Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  I bathed in milk from an extinct species, and had myself dried by an affectionate towel that cuddled me in all the right places and told me stories. Tall stories but true stories. I thought for a while, flopped on a temporary bed, then pulsed LAZ for a call. Got Jerzy, on EVA of all things. Taking hike up side of rimwall, wearing skinsuit, carrying parasol.

  "What you wanting, pussy-killer?" he asked. I could see my image reflected in his eyes, gridded over by life-support data. Serious business, walking.

  "Wanting you," I said. "Got an upcoming small social, want company. For two twos. Are you not flattered?" I waited for him to think of something. He seemed to be on interrupt overdrive from his response.

  "Flattered? I'm flattened! When, where?"

  "This diurn," I said. Consulted Wisdom. "Four hours, my node. Formal dinner with parent, parents' associate."

  "Um. Can intersect. That adequate?" His eyes, wide, disingenuous, interrogated me.

  "Better be! See you." I cut out and buried fists in foam bed. Maybe here, in six hours or so. I knew I needed him. This was becoming an embarrassment. (And don't tell me that referent is abstruse. I don't accept that; some things are universal to human experience.) Thinking about need, I slept.

  Woke to touch on shoulder. Rolled, foam surging and dissolving beneath me; it was Sheila. She belly-flopped beside me, face to face. "Farida, please accept my humblest apologies for waking you. I wanted to talk to you before Syrinx gets here, and you were going to sleep right through." She lay there like a big whale, mammalian, floating. "Right, Mom," I said. Breasts at my face against which I'd suckled until too old.

  "Right," she agreed. "I haven't been seeing much of you lately. Any particular reason?" Straight to the decision point, Mom. I yawned.

  "Not really," I said. "Been with the crowd, culling landpussies, hiking, plugging. Got someone you should meet coming, three hours minus, eat with us. Okay?"

  "Uh huh." I could see her wondering, is that all? But I didn't want to know for sure what she was thinking. It takes all the pleasure out of life to know everything. That's what's wrong with the kiddies, I think.

  "Is there a name to match this identity, perchance?" she asked.

  "Yes. Jerzy." Pronounced Cher-Tsee. "Hope you match abstracts."

  Mom rolled off the foam and bounced to her feet. "Do you, Fa?" She grinned like an electrical discharge in air. "See you in person."

  "In person," I echoed. Feel so distant, I wondered. What's wrong with me?

  Jerzy arrived, glamorous and beautiful. We spent minutes in rapt mutual admiration. Basking in a glow of self confidence. He sat at the base of our tree, outside the bole which concealed the door, and I sat beside him. Careful not to disturb his cosmetic artifice by contact; tigerstriped microtexture to face and body converted him into a baroque feline sapient. His skirt matched, too.

  "Did you find what you were looking for on your walk?" I asked, artlessly. He draped an arm across my shoulders, casual and superb.

  "Yes," he admitted after a lengthy pause. "Optic homing beacon for express. If we can fix the backup systems -- " he left the rest unverbalized. A passing police videomouse might overhear and correlate (direct mindtap being violation of human rights). Secrecy lay in bussing or in ellipsis.

  "I hope this is the right way to test it," I verbalised. "It's got to be done as a double blind, but the panic... " He hugged me.

  "Unquantifiable. Can kiddies panic? Some emotional states may be non-mappable. How old's your mother?"

  "My what?" I was taken aback.

  "Your mother. Physiological originator." He flushed slightly at such irreverence, but paused for response.

  "I never met him," I explained, "but I should guess at least a century. Maybe more -- great-great-granddad is ancient. And he shows up pretty often."

  But just then Syrinx arrived; I could see this leading to identity interpolation, subsequent confusion. "Jerzy," I said, "meet Syrinx. Friend of Mom's." That was mega understatement. Jerzy looked up, bared teeth, gaped in what looked like a manic vampire attack, and said, "Hello." (Big anticlimax.)

  Syrinx grinned back. "You could say so," he insinuated. A thought occurred to me; had they met? I asked Wisdom, which asked LAZ, who didn't know.

  "Am I too late?" I asked neither of them in particular. Jerzy recovered first.

  "Definitely," he agreed. "Met on surface, not long ago."

  "Precisely," said Syrinx, grin down-modulating to scowl. "Not in best of circumstances." A man of tungsten, notwithstanding his kevlar infrastructure. "Well, cheer up. You're not disrupting dinner, either or both of you. Injustice to food!" Somehow I didn't imagine the food cared. I made a Wisdom scratchpad entry to query Jerzy at leisure.

  Took man and factotum by the hand, stepped up through bole, and arrived. Remembered, blindingly fast, as passed entrance; Syrinx is police analyst! Terrible oversight -- should never have invited Jerzy. But it was too late. Mom had ordered dinner; multi-course spectacular. Main item was braised long pork, probably synthetic but tasted like real thing.

  We ate and chatted and filtered perceptions through a matrix she'd developed for the event, a hallucinatory experience in which senses became confused, crystal-clear. Syrinx seemed distracted; I asked him why.

  "Busy," he replied, "doing downtime for LAZ. Trying to trace suspected Triumvirate infiltration among insect life. Never let anyone misinform you: biological vetting is boring!" He scooped a chunk of meat into his mouth, sizzling hot. With gusto. I wondered if he suspected he was sitting opposite secret weapon. Jerzy restrained himself, no stolen glances detected.

  He and Syrinx, it devolved, had met in vicinity of hyperbahn surface; had watched a landing. The flat grey of the strip split by a silver flash, then a contrail of blue-hot oxygen. The lander zipped past at over 2 EXP 3 kilometres per hour, decelerating fast. Left molten tracks drying on the basalt.

  They shared a Moment of meditation, observing. Then branched. Branched again, after meal. Mom and Syrinx left, social circuit fizzing, tube to Gagarin on the other side of Luna. Looked like they'd miss the fun. Jerzy and I subsequently alone in homenode.

  He had words. "We should act soon," he said, quietly and urgently; "priority high. Or do you fancy delaying until someone else springs it?"

  "Guess not." I shrugged. "Any concepts?"

  "Yes. Get the rest, then act. Simple trick; trip-wire."

  "Trip-what?" He explained, my Wisdom concurred, and we did it. Went to get the gang. The rest was anticlimax.

  We gathered on the earthlit plain, seven silvery silhouettes with parasols. Faces indistinguishable but minds hot; we were bussed, again.

  There was a landing every ten minutes on the strip. Kid Inkatha and Hammurabi had tooled up a robotnik to make monofilament rope. It gleamed blue, flickers running up and down its extruded length. We waited for next landing, and afterwards crossed the strip. Pegged it out, taut but held between uneven heights. That way the wheel rims that survived would be skewed; enough to divert by a few degrees. Interface with dome. Then we sat it out inside, waiting for big splash, killcounters in place.

  Now you cannot convince me that kiddies are human. Their response pattern is alien. Their appearance often grotesque. Their thought patterns are non-parametric. Their logic is a virus. A virus infecting us as we age, until we are crippled by memories and Wisdom external and internal. I do not see that their lives matter. Ours do, but we are the future. That's why we needed to know that genocide theory works; subsequently apply it to rival groups. That's causality; kiddies are acausal. A history blockage. Maybe they didn't want to die; but they needed to.

  There was a flicker of yellow fire and a jolt through the ground. Moon, earth stood still in respect as the dome imploded. We'd missed a point; catastrophe theory. Dome was a geodesic structure. Damage resulted in chain reaction turning it to gravel.

  I think I saw the lander, embedded in a halo of light. But maybe not. We sheltered under a homenode as roof rained gently down. Our suits inflated as air curt
ain blew away in silence. We waited and watched, then walked.

  I saw a kiddie. It was genderized as a he, but large elements were ambiguous. He squatted and twitched, spraying soil around in agonised figure-infinity patterns until he was decorticated by a falling diamond the size of my fist. It was the only death I saw; population density was too low for mass havoc.

  A housetree had cramped and iced into a position of agony; around it lay the small, scattered twists of landpussies, strangely pathetic in the twilight. In death they assumed the colour of the lunar surface. Later we camped out in the desert, saw no more corpses, huddled together for emotional warmth. I hoped our deathcount program could verify the consequences of our initiation. In the pale earthglow it seemed almost futile; a waste of time. Erase and restart. Only ...

  This node has no door. I await sentence. Trial by statistical probability of neurones firing in order to precipitate havoc; jury is my own brain. Probable sentence is centerograde amnesia; no new memories recorded after crushing sense of guilt delivered. We live in an eternal present, huddled like ghosts against the vapour pressure of the past.

  They probably cannot read my texts. I can expect no mercy for my identity. The dead are all dead, remain so, resurrection improbable due to cost. Many of them sheltered death-lust, but still considered murdered by courts. Theory worked, by the way. Kill-level approached hundredth percentile because of dome systems collapse. We used overkill approach, brute force. A bit more finesse might have been a mitigating factor.

  I see Jerzy sitting opposite me in this node, guilt rooted in his facial muscles like skin. The others are in a different category; we seem to be viewed as netleaders.

  I look at him, and he looks at me; I mouth, silently. "Judgement soon; want to bus?" He inclines his head. I transmit pulse this time, and we lock together in total fusion. Sense of completeness, love unnecessary. There's not much time. I think that the old are an alien species; their state of mind is unknowable, their perspective

  -- eternal.

  Equoid, by Charles Stross

  Hugo Nomination for Best Novella 2014

  “Bob! Are you busy right now? I’d like a moment of your time.”

  Those thirteen words never bode well—although coming from my new manager, Iris, they’re less doom-laden than if they were falling from the lips of some others I could name. In the two months I’ve been working for her Iris has turned out to be the sanest and most sensible manager I’ve had in the past five years. Which is saying quite a lot, really, and I’m eager to keep her happy while I’ve got her.

  “Be with you in ten minutes,” I call through the open door of my office; “got a query from HR to answer first.” Human Resources have teeth, here in the secretive branch of the British government known to its inmates as the Laundry; so when HR ask you to do their homework—ahem, provide one’s opinion of an applicant’s suitability for a job opening—you give them priority over your regular work load. Even when it’s pretty obvious that they’re taking the piss.

  I am certain that Mr. Lee would make an extremely able addition to the Office Equipment Procurement Team, I type, if he was not already—according to your own goddamn database, if you’d bothered to check it—a lieutenant in the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army Jiangshi Brigade. Who presumably filled out the shouldn’t-have-been-published-on-the-internet job application on a drunken dare, or to test our vetting procedures, or something. Consequently I suspect that he would fail our mandatory security background check at the first hurdle. (As long as the vetting officer isn’t also a PLA mole.)

  I hit “send” and wander out into the neon tube overcast where Iris is tapping her toes. “Your place or mine?”

  “Mine,” says Iris, beckoning me into her cramped corner office. “Have a chair, Bob. Something’s come up, and I think it’s right up your street.” She plants herself behind her desk, leans back in her chair, and preps her pitch. “It’ll get you out of the office for a bit, and if HR are using you to stomp all over the dreams of upwardly-mobile Chinese intelligence operatives it means you’re—”

  “Underutilized. Yeah, whatever.” I wave it off. But it’s true: since I sorted out the funny stuff in the basement at St. Hilda’s I’ve been bored. The day-to-day occupation of the average secret agent mostly consists of hurry up and wait. In my case, that means filling in on annoying bits of administrative scutwork and handling upgrades to the departmental network—when I’m not being called upon to slay multi-tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime. (Which doesn’t happen very often, actually, for which I am profoundly grateful.) “You said it’s out of the office?”

  “Yes.” She smiles; she knows she’s planted the hook. “A bit of fresh country air, Bob—you’re too pallid. But tell me—” she leans forward—“what do you know about horses?”

  The equine excursion takes me by surprise. “Uh?” I shake my head. “Four legs, hooves, and a bad attitude?” Iris shakes her head, so I try again: “Go with a carriage like, er, love and marriage?”

  “No, Bob, I was wondering—did you ever learn to ride?”

  “What, you mean—wait, we’re not talking about bicycles here, right?” From her reaction I don’t think that’s the answer she was looking for. “I’m a city boy. As the photographer said, you should never work with animals or small children if you can avoid it. What’s come up, a dressage emergency?”

  “Not exactly.” Her smile fades. “It’s a shame, it would have made this easier.”

  “Made what easier?”

  “I could have sworn HR said you could ride.” She stares at me pensively. “Never mind. Too late to worry about has-beens now. Hmm. Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter—you’re married, so I don’t suppose you’re a virgin, either. Are you?”

  “Get away!” Virgins? That particular myth is associated with unicorns, which don’t exist, any more than vampires, dragons, or mummies—although I suppose if you wrapped a zombie in bandages you’d get a—stop that. In my head, confused stories about Lady Godiva battle with media images of tweed-suited shotgun-wielding farmers. “Do you need someone who can ride? Because I don’t think I can learn in—”

  “No, Bob, I need you. Or rather, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs needs a liaison officer who just happens to have your background and proven track record in—” she waves her left hand—“putting down infestations.”

  “Do they?” I do a double-take at putting down infestations. “Are they sure that’s what they need?”

  “Yes, they are. Or rather, they know that when they spot certain signs, they call us.” She pulls open a desk drawer and removes a slim folder, its cover bearing the Crowned Portcullis emblem beneath an elder sign. “Take this back to your office and read it,” she tells me. “Return it to the stacks when you’re done. Then you can spend the rest of the afternoon thinking of ways to politely tell HR to piss up a rope, because tomorrow morning you’re getting on a train to Hove in order to lend a DEFRA inspector a helping hand.”

  “You’re serious?” I boggle at her. “You’re sending me to do what? Inspect a farm?”

  “I don’t want to prejudice your investigation. There’s a livery stable. Just hook up with the man from The Archers, take a look around, and phone home if anything catches your attention.”

  She slides the file across my desk and I open the flyleaf. It starts with TOP SECRET and a date round about the battle of the Somme, crossed out and replaced with successively lower classifications until fifteen years ago it was marked down to MILDLY EMBARRASSING NO TABLOIDS. Then I flip the page and spot the title. “Hang on—”

  “Shoo,” she says, a wicked glint in her eyes. “Have fun!”

  I shoo, smarting. I know a set-up when I see one—and I’ve been conned.

  To understand why I knew I’d been tricked, you need to know who I am and what I do. Assuming you’ve read this far without your eyeballs boiling in your skull, it’s probably safe to tell you that my name’s Bob Howard—at least, for operational purposes; t
rue names have power, and we don’t like to give extradimensional identity thieves the keys to our souls—and I work for a secret government agency known to its inmates as the Laundry. It morphed into its present form during the Second World War, ran the occult side of the conflict with the Thousand Year Reich, and survives to this day as an annoying blob somewhere off to the left on the org chart of the British intelligence services, funded out of the House of Lords black budget.

  Magic is a branch of applied mathematics, and I started out studying computer science (which is no more about computers than astronomy is about building really big telescopes). These days I specialize in applied computational demonology and general dogsbody work around my department. The secret service has never really worked out how to deal with people like me, who aren’t admin personnel but didn’t come up through the Oxbridge civil service fast-track route. In fact, I got into this line of work entirely by accident: if your dissertation topic leads you in the wrong direction you’d better hope that the Laundry finds you and makes you a job offer you can’t refuse before the things you’ve unintentionally summoned up get bored talking to you and terminate your viva voce with prejudice.

  After a couple of years of death by bureaucratic snu-snu (too many committee meetings, too many tedious IT admin jobs) I volunteered for active duty, without any clear understanding that it would mean more years of death by boredom (too many committee meetings, too many tedious IT jobs) along with a side-order of mortal terror courtesy of tentacle monsters from beyond spacetime.

  As I am now older and wiser, not to mention married and still in possession of my sanity, I prefer my work life to be boringly predictable these days. Which it is, as a rule, but then along come the nuisance jobs—the Laundry equivalent of the way the US Secret Service always has to drop round for coffee, a cake, and a brisk interrogation with idiots who boast about shooting the president on Yahoo! Chat.