The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  There was nothing subtle about the way the vics sold themselves. The trampled-grass street I found myself in was lined with stacks of cages like the ones they use in dog kennels. They were festooned with strings of Christmas lights, and each one contained a crouched boy. Naked, to best display those mods and deformities that some found attractive. Off-duty soldiers strolled up and down the cages, checking out the possibilities. I recognized one of them.

  “Sergeant Major Pathak!” I cried. He looked up, startled and guilty. “Help me! Kill her—please! Kill her now!”

  Give him credit, the Sergeant major was a game little fellow. I can’t imagine what we looked like to him, one harridan chasing the other down the streets of Hell. But he took the situation in at a glance, unholstered his sidearm, and stepped forward. “Please,” he said. “You will both stand where you are. You will place your hands upon the top of your head. You will—”

  Gevorkian flicked her fingers at the young soldier. He screamed, and clutched his freshly-crushed shoulder. She turned away from him, dismissively. The other soldiers had fled at the first sign of trouble. All her attention was on me, trembling in her sight like a winded doe. “Sweet little vic,” she purred. “If you won’t play the part we had planned for you, you’ll simply have to be silenced.”

  “No,” I whispered.

  She touched my wrist. I was helpless to stop her. “You and I are going to go to my office now. We’ll have fun there. Hours and hours of fun.”

  “Leave her be.”

  As sudden and inexplicable as an apparition of the Virgin, Shriver stepped out of the darkness. He looked small and grim.

  Gevorkian laughed, and gestured.

  But Shriver’s hand reached up to intercept hers, and where they met, there was an electric blue flash. Gevorkian stared down, stunned, at her hand. Bits of tangled metal fell away from it. She looked up at Shriver.

  He struck her down.

  She fell with a brief harsh cry, like that of a sea gull. Shriver kicked her, three times, hard: In the ribs. In the stomach. In the head. Then, when she looked like she might yet regain her feet, “It’s one of them!” he shouted. “Look at her! She’s a spy for the Owners! She’s from the future! Owner! Look! Owner!”

  The refugees came tumbling out of the tents and climbing down out of their cages. They looked more alive than I’d ever seen them before. They were red-faced and screaming. Their eyes were wide with hysteria. For the first time in my life, I was genuinely afraid of them. They came running. They swarmed like insects.

  They seized Gevorkian and began tearing her apart.

  I saw her struggle up and halfway out of their grips, saw one arm rise up above the sea of clutching hands, like that of a woman drowning.

  Shriver seized my elbow and steered me away before I could see any more. I saw enough, though.

  I saw too much.

  “Where are we going?” I asked when I’d recovered my wits.

  “Where do you think we’re going?”

  He led me to my office.

  ***

  There was a stranger waiting there. He took out a hand-held detector like Sergeant Major Pathak and his men had used earlier and touched it to himself, to Shriver, and to me. Three times it flashed red, negative. “You travel through time, you pick up a residual charge,” Shriver explained. “It never goes away. We’ve known about Gevorkian for a long time.”

  “U.S. Special Security,” the stranger said, and flipped open his ID. It meant diddle-all to me. There was a badge. It could have read Captain Crunch for all I knew or cared. But I didn’t doubt for an instant that he was SS. He had that look. To Shriver he said, “The neutralizer.”

  Shriver unstrapped something glittery from his wrist—the device he’d used to undo Gevorkian’s weapon—and, in a silent bit of comic bureaucratic punctilio, exchanged it for a written receipt. The security officer touched the thing with his detector. It flashed green. He put both devices away in interior pockets.

  All the time, Shriver stood in the background, watching. He wasn’t told to go away.

  Finally, Captain Crunch turned his attention to me again. “Where’sthe snark?”

  “Snark?”

  The man removed a thin scrap of cloth from an inside jacket pocket and shook it out. With elaborate care, he pulled it over his left hand.An inertial glove. Seeing by my expression that I recognized it, he said, “Don’t make me use this.”

  I swallowed. For an instant I thought crazily of defying him, of simply refusing to tell him where the bippy was. But I’d seen an inertial glove in action before, when a lone guard had broken up a camp riot. He’d been a little man. I’d seen him crush heads like watermelons.

  Anyway, the bippy was in my desk. They’d be sure to look there.

  I opened the drawer, produced the device. Handed it over. “It’s a plant,” I said. “They want us to have this.”

  Captain Crunch gave me a look that told me clear as words exactly how stupid he thought I was. “We understand more than you think we do. There are circles and circles. We have informants up in the future, and some of them are more highly placed than you’d think. Not everything that’s known is made public.”

  “Damn it, this sucker is evil.”

  A snake’s eyes would look warmer than his. “Understand this: We’re fighting for our survival here. Extinction is null-value. You can have all the moral crises you want when the war is won.”

  “It should be suppressed. The technology. If it’s used, it’ll just help bring about…”

  He wasn’t listening.

  I’d worked for the government long enough to know when I waswasting my breath. So I shut up.

  ***

  When the Captain left with the bippy, Shriver still remained, looking ironically after him. “People get the kind of future they deserve,” he observed.

  “But that’s what I’m saying. Gevorkian came back from the future in order to help bring it about. That means that time isn’t deterministic.” Maybe I was getting a little weepy. I’d had a rough day. “The other guy said there was a lot riding on this operation. They didn’t know how it was goingto turn out. They didn’t know.”

  Shriver grunted, not at all interested.

  I plowed ahead unheeding. “If it’s not deterministic—if they’re working so hard to bring it about—then all our effort isn’t futile at all. This future can be prevented.”

  Shriver looked up at last. There was a strangely triumphant gleam in his eye. He flashed that roguish ain’t-this-fun grin of his, and said, “I don’t know about you, but some of us are working like hell to achieve it.”

  With a jaunty wink, he was gone.

  The Very Pulse of the Machine

  Click.

  The radio came on.

  “Hell.”

  Martha kept her eyes forward, concentrated on walking. Jupiter to one shoulder, Daedalus’s plume to the other. Nothing to it. Just trudge, drag, trudge, drag. Piece of cake.

  “Oh.”

  She chinned the radio off.

  Click.

  “Hell. Oh. Kiv. El. Sen.”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Martha gave the rope an angry jerk, making the sledge carrying Burton’s body jump and bounce on the sulfur hardpan. “You’re dead, Burton, I’ve checked, there’s a hole in your faceplace big enough to stick a fist through, and I really don’t want to crack up. I’m in kind of a tight spot here and I can’t afford it, okay? So be nice and just shut the fuck up.”

  “Not. Bur. Ton.”

  “Do it anyway.”

  She chinned the radio off again.

  Jupiter loomed low on the western horizon, big and bright and beautiful and, after two weeks on Io, easy to ignore. To her left, Daedalus was spewing sulfur and sulfur dioxide in a fan two hundred kilometers high. The plume caught the chill light from an unseen sun and her visor rendered it a pale and lovely blue. Most spectacular view in the universe, and she was in no mood to enjoy it.

  Click.

 
Before the voice could speak again, Martha said, “I am not going crazy, you’re just the voice of my subconscious, I don’t have the time to waste trying to figure out what unresolved psychological conflicts gave rise to all this, and I am not going to listen to anything you have to say.”

  Silence.

  ***

  The moon rover had flipped over at least five times before crashing sideways against a boulder the size of the Sydney Opera House. Martha Kivelsen, timid groundling that she was, was strapped into her seat so tightly that when the universe stopped tumbling, she’d had a hard time unlatching the restraints. Juliet Burton, tall and athletic, so sure of her own luck and agility that she hadn’t bothered, had been thrown into a strut.

  The vent-blizzard of sulfur dioxide snow was blinding, though. It was only when Martha had finally crawled out from under its raging whiteness that she was able to look at the suited body she’d dragged free of the wreckage.

  She immediately turned away.

  Whatever knob or flange had punched the hole in Burton’s helmet had been equally ruthless with her head.

  Where a fraction of the vent-blizzard—”lateral plumes” the planetary geologists called them—had been deflected by the boulder, a bank of sulfur dioxide snow had built up. Automatically, without thinking, Martha scooped up double-handfuls and packed them into the helmet. Really, it was a nonsensical thing to do; in a vacuum, the body wasn’t about to rot. On the other hand, it hid that face.

  Then Martha did some serious thinking.

  For all the fury of the blizzard, there was no turbulence. Because there was no atmosphere to have turbulence in. The sulfur dioxide gushed out straight from the sudden crack that had opened in the rock, falling to the surface miles away in strict obedience to the laws of ballistics. Most of what struck the boulder they’d crashed against would simply stick to it, and the rest would be bounced down to the ground at its feet. So that—this was how she’d gotten out in the first place—it was possible to crawl under the near-horizontal spray and back to the ruins of the moon rover. If she went slowly, the helmet light and her sense of feel ought to be sufficient for a little judicious salvage.

  Martha got down on her hands and knees. And as she did, just as quickly as the blizzard had begun—it stopped.

  She stood, feeling strangely foolish.

  Still, she couldn’t rely on the blizzard staying quiescent. Better hurry, she admonished herself. It might be an intermittent.

  Quickly, almost fearfully, picking through the rich litter of wreckage, Martha discovered that the mother tank they used to replenish their airpacks had ruptured. Terrific. That left her own pack, which was one-third empty, two fully-charged backup packs, and Burton’s, also one-thirdempty. It was a ghoulish thing to strip Burton’s suit of her airpack, but it had to be done. Sorry, Julie. That gave her enough oxygen to last, let’s see, almost forty hours.

  Then she took a curved section of what had been the moon rover’s hull and a coil of nylon rope, and, with two pieces of scrap for makeshift hammer and punch, fashioned a sledge for Burton’s body.

  She’d be damned if she was going to leave it behind.

  ***

  Click.

  “This is. Better.”

  “Says you.”

  Ahead of her stretched the hard, cold sulfur plain. Smooth as glass. Brittle as frozen toffee. Cold as hell. She called up a visor-map and checked her progress. Only forty-five miles of mixed terrain to cross and she’d reach the lander. Then she’d be home free. No sweat, she thought. Iowas in tidal lock with Jupiter. So the Father of Planets would stay glued to one fixed spot in the sky. That was as good as a navigation beacon. Just keep Jupiter to your right shoulder, and Daedalus to your left. You’ll come out fine.

  “Sulfur is. Triboelectric.”

  “Don’t hold it in. What are you really trying to say?”

  “And now I see. With eye serene. The very. Pulse. Of the machine.”A pause. “Wordsworth.”

  Which, except for the halting delivery, was so much like Burton, with her classical education and love of classical poets like Spencer and Ginsberg and Plath, that for a second Martha was taken aback. Burton was a terrible poetry bore, but her enthusiasm had been genuine, and now Martha was sorry for every time she’d met those quotations with rolled eyes or a flip remark. But there’d be time enough for grieving later. Right now she had to concentrate on the task at hand.

  The colors of the plain were dim and brownish. With a few quick chin-taps, she cranked up their intensity. Her vision filled with yellows, oranges, reds—intense wax crayon colors. Martha decided she liked them best that way.

  For all its Crayola vividness, this was the most desolate landscape in the universe. She was on her own here, small and weak in a harsh and unforgiving world. Burton was dead. There was nobody else on all of Io. Nobody to rely on but herself. Nobody to blame if she fucked up. Out of nowhere, she was filled with an elation as cold and bleak as the distant mountains. It was shameful how happy she felt.

  After a minute, she said, “Know any songs?”

  ***

  Oh the bear went over the mountain. The bear went over the mountain. The bear went over the mountain. To see what he could see.

  “Wake. Up. Wake. Up.”

  To see what he could—

  “Wake. Up. Wake. Up. Wake.”

  “Hah? What?”

  “Crystal sulfur is orthorhombic.”

  She was in a field of sulfur flowers. They stretched as far as the eye could see, crystalline formations the size of her hand. Like the poppies of Flanders field. Or the ones in the Wizard of Oz. Behind her was a trail of broken flowers, some crushed by her feet or under the weight of the sledge, others simply exploded by exposure to her suit’s waste heat. It was far from being a straight path. She had been walking on autopilot, and stumbled and turned and wandered upon striking the crystals.

  Martha remembered how excited she and Burton had been when they first saw the fields of crystals. They had piled out of the moon rover with laughter and bounding leaps, and Burton had seized her by the waist and waltzed her around in a dance of jubilation. This was the big one, they’d thought, their chance at the history books. And even when they’d radioed Hols back in the orbiter and were somewhat condescendingly informed that there was no chance of this being a new life-form, but only sulfide formations such as could be found in any mineralogy text…even that had not killed their joy. It was still their first big discovery. They’d looked forward to many more.

  Now, though, all she could think of was the fact that such crystal fields occurred in regions associated with sulfur geysers, lateral plumes, and volcanic hot spots.

  Something funny was happening to the far edge of the field, though. She cranked up her helmet to extreme magnification and watched as the trail slowly erased itself. New flowers were rising up in place of those she had smashed, small but perfect and whole. And growing. She could not imagine by what process this could be happening. Electrodeposition? Molecular sulfur being drawn up from the soil in some kind of pseudo-capillary action? Were the flowers somehow plucking sulfur ions from Io’s almost nonexistent atmosphere?

  Yesterday, the questions would have excited her. Now, she had nocapacity for wonder whatsoever. Moreover, her instruments were back in the moon rover. Save for the suit’s limited electronics, she had nothing to take measurements with. She had only herself, the sledge, the spare airpacks, and the corpse.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered. On the one hand, this wasa dangerous place to stay in. On the other, she’d been awake almosttwenty hours now and she was dead on her feet. Exhausted. So very,very tired.

  “O sleep! It is a gentle thing. Beloved from pole to pole. Coleridge.”

  Which, God knows, was tempting. But the numbers were clear: no sleep. With several deft chin-taps, Martha overrode her suit’s safeties and accessed its medical kit. At her command, it sent a hit of metham-phetamine rushing down the drug/vitamin catheter.

  There was a
sudden explosion of clarity in her skull and her heart began pounding like a motherfucker. Yeah. That did it. She was full of energy now. Deep breath. Long stride. Let’s go.

  No rest for the wicked. She had things to do. She left the flowers rapidly behind. Good-bye, Oz.

  ***

  Fade out. Fade in. Hours had glided by. She was walking through a shadowy sculpture garden. Volcanic pillars (these were their second great discovery; they had no exact parallel on Earth) were scattered across the pyroclastic plain like so many isolated Lipschitz statues. They were all rounded and heaped, very much in the style of rapidly cooled magma. Martha remembered that Burton was dead, and cried quietly to herself for a few minutes.

  Weeping, she passed through the eerie stone forms. The speed made them shift and move in her vision. As if they were dancing. They looked like women to her, tragic figures out of The Bacchae or, no, wait, The Trojan Women was the play she was thinking of. Desolate. Filled with anguish. Lonely as Lot’s wife.

  There was a light scattering of sulfur dioxide snow on the ground here. It sublimed at the touch of her boots, turning to white mist and scattering wildly, the steam disappearing with each stride and then being renewed with the next footfall. Which only made the experience all that much creepier.

  Click.

  “Io has a metallic core predominantly of iron and iron sulfide, overlain by a mantle of partially molten rock and crust.”

  “Are you still here?”

  “Am trying. To communicate.”

  “Shut up.”

  She topped the ridge. The plains ahead were smooth and undulating. They reminded her of the Moon, in the transitional region between Mare Serenitatis and the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, where she had undergone her surface training. Only without the impact craters. No impact craters on Io. Least cratered solid body in the Solar System. All that volcanic activity deposited a new surface one meter thick every millenium or so. The whole damned moon was being constantly repaved.

  Her mind was rambling. She checked her gauges, and muttered, “Let’s get this show on the road.”