Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “Do you know who . . .” Finch hesitated. Gray caps didn't like being called “gray caps,” but Finch couldn't pronounce the word they did use. Farseneeni or fanaarcensitii? The Partial circled them, blinking pictures through his fungal eye.

  “Do you know who that is?” Finch said finally, pointing at the dead gray cap.

  Heretic made a sound like something popping. “No. Not familiar to us. We cannot see him,” and Finch understood he meant something other than just looking out a window.

  “Have you ... ?” Couldn't say the whole sentence. Too ridiculous. Terrifying. At the same time. Have you eaten some of his flesh and picked clean the memories?

  But Heretic had been around humans long enough to know what he meant. “We tried it. Nothing that made sense.”

  For a second, Finch relaxed. Forgot Heretic could send him, Sintra, anybody he knew, to the work camps.

  “If you couldn't decipher it, how will I?”

  Then went stiff. Richard Dorn, a good detective, had questioned Heretic too closely. Nine months to die.

  A bullet to the head. In that case.

  But the gray cap said only, “With your fresh eyes, maybe you will have better luck.”

  Heretic pulled a pouch out of his robes, opened it. Finch rose, stood to the side as Heretic sprinkled a fine green powder over both bodies. Could've done it using his own supply, but Heretic enjoyed doing it. For some reason.

  “You know what to do,” Heretic said.

  In time, a memory bulb would emerge from both corpses' heads. Did the fanaarcensitii rely too much on what made them comfortable? No autopsies, just mushrooms. But also hardly any experts left to perform them.

  Nausea crept back into Finch's throat. “But I've never. Not a gray cap. I mean, not one of your people.”

  “We don't bite.” The grin on that impossible face grew wide and wider. The laughter again, worse.

  Finch laughed back, weakly.

  “Write down whatever you encounter, whether you understand it or not.”

  Mercifully, Heretic looked away. “A gray cap and a man. Dead in such a manner. We need to know everything.”

  “Yessir,” Finch said. He couldn't keep the grimace off his face.

  Heretic seemed to take it for a smile. As he walked past on his way to the door, he patted Finch's elbow. Finch shivered. A touch like wet, dead leaves sewn together and stuffed with meat.

  “Report in the morning,” Heretic said. “Report and report and report, Finch.” The laughter again.

  Then Heretic was gone. The hallway shadows ate him up, the apartment door opening and closing.

  Finch could hear his own breathing. Shallow. The sudden panicked drumming of his heart. The butterfly blinks of the Partial, still snapping photographs.

  Took a breath. A second. Closed his eyes.

  A sunny day by the river. A picnic lunch. A tree with shade. Long, cool grass. With Sintra.

  Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

  2

  o obvious bullet or stab wounds. No tattoos or other marks. Grunting with the effort, Finch turned the man over for a second. He seemed heavier than he should be. Skin warm, the flesh solid. From the position of the arms, Finch thought they might be broken. A discoloration at the edge of the man's mouth. Dried blood? When Finch was done, the man settled back into position as if he'd been there a hundred years.

  No point checking the gray cap. Their skin didn't retain marks or burns or stab wounds. Anything like that sealed over. Besides, the cause of the gray cap's death was obvious. Wasn't it? Still, he didn't want to assume murder. Yet.

  Out of the four “murders” in his sector over the past year, two had been suicides and one had been natural causes. The fourth solved in a day.

  Disappearances were another subject altogether.

  He stood. Looked down at the tableau formed by the dead. Something about it. Almost posed. Almost staged. But also: the man's neck, half-hidden by the shirt collar. Was it ... twisted? Who could tell with the gray cap. Impossibly long, smooth, gray neck. (Did that mean Heretic was old, this one young?) But also torqued.

  Finch glanced up at the tired, sagging ceiling. About ten feet.

  “They look like,” Finch said. “They look like they both fell.”

  Could that be the sound the neighbors heard?

  “The spore camera's first shot is of them on the floor,” the Partial said.

  Finch had forgotten him.

  Turned, stared at the Partial. The Partial stared back. Taking Finch's photo with each blink.

  “I could ...”

  “What?” the Partial said. “You could what?”

  I could tear out your eye with my bare hands. Not a thought he'd seen coming.

  “You know what I think?” the Partial said.

  Finch tamped down on his irritation. Tried to remember that, in a way, none of the Partials were more than six years old. Disaffected youths no matter what their age. All pale. Or made pale. Humans who'd gotten fungal infections and liked it, Truff help them. Got an adrenaline rush from heightened powers of sight. Enhanced by fungal drugs autogenerated inside the eye. Pumped into the brain. In a sense, their eye was always looking back at them.

  I'll never know what you think. Not in a million years.

  “You volunteered for that,” Finch said. Pointed at the Partial's eye. “That makes you crazy. So I don't need to know what you think.”

  The Partial snickered. “I've heard it all before. And you'll never know what you're missing ... But here's what I think, whether you want it or not. That man's not really human. Not really. I should know, right? And something went wrong. And maybe they didn't die here but were, I don't know, moved.”

  Finch gave the Partial a long glance. Turned to kneel again by the man's body. The second half of what the Partial had said made less sense than the first.

  “Just do your job.” I'll do mine.

  The Partial fell silent. Hurt? Seduced by something new to click?

  Finch really didn't care. Something had caught his attention. Two fingers of the man's left hand. Curled tight into the palm. Grit or sand under the fingernails. Finch got to his knees, leaned forward, took the man's hand in his. The warmth of it surprised him, the green spores already ghosting into the flesh. He pried the fingers back. Revealed a ragged piece of paper. A pulse-pounding moment of excitement.

  Then he pulled it out. Released the fingers. Let the arm fall. Shielding the paper from the Partial with his body.

  Normal paper, not fungal. Old and stained. Torn from a book? He unfolded it. Two words, written hurriedly, in black ink: Never Lost. And below that some gibberish that looked something like bellum omnium contra omnes. Self-contained, or once part of a longer message?

  Definitely torn from a book. On the back a printed sentence fragment, “the future can hold when the past holds ambiguity such as this,” and a symbol. Somehow familiar to Finch. Although he didn't know from where.

  Stuck the paper in his boot before the Partial could blink that he'd found something. Got up. Pulled gloves from his jacket pocket and put them on. Opened the pouch at his belt.

  Heretic had forgotten the preservatives, but would blame Finch if it wasn't done. Corpses didn't last long otherwise. Within forty-eight hours, you'd be breathing them, as the spores did their work.

  Carefully, he sprinkled a blue powder across both corpses. Not spores this time, but tiny fruiting bodies. The powder smelled like smoke from the camps to the south. Or the camps smelled like the powder. Pointless to wear the gloves after the hundreds of fungal toxins and experiments that had been released into the air. The millions of floating spore-eyes. Yet still he did it.

  Blue mingled with green. The green disappeared as he watched, colonized by the blue. The two bodies would not decay now. They would linger, suspended, until Finch returned to collect their memories.

  “... and know you don't want to eat the memories,” the Partial said to Finch's back. Sounding triumphant.

  Finch's thought
s had been so far away he'd missed the first part.

  “Is that all?” Wanted to laugh.

  Did they talk this way together in the barracks near the camps where the gray caps housed them like weapons? Spewing out each day and night like black ants. Foraging on the flesh of the city. Observers and security both.

  “You're afraid of change,” the Partial said. “Of being changed. That's why you hate me.”

  Swiveled abruptly in his crouch, hand on his gun. Met the Partial's corrupted gaze.

  “Is that all?” Finch repeated. “I mean, are you done with your picturetaking?”

  No skill when every blink was an image. No honor in a perpetual voyeurism. A kind of treason against your own kind. “It warps the privacy of your own life,” Wyte had said once, as if he knew. “Permanent occupation. I wouldn't want to live that way.” Yet now Wyte did. And so did Finch. In a sense.

  “I'm never done,” the Partial said. “And if you've got a past, you should be worried. They'll work through all the records some day. Maybe they'll find you.”

  Funny thing is, Partial, Heretic already knows my past. Most of it. And he doesn't give a fuck. That's not who I'm worried about.

  Wanted to say it but didn't. Unsnapped the clasp on his holster. The fungal gun trembled there like a live thing. Wet. Dripping. Useless against a gray cap. Very useful against a Partial. Still human, no matter how much you pretend.

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “I see everything,” the Partial said. “Everything.”

  “Yes,” Finch said, “but that's unavoidable, isn't it?”

  The Partial stared at Finch. Seemed about to say something. Bit down on it, hard. Walked out into the hall. Slammed the door behind him.

  Leaving Finch alone with the bodies.

  Now Finch can see the frailty death has lent them. Now Finch can see the vulnerability. The way the light uses them in the same way it uses him. He walks to the window. Looks out across the damaged face of Ambergris.

  Six years and I can't recognize a goddamn thing from before.

  Harsh blue sprawl of the bay, bled from the River Moth. Carved from nothing. The first thing the gray caps did when they Rose, flooding Ambergris and killing thousands. Now the city, riddled through with canals, is like a body that was once drowned. Parts bleached, parts bloated. Metal and stone for flesh. Places that stick out and places that barely touch the surface.

  In the foreground of the bay stands the scaffolding for the two tall towers still being built by the gray caps. A rough pontoon bridge reaches out to them, an artificial island surrounding the base. The scaffolding rises twenty feet above the highest tower. Hard to know if they are almost complete or will take a hundred years more. Great masses of green fungus cling to the tops. It makes the towers look shaggy, almost as if they had fur, were flesh and blood. A smell like oil and sawdust and frying meat. At dusk each day the gray caps lead a work force from the camps south of the city. All night, the sounds of hammering and construction. Emerald lights moving like slow stars. Screams of injury or punishment. To what purpose? No one knows. While along the lip of the bay, monstrous fungal cathedrals rise under cover of darkness, replacing the old, familiar architecture. Skyline like a jagged wound.

  Twenty years of civil war. Six years of the gray caps.

  To Finch's left, southwest: smudges of smoke, greasy and gray, above the distant mottled spectacle of the Spit, an island made of lashedtogether boats. A den for spies. A sanctuary for the desperate and the lawless.

  Beyond the Spit, the silhouette of the two living domes covering the detention camps. Broken by the smoke, hidden by debris. Built over a valley of homes. Built atop the remains of the military factories that had allowed the two great mercantile companies, House Hoegbotton and the invading House Frankwrithe & Lewden, to dream of empire, to destroy each other. And the city with them. Finch had fought for Hoegbotton. Once upon a time.

  Between the domes, the fiery green glitter and minarets of the Religious Quarter, occupied by the remnants of native tribes. Adapting. Struggling. Destined someday to be wiped out. He can see the exposed crater at the top of the Truffidian Cathedral. Cracked. All the prayers let out. Nothing left.

  To Finch's right, on the north shore: the Hoegbotton & Frankwrithe Zone. Huge tendrils of reddish-orange fungus vein into the rocks lining the water. A green haze obscures any view of what might be left on the north shore. Six years ago, the HFZ had just been northern Ambergris: wild, yes, but not infected. Then, under sustained attack by the gray caps, the rebel army had retreated there. So much heavy armor, munitions, and ordnance had gone in, along with twenty thousand soldiers, that it is hard for Finch to believe all of it could just vanish or molder. Yet, apparently, it had. They'd gone in and the gray caps had created the Zone around them. Only the rebel commander they called the Lady in Blue and some of her soldiers had escaped the trap.

  Once, the HFZ had grown in size every day. Now, it has stopped, covers about ten square miles. Almost every citizen can see it. For all the good that did. Will the rebels return? is the question everyone asks, even now. When the wind is strange-gusting this way and that without purpose-great glittering particles from the north drift orange and purple and blue across the bay into Ambergris. Even the gray caps don't enter the HFZ except by proxy. Content to let the remnants of the rebels wander through a toxic fungal stew, goes the theory. Almost like another camp, without fences or guards.

  Except, no one comes out of the HFZ.

  Beyond the towers, beyond the bay, the far shore of the River Moth. Distant. Unattainable. Beyond that, although Finch can't see it, just feels it: the eastern-most edge of the Kalif's empire, the Stockton Commonwealth to the south, the Morrow Protectorate to the north. Between them and Finch: security zones. Blockades. Set up by the surrounding countries. All three as determined as the gray caps that no one gets out of Ambergris. Even as they send in their spies to steal the city's secrets.

  Finch turns away from the window. It leaves him sad and cold and frightened. The towers especially. What will happen when the gray caps have finished them?

  A view like that could drive a person mad.

  Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

  3

  hen the time comes, right, Finch?"

  Back at the station, which used to be Hoegbotton & Sons' headquarters. High ceilings. Hints of gold leaf and mosaic. Dull light from tiny round windows set in rows across both side walls. A tortured light that never gave any hint of the weather outside. Sometimes in the early morning and late afternoon they had to use old lanterns. The chandeliers had been ripped out long ago.

  Back at his desk with the other detectives. The must of fungal rot from the green strip of carpet running from the front door down the middle. The whole back of the room hidden by a curtain. Smell of bad coffee from the table that also housed their only typewriter. Shoved up against the far wall. Next to the holding cell.

  Ten desks. Seven detectives. Skinner, Gustat, Blakely, Dapple, Albin, and Wyte furiously scritching away on their notepads with sharp pencils. Some on the phone. All of them like schoolboys in an incomprehensible class. None of them likely to ask questions of the teacher.

  Only a weak hello when Finch had walked in. Too much effort. Not yet over the paranoid morning jitters. Ever more difficult to know what to say. How to act. They all assumed the gray caps spied on them. Difficult to remember all day long. Especially when strange things happened with just enough irregularity to make them think that was the last time. The air pungent with old and new sweat. Laced with some underlying funk that was almost sweet.

  Albin, just off the phone, out of the corner of his mouth: “I'm not risking my life for a lost dog. Too many Partials there. Besides, it's an old Hoegbotton neighborhood.” Albin, the Frankwrithe & Lewden man. Finch might've shot at him back during the war. Former scientist. One of the few not killed by the gray caps or snatched by foreign powers in the chaos of the Rising.

  Finch's mood had soured on the way back
to the station. A tortuous route. The gray caps had banned bicycles and motored vehicles four years ago. Too many suicide bombings by rebel sympathizers. Not much fuel anyway, and no one outside the city willing to resupply, even on the black market. Too dangerous. And few alternatives since the horses had been eaten long ago.

  Instead, makeshift bridges over the canals. Through a sector where a lot of gray cap buildings had gone up, scrambling the landscape. Changes didn't correspond to any map. Sliced through existing apartment complexes, divided or blocked streets. Displayed an arrogance about the way things had been and were now that angered Finch.

  Then a mob to avoid at the corner of Albumuth and Lake, when he'd almost made it back. One of the huge blood-red drug mushrooms hadn't yet released the morning ration. Not Finch's problem. But the addicts were mad. They wanted their fix. Wanted out. They stood beneath the slow-breathing dead-white gills waiting for the purple nodules that also fed them. Wanted oblivion. A nice trip into waves of light and a past that didn't include dead bodies and nightmares.

  Maybe someday he'd join them. Instead, another rickety bridge over another canal. Had looked down at his frowning reflection in the silver-gray water and hadn't recognized it. Broad shoulders. Still muscular but losing some of it. Too much alcohol. Not enough nutrients in the gray caps' food. The man lingering in the water seemed at least forty-five, not forty. The hooded eyes. The paleness of the face. Wavery. Indistinct. Never in focus.

  “When the time comes, right, Finch?”

  “Sure, Wyte,” Finch said. “When the time comes.”

  “You'll know what to do.” The voice, once so deep and gravelly, had changed since Finch had first met Wyte. Become soft and liquid, lighter yet thicker.

  “I'll know what to do.”

  The ritual conversation.

  Ritual had a purpose. Ritual cordoned off fear. Ritual made the abnormal ordinary. The memory hole beside each of the desks. The deep green vein running the length of Wyte's arm. Pushing up ridgelike against the fabric of Wyte's long sleeve. Like the green carpet leading back to the curtains and what lay beyond.