The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror
Page 54
He was relieved to find himself near the Plaza Nuevo and not lost in some part of town he didn’t know. Tourists had warned him his first few days there that he’d be mugged in the Albaicin but he’d never had any problems; either he looked too disreputable to bother with or the danger was overstated. Now he fairly staggered along the cobblestone streets, still drunk although he’d felt fine back at the girl’s place. He stopped to lean against the wall and shut his eyes while colors squirmed against his lids. Beer rose to the back of his throat and hung there, although he did not vomit. When he came to his senses again he was on his knees, still leaning with one hand against the wall, and he imagined he heard the sound of Yarrow’s laughter ringing down the narrow stone pathway. But it was Samantha he smelled, Samantha fresh from her bath sweet with Johnson’s Baby Shampoo and that soap Ann used to buy at Lush down on 23rd Avenue. He felt a sudden stab of homesickness, so unfamiliar he didn’t know for a moment what to call it. Africa slipped away from him. He said, “I want to go home,” and he was crying, just like that, he who had been the strong one throughout, who’d held Ann and his mother and his father and her parents as well through their sobbing. He wondered how he would get back there. He didn’t have any money left, not enough for another plane ticket anyhow, but he longed for the alpine meadows of Mount Hood, for a run along the river esplanade, even for a number 20 bus trundling down Burnside late at night, lurching with drunks and jittery with addicts. He cried, remembering. He put up his face to the night and howled like a dog and that felt better too. He still had friends, and family, and when he phoned them tomorrow they would send him money and he would go home again and they would put him back together somehow.
He never saw them coming. A blow to his back that knocked him flat—it didn’t take much. He tried to pick himself up but couldn’t. He didn’t know how many of them there were but it felt like they were swarming him, like there were dozens. Hands reached into pockets, even his shoes, taking his wallet, his wristwatch. He felt something warm and liquid on his face and realized he was bleeding. He tried to talk to them although it took him several minutes for him to realize what he was saying to them. “Thank you.” They were freeing him, once and for all. “Thank you,” he said again. He stumbled to his feet and the moon swayed above him like the pendulum of a clock. He considered first that it was just as well he’d been unable to fight back, as he might have been seriously injured, and second that he seemed to have gotten drunker, more fucked-up since leaving the girl’s apartment, as though the air itself was an intoxicant. Maybe he’d really been hurt. Maybe he’d hit his head when he fell, knocked himself out or something, but he couldn’t feel a lump and the only blood came from his cut cheek.
So now he was free. He couldn’t go home just yet. He’d get back to Tomas’s, get his stuff and get out of there before dawn. He’d hitch down to the tip of Spain and he’d get to Morocco—“Shit,” he said; he’d forgotten the ferries cost money. He’d figure something out once he got there. People always did. He had to move. Keep moving. That had been the problem. Keep moving till he got to someplace where she could cross over fully and find him. Once she did he’d get them both back to Ann somehow and she’d see, the three of them would be together again. She would see then how he’d fixed things, made everything right. He understood now why Yarrow had talked about rending the fabric of space and time. You had to tear the world apart to get back the thing that you loved. He stumbled and yelped and nearly fell. He’d imagined that something had reached out to trip him, but it was only a stray brick on the cobblestones.
“Help me,” he’d said to Yarrow that day, but Yarrow had just sat back and laughed. “I already helped you,” Yarrow said, “it’s out of my hands.” And maybe he was telling the truth: Yarrow was dead within a week of that visit. He’d been sicker than he’d let on. Colin had heard there would be a memorial service and went because he felt obligated. The ceremony had been held at a shabby home deep in north Portland, officiated by a young woman in thrift-store mourning wear, down to the black veil over an olive-skinned face, unadorned but for the tattooed spider under her left eye. Colin didn’t recognize the handful of people in attendance and didn’t speak to any of them, though each got up in turn and offered a halting and enigmatic appraisal of Yarrow as someone who had come to their aid in a time of despair. Something in the atmosphere was poisonous, unwholesome, and he slipped out the back before the affair was finished.
Next thing he knew he was in front of Tomas’s, swaying in front of the massive wooden door. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there, and he fumbled for his key, which somehow, blessedly, the thieves hadn’t taken, maybe because he’d shoved it deep in the pocket of his jeans, maybe because they took pity on him at the last minute.
In the walled garden the detritus of the pond-cleaning lay scattered on the flagstones. The night was hot and dry yet he heard a splashing sound. The fish pond. They darted just below the surface of the now-clear water, bright and orange in the moonlight. Madih had set rocks about the pond, and built an island clear up to the surface. The fish swam in mad circles about the pond, beaching themselves on the rocks in pairs and threes and fours, their tails flicking madly at the surface of the water and one another, gills heaving, as they fought to thrust themselves back into the pond and then they repeated the same futile exercise over again. Colin watched them for a while. “Stupid,” he said to them. “You’re so stupid. No wonder you’re fish, you’re so stupid.”
He wandered into his little room and stood in the middle, wondering why he’d bothered. He had a couple of items there, one or two cheap shirts he’d bought after arriving, a pair of shorts. Wasn’t like he needed anything. He needed to get out. He tossed his key on the heavy wooden table and turned to leave.
Something made him turn back, a feeling, or something brushing against him perhaps. He couldn’t help it. “Samantha?” Her name felt like something dead in his mouth. He couldn’t smell her any longer like he had before. Something waited for him in the room that was both Samantha and not Samantha any longer. He took a deep breath. He had to be brave for the both of them. Of course she would be changed by her experience. She would be frightened when she came back, she wouldn’t understand what had happened to him, to either of them, and he had to stay strong.
“It’s okay, baby,” he murmured. “It’s going to be okay.” Back out, past the doomed fish in the pond, through the doors again and onto the street. She was almost corporeal. He was sure of it. “Come on,” he said. He climbed the stone steps, brushing the wall with his fingertips to steady himself. The moon had grown so brilliant it hurt his eyes. He wished all at once that Ann could be with him right now. He imagined what her face would look like when she saw Samantha again. Or maybe it wouldn’t be like that at all. Maybe it would be like none of it had ever happened. That would be best, he thought. Otherwise it would be so difficult to explain to people. He wished he had asked Yarrow for more details, how he should act, what they should do.
He was breathing heavily, as though he’d been running a great distance. The stairs were steep and many, but they shouldn’t have put him out of breath like this. Yarrow’s voice repeated like a loop inside his head: the moon will look strange the moon will look strange the moon will look strange. And he threw his head back and it did look strange, enormous and somehow pregnant, its deep malignant orange saturating the sky. Yarrow had said, this is how you will know. And here round the corner the sky was vast and the town stretched below him and across the canyon the Alhambra flamed, aglow in the miraculous light of this new and different moon. People gathered like wraiths along the wall, milling about and pointing and asking one another questions, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying. Tourists on a night visit to the Alhambra amassed on the ramparts, tiny faraway figures. He could hear their cries. It’s okay, Samantha, he told her, whether with speech or in his heart he could not be certain. It’s okay, people are frightened and you are frightened, but soon everything will be all r
ight again. Everything will be the way it ought to be.
His skin prickled, the back of his neck and along his arms. He swung round, crouching to embrace her, and lost his balance, catching himself with one hand on the cobblestones, an unfortunate recovery as his hand came away covered in dog shit. Something was wrong. “Samantha?” he said, and he heard his voice hoarse and raw with panic. Someone answered him. Someone said, “Thank you, Colin,” but Samantha didn’t call him Colin, she called him Daddy, and what stepped from the shadows wasn’t a little girl but a grown man, yellow teeth bright in the moonlight, his face like a wolf ’s. He shimmered in the unnatural light, like he wasn’t yet real. The moon was full to bursting now, bright as the sun, and some of the weeping people along the wall seemed to be praying. Colin saw a man hoist himself up on the side, shouting something, tears streaming down his face before hurling himself over and into the canyon on the other side. “You did well,” Yarrow said, “you did exactly as I asked you. You did every single thing.” Colin, still not understanding, reached for him, reached for something but Yarrow sidestepped him, laughing, and gravelly, mocking, said, “This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends and a new one begins. She’s not coming back, Colin. She never was.” Ann voice: If I were a dog I could have smelled it on him. Colin remembered his earlier conviction, that Yarrow had set the whole thing in motion the night they’d met for the first time. He pleaded, because there was nothing left to do. “What’s going to happen? What happens next? What did you make me do?” Yarrow only laughed and shrugged, and Colin saw now that in a matter of minutes he’d become horribly solid and realer, realer than anything else about him. “I don’t know what happens next,” Yarrow admitted. “No one’s ever done anything like this before.” Colin shut his eyes but even then the moon grew bigger and brighter behind his eyelids, and he felt the world shift and change, shaping itself into something new, something he didn’t know, something that didn’t exist before, and there was only the moon and the void and Yarrow’s voice low and incantatory: oh the moon oh the moon yes the moon will look strange.
Watts bases his story on Jon Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing (an adaptation of the 1938 John W. Campbell Jr. novella Who Goes There?, which had already been less faithfully filmed as 1951’s The Thing from Another World) from the alien’s perspective. There has been some blogosphere discussion as to whether it can be appreciated by those who have never seen the movie. Well . . . I have never seen the movie.
THE THINGS
PETER WATTS
I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.
I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.
I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.
The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.
I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.
The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.
There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase. I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.
I will go into the storm, and never come back.
I was so much more, before the crash. I was an explorer, an ambassador, a missionary. I spread across the cosmos, met countless worlds, took communion: the fit reshaped the unfit and the whole universe bootstrapped upwards in joyful, infinitesimal increments. I was a soldier, at war with entropy itself. I was the very hand by which Creation perfects itself.
So much wisdom I had. So much experience. Now I cannot remember all the things I knew. I can only remember that I once knew them.
I remember the crash, though. It killed most of this offshoot outright, but a little crawled from the wreckage: a few trillion cells, a soul too weak to keep them in check. Mutinous biomass sloughed off despite my most desperate attempts to hold myself together: panic-stricken little clots of meat, instinctively growing whatever limbs they could remember and fleeing across the burning ice. By the time I’d regained control of what was left the fires had died and the cold was closing back in. I barely managed to grow enough antifreeze to keep my cells from bursting before the ice took me.
I remember my reawakening, too: dull stirrings of sensation in real time, the first embers of cognition, the slow blooming warmth of awareness as body and soul embraced after their long sleep. I remember the biped offshoots surrounding me, the strange chittering sounds they made, the odd uniformity of their body plans. How ill-adapted they looked! How inefficient their morphology! Even disabled, I could see so many things to fix. So I reached out. I took communion. I tasted the flesh of the world—
—and the world attacked me. It attacked me.
I left that place in ruins. It was on the other side of the mountains—the Norwegian camp, it is called here—and I could never have crossed that distance in a biped skin. Fortunately there was another shape to choose from, smaller than the biped but better adapted to the local climate. I hid within it while the rest of me fought off the attack. I fled into the night on four legs, and let the rising flames cover my escape.
I did not stop running until I arrived here. I walked among these new offshoots wearing the skin of a quadruped; and because they had not seen me take any other shape, they did not attack.
And when I assimilated them in turn—when my biomass changed and flowed into shapes unfamiliar to local eyes—I took that communion in solitude, having learned that the world does not like what it doesn’t know.
I am alone in the storm. I am a bottom-dweller on the floor of some murky alien sea. The snow blows past in horizontal streaks; caught against gullies or outcroppings, it spins into blinding little whirlwinds. But I am not nearly far enough, not yet. Looking back I still see the camp crouched brightly in the gloom, a squat angular jumble of light and shadow, a bubble of warmth in the howling abyss.
It plunges into darkness as I watch. I’ve blown the generator. Now there’s no light but for the beacons along the guide ropes: strings of dim blue stars whipping back and forth in the wind, emergency constellations to guide lost biomass back home.
I am not going home. I am not lost enough. I forge on into darkness until even the stars disappear. The faint shouts of angry frightened men carry behind me on the wind.
Somewhere behind me my disconnected biomass regroups into vaster, more powerful shapes for the final confrontation. I could have joined myself, all in one: chosen unity over fragmentation, resorbed and taken comfort in the greater whole. I could have added my strength to the coming battle. But I have chosen a different path. I am saving Child’s reserves for the future. The present holds nothing but annihilation.
Best not to think on the past.
I’ve spent so very long in the ice already. I didn’t know how long until the world put the clues together, deciphered the notes and the tapes from the Norwegian camp, pinpointed the crash site. I was being Palmer, then; unsuspected, I went along for the ride.
I even allowed myself the smallest ration of hope.
But it wasn’t a ship any more. It wasn’t even a derelict. It was a fossil, embedded in the floor of a great pit blown from the glacier. Twenty of these skins could have stood one atop a
nother, and barely reached the lip of that crater. The timescale settled down on me like the weight of a world: how long for all that ice to accumulate? How many eons had the universe iterated on without me?
And in all that time, a million years perhaps, there’d been no rescue. I never found myself. I wonder what that means. I wonder if I even exist any more, anywhere but here.
Back at camp I will erase the trail. I will give them their final battle, their monster to vanquish. Let them win. Let them stop looking.
Here in the storm, I will return to the ice. I’ve barely even been away, after all; alive for only a few days out of all these endless ages. But I’ve learned enough in that time. I learned from the wreck that there will be no repairs. I learned from the ice that there will be no rescue. And I learned from the world that there will be no reconciliation. The only hope of escape, now, is into the future; to outlast all this hostile, twisted biomass, to let time and the cosmos change the rules. Perhaps the next time I awaken, this will be a different world.
It will be aeons before I see another sunrise.
This is what the world taught me: that adaptation is provocation. Adaptation is incitement to violence.
It feels almost obscene—an offense against Creation itself—to stay stuck in this skin. It’s so ill-suited to its environment that it needs to be wrapped in multiple layers of fabric just to stay warm. There are a myriad ways I could optimize it: shorter limbs, better insulation, a lower surface:volume ratio. All these shapes I still have within me, and I dare not use any of them even to keep out the cold. I dare not adapt; in this place, I can only hide.