The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  “Incoming!” Hester yelled. Fiorenzo’s head jerked up, and Cynthia thought, What damned good is —

  The report of the pistol would have been deafening in the confined space of the morgue, if not for Cynthia’s suit filters. Fiorenzo thrashed for a second, the left side of her skull blossoming into a cratered exit wound. Cynthia threw herself free and rolled across the decking.

  “Cables!” Hester yelled.

  Cynthia grabbed them from the middle and yanked. The ends came slithering toward her, sparking against the deck. Heavy yellow sparks. Cynthia grabbed them by the insulation and lifted.

  Fiorenzo rolled to a crouch, then stood. She laughed, one eye bobbing gently on the end of its optic nerve against her cheek. She sprang forward like a racer—

  Cynthia jabbed the cables into her chest.

  Fiorenzo arched back as the current went through her, hands splayed and clawing. She didn’t scream; there was no other sound to cover the crack of electricity, the hiss of cooking flesh.

  She slumped. Cynthia jumped backward, but Fiorenzo’s outflung hand still fell across her boot. She turned wildly; Meredith was still crawling toward her. Hester crouched by the controls, sliding the master switch back to off.

  “Decomp tie-ins,” Hester said. “You use the bolt nearest the panel.” She stepped over Fiorenzo’s corpse, her boot disturbing the gentle wisps of steam still rising, and dropped into the hole again. “And hand me the fucking cables again, would you please?”

  Following orders was the easiest, most pleasant thing that Cynthia had ever done. She clipped and locked her safety line to the bolt. She slid the power control back to full.

  “Do it!” she shouted to Hester.

  And Hester must have done it, because the Charles Dexter Ward convulsed. Cynthia was jerked hard against her tether and then slammed back into the machine — and that was with only enough slack to attach the line. Everything unanchored went flying; she heard the crunch as Meredith hit a bulkhead, and then she was jerked forward again and blacked out.

  * * *

  She couldn’t have been out for more than a minute, she reckoned later; she could hear things still cascading in thumps and crunches. But the ship himself was not moving, and more importantly, more tellingly, his necroluminescence was gone. The only light was Hester’s suit lamp, and Cynthia fumbled her own on.

  “Thank the ancient powers and the Buddha,” Hester said in a thin fervent voice. “I thought you were dead.”

  Cynthia swallowed bright copper where she’d bitten the inside of her mouth. “Ow.”

  “Yes.” Hester was undoing her safety line and dragging herself upright. Cynthia undid her own line with shaky fingers, and then her head cleared and she made it to her feet in one adrenaline-sour jerk. She twisted around, scanning, but Meredith was nowhere within the limited range of her light. She saw one of Ngao’s legs and part of his spine; he had been torn apart by the force of Charlie’s convulsions. As she watched, the foot twitched.

  “Do you think we can make it back to the Caitlin R. Kiernan alive?” Hester said.

  Cynthia squared her shoulders, wincing a little, and answered: “I think we can try.”

  Epilogue

  In his (second) death throes, the Charles Dexter Ward had taken a chunk out of the Jarmulowicz Astronomica, like a kid biting a chunk out of an apple. The casualties were five dead and thirteen injured, and they would have been worse except that everyone possible had been press-ganged into helping with the broken ward-mirror. The medical bay was gone, and now Cynthia knew why she’d only ever seen the one future-ghost, because there had only been one future path in which there was still a medical bay — the future path, she knew with cold uncomfortable certainty, in which she had not stood up to Wandrei and Fiorenzo, in which the Charles Dexter Ward had not died twice.

  Cynthia patched up the crew as best she could with bandages made of cloth and splints repurposed from any number of functions, and the crew patched up the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. The mass funeral was devastating; Cynthia stood with Hester and let Hester’s grip leave bruises on her hand.

  She bunked in with Hester, which was tight but doable. On her first sleep shift, after she finished brushing what she hoped was the last of the Charles Dexter Ward’s death stench out of her mouth, she came into Hester’s room and found two smug cheshires in the hammock slung crossways above Hester’s bunk. She surprised herself by bursting into tears.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said, fending off Hester’s concern. “I just didn’t expect them to find me.”

  “They know you,” Hester said, as if it were all that simple.

  The Jarmulowicz Astronomica sent out a distress signal, and before leaving the Charles Dexter Ward, they set warning beacons around the boojum’s carcass. The Universal Code didn’t have an entry for REANIMATED; Hester told Cynthia that the Faculty Senate passed a motion to submit a proposal to add it before agreeing that the best they could do for now was EPIDEMIC alternating with BANDERSNATCH, and trust that it would be dire enough to warn people away.

  And there was always the story, Cynthia thought, and that would do more good than a hundred beacons. Their distress call was answered, less than a week out, by a liveship, the Judith Merrill, and her crew lost nearly all their native distrust of Arkhamers in their desire for the details — Cynthia, as a non-Arkhamer, was pestered nearly to death. But she was willing to tell the story as often as necessary to make people believe it, and she knew perfectly well that half the reason she got so many questions was the Judith Merrill’s crew double-checking what the Arkhamers told them. Everyone knew Arkhamers lied.

  She was amused, though, and also touched that their greatest concern was for what Fiorenzo had done to the Charles Dexter Ward. They were fiercely protective of their ship, and while they were horrified by the idea of Fiorenzo reanimating the dead, it was Charlie they wanted to lynch her for. It was the wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward that was going to make the story, and Fiorenzo would be merely its villain, not a scientist striving— however wrong-headedly — for knowledge.

  With the Jarmulowicz Astronomica in a cargo bay, Cynthia and Hester (and a random assortment of cheshires) were sharing a dormitory cubicle somewhere under the Judith Merrill’s left front fin. The purser had offered to put her somewhere else, but Cynthia had turned him down. Until they reached Faraday Station, her contract bound her to the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. And even after that, friendship would bind her to Hester.

  And, the bare truth was, she didn’t want to try to sleep alone.

  When Cynthia reached their cubicle at the start of her next sleep shift, she said, “What makes forbidden knowledge forbidden, anyway?”

  Hester looked up with visible alarm.

  “No, I haven’t found another Mi-Go canister,” Cynthia said, amazed to find that she was able to joke about it. “I was just thinking about Fiorenzo and, well, how do you figure out where to draw the line? Because apparently I don’t know.”

  “You do know,” Hester said. “You knew Fiorenzo was wrong before I did.”

  “I knew Fiorenzo was suicidal. That’s not quite the same thing.”

  “No,” Hester said. “You looked at Ngao and you knew it was wrong. You saw the person suffering first, not the scientific achievement.”

  Cynthia winced. She had looked up Major Ngao — Major Kirawat Ngao, R.N. M.Sc. — but had had to draw back from attempting to contact his next of kin. What could she say? I’m sorry your loved one was murdered and reanimated by an unscrupulous scientist, and is still animate and possibly conscious — though in pieces — in the belly of a dead boojum. That was rank cruelty.

  It was Ngao and the rest of the Charles Dexter Ward’s crew that she still felt worst about; Charlie himself was at least peacefully dead — even the pseudoghosts had faded out before the Jarmulowicz Astronomica was picked up by the Judith Merrill, showing that the spacetime disruptions were healing. But the reanimated were trapped in their dead ship, and the best that could be hoped for
was that Fiorenzo’s serum might someday wear off.

  “Someday,” which might just be another word for “never.”

  “You said yourself,” Hester continued, pursuing the argument and jarring Cynthia out of a sad and pointless spiral of thought, “that you wouldn’t put anyone in a canister, and I suspect you wouldn’t have experimented at all if it had still had a brain in it.”

  “No,” Cynthia said, then muttered rebelliously, “I still think we could find really valuable applications for the knowledge.”

  “Which is exactly what we told you about Fiorenzo,” Hester said.

  “Ouch,” Cynthia said. She swung into her hammock and rearranged the cheshires to give her space.

  “Mostly, I’ve always thought ‘forbidden knowledge’ was another way of saying, ‘don’t do that or the bandersnatches will get you,’ ” Hester pursued thoughtfully. “Or, I suppose, the Mi-Go.”

  “Which is frequently true,” Cynthia said.

  “Yes, but it never stops us.” Hester looked up at Cynthia, her eyes dark. “Maybe that’s the worst part of human nature. Nothing ever stops us. Not for long.”

  “Not for long,” Cynthia agreed and petted the tentacled horror on her lap until it cuddled close and began to purr.

  INVISIBLE MEN

  Christopher Barzak

  Christopher Barzak lives in Youngstown, Ohio, and teaches writing at Youngstown State University. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Eclipse Online, Realms of Fantasy, Salon Fantastique, Firebirds Soaring: An Anthology of Original Speculative Fiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Flytrap, Apex Magazine, The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People, and elsewhere. His novels include One For Sorrow and The Love We Share Without Knowing. His most recent book is a collection, Birds and Birthdays. Coming up is a new collection, Before and Afterlives.

  Here he takes another look at a science fiction classic, retold from a somewhat different perspective.

  She SAID HE WAS an “ex-peer-i-ment-al in-vest-i-gat-or, don’t you know?” And lucky for me, I don’t catch her looking at me much, so I rolled my eyes at myself in the glass I was cleaning, then set it up on its shelf with my eyes rolling in its surface for a long time after.

  She always likens herself to our Lord in Heaven, and clutches her hand at her heart like some poor widow, though she just married for a second time not a year ago, and you’d think she’d be happier with Mr. Hall around to help. Especially when he came round and took rooms from them. I might be a bit of a dull-headed girl — that’s what my mother always told me, Lord keep her — but I ain’t so dull I can’t see something’s wrong with a person when he comes into the Coach and Horses with his head all wrapped up like some bloody mummy, and thick blue goggles for glasses. Really, I should wince and say to her, “Do you think that’s normal, miss?”

  Oh, shut up, you silly girl. Move it along. You’re slower than a cow! Help indeed! Snap, snap! Clap, clap! She’s got many ways of dealing with me. But I ain’t no girl, and I ain’t no cow. I got sixteen years, and four of them I been working like anyone. What she sees ain’t me, but some other girl. Cause ain’t I the one who cleared the straw he spilled from those crates of his all over the floor of his room? And ain’t I the one who scrubbed at a stain on the floor he’d made with all his chemicals and such?

  She wanted to take him his tea and his eggs and ham. She wanted to stand at his shut door and listen to his moaning and sobbing, hand clutched at her heart like some mother. She wanted to try speaking with him like she was on his level — whatever it was, it was surely above hers by the way he spoke — and all I could do was laugh behind my hand in the kitchen when he chased her out of that room with a chair, the chair floating in midair like a ghost, and she came shrieking down the staircase.

  Mrs. Hall gave me a hot time of it, she did, taking out her troubles with him on the likes of me while he was staying here. But I didn’t let her muck me about too much. And there was always talk to be had when she wasn’t round the bar, but upstairs leaning her ear against that door of his. Teddy Henfrey was here one day after all that mess with the Invisible Man started, and I caught him looking up at the pub’s ceiling, shaking his head. “Here, Millie,” he said, “what’s Mrs. Hall on to up there? Still trying to get old goggle-eyes to talk?”

  I kept wiping glasses and shook my head. “I don’t right know, Teddy,” I said. “I keep to my own or she’ll give me a hot time of it.”

  And Teddy said, “Ain’t like you’re to blame for anything, Millie. And anyway, you’re mostly back in the kitchen where nobody can see you.”

  “True enough,” I told Teddy. “But when she wants to, she can see me all right. When she wants to.”

  Teddy Henfrey is the village clock-mender. He had a bad round of it with old goggle-eyes on the very day he showed up at the Coach and Horses. Mrs. Hall asked Teddy to come mend a clock in her new guest’s room, but that clock had been dead some three months and she’d never once made a glance in its direction. Then goggle-eyes come through the door of the inn on the last day of February, snow blowing all round him, and him wrapped up in a greatcoat, muffler, and a hat with a brim so wide it cast a shadow over his face. And wouldn’t you know, not two hours after she brought him his eggs and ham, Mrs. Hall was going on about that clock in his room needing mending.

  It was just so she could get in there while Teddy went to work. Anyone could see that. Wanting a look at things, she was. We didn’t know goggle-eyes weren’t visible when he showed up, of course — we thought he’d been hurt in a fire or some other kind of accident — but if we’d known the truth of him then, I would’ve liked to say to her, “He’s invisible, miss. He ain’t blind, too, is he?”

  But I must remind myself I’ve got a place, and that ain’t so bad, considering I got no people. Ma died four years ago, and that’s when I come to the Coach and Horses, where she’d done the work before me. Dad’s been gone since I was little. Drowned, Ma told me, in the river one black night when he was wandering round like a fish with two legs. So I suppose it could have been me coming through that door on the last day of February, shouting, “In the name of human charity! A room and a fire!”

  It was the Invisible Man, though. And what happened after that, none of us would’ve guessed.

  What happened was this. Mrs. Hall wouldn’t leave the man well enough alone. She kept trying to get his story out of him. Whenever she got a chance, she’d make a reason to barge in, even though he’d said to leave him be. She took him ham and eggs, like I’ve said, and then, after he waited for her to leave, she came back to the kitchen and saw she’d forgotten the mustard I’d made. “I declare!” she shouted. “Slow as treacle, you are, Millie! Help indeed!” She took the mustard upstairs then, and I pulled a face at her backside, but when she come down again a few minutes later, her face was all wrinkled with trouble.

  “What is it, miss?” I asked, truly worried at that point. It’s not often Mrs. Hall looks like someone run her over with a carriage.

  She stood there for a while, blank, and then finally she started speaking. Said that his injuries must have something to do with his mouth, cause when she pushed in with the mustard, he put his serviette up to his face and wouldn’t move it for nothing till she turned to leave.

  “Something terrible must have happened to him,” I said, and she nodded, staring off into a distance.

  You’d have thought that would have been enough to keep a person from going on and bothering with him any more, but not Mrs. Hall. In fact, it wasn’t a half-hour passed before she took herself back up there, and this time it was to try and make a friend of him.

  I suppose I made my own reasons for being round where she was, too. Cause it was something to watch her get to work on him, it was. She was smooth as a confidence man if ever I saw one. Stood there in his room and started telling him about her sister’s boy, Tom, who’d cut his arm on a scythe last summer, and how Tom was three months getting better. “My sister wa
s tied up with her little ones, though,” she told him, “and there were all those bandages of Tom’s to do and undo every day. So I took to changing the bandages as a way of helping, and by the end of that summer I knew my way round wrapping and unwrapping people.” She paused after she finished her story, to make her point, and what she told the Invisible Man at the end of her ramble was, “If I may make so bold as to say it, sir—”

  Before she could finish making so bold, though, old goggle-eyes interrupted to say, “Will you get me some matches? My pipe is out.”

  I had to put my hand over my mouth when I heard that one out in the hall where I’d been putting away the bedding. He pulled her right up, he did. But she got him those matches he asked for, and she never did make so bold as to say anything else.

  Later that day was when she brought in Teddy Henfrey, like I mentioned, to make a show of fixing that dead clock. But Teddy stayed over his welcome. Kept trying to fix things about that clock that didn’t need fixing, just so he could get a look at our strange houseguest. So it weren’t just Mrs. Hall who was curious. I suppose anyone with a mind that notices things wanted a look at him. But when it was clear Teddy was wasting his time on that clock, goggle-eyes told him that’s exactly what he was doing, and sent him right off. I hear Teddy went round town in a tizzy about how a man must do a clock at times, surely!

  That was probably the first mistake, if you want to start counting the important ones, the ones that started other things happening. Mrs. Hall let Teddy in the man’s room for her own reasons, and when the Invisible Man threw Teddy out, Teddy went about town like a cloud spewing thunder and lightning. It was Teddy, you see, who ran across Mr. Hall coming back from his conveyance route to Sidderbridge Junction and told him, “You got a rum-looking customer at the Coach and Horses, Hall!”