The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Last time he was from Newsweek,” I say, interrupting her, and she shakes her head and takes another drag, coughs, and rubs at her bloodshot eyes.

  “You think it makes any goddamned difference?”

  “No,” I reply dishonestly, and she stares at me for a while without saying anything else.

  “When’s the last time you got a decent night’s sleep?” she asks me, finally, and I might laugh, or I might shrug, and “Yeah,” she says. “That’s what I thought.”

  She starts rattling on about the hydrobot, then, the towering black smokers, thermal vents, chemosynthesis, those first grainy snatches of video, but I’m not listening. I’m too busy zipping helplessly along above buckled Europan plains and vast stretches of blocky, shattered chaos material; a frozen world caught in the shadow of Big Daddy Jupiter, frozen for ages beyond counting but a long fucking way from dead, and I would wake up screaming or crying or, if I was lucky, too scared to make any sound at all.

  “They’re ready for you now, Mr. Paine,” the cop said, plain old NYPD street blue, and I wondered what the fuck he was doing here, why the Agency was taking chances like that. Probably the same poor bastard who’d found the spooch, I figured. Templeton had told me that someone in the building had complained about the smell and the super buzzed the cops, so this was most likely the guy who answered the call. He might have a partner around somewhere. I nodded at him and he glanced nervously back over his shoulder at the open door to the apartment, the translucent polyurethane iso-seal curtain with its vertical black zipper running right down the middle, all the air hoses snaking in and out of the place, keeping the pressure inside lower than the pressure outside. I doubted he would still be breathing when the sweeper crews were finished with the scene.

  “You see this sort of shit very often?” he asked, and it didn’t take a particularly sensitive son of a bitch to hear the fear in his voice, the fear and confusion and whatever comes after panic. I didn’t respond. I was busy checking the batteries in one of my cameras and, besides, I had the usual orders from Templeton to keep my mouth shut around civvies. And knowing the guy was probably already good as dead, that he’d signed his death warrant just by showing up for work that morning, didn’t make me particularly eager to chat.

  “Well, I don’t mind telling you, I’ve never seen shit like that thing in there,” he said and coughed. “I mean, you see some absolutely fucked-up shit in this city, and I even did my four years in the army—hell, I was in fucking Damascus after the bomb, but holy Christ Almighty—”

  “You were in Damascus?” I asked, but didn’t look up from my equipment, too busy double-checking the settings on the portable genetigraph clipped to my belt to make eye contact.

  “Oh yeah, I was there. I got to help clean up the mess when the fires burned out.”

  “Then that’s something we have in common,” I told him and flipped my vidcam’s on switch and the gray LED screen showed me five zeros. I was patched into the portable lab down on the street, a black Chevy van with Maryland plates and a yellow ping-pong ball stuck on the antenna. I knew Sarah would be in the van, waiting for my feed, jacked in, riding the amps, hearing everything I heard, seeing everything I saw through her perfectly calibrated eyes.

  “You were in Syria?” the cop asked me, glad to have something to talk about besides what he’d seen in the apartment.

  “No, I clean up other people’s messes.”

  “Oh,” he said, sounding disappointed. “I see.”

  “Had a good friend in the war, though. But he was stationed in Cyprus, and then the Taurus Mountains.”

  “You ever talk with him? You know, about the war?”

  “Nope. He didn’t make it back,” I said, finally looking up and I winked at the cop and stepped quickly past him to the tech waiting for me at the door. I could see she was sweating inside her hazmat hood, even though it was freezing in the hallway. Scrubbers don’t get hazmat suits. It interferes with the contact, so we settle for a couple of hours in decon afterwards, antibiotics, antitox, purgatives, and hope we don’t come up red somewhere down the line.

  “This is bad, ain’t it?” the cop asked. “I mean, this is something real bad,” and I didn’t turn around, just shrugged my shoulders as the tech unzipped the plastic curtain for me.

  “Is that how it looked to you?” I replied. I could feel the gentle rush of air into the apartment as the slit opened in front of me.

  “Jesus, man, all I want’s a straight fucking answer,” he said. “I think I deserve that much. Don’t you?” and since I honestly couldn’t say one way or the other, since I didn’t even care, I ignored him and stepped through the curtain into this latest excuse for hell.

  There’s still an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, on the fourth floor with the old Hall of Vertebrate Origins and all the dinosaur bones. The Agency didn’t shut it down after the first outbreaks, the glory spooches that took out a whole block in Philadelphia and a trailer park somewhere in West Virginia, but it’s not as popular as you might think. A dark, dusty alcove crowded with scale models and dioramas, video monitors running clips from the IcePIC’s hydrobot, endless black-and-white loops of gray seafloors more than half a billion kilometers from earth. When the exhibit first opened, there were a few specimens on loan from NASA, but those were all removed a long time ago. I never saw them for myself, but an acquaintance on staff at the museum, a geologist, assures me they were there. A blue-black bit of volcanic rock sealed artfully in a lucite pyramid, and two formalin-filled specimen canisters, one containing a pink wormlike organism no more than a few centimeters in length, the other preserving one of the ugly little slugs that the mission scientists dubbed “star minnows.”

  “Star leeches” would have been more accurate.

  On Tuesday afternoon, the day after I’d worked the scene on Columbus, hungover and hoping to avoid another visit from Sarah, I took B line from my hotel to the museum and spent a couple of hours sitting on a bench in that neglected alcove, watching the video clips play over and over again for no one but me. Three monitors running simultaneously—a NASA documentary on the exploration of Europa, beginning with Pioneer 10 in 1973, a flyover of the moon’s northern hemisphere recorded shortly before the IcePIC orbiter deployed its probes, and a snippet of film shot beneath the ice. That’s the one I’d come to see. I chewed aspirin and watched as the hydrobot’s unblinking eyes peered through veils of silt and plankton into the interminable darkness of an alien ocean, the determined glare of the bot’s lights never seeming to reach more than a few feet into the gloom. Near the end of the loop, you get to see one of the thermal vents, fringed with towering sulfide chimneys spewing superheated methane- and hydrogen-rich water into the frigid Europan ocean. In places, the sides of the chimneys were completely obscured by a writhing, swaying carpet of creatures. Something like an eel slipped unexpectedly past the camera lens. A few seconds later, the seafloor was replaced by a brief stream of credits and then the NASA logo, before the clip started itself over again.

  I tried hard to imagine how amazing these six minutes of video must have seemed, once upon a time, how people must have stood in lines just to see it, back before the shit hit the fan and everyone everywhere stopped wanting to talk about IcePIC and its fucking space minnows. Before the government axed most of NASA’s exobiology program, scrapped all future missions to Europa, and cancelled plans to explore Titan. Back before ET became a four-letter word. But no matter how hard I tried, all I could think about was that thing on the bed, the crap growing from the walls of the apartment and dripping from the goddamn ceiling.

  Above the monitor, there was a long quote from H. G. Wells printed in red-brown ink on a clear lexan plaque and I read it several times, wishing that I had a cigarette—“We look back through countless millions of years and see the great will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to power, crawling and then walking confidently upon the land, struggling generation af
ter generation to master the air, creeping down into the darkness of the deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself anew, we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless inconceivable purpose, until at last it reaches us and its being beats through our brains and arteries.”

  I’ve never cared very much for irony. It usually leaves a sick, empty feeling in my gut. I wondered why no one had taken the plaque down.

  By the time I got back to my room it was almost dark, even though I’d splurged and taken a taxi. After the video, the thought of being trapped in the crowded, stinking subway, hurtling along through the city’s bowels, through those tunnels where the sun never reaches, gave me a righteous fucking case of the heebie-jeebies and, what the hell, the Agency was picking up the tab. All those aspirin had left my stomach aching and sour and hadn’t done much of anything about the hangover, but there was an unopened pint waiting for me beneath the edge of the bed.

  I was almost asleep when Sarah called.

  Here’s a better quote. I’ve been carrying it around with me for the last few years, in my head and on a scrap of paper. It showed up in my e-mail one day, sent by some anonymous someone or another from an account that turned out to be bogus. Scrubbers get a lot of anonymous e-mail. Tips, rumors, bullshit, hearsay, wicked little traps set by the Agency, confessions, nightmares, curses, you name it and it comes rolling our way, and after a while you don’t even bother to wonder who sent the shit. But this one, this one kept me awake a few nights:

  “But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of a wrecked vessel above him should drop and bump him on the nose?

  “Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost impenetrable density.

  “Sometimes I’m a savage who has found something on the beach of his island. Sometimes I’m a deep-sea fish with a sore nose.

  “The greatest of mysteries:

  “Why don’t they ever come here, or send here, openly?

  “Of course there’s nothing to that mystery if we don’t take so seriously the notion—that we must be interesting. It’s probably for moral reasons that they stay away—but even so, there must be some degraded ones among them.”

  It’s that last bit that always sinks its teeth (or claws or whatever the fuck have you) into me and hangs on. Charles Hoyt Fort. The Book of the Damned. First published in 1919, a century and a half before IcePIC, and it occurs to me now that I shouldn’t be any less disturbed by prescience than I am by irony. But there you go. Sometimes I’m a savage. Sometimes I’m a deep-sea fish. And my life is become the sum of countless degradations.

  “You’re not going down there alone,” Sarah said, telling, not asking, because, like I already noted, Sarah stopped being the kind of girl who asks questions when she signed on with the Agency for life plus whatever else they could milk her biomeched cadaver for. I didn’t reply immediately, lay there a minute or three, rubbing my eyes, waiting for the headache to start in on me again, listening to the faint, insistent crackle from the phone. Manhattan’s landlines were shit and roses that February, had been that way for years, ever since some Puerto Ricans in Brooklyn had popped a homemade micro-EMP rig to celebrate the Fourth of July. I wondered why Sarah hadn’t called me on my thumbline while I looked about for the scotch. Turned out I was lying on the empty bottle, and I rolled over, wishing I’d never been born. I held the phone cradled between my left shoulder and my cheek and stared at the darkness outside the window of my hotel room.

  “Do you even know what time it is?” I asked her.

  “Templeton said you were talking about going out to Roosevelt. He said you might have gone already.”

  “I didn’t say dick to Templeton about Roosevelt,” I said, which was the truth, I hadn’t, but also entirely beside the point. It was John Templeton’s prerogative to stay a few moves ahead of his employees, especially when those employees were scrubbers, especially freebie scrubbers on the juice. I tossed the empty bottle at a cockroach on the wall across the room. It didn’t break, but squashed the roach and left a satisfying dent in the drywall.

  “You know Agency protocol for dealing with terrorists.”

  “They went and stuck something in your head so you don’t have to sleep anymore, is that it?”

  “You can’t go to the island alone,” she said. “I’m sending a couple of plainclothes men over. They’ll be at your hotel by six A.M. at the latest.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll be fucking asleep at six,” I mumbled, more interested in watching the roaches that had emerged to feed on the remains of the one I’d nailed than arguing with her.

  “We can’t risk losing you, Mr. Paine. It’s too late to call in someone else if anything happens. You know that as well as I do.”

  “Do I?”

  “You’re a drunk, not an idiot.”

  “Look, Sarah, if I start scutzing around out there with two of Temp’s goons in tow, I’ll be lucky if I find a fucking stitch, much less get it to talk to me.”

  “They’re all animals,” Sarah said, meaning the stitches and meatdolls and genetic changelings that had claimed Roosevelt Island a decade or so back. There was more than a hint of loathing in her voice. “It makes me sick, just thinking about them.”

  “Did you ever stop to consider they probably feel the same way about you?”

  “No,” Sarah said coldly, firmly, one hundred percent shitsure of herself. “I never have.”

  “If those fuckers knock on my door at six o’clock, I swear to god, Sarah, I’ll shoot them.”

  “I’ll tell them to wait for you in the lobby.”

  “That’s real damn thoughtful of you.”

  There was another static-littered moment of silence then and I closed my eyes tight. The headache was back and had brought along a few friends for the party. My thoughts were starting to bleed together and I wondered if I’d vomit before or after Sarah finally let me off the phone. I wondered if cyborgs vomited. I wondered exactly what all those agents in the black Chevy van had seen on their consoles and face-screens when I’d walked over and touched a corner of the bed in the apartment on Columbus Avenue.

  “I’m going to hang up now, Sarah. I’m going back to sleep.”

  “You’re sober.”

  “As a judge,” I whispered and glanced back at the window, trying to think about anything at all except throwing up. There were bright lights moving across the sky above the river, red and green and white, turning clockwise; one of the big military copters, an old Phoenix 6-98 or one of the newer Japanese whirlybirds, making its circuit around the Rotten Apple.

  “You’re still a lousy liar,” she said.

  “I’ll have to try harder.”

  “Don’t fuck this up, Mr. Paine. You’re a valued asset. The Agency would like to see you remain that way.”

  “I’m going back to sleep,” I said again, disregarding the not-so-subtle threat tucked between her words; it wasn’t anything I didn’t already know. “And I meant what I said about shooting those assholes. Don’t think I didn’t. Anyone knocks on this door before eight sharp and that’s all she wrote.”

  “They’ll be waiting in the lobby when you’re ready.”

  “Goodnight, Sarah.”

  “Goodnight, Mr. Paine,” she replied and a second or two later there was only the ragged dial tone howling in my ear. The lights outside the window were gone, the copter probably all the way to Harlem by now. I almost made it to the toilet before I was sick.

  If I didn’t keep getting the feeling that there’s someone standing behind me, someone looking over my shoulder as I write this, I’d say more about the dreams. The dreams are always there, tugging at me, insistent, selfish, wanting to be spilled out into the wide, wide world where everyone and his brother can get a good long gander at them. They’re not content anymore with the space inside my skull. My skull is a prison for dreams, an enclosed and infinite prison space where the arrows on the number line point toward each other,
converging but never, ever, ever meeting and so infinite all the same. But I do keep getting that feeling and there’s still the matter of the thing in the apartment.

  The thing on the bed.

  The thing that the cop who’d been in Damascus after the Israeli’s 40-megaton fireworks show died for.

  My thirteenth contact. The one that might have been my last, if I’d had the nerve to stop. If the Agency hadn’t been so desperate for hired guns.

  After I was finished with the makeshift airlock at the door, one of Templeton’s field medics, safe and snug inside a blue hazmat suit, led me through the brightly lit apartment. I held one hand cupped over my nose and mouth, but the thick clouds of neon yellow disinfectant seeped easily between my fingers, gagging me. My eyes burned and watered, making it even more difficult to see. I’ve always thought that shit smelled like licorice, but it seems to smell like different things to different people. Sarah used to say it reminded her of burning tires. I once knew a guy who said it smelled like carnations.

  “It’s in the bedroom,” the medic said, his voice flat and tinny through the suit’s audioport. “It doesn’t seem to have spread to any of the other rooms. How was the jump from Los Angeles, sir?”

  I didn’t answer him, too ripped on adrenaline for small talk and pleasantries, and he didn’t really seem to care, my silence just another part of the routine. I took shallow breaths and followed the medic through the yellow fog, which was growing much thicker as we approached ground zero. The disinfectant was originally manufactured by Dow for domestic bioterrorism clean-up, but the Agency’s clever boys and girls had added a pinch of this, a dash of that, and it always seemed to do the job. We passed a kitchenette, beer cans and dirty dishes, and an open box of corn flakes sitting on the counter, then turned left into a short hallway leading past a bathroom too small for a rat to take a piss in, past a framed photograph of a lighthouse on a rocky shore (the bits we remember, the bits we forget), to the bedroom. Templeton was there, of course, decked out in his orange hazmat threads, one hand resting confidently on the butt of the big Beretta Pulse 38A on his hip, and he pointed at me and then pointed at the bed.