Modern Classics of Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  I was aboard the ship a long time. We seemed to be running free, with the wind a few points to port and strong. When I went aloft at night, masts and spars and rigging quivered and sang in the wind, and sail upon sail towered above me, and sail upon white sail spread below me, and more masts clothed in sails stood before me and behind me. When I worked on deck by day, spray wet my shirt and left tear-shaped spots on the planks which dried quickly in the bright sunlight.

  I cannot remember ever having really been on such a ship, but perhaps, as a very small child, I was, for the sounds of it, the creaking of the masts in their sockets, the whistling of the wind in the thousand ropes, the crashing of the waves against the wooden hull were all as distinct, and as real, as much themselves, as the sounds of laughter and breaking glass overhead had been when, as a child, I had tried to sleep; or the bugles from the citadel which sometimes, then, woke me in the morning.

  I was about some work. I do not know just what, aboard this ship. I carried buckets of water with which I dashed clotted blood from the decks, and I pulled at ropes which seemed attached to nothing – or rather, firmly tied to immovable objects still higher in the rigging. I watched the surface of the sea from bow and rail, from the mastheads, and from atop a large cabin amidships, but when a starcrosser, its entry shields blinding-bright with heat, plunged hissing into the sea far off I reported it to no one.

  And all this time the dead man at the wheel was talking to me. His head hung limply, as though his neck were broken, and the jerkings of the wheel he held, as big waves struck the rudder, sent it from one shoulder to the other, or back to stare at the sky, or down. But he continued to speak, and the few words I caught suggested that he was lecturing upon an ethical theory whose postulates seemed even to him doubtful. I felt a dread of hearing this talk and tried to keep myself as much as possible toward the bow, but the wind at times carried the words to me with great clarity, and whenever I looked up from my work I found myself much nearer the stern, sometimes in fact almost touching the dead steersman, than I had supposed.

  After I had been on this ship a long while, so that I was very tired and very lonely, one of the doors of the cabin opened and my aunt came out, floating quite upright about two feet above the tilted deck. Her skirt did not hang vertically as I had always seen it, but whipped in the wind like a streamer, so that she seemed on the point of blowing away. For some reason I said, “Don’t get close to that man at the wheel, Aunt. He might hurt you.”

  She answered, as naturally as if we had met in the corridor outside my bedroom, “Nonsense. He’s far past doing anyone any good, Number Five, or any harm either. It’s my brother we have to worry about.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Down there.” She pointed at the deck as if to indicate that he was in the hold. “He’s trying to find out why the ship doesn’t move.”

  I ran to the side and looked over, and what I saw was not water but the night sky. Stars – innumerable stars were spread at an infinite distance below me, and as I looked at them I realized that the ship, as my aunt had said, did not make headway or even roll, but remained heeled over, motionless. I looked back at her and she told me, “It doesn’t move because he has fastened it in place until he finds out why it doesn’t move,” and at this point I found myself sliding down a rope into what I supposed was the hold of the ship. It smelled of animals. I had awakened, though at first I did not know it.

  My feet touched the floor, and I saw that David and Phaedria were beside me. We were in a huge, loftlike room, and as I looked at Phaedria, who was very pretty but tense and biting her lips, a cock crowed.

  David said, “Where do you think the money is?” He was carrying a tool kit.

  And Phaedria, who I suppose had expected him to say something else, or in answer to her own thoughts, said, “We’ll have lots of time; Marydol is watching.” Marydol was one of the girls who appeared in our plays.

  “If she doesn’t run away. Where do you think the money is?”

  “Not up here. Downstairs behind the office.” She had been crouching, but she rose now and began to creep forward. She was all in black, from her ballet slippers to a black ribbon binding her black hair, with her white face and arms in striking contrast, and her carmine lips an error, a bit of color left by mistake. David and I followed her.

  Crates were scatterd, widely separated, on the floor; and as we passed them I saw that they held poultry, a single bird in each. It was not until we were nearly to the ladder which plunged down a hatch in the floor at the opposite corner of the room that I realized that these birds were gamecocks. Then a shaft of sun from one of the skylights struck a crate and the cock rose and stretched himself, showing fierce red eyes and plumage as gaudy as a macaw’s. “Come on,” Phaedria said, “the dogs are next,” and we followed her down the ladder. Pandemonium broke out on the floor below.

  The dogs were chained in stalls, with dividers too high for them to see the dogs on either side of them and wide aisles between the rows of stalls. They were all fighting dogs, but of every size from ten-pound terriers to mastiffs larger than small horses, brutes with heads as misshapen as the growths that appear on old trees and jaws that could sever both a man’s legs at a mouthful. The din of the barking was incredible, a solid substance that shook us as we descended the ladder, and at the bottom I took Phaedria’s arm and tried to indicate by signs – since I was certain that we were wherever we were without permission – that we should leave at once. She shook her head and then, when I was unable to understand what she said even when she exaggerated the movements of her lips, wrote on a dusty wall with her moistened forefinger: “They do this all the time – a noise in the street – anything.”

  Access to the floor below was by stairs, reached through a heavy but unbolted door which I think had been installed largely to exclude the din. I felt better when we had closed it behind us even though the noise was still very loud. I had fully come to myself by this time, and I should have explained to David and Phaedria that I did not know where I was or what we were doing there, but shame held me back. And in any event I could guess easily enough what our purpose was. David had asked about the location of money, and we had often talked – talk I had considered at the time to be more than half empty boasting – about a single robbery that would free us from the necessity of further petty crime.

  Where we were I discovered later when we left; and how we had come to be there I pieced together from casual conversations. The building had been originally designed as a warehouse, and stood on the Rue des Egouts close to the bay. Its owner supplied those enthusiasts who stage combats of all kinds for sport, and was credited with maintaining the largest assemblage of these creatures in the Department. Phaedria’s father had happened to hear that this man had recently put some of his most valuable stock on ship, had taken Phaedria when he called on him, and, since the place was known not to open its doors until after the last Angelus, we had come the next day a little after the second and entered through one of the skylights.

  I find it difficult to describe what we saw when we descended from the floor of the dogs to the next, which was the second floor of the building. I had seen fighting slaves many times before when Mr Million, David, and I had traversed the slave market to reach the library; but never more than one or two together, heavily manacled. Here they lay, sat, and lounged everywhere, and for a moment I wondered why they did not tear one another to pieces, and the three of us as well. Then I saw that each was held by a short chain stapled to the floor, and it was not difficult to tell from the scraped and splintered circles in the boards just how far the slave in the center could reach. Such furniture as they had, straw pallets and a few chairs and benches, was either too light to do harm if thrown or very stoutly made and spiked down. I had expected them to shout and threaten us as I had heard they threatened each other in the pits before closing, but they seemed to understand that as long as they were chained, they could do nothing. Every head turned toward us as we came down the
steps, but we had no food for them, and after that first examination they were far less interested in us than the dogs had been.

  “They aren’t people, are they?” Phaedria said. She was walking erectly as a soldier on parade now, and looking at the slaves with interest; studying her, it occurred to me that she was taller and less plump than the “Phaedria” I pictured to myself when I thought of her. She was not just a pretty, but a beautiful girl. “They’re a kind of animal, really,” she said.

  From my studies I was better informed, and I told her that they had been human as infants – in some cases even as children or older – and that they differed from normal people only as a result of surgery (some of it on their brains) and chemically induced alterations in their endocrine systems. And of course in appearance because of their scars.

  “Your father does that sort of thing to little girls, doesn’t he? For your house?”

  David said, “Only once in a while. It takes a lot of time, and most people prefer normals, even when they prefer pretty odd normals.”

  “I’d like to see some of them. I mean the ones he’s worked on.”

  I was still thinking of the fighting slaves around us and said, “Don’t you know about these things? I thought you’d been here before. You knew about the dogs.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen them before, and the man told me about them. I suppose I was just thinking out loud. It would be awful if they were still people.”

  Their eyes followed us, and I wondered if they could understand her.

  The ground floor was very different from the ones above. The walls were paneled, there were framed pictures of dogs and cocks and of the slaves and curious animals. The windows, opening toward Egouts Street and the bay, were high and narrow and admitted only slender beams of the bright sunlight to pick out of the gloom the arm alone of a rich red-leather chair, a square of maroon carpet no bigger than a book, a half-full decanter. I took three steps into this room and knew that we had been discovered. Striding toward us was a tall, high-shouldered young man – who halted, with a startled look, just when I did. He was my own reflection in a gilt-framed pier glass, and I felt the momentary dislocation that comes when a stranger, an unrecognized shape, turns or moves his head and is some familiar friend glimpsed, perhaps for the first time, from outside. The sharp-chinned, grim-looking boy I had seen when I did not know him to be myself had been myself as Phaedria and David, Mr Million and my aunt, saw me.

  “This is where he talks to customers,” Phaedria said. “If he’s trying to sell something he has his people bring them down one at a time so you don’t see the others but you can hear the dogs bark even from way down here, and he took Papa and me upstairs and showed us everything.”

  David asked, “Did he show you where he keeps the money?”

  “In back. See that tapestry? It’s really a curtain, because while Papa was talking to him, a man came who owed him for something and paid, and he went through there with it.”

  The door behind the tapestry opened on a small office, with still another door in the wall opposite. There was no sign of a safe or strongbox. David broke the lock on the desk with a pry bar from his tool kit, but there was only the usual clutter of papers, and I was about to open the second door when I heard a sound, a scraping or shuffling, from the room beyond.

  For a minute or more none of us moved. I stood with my hand on the latch. Phaedria, behind me and to my left, had been looking under the carpet for a cache in the floor – she remained crouched, her skirt a black pool at her feet. From somewhere near the broken desk I could hear David’s breathing. The shuffling came again, and a board creaked. David said very softly, “It’s an animal.”

  I drew my fingers away from the latch and looked at him. He was still gripping the pry bar and his face was pale, but he smiled. “An animal tethered in there, shifting its feet. That’s all.”

  I said, “How do you know?”

  “Anybody in there would have heard us, especially when I cracked the desk. If it were a person he would have come out, or if he were afraid he’d hide and be quiet.”

  Phaedria said, “I think he’s right. Open the door.”

  “Before I do, if it isn’t an animal?”

  David said, “It is.”

  “But if it isn’t?”

  I saw the answer on their faces; David gripped his pry bar, and I opened the door.

  The room beyond was larger than I had expected, but bare and dirty. The only light came from a single window high in the farther wall. In the middle of the floor stood a big chest, of dark wood bound with iron, and before it lay what appeared to be a bundle of rags. As I stepped from the carpeted office the rags moved and a face, a face triangular as a mantis’, turned toward me. Its chin was hardly more than an inch from the floor, but under deep brows the eyes were tiny scarlet fires.

  “That must be it,” Phaedria said. She was looking not at the face but at the iron-banded chest. “David, can you break into that?”

  “I think so,” David said, but he, like me, was watching the ragged thing’s eyes. “What about that?” he said after a moment, and gestured toward it. Before Phaedria or I could answer, its mouth opened showing long, narrow teeth, gray-yellow. “Sick,” it said.

  None of us, I think, had thought it could speak. It was as though a mummy had spoken. Outside, a carriage went past, its iron wheels rattling on the cobbles.

  “Let’s go,” David said. “Let’s get out.”

  Phaedria said, “It’s sick. Don’t you see, the owner’s brought it down here where he can look in on it and take care of it. It’s sick.”

  “And he chained his sick slave to the cashbox?” David cocked an eyebrow at her.

  “Don’t you see? It’s the only heavy thing in the room. All you have to do is go over there and knock the poor creature in the head. If you’re afraid, give me the bar and I’ll do it myself.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  I followed him to within a few feet of the chest. He gestured at the slave imperiously with the steel pry bar. “You! Move away from there.”

  The slave made a gurgling sound and crawled to one side, dragging his chain. He was wrapped in a filthy, tattered blanket and seemed hardly larger than a child, though I noticed that his hands were immense.

  I turned and took a step toward Phaedria, intending to urge that we leave if David were unable to open the chest in a few minutes. I remember that before I heard or felt anything I saw her eyes open wide, and I was still wondering why when David’s kit of tools clattered on the floor and David himself fell with a thud and a little gasp. Phaedria screamed, and all the dogs on the third floor began to bark.

  All this, of course, took less than a second. I turned to look almost as David fell. The slave had darted out an arm and caught my brother by the ankle, and then in an instant had thrown off his blanket and bounded – that is the only way to describe it – on top of him.

  I caught him by the neck and jerked him backward, thinking that he would cling to David and that it would be necessary to tear him away, but the instant he felt my hands he flung David aside and writhed like a spider in my grip. He had four arms.

  I saw them flailing as he tried to reach me, and I let go of him and jerked back, as if a rat had been thrust in my face. That instinctive repulsion saved me; he drove his feet backward in a kick which, if I had still been holding him tightly enough to give him a fulcrum, would have surely ruptured my liver or spleen and killed me.

  Instead it shot him forward and me, gasping for breath, back. I fell and rolled, and was outside the circle permitted him by his chain; David had already scrambled away, and Phaedria was well out of his reach.

  For a moment, while I shuddered and tried to sit up, the three of us simply stared at him. Then David quoted wryly:

  Arms and the man I sing, who forc’d by fate,

  And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,

  Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore.

  Neither Phaedria nor I laughed, but
Phaedria let out her breath in a long sigh and asked me, “How did they do that? Get him like that?”

  I told her I supposed they had transplanted the extra pair after suppressing his body’s natural resistance to the implanted foreign tissue, and that the operation had probably replaced some of his ribs with the donor’s shoulder structure. “I’ve been teaching myself to do the same sort of thing with mice – on a much less ambitious scale, of course – and the striking thing to me is that he seems to have full use of the grafted pair. Unless you’ve got identical twins to work with, the nerve endings almost never join properly, and whoever did this probably had a hundred failures before he got what he wanted. That slave must be worth a fortune.”

  David said, “I thought you threw your mice out. Aren’t you working with monkeys now?”

  I wasn’t, although I hoped to; but whether I was or not, it seemed clear that talking about it wasn’t going to accomplish anything. I told David that.

  “I thought you were hot to leave.”

  I had been, but now I wanted something else much more. I wanted to perform an exploratory operation on that creature much more than David or Phaedria had ever wanted money. David liked to think that he was bolder than I, and I knew when I said, “You may want to get away, but don’t use me as an excuse, brother,” that that would settle it.

  “All right, how are we going to kill him?” He gave me an angry look.

  Phaedria said: “It can’t reach us. We could throw things at it.”

  “And he could throw the ones that missed back.”

  While we talked, the thing, the four-armed slave, was grinning at us. I was fairly sure it could understand at least a part of what we were saying, and I motioned to David and Phaedria to indicate that we should go back into the room where the desk was. When we were there I closed the door. “I didn’t want him to hear us. If we had weapons on poles, spears of some kind, we might be able to kill him without getting too close. What could we use for the sticks? Any ideas?”