Unnatural Selection

by Tim Lebbon

  * * *

  On the day she leaves, there is one goodbye to make.

  Few of Blake's creations speak any sort of language that Abby can understand. They fly or crawl, walk or slither, sleep or scream, but there is only one other creature whom Abby has any sort of communication with, and she never sees him. He — she assumes it is a he, simply because of his voice — is contained behind a heavy steel door, and the only space through which he can talk is a narrow grille at its base. Abby first noticed him soon after her birthing, when she wandered naked through the ship trying to find who she was, and since then she has been back at regular intervals to talk with him.

  Her voice feels like an alien in her throat, the thoughts that conjure it strangers in her mind It is the hidden creature — Voice, as she has come to know him — who helps her come to terms with herself. His words are few, but their meaning is always deep. He has built her from nothing to something, and years later she realizes that it was Voice who made her something more than Blake ever intended. He gave her the thirst to fill her potential. And he made her free.

  On that final night, she sits on the floor and leans back against the door. She can hear him breathing on the other side, and she likes to think that the metal is warmed by his breath. Some contact, at least. Some affection. Without really understanding or knowing why, that is something she has always missed.

  "It's so dark in here," she says.

  "It's made that way."

  "You told me years ago that he locked you away because of what you think, and what you know. Why doesn't he lock me away as well?"

  A snort comes from behind the door. "Because I made no secret of my doubt. I've told you before, you're unique here. You're a bright mind among stupidity. You're human. The fact that Blake didn't take that into account shows just how mad he has become. He has these things he has brought out of the Memory — you and me included — and because of that, he has begun to doubt the facility of humanity. He's committed the very crime that put everything in this New Ark into the Memory in the first place, except that he's committed it against humans. He doubts them, looks down upon them, and that has made him underestimate them."

  "And I'm human?" Abby doubts that, because there is something else deep down that drives her. Like a blazing fire behind a locked door, it surges for release at frequent intervals.

  "As human as anything aboard this ship, Blake included. "

  "And you, Voice?"

  Voice is quiet for a long time, and Abby begins to think he has fallen asleep. But then she feels movement at her back, a subtle vibration transmitted through the metal of the door, and when he speaks it sounds as though he is crying. "Abby, it's time for you to leave. Escape. You're looking for a life, and you'll never find it in here. Here, there's only death waiting for the right time to visit."

  "Voice?" Abby is shocked, but it is more at the way he seems to be reading her mind than anything else. Escape, she has been thinking for weeks. Escape is the only way. Perhaps seeking Voice's approval is the impetus she really needs.

  "Go," he says, and that is the last she hears.

  Abby stands. She has been planning this for some time, never really believing that it would happen; it was a fancy, a daydream, a glimpse of a future that would never be. Now that she is actually going through with it, she finds herself calmer and more composed than she has any right to be. She is leaving home for the first time, with only the good wishes of someone or something locked away from the world to see her on her way.

  The stern will be the best place for her to jump from. Even if she is seen, it will take hours for the New Ark to halt and come back to look for her. And it seems fitting that, at the moment of her plunging into the sea, she and Blake will be parting company at the greatest speed possible.

  "Goodbye," she whispers at the metal door. But it will be years before she knows whether or not Voice even hears.

  * * *

  On this, her final walk through the other world that is the New Ark, she takes in everything and commits it to memory. One day, she is thinking, it may all be useful She never intends to return to Blake's realm, yet she knows that a part of her will never be able to leave.

  She heads through the maze of rooms and cells at the bow of the great ship. It is dark in here, occasional lights flickering and blinking as the troubled generator soldiers on. A drone passes her, and she pauses to watch it go. She has never discovered the source of these things, and Voice claims not to know. Of one fact she is certain: they are not born out of the vats. Blake has created these creatures, not dragged them out of the Memory, and to Abby's mind that makes them more of a travesty. Gray, short, sallow, strong of muscle but weak of mind, the drones run the ship and do all the work that is necessary in keeping Blake's creatures alive and well. She has never seen them when they are not working. She has never seen a drone resting. She has never even seen a dead drone, though there are plenty of places where corpses can be disposed of inside the New Ark.

  "Hey!" she says. The drone stops and turns, pointing its doglike face her way and averting its eyes. They never meet her eyes. Blake has made them less than the other things aboard the huge ship, and they seem to know their place. "What do you do to rest?" she asks.

  "Huh," the drone says.

  She has never been able to make any sense in the noise, and even now she is still unsure whether there is any intelligence behind it at all.

  "What do you eat?"

  "Huh."

  "What do you like to do?"

  "Huh."

  "Touch your toes." The creature bends and fingers its toes. "Stand up." It stands. "Why are you here?"

  "Huh."

  Abby feels tears blurring her vision, and she wipes at them angrily. She knows nothing other than what she has been born with, yet this thing pains her, offends her. It is nothing so shallow as mourning the creature's rights or feeling upset at the abuse; it is more as though she senses the fallacy of the drones existence. Everything else on this ship — all the creatures she is about to pass by for the very last time — has risen out of rightness. Cast as they have been into the Memory, still they had their time, and they take up a space in the world that was once meant for them. These drones that Blake made are simply wrong.

  "Get the hell out of here," she whispers, and the drone turns and leaves. She continues her final walk to the stern.

  * * *

  The first of the chambers is hot and humid, bustling with activity. Drones dash here and there, fussing about the huge steel vat that stands at the center of the chamber. Abby feels a thrill of power as she hides back in the shadows to watch. She came from a vat — perhaps even this one — drawn out of the Memory and given life. That was natural, and that was also magic, and she has spent the years since her birthing struggling to come to terms with both. She walked, she thought, she talked with Voice, and she dreamed, but she could make out no true dividing line between what Benedict Blake plucked out of nature and what he forced back into it. Magic was a bending of its rules, but it was far less simple than that. There were complexities and subtleties, and however many birthings she witnessed — scores, perhaps a hundred — she never understood what she was truly seeing.

  "One last time?" she whispers. "Shall I try to comprehend what I'm seeing one last time?" Her head tells her to flee, now that the idea of escape is upon her. But her heart bids her to stay, to watch. Because in truth, each birthing is beautiful. And every new creation she witnesses makes her feel more justified in being alive.

  The vat — huge enough to hold Abby a hundred times over — is starting to shake and smoke, and several drones dash out from beneath it, squealing. Something has pattered down on their gray hides, and patches of skin seem to be fading into nothing. The Memory is leaking, Abby thinks. She tries to make out shapes in the darkness beneath the vat, wondering what can be slipping through between sheet-metal whose rivets have been weakened over the decades. Shadows flail, another drone runs out, its rear half already seemingly vani
shed.

  "More hydrochloric acid!" a voice roars. Blake is in the room.

  She sinks farther back into shadows, kneeling behind a pile of discarded crates. What they contain she does not know, but they stink of fish and chalk. She peers between two crates and watches the man walk down a metal staircase.

  His long coat swings around his feet, giving the impression that he floats rather than walks, and his gray beard reaches his chest. His shoulders are narrow, his hands splayed as if it hurts for his fingers to touch. Blake's face burns with excitement, and his eyes catch the weak electrical light and reflect it back as a fierce glare. "More acid, damn you!"

  Two drones scamper up steps set into the side of the vat and swing on a metal wheel. It squeals and then opens, letting a spray of fluid down into the vat. The smoke and vibration lessen, and the drones close the wheel and drop back to the deck.

  "Bring it through too soon, and it'll never coalesce," Blake says. He reaches the bottom of the stairs and stands with hands on hips, staring up at the vat even though he cannot see what it contains. The drones fuss around him, but he ignores them. The vat shakes again, as if whatever it contains senses Blake's presence, and Abby realizes that he is the center of the New Ark, its heart, its tainted soul. There is nothing grand or even intimidating about his appearance — he is an old man — but he seems to exude a power that keeps the vat turning. "Not long now," he whispers, and his voice fills the chamber. "Not long now, and the next of my children will be through."

  What this time? she thinks. Hidden away behind the crates, she thinks of all the strange creatures this ship is home to, and she tries her best to imagine what could be forming in the vat even now. Does it have wings or horns? Does it breathe air or water? Can it make fire or ice? Her hackles rise as a noise erupts from the vat — boiling liquid, or the growl of something already there — and she feels her own hidden strangeness aching to break out.

  Blake hurries to a control panel set in the side of the vat. He taps some dials, shades a display from the flickering light, and moves in close so that he can read it. He seems happy with what he can see. "Coming along fine!" he shouts, and Abby wonders whom he is talking to. The drones? Unlikely.

  Me?

  She shifts uncomfortably. She's still certain that Blake does not know of her presence; he must be talking to himself. After so long out here, he must crave company. She wonders for the thousandth time why he has never spoken to her since her birthing, though she is one of the few 'children' of his possessing intelligence enough for the gift of speech. The potential answer — that he does not truly care — hurts her as much as ever.

  "Crazy," she whispers. "He's a crazy old bastard." Even on the verge of escape, she almost goes to talk to him.

  But then something rises from the vat, something black and huge and monstrous, and Blake steps back, arms wide, face split by a maniacal smile, and he cries out in joy. "Black dog! My black dog!"

  The dog — five times the size of Abby, coated with slime and still spitting weird green ectoplasm at the shady air of the vat chamber — opens its mouth and barks for the first time in living memory.

  * * *

  Later, rushing through the ship, everything she sees crushing in on her, Abby at last realizes the importance of everything she has seen and known. It is as if leaving has given her sight, allowed her truly to perceive the very wrongness of all this. These creatures are terribly real and yet awfully redundant, their purposes on this world having long since faded away. They have had their time. Evolved out of humankind's collective mind, these things have been relegated to something darker and more distant than simple memory, a place where even legends no longer live and the memories of legends are less than sighs in a hurricane.

  Abby is one of those legends, and rushing through the ship, she feels that more keenly than ever. The knowledge cuts her, stabs her to the quick. It almost carves out her heart. But Abby has a mind, and she has a soul, and being here, though not of her own devices, is something she cannot deny. She is here, and she wants to continue being here. Life is precious. Perhaps, she thinks, even legends can find their own places in the world once more.

  Later, when she realizes that she has been fooling herself all along, the memory of her last contact with Blake will seem like the last time she has ever been alive.

  * * *

  Abby runs the entire length of the ship, from compartment to compartment, hold to hold. She rushes past the compounds and cages and cells, hearing their occupants screeching at her passing and growling at her meaty presence. She shoulders by things milling in corridors, creatures with dripping maws and the blistering stares of memories given a second chance. She even speaks to some of the things in the ship — a man who lives by drinking blood, some women with the tails offish bobbing in a huge water tank — but she is nothing like them. They are blanks upon which Blake has cast his anger and rage. However smart they may seem — and in one room there is something like an angel, singing songs of deliverance and growling the threat of vengeance falling from above — Abby is running with her own mind, not standing around waiting in tune with the mind of another.

  She wonders briefly why that can be, but dwelling on it will make her just like them.

  She hopes that news of her impending escape will not reach Blake's ears. By its very nature, the ship contains things that run, fly, or squirm their way back and forth, and she does not seem to attract any undue attention. Yet intent is there, and she hopes it will not mark out this particular running woman as something different.

  At last, at the giant ship's stern, with the cold night pressing in and the promise of colder water already tingling her skin, she hears the voice she has wished to never hear again.

  "You can't leave me," Blake says.

  Abby pauses, panting, and turns to face her father. "I can. I am. I'm not like you, not like any of them." She waves her hand back the way she has come. She is terrified. She has no idea how he got here before her — the last she saw of him, he was bending over the black dog back in the birthing chamber — but there is still so much she does not understand.

  "No, you're not," Blake says. "You're unique. Every one of you is unique."

  "I'm not a monster."

  Blake steps forward, and a light on the bulkhead stutters on. He is unruffled and calm, though he looks older than she has ever remembered. "What is a monster?" he says.

  "Something ... something that ... "

  "Yes?" He moves closer still, and she sees what he is trying to do. Shadows flit at the extremes of her vision, and though she cannot see them, she can sense the drones creeping into position. Soon they will grab her, and then she will find herself imprisoned until freedom is Blake's choice, not her own.

  She steps to the rail and curves one leg over. The cool metal sits across the underside of her thigh, and she realizes this is the first time even a part of her has been beyond the ship.

  "Full moon soon!" Blake says, glancing at the sky. "The hunger will be upon you. The griffin will come in with your food, and you'll rip and tear and thank me. But if you go ... what then? What will a werewolf eat in a world she doesn't know?"

  "Stay away from me!" she says, holding up a hand. The nails are longer, fingers more muscled. Full moon tomorrow, yes, but tonight the tides are already at war in her blood, and her flesh is weak.

  "Look at me," Blake says. "I'm no monster. I bring my children back to the world simply because they've been forgotten, allowed to fade away. That's no way to treat a child."

  "They're not children!" she snaps.

  Blake shrugs, and she sees a glimmer in his eyes — amusement. She is amusing him. He's talking to her, biding time while his drones prepare to grab her, and he's finding this humorous.

  "You're mad," she whispers.

  Blake raises his eyebrows and holds up one hand. "Ahh," he says. And then he nods.

  Abby falls sideways to the deck, and the first drone passes over her, crashing into the railing. She kicks out and sends i
t shrieking into the sea. The second drone grabs her arm, but she twists away, snapping at its throat and ripping flesh and sinew. She spits. The blood is rank, like old oil, and the flesh tastes bland and insipid. There is nothing to these things. Two more drones attach themselves to her, Blake laughs ... and instead of fighting them off, Abby goes for the old man.

  The next few seconds are a confusion in her memory. Blood and screams, the impact of flesh on flesh, her teeth crunching together, and a long, desperate howl that can only be her own as she falls from the ship and splashes into the water. She swims hard, kicking against the flow, pulling with her hands, knocking aside the drones that fell with her, and hearing their panicked squeals as they are sucked into the giant propellers. Seconds stretch into minutes, and at last she floats on her back, riding the swell and surprised that she can swim. She looks up at the shadow of her father, standing at the railing high above and staring down at Abby. Believing, perhaps, that she is dead. He says nothing. He does not move. Abby floats, staring up past her father at the waxing moon, and even as the tanker moves quickly away, she sees him standing there, looking back at her with mad eyes she hopes she will never see again.

  * * *

  Abby sat in the shade of a huge, anonymous building in Baltimore and cried. She remembered swimming ashore at last and finding her way to Paris. Freedom had never tasted the way she thought, and soon the Seine served to drown her sorrows. And then Abe was there, giving her a place in the world, whereas Blake had only given her a life ... and that was too painful to dwell upon as well. Because she was about to betray Abe — him and everyone at the BPRD — simply because she could not face admitting her lie.

  Her tears were not for herself but for that girl she had been. Innocent, unknowing, ripped out of myth and given something that resembled life by Benedict Blake, all to further his own madness and feed his hate. She cried also for what was to come. Because if the werewolf she had killed really was from Blake, then the other things even now being sighted across the globe were probably his as well. And that could mean only one thing: whatever insanity he had been courting over the decades was soon to come to fruition.