The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “How long’s it been?” I asked, and she shook her head and flashed me a look like she didn’t understand what I meant. “Since contact, Sailor. How long has it been since contact?”

  “That doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t take the serum.”

  “We’re not going to fucking argue about this. Yes, you’re going to take the serum. We’re going to the clinic right now, and you’re going to start the serum tonight. If you’re real bloody lucky, it might not be too late—”

  “Stop it!” she hissed. “This isn’t your decision, Dorry. It’s my body. It’s my goddamn life,” and that’s when she started crying. And that’s when I hit her.

  That’s when I started hitting her.

  There’s no point pretending that I remember how many times I struck her. I only stopped when I saw the blood from her broken nose, splattered on the wall of my study. I like to believe that it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t started crying, those tears like a shield, like a weapon she’d fashioned from her weakness. I’ve always loathed the sight of tears, for no sane reason, and I like to think everything would have played out some other way if she just hadn’t started crying. But that’s probably bullshit, and even if it isn’t, it wouldn’t matter, would it? So, whatever I said earlier about not being the sort of woman to interfere in another’s decisions, forget that. Remember this, instead.

  Sailor left that night, and I haven’t seen or heard from her since. I waited for a summons to appear before the quarter magistrate on charges of assault, but the summons never came, and one day I returned home from my morning classes to find that most of her clothes were gone. I never found out if she retrieved them herself or if someone did it for her. A couple of weeks later, I learned that three Fenrir priests had been arrested near Kepler City, and that the district marshals suspected they’d passed near Molesworth and Herschel earlier in Pisces, that they’d been camped outside Mensae sometime back in Capricorn.

  And that morning in Hope VII, all those months later, I sat and listened to Jun’ko’s billygirl sobbing because she was afraid, and I dug my nails into my palms until the pain was all that mattered.

  “I think you must miss her,” Mikaela said, looking back over her left shoulder at me, answering a question I hadn’t asked. “To have left Herschel and come all the way out here, to go poking around Jun’ko’s place. Lady, no one comes to Heaven, not if she can help it.”

  “I’ve been here before,” I said. “When I was young, about your age.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Jun’ko was telling me,” she replied, and I wanted to ask what else the mechanic might have told her, but I didn’t. I was following Mikaela down a street so narrow it might as well have been an alleyway, three or four blocks over from the dome’s main thoroughfare. Far above us, sensors buried in the framework of the central span were busy calibrating the skylights to match the rising sun outside. But some servo or relay-drive bot responsible for this sector of Hope VII had been down for the last few months, according to Mikaela. So we walked together in the lingering gloom, the patchy frost crunching softly beneath our feet, while the rest of the dome brightened and warmed. Once or twice, I noticed someone watching us through a smudgy window, suspicious eyes set in wary, indistinct faces, but there was no one on the street yet. The lack of traffic added to my unease and the general sense of desolation and decay; this was hardscrabble, even by the standards of Hope’s Heaven. That far back from town center, almost everything was adobe brick and pressed sand-tile, mostly a jumble of warehouses, garages, and machine shops, with a shabby handful of old-line modular residential structures stacked about here and there. If Mikaela were leading me into an ambush, she couldn’t have chosen a better setting.

  “You hang close to me, Councilor,” she said. “People around here, they don’t care so much for outsiders. It’s a bad part of town.”

  “You mean to say there’s a good part?” I asked, and she laughed, then stopped and peered down a cross street, rubbing her hands together for warmth. Her breath steamed in the morning air.

  “No,” she said. “I sure wouldn’t go so far as to say that. But there’s bad and there’s worse.” She frowned and looked back the way we’d come.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked. She shook her head, then pointed east, towards the cross street.

  “It’s that way, just a little piece farther,” she said, and then she changed the subject. “Is it true you’ve been offworld? That’s what Jun’ko said, that you’ve been up to Eos Station, that you’ve seen men. Men from Earth.”

  I nodded my head, still looking in the direction she’d pointed. “It’s true. But that was a long time ago.”

  “What were they like?” she asked, and I shrugged.

  “Different,” I replied, “but not half so different as most of us think. Two eyes, two hands, one mouth, a dick,” and I jabbed a thumb at her skirt. “More like some of us than others.”

  It was a crude comment, one I never would have made if I hadn’t been so nervous, and I half expected her to get pissed or something. But Mikaela only kicked at a loose paving tile and rubbed her hands together a little harder, a little faster.

  “Yeah, well, that was Jun’ko’s idea,” she said. “She even paid the surgeon. Claimed I wasn’t pretty enough, that I needed something special, you know, something exotic, if I was gonna work out of her place. It’s not so bad. Like I said, I’m a pretty good fuck. Better than I was before.”

  “No regrets, then?”

  She made a half-amused, snorting noise, wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jacket, and stared at her shoes. “I was born here,” she said. “What the hell would I do with a thing like regret?”

  “When are you going to tell me what’s waiting for me down there, Mickie?” I asked, and she almost smiled.

  “Sailor said you’d be like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “She said you weren’t a very trusting person. She said you had a nasty habit of stabbing people in the back before they could beat you to it.”

  I suppose that was payback for the remark about her penis, nothing I didn’t have coming, but it made me want to slap her. Before I could think of a reply, she was moving again, walking quickly away from me down the side street. I thought about turning around and heading straight back to the station. It was still three long hours until the next zep, but I could try to get a secure uplink and see what there was to learn about the Oryoku Maru. Following the whore seemed like a lazy way to commit suicide.

  I followed her, anyway.

  A couple of minutes later, we ducked through a low archway into what appeared to be an abandoned repair shop. It was dark inside, almost too dark to see, and even colder than it had been out on the street. The air stank of spent engine oil and hydrosol, dust and mildew and rat shit, and the place was crowded with the disassembled, rusting skeletons of harvesters and harrow rigs. They loomed around us and hung from ceiling hoists, broken, forgotten beasts with sickle teeth.

  “Watch your step, Councilor,” Mikaela warned, calling back to me after I tripped over some piece of machinery or another and almost stumbled into an open garage pit. I paused long enough to catch my breath, long enough to whisper a thankful prayer and be sure I hadn’t broken my ankle.

  “We need a fucking torch,” I muttered, my voice much louder than I’d expected, magnified and thrown back at me by the darkness pressing in around us.

  “Well, I don’t have one,” she said, “so you’ll just have to be more careful.”

  She took my hand and guided me out of the repair bay, along a pitch-black corridor that turned left, then right, then left again, before finally ending in a dim pool of light spilling in through a number of ragged, fist-sized holes in the roof. I imagined it was sunlight, though it wasn’t, of course, imagined it was warm against my upturned face, though it wasn’t that, either.

  “Down here,” she said, and I turned towards her voice, blinking back orange and violet afterimages. We were standing at the top of a sta
irwell.

  “I hid it when Sailor left,” Mikaela said. “Jun’ko has our rooms tossed once or twice a month, regular as clockwork, so I couldn’t leave it in the house. But I figured it’d be safe here. When I was a kid, my sister and I used to play hide-and-seek in this place.”

  “You have a sister?” I asked, and she started down the stairs without me, taking them two at a time despite the dark. I hurried to catch up, more afraid of being left alone in this place than wherever she might be leading me.

  “Yeah,” she called back. “I’ve got a little sister. She’s out there somewhere. Sheba’d up with a guild mason down in Arsia Mons, last I heard. But we don’t talk much these days. She got sick on Allah and doesn’t approve of whoring anymore.”

  We reached the bottom of the stairs, and I glanced back up at the patch of imitation daylight we’d left at the top. “How much farther, Mickie?” I asked, trying hard to sound calm, trying to sound confident, trying desperately to bury my anxiety in a pantomime of equipoise. But the darkness was quickly becoming more than I could handle, so much darkness crammed into the gap between the walls and floor and ceiling. It was becoming inconceivable that this place might somehow simultaneously contain so much darkness and ourselves. I’m a little claustrophobic, I pretended to have said, so that the mechanic’s girl would understand and get this the hell over and done with. Past the bottom of the stairs, the air was damp and smelled of mold and stagnant water, mushrooms and rotting cardboard. I was sweating now, despite the cold.

  “She made me promise that I’d keep it safe,” Mikaela said, as if she hadn’t heard my question or had simply chosen to ignore it. “I’m not really used to people trusting me with things. Not with things that matter to—”

  “How much farther?” I asked again, more insistent than before. “We need to hurry this up, or I’ll miss my flight.”

  “Here,” she said. “Right there, on your left,” and when I turned my head that way, there was the faintest chartreuse glow, like some natural fungal phosphorescence, a glow that I could have sworn hadn’t been there only a few seconds before. “Just inside the doorway, on the table,” Mikaela said.

  I took a deep breath of the fetid air and stepped past her through an opening leading into what might once have been a storeroom or maintenance locker. The glow became much brighter than it had been out in the corridor, illuminating the bare concrete walls, an M5 proctor droid that had been stripped raw and left for dead, and the intestine tangle of sagging pipes above my head. The yellow-green light was coming from a five- or six-liter translucent plastic catch cylinder, something that had probably been manufactured as part of a dew-farm’s cistern. And I stood staring at the pale thing floating inside the cylinder—not precisely dead because it had probably never been precisely alive—a wad of hair and mottled flesh, bone and the scabby shell of a half-formed exoskeleton.

  “She said it was yours, Dorry,” Mikaela whispered from somewhere behind me. “She said she didn’t know, when she took the mark, didn’t know she was pregnant.”

  I said something. I honestly can’t remember what.

  It hardly matters.

  The thing in the cylinder twitched and opened what I hadn’t realized was an eye. It was all pupil, that eye, and blacker than space.

  “She lost it before she even got here,” the whore said, “when she was working up in Sytinskakya. She couldn’t have taken it with her to the temples, and I promised her that I’d keep it safe. She thought you might want to take it back with you.”

  I turned away from the unborn thing, which might or might not have seen my face, pushing my way roughly past Mikaela and back out into the corridor. The darkness there seemed almost kind after the light from the catch cylinder, and I let it swallow me whole as I ran. I only fell twice or maybe three times, tripping over my own feet and sprawling hard on sand-tile or steel, then right back up in an instant, blindly making my way to the stairwell and the cluttered repair shop above, and, finally, to the perpetually shadowed street. I stopped and looked back then, breathless and faint and sick to my belly, pausing only long enough to see that Jun’ko’s girl hadn’t followed me. By the time I reached the transfer station at the lower end of Avenue South Eight, the morning was fading towards noon, and what I’d seen below Hope’s Heaven seemed hardly as substantial, hardly as thinkable, as any woman’s guilty dreams of Hell.

  I have Sailor’s book of proverbs from the cargo crate open on the table in front of me, the one written by the twentieth-century Tibetan monk. There’s a passage here on dreams, one of the passages I’ve underlined in red, which reads: “The pathway to Nirvana is a road along which the traveler penetrates the countless illusions of his waking mind, his dreams and dreamless sleep. There must be a full and final awakening from all illusion, waking and dreaming. By many forms of meditation a man may at last achieve this necessary process of waking up in his life and in his dreams and nightmares. He may follow Vipassanā in search of lasting, uninterrupted self-awareness, finally catching himself in the very act of losing himself in the cacophonous labyrinth of his thoughts and fantasies and the obscuring tides of emotion and sexual impulse that work to impede awakening.”

  I like to think that I know what most of that means, but, then again, I’m an arrogant woman, and admitting ignorance galls me. I may not have the faintest clue.

  On the long flight from Hope VII, from the ages-dead caldera of Tharsis Tholus towards the greater, but equally spent, craters of Pavonis Mons and Arsia Mons, skirting the sheer, narrow fissures of the Noctis Fossae and the dismal mining operations scattered like old scabs out along the edges of that district, as the zep drifted high above the rust-colored world, I dozed, losing myself in those obscuring tides. It’s not the same dream every time. I’m not sure I believe in dreams which recur with such absolute perfection that they’re always the same dream. So, then, this is a collective caricature of the dreams that I’ve had since Sailor left, an approximation of the dream I must have had as the drone of the zep’s engines answered my exhaustion and dragged me down to sleep.

  I’m standing outside the vast, impenetrable dome of Herschel City, locked safely inside my pressure suit, breathing clean, fresh air untainted by the fine red dust blowing down from Elysium. I can hear the wind through my comms, wild and terrible as any mythological banshee long since exiled here from Earth. In the distance, far across the plain, I can see a procession, a single-file line of robed figures and their cragged assortment of sandrovers and skidwagons. A great cloud of dust rises up behind them and hangs like a caul, despite the wind. Impervious to the wind. And I am filled with such complete dread, a fear like none that I have ever known, but I take one step forward. There’s music coming through my helmet, flutes and violins and the thump-thump-thump of drums. I know that music at once, though I’ve never heard it before. I know that music instinctively.

  “They’re not for you, Dorry,” Sailor says, and I turn, turning my back on the procession, and she’s standing there with her left hand on the shoulder of my suit. She isn’t wearing one herself. She isn’t wearing much of anything, and the dust has painted her skin muted shades of terra-cotta. She might be another race entirely, another species, something alien or angelic or ghostly that I have fucked and loved thinking she was only a human girl.

  “They would never let you follow,” she says. “Not as you are now.”

  I don’t wonder how she can breathe, or how her body is enduring the bitter cold or the low pressure or radiation. I only want to hold her, because it’s been so long, and I never imagined I would really see her again. But then she pushes me away, frowning, that look she used to get whenever she thought I was being particularly stupid. She licks her red-brown lips, and her tongue is violet.

  “No,” she says, sounding almost angry, almost hateful. “You hit me, Dorry. And I don’t need that shit. If I needed that shit, I’d have stayed with fucking Erin Antimisiaris. If I needed to be someone’s punch hound, I’d go hunt up my asshole swap-mother and le
t her have another go at me.”

  She says other, more condemning things, and I say nothing at all in my defense, because I know she’s telling the truth, laying it all out for me as the sun crawls feebly across the wide china sky. And then, slowly, grain by grain, the wind takes her apart, weathers her away until her face is hardly recognizable, a granite statue that might have stood at this spot a thousand years; her body has begun to crumble, too, reclaimed by the ground beneath our feet. I turn once more towards the procession, but it has passed beyond the range of my vision.

  And then we are lying in my bed, and the air smells like fresh cinnamon and clean linen, a musky, faint hint of sweat and sex, and Sailor lights her pipe. I wonder how long I’ve been sleeping, how long the dream could have lasted, and as I turn to tell her about it all—an act of sharing secrets to rob the nightmare of its claws—the room dissolves around me, and I’m standing alone at the edge of a crater so wide I can see only a little ways across it. I’m facing west, I think, and the sky is a roiling kaleidoscope of clotted, oily grays and blues, blacks and deep purples, no sky that any woman has ever seen on Mars. That’s the color of nausea, I think. That’s the color of plague and decay.

  I hear the music again, then. The pipes. The bows drawn across taut strings. The drums sounding out loudly across the flat, monotonous floor of the impact crater. A billion years ago, something fell screaming from the sky and buried itself here, broke apart in a storm of fire and vaporized stone, and here it has been waiting. It was here when the progenitors of humankind were mere protoplasmic slime clinging desperately to the sanctuary of abyssal hydrothermal vents. It was waiting when our australopithecine foremothers first looked up and noticed the red star hanging above African skies. It was here when men finally began to send their probes and landers, waiting while the human invasion was planned and executed. But not waiting patiently, because nothing so burned and shattered and hungry can wait patiently, but waiting all the same, because it has been left no choice. It has been cast down, gravity’s prisoner, and I look back once, looking back at the wastes stretching out behind me, before I begin the long, painful climb down to the place where the music is coming from.