“—a lot of crazy shit, and only time will tell. Maybe Twisby built herself the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Or, it may be I’m the Anti-Christ. Shiva. Maitreya. Take your pick. Or maybe I’m only a trial run, a dress rehearsal for the Big Show, so nobody of consequence. Nothing at all but a nerdy girl who wants to go back to her stones and bones.”
“That would be a waste,” Ptolema says.
What if Einstein had needed a small push to get him moving? What if, say, Oppenheimer or Fermi had needed a bit more motivation?
Waste is the only evil.
“Okay,” Elle says. “My turn.” She digs a thumb and index finger into a pocket of her jeans and pulls out a single .45-caliber cartridge. It gleams dully beneath the subway car’s fluorescent lights. “This was meant for you.”
Ptolema gazes down at the bullet.
“Then why am I still alive?”
“Ripples,” says Elle Margeride. “I think it’s about time I began making a few of my own. Here is the day, hmm? Twisby’s a sweetheart, and she means well, but she’s also the one went and made a queen out of a pawn. She needs to start taking that into account.”
And then Elle slips the cartridge into Ptolema’s hand and stands up.
“Is this the last time we’ll meet?” Ptolema asks, trying not to think about how heavy the bullet feels.
Elle shrugs. “We’ll know if it happens, maybe about a trillion dominoes from now.”
Ptolema tastes metal, and she licks her dry lips. “There are people looking for you and Dr. Dunham. You know that, right? They catch up with you, they won’t be merciful. You’ve made an impression.”
“Introduced a new variable,” says Elle, and she pokes a finger at the bridge of her cheap sunglasses.
“One last question?”
“Okay. One last question.”
Ptolema sits up straighter, glancing at the bullet and then back to the albino.
“Do you miss her? Your sister, your lover. If both of you were real—”
But then Lizbeth Elle Margeride is gone, as unceremoniously as she appeared, and, once again, there are but four other people in the car. Ptolema shuts her eyes and leans her head back and tries to concentrate on nothing but the rhythmic throb of steel wheels on the rails.
APPENDIX 9.: [le remix Anglaise]Bury Magnets. Swallow the Rapture.
(17 Vrishika, 2152)
She sits on a bench in the main observation tier of the Nautilus-IV, her eyes on the wide bay window set into the belly of the station, the icy spiral of the Martian northern pole filling her view. She being the White Woman. La femme albinos. Ca-ng bái de. Blancanieves. More appellations hung on her than all the words for god, some say. But if she has a true name—and doesn’t everyone?—it is her secret and hers alone. A scrap of knowledge forever lost to humanity. So, her blue eyes are fixed on the Planum Boreum four hundred kilometers below, yes, but her mind is on the Egyptian—Ancient of Days, el Judío Errante, Kundry, Ptolema—she has many names, as well. The Sino LDTC ferrying her is now less than eight sols out. The Egyptian racing towards her. An unforeseen inconvenience. In no way at all a calamity, no, but still an unfortunate occurrence to force the White Woman’s hand. It tries her patience, and patience has been the key for so long that she cannot even recall a time before she learned that lesson.
In less than eight sols, the transfer vessel will dock, and they will speak for the first time in . . .
How long has it been?
She answers the question aloud, “One hundred and thirty-nine years.”
“Truly?” asks Babbit. “As long as all that?”
When she arrived on the station two months ago, Babbit was assigned the task of seeing to her every need. As has been her wish, he hardly ever leaves her side. The company of anyone is a balm for her sometimes crippling monophobia. A medicine better than any she has ever been prescribed. It doesn’t matter that this tall, thin, towheaded man is only mostly human. Many times, she’s resorted to and relied upon the companionship of splices. Besides, Babbit’s fast-borrow capabilities saved her the trouble of telling him all the tales he needs to know to carry on useful conversations. And there will be much less fuss when she orders his death, before her flight back to Earth. Easy come, easy go.
“You’ve never been to Manhattan,” she says.
“Ma’am, it was lost before I was born.”
“Of course,” she replies, and the White Woman holds up her right hand, absentmindedly running fingertips along the window, tracing the serpentine furrow on the Chasma Boreale. It seems almost as long as her long life, and almost as aimless. Possessed of direction, she thinks, is not to be possessed of purpose.
“Anyway,” she says to Babbit, “we were in Manhattan. I’d only just returned from Sweden. It was that long ago. Almost all the way back at the start.”
“As long as all that,” he says again.
“I can’t begin to understand what she hopes to accomplish, coming here, chasing after me this way.”
“Nor can I, ma’am.”
“The vessel may be armed. It would be like her, a preemptive strike, sacrificing the whole station and everyone aboard if she believes doing so would accomplish her ends.”
“Zealots are extremely dangerous people,” says Babbit.
“It can’t be that she hopes to reason with me. She cannot entertain the notion that she and I have ever shared in common a concept of Reason.”
“True believers, I mean,” Babbit says.
“I know what you meant.”
“Of course, ma’am.”
“Maybe she only wishes to bear witness,” the White Woman says. “To be present when my king’s knight takes her remaining bishop.”
Babbit clears his throat. “I expect the Captain will have anticipated the possibility of an attack,” he says, then clears his throat once more.
She laughs. “He has done nothing of the sort. There has been no alert, no preparation to intercept or shield. He is sitting and waiting, like a small and frightened animal cowering in the underbrush.”
“I was only supposing,” admits Babbit.
The White Woman pulls her hand back from the window, and she seems to stare at it for a few seconds. As if in wonder, maybe. Or as if, perhaps, it’s been soiled somehow. Then she turns her head and watches Babbit. He lowers his head; he never meets her gaze.
“I have considered holding off on the launch until she boards,” she says to him. “Until she is that near.”
“Then you’ve made your decision? To make the drop, I mean.”
“I made that decision before I left Xichang. It was only ever a question of when.”
“And now you have decided when?”
No one on the Nautilus-IV, no one back on Earth, no one in the scattered, hardscrabble colonies below, none of them know why she is here. Few enough know that she is here. She was listed on no passenger manifest. They do not know she’s ready to call the Egyptian’s gambit and move her king’s knight. To cast a stone on the still waters. Not one of them knows the nature of her cargo. No one but Babbit, and he won’t talk.
“Now I have decided when,” she tells him, and the White Woman shuts her blue eyes and pictures the vial in its plasma-lock cradle, hidden inside a shipment of hardware and foodstuffs bound for Sharonov. The kinetic gravity bomb will detonate at five hundred feet, and the contents of the vial will be aerosolized. The sky will rain corruption, and the corruption will take root in the dome’s cisterns and reservoirs.
לענה
Wormwood.
Apsinthion.
. . . and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch . . .
“Ma’am,” says Babbit, not daring to raise his head. “You are certain you will obtain the desired results? There are evacuation protocols, environmental containment procedures—”
. . . the waters became wormwood . . .
Here is the day.
“Babbit, I have never in all my life been certain. Which is the point.”
&
nbsp; She turns back to the window and can almost feel the wild katabatic winds scouring the glaciers and canyons. The White Woman pulls her robes more tightly about herself. She’s glad that Babbit is with her. She wants to ask him if he might take for granted that she has never loved, if no one has ever been dear to her. But she doesn’t.
Instead, she says again, “Which is the point.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says. “Of course.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I do not write in a vacuum, and I should note the more important influences that played a role in my conception and execution of Black Helicopters: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; the works of Lewis Carroll and Charles Hoy Fort; more books on chess than would be practical to list here, but notably Martin Gardner’s examination of the “chess problem” in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There; Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; David Bowie’s Outside and Blackstar; Anne “Poe” Decatur Danielewski’s Haunted; Funcom’s The Secret World; J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci’s Fringe; Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles; Current 93’s Black Ships Ate the Sky and Soft Black Stars; James Joyce’s Ulysses; Eleanor Coerr’s Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes; the music of Radiohead, Moby’s Everything Is Wrong, and the Veils’ Total Depravity; various works on chaos theory, astronomy, and quantum physics, including Kip S. Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy, John Briggs and F. David Peat’s Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness, and P. J. E. Peebles’ Principles of Physical Cosmology; Leigh Van Valen and other biologists’ writings on the Red Queen hypothesis; and Edward Gorey’s The Other Statue. Very special thanks to Dr. Denise L. Davis (Brown University) for the French translation in Chapter Nine (“Bury Magnets. Swallow the Rapture. [17 Vrishika, 2152]”); to the amazing “Mr. Rook” for the evening games and the afternoon critiques; to my comrade in virtual arms and conspiracy, Vic Ruiz; to my niece, Sonoye Murphy; and to Kathryn A. Pollnac, my original Miss Sixty-Six. The paleontological exploits, misadventures, and disappointments of the “twins” mentioned in the text are all my own, a sharp jab of autobiography. Thanks to William K. Schafer at Subterranean Press, without whom this novella would never have been written, much less published, and also a posthumous thank-you to Peggy Rae Sapienza (1944–2015), who saw that I made it to Arlington County in October 2014. A special thanks to my editor, Jonathan Strahan, and to Katharine Duckett, Irene Gallo, Theresa DeLucci, and everyone else at Tor.com for giving Black Helicopters a new lease on life.
AUTHOR’S NOTE FOR THE DEFINITIVE EDITION
Black Helicopters was written between December 4 and December 15, 2012, as a chapbook to accompany my Subterranean Press collection, The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories (2013). I’d been carrying the story around inside my head for some time, and I admit that it was quite a bit larger than the 25,000-word chapbook that Subterranean Press required of me. So, a number of scenes were left unwritten. When Tor.com expressed an interest in publishing a new edition of the novella, I took the opportunity to sit down and write those “missing” scenes, and they are included here as chapters Six, Twelve, Thirteen, and Fourteen. Chapter Sixteen is also new, but occurred to me only after I’d written Agents of Dreamland in the summer of 2015.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
October 18, 2017
Providence, Rhode Island
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph by Kyle Cassidy
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN was born near Dublin, Ireland, in 1964 and was raised in Alabama and Florida. She’s worked as a vertebrate paleontologist, museum exhibit technician, biology instructor, reproductive rights activist, and drag queen. Her novels include Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree, and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. She has also published more than two hundred and sixty short stories, anthologized in several collections, including Subterranean Press’ two-volume “best of” retrospective of her short fiction, Two Worlds and In Between and Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea. In the 1990s, she scripted The Dreaming for DC Comics/Vertigo and returned to comics in 2011 with Alabaster: Wolves, Alabaster: Grimmer Tales, and Alabaster: The Good, the Bad, and the Bird, for Dark Horse Comics. She is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award, a four-time recipient of the International Horror Guild Award, and has also received the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Locus Award, along with nominations for the Nebula Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. She studied paleontology, geology, and comparative zoology at both the University of Alabama in Birmingham and the University of Colorado. In 1988, she described a new genus and species of mosasaur, Selmasaurus russelli, from Alabama (with S. W. Shannon) and ten years later discovered the first evidence of velociraptorine theropod dinosaurs (“raptors”) from the southeastern United States. In 2017, Brown University’s John Hay Library established the Caitlín R. Kiernan Papers, archiving juvenilia, manuscripts, artwork, and other material related to her work. She currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her partner, Kathryn A. Pollnac, and two cats.
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BOOKS BY Caitlín R. Kiernan
Agents of Dreamland (available from Tor)
Cherry Bomb (as Kathleen Tierney)
Red Delicious (as Kathleen Tierney)
Blood Oranges (as Kathleen Tierney)
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir
The Red Tree
Beowulf (novelization)
Daughter of Hounds
Murder of Angels
Low Red Moon
The Five of Cups
Threshold
Silk
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
1.: Radio Friendly Unit Shifter
2.: Anybody Could Write a True Story
3.: A Wolf at the Door/It Girl. Rag Doll.
4.: Black Ships Seen Last Year South of Heaven
5.: How Ghosts Affect Relationships
6 .: Late Saturday Night Motel Signal
7.: The Way Out Is Through
8.: Golgotha Tenement Blues/Counting Zeroes
9.: Bury Magnets. Swallow the Rapture.
10.: A Plague of Snakes, Turned to Stone
11.: Throwing a Donner Party at Sea
12.: If I Should Fall from Grace with God
13.: Late Saturday Night Motel Signal
14.: 折り紙設計/Hasenohr Faltung
15.: The Spider’s Stratagem
16.: Now[here] Man Saves/Damns the World
17.: Thunder Perfect Mind/Judas as a Moth
18.: Soft Black Stars
19.: Where I End and You Begin (The Sky Is Falling In)
20.: ἀποκαλύπτω
APPENDIX 9.: [le remix Anglaise]Bury Magnets. Swallow the Rapture.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE FOR THE DEFINITIVE EDITION
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOOKS BY Caitlín R. Kiernan
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BLACK HELICOPTERS: AUTHOR’S DEFINITIVE EDITION
Original edition copyright © 2015 by Caitlín R. Kier
nan in Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (Subterranean Press)
Expanded, revised edition copyright © 2018 by Caitlín R. Kiernan
All rights reserved.
Cover photograph of Sedgwick, Maine © Don Seymour/Getty Images
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
A Tor.com Book
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-19112-0 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-19113-7 (trade paperback)
First Edition: May 2018
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