I hesitate. I don’t know legally if I am allowed to tell her about transactions I had with her husband. On the other hand, the emails came with both their names on them. “He has bought three,” I say.
“Three?”
“Not all at once. About once a year. But people who want a special send me a picture. He always sends the same picture.”
“Oh,” she says. “That’s Ellam. He’s orderly. He’s used the same shampoo for fifteen years.”
“I thought it was strange,” I say. I can’t bear not to ask. “What do you think he did with them?”
“I think the twisted bastard used them to make women feel sorry for him,” she says through gritted teeth. “I think he got all sentimental about them. He probably has himself half convinced that he really did have a daughter. Or that it’s my fault that we didn’t have children. He never wanted children. Never.”
“I think a lot of my customers like the idea of having a child better than having one,” I say.
“I’m sure,” she says. “Thank you for your time and I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
So banal. So strange and yet so banal. I try to imagine him giving the doll to a woman, telling her that it was the image of his dead child. How did that work?
* * *
Orders for dildos begin to trickle in. I get a couple of doll orders and make a payment on the credit line and put away some towards real estate taxes. I may not have to live in my car.
One evening, I am working in the garden when Abby and Hudson start barking at the back gate.
I get off my knees, aching, but lurch into the house and into the bedroom where I grab the 9 mm out of the bedside table. It isn’t loaded, which now seems stupid. I try to think if I should stop and load it. My hands are shaking. It is undoubtedly just someone looking for a meal and a place to recharge. I decide I can’t trust myself to load and besides, the dogs are out there. I go to the back door, gun held stiffly at my side, pointed to the ground.
There are in fact two of them, alike as brothers, indian looking with a fringe of black hair cut in a straight line above their eyebrows.
“Lady,” one says, “we can work for food?” First one, then the other sees the gun at my side and their faces go empty.
The dogs cavort.
“I will give you something to eat, and then you go,” I say.
“We go,” the one who spoke says.
“Someone robbed me,” I say.
“We no rob you,” he says. His eyes are on the gun. His companion takes a step back, glancing at the gate and then at me as if to gauge if I will shoot him if he bolts.
“I know,” I say. “But someone came here, I gave him food, and he robbed me. You tell people not to come here, okay?”
“Okay,” he says. “We go.”
“Tell people not to come here,” I say. I would give them something to eat, something to take with them. I hate this. They are two young men in a foreign country, hungry, looking for work. I could easily be sleeping in my car. I could be homeless. I could be wishing for someone to be nice to me.
But I am not. I’m just afraid.
“Hudson! Abby!” I yell, harsh, and the two men flinch. “Get in the house.”
The dogs slink in behind me, not sure what they’ve done wrong.
“If you want some food, I will give you something,” I say. “Tell people not to come here.”
I don’t think they understand me. Instead they back slowly away a handful of steps and then turn and walk quickly out the gate, closing it behind them.
I sit down where I am standing, knees shaking.
The moon is up in the blue early evening sky. Over my fence I can see scrub and desert, a fierce land where mountains breach like the petrified spines of apocalyptic animals. The kind of landscape that seems right for crazed gangs of mutants charging around in cobbled together vehicles. Tribal remnants of America, their faces painted, their hair braided, wearing jewelry made from shiny CDs and cigarette lighters scrounged from the ruins of civilization. The desert is Byronic in its extremes.
I don’t see the two men. There’s no one out there in furs, their faces painted blue, driving a dune buggy built out of motorcycle parts and hung with the skulls of their enemies. There’s just a couple of guys from Nicaragua or Guatemala, wearing t-shirts and jeans.
And me, sitting watching the desert go dark, the moon rising, an empty handgun in my hand.
Mongoose
SARAH MONETTE & ELIZABETH BEAR
Sarah Monette was born and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the secret cities of the Manhattan Project. Having completed her Ph.D. in Renaissance English drama, she now lives and writes in a ninety-nine-year-old house in the Upper Midwest. Her Doctrine of Labyrinths series consists of the novels Mélusine, The Virtu, The Mirador and Corambis. Her short fiction has appeared in many places, including Strange Horizons, Aeon, Alchemy, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and has been collected in The Bone Key.
Elizabeth Bear was born in Connecticut and now lives in Brookfield, Massachusetts, with her husband, writer Scott Lynch. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005, and in 2008 took home a Hugo Award for her short story “Tideline,” which also won her the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (shared with David Moles). In 2009, she won another Hugo Award for her novelette “Shoggoths in Bloom.” Her short work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Subterranean, SCI FICTION, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Strange Horizons, On Spec, and elsewhere, and has been collected in The Chains That You Refuse and Shoggoths in Bloom. She is the author of the five-volume New Amsterdam fantasy series, the three-volume Jenny Casey SF series, the five-volume Promethean Age series, the three-volume Jacob’s Ladder series, the three-volume Edda of Burdens series, and the three-volume Eternal Sky series, as well as three novels in collaboration with Sarah Monette. Her other books include the novels Carnival and Undertow. Her most recent novel is The Stone in the Skull.
Bear and Monette have collaborated before, on the stories “The Ile of Dogges” and “The Boojum.” Here they join forces again with a chilling story about an interdimensional pest-control officer, and his very unusual helper.
The ship had no name of her own, so her human crew called her the Lavinia Whateley. As far as anyone could tell, she didn’t mind. At least, her long grasping vanes curled—affectionately?—when the chief engineers patted her bulkheads and called her “Vinnie,” and she ceremoniously tracked the footsteps of each crew member with her internal bioluminescence, giving them light to walk and work and live by.
The Lavinia Whateley was a Boojum, a deep-space swimmer, but her kind had evolved in the high tempestuous envelopes of gas giants, and their offspring still spent their infancies there, in cloud-nurseries over eternal storms. And so she was streamlined, something like a vast spiny lionfish to the earth-adapted eye. Her sides were lined with gasbags filled with hydrogen; her vanes and wings furled tight. Her color was a blue-green so dark it seemed a glossy black unless the light struck it; her hide was impregnated with symbiotic algae.
Where there was light, she could make oxygen. Where there was oxygen, she could make water.
She was an ecosystem unto herself, as the captain was a law unto herself. And down in the bowels of the engineering section, Black Alice Bradley, who was only human and no kind of law at all, loved her.
Black Alice had taken the oath back in ’32, after the Venusian Riots. She hadn’t hidden her reasons, and the captain had looked at her with cold, dark, amused eyes and said, “So long as you carry your weight, cherie, I don’t care. Betray me, though, and you will be going back to Venus the cold way.” But it was probably that—and the fact that Black Alice couldn’t hit the broad side of a space freighter with a ray gun—that had gotten her assigned to engineering, where ethics were less of a problem. It wasn’t, after all, as if she was going anywhere.
Black Alice was on duty when the Lavinia Whateley spotted prey; she felt the shiver of anticipation tha
t ran through the decks of the ship. It was an odd sensation, a tic Vinnie only exhibited in pursuit. And then they were underway, zooming down the slope of the gravity well toward Sol, and the screens all around Engineering—which Captain Song kept dark, most of the time, on the theory that swabs and deckhands and coal-shovelers didn’t need to know where they were, or what they were doing—flickered bright and live.
Everybody looked up, and Demijack shouted, “There! There!” He was right: the blot that might only have been a smudge of oil on the screen moved as Vinnie banked, revealing itself to be a freighter, big and ungainly and hopelessly outclassed. Easy prey. Easy pickings.
We could use some of them, thought Black Alice. Contrary to the e-ballads and comm stories, a pirate’s life was not all imported delicacies and fawning slaves. Especially not when three-quarters of any and all profits went directly back to the Lavinia Whateley, to keep her healthy and happy. Nobody ever argued. There were stories about the Marie Curie, too.
The captain’s voice over fiberoptic cable—strung beside the Lavinia Whateley’s nerve bundles—was as clear and free of static as if she stood at Black Alice’s elbow. “Battle stations,” Captain Song said, and the crew leapt to obey. It had been two Solar since Captain Song keelhauled James Brady, but nobody who’d been with the ship then was ever likely to forget his ruptured eyes and frozen scream.
Black Alice manned her station and stared at the screen. She saw the freighter’s name—the Josephine Baker—gold on black across the stern, the Venusian flag for its port of registry wired stiff from a mast on its hull. It was a steelship, not a Boojum, and they had every advantage. For a moment she thought the freighter would run.
And then it turned and brought its guns to bear.
No sense of movement, of acceleration, of disorientation. No pop, no whump of displaced air. The view on the screens just flickered to a different one, as Vinnie skipped—apported—to a new position just aft and above the Josephine Baker, crushing the flag mast with her hull.
Black Alice felt that, a grinding shiver. And had just time to grab her console before the Lavinia Whateley grappled the freighter, long vanes not curling in affection now.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dogcollar, the closest thing the Lavinia Whateley had to a chaplain, cross himself, and she heard him mutter, like he always did, Ave, Grandaevissimi, morituri vos salutant. It was the best he’d be able to do until it was all over, and even then he wouldn’t have the chance to do much. Captain Song didn’t mind other people worrying about souls, so long as they didn’t do it on her time.
The Captain’s voice was calling orders, assigning people to boarding parties port and starboard. Down in Engineering, all they had to do was monitor the Lavinia Whateley’s hull and prepare to repel boarders, assuming the freighter’s crew had the gumption to send any. Vinnie would take care of the rest—until the time came to persuade her not to eat her prey before they’d gotten all the valuables off it. That was a ticklish job, only entrusted to the chief engineers, but Black Alice watched and listened, and although she didn’t expect she’d ever get the chance, she thought she could do it herself.
It was a small ambition, and one she never talked about. But it would be a hell of a thing, wouldn’t it? To be somebody a Boojum would listen to?
She gave her attention to the dull screens in her sectors and tried not to crane her neck to catch a glimpse of the ones with the actual fighting on them. Dogcollar was making the rounds with sidearms from the weapons locker, just in case. Once the Josephine Baker was subdued, it was the junior engineers and others who would board her to take inventory.
Sometimes there were crew members left in hiding on captured ships. Sometimes, unwary pirates got shot.
There was no way to judge the progress of the battle from Engineering. Wasabi put a stopwatch up on one of the secondary screens, as usual, and everybody glanced at it periodically. Fifteen minutes on-going meant the boarding parties hadn’t hit any nasty surprises. Black Alice had met a man once who’d been on the Margaret Mead when she grappled a freighter that turned out to be carrying a division-worth of Marines out to the Jovian moons. Thirty minutes on-going was normal. Forty-five minutes. Upward of an hour on-going, and people started double-checking their weapons. The longest battle Black Alice had ever personally been part of was six hours, forty-three minutes, and fifty-two seconds. That had been the last time the Lavinia Whateley worked with a partner, and the double-cross by the Henry Ford was the only reason any of Vinnie’s crew needed. Captain Song still had Captain Edwards’ head in a jar on the bridge, and Vinnie had an ugly ring of scars where the Henry Ford had bitten her.
This time, the clock stopped at fifty minutes, thirteen seconds. The Josephine Baker surrendered.
* * *
Dogcollar slapped Black Alice’s arm. “With me,” he said, and she didn’t argue. He had only six weeks seniority over her, but he was as tough as he was devout, and not stupid either. She checked the velcro on her holster and followed him up the ladder, reaching through the rungs once to scratch Vinnie’s bulkhead as she passed. The ship paid her no notice. She wasn’t the captain, and she wasn’t one of the four chief engineers.
Quartermaster mostly respected crew’s own partner choices, and as Black Alice and Dogcollar suited up—it wouldn’t be the first time, if the Josephine Baker’s crew decided to blow her open to space rather than be taken captive—he came by and issued them both tag guns and x-ray pads, taking a retina scan in return. All sorts of valuable things got hidden inside of bulkheads, and once Vinnie was done with the steelship there wouldn’t be much chance of coming back to look for what they’d missed.
Wet pirates used to scuttle their captures. The Boojums were more efficient.
Black Alice clipped everything to her belt and checked Dogcollar’s seals.
And then they were swinging down lines from the Lavinia Whateley’s belly to the chewed-open airlock. A lot of crew didn’t like to look at the ship’s face, but Black Alice loved it. All those teeth, the diamond edges worn to a glitter, and a few of the ship’s dozens of bright sapphire eyes blinking back at her.
She waved, unselfconsciously, and flattered herself that the ripple of closing eyes was Vinnie winking in return.
She followed Dogcollar inside the prize.
They unsealed when they had checked atmosphere—no sense in wasting your own air when you might need it later—and the first thing she noticed was the smell.
The Lavinia Whateley had her own smell, ozone and nutmeg, and other ships never smelled as good, but this was … this was …
“What did they kill and why didn’t they space it?” Dogcollar wheezed, and Black Alice swallowed hard against her gag reflex and said, “One will get you twenty we’re the lucky bastards that find it.”
“No takers,” Dogcollar said.
They worked together to crank open the hatches they came to. Twice they found crew members, messily dead. Once they found crew members alive.
“Gillies,” said Black Alice.
“Still don’t explain the smell,” said Dogcollar and, to the gillies: “Look, you can join our crew, or our ship can eat you. Makes no never mind to us.”
The gillies blinked their big wet eyes and made fingersigns at each other, and then nodded. Hard.
Dogcollar slapped a tag on the bulkhead. “Someone will come get you. You go wandering, we’ll assume you changed your mind.”
The gillies shook their heads, hard, and folded down onto the deck to wait.
Dogcollar tagged searched holds—green for clean, purple for goods, red for anything Vinnie might like to eat that couldn’t be fenced for a profit—and Black Alice mapped. The corridors in the steelship were winding, twisty, hard to track. She was glad she chalked the walls, because she didn’t think her map was quite right, somehow, but she couldn’t figure out where she’d gone wrong. Still, they had a beacon, and Vinnie could always chew them out if she had to.
Black Alice loved her ship.
The door peeled back, and Black Alice found herself staring at rank upon rank of silver cylinders, each less than a meter tall and perhaps half a meter wide, smooth and featureless except for what looked like an assortment of sockets and plugs on the surface of each. The smell was strongest here.
“Shit,” she said.
Dogcollar, more practical, slapped the first safety orange tag of the expedition beside the door and said only, “Captain’ll want to see this.”
“Yeah,” said Black Alice, cold chills chasing themselves up and down her spine. “C’mon, let’s move.”
But of course it turned out that she and Dogcollar were on the retrieval detail, too, and the captain wasn’t leaving the canisters for Vinnie.
Which, okay, fair. Black Alice didn’t want the Lavinia Whateley eating those things, either, but why did they have to bring them back?
She said as much to Dogcollar, under her breath, and had a horrifying thought: “She knows what they are, right?”
“She’s the captain,” said Dogcollar.
“Yeah, but—I ain’t arguing, man, but if she doesn’t know…” She lowered her voice even farther, so she could barely hear herself: “What if somebody opens one?”
Dogcollar gave her a pained look. “Nobody’s going to go opening anything. But if you’re really worried, go talk to the captain about it.”
He was calling her bluff. Black Alice called his right back. “Come with me?”
He was stuck. He stared at her, and then he grunted and pulled his gloves off, the left and then the right. “Fuck,” he said. “I guess we oughta.”
The Very Best of the Best Page 55