“Cave men are full of surprises, I
guess. And I have a surprise of my
own. Friday’s my last day of class.
We’re moving to California. Melani has
an assistantship at Cal State. We’re
getting married in Vegas, on the way.
Otherwise I would invite you to the
wedding. Even though I know you
wouldn’t come.”
I stayed home sick Thursday. And so I
didn’t check my e-mails until Friday
morning, when I had two, after a lot of
Foundation Newsgroup gossip about a
new project, which I skipped. It was
mostly rumors, and I don’t like rumors.
That’s why I became a scientist.
THURSDAY
Dawn finally came, sunless. Something was wrong. I could feel it as we went down the hill, holding hands. The cave was filled with shadows, as before, but these were different in the way they stood and the way they moved. Then NTs saw them too, and fell to their knees, clutching one another with little cries. I was forgotten, even by Grub. The Dark Ones had come. The fire was less smoky, and the shadows moved like humans, like us, and chattering. Quarrelling, too. Many blows exchanged. They were butchering something. I drew closer before realizing, to my horror, that I was alone. The NTs had all fled. Before I had time to look around and see where they were gone, I was noticed by the dogs. The NTs don’t keep dogs, but the HS do. Perhaps they smelled the meat the NTs had dropped when they fled. They were barking all around me, nasty little creatures. Food or pets? Two of the HS came out of the cave toward me. They started to shout, and I shouted back, imitating their sounds, hoping they would perceive that I was one of them. No such luck. They moved closer, shaking their spears, which were tipped with vicious stone points. Shake-spear: they were acting, I realized. They were only interested in scaring me away. I took a step toward them, and they shook their spears harder. They are completely, unmistakably human. Their faces are very expressive. Their skins are hairless and very black. I think they thought I was an NT because I was so white, at least compared to them. Nothing else in my gait or face or speech seemed to matter. I saw over their shoulders what the others were butchering. It was the boy who had dared to eat the cooked grubs, Oliver. His head was laid off to one side, opened for the brains. NTs have big brains, even the kids. I was almost sad, but didn’t have the luxury. The two HS were shaking their spears, coming toward me one step at a time. I stepped back, still trying to talk, hoping that they would recognize me as one of their own, when something grabbed me by the ankle. It was Grub. He had come back for me. Come! Run! I scrambled after him, through the bushes, up the scree, toward the rocks and snow. The humans didn’t follow us.
FRIDAY
Snowing again, harder than ever. We’re in the cleft, Grub and I. I’m trying to save the batteries for the snatch connection (-21). No sun. Haven’t seen the sun for a week. After my last (too long) com, we circled up into the high country, careful to avoid the HS—me as well as Grub. It’s ironic that even here, at the beginning of human history, skin color trumps everything. Logical, I suppose, since it is the largest and most evident of the organs. The band has gone over the glacier; we found the tracks leading up onto the ice. Grub wanted to follow them, but I can’t get too far from the cleft and the snatch. Luckily, he won’t go anywhere without me. I maneuvered him back to the cleft, which was mercifully empty, and built a fire which seemed to comfort him—the building of it as much as the fire itself. I sat down beside him, and he quit shivering, and we slept under the space blanket, plus the skin. All we have to do is hole up here for another day and we will both be gone. Grub doesn’t know that, of course. He is shivering and whimpering in my arms. His desolation floods me as if it were my own. And his fear. The Dark Ones! The Dark Ones! What would he think if he knew I were one of them?
“I really don’t need to read any more,”
Ron said, tossing the printout aside.
“Didn’t you say that Homo sapiens had
originally come up from Africa?”
I nodded and shrugged. Nods and
shrugs are “piece of cake” for me.
“So there they are, your dark ones.
There will be a fight, and the
Neanderthals, the NTs, will lose. It is
clearly an amateur time-travel story. If
you ask me, and I suppose you have no
one else to ask, I think it just bounced
in off some anomaly in the Web. The
Web has released all sorts of wannabe
writers, sending stuff to one another
and to little amateur sites. This is a
piece of a sci-fi story that got
misaddressed in cyberspace.”
SF, I said, but he didn’t get the joke.
There are ways to indicate that you’re
joking but I have never mastered them.
Why me? I asked.
“I’ll bet it’s because you’re on the
Foundation server,” Ron said. “The one
in New Mexico. Doesn’t it use that new
quantum computer, the one that
received a message a few milliseconds
before it was sent? I read the story in
Science News. Some kind of loop thing.
But hey, it makes it the perfect receiver
for a time travel yarn. Speaking of
time—”
He looked at his watch, then stood up
and shook my hand. For the first time I
understood his relief in saying good-
bye. I tried to hold on, but he pulled his
hand away.
“I’ll stay in touch,” he said.
The people on the street were hurrying
by. Sixth Avenue is one-way for cars
but two-way for people. I didn’t mind
them through the glass. Scout’s Honor?
I asked.
“Scout’s Honor.”
I tried to take his hand again, just to be
sure, but he was gone. My mother had
finally set him free.
SATURDAY
Disaster. We missed the snatch, both Grub and me. We’ve been run off from the cleft. We were awakened—or rather, I was awakened by Grub. I was dragged out of the cleft and onto my feet, past the three HS with long spears at the cave door. Grub had smelled them before he had seen or heard them. They seized our supplies and the fire, and of course, the cleft, as we scurried up the rocks toward the ice above. They had no interest in following or harming us, just scaring us away. I can now see what happened in the Encounter: the HS didn’t kill off the NTs: they only grabbed their sites, their food, their fires, and ran them off; and ate those of their children who fell into their hands. That was enough. Meanwhile, it is getting dark, and Grub is counting on me to build a fire. I will make it a small one, to be sure.
I used to love Saturdays, I think, but
now they felt sad, even at the lab. I
wondered where Ron was, in the air
somewhere. He likes to fly. Of course it
was none of my business, not anymore.
I almost wished my mother were still
alive. I would have somebody to call.
There are lots of phones at the lab.
Sunday was the same.
SUNDAY
There was no snatch. Nothing happened. The HS who ran us off are still in the cleft, two of them. If I had left the com behind, you would at least have them. To their surprise. It was all I could do to drag Grub close enough to see. He’s terrified. Me, too. We’re 144 hours from a new snatch, if it can be accomplished. I am going to try and keep these corns down to keep the batteries functioning as long as possible. Haven’t seen the sun since I got here.
On Monday I had a personal eyes-only
message from the Foundation. Attached
was an e-ticket f
or a flight to New
Mexico to discuss the new project.
Don’t they know I never fly? I scrolled
on down and there it was, my next-to-
last message, from the distant past and
near future:
MONDAY
This morning Grub and I found four of his band, fireless and frozen in a small cave high on the ridgeline, above the ice. We buried them with great effort. No sign of the others, no more than five or six. I have a dreadful feeling that they are in fact the last band, childless now. When the HS took their fire, they signed their death warrant, unless the NTs luck upon a lightning strike or a live volcano. Perhaps such events are not as rare “then” as they are “now.” We’ll see.
On Tuesday I went to the Bagel Beret
alone for the first time. It felt weird.
Don’t think I’ll go back. Today’s
message, my last, cleared it all up. I
now know who the messages are from.
I also know that I will fly to New
Mexico. I will have to “suck it up” and
go. It is only one stop on a longer
journey.
TUESDAY
This may be my last, since even the LP light on the com is dying. Giving up the ghost, I think is the term. We have other worries anyway. More HS have arrived in the site below. We see them in twos and threes, out hunting. Us? We aren’t about to find out. Tomorrow we are going to cross the ridge and see if we can pick up tracks. Grub sleeps now, but it was hours before he stopped shivering. His hands wouldn’t leave hold of mine. Please don’t leave me, he said with that NT mix of gesture and touch and speech, and I said I wouldn’t, but I could tell he didn’t believe me, and who could blame him? He was alone in the world, more alone, I suspected, than he knew. If his band is alive (and I doubt it) they are somewhere above us, childless, fireless, slowly dying of heartbreak and cold. I shiver to think of it. You won’t leave me? he asked again, tentatively, all fingertips, right before he went to sleep. I put his fingertips on my lips so he would understand what I was saying and know that it was for him, Grub.
Scout’s Honor, I said.
Men Are Trouble
JAMES PATRICK KELLY
James Patrick Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and since has gone on to become one of the most respected and popular writers to enter the field in the last twenty years. Although Kelly has had some success with novels, especially with Wildlife, he has perhaps had more impact to date as a writer of short fiction, with stories such as “Solstice,” “The Prisoner of Chillon,” “Glass Cloud,” “Mr. Boy,” “Pogrom,” “Home Front,” “Undone,” and “Bernardo’s House,” and is often ranked among the best short story writers in the business. His story “Think Like a Dinosaur” won him a Hugo Award in 1996, as did his story, “1016 to I,” in 2000. Kelly’s first solo novel, the mostly ignored Planet of Whispers , came out in 1984. It was followed by Freedom Beach, a mosaic novel written in collaboration with John Kessel, and then by another solo novel, Look Into the Sun. His short work has been collected in Think Like a Dinosaur, and, most recently, in a new collection, Strange But Not a Stranger. A collaboration between Kelly and Kessel appeared in our First Annual Collection, and solo Kelly stories have appeared in our Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Annual Collections. Born in Minneola, New York, Kelly now lives with his family in Nottingham, New Hampshire. He has a Web site at www.JimKelly.net, and reviews Internetrelated matters for Asimov’s Science Fiction.
Private Eyes have traditionally had to venture all alone down Mean Streets, and here Kelly walks us down some very strange Mean Streets in a bizarre future dominated by some enigmatic, unpredictable, and totally ruthless aliens, a world where human existence as we now know it has been turned completely on its head by alien whim, and where a PI reluctantly investigating a politically touchy case bites off far more than she can chew …
1
I stared at my sidekick, willing it to chirp. I’d already tried watching the door, but no one had even breathed on it. I could’ve been writing up the Rashmi Jones case, but then I could’ve been dusting the office. It needed dusting. Or having a consult with Johnnie Walker, who had just that morning opened an office in the bottom drawer of my desk. Instead, I decided to open the window. Maybe a new case would arrive by carrier pigeon. Or wrapped around a brick.
Three stories below me, Market Street was as empty as the rest of the city. Just a couple of plain janes in walking shoes and a granny in a blanket and sandals. She was sitting on the curb in front of a dead Starbucks, strumming street guitar for pocket change, hoping to find a philanthropist in hell. Her singing was faint but sweet as peach ice cream. My guy, talking ‘bout my guy. Poor old bitch, I thought. There are no guys—not yours, not anyone’s. She stopped singing as a devil flapped over us, swooping for a landing on the next block. It had been a beautiful June morning until then, the moist promise of spring not yet broken by summer in our withered city. The granny struggled up, leaning on her guitar. She wrapped the blanket tight around her and trudged downtown.
My sidekick did chirp then, but it was Sharifa, my about-to-be exlover. She must have been calling from the hospital; she was wearing her light blue scrubs. Even on the little screen, I could see that she had been crying. “Hi, Fay.”
I bit my lip.
“Come home tonight,” she said. “Please.”
“I don’t know where home is.”
“I’m sorry about what I said.” She folded her arms tight across her chest. “It’s your body. Your life.”
I loved her. I was sick about being seeded, the abortion, everything that had happened between us in the last week. I said nothing.
Her voice was sandpaper on glass. “Have you had it done yet?” That made me angry all over again. She was wound so tight she couldn’t even say the word.
“Let me guess, Doctor,” I said, “‘Are we talking about me getting scrubbed?”
Her face twisted. “Don’t.”
“If you want the dirt,” I said, “you could always hire me to shadow myself. I need the work.”
“Make it a joke, why don’t you?”
“Okey-doke, Doc,” I said and clicked off. So my life was cocked—not exactly main menu news. Still, even with the window open, Sharifa’s call had sucked all the air out of my office. I told myself that all I needed was coffee, although what I really wanted was a rich aunt, a vacation in Fiji, and a new girlfriend. I locked the door behind me, slogged down the hall and was about to press the down button when the elevator chimed. The doors slid open to reveal George, the bot in charge of our building, and a devil—no doubt the same one that had just flown by. I told myself this had nothing to do with me. The devil was probably seeing crazy Martha down the hall about a tax rebate or taking piano lessons from Abby upstairs. Sure, and drunks go to bars for the peanuts.
“Hello, Fay,” said George. “This one had true hopes of finding you in your office.”
I goggled, slack-jawed and stupefied, at the devil. Of course, I’d seen them on vids and in the sky and once I watched one waddle into City Hall but I’d never been close enough to slap one before. I hated the devils. The elevator doors shivered and began to close. George stuck an arm out to stop them.
“May this one borrow some of your time?” George said.
The devil was just over a meter tall. Its face was the color of an old bloodstain and its maw seemed to kiss the air as it breathed with a wet, sucking sound. The wings were wrapped tight around it; the membranes had a rusty translucence that only hinted at the sleek bullet of a body beneath. I could see my reflection in its flat compound eyes. I looked like I had just been hit in the head with a lighthouse.
“Something is regrettable, Fay?” said George.
That was my cue for a wisecrack to show them that no invincible mass-murdering alien was going to intimidate Fay Hardaway.
“No,” I said. “This way.”
<
br /> If they could’ve sat in chairs, there would’ve been plenty of room for us in my office. But George announced that the devil needed to make itself comfortable before we began. I nodded as I settled behind my desk, grateful to have something between the two of them and me. George dragged both chairs out into the little reception room. The devil spread its wings and swooped up onto my file cabinet, ruffling the hardcopy on my desk. It filled the back wall of my office as it perched there, a span of almost twenty feet. George wedged himself into a corner and absorbed his legs and arms until he was just a head and a slab of gleaming blue bot stuff. The devil gazed at me as if it were wondering what kind of rug I would make. I brought up three new icons on my desktop. New Case. Searchlet. Panic button.
“Indulge this one to speak for Seeren?” said George. “Seeren has a bright desire to task you to an investigation.”
The devils never spoke to us, never explained what they were doing. No one knew exactly how they communicated with the army of bots they had built to prop us up.
I opened the New Case folder and the green light blinked. “I’m recording this. If I decide to accept your case, I will record my entire investigation.”
“A thoughtful gesture, Fay. This one needs to remark on your client Rashmi Jones.”
“She’s not my client.” It took everything I had not to fall off my chair. “What about her?”
“Seeren conveys vast regret. All deaths diminish all.”
I didn’t like it that this devil knew anything at all about Rashmi, but especially that she was dead. I’ll found the body in Room 103 of the Comfort Inn just twelve hours ago. “The cops already have the case.” I didn’t mind that there was a snarl in my voice. “Or what’s left of it. There’s nothing I can do for you.”
The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004 Page 32
