Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One)

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  The lasers part my soft flesh with even less effort than my thoughts part this moment. One key. One key, Xiao Chen, and the crew would be in here, wondering how to stitch me back together again. Pretending the fire isn’t inside me, and inside them, as well.

  I believe that they’ll never see it.

  Or hear what it whispers in my sleep.

  That I am only the beginning of alone, that alone stretches out before me, time’s sartorius muscle, and in a billion lifetimes I would never comprehend the smallest portion of alone. Alone is the black and the stars and the crackle of background radiation and the cold and scorch of vacuum. Alone is everywhere that we have been headed since feeble Devonian footsteps carried us away from murky oxbow heavens. Out here, we are alone. Completely. Absolutely. Stripped of illusions otherwise. No matter how much we talk, or what precautions have been taken, alone out here is God. The fire in me won’t let me do that monkey trick and forget it, not again, not ever again.

  We are alone.

  In pain. In fear. In the space between stars. In the bright light of a surgical bay. In death.

  At the start, and at the end, we are alone.

  They have unveiled me for alone. I lie here, honest, baring secrets and trying to find the fire, organs and tissue and memories, my past and future written in the blue-white-red-grey convolutions of my large intestine.

  All I can smell is blood, and the burning pork odor the lasers make as they work. The silver needles and the anesthetic making me much, much more like stone than meat. Already? Wasn’t there an injection –

  Blink is probing my left gluteus medius, and the one I call Yu Jie, because the palms of its three hands are light green, is measuring something. I’m not sure what. Stainless steel slips beneath fibers that extend from the ilium to the femur, and now Yu Jie is pulling back the tensor fasciae latae so that Blink can get a better look. So that I can also get a better look.

  Before it started, I asked Blink what it thought about going home, and it didn’t understand my question.

  I suspect that’s what has kept the droids safe from the fire. Questions that they don’t understand, concepts mercifully beyond their programming.

  If Tyler ever understood the question, he’d shut down life support and blow the hull, leave us drifting dead in the abyss, and no one would ever find us and I wouldn’t have to explain to them about alone. That’s a sort of bargain. Alone would agree to that, I am certain. A sacrifice, because it knows that it’ll win anyway, in the end. Everyone comes here, eventually. You don’t have to have a rocket. You don’t have to be in the employ of the Allied National Space Agency or score so high on the standard that no one wants to talk to you because they know there’s no room in there for a soul, just numbers and facts and consequence. Everyone comes here.

  So alone is patient.

  And willing to make deals.

  (END slip 7, 987.EC1 fell, mark and file)

  (7code21-7)

  (KN90*2MA)

  (mark)

  * * *

  The Dry Salvages

  More often than not, I go away from a story for many years. I write it and set it aside and never read it after publication. Sometimes, I go back and find I no longer love the story, that I can hardly stand the sight of it. That’s usually the way this process plays out. But on other very rare and wonderful occasions, I come back to a story after years of estrangement and discover I’m still pleased with what I’ve done. That’s exactly what happened with The Dry Salvages. And, as is the way of sf, we know much more now than I could have known then about Gliese 876 and the bodies that spin about it. Still, I’ve resisted the urge to update the story to include more recent discoveries.

  Houses Under The Sea

  1.

  When I close my eyes, I see Jacova Angevine.

  I close my eyes, and there she is, standing alone at the end of the breakwater, standing with the foghorn as the choppy sea shatters itself to foam against a jumble of grey boulders. The October wind is making something wild of her hair, and her back’s turned to me. The boats are coming in.

  I close my eyes, and she’s standing in the surf at Moss Landing, gazing out into the bay, staring towards the place where the continental shelf narrows down to a sliver and drops away to the black abyss of Monterey Canyon. There are gulls, and her hair is tied back in a ponytail.

  I close my eyes, and we’re walking together down Cannery Row, heading south towards the aquarium. She’s wearing a gingham dress and a battered pair of Doc Martens that she must have had for fifteen years. I say something inconsequential, but she doesn’t hear me, too busy scowling at the tourists, at the sterile, cheery absurdities of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company and Mackerel Jack’s Trading Post.

  “That used to be a whorehouse,” she says, nodding in the direction of Mackerel Jack’s. “The Lone Star Cafe, but Steinbeck called it the Bear Flag. Everything burned. Nothing here’s the way it used to be.”

  She says that like she remembers, and I close my eyes.

  And she’s on television again, out on the old pier at Moss Point, the day they launched the ROV Tiburón II.

  And she’s at the Pierce Street warehouse in Monterey; men and women in white robes are listening to every word she says. They hang on every syllable, her every breath, their many eyes like the bulging eyes of deep-sea fish encountering sunlight for the first time. Dazed, terrified, enraptured, lost.

  All of them lost.

  I close my eyes, and she’s leading them into the bay.

  Those creatures jumped the barricades

  And have headed for the sea

  All these divided moments, disconnected, or connected so many different ways, that I’ll never be able to pull them apart and find a coherent narrative. That’s my folly, my conceit, that I can make a mere story of what has happened. Even if I could, it’s nothing anyone would ever want to read, nothing I could sell. CNN and Newsweek and The New York Times, Rolling Stone and Harper’s, everyone already knows what they think about Jacova Angevine. Everybody already knows as much as they want to know. Or as little. In those minds, she’s already earned her spot in the death-cult hall of fame, sandwiched firmly in between Jim Jones and Heaven’s Gate.

  I close my eyes, and “Fire from the sky, fire on the water,” she says and smiles; I know that this time she’s talking about the fire of September 14, 1924, the day lightning struck one of the 55,000-gallon storage tanks belonging to the Associated Oil Company and a burning river flowed into the sea. Billowing black clouds hide the sun, and the fire has the voice of a hurricane as it bears down on the canneries, a voice of demons, and she stops to tie her shoes.

  I sit here in this dark motel room, staring at the screen of my laptop, the clean liquid-crystal light, typing irrelevant words to build meandering sentences, waiting, waiting, waiting, and I don’t know what it is that I’m waiting for. Or I’m only afraid to admit that I know exactly what I’m waiting for. She has become my ghost, my private haunting, and haunted things are forever waiting.

  “In the mansions of Poseidon, she will prepare halls from coral and glass and the bones of whales,” she says, and the crowd in the warehouse breathes in and out as a single, astonished organism, their assembled bodies lesser than the momentary whole they have made. “Down there, you will know nothing but peace, in her mansions, in the endless night of her coils.”

  “Tiburón is Spanish for shark,” she says, and I tell her I didn’t know that, that I had two years of Spanish in high school, but that was a thousand years ago, and all I remember is si and por favor.

  What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?

  I close my eyes again.

  The sea has many voices.

  Many gods and many voices.

  “November 5, 1936,” she says, and this is the first night we had sex, the long night we spent together in a seedy Moss Point hotel, the sort of place the fishermen take their hookers, the same place she was still staying when she died. “The Del Mar Canning Company
burned to the ground. No one ever tried to blame lightning for that one.”

  There’s moonlight through the drapes, and I imagine for a moment that her skin has become iridescent, mother-of-pearl, the shimmering motley of an oil slick. I reach out and touch her naked thigh, and she lights a cigarette. The smoke hangs thick in the air, like fog or forgetfulness.

  My fingertips against her flesh, and she stands and walks to the window.

  “Do you see something out there?” I ask, and she shakes her head very slowly.

  I close my eyes.

  In the moonlight, I can make out the puckered, circular scars on both her shoulder blades and running halfway down her spine. Two dozen or more of them, but I never bothered to count exactly. Some are no larger than a dime, but several are at least two inches across.

  “When I’m gone,” she says, “when I’m done here, they’ll ask you questions about me. What will you tell them?”

  “That depends what they ask,” I reply and laugh, still thinking it was all one of her strange jokes, the talk of leaving, and I lie down and stare at the shadows on the ceiling.

  “They’ll ask you everything,” she whispers. “Sooner or later, I expect they’ll ask you everything.”

  Which they did.

  I close my eyes, and I see her, Jacova Angevine, the lunatic prophet from Silinas, pearls that were her eyes, cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o, and she’s kneeling in the sand. The sun is rising behind her and I hear people coming through the dunes.

  “I’ll tell them you were a good fuck,” I say, and she takes another drag off her cigarette and continues staring at the night outside the motel windows.

  “Yes,” she says. “I expect you will.”

  2.

  The first time that I saw Jacova Angevine – I mean, the first time I saw her in person. I’d just come back from Pakistan and had flown up to Monterey to try and clear my head. A photographer friend had an apartment there and he was on assignment in Tokyo, so I figured I could lay low for a couple of weeks, a whole month maybe, stay drunk and decompress. My clothes, my luggage, my skin, everything about me still smelled like Islamabad. I’d spent more than six months overseas, ferreting about for real and imagined connections between Muslim extremists, European middlemen, and Pakistan’s leaky nuclear arms program, trying to gauge the damage done by the enterprising Abdul Qadeer Khan, rogue father of the Pakistani bomb, trying to determine exactly what he’d sold and to whom. Everyone already knew – or at least thought they knew – about North Korea, Libya, and Iran, and American officials suspected that al Queda and other terrorist groups belonged somewhere on his list of customers, as well, despite assurances to the contrary from Major-General Shaukat Sultan. I’d come back with a head full of apocalypse and Urdu, anti-India propaganda and Mushaikh poetry, and I was determined to empty my mind of everything except scotch and the smell of the sea.

  It was a bright Wednesday afternoon, a warm day for November in Monterey County, and I decided to come up for air. I showered for the first time in a week and had a late lunch at the Sardine Factory on Wave Street – Dungeness crab remoulade, fresh oysters with horseradish, and grilled sanddabs in a lemon sauce that was a little heavy on the thyme – then decided to visit the aquarium and walk it all off. When I was a kid in Brooklyn, I spent a lot of my time at the aquarium on Coney Island, and, three decades later, there were few things a man could do sober that relaxed me as quickly and completely. I put the check on my MasterCard and followed Wave Street south and east to Prescott, then turned back down Cannery Row, the glittering bay on my right, the pale blue autumn sky stretched out overhead like oil on canvas.

  I close my eyes, and that afternoon isn’t something that happened three years ago, something I’m making sound like a goddamn travelogue. I close my eyes, and it’s happening now, for the first time, and there she is, sitting alone on a long bench in front of the kelp forest exhibit, her thin face turned up to the high, swaying canopy behind the glass, the dapple of fish and seaweed shadows drifting back and forth across her features. I recognize her, and that surprises me, because I’ve only seen her face on television and in magazine photos and on the dust jacket of the book she wrote before she lost the job at Berkeley. She turns her head and smiles at me, the familiar way you smile at a friend, the way you smile at someone you’ve known all your life.

  “You’re in luck,” she says. “It’s almost time for them to feed the fish.” And Jacova Angevine pats the bench next to her, indicating that I should sit down.

  “I read your book,” I say, taking a seat because I’m still too surprised to do anything else.

  “Did you? Did you really?” and now she looks like she doesn’t believe me, like I’m only saying that I’ve read her book to be polite, and from her expression I can tell that she thinks it’s a little odd, that anyone would ever bother to try and flatter her.

  “Yes,” I tell her, trying too hard to sound sincere. “I did really. In fact, I read some of it twice.”

  “And why would you do a thing like that?”

  “Truthfully?”

  “Yes, truthfully.”

  Her eyes are the same color as the water trapped behind the thick panes of aquarium glass, the color of the November sunlight filtered through saltwater and kelp blades. There are fine lines at the corners of her mouth and beneath her eyes that make her look several years older than she is.

  “Last summer, I was flying from New York to London, and there was a three-hour layover in Shannon. Your book was all I’d brought to read.”

  “That’s terrible,” she says, still smiling, and turns to face the big tank again. “Do you want your money back?”

  “It was a gift,” I reply, which isn’t true, and I have no idea why I’m lying to her. “An ex-girlfriend gave it to me for my birthday.”

  “Is that why you left her?”

  “No, I left her because she thought I drank too much, and I thought she drank too little.”

  “Are you an alcoholic?” Jacova Angevine asks, as casually as if she were asking me whether I liked milk in my coffee or if I took it black.

  “Well, some people say I’m headed in that direction,” I tell her. “But I did enjoy the book, honest. It’s hard to believe they fired you for writing it. I mean, that people get fired for writing books.” But I know that’s a lie, too; I’m not half that naive, and it’s not at all difficult to understand how or why Waking Leviathan ended Jacova Angevine’s career as an academic. A reviewer for Nature called it “the most confused and preposterous example of bad history wedding bad science since the Velikovsky affair.”

  “They didn’t fire me for writing it,” she says. “They politely asked me to resign because I’d seen fit to publish it.”

  “Why didn’t you fight them?”

  Her smile fades a little, and the lines around her mouth seem to grow the slightest bit more pronounced. “I don’t come here to talk about the book, or my unfortunate employment history,” she says.

  I apologize, and she tells me not to worry about it.

  A diver enters the tank, matte-black neoprene trailing a rush of silver bubbles, and most of the fish rise expectantly to meet him or her, a riot of kelp bass and sleek leopard sharks, sheephead and rockfish and species I don’t recognize. She doesn’t say anything else, too busy watching the feeding, and I sit there beside her, at the bottom of a pretend ocean.

  I open my eyes. There are only the words on the screen in front of me.

  I didn’t see her again for the better part of a year. During that time, as my work sent me back to Pakistan, and then to Germany and Israel, I reread her book. I also read some of the articles and reviews, and a brief online interview that she’d given Whitley Strieber’s Unknown Country website. Then I tracked down an article on Inuit archaeology that she’d written for Fate and wondered at what point Jacova Angevine had decided that there was no going back, nothing left to lose and so no reason not to allow herself to become part of the murky, strident world of fri
nge believers and UFO buffs, conspiracy theorists and paranormal “investigators” that seemed so eager to embrace her as one of its own.

  And I wondered, too, if perhaps she might have been one of them from the start.

  3.

  I woke up this morning from a long dream of storms and drowning and lay in bed, very still, sizing up my hangover and staring at the sagging, water-stained ceiling of my motel room. And I finally admitted to myself that this isn’t going to be what the paper has hired me to write. I don’t think I’m even trying to write it for them anymore. They want the dirt, of course, and I’ve never been shy about digging holes. I’ve spent the last twenty years as a shovel-for-hire. I don’t think it matters that I may have loved her, or that a lot of this dirt is mine. I can’t pretend that I’m acting out of nobility of soul or loyalty or even some selfish, belated concern for my own dingy reputation. I would write exactly what they want me to write if I could. If I knew how. I need the money. I haven’t worked for the last five months, and my savings are almost gone.

  But if I’m not writing it for them, if I’ve abandoned all hope of a paycheck at the other end of this thing, why the hell then am I still sitting here typing? Am I making a confession? Bless me, Father, I can’t forget? Do I believe it’s something I can puke up like a sour belly full of whiskey, that writing it all down will make the nightmares stop or make it any easier for me to get through the days? I sincerely hope I’m not as big a fool as that. Whatever else I may be, I like to think that I’m not an idiot.