The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

A burly man in a Westinghouse suit grabbed Gunther’s bad arm and shook him. “Shut the fuck up!” he growled. “This is serious, damn you. We don’t have the time to baby you.”

  Hamilton shoved between them. “For God’s sake, Posner, he’s just seen—” She stopped. “Let me take care of him. I’ll get him calmed down. Just give us half an hour, okay?”

  The others traded glances, nodded, and turned away.

  To Gunther’s surprise, Ekatarina spoke over his trance chip. “I’m sorry, Gunther,” she murmured. Then she was gone.

  He was still holding Hiro’s corpse. He found himself staring down at his friend’s ruined face. The flesh was bruised and as puffy-looking as an overboiled hot dog. He couldn’t look away.

  “Come on.” Beth gave him a little shove to get him going. “Put the body in the back of that pick-up and give us a drive out to the cliff.”

  At Hamilton’s insistence, Gunther drove. He found it helped, having something to do. Hands afloat on the steering wheel, he stared ahead looking for the Mausoleum road cut-off. His eyes felt scratchy, and inhumanly dry.

  “There was a preemptive strike against us,” Hamilton said. “Sabotage. We’re just now starting to put the pieces together. Nobody knew you were out on the surface or we would’ve sent somebody out to meet you. It’s all been something of a shambles here.”

  He drove on in silence, cushioned and protected by all those miles of hard vacuum wrapped about him. He could feel the presence of Hiro’s corpse in the back of the truck, a constant psychic itch between his shoulder blades. But so long as he didn’t speak, he was safe; he could hold himself aloof from the universe that held the pain. It couldn’t touch him. He waited, but Beth didn’t add anything to what she’d already said.

  Finally he said, “Sabotage?”

  “A software meltdown at the radio station. Explosions at all the railguns. Three guys from Microspacecraft Applications bought it when the Boitsovij Kot railgun blew. I suppose it was inevitable. All the military industry up here, it’s not surprising somebody would want to knock us out of the equation. But that’s not all. Something’s happened to the people in Bootstrap. Something really horrible. I was out at the Observatory when it happened. The newsjay called back to see if there was any backup software to get the station going again, and she got nothing but gibberish. Crazy stuff. I mean, really crazy. We had to disconnect the Observatory’s remotes, because the operators were…” She was crying now, softly and insistently, and it was a minute before she could speak again.”Some sort of biological weapon. That’s all we know.”

  “We’re here.”

  As he pulled up to the foot of the Mausoleum cliff, it occurred to Gunther that they hadn’t thought to bring a drilling rig. Then he counted ten black niches in the rockface, and realized that somebody had been thinking ahead.

  “The only people who weren’t hit were those who were working at the Center or the Observatory, or out on the surface. Maybe a hundred of us all told.”

  They walked around to the back of the pick-up. Gunther waited, but Hamilton didn’t offer to carry the body. For some reason that made him feel angry and resentful. He unlatched the gate, hopped up on the treads, and hoisted the suited corpse. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Before today, only six people had ever died on the Moon. They walked past the caves in which their bodies awaited eternity. Gunther knew their names by heart: Heisse, Yasuda, Spehalski, Dubinin, Mikami, Castillo. And now Hiro. It seemed incomprehensible that the day should ever come when there would be too many dead to know them all by name.

  Daisies and tiger lilies had been scattered before the vaults in such profusion that he couldn’t help crushing some underfoot.

  They entered the first empty niche, and he laid Hiro down upon a stone table cut into the rock. In the halo of his helmet lamp the body looked piteously twisted and uncomfortable. Gunther found that he was crying, large hot tears that crawled down his face and got into his mouth when he inhaled. He cut off the radio until he had managed to blink the tears away. “Shit.” He wiped a hand across his helmet. “I suppose we ought to say something.”

  Hamilton took his hand and squeezed.

  “I’ve never seen him as happy as he was today. He was going to get married. He was jumping around, laughing and talking about raising a family. And now he’s dead, and I don’t even know what his religion was.”A thought occurred to him, and he turned helplessly toward Hamilton. “What are we going to tell Anya?”

  “She’s got problems of her own. Come on, say a prayer and let’s go. You’ll run out of oxygen.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He bowed his head. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.…”

  ***

  Back at Bootstrap, the surface party had seized the airlocks and led the overseer away from the controls. The man from Westinghouse, Posner, looked down on them from the observation window. “Don’t crack your suits,” he warned. “Keep them sealed tight at all times. Whatever hit the bastards here is still around. Might be in the water, might be in the air. One whiff and you’re out of here! You got that?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Gunther grumbled. “Keep your shirt on.”

  Posner’s hand froze on the controls. “Let’s get serious here. I’m not letting you in until you acknowledge the gravity of the situation. This isn’t a picnic outing. If you’re not prepared to help, we don’t need you. Is that understood?”

  “We understand completely, and we’ll cooperate to the fullest,” Hamilton said quickly. “Won’t we, Weil?”

  He nodded miserably.

  Only the one lock had been breached, and there were five more sets of pressurized doors between it and the bulk of Bootstrap’s air. The city’s designers had been cautious.

  Overseen by Posner, they passed through the corridors, locks and changing rooms and up the cargo escalators. Finally they emerged into the city interior.

  They stood blinking on the lip of Hell.

  At first, it was impossible to pinpoint any source for the pervasive sense of wrongness nattering at the edge of consciousness. The parks were dotted with people, the fill lights at the juncture of crater walls and canopy were bright, and the waterfalls still fell gracefully from terrace to terrace. Button quail bobbed comically in the grass.

  Then small details intruded. A man staggered about the fourth level, head jerking, arms waving stiffly. A plump woman waddled by, pulling an empty cart made from a wheeled microfactory stand, quacking like a duck. Someone sat in the kneehigh forest by Noguchi park, tearing out the trees one by one.

  But it was the still figures that were on examination more profoundly disturbing. Here a man lay half in and half out of a tunnel entrance, as unselfconscious as a dog. There, three women stood in extreme postures of lassitude, bordering on despair. Everywhere, people did not touch or speak or show in any way that they were aware of one other. They shared an absolute and universal isolation.

  “What shall we—” Something slammed onto Gunther’s back. He was knocked forward, off his feet. Tumbling, he became aware that fists were striking him, again and again, and then that a lean man was kneeling atop his chest, hysterically shouting, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”

  Hamilton seized the man’s shoulders, and pulled him away. Gunther got to his knees. He looked into the face of madness: eyes round and fearful, expression full of panic. The man was terrified of Gunther.

  With an abrupt wrench, the man broke free. He ran as if pursued by demons. Hamilton stared after him. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure.” Gunther adjusted his tool harness. “Let’s see if we can find the others.”

  They walked toward the lake, staring about at the self-absorbed figures scattered about the grass. Nobody attempted to speak to them. A woman ran by, barefooted. Her arms were filled with flowers. “Hey!” Hamilton called after her. She smiled fleetingly over her shoulder, but did not slow. Gunther knew her vaguely, an executive supervisor for Martin Marietta.

  “Is everybody h
ere crazy?” he asked.

  “Sure looks that way.”

  The woman had reached the shore and was flinging the blossoms into the water with great sweeps of her arm. They littered the surface.

  “Damned waste.” Gunther had come to Bootstrap before the flowers; he knew the effort involved getting permission to plant them and rewriting the city’s ecologics. A man in a blue-striped Krupp suit was running along the verge of the lake.

  The woman, flowers gone, threw herself into the water.

  At first it appeared she’d suddenly decided to take a dip. But from the struggling, floundering way she thrashed deeper into the water it was clear that she could not swim.

  In the time it took Gunther to realize this, Hamilton had leaped forward, running for the lake. Belatedly, he started after her. But the man in the Krupp suit was ahead of them both. He splashed in after the woman. An outstretched hand seized her shoulder and then he fell, pulling her under. She was red-faced and choking when he emerged again, arm across her chest.

  By then Gunther and Beth were wading into the lake, and together they three got the woman to shore. When she was released, the woman calmly turned and walked away, as if nothing had happened.

  “Gone for more flowers,” the Krupp component explained. “Thisis the third time fair Ophelia there’s tried to drown herself. She’s notthe only one. I’ve been hanging around, hauling ’em out when they stumble in.”

  “Do you know where everybody else is? Is there anyone in charge? Somebody giving out orders?”

  “Do you need any help?” Gunther asked.

  The Krupp man shrugged. “I’m fine. No idea where the others are, though. My friends were going on to the second level when I decided I ought to stay here. If you see them, you might tell ’em I’d appreciatehearing back from them. Three guys in Krupp suits.”

  “We’ll do that,” Gunther said.

  Hamilton was already walking away.

  On a step just beneath the top of the stairs sprawled one ofGunther’s fellow G5 components. “Sidney,” he said carefully. “How’s it going?”

  Sidney giggled. “I’m making the effort, if that’s what you mean. I don’t see that the ‘how’ of it makes much difference.”

  “Okay.”

  “A better way of phrasing that might be to ask why I’m not at work.” He stood, and in a very natural manner accompanied Gunther up the steps. “Obviously I can’t be two places at once. You wouldn’t want to perform major surgery in your own absence, would you?” He giggled again. “It’s an oxymoron. Like horses: Those classically beautiful Praxitelesian bodies excreting these long surreal turds.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve always admired them for squeezing so much art into a single image.”

  “Sidney,” Hamilton said. “We’re looking for our friends. Three people in blue-striped work suits.”

  “I’ve seen them. I know just where they went.” His eyes were cool and vacant; they didn’t seem to focus on anything in particular.

  “Can you lead us to them?”

  “Even a flower recognizes its own face.” A gracefully winding gravel path led through private garden plots and croquet malls. They followed him down it.

  There were not many people on the second terrace; with the fall of madness, most seemed to have retreated into the caves. Those few who remained either ignored or cringed away from them. Gunther found himself staring obsessively into their faces, trying to analyze the deficiency he felt in each. Fear nested in their eyes, and the appalled awareness that some terrible thing had happened to them coupled with a complete ignorance of its nature.

  “God, these people!”

  Hamilton grunted.

  He felt he was walking through a dream. Sounds were muted by his suit, and colors less intense seen through his helmet visor. It was as if he had been subtly removed from the world, there and not-there simultaneously, an impression that strengthened with each new face that looked straight through him with mad, unseeing indifference.

  Sidney turned a corner, broke into a trot and jogged into a tunnel entrance. Gunther ran after him. At the mouth of the tunnel, he paused to let his helmet adjust to the new light levels. When it cleared he saw Sidney dart down a side passage. He followed.

  At the intersection of passages, he looked and saw no trace of their guide. Sidney had disappeared. “Did you see which way he went?” he asked Hamilton over the radio. There was no answer. “Beth?”

  He started down the corridor, halted, and turned back. These things went deep. He could wander around in them forever. He went back out to the terraces. Hamilton was nowhere to be seen.

  For lack of any better plan, he followed the path. Just beyond an ornamental holly bush he was pulled up short by a vision straight out of William Blake.

  The man had discarded shirt and sandals, and wore only a pair of shorts. He squatted atop a boulder, alert, patient, eating a tomato. A steel pipe slanted across his knees like a staff or scepter, and he had woven a crown of sorts from platinum wire with a fortune’s worth of hyperconductor chips dangling over his forehead. He looked every inch a kingly animal.

  He stared at Gunther, calm and unblinking.

  Gunther shivered. The man seemed less human than anthropoid, crafty in its way, but unthinking. He felt as if he were staring across the eons at Grandfather Ape, crouched on the edge of awareness. An involuntary thrill of superstitious awe seized him. Was this what happened when the higher mental functions were scraped away? Did Archetype lie just beneath the skin, waiting for the opportunity to emerge?

  “I’m looking for my friend,” he said. “A woman in a G5 suit like mine? Have you seen her? She was looking for three—” He stopped. The man was staring at him blankly. “Oh, never mind.”

  He turned away and walked on.

  After a time, he lost all sense of continuity. Existence fragmented into unconnected images: A man bent almost double, leering and squeezing a yellow rubber duckie. A woman leaping up like a jack-in-the-box from behind an air monitor, shrieking and flapping her arms. An old friend sprawled on the ground, crying, with an broken leg. When he tried to help her, she scrabbled away from him in fear. He couldn’t get near to her without doing more harm. “Stay here,” he said, “I’ll find help.” Five minutes later he realized that he was lost, with no slightest notion of how to find his way back to her again. He came to the stairs leading back down to the bottom level. There was no reason to go down them. There was no reason not to. He went down.

  He had just reached the bottom of the stairs when someone in a lavender boutique suit hurried by.

  Gunther chinned on his helmet radio.

  “Hello!” The lavender suit glanced back at him, its visor a plate ofobsidian, but did not turn back. “Do you know where everyone’s gone? I’m totally lost. How can I find out what I should be doing?” The lavender suit ducked into a tunnel.

  Faintly, a voice answered, “Try the city manager’s office.”

  ***

  The city manager’s office was a tight little cubby an eighth of a kilometer deep within the tangled maze of administrative and service tunnels. It had never been very important in the scheme of things. The city manager’s prime duties were keeping the air and water replen-ished and scheduling airlock inspections, functions any computer could handle better than a man had they dared trust them to a machine. The room had probably never been as crowded as it was now. Dozens of people suited for full vacuum spilled out into the hall, anxiously listening to Ekatarina confer with the city’s Crisis Management Program. Gunther pushed in as close as he could; even so, he could barely see her.

  “—the locks, the farms and utilities, and we’ve locked away all the remotes. What comes next?”

  Ekatarina’s peecee hung from her work harness, amplifying the CMP’s silent voice. “Now that elementary control has been established, second priority must go to the industrial sector. The factories must be locked down. The reactors must be put to sleep. There is not sufficient human
supervisory presence to keep them running. The factories have mothballing programs available upon request.

  “Third, the farms cannot tolerate neglect. Fifteen minutes without oxygen, and all the tilapia will die. The calamari are even more delicate. Three experienced agricultural components must be assigned immediately. Double that number, if you only have inexperienced components. Advisory software is available. What are your resources?”

  “Let me get back to you on that. What else?”

  “What about the people?” a man asked belligerently. “What the hellare you worrying about factories for, when our people are in the state they’re in?”

  Izmailova looked up sharply. “You’re one of Chang’s research components, aren’t you? Why are you here? Isn’t there enough for you to do?” She looked about, as if abruptly awakened from sleep. “All of you! What are you waiting for?”

  “You can’t put us off that easily! Who made you the little brass-plated general? We don’t have to take orders from you.”

  The bystanders shuffled uncomfortably, not leaving, waiting to take their cue from each other. Their suits were as good as identical in this crush, their helmets blank and expressionless. They looked like so many ambulatory eggs.

  The crowd’s mood balanced on the instant, ready to fall into acceptance or anger with a featherweight’s push. Gunther raised an arm. “General!” he said loudly. “Private Weil here! I’m awaiting my orders. Tell me what to do.”

  Laughter rippled through the room, and the tension eased. Ekatarina said, “Take whoever’s nearest you, and start clearing the afflicted out of the administrative areas. Guide them out toward the open, where they won’t be so likely to hurt themselves. Whenever you get a room or corridor emptied, lock it up tight. Got that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He tapped the suit nearest him, and its helmet dipped in a curt nod. But when they turned to leave, their way was blocked by the crush of bodies.

  “You!” Ekatarina jabbed a finger. “Go to the farmlocks and foam them shut; I don’t want any chance of getting them contaminated. Anyone with experience running factories—that’s most of us, I think—should find a remote and get to work shutting the things down. The CMP will help direct you. If you have nothing else to do, buddy up and work at clearing out the corridors. I’ll call a general meeting when we’ve put together a more comprehensive plan of action.” She paused. “What have I left out?”