “You come out to Stitchtown without a gun or a knife? Then you must have some bangers, Mister. You must have whennymegs big as my fist,” and he held up one clenched fist so I could see exactly what he meant. “Or you don’t want to live so much longer, maybe.”

  “Maybe,” I replied.

  “Meat’s scarce this time of year,” the boy chuckled and then licked his thin, ebony lips.

  Down at the other end of the hallway, something growled softly and the boy glanced over his shoulder, then back up at me. He was smiling, a hard smile that was neither cruel nor kind, revealing the sharp tips of his long canines and incisors. He looked disappointed.

  “All in good time,” he said and took my hand. “All in good time,” and I let him lead me toward the eager shadows crouched at the other end of the hallway.

  Near the end of his book, Emmanuel Weatherby-Jones writes, “The calamities following, and following from, the return of the IcePIC probe may stand as mankind’s gravest defeat. For long millennia, we had asked ourselves if we were alone in the cosmos. Indeed, that question has surely formed much of the fundamental matter of the world’s religions. But when finally answered, once and for all, we were forced to accept that there had been greater comfort in our former, vanished ignorance.”

  We are more alone than ever. Ronnie got that part right.

  When I’d backed out of the contact and the techs had a solid lockdown on the critter’s signal, when the containment waves were pinging crystal mad off the putrescent walls of the bedroom on Columbus and one of the medics had administe
red a stimulant to clear my head and bring me the rest of the way home, I sat down on the floor and cried.

  Nothing unusual about that. I’ve cried almost every single time. At least I didn’t puke.

  “Good job,” Templeton said and rested a heavy gloved hand on my shoulder.

  “Fuck you. I could hear them. I could hear both of them, you asshole.”

  “We did what we could, Deet. I couldn’t have you so tanked on morphine you’d end up flatlining.”

  “Oh my god. Oh Jesus god,” I sobbed like an old woman, gasping, my heart racing itself round smaller and smaller circles, fried to a crisp on the big syringe full of synthetadrine the medic had pumped into my left arm. “Kill it, Temp. You kill it right this fucking instant.”

  “We have to stick to protocol,” he said calmly, staring down at the writhing mass of bone and meat and protoplasm on the bed. A blood-red tendril slithered from the place where the man’s mouth had been and began burrowing urgently into the sagging mattress. “Just as soon as we have you debriefed and we’re sure stasis is holding, then we’ll terminate life signs.”

  “Fuck it,” I said and reached for his Beretta, tearing the pistol from the velcro straps of the holster with enough force that Temp almost fell over on top of me. I shoved him aside and aimed at the thing on the bed.