The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  “How long has she been like this?” I asked.

  “Ohhhh…” He blew out his cheeks. “Forty-seven, maybe fifty years?”

  “You her father?”

  “Husband. Was, anyhow. Not sure how long the vows were meant to hold up under these conditions: can’t say I’ve kept ’em any too well. You got something that bag for her?” He said it as casual as he could, but his eyes were big and spooked-looking.

  I made my decision. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll give you forty dollars for her.”

  “The sheriff wouldn’t think much of what you just said,” the man said low and quiet.

  “No. But then, I suppose I’ll be off of the eye-lands entirely before he knows a word of it.”

  I picked up my syringe.

  “Well? Is it a deal or not?”

  ***

  Her name was Victoria. We were a good three days march into the chitin before she came out of the trance state characteristic of the interim zombie stage of Recovery. I’d fitted her with a pack, walking shoes, and a good stout stick, and she strode along head up, eyes blank, speaking in the tongues of angels afloat between the stars.

  “—cisgalactic phase intercept,” she said. “Do you read? Das Uberraumboot zuruckgegenerinnernte. Verstehen? Anadaemonic mesotechnological conflict strategizing. Drei tausenden Affen mit Laseren! Hello? Is anybody—”

  Then she stumbled over a rock, cried out in pain, and said, “Where am I?”

  I stopped, spread a map on the ground, and got out my pocket gravitometer. It was a simple thing: a glass cylinder filled with aerogel and a bright orange ceramic bead. The casing was tin, with a compressor screw at the top, a calibrated scale along the side, and the words “Flynn & Co.” at the bottom. I flipped it over, watched the bead slowly fall. I tightened the screw a notch, then two, then three, increasing the aerogel’s density. At five, the bead stopped. I read the gauge, squinted up at the sun, and then jabbed a finger on an isobar to one edge of the map.

  “Right here,” I said. “Just off the lens. See?”

  “I don’t—” She was trembling with panic. Her dilated eyes shifted wildly from one part of the empty horizon to another. Then suddenly, sourcelessly, she burst into tears.

  Embarrassed, I looked away. When she was done crying, I patted the ground. “Sit.” Sniffling, she obeyed. “How old are you, Victoria?”

  “How old am…? Sixteen?” she said tentatively. “Seventeen?” Then, “Is that really my name?”

  “It was. The woman you were grew tired of life, and injected herself with a drug that destroys the ego and with it all trace of personal history.” I sighed. “So in one sense you’re still Victoria, and in another sense you’re not. What she did was illegal, though; you can never go back to the oculus. You’d be locked into jail for the rest of your life.”

  She looked at me through eyes newly young, almost childlike in their experience, and still wet with tears. I was prepared for hysteria, grief, rage. But all she said was, “Are you a magician?”

  That rocked me back on my heels. “Well—yes,” I said. “I suppose I am.”

  She considered that silently for a moment. “So what happens to me now?”

  “Your job is to carry that pack. We also go turn-on-turn with the dishes.” I straightened, folding the map. “Come on. We’ve got a far way yet to go.”

  We commenced marching, in silence at first. But then, not many miles down the road and to my complete astonishment, Victoria began to sing!

  ***

  We followed the faintest of paths—less a trail than the memory of a dream of the idea of one—across the chitin. Alongside it grew an occasional patch of grass. A lot of wind-blown loess had swept across the chitin-lands over the centuries. It caught in cracks in the carapace and gave purchase to fortuitous seeds. Once I even saw a rabbit. But before I could point it out to Victoria, I saw something else. Up ahead, in a place where the shell had powdered and a rare rainstorm had turned the powder briefly to mud, were two overlapping tire prints. A motorbike had been by here, and recently.

  I stared at the tracks for a long time, clenching and unclenching my good hand.

  The very next day we came upon a settlement.

  It was a hardscrabble place. Just a windmill to run the pump that brought up a trickle of ichor from a miles-deep well, a refinery to process the stuff edible, and a handful of unpainted clapboard buildings and Quonset huts. Several battered old pickup trucks sat rusting under the limitless sky.

  A gaunt man stood by the gate, waiting for us. His jaw was hard, his backbone straight and his hands empty. But I noted here and there a shiver of movement in a window or from the open door of a shed, and I made no mistake but that there were weapons trained upon us.

  “Name’s Rivera,” the man said when we came up to him.

  I swept off my bowler hat. “Daniel. This’s Miss Victoria, my ward.”

  “Passing through?”

  “Yessir, I am, and I see no reason I should ever pass this way again. If you have food for sale, I’ll pay you market rates. But if not, why, with your permission, we’ll just keep on moving on.”

  “Fair spoken.” From somewhere Rivera produced a cup of water, and handed it to us. I drank half, handed the rest to Victoria. She shivered as it went down.

  “Right good,” I said. “And cold too.”

  “We have a heat pump,” Rivera said with grudging pride. “C’mon inside. Let’s see what the women have made us to eat.”

  Then the children came running out, whooping and hollering, too many to count, and the adult people behind them, whom I made out to be twenty in number. They made us welcome.

  They were good people, if outlaws, and as hungry for news and gossip as anybody can be. I told them about a stump speech I had heard made by Tyler B. Morris, who was running for governor of the Northern Department, and they spent all of dinnertime discussing it. The food was good, too—ham and biscuits with red-eye gravy, sweet yams with butter, and apple cobbler to boot. If I hadn’t seen their chemical complex, I’d’ve never guessed it for synthetic. There were lace curtains in the window, brittle-old but clean, and I noted how carefully the leftovers were stored away for later.

  After we’d eaten, Rivera caught my eye and gestured with his chin. We went outside, and he led me to a shed out back. He unpadlocked the door and we stepped within. A line of ten people lay unmoving on plain-built beds. They were each catheterized to a drip-bag of processed ichor. Light from the door caught their hair, ten white haloes in the gloom.

  “We brought them with us,” Rivera said. “Thought we’d be doing well enough to make a go of it. Lately, though, I don’t know, maybe it’s the drought, but the blood’s been running thin, and it’s not like we have the money to have a new well drilled.”

  “I understand.” Then, because it seemed a good time to ask, “There was a man came by this way probably less’n a week ago. Tall, riding a—”

  “He wouldn’t help,” Harry said. “Said it wasn’t his responsibility. Then, before he drove off, the sonofabitch tried to buy some of our food.” He turned and spat. “He told us you and the woman would be coming along. We been waiting.”

  “Wait. He told you I’d have a woman with me?”

  “It’s not just us we have to think of!” he said with sudden vehemence. “There’s the young fellers, too. They come along and all a man’s stiff-necked talk about obligations and morality goes right out the window. Sometimes I think how I could come out here with a length of iron pipe and—well.” He shook his head and then, almost pleadingly, said, “Can’t you do something?”

  “I think so.” A faint creaking noise made me turn then. Victoria stood frozen in the doorway. The light through her hair made of it a white flare. I closed my eyes, wishing she hadn’t stumbled across this thing. In a neutral voice I said, “Get my bag.”

  Then Rivera and I set to haggling out a price.

  ***

  We left the settlement with a goodly store of food and
driving their third-best pickup truck. It was a pathetic old thing and the shocks were scarce more than a memory. We bumped and jolted toward the south.

  For a long time Victoria did not speak. Then she turned to me and angrily blurted, “You killed them!”

  “It was what they wanted.”

  “How can you say that?” She twisted in the seat and punched me in the shoulder. Hard. “How can you sit there and…say that?”

  “Look,” I said testily. “It’s simple mathematics. You could make an equation out of it. They can only drill so much ichor. That ichor makes only so much food. Divide that by the number of mouths there are to feed and hold up the result against what it takes to keep one alive. So much food, so many people. If the one’s smaller than the other, you starve. And the children wanted to live. The folks in the shed didn’t.”

  “They could go back! Nobody has to live out in the middle of nowhere trying to scratch food out of nothing!”

  “I counted one suicide for every two waking adults. Just how wel-come do you think they’d be, back to the oculus, with so many suicides living among them? More than likely that’s what drove them out here in the first place.”

  “Well…nobody would be starving if they didn’t insist on having so many damn children.”

  “How can you stop people from having children?” I asked.

  There was no possible answer to that and we both knew it. Victoria leaned her head against the cab window, eyes squeezed tight shut, as far from me as she could get. “You could have woken them up! But no, you had your bag of goodies and you wanted to play. I’m surprised you didn’t kill me when you had the chance.”

  “Vickie…”

  “Don’t speak to me!”

  She started to weep.

  I wanted to hug her and comfort her, she was so miserable. But I was driving, and I only had the one good arm. So I didn’t. Nor did I explain to her why it was that nobody chose to simply wake the suicides up.

  ***

  That evening, as usual, I got out the hatchet and splintered enough chitin for a campfire. I was sitting by it, silent, when Victoria got out the jug of rough liquor the settlement folks had brewed from ichor. “You be careful with that stuff,” I said. “It sneaks up on you. Don’t forget, whatever experience you’ve had drinking got left behind in your first life.”

  “Then you drink!” she said, thrusting a cup at me. “I’ll follow your lead. When you stop, I’ll stop.”

  I swear I never suspected what she had in mind. And it had been a long while since I’d tasted alcohol. So, like a fool, I took her intent at face value. I had a drink. And then another.

  Time passed.

  We talked some, we laughed some. Maybe we sang a song or two.

  Then, somehow, Victoria had shucked off her blouse and was dancing. She whirled around the campfire, her long skirts lifting up above her knees and occasionally flirting through the flames so that the hem browned and smoked but never quite caught fire.

  This wildness seemed to come out of nowhere. I watched her, alarmed and aroused, too drunk to think clearly, too entranced even to move.

  Finally she collapsed gracefully at my feet. The firelight was red on her naked back, shifting with each gasping breath she took. She looked up at me through her long, sweat-tangled hair, and her eyes were like amber, dark as cypress swamp water, brown and bottomless. Eyes a man could drown in.

  I pulled her toward me. Laughing, she surged forward, collapsing upon me, tumbling me over backwards, fumbling with my belt and then the fly of my jeans. Then she had my cock out and stiff and I’d pushed her skirt up above her waist so that it seemed she was wearing nothing but a thick red sash. And I rolled her over on her back and she was reaching down between her legs to guide me in and she was smiling and lovely.

  I plunged deep, deep, deep into her, and oh god but it felt fine. Like that eye-opening shock you get when you plunge into a cold lake for the first time on a hot summer’s day and the water wraps itself around you and feels so impossibly good. Only this was warm and slippery-slick and a thousand times better. Then I was telling her things, telling her I needed her, I wanted her, I loved her, over and over again.

  ***

  I awoke the next morning with a raging hangover. Victoria was sitting in the cab of the pickup, brushing her long white hair in the rear-view mirror and humming to herself.

  “Well,” she said, amused. “Look what the cat dragged in. There’s water in the jerrycans. Have yourself a drink. I expect we could also spare a cup for you to wash your face with.”

  “Look,” I said. “I’m sorry about last night.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “I maybe said some foolish things, but—”

  Her eyes flashed storm-cloud dark. “You weren’t speaking near so foolish then as you are now. You meant every damn word, and I’m holding you to them.” Then she laughed. “You’d best get at that water. You look hideous.”

  So I dragged myself off.

  Overnight, Victoria had changed. Her whole manner, the way she held herself, even the way she phrased her words, told me that she wasn’t a child anymore. She was a woman.

  The thing I’d been dreading had begun.

  ***

  “Resistance is useless,” Victoria read. “For mine is the might and power of the Cosmos Itself!” She’d found a comic book stuck back under the seat and gone through it three times, chuckling to herself, while the truck rattled down that near-nonexistent road. Now she put it down. “Tell me something,” she said. “How do you know your magician came by this way?”

  “I just know is all,” I said curtly. I’d given myself a shot of B-complex vitamins, but my head and gut still felt pretty ragged. Nor was it particularly soothing having to drive this idiot truck one-armed. And, anyway, I couldn’t say just how I knew. It was a feeling I had, a certainty.

  “I had a dream last night. After we, ummmm, danced.”

  I didn’t look at her.

  “I was on a flat platform, like a railroad station, only enormous. It stretched halfway to infinity. There were stars all around me, thicker and more colorful than I’d ever imagined them. Bright enough to make your eyes ache. Enormous machines were everywhere, golden, spaceships I suppose. They were taking off and landing with delicate little puffs of air, like it was the easiest thing imaginable to do. My body was so light I felt like I was going to float up among them. You ever hear of a place like that?”

  “No.”

  “There was a man waiting for me there. He had the saddest smile, but cold, cruel eyes. Hello, Victoria, he said, and How did you know my name, I asked. Oh, I keep a close eye on Daniel, he said, I’m grooming him for an important job. Then he showed me a syringe. Do you know what’s in here? he asked me. The liquid in it was so blue it shone.” She fell silent.

  “What did you say?”

  “I just shook my head. Mortality, he said. It’s an improved version of the drug you shot yourself up with fifty years ago. Tell Daniel it’ll be waiting for him at Sky Terminus, where the great ships come and go. That was all. You think it means anything?”

  I shook my head.

  She picked up the comic book, flipped it open again. “Well, anyway, it was a strange dream.”

  ***

  That night, after doing the dishes, I went and sat down on the pickup’s sideboard and stared into the fire, thinking. Victoria came and sat down beside me. She put a hand on my leg. It was the lightest of touches, but it sent all my blood rushing to my cock.

  She smiled at that and looked up into my eyes. “Resistance is useless,” she said.

  Afterwards we lay together between blankets on the ground. Looking up at the night sky. It came to me then that being taken away from normal life young as I had been, all my experience with love had come before the event and all my experience with sex after, and that I’d therefore never before known them both together. So that in this situation I was as naive and unprepared for what was happening to us as Victoria was.
/>
  Which was how I admitted to myself I loved Victoria. At the time it seemed the worst possible thing that could’ve happened to me.

  ***

  We saw it for the first time that next afternoon. It began as a giddy feeling, like a mild case of vertigo, and a vague thickening at the center of the sky as if it were going dark from the inside out. This was accompanied by a bulging up of the horizon, as if God Himself had placed hands flat on either edge and leaned forward, bowing it upward.

  Then my inner ear knew that the land which had been flat as flat for all these many miles was now slanting downhill all the way to the horizon. That was the gravitational influence of all that mass before us. Late into the day it just appeared. It was like a conjuring trick. One moment it wasn’t there at all and then, with the slightest of perceptual shifts, it dominated the vision. It was so distant that it took on the milky backscatter color of the sky and it went up so high you literally couldn’t see the top. It was—I knew this now—our destination:

  The antenna.

  Even driving the pickup truck, it took three days after first sighting to reach its base.

  On the morning of one of those days, Victoria suddenly pushed aside her breakfast and ran for the far side of the truck. That being the only privacy to be had for hundreds of miles around.

  I listened to her retching. Knowing there was only one thing it could be.

  She came back, pale and shaken. I got a plastic collection cup out of my bag. “Pee into this,” I told her. When she had, I ran a quick diagnostic. It came up positive.

  “Victoria,” I said. “I’ve got an admission to make. I haven’t been exactly straight with you about the medical consequences of your…condition.”

  It was the only time I ever saw her afraid. “My God,” she said, “What is it? Tell me! What’s happening to me?”

  “Well, to begin with, you’re pregnant.”

  ***

  There were no roads to the terminus, for all that it was visible from miles off. It lay nestled at the base of the antenna, and to look at the empty and trackless plains about it, you’d think there was neither reason for its existence nor possibility of any significant traffic there.