Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  I went back to sketching in the new, larger grid around Angleton and the door. I could feel his concentration focussed on the wards around the office, intent and precise as that of any surgeon. “Nearly done,” I murmured, sketching glyphs rapidly: Elder Sign, Horned Skull, NAND Gate. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Move two zombies in here, boy.” (Angleton predates political correctness.) “Then activate the grid as soon as I’m clear of it.”

  I waved the first two night watch shamblers forward, then ducked to connect the grid terminals to a clunky-looking wireless transponder controlled by my smartphone. “Ready when you are, boss.”

  Angleton stepped back sharply. “Now, boy,” he said. I poked at the touchscreen and opened my inner eye. The new grid shimmered pale blue around a smaller violet doorway, fronting the roiling darkness around Andy’s office—I could see the thing right through the walls and floor. “Thou,” Angleton said sharply, in Old Enochian, “it is thine honor upon my word to open the door. And thou shalt step through the portal and be my ears and eyes and tongue for that which lies within—”

  I twitched slightly. Was Angleton really going to use a zombie as a webcam? I’ve gotten used to dealing with the metabolically challenged over the past year, but even so, that was a level of intimacy I wouldn’t willingly approach.

  “Sssss,” said one of the night watchmen, reaching for the doorknob. I could feel the taste of its mind, half-afraid and half-eager to discover whatever waited behind the door, ready to eat—

  It touched the doorknob. And pushed.

  The door swung open to reveal a luminous chaos. Green-edged shadows flickered across the room, dazzling me, as the other zombie lurched forward, straight into the embrace of a tangled skein of many-jointed limbs and a hairball of writhing tentacles, some of them sprouting fern-like leaves that quested blindly around the edges of the door. One of them sprouted, extending swiftly into the room; it reached the edge of the inner grid and sizzled, recoiling violently. The mass of wildly waving intrusive appendages spasmed and twitched, pulling back—with the zombie dangling in its grasp, unmoving. “Close the door!” called Angleton, and the other zombie pulled, hard. The door scraped shut, the warding on it sucking it back into place in its frame.

  “Well, that didn’t go so well,” he remarked conversationally, pulling a starched white cotton handkerchief from his breast pocket. He wiped his forehead: the cloth came away pink, smeared with perspiration and blood. Angleton glanced at the kerchief disapprovingly, then folded it neatly and tucked it away. Then he looked at me. “The natives are restless tonight.” A mirthless smile. “A capital learning opportunity don’t you think, boy? Quick. Tell me what you saw.”

  “I—” I swallowed. You have got to be shitting me. This was Angleton all over. What you or I would recognize as an alien invasion by tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime Angleton would see as a teachable moment. I could swear there was liquid helium running in his veins. “Morphologically diverse subsentient entity, didn’t even notice it was in physical contact with a vessel for the feeders in the night; the usual death patterning didn’t touch it.” (One of the reasons the night watch are so dreadful—to most people—is that skin-to-skin contact with one of them is usually about as survivable as skin-to-metal contact with an electric chair. Angleton is made of sterner stuff, and I’m immune to them for a different reason. But even so.) “What next?”

  The mirthless smile broadened. “You send in another body and watch what happens, while I see what I can find out about the world on the other side of that door.”

  I turned to the group of Residual Human Resources in the corner. They looked singularly unenthusiastic for the fate Angleton had in mind for them, even by zombie standards. “You can’t just go using the night watch as meat probes!” A residual budget-focussed reflex prompted me to protest. “There’ll be hell to pay in the morning! Security will have a cow!”

  “Security will have a much bigger problem to deal with if we can’t close down this portal by then, boy.” Angleton glanced at Andy’s office. The remaining zombie in the outer ward was still clutching the door handle. After a moment I realized it was frozen to it. “Do you have any suggestions?”

  “We don’t have any spare nukes on the premises, do we?” Don’t be silly, Bob, I told myself. “Well, hmm. It depends if what is on the other side of the door is still Andy’s office, with a portal inside it, or if the grid’s ripped wide open and the door is actually opening into another domain.”

  “The latter, I believe.” Angleton cocked his head on one side. “You are considering the question of damage containment?”

  “Yeah.” I scratched my head, then pulled my hand back when I felt my hair dripping with sweat. “Send a bomb through, kill or injure whatever is pushing through from the other side, use the opportunity to exorcise everything on the other side of the door—”

  “I have a better solution than exorcism,” Angleton stated. “Your camera, boy. Have you loaded the basilisk firmware?”

  “Um, let me check.” My pocket snapper is a hacked 3D digital camera, with firmware that turns it into a not-terribly-accurate basilisk gun. “Yes, but I wouldn’t recommend using it at this range . . .”

  Basilisk guns are a nasty little spin-off of research into medusae, and our happy fun way of dealing with other universes. It’s an observer-mediated quantum effect that applies a rather odd probability field to whatever it focusses on. About one carbon-12 or carbon-13 nucleus in a hundred, in the target, is spontaneously swapped for a silicon-28 or silicon-29 nucleus. (Yes, this violates the law of conservation of mass/energy: we reckon it works via a tunneling process from another universe.) The effect is rather dramatic. Lots of bonds break, lots of energy comes spewing out. Protein molecules go twang, nucleotide chains snap, everything gets rather hot. To a naive bystander, the target turns to stone—or rather, to red-hot, carbon-riddled cinderblock.

  On the one hand, it’s a lethally powerful hand weapon. On the other hand, you really don’t want to use one at close range—say, at something on the other side of a door. The smallest area of effect it has is a bit like a sawn-off shotgun; at worst, it’s an air strike in a pocket-sized package. Right now I was standing close enough that if I pointed it at Andy’s door the blast effect would probably kill me.

  “I have an idea. Wait here, boy, I need to fetch something from my office. If the ward on the door fails, snap away by all means: you’ll be dead either way.” And with that reassuring message, Angleton turned and scampered helter-skelter back towards his den.

  • • •

  ANGLETON WAS ONLY GONE FOR A MINUTE, BUT IT FELT LIKE AN eternity as I stood watching the vapor-smoking door in the pentacle. The zombie with the handle was slowly slumping towards the floor, leaning against the side of the door frame; I could hear him in the back of my head, growing sluggish and faint as if the feeder that animated his body was slowly being drained.

  I hefted my camera, checked the battery status, and pointed it at the portal, knowing that if the wards didn’t hold it was probably futile; anything that could break in from another universe under its own motive power was out of my league. Possibly out of Angleton’s, too. The night watch shuffled anxiously in the corner between the reception desk and the dying potted rubber plant; I could feel their unease gnawing at the back of my head. As a rule, Residual Human Resources don’t do unease: they’re placid as long as they’ve got some flesh to embody them and the occasional hunk of brains to munch on. (Any old slaughterhouse brains will do: they eat them for the fatty acids. At a pinch, you can substitute a McDonald’s milk shake.) But these RHRs were definitely unhappy about something on the other side of the portal, and that was enough for me.

  Man up, Bob, I told myself. I checked the camera again, double-checked that I had the basilisk firmware loaded rather than the charming novelty 3D snapshot firmware that had come with it, shifted from foot to foot. That’s w
hen the moment of blinding insight went off inside my head like a flashbulb. I peered at the display back and frantically scrolled through the settings menu. Pinky and Brains, our departmental Mad Scientist unit, had somehow gotten hold of the original source code and hacked the basilisk functionality into it, hadn’t they? It had to operate as a stereo camera, or the medusa effect wouldn’t work, but normally I just left it on auto-focus. But had they left the original features—the other features, like aperture, exposure, focus, special photographic effects—intact? Because if so . . .

  Angleton cleared his throat right behind me and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “Well, boy?” he asked as I spun round. He was holding a small black binder, open at a page of peel-off stickers. Three of the five circular symbols had been removed, leaving shiny grease paper backing. I tried to look at the remaining ones but they gave me a stabbing pain behind my right eye.

  “The thing on the other side of the door is pretty dumb,” I said. “I think I can take it out, if we open the door, but it’ll be touch-and-go. And if it’s actually inside the office, rather than on the other side of a portal with its end point in the office, it might make a mess of—”

  “Leave that to me.” Angleton hefted his book of stickers. “Harrumph. What do you propose to do?” I told him. “Harrumph,” he said again, and considered the idea for a few seconds before nodding. “Yes, you do that, Bob. I’ll sign off on the forms for the replacement kit tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I said. Turned towards the cowering crowd of Residual Human Resources. “Here’s how we’ll do it. Eenie, meenie, minie, mo, catch a zombie by the—”

  I reached out with my mind and grabbed. He came, shuffling, reluctantly: an older, more withered corpse, wearing the dress uniform of a funereal military policeman. The original owner of the body was long dead. What held it upright now was a feeder in the night, a weak demon with a tendency to embed itself in (and take over) the neural connectome of its victims. I think it knew that I had a fate in mind for it, and not a pleasant one, but it was bound into the body by a geas, a compact of power that required it to obey my lawful commands. “Hear ye this,” I said, in my halting Old Enochian: “define new subroutine basilisk_grenade() as callback from operator(); begin; depress red button on front of payload; aim payload at self->face(); walk forward for ten paces; halt and retain physical control of payload indefinitely . . .”

  I set the self-portrait timer on the camera to ten seconds, handed it to the zombie, and sent him into the grid and through the door to blow himself up. Then things got weird.

  • • •

  ABOUT THAT STICKER BOOK:

  “I want you to turn off the outer ward, boy,” he told me. “Then shove your zombie inside and turn it on again. And after another fifteen seconds I want you to turn it off. Can you do that?”

  I nodded. I had the beginning of a throbbing headache: the crackling gibber and howl from beyond the portal, combined with the Residual Human Resource’s whining sense of dread at its undeserved fate, was getting to me. Controlling the ward at the same time wasn’t exactly demanding but required focus—especially in case anything went wrong. “Okay,” I said.

  “Good. Then do it now.”

  I switched off the outer ward, and the howl rose to a near-deafening roar, a silent arctic gale buffeting at my attention. “Thou shalt advance!” I commanded my blue-suited minion: “Perform the operation as soon as the portal opens!” Then, to the all-but-deanimated relic on the door handle: “Open the door fucking right now!”

  I shoved the full force of my necromantic mojo into the doorman, who twitched slightly and moaned something inarticulate and inaudible. So I shoved again. I’m not sure I can describe exactly what it feels like to pump your will into an empty vessel, filling and inflating it and bringing purpose (if not life) back to lumpen dead limbs. The feeder was still there, so I wasn’t entirely doing it from cold: but it was listless and tired, as close to exhausted as I’ve ever felt. I rubbed my forehead and concentrated. “Go!” I shouted.

  The nearly twice-dead corpse lurched to its feet. Then it twisted the door handle and pushed, opening the path for my reluctant bomb carrier.

  I’m not sure what I saw through the open portal. My memory is full of confused, jumbled-up images of tentacles and lobster-claws and crazy-ass stuff looking like industrial robots made out of raw sewage and compound eyes the size of my head. I can’t really say what it was, though, because my inner ears were ringing. It was total sensory overload, backlit by shimmering curtains of light and electrical discharges and the screaming of damned telemarketers in hell. Okay, I made that last bit up. But it was raw.

  “Close, dammit! Close!” I yelled in Enochian. The door-zombie moaned incoherently and stumbled, collapsing against the portal, just as a bouquet of tentacles reached across the threshold and wrapped themselves around my bomb-carrier zombie in something that was probably not intended as a loving embrace.

  My bomb carrier groaned piteously, with an inner voice so loud that I could feel it in my head even over the unholy din from the tentacle monster. I shuddered. I’ve never actually seen something kill a feeder in the night before—disembodiment is all very well, but something told me my minion wouldn’t be coming back for sloppy seconds. But he’d stepped up to the threshold, and he was carrying the basilisk gun, and he’d pushed the self-timer “start” button . . . “Close the fucking door before I invent a whole new hell to banish you to!” I screamed at the door-corpse. (I am taking a liberty here. I had, and have, no idea what the Enochian for “fuck” is. Probably because the beings who invented that language didn’t have anything remotely approximating mammalian genitalia. Even before their final extinction rendered the whole point moot.)

  I shoved, hard, with my mind. So hard, in fact, that everything began to turn gray and my ears—my physical ears—began to ring. K syndrome here I come, I thought with a resigned sense of futility. Angleton was in front of me, approaching the edge of the outer ward, but I could tell this wasn’t going to work—

  There was a soundless flash of light and a deep, resonant thud, as of a gigantic door slamming on the other side of a wall. I felt it in my gut as I stumbled. Another flicker: I couldn’t see properly—

  “Cut the ward, boy, cut it now!” Angleton snarled over his shoulder.

  The ward? Oh, right. I fumbled with my phone and hit the “off” icon on the control app. The light show began to fade. “Hang on, have we closed the portal?” I asked.

  The door to Andy’s office was still half-ajar, a skeletonized hand dangling from the doorknob. Angleton stepped around the remains of the door zombie with the delicate gait of a man in expensive shoes avoiding a dog turd. He raised a hand: dust and bones and other disquieting shapes gathered themselves up from the pile on the threshold and rolled beneath the lintel, vanishing into the darkened space beyond.

  Angleton waited a few seconds, then pulled the door shut with his fingertips. Next he raised the black folder and delicately removed a decal. “By the authority vested in me,” he said, “I declare this office closed.” Then he carefully applied the sticker to the center of the door, and stepped backwards.

  “Have we closed the—” I began to repeat, then stopped. “Hang on. What’s going on?” I stared at the mess of paint, charred patch of carpet, and graffiti’d patch of blank wall at the side of our office area. “Hang on,” I repeated, backing up mentally. “Wow.”

  I took a step towards the wall. Angleton caught my arm. “You don’t want to get too close until it’s had time to anneal.”

  “Until what’s had time?”

  “The ward I placed on Mr. Newstrom’s office. Class ten,” he added, almost smugly.

  “Class ten?” I’d heard of wards that strong: I didn’t know we actually had any.

  “Yes, boy. By tomorrow morning nobody except you, me, and Mr. Newstrom will even remember there was an office there—and
Andy will only do so because he left his coat inside.” He clapped his hands together. “I want you to prepare a report on this incident for me. But be a good chap and fetch Mr. Newstrom back inside first. I believe it has begun to rain, and as I mentioned, he doesn’t have a jacket anymore.”

  • • •

  I WENT OUTSIDE AND HAULED ANDY IN, AND THEREAFTER WE didn’t get much work done, apart from the inevitable clean-up and sending the surviving Residual Human Resources back to their crypt. Then I made an executive decision that Andy and I needed to finish the night shift by performing a destructive bioassay on the contents of a bottle labelled “drain cleaner” I’d found in a drawer in my desk. After repeated oral analysis, we concluded it was mislabelled. It was a risky procedure—if the bottle hadn’t been mislabelled we could have made ourselves very ill indeed—but certain traditions must be upheld. In particular, a young high-flying officer should not tell a former superior that they’ve been bloody idiots without the plausible deniability lent by a sufficiency of single malt whisky. Even if it’s true.

  “So what’s your ten-percenter?” Andy asked after I finished explaining precisely why he needed the refresher course on health and safety procedures when conducting summonings. “Don’t tell me you’re working on an admin-side scheme?”

  “Actually, I am,” I said, hoisting a shot glass in his direction: “Prosit!”

  “Up yours.” He took a sensible sip. “No, seriously, they’ve got you on the hook, too, haven’t they? That’s why you came in to work late?”

  Actually they didn’t. The ten-percenter thing only really applied to staff with actual postgraduate degrees. I’d never finished my PhD, much less got to strut my stuff in a silly robe, but I’d jumped on the bandwagon with a carefully muted shriek of glee. I had my own entirely selfish reasons. Andy might have selected his project because he was suffering from that peculiar version of impostor syndrome to which researcher-turned-admin bodies are prone, but for my part I’d been bitten by a bug, and I needed a plausible excuse to spend 10 percent of my working hours on a scheme the suggestions box committee probably only authorized because they hadn’t understood the full implications. (I had. And it was fascinating. I wish I knew who’d had the idea first, so I could shake their hand . . .)