I shook her off. “Wait.” I threw myself on the ground, peering into the crevice for the thing I’d seen before.
There was only darkness.
I let Shayna pull me away from the crevice, from the circle of torches, from the screams of Mike Bara as the leather birds pummeled him into the dirt.
* * *
Mike Bara lived, but whatever he believed about the Writing Wall, it stayed locked in his mind after the leather birds’ attack. When the company scouts found him in the morning, he was in a catatonic state. Songheuser sent him to a maximum security facility for the criminally insane anyway.
Shayna and I completed the mission in the Nithon cavern system. I never saw the phosphorescent fungi again although I did discover several damaged patches in the mycelial mat on the Writing Wall. I suggested that Bara did it, and the company believed me.
The geology department decided there weren’t substantial enough mineral deposits to justify a mining facility at Nithon. But the company made a few million from patents based on my work, and I managed to wrangle a full-time appointment here on Huginn. I mostly handle paperwork and samples from other caverns. Sometimes the company talks about re-evaluating Nithon, and I gently steer them toward other locations.
I don’t really believe Bara’s ravings, but I can’t stop thinking about them. His family didn’t want any of his effects, so I took his books, and some things that he said do make sense. The texts did place his mythical fungal planet, Yuggoth, at just the location of the wormhole leading to Huginn. And Bara had reproductions going back over a thousand years that could, if read with a certain bias, suggest that the galaxy is filled with powerful beings who are eager to manipulate human development for their own nefarious purposes. These great and powerful creatures—I can’t bring myself to call them “gods,” like Bara did—certainly have the ability to punch wormholes through time and space.
But what keeps me up at night isn’t any of the stuff Bara said or what I’ve found in his books. It’s the sound that replays in my mind when I turn off the light, the sound of dry rustling like leather birds’ wings—or perhaps like a whisper from the dried throat of something that’s been asleep for a thousand years. And it’s what I see when I close my eyes before sleep takes me.
That face. That eyeless, mouth-less face with the blue-green glowing skin, and underneath the luminescence is a swirling darkness like the twisting folds of the mycelium growing up the Writing Wall. When I look into it, that darkness, I see it re-shaping, turning and twisting until the black lines are no longer meaningless swirls but instead letters, words, a declaration:
You’re next.
Wendy N. Wagner is the author of more than forty short stories and has also written two novels for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Her third novel, An Oath of Dogs, is a sci-fi thriller from Angry Robot Books. She is currently part of the Hugo Award-winning Lightspeed magazine editorial team. An avid gamer and gardener, she lives in Portland, Oregon, with her very understanding family.
Canary Down
Kara Dennison
Illustrated by Justine Jones
She’s staring at me. It’s creepy.”
Rosie shrugged, eyes still on the nav system. “Then don’t look at her.”
“You told me to keep an eye on her.”
“Ugh.” She glanced back over her shoulder. Behind her sat Trall, cir eyes fixed almost obsessively on the tiny girl in the yellow dress—eight, nine years old at best and shoes as shiny as her ringlets. “The way you’re staring at her, she’s probably more afraid of you than you are of her.”
Trall sniffed. “It’s the eyes. They’re all big and glassy. Look at them.”
“They don’t look that big to me.”
“They’re just . . . they’re just a little on the big side. You know? Cartoon eyes. It’s creepy.”
“Trall. She can year you.”
Trall sat up straight. Ce peered at the little girl, waving a gloved hand in front of her eyes. “Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you.” The voice was small and monotone.
“Sheez.” Trall wrinkled cir nose. “Couldn’t you have gotten a guy version? Or a cay version?”
“Perv.”
“How dare. It was a legitimate question.”
Rosie shrugged. “The manufacturer is kind of backward, anyway. Only male and female.”
“Huh.”
“Not that it matters. You shouldn’t be getting attached to her.”
Trall puffed out cir cheeks, swiveling away from the little girl so ce was no longer facing her. “No fear. How far to the fossil?”
“It’s, uh . . . varying.”
“Varying? Let me see.” Trall jumped up, taking the seat next to Rosie in the cockpit. Rosie shifted in her seat, allowing cir a better view of the console.
“See?” Rosie pointed at a dot on the GPS visual that darted back and forth, like an indecisive hummingbird. “Varying. Every time we get closer, it shifts.”
“It’s a giant fossil. It shouldn’t be able to move.”
Rosie clasped her hands together, smiling brightly. “Oh, well done. Good to see you were paying attention in class.”
Trall shook cir head impatiently, missing the jab entirely as ce swiped a hand nervously through cir hair. “No, I mean . . . literally, what we’re seeing is impossible. Even in our line of work. Dead is dead is dead. So why is it flitting around? It couldn’t even move like this when it was alive, as far as I know.”
There was a tiny cough from the jump seats. Both Rosie and Trall looked back. The wide-eyed girl was standing, her gloved hand folded primly in front of her, resting against the skirt of her bright yellow dress.
“Yes?” Rosie asked, as patiently as she could.
The girl’s eyes turned toward them; Rosie was starting to see what Trall meant about them being “just a little” too big. “The artifact in question is aware of his situation. He will, of course, attempt to flee. But there is only so far he can go. Our only hope of intercepting him is to observe his pattern and meet him on one of his jumps.”
“Sounds good to me.” Rosie turned back to the controls. “Right, Trall, you watch the screen, I’ll take down the coordinates, and we’ll see if we can’t—”
“He?”
Rosie glanced over her shoulder. “Huh?”
“You heard her. She said he will attempt to flee us. Not it.”
“Well, she was probably . . .” Rosie trailed off. No. There was no reason. Why would she say that? Not unless . . .
She swiveled her chair around to face the girl. “Hey. You said he, not it. Are you saying that the fossil is . . . still alive?”
The girl’s lips parted slightly; it was hard to tell whether she was thinking or simply pausing for emphasis. “Alive and dead are very unhelpful words when dealing with a being of this sort. They work only with creatures who deal in dimensions of finality. Which he does not.”
Trall glanced at Rosie. “She . . . does know we’re just raiding an old star whale carcass for a class project, right?”
But Rosie didn’t hear cir. She rolled her chair closer to the girl, head ducked, hands clasped. “Tell me more about him.”
The girl closed her eyes, nodding. “He is long deceased. His fossilized form floats through the universe, still and petrified. He wishes only for an ending, but his instincts keep him on his guard. He will fight despite his longing to sleep. It is all he knows.”
“What . . .” Rosie took a deep breath. “What is he?”
The word that spilled from the girl’s lips only took the space of a breath but seemed a thousand syllables long—unpronounceable, impossible to parse. It struck terror into the hearts of her companions.
Trall looked over at Rosie, cir eyes wide.
“This scholarship is so not worth it anymore.”
* * *
“The technical term is HAGU, or Humanoid Artificial Gauging Unit.” Professor Fernandez handed out a series of flat datascreen flyers to the students
. “Though, in the business, we rather artlessly call them canaries.”
Rosie slid her fingers around the surface of the flyer, rifling through the information on various companies as Professor Fernandez went on. “Artificially bred to be hypersensitive to chemical, temperature, and atmospheric changes and able to pick up local radio interference.” He smiled awkwardly. “And before you get too attached, they are disposable and recyclable. You will be returning your HAGU at the end of your final.”
Rosie sighed. She and Trall had spent the majority of their scholarship funds on upgrades for their used ship, not realizing they’d be required to buy an entire artificial human before the semester was out. She flicked down into the cheaper and cheaper units, finally finding a company that produced serviceable ones that didn’t go completely uncanny valley.
“Your team of two will be permitted one HAGU. In the field, most astroarchaeologists will have a minimum of three. But this is a small project with low risk, and you’re on small teams, so one should be more than sufficient. Besides, it behooves you to learn to work without a spare . . . which will happen on occasion.”
The star charts came out, and each pair had to pick their field. Rosie winced. Trall was the best at picking out dig sites, but ce was home with an especially unpleasant flu. She tried snapping a photo of the charts on her phone and shooting it over, but no answer came; Trall was probably medicated to within an inch of cir life and too busy having fever dreams to answer.
“Oh, well. They’ve surveyed all the areas. It’s not like we can go too wrong.”
* * *
“Sixteen-alpha-seven-point-five by seventy-four-gamma-four even.”
Rosie steered them according to Trall’s coordinates. And they waited.
The dot on the screen blipped. Blip. Blip. Blip.
Blip.
The dot was on top of them.
“Sweet hell-blisters,” Trall breathed, and Rosie looked up. Her heart clenched to the size of a raisin.
Hovering in front of them was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a star whale. Not unless that star whale’s mother had mated with an octopus the size of Jupiter, bought her baby a set of artificial limbs, and left it to rot.
The creature hove into view, like an oddly shaped planet: bone-white and cut with intricate shadows. Rosie thought she spied an eye socket somewhere below them, wide as a canyon and twice as deep.
“Canary,” she breathed. “Tell me again. I-is he alive? Or is he dead?”
“He is,” Canary said placidly.
“Which one?”
“He is not alive. He is not dead. He is.” The girl’s small voice was clear, almost ringing, like a dirge played on water glasses.
“Look,” Trall said shakily, “we’re out here to explore a star whale, right? Not . . . whatever this big guy is. Let’s just turn around and get out of here, okay? We’ll take some photos, tell the professor what happened, but we should not be—”
“He hears,” Canary whispered.
Trall turned to her, grimacing. “I do not need this right now, small spooky child. I want to go home.”
“He hears this, too.”
“Aren’t you just supposed to tell us if we’re gonna get frostbite?” Trall turned to Rosie. “What the hell moonshine kind of gene splicer did you buy this freak show off?”
Rosie swallowed. “She was all we could afford.”
“Great. Awesome. So you expect me to take direction from the kid from Six Nights in the Moon Crypt? Hells no.” Ce shoved cir way back to the controls. “Hopping us out of here. Sit down, losers.”
“You cannot.”
Trall jabbed a finger at Canary. “And you can shut up.”
“Trall . . .” Rosie stared out the front window. “I think we’re closer than we were.”
It was true. The far-off crater of an eye socket now seemed closer than ever, looming, ready to swallow them up. Rosie felt herself shudder imperceptibly.
You’re too late.
“Who said that?” Rosie and Trall spoke at once.
“I-it wasn’t me,” Rosie stammered.
Trall shook cir head.
They both looked back at Canary. The small girl was unresponsive, seeming to stare through both of them at the looming shape.
Trall shook cirself out of cir surprise and began jamming buttons. “Okay. Okay. Jumping us out of here. Hang on to something.” Rosie did as she was told, but Canary stood still. “Canary. Sit.”
“My mental calculations estimate that this would be a waste of energy.”
“Ugh. Fine. Enjoy your concussion.” Trall took a deep breath. “Punching it!”
Nothing happened.
“Did you punch it?”
“I punched it!” Trall snapped back at Rosie. Ce punched it again. And again. Ce tried the floor pedal. The override. Everything ce touched seem to just take them close and closer to the giant fossilized beast before them.
Rosie grabbed one of Canary’s little hands. “Hey. Hey, you can, like, read his thoughts, right? Maybe you can talk back to him? Tell him to let us go?”
“I do not possess that mental capacity.”
“So . . . what’s going to happen to us?”
Canary looked placidly out the front window. “We will land in his eye. We will enter. One of”—she paused—“seven scenarios will ensue.”
“Worst case and best case?”
“Best case,” Canary said, still staring ahead at the looming chasm, “we will shatter the fossil, freeing ourselves from his pull and returning home. Worst case . . .”
Trall and Rosie held their breaths.
“We are driven mad by his influence and tear our own eyes out before leaping into the vacuum of space where we, too, will float forever frozen.”
Trall dragged cir hands down cir face. “I will honestly go for any of the other six at this point.”
Canary cocked her head slightly. “One of the potential scenarios involves you being digested in dormant stomach juices—”
“Shut her up, Rosie!”
* * *
The ship landed surprisingly softly at the nadir of the empty socket. Rosie and Trall began suiting up, the latter arming cirself with every destructive item in cir arsenal. Rosie began fastening her helmet, eyeing Canary curiously.
“Are you not coming with us?”
“I am coming with you. It is my duty.”
“Won’t you need a suit?”
Canary shook her head. “HAGUs are required to be able to function, survive, and communicate in unlivable environments, so we may report back to our human supervisors. If a HAGU died after every human-unfriendly encounter, a standard two-person excavation mission would go through approximately six and a half of us.”
“What happens to that half?” Trall muttered.
“My calculations indicate that you would tell me to shut up if I elaborated.”
Trall sniffed. “Smart kid.”
The three exited the ship, Rosie and Trall touching down first. Canary floated down delicately behind them, ringlets and skirt weightless in the air—more like Alice dropping down the rabbit hole than a humanoid tool dropping into a monster’s skull.
“So,” Rosie huffed into her helmet, “what do we need to do to get away?”
“We are being held here by his will,” Canary responded. Despite speaking into the void of space, her voice reached their ears—flat and strained, like a school PA system. “Two paths of escape lie open to us: we make ourselves uninteresting or we shatter his mind.”
Trall nodded. “And . . . uh . . . which one of those is easier?”
“We will have marginally higher success at shattering his mind than at distracting him from us. However, it comes with a higher risk as we must enter his body.”
Rosie glanced around the chasm. “Is that . . . a door?” She pointed toward one of the sloping walls of the eye socket: there, indeed, seemed to be a doorway. But not just a door-shaped exit—a genuine arch with column-like decorations carved aro
und it.
“Pardon me.” Canary leaped ahead of the pair, drifting daintily through the doorway and disappearing into the blackness beyond. Five seconds passed, ten, and the curly head popped out.
“It is safe to enter.”
Rosie and Trall followed. Once they were through the door, Trall pulled out cir flashlight, lighting the way for all of them. There was little to see but stony walls on either side. Their steps gradually began to feel weightier.
“Is it just me, or is there gravity in here?” Rosie muttered.
“The atmosphere is also breathable for you,” Canary said, her voice sounding more like itself again. “It should be safe to take off your helmets, though the temperature is still somewhat low. I recommend leaving your suits on until we are in a warmer environment.
Rosie was the first to test the air. She unlatched her helmet—sure enough, the air was comfortably breathable and even smelled oddly pleasant. “Trall, check it out.”
Dubiously, Trall followed suit, taking in a whiff of air. “Hmm. That’s . . . almost nice. Kinda reminds me of . . .”
“Lavender,” Rosie said quietly.
“Huh? No, I was gonna say limes. My old partner’s aftershave.” Ce sniffed. “Where are you getting lavender?”
Rosie sniffed again. Then furrowed her brow. “Canary?”
The girl tilted her head upward, sniffing the air, almost like a puppy. “Formaldehyde.”
“Uh . . .”
“This area appears to synthetize the scent that each person finds most comforting.”
Trall turned cir head toward Canary slowly. “And you find formal . . . you know what, never mind.”
“Why?” Rosie asked.
“It is hard to tell. Perhaps, it is an invitation. Or perhaps, it is bait.”
Ahead of them, the hallway opened out into a wide, irregularly shaped room. Canary held up a hand and dashed ahead, making a complete running circuit of the room before running back, completely unwinded.
“It is safe. And it is warm. You will likely wish to remove your suits.”
Both Trall and Rosie removed their suits, turning them inside-out and zipping them up into backpacks and stowing their helmets inside. Canary was right: it was warm but not uncomfortably so. Rather, it felt pleasant, like that first surprising day of spring when you realize you don’t mind going outside.
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