In my terror, I have made a monster.
“I know you,” Nix whispers. The figure standing between her and the hatchway back to Four has Shiloh’s kindly hazel-brown eyes, and even though the similarity ends there, about the whole being there is a nagging familiarity.
“Do you?” it asks. It or she. “Yes, I believe that you do. I believe that you have known me a very, very long while. “Whither so early, Little Red Riding Hood?”
“I’ve never seen you.”
“Haven’t you? As a child, didn’t you once catch me peering in your bedroom window? Didn’t you glimpse me lurking in an alley? Didn’t you visit me at the bio that day? Don’t I live beneath your daughter’s bed and in your dreams?”
And now Nix does reach into her left hip pouch for the antipsychotics there. She takes a single step backwards and her boot comes down in the warm, stagnant pool, sinking in up to the ankle. The splash seems very loud, louder than the atonal symphony of dragonflies buzzing in her ears. She wants to look away from the someone or something she only imagines there before her, a creature more canine than human, an abomination that might have been created in an illicit sub rosa recombinant-outcross lab back on earth. A commission for a wealthy collector, for a private menagerie of designer freaks. Were the creature real. Which it isn’t.
Nix tries to open the Mylar med packet, but it slips through her fingers and vanishes in the underbrush. The thing licks its muzzle with a mottled blue-black tongue, and Shiloh’s eyes sparkle from its face.
“Are you going across the stones or the thorns?” it asks.
“Excuse me?” Nix croaks, her throat parched, her mouth gone cottony. Why did I answer it. Why am I speaking with it at all?
It scowls.
“Don’t play dumb, Nix.”
It knows my name.
It only knows my name because I know my name.
“Which path are you taking? The one of needles or the one of pins?”
“I couldn’t reach the crawls,” she hears herself say, as though the words are reaching her ears from a great distance. “I tried, but the ladder was broken.”
“Then you are on the Road of Needles,” the creature replies, curling back its dark lips in a parody of a smile and revealing far too many sharp yellow teeth. “You surprise me, Petit Chaperon rouge. I am so rarely ever surprised.”
Enough . . .
My ship is dying all around me, and that’s enough, I will not fucking see this. I will not waste my time conversing with my id.
Nix Severn turns away, turning much too quickly and much too carelessly, almost falling face first into the pool. It no longer matters to her how deep the water might be or what might be lurking below the surface. She stumbles ahead, sending out sprays of the tea-colored water with every step she takes. They sparkle like gems beneath the artificial sun. The mud sucks at her feet, and soon she’s in up to her chest. But even drowning would be better, she assures herself. Even drowning would be better.
5.
Nix has been at Shackleton Relay for almost a week, and it will be almost another week before a shuttle ferries her to the CTV Blackbird, waiting in dockside orbit. The cafeteria lights are too bright, like almost everything else in the station, but at least the food is decent. That’s a popular myth among the techs and co-op officers who never actually spend time at Shackleton, that the food is all but inedible. Truthfully, it’s better than most of what she got growing up. She listens while another EOT sitter talks, and she pokes at her bowl of udon, snow peas, and tofu with a pair of blue plastic chopsticks.
“I prefer straight up freight runs,” Marshall Choudhury says around a mouthful of noodles. “But terras, they’re not as hinky as some of the caps make them out to be. You get redundant safeguards out the anus.”
“Far as I’m concerned,” she replies, “cargo is cargo. Jaunts are jaunts.”
Marshall sets down his own bowl, lays his chopsticks on the counter beside it.
“Right,” he says. “You’ll get no kinda donnybrook here. None at all. Just my pref, that’s it. Less hassle hauling hardware and whatnot, less coddling the payload. More free for dream-away.”
Nix shrugs and chews a pea pod, swallows, and tells him, “Fella, here on my end, the chips are chips, however I may earn them. I’m just happy to have the work.”
“Speaking of which . . . ” Marshall says, then trails off.
“That your concern now, Choudhury, my personal life?”
“Just one fella’s consideration for a comrade’s, all.”
“Well, as you’ve asked, Shiloh is still nagging me about hooking something in the yards.” She sets her bowl down and stares at the broth in the bottom. “Like she didn’t know when I married her, like she didn’t know before Maia, that I was EOT and had no intent or interest in ever working anything other than offworld.”
“Lost a wife over it,” he says, as if Nix doesn’t know already. “She gave me the final notice and all, right, but fuck it. Fuck it. She doesn’t know the void. Couldn’t know what she was asking a runner to give up. Gets wiggled into a fella’s blood, don’t ever get out again.”
Marshall has an ugly scar across the left side of his face, courtesy of a coolant blowout a few years back and the ensuing frostbite. Nix tries to look at him, without letting her eyes linger on the scar, but that’s always a challenge. A wonder he didn’t lose that eye. He would have, if his goggles had cracked.
“Don’t know if that’s the why with me.” She says. “Can’t say. Obviously, I do miss them when I’m out. Sometimes, miss ’em like hell.”
“But that doesn’t stop you flying, doesn’t turn you to the yards.”
“Sometimes, fuck, I wish it would.”
“She gonna walk?” he asks.
“I try not think about that, and I especially try not to think about that just before outbound. Jesus.”
Marshall picks up his bowl and chopsticks, then fishes for a morsel of tofu.
“One day not too far, the cooperatives gonna replace us with autos,” he sighs, and pops the white cube into his mouth. “So, gotta judge our sacrifices against the raw inevitabilities.”
“Union scare talk,” Nix scoffs, though she knows he’s probably right. Too many ways to save expenses by completely, finally, eliminating a human crew. A wonder it hasn’t happened before now, she thinks.
“Maybe you ought consider cutting your losses, that’s all.”
“Fella, you only just now told me how much choice we don’t have, once the life digs in and it’s all we know. Make up your damn mind.”
“You gonna finish that?” he asks and points at her bowl.
She shakes her head and slides it across the counter to him. Thinking about Maia and Shiloh, her appetite has evaporated.
“Anyway, point is, no need to fret on a terra run, no more than anything else.”
“Never said I was fretting. It’s not even my first.”
“No, but that was not my point, fella,” Marshall slurps at the broth left in the bottom of her white bowl, which is the same unrelenting white as the counter, their seats, the ceiling and walls, the lighting. When he’s done, he wipes his mouth on a sleeve and says, “Maybe it’s best EOTs stay lone. Avoid the entire mess, start to finish.”
She frowns and jabs a chopstick at him. “Isn’t it rough enough already without coming back from the black and lonely without anyone waiting to greet us?”
“There are other comforts,” he says.
“No wonder she left you, you indifferent fuck.”
Marshall massages his temples, then changes the subject. For all his faults, he’s pretty good at sensing thin ice beneath his feet. “It’s your first time to the Kasei though, that’s true, yeah?”
“That’s true, yeah.”
“You can and will and no doubt already have done worse than the Kasei ’tats.”
“I hear good things,” she says, but her mind’s elsewhere, and she’s hoping Marshall grows tired of talking soon so she can get back
to her quarters and pop a few pinks for six or seven hour’s worth of sleep.
“Down on the north end of Cattarinetta Boulevard—in Scarlet Quad—there’s a brothel. Probably the best on the whole rock. I happen to know the proprietress.”
Nix isn’t so much an angel she’s above the consolation of whores when away from Shiloh. All those months pile up. The months between docks, the interminable Phobos reroutes, the weeks of red dust and colonist hardscrabble.
“Her name’s Paddy,” he continues, “and you just tell her you’re a high fella to Marshall Mason Choudhury, and she’ll see you’re treated extra right. Not those half-starved farm girls. She’ll set you up with the pinnacle merch.”
“That’s kind of you,” and she stands. “I’ll do that.”
“Not a trouble,” he says and waves a hand dismissively. “And look, as I said, don’t you fret over the cargo. Terra’s no different than aluminum and pharmaceuticals.”
“It’s not my first goddamn terra run. How many times I have to—”
But she’s thinking, Then why the extra seven-percent hazard commission, if terras are the same as all the rest? Nix would never ask such a question aloud, anymore than she can avoid asking it of herself.
“Your Oma, she’ll—”
“Fella, I’ll see you later,” she says, and walks quickly towards the cafeteria door before he can get another word or ten out. Sometimes, she’d lay good money that the solitudes are beginning to gnaw at the man’s sanity. That sort of shit happens all too often. The glare in the corridor leading back to the housing module isn’t quite as bright as the lights in the cafeteria, so at least she has that much to be grateful for.
6.
Muddy, sweat-soaked, insect-bitten and insect-stung, eyes and lungs and nostrils smarting from the hundreds of millions of gametophytes she breathed during her arduous passage through each infested isotainer, arms and legs weak, stomach rolling, breathless, Nix Severn has finally arrived at the bottom of the deep shaft leading down to Oma’s dormant CPU. The bzou has kept up with her the entire, torturous way. Though she didn’t realize that it was a bzou until halfway through the second ’tainer. Sentient viruses are so rare that the odds of Oma’s crash having triggered the creation (or been triggered by) bzou has a probability risk approaching zero, at most a negligent threat to any transport. But here it is, and the hallucination isn’t a hallucination.
An hour ago, she finally had the presence of mind to scan the thing, and it bears the distinctive signatures, the unmistakable byte sequence of a cavity-stealth strategy.
“A good quarter of an hour’s walk further in the forest, under yon three large oaks. There stands her house. Further beneath are the nut trees, which you will see there,” it said when the scan was done. “Red Hood! Just look! There are such pretty flowers here! Why don’t you look round at them all? Methinks you don’t even hear how delightfully the birds are singing! You are as dull as if you were going to school, and yet it is so cheerful in the forest!”
Oma knows Nix’s psych profile, which means the bzou knows Nix’s psyche.
Nix pushes back the jumpsuit’s quilted hood and visor again—she’d had to lower it to help protect against a minor helium leak near the shaft’s rim—and tries to concentrate and figure out precisely what has gone wrong. Oma is quiet, dark, dead. The holo is off, so she’ll have to rely on her knowledge of the manual interface, the toggles and pressure pads, horizontal and vertical sliders, spinners, dials, knife switches . . . all without access to Oma’s guidance. She’s been trained for this, yes, but AI diagnostics and repair has never been her strong suit.
The bzou is crouched near her, Shiloh’s stolen eyes tracking her every move.
“Who’s there?” it asks.
“I’m not playing this game anymore,” Nix mutters, and begins tripping the instruments that ought to initiate a hard reboot. “I’m done with you. Fifteen more minutes, you’ll be wiped. For all I know, this was sabotage.”
“Who’s there, skycap?” the bzou says again.
Nix pulls down on one of the knife switches, and nothing happens.
“Push on the door,” advises the bzou. “It’s blocked by a pail of water.”
Nix pulls the next switch, a multi-boot resort—she’s being stupid, so tired and rattled that she’s skipping stages—which should rouse the unresponsive Oma when almost all else fails. The core doesn’t reply. Here are her worst fears beginning to play themselves out. Maybe it was a full-on panic, a crash that will require triple-caste post-mortem debugging to reverse, which means dry dock, which would mean she is utterly fucking fucked. No way in hell she can hand pilot the Blackbird back onto the rails, and this far off course an eject would only mean slow suffocation or hypothermia or starvation.
Nix speaks to the bzou without looking at it. She takes a tiny turnscrew from the kit strapped to her rebreather (which she hasn’t needed to use, and it’s been nothing but dead weight she hasn’t dared abandon, just in case).
Maybe she isn’t through playing the game, after all. She takes a deep breath, winds the driver to a 2.4 mm. mortorq bit, and keeps her eyes on the panel. She doesn’t need to see the bzou to converse with it.
“All right,” she says. “Let’s assume you have a retract sequence, that you’re a benign propagation.”
“Only press the latch,” it says. “I am so weak, I can’t get out of bed.”
“Fine. Grandmother, I’ve come such a very long way to visit you.” Nix imagines herself reading aloud to Maia, imagines Maia’s rapt attention and Shiloh in the doorway.
“Shut the door well, my little lamb. Put your basket on the table, and then take off your frock and come and lie down by me. You shall rest a little.”
Shut the door. Shut the door and rest a little . . .
Partial head crash, foreign-reaction safe mode. Voluntary coma.
Nix nods and opens one of the memory trays, then pulls a yellow bus card, replacing it with a spare from the console’s supply rack. Somewhere deep inside Oma’s brain, there’s the very faintest of hums.
“It’s a code,” Nix says to herself.
And if I can get the order of questions right, if I can keep the bzou from getting suspicious and rogueing up . . .
A drop of sweat drips from her brow, stinging her right eye, but she ignores it. “Now, Grandmother, now please listen.”
“I’m all ears, child.”
“And what big ears you have.”
“All the better to hear you with.”
“Right . . . of course,” and Nix opens a second tray, slicing into Oma’s comms, yanking two fried transmit-receive bus cards. She hasn’t been able to talk to Phobos. She’s been deaf all this fucking time. The CPU hums more loudly, and a hexagonal arrangement of startup OLEDs flash to life.
One down.
“Grandmother, what big eyes you have.”
“All the better to see you with, Rotkäppchen.”
Right. Fuck you, wolf. Fuck you and your goddamn road of stones and needles. Nix runs reset on all of Oma’s optic servos and outboards. She’s rewarded with the dull thud and subsequent discordant chime of a reboot.
“What big teeth I have,” Nix says, and now she does turn towards the bzou, and as Oma wakes up, the virus begins to sketch out, fading in incremental bursts of distorts and static. “All the better to eat you with.”
“Have I found you now, old rascal?” the virus manages between bursts of white noise. “Long have I been looking for you.”
The bzou had been meant as a distress call from Oma, sent out in the last nanoseconds before the crash. “I’m sorry, Oma,” Nix says, turning back to the computer. “The forest, the terra . . . I should have figured it out sooner.” She leans forward and kisses the console. And when she looks back at the spot where the bzou had been crouched, there’s no sign of it whatsoever, but there’s Maia, holding the storybook . . .
The New York Times recently hailed Caitlín R. Kiernan as “one of our essential writers of dark f
iction.” Her novels include The Red Tree (nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and Mythopoeic awards). To date, her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes, most recently Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One), and The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. Currently, she’s writing the graphic novel series Alabaster for Dark Horse Comics and working on her next novel, Red Delicious.
“Lupine” grew from grafts to the fairy tale rootstock most of us received as children. Here’s one addition: the blue-petaled wildflower for which the heroine is named was once thought to deplete the soil, ravaging it like a wolf (there’s an etymological connection); a nitrogen-fixer, lupine actually enhances it. Here’s another addition: when in the company of a desperate crush we often act idiotically, in direct opposition to our own best interests. Here’s a third: a character in Peter S. Beagle’s awe-worthy novel The Last Unicorn curses another by saying: “I’ll make you a bad poet with dreams!” This caused Nisi Shawl to think about what makes a curse truly terrible to its victims and to devise her own—strictly for literary uses.
Lupine
Nisi Shawl
Once there was a little girl whose mother hated her. The mother was not a bad woman, but she had not wanted a child, and so she put her daughter into a secret prison and pretended she did not exist. The father was deceived, for he and the woman parted long before he would have learned she was to have a child. Soon after they separated, the mother’s love for him languished and died. As for her daughter, the mother felt nothing toward her but the deepest loathing.
The little girl, on the contrary, loved her mother very much, because she was born to love, and in her prison she knew no one else. Lupine, as she was called, had not even a kitten or a cricket to love, not even a doll to play with. The wind from the mountains blew seeds into her lonely tower, and she nourished these into plants: flowers and downy herbs.
Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Page 14