Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49

by Seanan McGuire

  “No,” he says indignantly. She’s laughing.

  There’s a commotion at the door. Santa must be here. “So are you listening to me right now?” Her hip bumps his as she leans in to speak softly to him, her lips brushing his ear, and oh, yes, he can hear. It’s been getting more difficult in the time since Damascus. It’s hard to think. The storm is howling around him. His vision is overtaken by the overlay, a translated image compiled by the neuropathic implants hooked into his visual cortex. It looks like snow in the headlights—streaks of white hurtling towards him in the blackness.

  He feels the swelling pressure of the party—the excitement of the children, the amusement of the adults. Warm, muzzy happiness. Arousal. She’s laid her hand on his arm and he snaps open to cast, even though she doesn’t need to be read. She pulls him out of the room and they are suddenly in the chilly gloom of the garage. She is tugging at his shirt, running her hands over the scars and the panels, exclaiming at the LEDs. “Let me see,” she whispers. “Can you tell what I’m thinking now?” He lifts her onto a freezer and kisses her, pushing her dress up and reaching for her while she fumbles with his belt. He is shaking, wide open as gusts of animal lust emanate from her, blinding him. He doesn’t close off the cast. He should. He knows he should. But he doesn’t.

  It will be recorded, a pinpoint of data on the memristors, and tomorrow it will all come flashing back when he comes creeping down to sit on the sofa with a cup of coffee, blearily watching the kids open their presents. Every moment of it, from the way the small of her back feels under his hands as she wraps her legs around him to the hammering blow of his sister’s shock when she comes looking for him and opens the door. It’s her shock that triggers it. There’s a rush of nausea, pain, and then the nosebleed comes with the rising taste of dust and vinegar in his mouth as he struggles vainly to close off the cast, the surging sickness of the recall rising around him. Damascus comes rolling in, and he barely hears the woman’s gasp as his body goes rigid, Erin’s voice rising with alarm. What’s the saying? Something about best laid plans?

  • • •

  “I’m not mad,” Erin says to him when they are finally alone. The kids are sprawled on the floor by the Christmas tree, playing with the toys Megan bought for them. Spencer is sitting in the kitchen, unsteadily eating toast and trying to drink an Ensure. His lights have gone from amber to pink, and he stared at them for a long time before getting dressed. It doesn’t matter how hungover he is—the equipment needs to be fed. It sucks glucose from him. He should have eaten last night, but he forgot and now he’s paying for that, too. Erin is stuffing the turkey.

  “I’m sorry.” He’d rather not see her with her hand inside the bird, but it’s too hard to get up and move to another room. Besides, Erin has rules about eating at the kitchen table.

  “We might have to take a pass on the Westlunds’ New Year’s party,” she says. Her tone is dangerously light. He’s not sure if he ought to answer her or if this one of those times when it’s best to say nothing. She speaks without turning. “Cut me the string, will you?”

  “The string?”

  “Pieces this long,” she says, holding her hands apart. They are glistening. He swallows thickly. “The scissors are in the drawer by the sink. Left drawer. Your other left.” She watches him for a moment and goes back to the turkey. The moist sound of her hands inside it makes him want to vomit.

  Spencer brings her the string and she takes it from him. He stands in the middle of the kitchen, uncertainly. The buzz in his head loudens, and he has to concentrate to hear her. “What I don’t understand is why you’d do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Are you kidding me? You get plastered at a Christmas party—hey, sure. We’ve all been there, Spencer. But then you hook up with a perfect stranger—”

  “Don’t,” he says quickly, but it’s too late. The recall is triggered before he can stop it and begins to play again in rapid succession. He blushes.

  “Maybe you can see why I’m concerned,” Erin says.

  “I’m really sorry … ”

  “You never used to be like that,” she says. “Is that what things are like in LA for you?”

  Things are not like that, he thinks. He’s hardly home long enough for things to get like that. “No.”

  “Then what the hell, Spencer?”

  “I … ”

  “So you cut a little loose. Fine. No problem. Whatever. You’re sick as a dog, but yeah, okay. I get it. But the small pharmacy in your suitcase, Spencer? What the hell is that?”

  “Nothing,” he says. He can’t tell her. She won’t understand.

  “Are you sick? Do you have some kind of problem?”

  “No.”

  A long silence then, as she finishes trussing the bird and washes her hands. He finishes the toast and cracks open another can of Ensure. It’s the last thing he wants, but if he doesn’t eat the headache will just get worse. He watches his sister covering the turkey with tin foil. “I’m really sorry,” he says, finally.

  “I’m not angry at you, Spencer.” She bangs the oven door closed. The sound reminds him of something; he can’t quite put a finger on it, but he suddenly feels irritated, too warm and two sizes too large for his skin.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Keep your voice down.” She turns her head towards the living room, but the kids can’t hear them. She turns back to him and her eyes widen. “Spence. Your nose is bleeding.” He touches his upper lip and examines his fingertips. His hand shakes. “Here,” she says, passing him a wad of napkins. “Use some pressure.” He tips his head back. “No, look down.” She goes to the freezer and comes back with an icepack wrapped in a damp towel, and holds it to the back of his neck. “Are you okay?”

  The recall slams into him when the cold towel touches the back of his neck, and Spencer is lost to the memory. His heart begins to beat faster as a white hot pain blossoms in his head. There is a bitter taste in his mouth. The room is small, made smaller by men sitting around him. Spencer can smell their sweat and their fear. He’s sitting on the floor because the only available chair in the bare little room looks too rickety to be trusted. Everybody is waiting on him, crowded into a safehouse that feels terribly unsafe. He has to get the cast right so they can leave.

  He can hear shouts out in the street, through the closed windows, the sharp retort of guns and grumble of explosions in the distance. Megan is sitting next to him on the floor, a legal pad in her lap, waiting for him to speak. He can’t see her. All Spencer can see is the white of the storm. It’s overtaken him, but he’s not lost. He’s searching. There are flashes. Fear. Lots of fear. Grief. A woman’s wailing anguish. Pain and shock, the panic of a man hurrying three small children out the door and into a car. For a moment his attention settles on them. Spencer can taste the man’s urgency, the children’s terror and confusion.

  Megan takes notes as he describes what he sees. Then he moves away, riding the storm, searching. Hunting. There have been rumours, a warning that something is coming. They’ve been in Damascus a week already, eating cold spaghetti straight out of the can and MREs, dropping iodine tablets into the water before drinking it. He’s been playing cards with Megan in between casts, when he has to take a break. Cribbage. Poker. Gin. They don’t bother keeping score. Something is coming, but they have to wait for it. The war is ten years old now and still going strong, but the hate and the anger are turning cold and steely. Something is coming.

  This part of the memory sickens him. Spencer is helpless to stop it, dimly aware that Erin is speaking to him. A gaping, sucking hole opens all around him, dragging him down. He is not alone. In the dark, he can feel them. They are waiting for him, all of them, watching in the cold dark. He’s locked into the recall, despite his frantic efforts to close it off. It is recorded and inscribed on the memristors, data that can’t ever be wiped clean, a horror that cannot be severed. The smell of rotten eggs and vinegar, a pain in his chest, the terror of listening as people begin to ch
oke and die in their beds, the writhing agony of the man and those three children in their car. It’s too late to back out of the cast, to scramble out of the storm to safety. All he can do is speak, wanting to shout it out but only able to whisper hoarsely of what it feels like to be steadily choked to death by sarin as their security escorts scramble for gas masks and hoods. He can hear Megan anxiously telling him to stop, to cut the cast. Somebody slaps his face sharply, but he can’t register the pain.

  The recall wanes, but they are still there, crowded around him, pushed to the edges as his vision begins to clear. When will they leave him alone? He has his head in his hands, rocking back and forth. Blood drips steadily from his nose into his lap. Spencer hears himself flatly repeating the words and knows, with a sick turn of his stomach, that Erin is listening as he gives voice to all those deaths all over again.

  • • •

  He’s back in LA before New Year’s Eve. Erin and Bill can go to the Westlunds’ party after all. There’s a seat on a flight and Spencer buys it, cramming himself into an economy seat and leaving his sunglasses on the whole way. He swallows sedatives as soon as he’s seated, enough to get through the next few hours without the risk of remembering.

  Erin pleaded with him to stay. She wanted to take him to the hospital. “Please, Spence. You’re sick. You can tell them you’ve had enough. Right? They can take it out and then you can come and stay with us. I can look after you.” He gets her to help him upstairs to the bathroom, and she brings him the satchel brimming with syringes and vials, watching as he steadies his hand before plunging the needle into the port. She’s horrified by the LEDs, which have started to blink ominously, crimson and bright. “Tell them you don’t want to do it anymore. Nobody would think any less of you, Spence. Come home. Please? Please, will you do it for me?’

  Spencer lies and tells her that he’s got to get back. He lets her believe he’ll talk to DA about getting the equipment out, that it’s as easy as that. Megan meets him at the airport, taking the luggage from him and carrying it out to the car. “Good time, boss?”

  “Oh, you know.” He thinks of the Christmas party. Why couldn’t it have been her? He starts to say something, struggling to form the thought. “I missed … ”

  “You look a little tired,” she says, interrupting him. She climbs into the back seat of a DA company car with him, leaning forward to speak quietly to the driver.

  Spencer closes his eyes. “You always say that.” I missed you, he thinks. I wish you’d been there with me. He can smell her perfume. Something like tangerines and spice, warm and inviting.

  “I got a call while you were away.” She is scrolling through her phone, pushing messages around with her thumb.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Senegal. I told them you needed to think about it.” Megan glances at him. “I wasn’t sure you’d be ready.”

  He leans his head back. The world seems to be spinning gently, and he feels a little queasy. His mouth is dry. “I never thought the recall would do me in,” he says dully.

  “What’s that, boss?”

  “Do you ever think about it? What it’d be like to never be able to forget something?”

  She raises her eyebrows. They’re on the 105 now, merging smoothly into traffic. “I don’t think too much about it,” she says carefully.

  “That must be nice. For you, I mean.”

  “Is something wrong?” Megan puts her phone down and looks him. “Did something happen?”

  Something happened, he wants to say. He was doing just fine until Damascus. Things were just fine. He wasn’t in love with her. He wasn’t wracked with fear over a goddamn memory. And then he went to some shitty little room in the middle of a civil war because some intelligence agency had heard a rumour that something big was going to happen. And he’d done his job, in between hands of gin rummy, until he accidentally recorded not one murder, not ten, but one hundred and twenty fucking thousand. And it’s been choking him from the inside out, splinters on fire beneath his skin. This memory—this—is awful. It’s done something to him. It’s an effort to hold himself up now. He can only stumble forward, a little at a time, afraid that if he falls he won’t get up again. He’s locked into a recalled cast that triggers itself over the smallest, stupidest things. A sound. A thought. When the wind blows a certain way, when he smells something that reminds him of Damascus, he’s forced to witness their deaths all over again. Each recall is more painful than the one before, and he’s certain that it’s only going to get worse.

  He can try and put down new casts ahead of it, put some distance between it and him, but it’s bursting free. Even the storm is filled with it … he casts and he can see it. The moment when they died. A hundred and twenty thousand ghosts have taken up residence in the memristors in his brain, and they won’t let go of him. It’s going to slowly kill him. He’s sees it now. The dead are going to take him with them. They’ve been doing it for weeks. Picking him apart, bit by bit.

  “Spencer? Are you okay?”

  He manages to smile. “Senegal, huh?”

  “Saint-Louis. I’ve got the dossier with me if you want to take a look.”

  He can pack in more casts, one over top another. He can hope it’ll be enough to hold back Damascus. He wants things to be like Berlin again—when it was fun and sexy and he felt good enough to hit a nightclub with Megan and the DA techs after the job was done. Why can’t it be like that again? More casts. That’s got to be the answer. And if it’s not—if Damascus keeps breaking through, he’ll just wait for it. It can’t be very much longer before he strokes out. Each recall is worse than the last. The equipment will burn him, baking him from the inside out.

  Spencer reaches to take the folder from Megan and something in his chest tightens. She’s the one good thing about this, he thinks. Recklessly, he lets his hand cover hers. His heart thumps unsteadily, but he doesn’t care. She raises her eyes to look at him, speechless, but he hangs on. Love and regret, that’s what he felt from her, but maybe it was more one than the other. It’ll only take a thought to open the cast, and then, he thinks, he’ll know for sure. He’ll know if there’s still time to tell her that he wants to be with her, that he feels it, too. But she’s frowning.

  “You’re … bleeding,” she says, pulling her hand away to rummage in her bag for a tissue. The car begins to dissolve into brimming darkness.

  The first hit of adrenaline comes with the whispers of the dead, and he wonders if it isn’t already too late.

  © 2014 by Heather Clitheroe.

  Heather Clitheroe’s work has appeared in Kaleidotrope, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead anthologies. Heather lives in Calgary, where she works as a student advisor for the engineers and quietly reads the research papers and announcements on her break, taking notes and dreaming up stories. She gratefully acknowledges the support of the Banff Centre for the Arts, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, and the people in her life who never stop asking “How’s the writing going?” You can find her online at lectio.ca or @lectio.

  Walking Awake

  N. K. Jemisin

  Art by Hillary Pearlman

  The Master who came for Enri was wearing a relatively young body. Sadie guessed it was maybe fifty years old. It was healthy and in good condition, still handsome. It could last twenty years more, easily.

  Its owner noticed Sadie’s stare and chuckled. “I never let them get past fifty,” the Master said. “You’ll understand when you get there.”

  Sadie quickly lowered her gaze. “Of course, sir.”

  It turned the body’s eyes to examine Enri, who sat very still in his cell. Enri knew, Sadie could see at once. She had never told him—she never told any of the children, because she was their caregiver and there was nothing of care in the truth—but Enri had always been more intuitive than most.

  She cleared her throat. “Forgive me, sir, but it’s best if we return to the transfer center. He’ll have to be prepp
ed—”

  “Ah, yes, of course,” the Master said. “Sorry, I just wanted to look him over before my claim was processed. You never know when they’re going to screw up the paperwork.” It smiled.

  Sadie nodded and stepped back, gesturing for the Master to precede her away from the cell. As they walked to the elevator they passed two of Sadie’s assistant caregivers, who were distributing the day’s feed to Fourteen Male. Sadie caught Caridad’s eye and signed for them to go and fetch Enri. No ceremony. A ceremony at this point would be cruel.

  Caridad noticed, twitched elaborately, got control of herself and nodded. Olivia, who was deaf, did not look up to catch Sadie’s signing, but Caridad brushed her arm and repeated it. Olivia’s face tightened in annoyance, but then smoothed into a compliant mask. Both women headed for cell 47.

  “The children here all seem nicely fit,” the Master commented as they stepped into the elevator. “I got my last body from Southern. Skinny as rails there.”

  “Exercise, sir. We provide a training regimen for those children who want it; most do. We also use a nutrient blend designed to encourage muscle growth.”

  “Ah, yes. Do you think that new one will get above two meters?”

  “He might, sir. I can check the breeder history—”

  “No, no, never mind. I like surprises.” It threw her a wink over one shoulder. When it faced forward again, Sadie found her eyes drawn to the crablike form half-buried at the nape of the body’s neck. Even as Sadie watched, one of its legs shifted just under the skin, loosening its grip on the tendons there.

  She averted her eyes.

  Caridad and Olivia came down shortly. Enri was between the two women, dressed in the ceremonial clothing: a plain low-necked shirt and pants, both dyed deep red. His eyes locked onto Sadie, despairing, betrayed, before he disappeared through the transfer room’s door.

  “Lovely eyes,” the Master remarked, handing her the completed claim forms. “Can’t wait to wear blue again.”

  Sadie led it into the transfer center. As they passed through the second gate, the airy echoes of the tower gave way to softer, closer acoustics. The center’s receiving room had jewel-toned walls, hardwood floors, and luxuriant furniture upholstered in rich, tasteful brocades. Soft strains of music played over the speakers; incense burned in a censer on the mantle. Many Masters liked to test their new senses after a transfer.