Year's Best SF 8

by David G. Hartwell

  And now Earth couldn’t afford Venusian water either. So Venus fought a bloody civil war for control of what was left of her trade. For a while MacShard had run bootleg water out of New Malvern. The kind of money the rich were prepared to pay for a tiny bottle was phenomenal. But he’d become sickened with it when he’d walked through London’s notorious Westminster district and seen degenerates spending an artisan’s wages on jars of gray reconstitute while mothers held the corpses of dehydrated babies in their arms and begged for the money to bury them.

  “Mr. Captain John MacShard.”

  Captain John MacShard knew the boy had followed him all the way to the hotel. Without turning, he said: “You’d better introduce yourself, sonny.”

  The boy seemed ashamed, as if he had never been detected before. He hung his head. “My dad called me Milton,” he said.

  Captain John MacShard smiled then. Once. He stopped when he saw the boy’s face. The child had been laughed at too often and to him it meant danger, distrust, pain. “So your dad was Mr. Eliot, right?”

  The boy forgot any imagined insult. “You knew him?”

  “How long did your mother know him?”

  “Well, he was on one of those long-haul ion sailors. He was a great guitarist. Singer. Wrote all his own material. He was going to see a producer when he came back from Earth with enough money to marry. Well, you know that story.” The boy lowered his eyes. “Never came back.”

  “I’m not your pa,” said Captain John MacShard and went inside. He closed his door. He marveled at the tricks the street kids used these days. But that stuff couldn’t work on him. He’d seen six-year-old masters pulling the last Uranian bakh from a tight-fisted New Nantucket blubber-chaser who had just finished a speech about a need for more workhouses.

  A few moments later, Morricone arrived. Captain John MacShard knew it was him by the quick, almost hesitant rap.

  “It’s open,” he said. There was never any point in locking doors in this place. It advertised you had something worth stealing. Maybe just your body.

  Morricone was terrified. He was terrified of the neighborhood and he was terrified of Captain John MacShard. But he was even more terrified of something else. Of whatever the Thennet might have done to his daughter.

  Captain John MacShard had no love for the Thennet, and he didn’t need a big excuse to put a few more of their number in hell.

  The gaudily dressed old man shuffled into the room, and his terror didn’t go away. Captain John MacShard closed the door behind him. “Don’t tell me about the Thennet,” he said. “I know about them and what they do. Tell me when they took your daughter and whatever else you know about where they took her.”

  “Out past the old tombs. A good fifty or sixty versts from here. Beyond the Yellow Canal. I paid a breed to follow them. That’s as far as he got. He said the trail went on, but he wasn’t going any farther. I got the same from all of them. They won’t follow the Thennet into the Aghroniagh Hills. Then I heard you had just come down from Earth.” He made some effort at ordinary social conversation. His eyes remained crazed. “What’s it like back there now?”

  “This is better,” said Captain John MacShard. “So they went into the Aghroniagh Hills? When?”

  “Some two days ago…”

  Captain John MacShard turned away with a shrug.

  “I know,” said the merchant. “But this was different. They weren’t going to eat her or—or—play with her…” His skin crawled visibly. “They were careful not to mark her. It was as if she was for someone else. Maybe a big slaver? They wouldn’t let any of their saliva drip on her. They got me, though.” He extended the twisted branch of burned flesh that had been his forearm.

  Captain John MacShard drew a deep breath and began to take off his boots. “How much?”

  “Everything. Anything.”

  “You’ll owe me a million hard deens if I bring her back alive. I won’t guarantee her sanity.”

  “You’ll have the money. I promise. Her name’s Mercedes. She’s sweet and decent—the only good thing I ever helped create. She was staying with me…the vacation…her mother and I…”

  Captain John MacShard moved toward his board bed. “Half in the morning. Give me a little time to put the money in a safe place. Then I’ll leave. But not before.”

  After Morricone had shuffled away, his footsteps growing softer and softer until they faded into the general music of the rowdy street outside, Captain John MacShard began to laugh.

  It wasn’t a laugh you ever wanted to hear again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Unpromised Land

  The Aghroniagh Hills had been formed by a huge asteroid crashing into the area a few million years earlier, but the wide sweep of meadowland and streams surrounding them had never been successfully settled by Captain John MacShard’s people. They were far from what they seemed.

  Many settlers had come in the early days, attracted by the water and the grass. Few lasted a month, let alone a season. That water and grass existed on Mars because of Blake, the terraplaner. He had made it his life’s work, crossing and recrossing one set of disparate genes with another until he had something which was like grass and like water and which could survive, maybe even thrive and proliferate, in Mars’ barren climate. A sort of liquid algae and a kind of lichen, at root, but with so many genetic modifications that its mathematical pedigree filled a book.

  Blake’s great atmosphere pumping stations had transformed the Martian air and made it rich enough for Earthlings to breathe. He had meant to turn the whole of Mars into the same lush farmland he had seen turn to dust on Earth. Some believed he had grown too ambitious, that instead of doing God’s work, he was beginning to believe he, himself, was God. He had planned a city called New Jerusalem and had designed its buildings, its parks, streams, and ornamental lakes. He had planted his experimental fields and brought his first pioneer volunteers and given them seed he had made and fertilizer he had designed, and something had happened under the unshielded Martian sunlight which had not happened in his laboratories.

  Blake’s Eden became worse than Purgatory.

  His green shoots and laughing fountains developed a kind of intelligence, a taste for specific nutrients, a means of finding them and processing them to make them edible. Those nutrients were most commonly found in Earthlings. The food could be enticed the way an anemone entices an insect. The prey saw sweet water, green grass and it was only too glad to fling itself deep into the greedy shoots, the thirsty liquid, which was only too glad to digest it.

  And so fathers had watched their children die before their eyes, killed and absorbed in moments. Women had seen hard-working husbands die before becoming food themselves.

  Blake’s seven pioneer families lasted a year and there had been others since who brought certain means of defeating the so-called Paradise virus, who challenged the hungry grass and liquid, who planned to tame it. One by one, they went to feed what had been intended to feed them.

  There were ways of surviving the Paradise. Captain John MacShard had tried them and tested them. For a while he had specialized in finding artifacts which the settlers had left behind, letters, deeds, cherished jewelry.

  He had learned how to live, for short periods at least, in the Paradise. He had kept raising his price until it got too high for anybody.

  Then he quit. It was the way he put an end to his own boredom. What he did with all his money nobody knew, but he didn’t spend it on himself.

  The only money Captain John MacShard was known to exchange in large quantities was for modifications and repairs to that ship of his, as alien as his sidearm, which he’d picked up in the Rings and claimed by right of salvage. Even the scrap merchants hadn’t wanted the ship. The metal it was made of could become poisonous to the touch. Like the weapon, the ship didn’t allow everyone to handle her.

  Captain John MacShard paid a halfling phunt-renter to drive him to the edge of the Paradise, and he promised the sweating driver the price of
his phunt if he’d wait for news of his reappearance and come take him back to the city. “And any other passenger I might have with me,” he had added.

  The phunter was almost beside himself with anxiety. He knew exactly what that green sentient weed could do, and he had heard tales of how the streams had chased a man halfway back to the Low City and consumed him on the spot. Drank him, they said. No sane creature, Earthling or Martian, would risk the dangers of the Paradise.

  Not only was the very landscape dangerous, there were also the Thennet.

  The Thennet, whose life-stuff was unpalatable to the Paradise, came and went comfortably all year round, emerging only occasionally to make raids on the human settlements, certain that no posse would ever dare follow them back to their city of tunnels, Kong Gresh, deep at the center of the Aghroniagh Crater, which lay at the center of the Aghroniagh Hills, where the weed did not grow and the streams did not flow.

  They raided for pleasure, the Thennet. Mostly, when they craved a delicacy. Human flesh was almost an addiction to them, they desired it so much. They were a cruel people and took pleasure in their captives, keeping them alive for many weeks sometimes, especially if they were young women. But they savored this killing. Schomberg had put it graphically enough once: The longer the torment, the sweeter the meat. His customers wondered how he understood such minds.

  Captain John MacShard knew Mercedes Morricone had a chance at life. He hoped, when he found her, that she would still want that chance.

  What had Morricone said about the Thennet not wishing to mark her? That they were capturing her for someone else?

  Who?

  Captain John MacShard wanted to find out for himself. No one had needed to pay the Thennet for young girls in years. The wars among the planets had given the streets plenty of good-looking women to choose from. Nobody ever noticed a few missing from time to time.

  If the Thennet were planning to sell her for the food they would need for the coming Long Winter, they would be careful to keep their goods in top quality, and Mercedes could well be a specific target. The odds were she was still alive and safe. That was why Captain John MacShard did not think he was wasting his time.

  And it was the only reason he would go this far into the Aghroniaghs, where the Thennet weren’t the greatest danger.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hell Under The Hill

  It was hard to believe the Thennet had ever been human, but there was no doubt they spoke a crude form of English. They were said to be degenerated descendants of a crashed Earth ship which had left Houston a couple of centuries before, carrying a political investigative committee looking into reports that Earth mining interests were using local labor as slaves. The reports had been right. The mining interests had made sure the distinguished senators never got to see the evidence.

  Captain John MacShard was wearing his own power armor. It buzzed on his body from soles to crown. The silky energy, soft as a child’s hand, rippled around him like an atmosphere. He flickered and buzzed with complex circuitry outlining his veins and arteries, following the course of his blood. This medley of soft sounds was given a crazy rhythm by the ticking of his antigrav’s notoriously dangerous regulators as he flew an inch above the hungry, whispering grass, the lush and luring streams of Paradise.

  Only once did he come down, in the ruins of what was to have been the city of New Jerusalem and where the grass did not grow.

  Here he ran at a loping pace which moved him faster over the landscape and at the same time recharged the antigrav’s short-lived power units.

  He was totally enclosed in the battlesuit of his own design, his visible skin a strange arsenical green behind the overlapping energy shields, his artificial gills processing the atmosphere to purify maximum oxygen. Around him as he moved was an unstable aura buzzing with gold and misty greens, skipping and sizzling as elements in his armor mixed and reacted with particles of semi-artificial Martian air, fusing them into toxic fumes which would kill a man if taken straight. Which is why Captain John MacShard wore his helmet. It most closely resembled the head of an ornamental dolphin, all sweeping flukes and baroque symmetry, the complicated, delicate wiring visible through the thin plasdex skin, while the macro-engineered plant curving from between his shoulder blades looked almost like wings. He could have been one of the forgotten beasts of the Eldren which they had ridden against Bast-Na-Gir when the first mythologies of Mars were being made. The transparent steel visor plate added to this alien appearance, enlarging and giving exaggerated curve to his eyes. He had become an unlikely creature whose outline would momentarily baffle any casual observer. There were things out here which fed off Thennet and human alike. Captain John MacShard only needed a second’s edge to survive. But that second was crucial.

  He was in the air again, his batteries at maximum charge. He was now a shimmering copper angel speeding over the thirsty grass and the hungry rivers of Paradise until he was at last standing on the shale slopes of the Aghroniagh Mountains.

  The range was essentially the rim of a huge steep-sided crater. At the crater’s center were peculiar pockets of gases which were the by-product of certain rock dust interacting with sunlight. These gases formed a breeding and sleeping environment for the Thennet, who could only survive so long away from what the first Earth explorers had called their “clouds.” Most of the gas, which had a narcotic effect

  on humans, was drawn down into their burrows by an ingenious system of vents and manually operated fans. It was the only machinery they used. Otherwise they were primitive enough, though inventive murderers who delighted in the slow, perverse death of anything that lived, including their own sick and wounded. Suicide was the commonest cause of death.

  As Captain John MacShard raced through the crags and eventually came to the crater walls, he knew he might have a few hours left in which to save the girl. The Thennet had a way of letting the gases work on their human victims so that they became light-headed and cheerful. The Thennet knew how to amuse humans.

  Sometimes they would let the human feel this way for days, until they began to get too sluggish.

  Then they would do something which produced a sudden rush of adrenaline in their victim. And thereafter it was unimaginable nightmare. Unimaginable because no human mind could conceive of such tortures and hold the memory or its sanity. No mind, that is, except Captain John MacShard’s. And it was questionable now that Captain John MacShard’s mind was still in most senses human.

  Here’s where I was too late. There’s her bone and necklace again. That’s the burrow into middle chamber. Gas goes low there. All these thoughts passed through his head as he retraced steps over razor rocks and unstable shale. He had been paid four times to venture into Thennet territory. Twice he had successfully brought out living victims, both still relatively sane. Once he had brought out a corpse. Once he had left a corpse where he found it. Seven times before that, curiosity had taken him there. The time they captured him, his chances of escape had been minimal. He was determined not to be captured again.

  Now, however, there was something different about the sinister, smoking landscape of craters and spikes. There was a kind of silence Captain John MacShard couldn’t explain. A sense of waiting. A sense of watching.

  Unable to do anything but ignore the instinct, he dropped down into the fissures and began to feel his way into the first flinty corridors. He had killed five Thennet guards almost without thought by the time he had begun to descend the great main passage into the Thennet underworld. He always killed Thennet at a distance, if he could. Their venom could sear into delicate circuitry and destroy his armor and his lifelines.

  Three more Thennet fell without knowing they were dead. Captain John MacShard felt no hesitation about killing them wherever he came across one. He killed them on principle, the way they killed by habit. The less of the Thennet there were, the better for everyone. And each corpse offered something useful to him as he crept on downward into the subsidiary tunnels, following still famil
iar routes.

  The walls of the caverns were thick with flaking blood and ordure, which the Thennet used for building materials. Mostly it had hardened, but every so often it became soft and slippery. Captain John MacShard had to adjust his step, glad of his gills as well as his armor, which meant he did not have to smell or touch any of the glistening stuff, though every so often his air system overloaded and he got just a hint of the disgusting stench.

  But something was wrong. His armor began to pop and tremble. It was a warning. Captain John MacShard paused in the slippery passage and considered withdrawing. There would normally be more Thennet, males and females, shuffling through the passages, going about their business, tending their eggs, tormenting their food.

  He had a depressing feeling that he couldn’t easily get back, that he was already in a trap. Was it a trap which had been set for him specifically? Or could anyone be the prey? This wasn’t the Thennet. Could it be the Thennet had new leadership and wider goals? Captain John MacShard could smell intelligence. This was intelligence. And it wasn’t a kind he’d smelled before. Not in Thennet territory. Mostly what you smelled was terror and ghastly glee.

  There was something else down here. Something which had a personality. Something which had ambitions. Something which was even now gathering power.

  Captain John MacShard had learned to trust his instincts, and his instincts told him he would have to fight to return to the surface. What was more, he had an unpleasant feeling about what he might have to fight….

  His best chance was to pretend he had noticed nothing, but keep his attention on that intelligence, even as he sought out the merchant’s daughter. What was her name? Mercedes?