I summoned the vid attached to her name. It was innocuous. She’d been taking the stairs between levels and had paused briefly on the landing. Still, it bothered me. Hera had been involved with Key Lu, she’d filed the complaint against Tishembra, and now I had her on Level 5. Coincidence maybe … but I remembered the chill I’d felt when she accosted me in the corridor … and how confused she’d been when I reminded her of the incident.
I went by my office and changed back into my uniform. Then I checked city records for Hera’s location. She was at the infirmary, sitting with Tishembra … Tishembra, who’d been a quirk just like Hera’s brother except she’d eluded punishment while Hera’s brother was dead. Maybe it was baseless panic, but I sprinted for the door.
* * *
THE INFIRMARY HAD a reception room with a desk, and a hallway behind it with small rooms on either side. The technician at the desk looked up as I burst in. “Robin Indens!” I barked.
“Critical care. End of the hall.”
I sprinted past him. A sign identified the room. I touched the door and it snapped open. The bivouac had been set up on a table in the center of the room. Slender feeder lines descending from the ceiling were plugged into its ports. Tishembra and Hera stood alongside the bivouac, Hera with a comforting arm around Tishembra’s shoulders. They both looked up as I burst in. “Zeke?” Tishembra asked, with an expression encompassing both hope and dread.
“Tish, it’s going to be okay. But I need to talk to Hera. Alone.”
They traded a puzzled glance. Then Hera gave Tishembra a quick hug—“I’ll be right back”—and stepped past me into the hall. I followed her, closing the door behind us.
Hera turned to face me. She looked gaunt and worn—a woman who had seen too much grief. “I want to thank you, Zeke, for not telling Tishembra who filed that complaint. I wasn’t myself when I did it. I don’t even remember doing it.”
She wasn’t lying.
I stumbled over that fact. Had I gotten it wrong? Was there something more going on than a need for misguided revenge?
“When was the last time you had your defensive Makers upgraded?”
She flinched and looked away. “It’s been a while.”
I sent a DI to check the records. It had been three years. I pulled up an earlier report and cross checked the dates to be sure. She hadn’t had an upgrade since her brother’s execution. My heart rate jumped as I contemplated a new possibility. No doubt my pupils dilated, but Hera was still looking away and she didn’t see it. I sent the DI out again.
We were standing beside an open door to an unoccupied office. I ushered Hera inside. The DI came back with a new set of records even before the door was closed. At my invitation, Hera sat in the guest chair, her hands fidgeting restlessly in her lap. I perched on the edge of the desk, scanning the records, trying to stay calm, but my DI wasn’t fooled. It sensed my stress and sent the paralytic ribbon creeping down my arm and into my palm.
“Let’s talk about your brother.”
Hera’s hands froze in her lap. “My brother? You must know already. He’s dead … he died like Key.”
“You used to be a city councilor.”
“I resigned from the council.”
I nodded. “As a councilor you were required to host visitors … but you haven’t allowed a ghost in your atrium since your brother’s arrest.”
“Those things don’t matter to me anymore.”
“You also haven’t upgraded your defensive Makers, and you haven’t been scanned—”
“I’m not a criminal, Zeke. I just … I just want to do my job and be left alone.”
“Hera? You’ve been harboring your brother’s ghost, haven’t you? And he didn’t like it when you started seeing Key.”
The DI showed me the flush of hot and cold across her skin. “No,” she whispered. “No. He’s dead, and I wouldn’t do that.”
She was lying. “Hera, is your atrium quirked? To let your brother’s ghost take over sometimes?”
She looked away. “Wouldn’t that be illegal?”
“Giving up your body to another? Yes, it would be.”
Her hands squeezed hard against the armrests of the chair. “It was him, then? That’s what you’re saying?” She turned to look at me, despair in her eyes. “He filed the complaint against Tish?”
I nodded. “I knew it wasn’t you speaking to me that day. I think he also used you to sabotage Key’s railcar, knowing I’d have to look into it.”
“And Robin?” she asked, her knuckles whitening as she gripped the chair.
“Ask him.”
Earlier, I’d asked the DI to bring me a list of all the trained molecular designers in Nahiku, but I’d asked the wrong question. I queried it again, asking for all the designers in the past five years. This time, mine wasn’t the only name.
“Ask him for the design of the assault Maker, Hera. Robin doesn’t deserve to die.”
I crouched in front of her, my hand on hers as I looked up into her stunned eyes. It was a damned stupid position to put myself into.
He took over. It took a fraction of a second. My DI didn’t catch it, but I saw it happen. Her expression hardened and her knee came up, driving hard into my chin. As my head snapped back he launched Hera against me. At that point it didn’t matter that I outweighed her by forty percent. I was off balance and I went down with her on top of me. Her forehead cracked against my nose, breaking it.
He wasn’t trying to escape. There was no way he could. It was only blind rage that drove him. He wanted to kill me, for all the good it would do. I was a cop. I had backups. I couldn’t lose more than a few days. But he could still do some damage before he was brought down.
I felt Hera’s small hands seize my wrists. He was trying to keep me from using the ribbon arsenal, but Hera wasn’t nearly strong enough for that. I tossed her off, and not gently. The back of her head hit the floor, but she got up again almost as fast as I did and scrambled for the door.
I don’t know what he intended to do, what final vengeance he hoped for. One more murder, maybe. Tishembra and Robin were both just across the hall.
I grabbed Hera, dragged her back, and slammed her into the chair. Then I raised my hand. The DI controlled the ribbon. Fibers along its length squeezed hard, sending a fine mist across Hera’s face. It got in her eyes and in her lungs. She reared back, but then she collapsed, slumping in the chair. I wiped my bloody nose on my sleeve and waited until her head lolled against her chest. Then I sent a DI to Red Star.
I’d need help extracting the data from her quirked atrium, and combing through it for the assault Maker’s design file.
* * *
IT TOOK A few days, but Robin was recovered. When he gets cranky at night he still tells Tishembra she’s “wrong,” but he’s only three. Soon he won’t remember what she was like before, while I pretend it doesn’t matter to me.
Tishembra knows that isn’t true. She complains the laws are too strict, that citizens should be free to make their own choices. Me, I’m just happy Glory Mina let me stay on as Nahiku’s watch officer. Glory likes reminding me how lucky I am to have the position. I like to remind her that I’ve finally turned into the uncompromising jackboot she always knew I could be.
Don’t get me wrong. I wanted to help Hera, but she’d been harboring a fugitive for three years. There was nothing I could do for her, but I won’t let anyone else in this city step over the line. I don’t want to sit through another execution.
Nahiku isn’t quite bankrupt yet. Glory assessed a minimal fine for Hera’s transgression, laying most of the fault on the police since we’d failed to hunt down all ghosts of a condemned criminal. So the city won’t be sold off, and Tishembra will have to wait to get free.
I don’t think she minds too much.
Here. Now. This is enough. I only wonder: Can we make it last?
HOUSEFLIES
Joe Pitkin
Joe Pitkin teaches at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, and belongs
to the Evolutionary Ecology Lab at Washington State University, Vancouver. One online bio says, “Joe Pitkin writes poetry, fiction, and nerdy pop songs,” and “He teaches English at Clark College, plays bass for The Gravitropes, and studies primary succession on the pumice plain of Mount St. Helens.” He says, “A newcomer to science fiction, Joe Pitkin began his writing career as a poet, where his work has appeared in North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Since his debut as a speculative fiction writer, his stories have appeared in Analog, Cosmos, The Future Fire, Expanded Horizons, and other fine magazines.”
“Houseflies” was published in Cosmos. It is a chilling and darkly funny story of ecocatastrophe, and humanity’s perseverance.
THERE ARE HUMANS, and then there’s corn, the tomatoes that we hand-pollinate, fennel pondweed, buckhorn plantain, common ragweed, tansy ragwort, two different species of mite, the common pill wood louse (in spite of the absence of wood), Mormon crickets, the common earthworm under the ground, and houseflies, probably a hundred thousand times more houseflies than people. Thirteen species of plants and animals in all. Of course there are God knows how many species of molds and mildews and bacteria and algae, especially in the slimy cesspools of the oceans, but nowadays when people talk of the food web they mean those thirteen species.
Everyone knows those plucky, lucky 13: the city has billboards everywhere showing the connections between the species as though we were prey hanging on a spider’s web, though of course all spiders have been extinct for 20 years and if a hypothetical kindergartener were to see a real spider’s web she would almost certainly say “look, mummy, I found a food web!”
The billboards read “Protect Your Food Web,” except in the Little Texas district of the city, where I’d gone last year for a cricket barbecue. There, the billboards say “Don’t Mess With the Food Web.”
Apparently it’s not quite as simple as all that: every year systematists are discovering a new subspecies of housefly, or an entirely new housefly species. What we biologists call an adaptive radiation event. In the far south of the city there are flies as large as the dog turds that flies used to eat back in the days of dog turds.
But I don’t study flies. Like ten thousand other citizens, I was trained in those last years of the crash, in the frantic hope that we might save a few species from years of habitat loss and hormone disruption and eutrophication, the genetic pollution and salt bombs and designer viruses and climate hacking, the volcano induction and self-replicating bioplastic film and mimetic pheremonal pornography, the alkaloid release and the weather guns. I was trained to work on the genetic conservation of curlews and godwits, though the last of the curlews went extinct even before I graduated, and the godwits are gone now, too, so now I study nothing.
Nowadays I work for a guy who represents a social club, The Hemingway Society. His name is Guillame, but that’s almost all I can tell you about him because I’ve never seen him. On the phone he sounds like an old-school Harvard man who might have grown up in the Caribbean, and he’s old enough—almost 70, he once said—that he could really be such a person.
Today, Guillame is sending me to The Vault. I pick up the train in Sam Walton Station, which I always think of as Tardigrade Station because of the massive “Whither the Tardigrade?” spray-painted on the retaining wall behind the tracks. I have no idea what that means. I think tardigrades were what kids called water bears, those tiny brine-animals that could wrap themselves up in a cyst for years in the absence of water. You could order them in the mail, drop them in a glass of water, and watch them start kicking around on their eight stubby legs as though all those dry years had never happened at all. It is hard to believe that all species of tardigrades would go extinct, but there you are. If roaches and rats and pigeons could go extinct because of human malice, why couldn’t the lowly water bear slip through the cracks? And anyway, what do I know about the tardigrade’s chances? 99.99% of the surface of Earth is salt waste; probably there are tardigrades bundled up somewhere out there, waiting for rain.
* * *
THE VAULT OF all life sits at the end of the line for this train. In fact The Vault makes up part of the city’s eastern border separating civilisation from the rest of the cindery salt world. I’m old enough to remember the time before the construction: the city government considered so many competing designs, the fanciful and the serious and those designs meant to scold us in some way. I remember the public debate over whether The Vault would be built as a spindly double-helical tower to celebrate the survival of the vital DNA molecule, or whether it would look grander as a great artificial mountain in the style of the pyramids. For a while a huge monolith was the favored design, as though to commemorate the loss of so many species with a simple gigantic headstone. But in the end, the design that city hall chose was a circular well shaft several kilometers deep. The most poetic memorial the city council could think of was an unfathomable hole.
Most people never see the hole; in fact, not many come out this far to see the building on top of the hole. I’m not sure whether the building is tasteful and understated, or if it’s just a great big silo. I really don’t know anything about architecture. Guillame told me it was designed like a Navajo hogan, or a kiva, I don’t remember. What I notice more than the cylinder of the building is the expanse of cornfields on one side and a whole world of salt waste on the other.
Inside, past the vestibule, the great hall is decorated floor to ceiling with a mosaic depicting the Tree of Life. That’s not the most noticeable thing on walking in, though: what I see pretty quickly, and can’t look away from, is the lip of the gaping hole. The guardrail looks useless and pathetic around that pit. Above it hang a dozen or so beautiful brass baskets as big as chariot cars, suspended invisibly, I assume by nanofiber cables.
My appointment is with one of the guardians, someone named Daphne. The great hall seems strangely empty, even in a city full of empty buildings. I walk to the rail and look down and feel the shudder in my groin as I confront the possibility of that endless fall. A long way down, at the limit of my sight, a speck of a basket glints under the pit lights as it climbs or descends past them.
It takes me a minute or so to tell that the basket is climbing, another ten minutes before the occupant comes into view and approaches hailing distance. “Are you Guillame’s friend?” the woman calls to me.
She is slender, just past middle age, her iron gray hair pulled back into a grim little bun like the woman from American Gothic. Daphne seems to me such a young woman’s name that I stutter a moment before realising that this is Daphne. I introduce myself, thank her for taking the time for me.
“Guillame tells me you’ll be doing some work on the blue swallow?” she asks. I nod, I hope modestly. She asks if I’d like to accompany her into the pit to retrieve the specimen, and I would rather have my wisdom teeth pulled without anesthesia, but I am ashamed of my cowardice enough that I say I’ve always wanted to descend into The Vault of All Life. I climb into her basket and steel myself for the descent.
* * *
“YOU’LL GET NEARLY the full tour,” she says as she taps out a code on a hand-held controller. “The passerines are almost at the bottom of the vault.” We begin to drop and for a moment before we pick up speed I can see the array of individual Lucite bricks, which make up the walls of the well. Here each translucent square seems to contain a tissue sample from a different species of tube worm. The fluid in each one seems to slosh a bit as we pass by it—probably my imagination.
“How is The Vault organised?” I ask. “I would have expected the animal samples to be separated from the plant samples and fungi.”
“The samples we use most frequently are up top; that way we’re not in the cars all day.” Probably half of the people I went to school with are working on tube worms, trying to figure out the genes for different bacterial symbioses.
Most of the trip seems like a controlled fall and I grip the rim of our chariot car and imagine t
hat I feel the sickening vibrations of a far-off motor unspooling our invisible cable. Twenty minutes later the car glides to a stop; I still can’t see the bottom beyond the last ring of pit lights.
“What’s down at the bottom?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“I would have thought there would be a plaque or something.”
“Who would see it? No one ever goes down there but me.”
Each of the thousands of bricks in this section contains a passerine. Daphne taps out a passcode into her hand-held controller and one of the bricks slides forward with a soft, cunning hiss.
She takes out a tight bundle of greasy wax paper like an ancient sausage and hands it to me. “The blue swallow,” she says. “Bon appétit.”
Later that afternoon I sit on the train watching the cornfields give way to city streets, the corpse of the swallow sitting in my coat pocket. Corpse isn’t the right word; if you’re going to eat it you don’t call it a corpse. In fairness, though, no one is going to eat this particular bird.
From the train I look down on a city street where a dozen or so people are rushing to get indoors. A plague of houseflies seems to have descended here. Many times I’ve wondered—everybody’s wondered—how that one species survived so famously when so many other nuisance species died out. Even cockroaches, for God’s sake. I remember a professor from my school days talking about how we should love the fly but we don’t, because watching a fly is like watching our own waste reborn as something buzzing around us, our filth made flesh. Actually right now I could love the miraculous cloud of flies below me, but that’s easier to do when they’re down in the street and I’m sealed in a train carriage.
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