Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

by Jeff VanderMeer

  HUGHES, SHANNA, OCCUPANCY I MONTH, 2 WEEKS, 3 DAYS, 10 MINUTES, 35 SECONDS-KILLED BY A FUNGAL BOMB ...

  “Maybe they got it from the old bureaucratic quarter?” Wyte whispered out of the side of his mouth as he leaned over to give Finch the towel. Smell of sweat mixed with something sweeter. “Maybe they just copied it down?” Returning to his desk, receding into the background.

  “It's half-encrypted with their symbols, Wyte,” Finch said. Tried to correct for the disdain in his voice. “It contains surveillance information. They collected it themselves.”

  From underground. Using a million spore-eye cameras. Somewhere, he knew, in one of a series of images captured by the gray caps: evidence of his past that Heretic didn't know about. Finch as a Hoegbotton Irregular fighting against Frankwrithe & Lewden in the War of the Houses. Finch standing side by side with F&L soldiers against the gray caps before they Rose. What he'd done.

  Except the gray caps didn't have the time to pore over that many images unless given a good reason. And Finch hadn't. Only Wyte knew the truth.

  GILRISH, MEGHAN, OCCUPANCY 10 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 6 DAYS, 14 HOURS, 15 MINUTES, 6 SECONDS-OWNER OF A GROCERY STORE...

  BARRAN, GEORGE, OCCUPANCY 2 YEARS, 1 WEEK, 5 DAYS, 7 MINUTES, 18 SECONDS-DIED OF OLD AGE ...

  Finch stared at the first rows of names on the paper. The sheer density of information defeated him.

  Kept thinking about the bodies. Saw them lying there on the floor of the apartment. They dropped in out of thin air.

  Why there?

  A riddle wrapped in a puzzle. Perversely comforting, that the memory bulbs might hold the answers.

  Never lost.

  Bellum omnium contra omnes.

  Never lost.

  Said it three times under his breath. Wondering if Wyte was staring at him. Still didn't dislodge an answer.

  “Well,” Finch said, out of the corner of his mouth, “do you know what those words mean? Bellum omnium contra omnes?”

  But Wyte was done talking to him about the case.

  Sometimes the overlay of reality seemed a sham. One day, he would turn a corner on a rubble-strewn street. Pass through an archway into a courtyard. Be back in that other, simpler world. When he worked in the same building but as a Hoegbotton courier. Not as a detective. When he worked for Wyte, not with him.

  Am I dead? he thought sometimes, walking down that green carpet he remembered from a different city, a different time. Am I a ghost?

  Six in the afternoon. Time to leave. He packed Heretic's list in a satchel and holstered his miserable gun. Watched Blakely and Gustat put on spore gas masks “just in case.” Just in case of what? Just in case there's one fungus in the whole damn city you haven't been exposed to yet?

  A nod. A handshake or two. Muttered goodbyes to Wyte. Then they dispersed. The night shift would arrive soon. Partial patrols outside started in only two hours. Curfew. Gray caps lurking. You rarely saw more than one, but that was one too many. A detective's badge might help or it might not.

  The others headed north, up Albumuth. Wyte was a hulking shadow hanging back at the rear. Finch went south, but not home. Not yet. First, he had to pick up the memory bulbs from the crime scene. But he also had decided not to trust the Partial. Wanted to interview some of the residents of 239 Manzikert Avenue himself.

  A different route than that morning. Late-afternoon sun like dark gold against brick walls. The street sloped on an incline before following a gentle curve downward. Tight high walls of shovedtogether tenements and lofts. Hoegbotton territory, before the Rising. Finch brushed by a man or woman covered up in robes. Another person ducked into a doorway, face made a question mark by an old gas mask that might or might not keep spores out. Stain of blue-green lichen in the gutter. A rancid quality to the air.

  Faintest hint of the bay from the cross street. Mostly obscured by mansards and rubble. Glimpse of the two towers. Did the sky match? Or was it darker between the towers? Had a bet going with the other detectives about the purpose of the towers. To dull the fear.

  A hint of shadow moved behind him as he rounded a tight corner. It made him cautious. It made him paranoid. He stopped a minute later. Pretended to tie his shoe. Managed a backward glance. Nothing.

  Imagined it?

  Wouldn't put it past Heretic to have him followed. Or maybe it was just some ragged kid hoping to mug a passerby. As he rose, Finch made sure to pull his jacket back. To show his gun. Such as it was.

  239 Manzikert Avenue was a dark vertical slab of stone and wood with blackened filigree balcony railings crawling up the front. Trees left black leaves and rotting yellow berries on the steps. If the berries had been edible, the steps would've been clean.

  Ornate double doors stripped of the metal that had once served as inlay. Steps guarded by a three-legged cat that hissed. Then hopped away. Beyond the doors, a hallway studded with lights so dim it would've been hard to read by them. Finch stepped inside. The feeling of being followed shut off. Like it'd been attached to a timer inside of him.

  The floor squeaked. Freshly waxed. It hadn't been waxed in the morning. Finch smiled. Old Hoegbotton trick. Cheap security. Bell the cat. He went squeaking to the stairwell. Already knew the elevator didn't work.

  The outside light couldn't seem to push through the tiny windows set into the walls. The stairwell got darker the further up he went. But, gradually, more evidence of people. A dog howling. The flushing of a shared toilet. A screaming child. A mother's raised voice. The smell of something spicy being cooked for dinner. Filtered through the exhausted, stale funk of a place in which too many had lived in close quarters for too many years.

  Finch knew not to start on the first couple of floors. No one liked to live that low if they had a choice. Ambergris Rules. Better to live next to a corpse than one floor above the gray caps' underground realm. His father had taught him that.

  Stopped at the fourth floor. Just to be safe. Fourth or sixth. Anyone on the fifth was long gone. Either after the corpse arrived and before the Partial came to talk to them. Or after the Partial came to talk.

  Finch had a simple formula. A polite knock. Short questions, in a friendly tone. Didn't like to go in like Blakely, guns blazing. Or like Gustat, using threats to coerce. They got information, sure. But not always the right information.

  He worked the long line of closed doors to either side of the discolored, torn carpet. At the fifth door, a mother answered, holding her son. Maybe five or six, born around the time of the Rising. The mother looked worn. Pale and thin. Probably starving herself to feed the child. Probably thought that holding the kid would make Finch play nice. The kid's open, eager face confounded Finch. Almost like seeing another species. Parents kept their children hidden. Went out to forage for them. Finch's father had done the same for him. During the wars.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  Finch decided he wanted nothing. Asked a couple of easy questions. Showed her the photo of the dead man. The woman didn't recognize him.

  Tried a couple more doors. A middle-aged man in a tank top and shorts answered holding a frying pan. For defense? For dinner? Either way, he didn't know anything, hadn't seen anything.

  Neither did the old married couple who might've lived there for forty, fifty years. Might even have recalled when 239 Manzikert Avenue hadn't been a dump. The man stood behind the woman, peering out with the kind of distant stare Finch associated with the camps. The wife had a blotch of purple on her forehead that might've been a birthmark or might've been fungus.

  The next interview went better. A man of about sixty answered. Slight build. Large blue eyes, accentuated by the wrinkles in his forehead. A cultured voice. He wore a too-tight dinner jacket. The points of the collars on the white shirt beneath stabbed the flesh of his neck. His wrists showed from the dark ends of his cuffs. He looked like a child in a straitjacket.

  As Finch questioned him, he slowly realized the man had dressed up for the interrogation. Had heard him at other doors down the hall.
Soon, the man was asking him to come in for tea. Polite in a way that hadn't been common in Ambergris for years. Finch guessed violinist or theater owner. Either that or he'd once been the doorman.

  He didn't know anything about the murders. (Finch couldn't recall when he'd started calling them murders, but the word felt right.) Thought the man in the photograph looked familiar, but couldn't place him. In the way people do when they're trying to help.

  Then the man asked if the people living there had been of use.

  “People living there?” Finch echoed.

  “Yes. There were people living there. A man. A woman.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I don't know their names.”

  Didn't know anything else, either.

  Who was lying to him then? Heretic? The Partial?

  Remembered Heretic's strange mood as he headed up to the fifth floor.

  In the apartment, the bodies lay much as before. Except that each had sprouted a thick, emerald-green stalk topped by a nodule. The detectives called them memory bulbs. No one could pronounce what the gray caps called them. Sounded like a word between loam and leer. An aqua-colored nodule for the man. Bright orange for the gray cap. Which meant Finch had learned something new.

  The bodies still looked peaceful. Even with the dull light streaming through the open window. The man looked better preserved than when Finch had seen him that morning. Sometimes death did that. For a time.

  A figure stepped out of the back room. The Partial, grinning.

  “Shit.” Finch's gun appeared in his hand. Heart pounding.

  “I'd aim that somewhere else if I were you,” the Partial said. Fungal eye blinking and blinking. Recording.

  Finch transferred his gun to his left hand. Shook his right. Green liquid hit the floor. Goddamn gun. Wiped his hand on the side of the couch.

  “Did you follow me here?” Finch demanded.

  One eyebrow arched. “Getting paranoid? Afraid you'll be found out?”

  Snarled, “Why do you keep saying that?”

  The Partial smiled. Triumphant. “Everyone has something to hide.”

  “Why didn't you tell me two people lived here?” he asked the Partial. “A man and a woman. Did you question them? And where are they?”

  A preternatural calm to the Partial as he countered with, “Tell me what was in the dead man's hand.”

  Finch stepped back. Took in the narrow face, all slab of tongue and uncanny black-green left eye. Right eye atrophied from the repurposing. Dull orange lichen lived there now. The tongue moved like Finch's pet lizard's tongue. Tasting the air. The amount of energy that went into the eye meant they had to suck on gray cap-provided mushroom juice seven or eight times a day. Looked like green pus. What was their name for themselves? A gray cap word. Sounded like grineeknsenz or something just as ugly. Rumor had it they'd made a pact with the gray caps. That soon they'd be made more like the gray caps, in return for their service.

  “Nothing important,” Finch managed finally.

  “Isn't that for me to decide?”

  “It's for Heretic to decide. It'll be in my report.”

  “I hope it is.” The Partial's gaze was cold and dark. “We notice more than the gray caps, Finch. And we're more prepared to use what we find than they are.”

  That surprised Finch. Was the Partial criticizing Heretic? Safer to ignore it.

  “What did the people who lived here tell you?”

  “Nobody lived here.”

  Finch chewed on that for a moment. Was the Partial hiding something from Heretic? He patted his satchel. “I've got the entire list from Heretic of anyone who lived here.” Idiot. “You're saying it won't include the two who lived here?”

  “They don't live here,” the Partial said, a hint of warning in his voice. “They don't live anywhere anymore. They didn't know anything important.”

  Dead, then. Disappeared into the abyss of history.

  Appalled, Finch said, “Heretic knows this?”

  The Partial nodded, folding his arms. “Don't take anything from the bodies this time except for the memory bulbs. I'm supposed to guard them. I've been here all day. Someone will always be here.”

  The way the Partial said this made Finch think the man, the abomination, was applying for martyrdom. Did the Partial think Finch was weak just because he hadn't allowed the gray caps to take his eye? Part of Finch wanted to hit the Partial in the mouth for that. Instead, he squatted next to the man's body. Looked so peaceful.

  Was he alive for a time? In the room? Was he fighting the gray cap? Fleeing him?

  The Partial, from in front and above him: “I'll watch. Just to make sure.”

  Make sure of what?

  “Stay where I can see you.”

  “Such distrust,” the Partial murmured.

  Finch knelt beside the man's body. Pushed aside the matted hair on the man's head to get a good grip on the stalk. Held the bulb in his hand. Sticky, porous, rubbery. Gently twisted it off the stalk. A pock sound as he detached it. He put the bulb in his pocket. Pulled the stalk out at the root. Left behind a round indentation about a half inch deep. Blood began to fill the small wound.

  That'll leave a scar.

  Let loose a yip of nervous laughter. Shut it down.

  But the Partial still noticed it. “I knew you didn't want to eat their memories.”

  Finch ignored the Partial. Repeated the process for the gray cap. No blood, no pock sound.

  “You might be the first person to ever eat a gray cap's memory bulb. Aren't you the lucky one.”

  Finch rose to face the Partial. “Pathetic idea of security, by the way. One Partial. First thing any intruder will want to do is shoot out or cut out your eye. Followed by cutting off your head to make absolutely sure.” Said each word slowly. Savored each.

  The Partial wasn't smiling now. The eye twitched. He advanced on Finch until he stood inches away. Finch looked into that ruin of a face and tried not to turn away in disgust.

  “Finch. Finchy. Whoever you are. You're not as smart as you think. I'm not the only one here. We've got this whole building staked out. If anyone comes here, we'll see them. The spores will see them.”

  Bellum omnium contra omnes. “Never lost” in a dead man's hand.

  “Who would come here? And why?”

  “Followers of the Blue.” The Partial seemed on the verge of saying more. Caught himself.

  But Finch had heard enough. A grin broke across his face. Didn't turn back soon enough. He gave the Partial a last poisonous stare.

  “What? Nothing more to say?” the Partial called after him as he headed down the stairs. “I'm disappointed, Finchy . . . Someday, though, Finchy, someday. . .”

  Out onto the street, amid the black leaves. The rotten fruit. A memory bulb in each pocket. Looking now for the signature of the rebels in every figure that he passed.

  Followers of the Blue ... The Lady in Blue.

  A thousand tales told about her by now. Told by old men to young men. Told by mothers to sons and daughters. Most are about her voice. No one agrees on where the Lady in Blue came from, but everyone agrees that during the worst of the War of the Houses her voice was heard coming from courtyards, buildings, even underground. Or seemed to. Some thought she was an opera singer transformed by grief over a slain lover. That she was in some way the voice of the city, coming up from the earth. Believed this even though it could not be true. None of it could be true.

  Then her voice started coming to the people on the radio stations of House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe, before the Rising. In those interim years when the Houses combined forces to confront the true insurgents. The enemy hidden in the ground.

  Finch remembers some of those broadcasts. Listened to them with his father. Near the end.

  The Lady in Blue would begin in a low, slow voice. Almost the murmurs of a lover. Her voice would build in volume and strength. Until she was exhorting the people of Ambergris to stand firm against not only the “undergroun
d invader,” but also against the avarice and selfishness of its own leaders.

  That her voice came from everywhere was reinforced by background noises in her broadcasts. Many different settings. Sometimes the sounds of the River Moth behind her. Sometimes a windy tower. Sometimes a water-clogged basement that she would claim was actually an underground gray cap stronghold. Often, she sounded weary. So incredibly tired. And other times strong, defiant.

  Then the gray caps Rose, and Hoegbotton and Frankwrithe alike became the rebels. Dead. Dispersed. Fled. Lost. But the Lady in Blue survived, and by surviving she seemed to have again become greater than herself. Neither the green of the Hoegbottons nor the red of the Frankwrithe & Lewdens, but all the colors mixed together. People clung to the hope that she would return in force to save them. Even though she'd never been more than a voice on the radio to most of them.

  Finch has seen the gray caps' files on the Lady in Blue, of course. Knows that she was born Alessandra Lewden in the Southern Isles. Received her education from various private schools in Morrow and Stockton. Then became Alessandra Hoegbotton in a politically advantageous marriage arranged during a brief truce between the Houses. Wife to the opera singer Joseph Hoegbotton, who was shot dead by an insane rival after a performance. After which Alessandra disappeared for several years. Until House Hoegbotton needed her for their latest propaganda tool: radio broadcasts. Across enemy lines. The disembodied voice of the self-described “Lady in Blue” coming out of houses and the back rooms of cafes.

  Unclear from the files if Alessandra had given herself over entirely to Cause Hoegbotton. But it didn't matter when Cause Hoegbotton and Cause Frankwrithe-Lewden came together. The Lady in Blue just became more powerful. Sometimes, she was the only thing connecting the two factions.

  But fascinating to Finch: her voice coming over the radio had driven the gray caps insane with anger. At first, they did not understand this new invention, brought to Ambergris by the busy scientists of the Kalif's empire. So for a time her voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Magically. Or a magic that was beyond them, unaffected by spores or fruiting bodies. You could not re-create radio using fungi. You could not spy on it from within.