The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  Henry’s version, a human voice, perfectly mimicking a tiger’s roar. I heard him do it hundreds of times. It’s nothing one forgets. I shook my head, trying to dispel the hallucination.

  It was, of course, a tiger calling. A night spent in Henry’s company. It was no wonder. Another roar, and this voice was Henry’s as well, calling in the tones of a tigress, and a moment later, calling in the voice of a male tiger, and now another, an elderly cat, and a cub.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked K_ and his only response was quick breathing.

  “How many are there?” he asked.

  “Do you hear Henry?” The depth of my uncertainty had overcome me. I was queasy with it.

  “I hear tigers,” he said.

  A flurry of calls, the startling bells of a sambur, like automobiles in traffic, squeezing horns. Tiger here, tiger passing. All in the voice of Henry. It was as though Henry had become the entire forest, and all its occupants.

  I stood still, fighting that old urge, run, curl to protect stomach, meticulously checking my rifle instead. Tiger running, shrieked a peafowl, in Henry’s voice.

  Through the trees, I saw red. And more red. More than one tiger. How many? They were not leaping at us, but running for some other reason. A mass of tigers, in step, all moving at the same pace, flowing through the shadows faster than I could watch. This was nothing tigers, who do not hunt in packs, would do.

  At last, I saw her, my old enemy, stepping out of the forest in front of us.

  My rifle was already aimed as she leapt. I fired, but did not come close to hitting her. Her spring took her over our heads, and she landed, softly behind us. K_ shook beside me, and I felt him considering a run.

  “Don’t move,” I hissed. “If you move, she’ll have you.”

  I scanned the trees for the other tigers, but they were invisible. She opened her jaws and roared to me in Henry’s voice and I felt the tears of a madman running down my face.

  Perhaps this was his last gift to me, I thought, this aural hallucination that reminded me what to do when a tiger had gotten this close. Call her closer. He’d taught me the call, and now I made it back to her. I roared at her, at Henry’s killer, at this killer who hadn’t killed him.

  She stepped toward me, her pelt shining, her eyes golden and glowing, her muscles gathering, and as she launched herself, I fired into her throat, the rifle kicking my shoulder.

  The tigress screamed in Henry’s voice again, and threw herself into the trees as though they, and not I, were her murderer. I could see no blood on her pelt, but her madness was that of the wounded. The tree trunk cracked as she bellowed and threw herself at its branches, and slowly it toppled, tigress atop it, her growls quietening now, her motions slower.

  I shot her once more, this time in the skull, just over her left eye, and she made a sound, a raw hissing, something beyond anything animal. I expected her to disappear, for there to be a cloud of smoke left behind, a ghost gone, but she did not. I edged closer, K_ on my heels.

  The tigress looked up suddenly, pupils fully dilated, and I knew that she was dying. How could a ghost die?

  I could smell my own sweat, and a deep, metallic odor too, tiger’s blood, I thought, though I’d long since forgotten the smell of it.

  Above, the stars blinked on, one by one, and the bats began to hunt. Insects rattled their shells like shields.

  The tigress’ head dropped slowly onto her paws, and the light went out in her, as a headlamp on a train might go to black when pulled into its end station. There was a sound, a strange sound, which I attributed to bullets against stone, and then she was still.

  “Shaitan,” I said, quietly, a prayer to the devil I’d killed for the second time.

  K_ vibrated behind me. “Is it dead?”

  “A man-eater for your museum,” I told him, overcome by the sadness I always feel when I kill something large as her, and with this sadness, something more, something darker. Confusion.

  “You must know she’s not for a museum, old man,” K_ told me, his voice returning, more confident than it had been before. “A museum wouldn’t pay for something like this.”

  I looked at him.

  “Everyone wants a tiger,” he said. “Everyone wants a man-eater certified by someone like you.”

  “Who’s this tiger for?” I knew the answer already.

  “A collector. Already has a table made of elephant legs.”

  K_’s wry laugh sounded to me like something from a moving picture, overheard from far down the street, through walls and bodies. Hollow and cluttered, the laughter of something made of less than nothing. My own laughter had, on occasion, sounded the same.

  He took his flask from his pocket, sipped, and offered it to me. I refused.

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” he said, kneeling to unpack his case. “I read your book. That’s why I do this. I show the world the things they want to see, but don’t want to travel to. It’s conservation, isn’t it? People like that, here, they’d ruin things. You, though, you’ve killed what? Two hundred tigers? You know what you’re doing.”

  With effort, he rolled the man-eater onto her back, and removed a scalpel from his pack.

  “If I don’t gut her soon, the skin’ll spoil,” he said, and then bent over the tigress, parting the fur on her chest.

  “An old bullet wound.” He jabbed her left shoulder, but I didn’t look. I knew the wound. “There’s another scar here,” he said. “As old as the other.”

  He ran his finger down the man-eater’s pelt, from chest to abdomen. I could scarcely keep myself from tearing the scalpel from his hand. I felt as though she was the only one on earth who’d known my past. I didn’t dare think of how she could be here at all, thirty-two years later, did not dare imagine what this all might mean, for it was her. I knew her face, her tracks. It was her. A dead, mortal tigress.

  “Peculiar,” K_ muttered, cutting into the scar. An echoing scratch. Scalpel on bullet, I thought.

  “What in Christ is this?” K_ whispered.

  I wasn’t looking at him, nor at the tigress. I was focused into the distance, imagining Kenya, when he shook my shoulder. I turned my head, reluctant to see what he’d done.

  A gleam, straight down the center of the tigress’ body. K_ peeled back the flesh on either side of the incision.

  There was no blood. No. Only skin, and beneath the skin, metal.

  K_ began tearing at the pelt, pulling it away from the structure beneath, breathing through his mouth.

  “What is it?” he asked, looking suddenly, frantically up at me. “Is it a prank?”

  I couldn’t speak.

  Henry, kneeling with a tin can and a watch spring. Henry, wounded, climbing down into that ravine to retrieve her body. Skinning her, hauling her back up the mountain, and bringing her back to life. He’d made a new kind of tiger, one that could resist hunters and poachers. One that could resist me.

  K_’s hands peeled the flesh back still further. I could see solder marks, where seams had been joined.

  “The hide isn’t dry. How did he get it to heal? What did he use? How does it move?”

  He attempted haphazardly to slice into the tigress’ chest, denting the metal. He pulled up the tigress’ eyelid, his fingernail tapping at her pupil. Glass. I looked at her feet. The strange marks I’d seen in the village had not been made by claws. Henry had given her knives, forged into the shape of talons.

  I felt myself half-smiling, an echo of the old enchantment, Henry’s genius, Henry as a shikari.

  “Whatever he’s done, however he’s done it,” K_ said, his voice scarcely under control, wobbling with joy, “We’ll lead an expedition back here. Photographers. Film cameras.”

  He jabbed the scalpel into a seam between the metal pieces, levering at it. A dark fluid leaked out. Blood? Not blood? Henry never explained himself. I still had K_’s rifle. I swung it slowly around to the front. When he heard the click, he looked up, entirely startled.

  “What are you doing?�
��

  I fired into K_’s face, approximating the angle he himself would have taken had he stumbled over his own weapon in the forest, drunk on gin, and a fool. I left him where he lay, skull exposed. I used my handkerchief to polish his rifle and put it into his own hands. Took his scalpel.

  Anyone who found K_’s body would imagine he’d been attacked by a tiger, and inadvertently shot himself in the scuffle.

  I chopped down two saplings, lashed the tigress to them with my machan ropes, and began a laborious drag. I’d drop her into that ravine. Everything was clear to me now. If the world learned of this tiger, they’d cut down the forests to find more like her, though surely there were no more. This would’ve taken Henry years to accomplish, however it was he’d done it. Magic. Gears.

  Kumaon would be overrun. All the remaining living tigers would be taken, shot, opened like stuffed toys, left to dry in the sun, unused, unburied.

  I hauled her through the trees, straining at her great weight, squinting toward the earliest light, toward the place I remembered from 1918. If I threw her off the cliffs here, she would not be found. Dead, I’d tell the villagers, and fallen, just as I’d told them before. My fingers were blue with cold despite the effort of hauling her, and my breath came sharply, each gasp painful.

  At last, I found the place, and panting, unlashed her. My heart, by this juncture, was pounding inside me like something independent of my body, a metal bird flying for no reason other than someone else’s will.

  I pushed the tigress over the edge. I watched her fall for the second time, her golden face and fur, her gleaming, opened breast. I was not watching my footing. Is it any wonder I fell? Not from the cliff, as I might deserve, but over a small rise, and into a clearing, flat rock beneath me.

  Hours have passed. I cannot stand. It’s cold now, and the light fades again. My left leg, in my trousers, is bent in such a way that I know it would be useless to attempt to place it back in line. I’ve bled into the ice, and it shines like a glass ruby on an elephant’s forehead.

  I have this journal, and my pencil, and I write for comfort. What else do I have, after all these years wandering in the wilderness? Tomorrow, I’ll burn these words. I write only to tell myself what happened, not to place the story into the world.

  Out there in the sky I see each star again, and like every man dying from the beginning of his days, I regret the things I didn’t do, and I regret the things I did.

  19 September, 1950 Dawn.

  All night, Henry’s tigers paced around me, circling close enough to brush me with their fur. I couldn’t count them, couldn’t name them. There may be hundreds, or twelve, or a thousand.

  Now, the sun is risen, and snow has fallen here at the top of this mountain, over me and around my body. If I could stand, I might look down again onto my own lost village, the teardrop lake at the center of the vista like the eye of a god, wide open for eternity, never freezing, never anything more or less than blue. No passage to heaven from that lake. One needs a river, one needs a fire, one needs bones.

  Ram nam satya hai , sing the voices in my memory, a hymn to carry the victims away, shrouded and saved from further sorrow.

  What will the tigers leave of me? Will there be bones to send to my wife? Who will find them here? The villagers await the sound of my fire, five shots to come and take the tiger from here, but I won’t fire this rifle again. They will assume me dead, along with K_, and the tigress escaped.

  When I turn my head, all I can see in this clearing are pug marks, tracks circling over tracks, lines and circuits, loops and letters. Each of the footfalls, each of the places where a tail touched the earth, each spatter of blood, each piece of fur brushed onto a tree trunk tells me something.

  Coded lines left behind by Henry, placed in the tiger’s metal minds, along with the calls he gave them, but I’ve no key to break them. When the cats move, I hear their machinery now, the sound of gears against gears, metal against metal.

  All these years haunted by a ghost that wasn’t. All these years imagining tracks around my house, when they were here all along. There are no ghosts but the ones you make.

  I lay last night in the dark and heard the tigers dragging their claws through the snow, each one marking my name. That, at least, was mine, but it’s become something the tigers use. I can’t read it, but I know it belonged to me, just as one knows a book read long ago, the margins scarred with ink, the pages folded down. A possession. This book, this journal, I’d know anywhere. I sought to burn it, but my firestarter is wet, and I can’t strike a flame. Perhaps the tigers will take it too.

  In my hand, I have a penknife, given to me by Henry, the handle made of something’s bones, the blade so thin now that it scarcely exists. Used on pelts, and on tin cans, and on apples, and on birds. Used on tigers and leopards, on man-eaters all over India. Used on tiger cubs. Two hearts eaten, and I thought it made me a man and gave me a vengeance on all the things that take hunters from their lives.

  Over my head, high and far away, an airplane tears a line across the heavens, hunting some smaller prey, and I think about a sky filled with roaring ghosts. I feel displaced in time, a traveler returning home after decades spent in a place where years passed at a strange rate. If I came down from the mountains now, an old man, I might find the children I left in this village thirty-two years ago. I might find myself, walking into the woods. I might find Henry, twisting metal into life.

  I am well-acquainted with the paths to heaven from this part of the mountains. I do not expect heaven.

  Send my bones up in smoke along with those I killed, and let us hunt together, shifting between prey and shikari, stalking, killing enemies already dead. The bones in my pouch belong to the dead. Burn them.

  A hunter hunts. We are all hunters here.

  The Last Log of the Lachrimosa

  by Alastair Reynolds

  Wake up. No, really. Wake up. I know you don’t want to, but it’s important that you understand what’s happened to you, and—just as vitally—what’s going to happen next. I know this is hard for you, being told what to do. It’s not the way it usually works. Would it help if I still called you Captain?

  Captain Rasht, then. Let’s keep it formal.

  No, don’t fight. It’ll only make it worse. There. I’ve eased it a little. Just a tiny, tiny bit. Can you breathe more easily now? I wouldn’t waste your energy speaking, if I were you. Yes, I know you’ve a lot on your mind. But please don’t make the mistake of thinking there’s any chance of talking your way out of this one.

  Nidra? Yes, that’s me. Good that you’re wide awake enough to remember my name. Lenka? Yes, Lenka is alive. I went back for Lenka, the way I said I would.

  Yes, I found Teterev. There wasn’t much I could do for her, though. But it was good to hear what she had to say. You’d have found it interesting, I think.

  Well, we’ll get to that. As I said, I want you to understand what happens next. To some extent, that’s in your control. No, really. I’m not so cruel that I wouldn’t give you some influence over your fate. You wanted to make your name—to do something that would impress the other ships, the other crews— leave your mark on history.

  Make them remember Rasht of the Lachrimosa.

  This is your big chance.

  * * *

  “I’ll find Mazamel,” said Captain Rasht, clenching his fist around an imaginary neck. “Even if I have to take the Glitter Band apart. Even if I have to pluck him out of the bottom of the chasm. I’ll skin him alive. I’ll fuse his bones. I’ll make a living figurehead out of him.”

  Lenka and I were wise enough to say nothing. There was little to be gained in pointing out the obvious: that by the time we returned to Yellowstone, our information broker stood every chance of being light years away.

  Or dead.

  That was what you got when you could only afford the cheapest, least-reliable information brokers. When your ship was falling apart around you and you were down to four crewmembers, of which one was
a monkey.

  “I won’t fuse his bones after all,” Captain Rasht continued. “I’ll core out his spine. Kanto needs a new helmet for his spacesuit. I’ll make one of out Mazamel’s skull. It’s fat and stupid enough for a monkey. Isn’t it, my dear?”

  Rasht interrupted his monologue to pop a morsel into the stinking, tooth-rotted mouth of Kanto, squatting on his shoulder like a hairy disfigurement.

  In fairness, Mazamel’s information wasn’t totally valueless. The ship at least was real. It was still there, still orbiting Holda. From a distance it had even looked superficially intact. It was only as we came in closer, tightening our own orbit like a noose, that the actual condition became apparent. The needle-tipped hull was battered, pocked and gouged by numerous collisions with interstellar material. That was true of our own Lachrimosa—no ship makes it between solar systems without some cost— but here the damage was much worse. We could see stars through some of the holes in the hull, punched clean through to the other side. The engine spars, sweeping out from the hull at its widest point, had the look of ruptured batskin. The engines still seemed to be present when we made our long-distance survey. But we had been tricked by the remains of their enclosing structures. They were hollow, picked open and gouged of their dangerous, seductive treasures.

  “We should check out the wreck,” Lenka said, trying to make the best of a bad situation. “At least find the name of that ship. But there’s something on the surface we should look at as well.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure. Some kind of geomagnetic anomaly, spiking up in the northern hemisphere. Got some metallic backscatter, too. Neither makes much sense. Holda’s not meant to have much of a magnetosphere. Core’s too old and cold for that. The metal signature’s in the same area, too. It’s quite concentrated. It could be a ship or something, put down on the surface.”

  Rasht thought about it, grunted his grudging approval.