The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The teeth were set in impossibly wide jaws. Above the jaws were pupilless crimson eyes.

  The flashman spoke again, louder this time. A third time. The psychomorph swelled out of the wall, looming over Hypatia. She lay on her back, staring up at it. It ignored her as it concentrated on the flashman.

  “No. That was the key.” He turned toward the Federale, and Cardenas saw stark terror in the man’s eyes. “I took it off the filament. THAT WAS THE KEY!” He screamed the words into the vorec. They were the right words, the proper inflection. Then he threw the scrambler at the opaque shape and turned to run.

  The psychomorph bit off his head.

  As a psychic convergence, it was the most realistic Cardenas had ever seen. The decapitated body stood swaying. Blood appeared to fountain from the severed neck. Then the corpse toppled forward onto the floor.

  He stood without moving, uncertain whether to run, shout for Security, or reach for the petit point. The psychomorph turned slowly to face him. It was a thousand times more real, more solid than any convergence he’d ever seen. He thought it stared at him for a moment. Since it had no pupils, it was hard to tell. Then it whooshed back into the wall, sucked into the holodepths that had given it birth. As it vanished, the tunnel collapsed on top of it.

  It was quiet in the office again. The wallscreen was full of harmless, flickering symbology. The speakers whispered of mystery and nonsense. On the floor behind the desk, the flashman lay in a pool of his own blood, the expression on his face contorted, his eyes bulged halfway out of their sockets. His ragged nails showed where he’d torn out his own throat. Cardenas searched through blood-stained pockets until he found the applicator he needed. Then he turned away, sickened.

  The applicator contained debonder for the secrylic. First, he dissolved the gag, then went to work on Hypatia’s wrists. She spat out tasteless chunks of the pale green putty. She was crying, brokenly but not broken. “Jesus, Angel, Jesus, God, I thought he was going to kill me!”

  “He was. Would have.” He ripped away sagging lumps of putty and carefully began applying debonder to her bound ankles. “After he’d finished his transferring. Nothing you or I could have said would have mattered. He couldn’t leave any witnesses. He knew that.” He glanced up at the innocuous wallscreen. “You saw it?”

  “Saw it?” She sat up and rubbed her wrists, then her chest where the scrambler had been applied. There was a painful red welt there, but no permanent damage. She was breathing in long steady gasps. “It was right on top of me.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “It was a psychomorph, Angel. The worst one I ever saw. The worst one anyone ever saw.” She was looking past him, at the torn body of the flashman. “Talk about tactile. It really got inside him.”

  He finished with her ankles. “Don’t try to stand yet.”

  “Don’t worry. Jesus.” She moved her legs tentatively, loosening the cramped muscles. Behind her was harmless holospace. If you put out your hand, you’d touch solid wall. Or would you? Could they be sure of anything anymore? Could anyone?

  “Another trap.” Cardenas too was studying the wall. “The last trap. Why’d he kill Charliebo? He said he didn’t.” He found he couldn’t look at the pitiful gray shape that lay crumpled alongside the desk.

  Hypatia inhaled, coughed raggedly. “He didn’t.”

  That made him look down at her. “What?”

  “He was telling the truth. He didn’t kill Charliebo. The tunnel did. Or the subox working up the tunnel. I don’t know.” She rubbed her forehead. “The psychomorph was the last trap, but there was one inserted in front of it. It—it was my fault, Angel. I thought I knew how to protect myself. I thought I was being careful, and I was. But there’s never been a tunnel like that one. Part of the tunnel, before the psychomorph.

  “I was worried about you, Angel. I thought maybe you were working too hard, too long. You don’t see yourself, sitting there, reciting in that unbroken monotone into that damn vorec. It’s like it becomes an extension of your own mouth.”

  “It does,” he told her softly.

  “So I thought I’d do some tunneling myself. Before the psychomorph there’s—I don’t know what you’d call it. Not a psychomorph. Subtler. Like a reciprocal program. It vacuumed the first thing it focused on.” Maybe he couldn’t look at the shepherd’s corpse, but she could. “If Charliebo hadn’t been where he was, it’d be me lying there instead of him. The tunnel, the program—it vacuumed him, Angel. Sucked him right out. It was quick. He just whimpered once and fell over on his side. The look in his eyes—I’ve seen that look on people who’ve been vacuumed. But I didn’t know you could do it to an animal.

  “The crunch consumption figures went stratospheric. Maybe it was the same program Crescent and Noschek used to vacuum themselves. I guess they figured that’d be one way to make sure anybody who got this close to them wouldn’t bother them.”

  “Charliebo wasn’t an animal.”

  “No. Sure he wasn’t, Angel.” It was quiet for a long time. Later: “I cut power and figured out a key to get around the trap. I thought it was the last one. That’s when he came in.” She indicated the flashman. “But it wasn’t the last one. The psychomorph was. There were no warnings, no hints. I never would’ve seen it coming. Neither did he.”

  “Not surprising, really. I wonder if it would’ve made a difference if you or I had tripped it first. Because it wasn’t a psychomorph.”

  She gaped at him.

  “It wasn’t a psychomorph,” he said again. “It was a—let’s call it a manifesting resonance. A full-field projection. I asked you if you saw it. I asked you what it looked like. You had a ventral view. I saw it face on.” Now he found he was able to turn and look at the shepherd’s corpse.

  “It wasn’t a psychomorph. It was Charliebo.”

  She said nothing this time, waiting for him to continue, wondering if she’d be able to follow him. She could. It wasn’t that difficult to understand. Just slightly impossible. But she couldn’t find the argument that would contradict him.

  “Their last defense,” he was saying. “If you can’t lick ’em, make ’em join you. You were right when you called it a reciprocal program. Vacuum the first intruder and use him to keep out anybody thereafter. That way you don’t expose yourself. Co-opt the first one clever enough to make it that far down the tunnel. It could’ve been you. It could’ve been me. They were luckier than they could’ve dreamed. They got Charliebo.

  “Noschek and Cresent. Couple of clever boys. Too clever by half. I won’t be surprised if they’ve learned how to manipulate their new environment. If so, they’ll know their reciprocal’s been triggered. Maybe they’ll try to move. Somewhere more private. Maybe they can cut the tunnel. We’re dealing with entirely new perceptions, new notions of what is and what isn’t reality, existence. I don’t think they’d take kindly to uninvited visitors, but now Charliebo’s in there somewhere with them, wherever ‘there’ is. Maybe they’ll be easier on him. I don’t think he’ll be perceived as much of a threat.”

  She chose her words slowly. “I think I understand. The first key triggered the reciprocal program and Charliebo got vacuumed. When that bastard tried to go around it—”

  “He got Charliebo’s resonance instead of Crescent’s or Noschek’s. I hope they enjoy having him around. I always did.” He helped her stand on shaky legs.

  “What now?”

  As he held on to her, he began to wonder who was supporting whom. “I could go back to Nogales, close the file, report it officially as unsolvable. Leave Noschek and Crescent to their otherwhere privacy. Or—we could dig in and try going back.”

  She whistled softly. “I’m not sure I can take anymore of their surprises. What if next time they come out for us instead of Charliebo? Or if they send something else, something new they’ve found floating around down in the guts of otherwhere?”

  “We’ll go slow. Put up our own defenses.” He jerked his head in the flashman’s direction.
“He seemed to think his people would know how to do it. Maybe with a little help from GenDyne’s Box we can, too.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we’ll see.”

  * * *

  It took almost a month for them to learn how to recognize and thereby avoid the remaining tunnel guards. Crescent and Noschek failed to manifest themselves when the end of the tunnel was finally reached. There was a subox there, all right, but it proved empty. The designers’ resonances had gone elsewhere. There were hints, clues, but nothing they could be certain of. Tiny tracks leading off into a vast emptiness that might not be as empty as everyone had once suspected. Suggestions of a new reality, a different otherwhere.

  They didn’t push. There was plenty of time, and Cardenas had no intention of crowding whatever the two men had become. It/They was dangerous.

  But there was another way, clumsy at first. It would take patience to use it. What was wonderfully ironic was that in their attempt to defend themselves, to seal their passage, Crescent and Noschek had unwittingly provided those who came after a means for following.

  First, it was necessary to have Hypatia jumped several grades. GenDyne balked but finally gave in. Anything to aid the investigation, to speed it along its way. What the company didn’t know, couldn’t imagine, was what way that investigation was taking. And Senior Designer Spango and Sergeant Cardenas weren’t about to tell them. Not yet. Not until they could be sure.

  Besides, the additional salary would be useful to a newly married couple.

  There was uncertainty on both sides at first. Gradually, hesitation gave way to recognition, then to understanding. After that, there was exchange of information, most but not all of it one-way. Once this had been established, not only GenDyne’s Box was open to inspection but also that of Parabas S.A., and through the power of the Fordmatsu link, so was everything one would ever want to access. Including an entirely new state of reality that had yet to be named.

  Cardenas and Spango played with it for a while, kids enjoying the biggest toy that had ever been developed. Then it was time to put aside childish things and take the plunge into that otherwhere Crescent and Noschek had discovered, where existence meant something new and exciting and a whole universe of new concepts and physical states of matter and energy danced a dance that would need careful exploration and interpretation.

  But they had an advantage that could not have been planned for, one even Noschek and Crescent hadn’t had.

  They wouldn’t be jumping in blind because they wouldn’t be alone.

  Hypatia had pulled her chair up next to his. It was quiet in the office. The climate conditioning whispered softly. The walls and door were security-sealed. Cardenas had checked every light bulb by hand.

  In front of them, Crescent’s wallscreen glowed with symbols and figures and words, with rotating holo shapes and lines. The tunnel stretched out before them, narrowing now to a point. Only it wasn’t a point; it was an end, and a beginning. The jumping-off place. The ledge overlooking the abyss of promise.

  They knew what they wanted, had worked it out in the previous weeks. They knew where they wanted to go and how to get there.

  Cardenas took Hypatia’s hand in his, squeezed tightly. Not to worry now. Not anymore. Because they weren’t doing this alone. He raised the vorec to his lips.

  “Fetch,” he said.

  MICHAEL SWANWICK

  The Dragon Line

  One of the most popular and respected of all the decade’s new writers, Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980 with two strong and compelling stories, “The Feast of St. Janis” and “Ginungagap,” both of which were Nebula Award finalists that year. Since then, he has gone on to become a frequent contributor to Omni, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Amazing; his stories have also appeared in Penthouse, Universe, High Times, Triquarterly, and New Dimensions, among other places. His powerful story “Mummer Kiss” was a Nebula Award finalist in 1981, and his story “The Man Who Met Picasso” was a finalist for the 1982 World Fantasy Award. He has also been a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. His fast-paced and evocative first novel, In the Drift, was published in 1985 as part of the resurrected Ace Specials line. His most recent book is the popular novel Vacuum Flowers, and he is currently at work on a third novel. His story “Trojan Horse” was in our Second Annual Collection; his story “Dogfight,” written with William Gibson, was in our Third Annual Collection; his story “Covenent of Souls” was in our Fourth Annual Collection. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife Marianne Porter and their young son Sean.

  In the hard-edged and evocative story that follows, he takes us down some Mean Streets in modern-day Philadelphia, for an encounter among the oil refineries and tank farms with some very ancient magic.

  THE DRAGON LINE

  Michael Swanwick

  Driving by the mall in King of Prussia that night, I noticed that between the sky and earth where the horizon used to be is now a jagged-edged region, spangled with bright industrial lights. For a long yearning instant, before the car topped the rise and I had to switch lanes or else be shunted onto the expressway, I wished I could enter that dark zone, dissolve into its airless mystery and cold ethereal beauty. But of course that was impossible: Faerie is no more. It can be glimpsed, but no longer grasped.

  At the light, Shikra shoved the mirror up under my nose, and held the cut-down fraction of a McDonald’s straw while I did up a line. A winter flurry of tinkling white powder stung through my head to freeze up at the base of the skull, and the light changed, and off we went. “Burn that rubber, Boss-man,” Shikra laughed. She drew up her knees, balancing the mirror before her chin, and snorted the rest for herself.

  There was an opening to the left, and I switched lanes, injecting the Jaguar like a virus into the stream of traffic, looped around and was headed back toward German-town. A swirling white pattern of flat crystals grew in my left eye, until it filled my vision. I was only seeing out of the right now. I closed the left and rubbed it, bringing tears, but still the hallucination hovered, floating within the orb of vision. I sniffed, bringing up my mouth to one side. Beside me, Shikra had her butterfly knife out and was chopping more coke.

  “Hey, enough of that, okay? We’ve got work to do.”

  Shikra turned an angry face my way. Then she hit the window controls and threw the mirror, powder and all, into the wind. Three grams of purest Peruvian offered to the Goddess.

  “Happy now, shithead?” Her eyes and teeth flashed, all sinister smile in mulatto skin, and for a second she was beautiful, this petite teenaged monstrosity, in the same way that a copperhead can be beautiful, or a wasp, even as it injects the poison under your skin. I felt a flash of desire and of tender, paternal love, and then we were at the Chemical Road turnoff, and I drifted the Jag through three lanes of traffic to make the turn. Shikra was laughing and excited, and I was too.

  It was going to be a dangerous night.

  * * *

  Applied Standard Technologies stood away from the road, a compound of low, sprawling buildings afloat on oceanic lawns. The guard waved us through and I drove up to the Lab B lot. There were few cars there; one had British plates. I looked at that one for a long moment, then stepped out onto the tarmac desert. The sky was close, stained a dull red by reflected halogen lights. Suspended between vastnesses, I was touched by a cool breeze, and shivered. How fine, I thought, to be alive.

  I followed Shikra in. She was dressed all in denim, jeans faded to white in little crescents at the creases of her buttocks, trade beads clicking softly in her cornrowed hair. The guards at the desk rose in alarm at the sight of her, eased back down as they saw she was mine.

  Miss Lytton was waiting. She stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette, strode briskly forward. “He speaks modern English?” I asked as she handed us our visitor’s badges. “You’ve brought him completely up to date on our history and technology?” I didn’t want to have to deal with culture shock. I’d been present when my people had
dug him, groggy and corpse-blue, sticky with white chrysalid fluids, from his cave almost a year ago. Since then, I’d been traveling, hoping I could somehow pull it all together without him.

  “You’ll be pleased.” Miss Lytton was a lean, nervous woman, all tweed and elbows. She glanced curiously at Shikra, but was too disciplined to ask questions. “He was a quick study—especially keen on the sciences.” She led us down a long corridor to an unmanned security station, slid a plastic card into the lockslot.

  “You showed him around Britain? The slums, the mines, the factories?”

  “Yes.” Anticipating me, she said, “He didn’t seem at all perturbed. He asked quite intelligent questions.”

  I nodded, not listening. The first set of doors sighed open, and we stepped forward. Surveillance cameras telemetered our images to the front desk for reconfirmation. The doors behind us closed, and those before us began to cycle open. “Well, let’s go see.”

  * * *

  The airlock opened into the secure lab, a vast, overlit room filled with white enameled fermentation tanks, incubators, autoclaves, refrigerators, workbenches, and enough glass plumbing for any four dairies. An ultrafuge whined softly. I had no clear idea what they did here. To me AST was just another blind cell in the maze of interlocking directorships that sheltered me from public view. The corporate labyrinth was my home now, a secure medium in which to change documentation, shift money, and create new cover personalities on need. Perhaps other ancient survivals lurked within the catacombs, mermen and skinchangers, prodigies of all sorts, old Grendel himself; there was no way of telling.

  “Wait here,” I told Shikra. The lab manager’s office was set halfway up the far wall, with wide glass windows overlooking the floor. Miss Lytton and I climbed the concrete and metal stairs. I opened the door.

  He sat, flanked by two very expensive private security operatives, in a chrome swivel chair, and the air itself felt warped out of shape by the force of his presence. The trim white beard and charcoal-grey Saville Row pinstripe were petty distractions from a face as wide and solemn and cruel as the moon. I shut my eyes and still it floated before me, wise with corruption. There was a metallic taste on my tongue.