Whichever it is, I know what he would think of this. He killed thirteen people. He’d like to kill me, too.
I’m shivering.
The jacket’s gone cold, and it—and I—am soaked. The wool still insulates while wet, but not enough. The jacket and my compression tights don’t do a damned thing.
I wonder if my captor realized this. Maybe this is his game.
Considering all the possibilities, freezing to death is actually not so bad.
Maybe he just doesn’t realize the danger? Not everybody knows about cold.
The last wrap of tape parts, sticking to my chapped lower lip and pulling a few scraps of skin loose when I tug it free. I’m leaving my DNA all over this basement. I spit in a corner, too, just for good measure. Leave traces: even when you’re sure you’re going to die. Especially then. Do anything you can to leave clues.
It was my skin under a fingernail that finally got me.
* * *
The period when he was undergoing the physical and mental adaptations that turned him into me gave me a certain … not sympathy, because they did the body before they did the rightminding, and sympathy’s an emotion he never felt before I was thirty-three years old … but it gave him and therefore me a certain perspective he hadn’t had before.
It itched like hell. Like puberty.
There’s an old movie, one he caught in the guu this one time. Some people from the future go back in time and visit a hospital. One of them is a doctor. He saves a woman who’s waiting for dialysis or a transplant by giving her a pill that makes her grow a kidney.
That’s pretty much how I got my ovaries, though it involved stem cells and needles in addition to pills.
I was still him, because they hadn’t repaired the damage to my brain yet. They had to keep him under control while the physical adaptations were happening. He was on chemical house arrest. Induced anxiety disorder. Induced agoraphobia.
It doesn’t sound so bad until you realize that the neurological shackles are strong enough that even stepping outside your front door can put you on the ground. There are supposed to be safeguards in place. But everybody’s heard the stories of criminals on ChemArrest who burned to death because they couldn’t make themselves walk out of a burning building.
He thought he could beat the rightminding, beat the chemarrest. Beat everything.
Damn, I was arrogant.
* * *
My former self had more grounds for his arrogance than this guy. This is pathetic, I think. And then I have to snort laughter, because it’s not my former self who’s got me tied up in this basement.
I could just let this happen. It’d be fair. Ironic. Justice.
And my dying here would mean more women follow me into this basement. One by one by one.
I unbind my ankles more quickly than I did the wrists. Then I stand and start pacing, do jumping jacks, jog in place while I shine my light around. The activity eases the shivering. Now it’s just a tremble, not a teeth-rattling shudder. My muscles are stiff; my bones ache. There’s a cramp in my left calf.
There’s a door locked with a dead bolt. The windows have been bricked over with new bricks that don’t match the foundation. They’re my best option—if I could find something to strike with, something to pry with, I might break the mortar and pull them free.
I’ve got my hands. My teeth. My tiny light, which I turn off now so as not to warn my captor.
And a core temperature that I’m barely managing to keep out of the danger zone.
* * *
When I walked into my court-mandated therapist’s office for the last time—before my relocation—I looked at her creamy complexion, the way the light caught on her eyes behind the glasses. I remembered what he’d thought.
If a swell of revulsion could split your own skin off and leave it curled on the ground like something spoilt and disgusting, that would have happened to me then. But of course it wasn’t my shell that was ruined and rotten; it was something in the depths of my brain.
“How does it feel to have a functional amygdala?” she asked.
“Lousy,” I said.
She smiled absently and stood up to shake my hand—for the first time. To offer me closure. It’s something they’re supposed to do.
“Thank you for all the lives you’ve saved,” I told her.
“But not for yours?” she said.
I gave her fingers a gentle squeeze and shook my head.
* * *
My other self waits in the dark with me. I wish I had his physical strength, his invulnerability. His conviction that everybody else in the world is slower, stupider, weaker.
In the courtroom, while I was still my other self, he looked out from the stand into the faces of the living mothers and fathers of the girls he killed. I remember the eleven women and seven men, how they focused on him. How they sat, their stillness, their attention.
He thought about the girls while he gave his testimony. The only individuality they had for him was what was necessary to sort out which parents went with which corpse, important, because it told him who to watch for the best response.
I wish I didn’t know what it feels like to be prey. I tell myself it’s just the cold that makes my teeth chatter. Just the cold that’s killing me.
Prey can fight back, though. People have gotten killed by something as timid and inoffensive as a white-tailed deer.
I wish I had a weapon. Even a cracked piece of brick. But the cellar is clean.
I do jumping jacks, landing on my toes for silence. I swing my arms. I think about doing burpees, but I’m worried that I might scrape my hands on the floor. I think about taking my shoes off. Running shoes are soft for kicking with, but if I get outside, my feet will freeze without them.
When. When I get outside.
My hands and teeth are the only weapons I have.
An interminable time later, I hear a creak through the ceiling. A footstep, muffled, and then the thud of something dropped. More footsteps, louder, approaching the top of a stair beyond the door.
I crouch beside the door, on the hinge side, far enough away that it won’t quite strike me if he swings it violently. I wish for a weapon—I am a weapon—and I wait.
A metallic tang in my mouth now. Now I am really, truly scared.
His feet thump on the stairs. He’s not little. There’s no light beneath the door—it must be weather stripped for soundproofing. The lock thuds. A bar scrapes. The knob rattles, and then there’s a bar of light as it swings open. He turns the flashlight to the right, where he left me lying. It picks out the puddle of vomit. I hear his intake of breath.
I think about the mothers of the girls I killed. I think, would they want me to die like this?
My old self would relish it. It’d be his revenge for what I did to him.
My goal is just to get past him—my captor, my old self; they blur together—to get away, run. Get outside. Hope for a road, neighbors, bright daylight.
My captor’s silhouette is dim, scatter-lit. He doesn’t look armed, except for the flashlight, one of those archaic long heavy metal ones that doubles as a club. I can’t be sure that’s all he has. He wavers. He might slam the door and leave me down here to starve—
I lunge.
I grab for the wrist holding the light, and I half-catch it, but he’s stronger. I knew he would be. He rips the wrist out of my grip, swings the flashlight. Shouts. I lurch back, and it catches me on the shoulder instead of across the throat. My arm sparks pain and numbs. I don’t hear my collarbone snap. Would I, if it has?
I try to knee him in the crotch and hit his thigh instead. I mostly elude his grip. He grabs my jacket; cloth stretches and rips. He swings the light once more. It thuds into the stair wall and punches through drywall. I’m half-past him and I use his own grip as an anchor as I lean back and kick him right in the center of the nose. Soft shoes or no soft shoes.
He lets go, then. Falls back. I go up the stairs on all fours, scrambling, sure he’
s right behind me. Waiting for the grab at my ankle. Halfway up I realize I should have locked him in. Hit the door at the top of the stairs and find myself in a perfectly ordinary hallway, in need of a good sweep. The door ahead is closed. I fumble the lock, yank it open, tumble down steps into the snow as something fouls my ankles.
It’s twilight. I get my feet under me and stagger back to the path. The shovel I fell over is tangled with my feet. I grab it, use it as a crutch, lever myself up and stagger-run-limp down the walk to a long driveway.
I glance over my shoulder, sure I hear breathing.
Nobody. The door swings open in the wind.
Oh. The road. No traffic. I know where I am. Out past the graveyard and the bridge. I run through here every couple of days, but the house is set far enough back that it was never more than a dim white outline behind trees. It’s a Craftsman bungalow, surrounded by winter-sere oaks.
Maybe it wasn’t an attack of opportunity, then. Maybe he saw me, and decided to lie in wait.
I pelt towards town—pelt, limping, the air so cold in my lungs that they cramp and wheeze. I’m cold, so cold. The wind is a knife. I yank my sleeves down over my hands. My body tries to draw itself into a huddled comma even as I run. The sun’s at the horizon.
I think, I should just let the winter have me.
Justice for those eleven mothers and seven fathers. Justice for those thirteen women who still seem too alike. It’s only that their interchangeability bothers me now.
At the bridge, I stumble to a dragging walk, then turn into the wind off the river, clutch the rail, and stop. I turn right, and don’t see him coming. My wet fingers freeze to the railing.
The state police are a half mile on, right around the curve at the top of the hill. If I run, I won’t freeze before I get there. If I run.
My fingers stung when I touched the rail. Now they’re numb, my ears past hurting. If I stand here, I’ll lose the feeling in my feet.
The sunset glazes the ice below with crimson. I turn and glance the other way; in a pewter sky, the rising moon bleaches the clouds to moth-wing iridescence.
I’m wet to the skin. Even if I start running now, I might not make it to the station house. Even if I started running now, the man in the bungalow might be right behind me. I don’t think I hit him hard enough to knock him out. Just knock him down.
If I stay, it won’t take long at all until the cold stops hurting.
If I stay here, I wouldn’t have to remember being my other self again. I could put him down. At last, at last, I could put those women down. Amelie, unless her name was Jessica. The others.
It seems easy. Sweet.
But if I stay here, I won’t be the last person to wake up in the bricked up basement of that little white bungalow.
The wind is rising. Every breath I take is a wheeze. A crow blows across the road like a tattered shirt, vanishing into the twilight cemetery.
I can carry this a little further. It’s not so heavy. Thirteen corpses, plus one. After all, I carried every one of them before.
I leave skin behind on the railing when I peel my fingers free. Staggering at first, then stronger, I sprint back into town.
Jubilee
KARL SCHROEDER
“Jubilee” has at its core one of the most ingenious ideas in recent SF, a social system whereby whole communities go into a synchronized pattern of hibernation and awakening that allows them to wait out the hundreds or even thousands of years it takes for spaceships to travel between the stars (no faster-than-light-travel or wormhole shortcuts in Schroeder’s scenario) without falling hopelessly behind the space travelers, thus making it possible to maintain social continuity even at interstellar distances. On the individual human level, though, this system can create some unique and nearly insurmountable obstacles for people in love, as the story that follows poignantly demonstrates …
Canadian writer Karl Schroeder was born and raised in Brandon, Manitoba. He moved to Toronto in 1986, and has been working and writing there ever since. He is best known for his far-future Virga series, consisting of Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce, Pirate Sun, and The Hero, but he has also written the novels Ventus, Permanence, and Lady of Mazes, as well as a novel in collaboration with David Nickle, The Claus Effect. He’s also the coauthor, with Cory Doctorow, of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. His short fiction has been collected in Engine of Recall. His most recent book is a new novel, Lockstep, set in the same universe as “Jubilee.”
Three muttering men stood on the path, not five meters below where Lauren and her companion crouched. It would do no good to tell Malak that she’d been to the wedding of the eldest of the three, or that she had brought candles to the houses of another the week he was born. Their rifles were unslung, their voices low. She knew why they were here.
Malak wasn’t watching them, but instead gazed longingly at the near end of a rope bridge that started about fifty meters ahead. The newly cleared path to it wound up the side of a hundred-meter-tall bedrock tower. Thick rain forest coated most of the karst spires in this region; their bases were lost in mist, which transformed them into a crowd of green-hooded giants standing on cloud. The fat domed pillar at the far end of the bridge had sheer vertical sides, making this the only approach. All these men had to do was camp out at the bridge’s near end to make it impossible for Lauren and Malak to complete their mission.
Lauren eased back behind the bushes, pulling Malak down gently beside her. “Patience,” she murmured. “If they can’t catch us alone, they’ll have to let us get through when other travelers arrive. If this letter doesn’t get delivered, it’s as much a disaster for them as for us.” She tapped the waterproof courier’s pouch slung at her waist.
“It’s huge,” said Malak, and Lauren realized he hadn’t been looking at the bridge at all, but at the lockstep fortress it led to. He was only seventeen, he’d only ever seen sleepers’ fortresses in picture books. This one’s outlines were veiled by the clouds that drifted among the pillar-landscape. It took up nearly the entire top of the miniature plateau it rested on.
She decided not to point out the even bigger fortress that was just visible seven kilometers to the south. He really should be thinking about those men.
But she heard singing, and presently a group of laborers appeared around the curve of the path. At their left was a sheer vertical rock face, to their right an equally sheer drop-off, but half of them were horsing around while the other half sang. They were carrying planks and other supplies, their powered exoskeletons squeaking and protesting against the weight.
Lauren checked out the three men. They were gone—stepped off the path, or hiding in the bushes, it made no difference. “Time to go,” she hissed at Malak, and without waiting for him she began climbing down.
One of the newcomers arched an eyebrow when she plunked onto the road in front of him. “You’re an unlikely bandit,” he said. “What were you doing up there?”
Lauren adjusted her waistband with dignity. “Would you rather I did it in the road?”
He laughed. “Never mind!” She heard Malak hit the path and, as she turned, made out three sullen bearded faces watching her from the underbrush. Lauren resisted an urge to stick her tongue out at them. Better not push it.
“You’re headed for the fortress?” she asked the laborer, who had a hundred or so kilos of plank laid across his machine-augmented shoulders.
“Where else would we be going?”
“Can we walk with you?”
“If you don’t mind foul language, bad manners, body odor and the occasional fistfight,” he said with a grin.
“It’s okay.” She sent Malak a sidelong look. “I’m used to boys.”
She could feel the eyes of their three purusers on her back as she set out across the swinging bridge, and that prickle warred with the vertiginous fear of crossing a seemingly bottomless chasm with nothing but knotted ropes under her feet. By the time she’d reached the other side the bridge had won,
and she collapsed panting for a moment while Malak skipped off the end and the laborers approached deliberately and deadpan. Clearly they did this every day.
Lauren straightened and dusted herself off, staring them down. Then she took Malak’s shoulder and turned to confront the fortress.
“You’ve been here before,” said Malak. She nodded.
“Thirty-one years ago for me, one night for the people sleeping in there. I was a little older than you. I practically danced across the bridge that time. And it all went smoothly that time.”
“What’re they like?”
“Seriously?” She barked a laugh as they started walking. “How many times have we talked about this?”
“Yes, but…” He rolled his shoulders and splayed out his hands which, like his feet, were too big for him at his age. “None of this has been like anybody said it would be. I mean … look at that.”
Work gangs had been clearing its flanks for months, but the fortress was still half-choked by vines. The traditional plaza in front of the giant building was brush-free, and they’d redone the paths that led around its sides. These, she remembered, led to the landing pads and other spaces the sleepers would need when they awoke in two days. There was even a little village, built on exactly the same plan, and even painted the same colors as the one she’d visited three decades ago. Yet the fortress towered over it all, black, windowless and bleak, as if immune to any cosmetics they might dress it up with. Its stone corners were rounded with erosion, to the point where any given surface looked like natural stone. It was only when you took in the whole that you realized it was a building, and even then, an eerie battle was thenceforth waged between the parts of the mind that recognized objects as being artificial and those that identified them as natural. The fortress trembled between categories, indecisively alien.
“Just you wait,” she said, remembering last time. “In three days this’ll be the liveliest part of the country.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection Page 68
