by Neil Clarke
Lin was gone.
Not like gone to the store. Gone, left. Leaving him.
She left a note about it. The note explained. Blamed him.
Distantly, he heard himself curse.
All Bell could think, at first, was that she didn’t seem to have taken anything. Like there was nothing about their life worth bothering with. She had written the whole thing off, it seemed. Him. Their life. A total loss.
He made some growling noises.
She might be back. She might change her mind.
The stereo, after all, was really hers. She’d had it before they moved in together, and they’d never been able to afford a new one.
Somberly, he unplugged the stereo. In something like a trance, he planted it in the sink and turned on the water. Like a zombie, he let the water run and started searching the trailer for enough change to buy beer.
The next month passed in a haze.
Word filtered down, as word always did, and it turned out Cole had skipped town. The cops were still looking.
Not many of the grubs had survived Cole’s attack. The ones that did were scarred. Cole had been very thorough, even pouring lye in the terrarium on the floor. In all, only a handful of the grubs finished their cocoons. A few from the control cage. A few from the terrarium marked “heat” next to the space heater. But they were twisted things, these cocoons. Damaged things. His experiment was ruined. His hope was that he’d be able to get at least a few reproducing adults, start over. If the cocoons hatched at all.
And word had filtered down, too, that it would be bad for Cole when he was caught, because the list of charges had grown, and the warrant had sprouted teeth. Cole was facing time, real time, for what had happened. Bell knew Cole would need someone to blame.
He would blame Bell, and he would blame the zoo.
Several weeks later, Bell pulled into the parking lot and found there were fire trucks already in the lot. Hoses ran upward along the hill. Black smoke curled into the sky. Bell ran. He knew what he’d see before he saw it. The castle was engulfed in flame. The firefighters fought the blaze, but Bell knew it was too late. He imagined the animals inside baking. He imagined the sizzle and pop of burst skin, the soundless cries of dying snakes and lizards and frogs and bugs. He imagined his insects burning alive.
He looked around, searching for Cole, wondering if he’d stayed long enough to watch it burn.
When the fire was out, Bell walked through the ruins. The devastation was complete. Dead frogs and snakes and lizards. In the back room, he found the terrariums blackened and cracked. The insects inside charred and unrecognizable.
Except for one. The terrarium on the floor.
The terrarium with the heat sticker, now curled and blackened.
The cocoon was charred, split wide by the heat of the fire.
There was no grub inside.
They found Cole’s body later that day in the weeds behind the parking lot. Bell watched them load the body into the ambulance. Dark and swollen. It had been a bad death.
There were burns, minor, across his hands, like he’d come too close to his creation.
Burns and something else.
Something like stings.
Eyes swollen shut, anaphylactic shock.
Not everything burned in the fire.
Not all that burns is consumed. Cole had said that once.
Bell stood there for a long time, listening. Listening for a buzz like an electric light, but there was no sound. Only the sound of wind in the trees.
It was long gone, whatever it was. He just wished he could have seen what the grub had turned into. Next year it would be different.
Next year it would be a fruit eater, or a wasp, or a beetle. It would be what it needed to be.
It would be what the world made it.
Approaching home, Bell felt his inner alarm stir again.
The cable had been turned off.
Those cocksuckers didn’t know who they were dealing with. Bell had gotten drunk two nights in a row now, and he was feeling mean, feeling predatory.
He stalked outside, nine trailers down to the cable box, opened it up with a hex wrench, and hooked his cable back up.
Went home and surfed channels for anything resembling porn.
After two hours of this, his thumb hurt and the battery on the remote died.
He heard the screen door open.
Lin?
In the moment before the inner door opened, it occurred to him that her stereo was still soaking in the kitchen sink. He had a momentary, fearful impulse; his leg jerked. Then the beer kicked back in. He slouched back. He sneered like a sleepy lion.
A shape in a doorway.
Seana.
His sneer disappeared.
She stepped inside and said nothing. Looked at him a moment, as if reading him. Slouched down beside him with a sack of takeout chicken.
His hand, heavy and lazy, rested on her leg.
She tugged his hand higher.
They didn’t talk. Even the TV flashed in silence.
Outside the thin walls, the world licked itself and made hunting noises.
First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October-November 2009.
About the Author
Ted Kosmatka set his sights early on being a writer. This mostly involved having all his writing rejected, pursuing a biology degree, dropping out before graduation, and becoming a steelworker like his father and grandfather. Then the mill went bankrupt. At one point, he worked in a zoo. Now he works in video games, and his latest novel, The Flicker Men, came out last summer.
Michael Poore’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Glimmer Train, AGNI, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. His novel, Up Jumps the Devil, hailed by the New York Review of Books as “an elegiac masterpiece,” is available from HarperCollins. His story “The Street of the House of the Sun,” originally published in The Pinch, was reprinted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012.
Mercurial
Kim Stanley Robinson
“She rules all of Oz,” said Dorothy, “and so she rules your city and you, because you are in the Winkie Country, which is part of the Land of Oz.”
“It may be,” returned the High Coco-Lorum, “for we do not study geography and have never inquired whether we live in the Land of Oz or not. And any Ruler who rules us from a distance, and unknown to us, is welcome to the job.”
—L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz
I am not, despite the appearances, fond of crime detection. In the past, it is true, I occasionally accompanied my friend Freya Grindavik as she solved her cases, and admittedly this watsoning gave me some good material for the little tales I have written for the not-very-discriminating markets on Mars and Titan. But after the “Case of the Golden Sphere of the Lion of Mercury,” in which I ended up hanged by the feet from the clear dome of Terminator, two hundred meters above the rooftops of the city, my native lack of enthusiasm rose to the fore. And following the unfortunate “Adventure of the Vulcan Accelerator,” when Freya’s arch-foe Jan Johannsen tied us to a pile of hay under a large magnifying glass in a survival tent, there to await Mercury’s fierce dawn, I put my foot down: no more detecting. That, so to speak, was the last straw.
So when I agreed to accompany Freya to the Solday party of Heidi van Seegeren, it was against my better judgment. But Freya assured me there would be no business involved; and despite the obvious excesses, I enjoy a Solday party as much as the next esthete. So when she came by my villa, I was ready.
“Make haste,” she said. “We’re late, and I must be before Heidi’s Monet when the Great Gates are opened. I adore that painting.”
“Your infatuation is no secret,” I said, panting as I trailed her through the crowded streets of the city. Freya, as those of you who have read my earlier tales know, is two and a half meters tall, and broad-shouldered; she barged through the shoals of Solday celebrants rather like a whale, and I, pilot-fish-like, dodged in her wake.
She led me through a group of Grays, who with carpetbeaters were busy pounding rugs saturated with yellow dust. As I coughed and brushed off my fine burgundy suit, I said, “My feeling is that you have taken me to view that antique canvas once or twice too often.”
She looked at me sternly. “As you will see, on Solday it transcends even its usual beauty. You look like a bee drowning in pollen, Nathaniel.”
“Whose fault is that?” I demanded, brushing my suit fastidiously.
We came to the gate in the wall surrounding Van Seegeren’s town villa, and Freya banged on it loudly. The gate was opened by a scowling man. He was nearly a meter shorter than Freya, and had a balding head that bulged rather like the dome of the city. In a mincing voice he said, “Invitations?”
“What’s this?” said Freya. “We have permanent invitations from Heidi.”
“I’m sorry,” the man said coolly. “Ms. Van Seegeren has decided her Solday parties have gotten overcrowded, and this time she sent out invitations, and instructed me to let in only those who have them.”
“Then there has been a mistake,” Freya declared. “Get Heidi on the intercom, and she will instruct you to let me in. I am Freya Grindavik, and this is Nathaniel Sebastian.”
“I’m sorry,” the man said, quite unapologetically. “Every person turned away says the same thing, and Ms. Van Seegeren prefers not to be disturbed so frequently.”
“She’ll be more disturbed to hear we’ve been held up,” Freya shifted toward the man. “And who might you be?”
“I am Sander Musgrave, Ms. Van Seegeren’s private secretary.”
“How come I’ve never met you?”
“Ms. Van Seegeren hired me two months ago,” Musgrave said, and stepped back so he could look Freya in the eye without straining his neck. “That is immaterial, however—”
“I’ve been Heidi’s friend for over forty years,” Freya said slowly, once again shifting forward to lean over the man. “And I would wager she values her friends more than her secretaries.”
Musgrave stepped back indignantly. “I’m sorry!” he snapped. “I have my orders! Good day!”
But alas for him, Freya was now standing well in the gateway, and she seemed uninclined to move; she merely cocked her head at him. Musgrave comprehended his problem, and his mouth twitched uncertainly.
The impasse was broken when Van Seegeren’s maid Lucinda arrived from the street. “Oh, hello, Freya, Nathaniel. What are you doing out here?”
“This new Malvolio of yours is barring our entrance,” Freya said.
“Oh, Musgrave,” said Lucinda. “Let these two in, or the boss will be mad.”
Musgrave retreated with a deep scowl. “I’ve studied the ancients, Ms. Grindavik,” he said sullenly. “You need not insult me.”
“Malvolio was a tragic character,” Freya assured him. “Read Charles Lamb’s essay concerning the matter.”
“I certainly will,” Musgrave said stiffly, and hurried to the villa, giving us a last poisonous look.
“Of course, Lamb’s father,” Freya said absently, staring after the man, “was a house servant. Lucinda, who is that?”
Lucinda rolled her eyes. “The boss hired him to restore some of her paintings, and get the records in order. I wish she hadn’t.”
The bell in the gate sounded. “I’ve got it, Musgrave,” Lucinda shouted at the villa. She opened the gate, revealing the artist Harvey Washburn.
“So you do,” said Harvey, blinking. He was high again; a bottle of the White Brother hung from his hand. “Freya! Nathaniel! Happy Solday to you—have a drink?”
We refused the offer, and then followed Harvey around the side of the villa, exchanging a glance. I felt sorry for Harvey. Most of Mercury’s great collectors came to Harvey’s showings, but they dissected his every brushstroke for influences, and told him what he should be painting, and then among themselves they called his work amateurish and unoriginal, and never bought a single canvas. I was never surprised to see him drinking.
We rounded the side of the big villa and stepped onto the white stone patio, which was made of a giant slab of England’s Dover cliffs, cut out and transported to Mercury entire. Malvolio Musgrave had spoken the truth about Heidi reducing the size of her Solday party: where often the patio had been jammed, there were now fewer than a dozen people. I spotted George Butler, Heidi’s friend and rival art collector, and Arnold Ohman, the art dealer who had obtained for many of Mercury’s collectors their ancient masterpieces from Earth. As I greeted them Freya led us all across the patio to the back wall of the villa, which was also fronted with white slabs of the Dover cliffs. There, all alone, hung Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral—Sun Effect. “Look at it, Nathaniel!” Freya commanded me. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
I looked at it. Now you must understand that, as owner of the Gallery Orientale, and by deepest personal esthetic conviction, I am a connoisseur of Chinese art, a style in which a dozen artfully spontaneous brushstrokes can serve to delineate a mountain or two, several trees, a small village and its inhabitants, and perhaps some birds. Given my predilection, you will not be surprised to learn that to look at the antique rectangle of color that Freya so admired was to risk damaging my eyes. Thick scumbled layers of grainy paint scarcely revealed the cathedral of the title, which wavered under a blast of light so intense that I doubted Mercury’s midday could compete with it. Small blobs of every color served to represent both the indistinct stone and a pebbly sky, both were composed of combinations principally of white, yellow, and purple, though as I say every other color made an appearance.
“Stunning,” I said, with a severe squint. “Are you sure this Monet wasn’t a bit nearsighted?”
Freya glared at me, ignoring Butler’s chuckles. “I suppose your comment might have been funny the first time you made it. To children, anyway.”
“But I heard it was actually true,” I said, shielding my eyes with one hand. “Monet was nearsighted, and so, like Goya, his vision affected his painting—”
“I should hope so,” Harvey said solemnly.
“—so all he could see were those blobs of color; isn’t that sad?”
Freya shook her head. “You won’t get a rise out of me today, Nathaniel. You’ll have to think up your dinner conversation by yourself.”
Momentarily stopped by this riposte, I retired with Arnold Ohman to Heidi’s patio bar. After dialing drinks from the bartender we sat on the blocks of Dover cliffs that made up the patio’s outer wall. We toasted Solday, and contemplated the clouds of yellow talc that swirled over the orange tile rooftops below us. For those of you who have never visited it, Terminator is an oval city. The forward half of the city is flat, and projects out under the clear dome. The rear half of the oval is terraced, and rises to the tall Dawn Wall which supports the upper rim of the dome, and shields the city from the perpetually rising sun. The Great Gates of Terminator are near the top of the Dawn Wall, and when they are opened shafts of Sol’s overwhelming light spear through the city’s air, illuminating everything in a yellow brilliance. Heidi van Seegeren’s villa was about halfway up the terraced slope; we looked upon gray stone walls, orange tile roofs, and the dusty vines and lemon trees of the terrace gardens that dotted the city. Outside the dome the twelve big tracks of the city extended off to the horizon, circling the planet like a slender silver wedding band. It was a fine view, and I lifted my glass remembering that Claude Monet wasn’t there to paint it. For sometimes, if you ask me, reality is enough.
Ohman downed his drink in one swallow. Rumor had it that he was borrowing heavily to finance one of his big Terran purchases; it was whispered he was planning to buy the closed portion of the Louvre—or the Renaissance room of the Vatican museum—or Amsterdam’s Van Gogh collection. But rumors like that circulated around Arnold continuously. He was that kind of dealer. It was unlikely any of them were true; still, his silence seemed to reveal a certain tension.
“Look at the way Freya is soaking in that painting you got for Heidi,” I
said, to lift his spirits. Freya’s face was within centimeters of the canvas, where she could examine it blob by blob; the people behind her could see nothing but her white-blond hair. Ohman smiled at the sight. He had brought the Monet back from his most recent Terran expedition, and apparently it had been a great struggle to obtain it. Both the English family that owned it and the British government had had to be paid enormous sums to secure its release, and only the fact that Mercury was universally considered humanity’s greatest art museum had cleared the matter with the courts. It had been one of Arnold’s finest hours.
Now he said, “Maybe we should pull her away a bit, so that others can see.”
“If both of us tug on her it may work,” I said. We stood and went to her side. Harvey Washburn, looking flushed and frazzled, joined us, and we convinced Freya to share the glory. Ohman and Butler conferred over something, and entered the villa through the big French doors that led into the concert room. Inside, Heidi’s orchestra rolled up and down the scales of Moussorgsky’s Hut of Baba Yaga. That meant it was close to the time when the Great Gates would open (Heidi always gets inside information about this).
Sure enough, as Moussorgsky’s composition burst from The Hut of Baba Yaga into The Great Gates of Kiev, two splinters of white light split the air under the dome. Shouts and fanfares rose everywhere, nearly drowning the amplified sound of our orchestra. Slowly the Great Gates opened, and as they did the shafts of light grew to thick buttery gold bars of air. By their rich, nearly blinding glare, Heidi van Seegeren made her first entrance from her villa, timing her steps to the exaggerated Maazel ritard that her conductor Hiu employed every Solday when Pictures at an Exhibition was performed. This ritard shifted the music from the merely grandiose to the utterly bombastical, and it took Heidi over a minute to cross her own narrow patio; but I suppose it was not entirely silly, given the ritual nature of the moment, and the flood of light that was making the air appear a thick, quite tangible gel. What with the light, and the uproar created by the keening Grays and the many orchestras in the neighborhood, each playing their own overture or fanfare (the Coriolan came from one side of us, the 1812 from the other), it was a complex and I might even say noisy esthetic moment, and the last thing I needed was to take another look at the Monet monstrosity, but Freya would not have it otherwise.
