The Nex

by Tim Pratt

  “I know it is,” Howlaa said. “Now get in the fish. This lake isn’t going to cross itself.”

  I blinked. “In that?”

  Howlaa thumped the side of the big fish, and a hatch popped open, with a collapsible stairway unfolding down. “The only way to travel. At least, the only way to travel unnoticed. If we move on the surface of the lake, the Regent’s spies might see us, but if we travel under the waves...”

  “That thing’s a submarine? I thought it was, I don’t know, a bath toy for giants.”

  “The only giants here are the steam colossi, and they don’t take baths,” Wisp said. “And while they do enjoy toys, of a sort... this isn’t the sort.”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Howlaa said. “Or close enough. You might get wet, but otherwise. Merrill swears it’s seaworthy. He knows if he tries to drown us I’ll just swim out and drown him.” Howlaa made a hurry-up motion but I didn’t budge.

  “Can’t you just turn into a manatee or something? Swim that way?”

  “Yes, and Wisp can just dim his lights a bit and float, but you can’t, and we need you. Until we figure out how to work that jump-engine you’re wearing, you need to travel the ordinary way.”

  I didn’t think a big metal fish was very ordinary. “Where exactly are we going? You keep talking about a plan, plans for me, and I know what your goal is, but what are we doing?”

  An old man with a neatly trimmed beard, wearing a long white robe, appeared between us. He didn’t so much as glance at me, just smiled beatifically, looking at nothing in particular. “Howlaa. This disobedience saddens me. And Wisp, I expected better of you. Please, both of you, return to the palace. Whatever your objections to the terms of your service, I’m sure we can work out some mutually beneficial agreement. Just return the thing you stole, and all will be forgiven.” The old man chuckled. “I can’t fault you for stealing, after all. You did learn it from watching me. But you must choose your targets more wisely.”

  “Into the fish,” Howlaa said. “No more talk, now.”

  I hurried around the man, wanting to ask who he was. He sighed. “I assume you’re ignoring me? Attempting to flee? Really, Howlaa, all the resources of Nexington-on-Axis are arrayed against you. Didn’t you realize we would have Merrill under remote surveillance, after the indiscretions in his past? Admittedly, he tends to destroy any equipment we place within his perimeter of influence, but he can’t knock spy satellites out of the sky.”

  “Ignore him,” Wisp said. “It’s just a projection, beamed down from the satellite. They can see us with their remote cameras, but they can’t hear us, and they can only see the tops of your heads, not your faces. And, I hope, not your jewelry.”

  I went up the rickety steps into the fish. There was another door immediately in front of me, like I was in an airlock, so I pushed that open and looked around. I’d been on boats before. This wasn’t much like those boats. The inside of the fish was mostly bare metal and steel mesh and pipes running everywhere, and it smelled of algae. “Is that guy the Regent?”

  “None other,” Howlaa said. “Probably sending a fleet of autogyros and drone jets as we speak. The sooner we get into the lake the better. The satellites can’t see underwater, and it’s a big lake, and I know all the caves.” Howlaa slammed the door shut, and I tried to find a place to sit that didn’t look like it would give me tetanus just from touching it.

  “Where’s Howlaa going?”

  “She has to push the sub in the water,” Wisp said. The fish jerked, and lurched, and splashed, and I barely kept my seat by grabbing a metal cross-bar overhead. The hatch opened again and Howlaa climbed in, dripping water.

  “How did you push this thing? It’s huge!”

  “Some of my forms are very strong.” Howlaa went past me and sat down in a pilot’s chair in the fish’s head. She started to throw levers and flip switches and the fish sank, the big glass eyes filling up with lake water, clear at first, then murkier as we descended. Water began to drip in tiny dribbles from the inside of the fish’s head, though it was dry where I sat. “I’ll take evasive maneuvers, though I doubt there are other subs here. They were all in the Landlock Sea last time I saw a status-of-force report. It will take some time for the Regent to get combat vessels here, and we’ll be gone by then, I hope.”

  “So about this plan –” I said.

  “Shushit!” Howlaa shouted, and I shrunk back as her voice echoed in the confines of the sub.

  “Howlaa needs to concentrate now,” Wisp said, soothing. “Better to talk about... other things. You mentioned your mother’s boyfriend. What happened to your, ah, original father?”

  “Wisp is taking an interest,” Howlaa said from the sweating head of the fish, and I wondered if her friendly tone was an apology for snapping at me. “Watch out.”

  “I am interested,” Wisp said, sounding dramatically hurt. I guess when you don’t have a face you learn to put a lot of expression into your voice. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but it’s apt to be a long voyage, and Howlaa’s not much of a conversationalist.”

  “My Dad was –” I almost used my Mom’s phrase, and said “He was taken from us,” but instead I said, “He got blown up. Two years ago.”

  “Bomb? Mortar fire? Soldier?” Howlaa sounded halfway interested.

  “He was a chef. At a restaurant downtown. There was a gas leak one night, and he was the first one in the next morning, wanted to try out some new ideas for recipes, and... They think when he turned on the light there was a spark, or maybe he just somehow didn’t smell the gas and tried to turn on the stove... Anyway, the restaurant blew up. We went to see it, after. Nothing left but a hole in the ground and some pipes sticking out.”

  “I am sorry for your loss,” Wisp said, solemn.

  “Hell of a thing,” Howlaa said. “There may be explosions in our future, but we’ll try to keep you out of them.”

  “Do you have a large family?” Wisp asked.

  “A few cousins I don’t see much, but otherwise, no, just me, my Mom, and my brother Cal, for whatever he’s worth.”

  “Ah,” Wisp said. “Your brother is... not nice?”

  “He’s just Cal.” I almost missed him. “He won’t drive me to school unless Mom yells at him, but he’s not all bad. He lets me watch his band practice.” His guitarist was really cute, even if the music sucked. “He’s the only one who hates Mom’s boyfriend as much as I do.” I looked at the rings on my fingers and sighed. “Cal’s the one who found the jump-engine. I don’t know where. I guess he just picked it up because it was pretty, same as me, probably saw it on the side of the road somewhere. I noticed it glinting in the back of his car when I got home from school yesterday...” Was it only yesterday? “Anyway, I know where he keeps his spare key, so I unlocked the car and took the necklace. He came out of the house and yelled at me and started chasing me so I took off into the woods.”

  “Ha! She stole,” Howlaa said. “See, she’ll be right at home here.”

  I thought about saying “I steal lots of things,” but that wasn’t exactly something to be proud of, was it? I don’t know why it started. The shoplifting, I mean. I never did it before Dad died. I’m not a kleptomaniac, it’s not like I can’t stop myself from taking stuff. I just like it. Jenny Kay started it, kind of, stealing some sunglasses from the mall and encouraging me to do the same, but I took it a lot farther than Jenny ever did. There’s a loose board in the floor of my closet and I’ve got all kinds of stuff in there. I tell myself it’s Christmas presents for everybody, but it’s not like I even steal things anybody would want. Shoplifting just makes me feel a thrill, like I’m on an adventure, like life is exciting and dangerous instead of boring and annoying. I feel bad afterward, but the thrill is better than the guilt is bad, you know?

  Something started beeping like an insistent alarm clock. “Piss and poison,” Howlaa said. “We’ve got frogmen coming after us.” She leaned forward and peered into the water, but I couldn’t see any
thing but murk.

  “Like scuba divers?” I said. “With spear guns or something?”

  “No,” Wisp said. “Literally frogmen. They’re called Dagonites. They must have a settlement near here. And they have much worse than spearguns. Normally they aren’t aggressive. The Regent must have sent them.”

  “They work for the Regent?”

  “Everyone here works for the Regent, Miranda. The whole of Nexington-on-Axis. Most of the residents just hope he never thinks of a job for them. But when he calls, you answer. Obedience is the price they pay for food and security”

  “Take the helm, Randy,” Howlaa said. “I’m going for a little swim.” She stood up and went to the airlock hatch.

  “I – what?”

  “Just sit there, and if the nose starts to dip, pull back on the lever with the red handle, just a little. If the nose starts to tilt up, push the same lever forward. It’s simple. I don’t want you to go anywhere, just keep the fish steady.”

  “But can’t –” No. Wisp couldn’t do it. Wisp didn’t have a body.

  “It’s you, Randy.”

  I sat down in the pilot’s seat and touched the lever lightly. I could see things moving in the water, now, but couldn’t make out exactly what they were. “What are you going to do?”

  Howlaa paused by the airlock. “I haven’t been a Manipogo in ages. It should be fun. And Manipogos eat Dagonites.” Then she climbed in, slammed shut the hatch, and was gone.

  “Well,” Wisp said. “Either Howlaa will win, or we’ll throw caution to the wind and see if we can figure out how to work that jump-engine after all.”

  “Because dying in the vacuum of space is better than waiting to drown inside this fish?”

  “You understand the situation completely.”

  We sat. We bobbed. We waited. I saw something like a snake the size of a couch but longer go slithering across the fish’s transparent eyes, twisting sinuously as it passed.

  I never knew screams sounded like that under water.

  Chapter 4

  The fish shifted in a sudden surge of water, either from invisible currents or because of Howlaa’s slimy violence. I hauled back on the stick way too hard and the fish’s head tilted up, up, up, but I took a deep breath and eased it forward gently, just a touch at a time, and it settled back to the comfortably horizontal again. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so twisted-up and worried inside. Probably right after dad died.

  Wanting to take my mind off the ten million things totally beyond my control, I said, “That big sea serpent thing that went past the window – that was Howlaa?”

  “In the green and scaly flesh,” Wisp said.

  “But it was like a hundred feet long. How can that be Howlaa? I’m not a scientist or anything, but isn’t there some kind of law of conservation of... bigness?”

  “I believe the Howlaa we see – in whatever form she takes – is not the real Howlaa. Not all of her. Skinshifters have never been extensively studied, and much about their nature is mysterious. They don’t like to reveal their secrets, and since they have a unique gift for posing as members local populations, they’re seldom even recognized. One theory holds that skinshifters are extradimensional creatures. The part of Howlaa we see is simply the part that... emerges into the dimensions you and I are able to perceive. The rest of her body – including additional mass – is somewhere else.” He went on for a while, saying things like “M-theory” and “string theory” and “brane cosmology,” and I just let it wash over me, not because I’m dumb, but because I didn’t have the background – it was like learning algebra before you can add or subtract. Jenny Kay would’ve understood it all, I bet. I felt a stab of homesickness, sort of, but it was just homesickness for Jenny. It would’ve been good to have her here with me.

  Wisp must’ve noticed the faraway look on my face, because he said, “Listen: think of a shark’s fin, breaking the surface of the water, coming toward you. You can see the fin, and you can deduce the existence of the shark, but you can’t actually see the shark. You see? The fin is all that extends into your world from the water. But instead of hiding under water, the rest of Howlaa is hidden away in higher dimensions of our universe.”

  “Like an iceberg,” I said. “Nine-tenths of it is underwater.”

  “Apt enough, though when talking about Howlaa, a shark is a better metaphor than an iceberg.”

  The airlock squealed, and I turned in my chair, wishing for a speargun or something – but then, I always had my rings and bracelets, and if I had no other choice, those would maybe let me punch somebody hard enough to make them disappear, or at least get me to safety.

  Howlaa came in, looking perfectly human if extremely wet in a shadowcloth bikini, dragging what looked like some kind of green garbage bag full of bones. But when she tossed the thing on the floor, I realized it had a face, and the greasy pierogies I ate at Merrill’s rose up in my throat. I fought down the urge to puke by squeezing my hands into fists so hard the rings dug into my flesh, distracting myself with pain.

  “I see you brought a souvenir,” Wisp said.

  Howlaa leaned over and spat several times, expelling ropy green slime with each hacking gag. She wiped her hand across her mouth and shuddered, then caught my eye. “Sorry. Bad manners. Wisp is always telling me to be less disgusting. But Dagonites have poison in their skin. Doesn’t bother me when I’m a Manipogo – they’re immune – but I had to expel the poison from this body unless I wanted to go gangrenous from the inside out. Hop up from my chair, Randy. We should get going before the second wave arrives.”

  I got up, though it meant moving closer to the corpse in front of the airlock. I’d never seen a dead person before, and this wasn’t exactly a person, but then again, it kinda was. The dead Dagonite had a bracelet of its own, seashells and smooth beads on a string, and I wondered if the jewelry had been a gift, or if the Dagonite had made it, or –

  “It was us or them,” Wisp said in a low voice. “Always pick ‘us’ in that situation. Anyone would.”

  “Here’s something to take your mind off the moral torment.” Howlaa reached into a pocket of the shadowcloth – a bikini with pockets? – and tossed me something like an oversized brown leather wallet. I opened it and found a creepy-looking syringe, the old-timey kind you see in horror movies set in abandoned insane asylums, all dull brass finger-holds and a needle the size of a ballpoint pen. “Jam that in Froggy’s neck and suck out some of his blood.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re right,” Howlaa said. “It doesn’t really have a neck. Just shove it generally below the head there. You’ll probably hit blood.”

  “Why... would I be doing this?”

  “Wisp, I have to drive,” Howlaa said crankily, and turned away, pulling levers and twisting knobs and sending the submersible fish through the lake water at high speed. Occasional green lumps bumped off the windows and spun lazily away.

  “Howlaa doesn’t have a Dagonite in her... repertoire,” Wisp said. “But if you draw the blood, Howlaa can drink it.”

  “You drink blood? I thought you were a werewolf, not a vampire.”

  Howlaa didn’t answer me, didn’t even appear to hear me, just turned on some wobbly black-and-white screen on the fish’s cockpit that beeped and booped, like sonar or something.

  “Howlaa can take on the form of any creature she consumes,” Wisp said. “It’s disgusting, worse even than the ordinary eating habits of the bodied, I know, but it is her way. Skinshifters can take in a genetic sample, extrapolate the entire organism from that sample, and duplicate that organism, perfect in every way.”

  I looked at the back of Howlaa’s totally human neck. “So at some point... Howlaa drank the blood of a human?” Like me, I didn’t say.

  “Ah,” Wisp said. “Well. In that particular situation, it was consensual. Part of a rather complex intrigue involving impersonation and espionage in the service of the Regent... but that was long ago.”

  “And that w
oman’s been dead for eighty thousand days,” Howlaa said. “Her genes only live on in me. But, yes, most of the other bodies are things I just ate. I didn’t consume any of the Dagonites during that battle, though – just bit them dead and spat them out. They tasted awful. The blood won’t be a treat, either, but I want it.”

  “Skinshifters are apex predators,” Wisp said. “Masters of disguise. Once they manage to eat one example of a species, they can blend in with the herd... or society... and prey on others at will.”

  “Wolf in sheep’s clothing,” I said. I’d known Howlaa was kind of scary, that much was obvious, but somehow the total not-human-ness of her hadn’t sunk in before. Turning into a wolf, okay, werewolves are just people with a weird medical problem and a big shaving cream budget. I could relate to a werewolf. But Howlaa only looked human, and she was really something else entirely. “Are you sure you two are the good guys?”

  “Definitely, in comparison to the opposition,” Wisp said. “But Howlaa only plays the predator in the line of duty these days. If she ever did otherwise, ever tried to prey on an innocent, I would step in, and stop it.”

  “How would you – Oh. The body control thing.”

  “It’s why we were made partners,” Howlaa said. “The Regent knew I wouldn’t like being leashed, so he sent Wisp along to make sure I behaved myself. If I tried to run – not that there’s anywhere to run on the Ax, not really – Wisp would hijack my body and walk me back to the palace for a bout of reeducation.” Howlaa turned and gave me one of her grins. “It took me decades to get Wisp reeducated into seeing things my way.”

  “I owed a debt to society,” Wisp said stiffly. “I sought only to pay it off honorably, through service. But the Regent abused my loyalty, and his sovereignty, and I agreed to help Howlaa find a way out of our situation. Out of this place. Beyond the Regent’s reach, even though his reach extends into every corner of every possible universe.”

  “Now that you know the terrible true nature of beastly old me,” Howlaa said, “suck out that frog’s blood, Randy. Before it spoils and starts to stink. Blood dead more than a little while is no good to me – the cells decay.”