The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05

by Bill Congreve (ed) (v1. 0) (epub)

  “So,” Holly interrupted with a triumphant laugh, “the dog is trying to survive. That what you’re saying? The dog is eating the man.”

  Timmons didn’t nod, didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge what she’d said at all.

  “The one-gens were pure experiment. We’ve enabled them to continue as long as they can. To see how long the brain will retain its original mash. Other generations are put down earlier -”

  “When you’ve had your fill of them? When they’ve fulfilled the purpose you chose them for? How humane.”

  Timmons didn’t answer.

  Holly humphed. “And Joseph’s real brain? You kept it?”

  “Lost -”

  “Lost?”

  “In an attack on the labs. Anti-research groups,” Timmons continued.

  “That’s what got me out of research, you know,” Holly said. “Animal rights groups.”

  “These particular ones weren’t pro-animal,” said Timmons. “They were religious -”

  “Ah! The ones that claim the brain is the seat of the soul, hey? Wowsers,” Holly spat. “They don’t like researchers playing God. Full of self-righteousness, like everybody in this game. They’re right, though.”

  “About the soul?”

  “About Joseph. Playing God.”

  Shep snuffled and coughed, and Holly reached down again to stroke her ears. This time with more gentleness. When Holly next spoke, her voice had a new calm to it.

  “An entire litter of pups,” she said. “And what happens to the soul, do you reckon? Does it split, or are they replicas of the same soul? Does each soul carry the same stain?”

  She grinned, an unsettling sight. The teeth in her head were discoloured and narrow, and the lines from her eyes to her hairline crowded her skin and turned her face into a loose mask.

  “Such arrogance,” she murmured. “To think animal nature is lower than human nature. To think we can use animals as ready-made teacups for the human brain.”

  When Timmons didn’t respond, she added quietly, “Never struck you as odd, how many children’s bodies Joseph was able to source? For his research?”

  “In times of poverty,” Timmons’ voice was cold, “children -”

  “Are cheaper?”

  Holly’s hand was still.

  Shep watched them stare at each other unblinkingly, their silhouettes stark against the smoky dark sky.

  Timmons rose to his feet. “Thank you,” he said, “for your hospitality.”

  “Well. Not at all.”

  She saw them to the door, Shep limping with the pain in her hind legs. As Timmons operated the ramp to the carriage, Holly leant down and addressed Shep one more time.

  “Best thing for you, old girl,” she said. “Joseph was so afraid of death he couldn’t look away from it. But you don’t need that, hey? Just need to rest. Nothing to be afraid of there.”

  Shep let out a soft whine. There was a comforting familiarity in Holly’s presence and she found she didn’t want to lose it.

  “Joseph told me once,” she said more loudly, “when I complained about the experiments on kids. He told me research is never clean. Progress relies on sacrifice. And a refusal to be reasonable, that’s what he said. Think there’s anything in that? Gotta be unreasonable to push progress forward, so he said. Can’t take things lying down.”

  Timmons was harnessing a resisting horse.

  “Up, Shep,” he said, lowering the carriage ramp. Then to Holly, “I’m sure I couldn’t say.”

  He climbed into the carriage and slammed the door behind him. Holly rested her hand on the window, staying them.

  “Reasonable men,” said Holly, “couldn’t do what you do.”

  Shep turned to Timmons, but he was staring at his host with blank eyes.

  “Funny thing about Bernese, though,” she nodded towards Shep. “They’re quiet. Rarely bark. Good with cattle. Good with kids, too. Not vicious. Not a vicious bone in their bodies. Can’t see how you’d ever call them bestial.”

  She moved off and raised her hand in a wave.

  ~ * ~

  “There, there, girl.”

  Timmons slumped in his seat, finger across lip, eyes fixed on the haze masking the horizon. She nudged his leg and he shushed her, but offered nothing more in the way of comfort. Shep whined once to herself and slept, the rumble and clump of their progress rocking her to sleep.

  When she woke the sky was boiling pink and the desert beneath it was a blurred red. She rose stiffly, dull pain in her ribs and elbows.

  Timmons was dozing, his chin on his shoulder and his arms slack at his sides. He looked washed out, as if dawn and wakefulness might never find him.

  Shep sniffed the air. She growled.

  Onions.

  “What -” Timmons roused, but the rest of what he’d meant to say was lost behind a muffled cry.

  The carriage came to an abrupt stop that sent Shep skidding. Timmons too had to hold onto his seat against the momentum.

  Two men moved into the carriage, oxygen masks on their faces. One moved fast towards Timmons and pushed a cloth to his face. Timmons fought blindly, his cries becoming more distant until they stopped.

  Shep moved to stand, splinters of pain shooting through her back. She landed a bite on the leg of the nearest man, and he yelped and lashed out with his foot. She was sent skidding to the far side of the carriage where she hit the wall hard. She let out a yelp and swerved back to the fray. But the other man leapt on her with a cloth in one hand, pressing it to her snout.

  Timmons had fallen to the side, mouth open. Shep tried to call out, but her vision rolled and she fell choking into a darkness deeper than sleep.

  ~ * ~

  When she came to she was on her side. The uneven floor dug into her ribs, bruising her with each roll and lurch of the vehicle. Loud music was playing and there was a stink of vegetables. She was in a van, she realized, its high windows covered in dark cloth. Impossible to tell if it was day or night.

  She stiffened at the sounds of voices.

  “Is he for my birthday?”

  A child’s voice. Shep tried to rise but her first few attempts were thwarted by the rough roads. Her back creaked and refused to bend, her claws scrambled for purchase. She struggled, finally, to a sitting position.

  “That’s right, son.”

  There was a man at the steering wheel. No mash-driver for him. She could smell animals, though, beneath the reek of onions.

  Onions.

  She craned forward. The smell was unmistakable. Sure enough she spotted Hendricks, their onion-stink stable owner. The man who’d given them the horse and carriage. She whined to herself. Where was Timmons?

  She moved closer to the back of the seat. From there she could make out the halo of hair that marked the child sitting beside the driver.

  “He’s a she, son,” said Hendricks. “She’s very rare. And smart! Ever seen a dog before, Huck?”

  There was silence from the boy, but his hair spun in the Moonlight.

  “What about in books? You seen dogs in books?”

  “Sometimes,” said Huck. “Sometimes they bite.”

  Hendricks chuckled, wet and snide. “Those are old books. Dogs don’t bite anymore. They’re just like people now.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Good people,” Hendricks assured the boy. “Hand-chosen for their brains. Well, not your grandmother, she chose herself. But this one, this dog, was a scientist.”

  There was a photo hanging from the rear-view mirror, a boy with a grin as wide as his face, eyes screwed up against the light. With the Moon behind the photo like that, the boy looked blue. Like he was suffocating, Shep thought. She tensed.

  She edged closer, the radio masking the clack-clack of her nails. There was a growl trapped in her throat, but she held it there.

  “She’ll keep you company when Daddy’s at work. See?” Hendricks was saying.

  “Okay.”

  Beyond the windscreen the night loomed starkly. To the righ
t, Shep saw the rough earth edge of a cliff rising above them. On the other side of the car, nothing. Just night and the Moon.

  “It’ll be just like having a grown-up looking after you.”

  “Okay,” said Huck again.

  Shep eased in close. Her snout was just above the boy’s head. She could smell the sweat in his hair and the dirty synthetic clothing he wore. He needed a bath, she thought with unaccustomed clarity. He should be clean.

  A sneer pulled her lips above her teeth. She watched the small skull beneath her, the tender mechanisms of its little brain sliding in and out of place. She eased back and placed her front legs on the seat.

  The growl escaped her then.

  The man turned in a daze, the smile still on his face.

  Shep pushed forward, aiming to snap her jaw around the boy’s neck.

  Protect the brain, she thought. Protect and preserve the brain.

  The pain in her back snagged her and she came up short. Her jaw clamped down hard on the child’s skull and the impact sent a shudder all the way to her chest.

  She’d never liked the taste of blood.

  The boy screamed and screamed. He tried to pull away but Shep was too strong. She shook him almost gently, trying to work her way to his neck.

  He was screaming without pause, his hands held out stiff in front of him.

  “Let go,” shouted Hendricks. “Let go of my boy!”

  He had one hand on the steering wheel. With the other he landed a punch to the side of Shep’s head. She grunted but held fast.

  He punched her again. Again and again until her grip loosened.

  The boy tipped forward, exposing the back of his neck and Shep dived for him, grabbing hold of the skin beneath his hair. Her back erupted in a fierce pain like fire.

  But at least after that the boy stopped screaming.

  Hendricks’ face had gone slack. He wasn’t watching the road, Shep noted. He was staring at Huck with the expression of someone waking from a dream.

  “Huck,” he whispered.

  He reached for his son with both hands.

  Shep tried to shout a warning, but it was muffled against the boy’s neck.

  Free to follow its own nose, the van slid towards the edge of the road and off and out, arcing across the empty air towards the Moon.

  * * * *

  Deborah Biancotti is a Sydney-based writer. Her first published story won the 2001 Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story and her first collection, A Book of Endings, was shortlisted for the 2010 William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Book. Her fiction has appeared in Clockwork Phoenix, Eidolon 1, Ideomancer, infinity plus, Australian Dark Fantasy And Horror and Prime’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. She has new work coming out from Twelfth Planet and Eneit Presses, a novella from Gilganiesh Press and an essay in Scarecrow Press’ Twenty-First Century Gothic. She is wrapping up her first novel.

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  * * *

  This Is Not My Story

  DIRK FLINTHART

  This is not my story. You don’t want to hear my story. You’ve heard it before. It’s the story of the missed opportunity, the lost moment, the chance that will never come again, and it’s been told many times over by writers better than I. You don’t need that story.

  There’s another story I’d like to offer you, but I can’t. It isn’t mine to tell, and anyway, it isn’t finished yet.

  Instead, I’ll give you Janey’s story, or what I know of it. Janey wouldn’t mind, and some of it is my story too, and it’s got a proper ending and everything, so maybe I can publish it. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll have to wait until somebody asks me the question they always ask, sooner or later. Then I’ll tell them Janey’s story, and laugh, and sign a book or a shirt or something, and they’ll go away and tell their friends what a character I am in real life.

  That’s the way it works.

  ~ * ~

  Janey was quick and Janey was clever and Janey was slim and sharp as the minnows that lived in the little creek which ran through the wooded gully between our houses out on the edge of town when I was seven years old and the world was still in front of me. Boys and girls didn’t play together much at that age, but there was nobody else to play with, or to taunt us for playing together. Besides, she liked Batman, and she had a real Swiss Army knife from her father and she knew the names of the stars that crept out by twilight when we hid from baths and supper. Her name was Jane Clayforth, and she lived with her gram and grampa in an old house on wooden posts, with a cast iron cockerel on the roof that showed the wind which way to blow.

  Janey was an inventor, like me. Or at least, like I wanted to be, back then. Didn’t everyone? I used to pull apart broken radios and clocks, cassette recorders and old motors. I’d strip them down, piece by piece, and put all the parts into carefully labelled boxes under my bed, which my mother would eventually empty into the garbage. Sometimes I’d gather up the most interesting-looking components and hook them together in ways that looked cool. I was forbidden anything more powerful than a double-A battery after my Cosmo-Plasmic Pulse Signaller blew the house fuses when I plugged it into a socket in the laundry.

  Janey’s inventions were different. Sometimes they worked.

  The first time I saw it happen, we were at school. We usually didn’t have much to do with each other during school. We were in different classes. If we’d tried to spend time together there would have been all those chants of ‘boyfriend, girlfriend’. I was surprised when Janey came up to me on the back oval, near the cricket pitch.

  I was waiting with a bunch of other boys. We were going to do some extra football training with Mr Fleet, the new phys ed teacher. We all liked Mr Fleet. Everyone did. He was kind and clever, and had a way of making jokes and conversation that made you feel like you were grown up and worth paying attention to.

  When Janey turned up, she was wearing an outlandish pair of horn-rim glasses that made her look like some kind of insect. I recognized them at once.

  “Hey! You’ve got my X-ray specs!”

  “Shh,” she said, without looking at me. “They’re not yours any more. You threw them away.”

  “They didn’t work,” I said. The picture in the comic book showed a surprised kid looking at the bones of his hand. The advertisement promised you could “Look right through walls, doors, even clothing!” and there was a picture of a shocked-looking girl. I was really excited when they came in the post, but all they ever did for me was make things look blurry, and give me a headache.

  “I fixed them,” said Janey. “Sort of. Hold on. Let me activate the alpha-wave field.” Batman had built an alpha-wave field just last issue, so I knew what she was talking about. She tweaked a knob on a little panel on her belt, and handed me the glasses. “Try them now.”

  At first, everything was still blurry, but as I looked around, I began to notice things. People, mostly. They were ... well, the same ... and different. Michael Whitby, the class bully: with the glasses on, he looked somehow bigger, and nastier. He looked the way he ought to look in real life, the way a person who likes knocking down little kids and stepping on their fingers really should look. And Shaun Browning, who could run so fast that not even the big kids in grade five could catch him: he looked swift, and lean, like a cheetah.

  It wasn’t much of a difference, really. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you might think it was just your imagination. Just to be sure, I took the glasses off and had another look. Everything seemed normal. Then I put them back on, and watched the people around me change.

  “Wow,” I said, as quietly as I could through my excitement. “These are great, Janey. Have you looked at Peter Thorpe? He looks -”

  “Stupid,” she said. “Like a cave-man. I know.” Then she giggled. “And Miss Barwick looks like one of those swimsuit girls in the Archie comics. But that’s not why I brought them here. Have another look around.”

  Because the effect was so subtle, it to
ok a minute or two before I saw what Janey wanted me to see.

  It was Mr Fleet. There was something wrong with him. Through Janey’s glasses, he looked sort of disjointed, disconnected, like a marionette with tangled strings. His face seemed stretched and taut, and it moved wrong, as though it was just a latex mask pulled tight over something that wasn’t really human-shaped. It was fascinating.