The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  “How did it take it?”

  “How do you think, Nidra? But very soon the question concerned neither of us. It had become me, I had become it. Our memories were a knot of entanglements. It understood my concerns. It grasped that there had only ever been one path. It knew that we had no choice about what we had become.”

  “Forgiveness?”

  “Acceptance.”

  “But it didn’t end, did it? There were more. Always more. Other species…dozens, hundreds of them. Until we came!”

  “You are no different.”

  “Perhaps we aren’t. But this alters things, doesn’t it?” I still had my thumb on the trigger, ready to unleash a matter-antimatter conflagration. “You think I won’t do this? You’ve told me what you are. I understand that you acted…that you’ve been acting…for what you think is the common good. Maybe you’re right, too. But enough is enough. You have Teterev. It’s too late for her…too late for you, if I’m still reaching a part of her. But it stops with Lenka. She’s mine. She’s coming back with me.”

  “I need her. I need to add her library of fears to my own. I need to make myself stronger.”

  “It won’t work. It hasn’t been working. You’re stuck in a spiral…a destructive feedback loop. The more you try to make yourself impregnable, the more evident you become to the outside world. So you have to make yourself yet more impregnable…add to your library of fears. But it can’t continue.”

  “It must.”

  “I tried to stop myself. But always they came. New travellers, new species. Nothing I did made myself invisible to them. I could not negotiate, I could not persuade, because that would have been tantamount to confessing the hard fact of my existence. So I did what I had always done. I hid. I made myself as quiet and silent as physics allowed, and willed them to leave. I dug into our mutual psychologies, trawled the ocean of our terrors, and from that sea of fears I shaped the phantasms that I hoped would serve as deterrence, encouraging newcomers to come no nearer. But it was never totally sufficient. Some were always too brave, or curious, and by force of will they reached the heart of me. And always I had no choice but to take, to incorporate, to turn them to my cause. To feed me their fears, so that I might better my defenses. Why do you think I had to take Teterev? She was the first of your kind—a new jewel, to place in my collection. She had been very useful, has Teterev. We are all very glad of her. Her fears are like a new colour, a new smell. We never imagined such things!”

  “Good. I’m truly sorry for Teterev. But you don’t need Lenka. Give her back control of her suit, and we’ll leave you alone.”

  “You could make that promise to me. But you did not come here alone.”

  “The Captain…we’ll take care of him.”

  * * *

  See? Thinking of you even then. Always in our hearts and minds.

  * * *

  “I listened to your babble. The theories of your Captain. He craves his fortune. He will think he can turn the fact of me to profit. He will try to sell the knowledge of my location.”

  “He doesn’t even know what you are!”

  “But he will find out. He will ask what became of you, what became of Lenka. Your silence will count for nothing. He will return. He will send machines into me. And soon more will come, in other ships, and I am bound to fail. When the machines touch your civilisation, they will scorch you into history. They have done it a thousand times, with a thousand cultures. They will leave dust and ruins and silence, and you will not be the last.”

  “Lev,” I said quietly.

  There was a silence. I wondered if the thing before me would speak again. Perhaps I had shut the door of communication between us with that one invocation.

  But the voice asked: “What do you know of Lev?”

  “Your son,” I answered. “The son of part of you, the son of Teterev. You had to leave him on the orbiting ship. You didn’t mean to, but it must have been the only way. You loved him. You wanted very badly to get a message to him, to have him help you. That’s why you came as far as you did. But you failed.”

  “And Lev is gone.”

  I nodded. “But not in the way you think. Someone got to that ship before us—cleaned it out. Stripped it of engines, weps, crew. The frozen. But they’d have been valuable to someone. If Lev was on that ship, he’d have made it back to one of the settled worlds by now. And we can find him. The Mendicants trade in the frozen, and we have traded with the Mendicants, in many systems. There are channels, lines of enquiry. The name of your ship…”

  “What would it be to you?”

  “Give us that name. Let us find Lev. I’ll return. I promise you that much.”

  “No one ever promises to return, Nidra. They promise to stay away.”

  “The name of the ship,” I said again.

  She told me.

  * * *

  So many names, so many ships. Numberless. Names too strange to put into language, at least no language that would fit into our heads. Names like clouds. Names like forests. Names like ever unfolding mathematical structures—names that begat themselves, in dreams of recursion. Names that split the world in two. Names that would drive a nail through your sanity.

  But she told me some of them, as best as she could.

  Lovely names. Names of such beauty and terror they made me weep. The hopes and fears of the brave and the lost. The best and the worst of all of us. All wayfarers, all travellers.

  I asked her to try and remember the last of them.

  She did.

  Tell you?

  Not a chance, Captain. You don’t get to know everything.

  * * *

  I stepped back from his suited-but-immobile form, admiring my handiwork. He really did look sculptural, frozen into that oddly dignified posture, with his arms coming together across his chest, one hand touching the cuff of the other.

  “I suppose you could say that we came to an understanding, Teterev and I,” I said. “Or what Teterev had become. Partly it was fear, I think, that I’d use the hot-dust. Did I come close? Yes, definitely. Not much to lose at that point. I might have been able to work the ship without you, but certainly not without Lenka. If she didn’t survive, there wasn’t much point in me surviving either. But Lenka was allowed to leave, and so was I. It was hard work, getting Lenka back here. But she’s begun to regain some suit function now, and I don’t think either of us will have any trouble returning to the lander.”

  The Captain tried to speak. It was hard, with the noose tight around his throat. He could breathe, but anything more was an effort.

  He rasped out three words that might have been “fuck you, Nidra”. But I could not be sure.

  “I made a commitment to Teterev,” I carried on. “Firstly, that we’d make sure you were not a problem. Secondly, that I’d do what I could to find Lev. If that decades, longer, so be it. It’s something to live for, anyway. A purpose. We all need a purpose, don’t we?”

  He attempted another set of syllables.

  “Here’s yours,” I said. “Your purpose is to die here. It will happen. How fast it happens, is in your hands. Quite literally. Those pieces of debris I set around you are curved mirrors. Now, it’s not an exact science. But when the sun climbs, some of them will concentrate the sun’s light on the snow and ice on which you are standing. It will begin to melt. The tension on your noose will increase.” I paused, allowing that part to sink in, if he had not already deduced matters for himself. “In any case, the ice will melt eventually, as the days go on. It’s only permafrost deeper in the cave mouth, and we’re moving into warmer months. But you’ll be dead by then. It’ll be a nasty, slow death, though. Hypothermia, frostbite, slow choking— take your pick. But you can speed it up, if you like. Turn up your suit’s heat, and you can stay as warm as you like. The downside is that the heat will spill away from your suit and melt the ice even quicker. You’ll be hanging by your neck within hours, with the entire weight of your suit trying to rip your skull from your spine. At
that point, overwhelmed by terror and pain, you might try and turn down the thermal regulation again. But by then you might not be able to move your fingers. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. There are many paths to the one goal. All the scenarios end with your corpse hanging from the mouth of the cave. Swinging there until the ice returns. You’ll make an effective deterrent, wouldn’t you say? A tolerable invitation to keep away?”

  Rasht tried to say something. But Lenka, who had hobbled closer, placed a finger on his lips.

  Something had changed in Lenka since her return from the cave. If the thing in the cave has the means to sense the damage in her head, I wondered, could it also make some repairs? Nothing major—just enough to break her submissive, to turn her from Rasht?

  “Enough,” she whispered. “Save your breath.”

  “Where is the monkey?” I asked.

  “Tethered where we left it, over by the wreck. Shall we leave it here?”

  “No. Well bring it with us, and we’ll take good care of it. I promised him that much.”

  “He doesn’t deserve it.”

  “That’s true. But I try not to break my promises. Any of them.”

  “Then we’re done here,” Lenka said.

  “I think we are.”

  We turned our backs on our former Captain and commenced the slow walk back to the lander. We would stop at the wreck on our way, collect the monkey, and what we could of Teterev’s belongings—her journal, in particular, would be coming with us. Then we would be off Holda, out of this system, and that was a good thought.

  Even if I knew I had to return.

  “When we get back to the ship, I want to give it a new name. Lachrimosa was his ship, not ours.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “That’s a good idea. A clean break.

  I have some suggestions, if you’d like to hear them.”

  The Seventeenth Kind

  by Michael Marshall Smith

  Hi. I’m James Richard. No, not “Richards,” but “Richard.” Dumb name, I think you’ll agree. No, it’s okay. Really. I’ve had many years to savor it, to laboriously spell it out over the phone and find parcels arriving at my door marked for Richard James anyhow. I didn’t even make it up. It’s not a stage name. My parents gave it to me when I was born, bless them—along with a straight nose, wavy brown hair and next to no talent at all.

  “Why,” I asked my father one time, back when I was young in years and full of hope, “Why in the name of sweet Jesus did you call me James Richard?”

  He stared down at me, confused, and I belatedly realized he was in the same predicament. His name was David. David Richard. Maybe when he was young his peers also snarled, “Hey, shithead—why have you got two first names?” For a moment I felt a strange and poignant affinity with my dad, as if we were holding hands down the years, two small boys a generation apart who’d shouldered a similar burden. Then I kicked him in the shin.

  Anyway. This isn’t about my name. This is about what I do, and what I do is I’m a presenter on a shopping channel. No, go ahead. Laugh all you like. Just the stupidest job in the whole damned universe, right? Well, you know, screw you. If I hear one more person say a chimp could do my job then I’m going to take some innovative and durable kitchen implement— retailing in stores for $19.99 but available for this hour only at the low-low price of $11.99 plus postage and packing—and stuff it up their ass. This is a skill. It really is.

  And it saved my life.

  * * *

  I wound up working in home shopping via a circuitous route. Everyone does. Nobody wakes up one morning thinking “Hey, I want to be on live cable selling people shit they don’t need.” Or perhaps they do, in which case they genuinely are stupid. Maybe they think it counts as television, and is therefore glamorous. It’s not. The point of being on the tube is first, to earn big bucks; second, to be recognized in the street. Anyone who tells you different is a moron. What—they instead want the unsociable hours, the danger of being sacked at any moment, the ever-present threat of exposure and embarrassment, not to mention the joy of standing under hot lights while hairy-backed yahoos point cameras at you and swop impenetrable menial jokes behind your back? The money in cable really isn’t that great, and the people you actually want to recognize you are pretty young things of the opposite sex. Or of the same sex, whatever. You work a shopping channel then these are not the people who are going to be recognizing you. They’re going to be…well, I’ll come to that.

  I was an actor originally. I was profoundly average, and there’s only so many times you can emote your heart out to scraggly-bearded directors to be told you’re insufficiently tall or Turkish-looking or female or frankly even any good. So I switched to stand-up as a kind of holding pattern. Easier to get gigs, but the money stinks like fish and I couldn’t write my own material so I was going nowhere fast.

  Finally there was a spell on a local radio news station for which cattle made up the main demographic. That was really fucking grim. It was while I was there, reading out the weather and listening to the neurons in my brain popping one by one, that I saw a trade ad for a presenter on a cable channel. I combed the straw out of my hair, jumped on a plane and went and did my thing. I dug deep, gave it everything I had. I was desperate.

  I got the gig.

  Now. If you don’t do any home shopping then I’m going to have to explain the deal to you. (If you do, then just skip-read or have a sandwich or something. I’ll be back in a minute). How it works is this. The channels basically have a pile of goods which they want to sell. Pots and pans. Jewelry. Gardening implements. Technical gizmos for the home. Limited Edition Star Trek™ bathmats. The buy-me inducements they offer are severalfold. First, the goods are cheap. No store overheads, plus the advantages of buying in bulk. Two, you just pick up the phone and give a credit card number (hell, just your name, if you’re a returning customer) and the thing will be with you in a couple days—without you even having to get up off your couch. I assume when it drops through your mailbox you have to get up and go fetch it, or maybe these people have someone who does that for them too.

  The third inducement is people like me. The presenters. Your friend on the screen.

  As the audience, this is what you see. A live picture of the object in question, with a panel at one side telling you the cost and the product code and just how beguilingly cheap it is compared to normal in-store prices. You listen to a voice-over, with cutaways to the presenter’s face and upper body as he or she tells you how much the thing costs (in case you can’t read), how many are left to buy (“Only three quarters of stock left now— this one’s moving just incredibly quickly everybody, so hurry hurry, pick up your phone and make that call, operators are standing by…”) and also explains to the hard-of-thinking why they should want the damn thing in the first place. If it’s a ring, for example, my job would be to remind you that you could put it on your finger and wear it for cosmetic purposes, in order to enhance your attractiveness and/or perceived status. You think I’m kidding. I’m really not.

  Sounds easy, but wait. Sometimes you may have to fill twenty minutes with this crap. You try talking for half that time, non-stop—with no help, no cues and moreover with people pointing cameras at you and some fool chattering in your ear—explaining why someone would want to buy an enormous cookie jar shaped like a chicken, and you’ll begin to see it’s not as easy as it sounds. Most of the presenters cheat. They’ll repeat themselves endlessly, rehearsing the remaining stock levels time and again just to give themselves something extra to say. I never did that. I never dried. I also never said anything like “Today’s special value today is really special,” as one of my colleagues once did; nor “In the sixteenth century was the Renaissance, and garnet was a stone,” another of my personal favorites.

  I didn’t do these things because when I found myself in this weird job it was like I’d come home. I knew it was worthless, but on the other hand I thought: Hey—perhaps this is something I could be good at. Maybe t
his was a corner of an ill-regarded field which I could make forever James Richard. Most of the stuff the channel pushed was skull-crushingly dull, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t talk about it. Okay, so it might be a hideous hexagonal pendant in faux gold with a miniscule pseudo-emerald in the middle: but you could point out how delightfully hexagonal it was, and how neatly the “emeraldite” sat in its exact centre. You could measure it with the special Home Mall ruler, just in case someone in the audience didn’t understand perspective and was worried that the pendant was as big as a house. You could tell them how many different occasions they’d find to wear it, and list them, and generally evoke just how unspeakably lovely their lives would become—all because of this twenty dollar piece of costume jewelry.

  The whole time you’re working you have the director talking at you, relaying sales information through a plug in your ear. But I mentioned availability twice, three times in each hour. At most. Just enough to keep people on their toes, to convince them they ought to get working that phone. And you can believe this—when I was doing the selling, the units started shifting. That sounds arrogant, I guess. Well, maybe; and so what? For all the times some shithead casting agent dumped on me; for all the times I died on a small stage because the jokes I wrote weren’t funny; for all the times I was shown I couldn’t do a job well enough to be proud of myself—now I had Home Mall to show I could do something.