Black Alice knew the Lavinia Whateley was old, for a Boojum. Captain Song was not her first captain, although you never mentioned Captain Smith if you knew what was good for you. So if there was another stage to her life cycle, she might be ready for it. And her crew wasn’t letting her go.
Jesus and the cold fishy gods, Black Alice thought. Is this why the Marie Curie ate her crew? Because they wouldn’t let her go?
She fumbled for her tools, tugging the cords to float them closer, and wound up walloping herself in the bicep with a splicer. And as she was wrestling with it, her headset spoke again. “Blackie, can you hurry it up out there? Captain says we’re going to have company.”
Company? She never got to say it. Because when she looked up, she saw the shapes, faintly limned in starlight, and a chill as cold as a suit leak crept up her neck.
There were dozens of them. Hundreds. They made her skin crawl and her nerves judder the way gillies and Boojums never had. They were man-sized, roughly, but they looked like the pseudoroaches of Venus, the ones Black Alice still had nightmares about, with too many legs, and horrible stiff wings. They had ovate, corrugated heads, but no faces, and where their mouths ought to be sprouting writing tentacles
And some of them carried silver shining cylinders, like the canisters in Vinnie’s subhold.
Black Alice wasn’t certain if they saw her, crouched on the Boojum’s hide with only a thin laminate between her and the breathsucker, but she was certain of something else. If they did, they did not care.
They disappeared below the curve of the ship, toward the airlock Black Alice had exited before clawing her way along the ship’s side. They could be a trade delegation, come to bargain for the salvaged cargo.
Black Alice didn’t think even the Mi-Go came in the battalions to talk trade.
She meant to wait until the last of them had passed, but they just kept coming. Wasabi wasn’t answering her hails; she was on her own and unarmed. She fumbled with her tools, stowing things in any handy pocket whether it was where the tool went or not. She couldn’t see much; everything was misty. It took her several seconds to realize that her visor was fogged because she was crying.
Patch cables. Where were the fucking patch cables? She found a two-meter length of fiberoptic with the right plugs on the end. One end went into the monitor panel. The other snapped into her suit comm.
“Vinnie?” she whispered, when she thought she had a connection. “Vinnie, can you hear me?”
The bioluminescence under Black Alice’s boots pulsed once.
Gods and little fishes, she thought. And then she drew out her laser cutting torch and started slicing open the case on the console that Wasabi had called the governor. Wasabi was probably dead by now or dying. Wasabi, and Dogcollar, and … well, not dead. If they were lucky, they were dead.
Because the opposite of lucky was those canisters the Mi-Go were carrying.
She hoped Dogcollar was lucky.
“You wanna go out, right?” she whispered to the Lavinia Whateley. “Out into the Big Empty.”
She’d never been sure how much Vinnie understood of what people said, but the light pulsed again.
“And this thing won’t let you.” It wasn’t a question. She had it open now, and she could see that was what it did. Ugly fucking thing. Vinnie shivered underneath her, and there was a sudden pulse of noise in her helmet speakers: screaming. People screaming.
“I know,” Black Alice said. “They’ll come get me in a minute, I guess.” She swallowed hard against the sudden lurch of her stomach. “I’m gonna get this thing off you, though. And when they go, you can go, okay? And I’m sorry. I didn’t know we were keeping you from…” She had to quit talking, or she really was going to puke. Grimly, she fumbled for the tools she needed to disentangle the abomination from Vinnie’s nervous system.
Another pulse of sound, a voice, not a person: flat and buzzing and horrible. “We do not bargain with thieves.” And the scream that time—she’d never heard Captain Song scream before. Black Alice flinched and started counting to slow her breathing. Puking in a suit was the number one badness but hyperventilating in a suit was a really close second.
Her heads-up display was low-res, and slightly miscalibrated, so that everything had a faint shadow-double. But the thing that flashed up against her own view of her hands was unmistakable: a question mark.
<?>
“Vinnie?”
Another pulse of screaming, and the question mark again.
<?>
“Holy shit, Vinnie!… Never mind, never mind. They, um, they collect people’s brains. In canisters. Like the canisters in the third subhold.”
The bioluminescence pulsed once. Black Alice kept working.
Her heads-up pinged again:
“Um, yeah. I figure that’s what they’ll do with me, too. It looked like they had plenty of canisters to go around.”
Vinnie pulsed, and there was a longer pause while Black Alice doggedly severed connections and loosened bolts.
“Want? Do I want…?” Her laughter sounded bad. “Um, no. No, I don’t want to be a brain in a jar. But I’m not seeing a lot of choices here. Even if I went cometary, they could catch me. And it kind of sounds like they’re mad enough to do it, too.”
She’d cleared out all the moorings around the edge of the governor; the case lifted off with a shove and went sailing into the dark. Black Alice winced. But then the processor under the cover drifted away from Vinnie’s hide, and there was just the monofilament tethers and the fat cluster of fiber optic and superconductors to go.
“I’m doing my best here, Vinnie,” Black Alice said through her teeth.
That got her a fast double-pulse, and the Lavinia Whateley said,
And then,
“You want to help me?” Black Alice squeaked.
A strong pulse, and the heads-up said,
“That’s really sweet of you, but I’m honestly not sure there’s anything you can do. I mean, it doesn’t look like the Mi-Go are mad at you, and I really want to keep it that way.”
Black Alice came within a millimeter of taking her own fingers off with the cutting laser. “Um, Vinnie, that’s um … well, I guess it’s better than being a brain in a jar.” Or suffocating to death in her suit if she went cometary and the Mi-Go didn’t come after her.
The double-pulse again, but Black Alice didn’t see what she could have missed. As communications went, EAT ALICE was pretty fucking unambiguous.
“By eating me? Look, I know what happens to things you eat, and it’s not…” She bit her tongue. Because she did know what happened to things the Lavinia Whateley ate. Absorbed. Filtered. Recycled. “Vinnie … are you saying you can save me from the Mi-Go?”
A pulse of agreement.
“By eating me?” Black Alice pursued, needing to be sure she understood.
Another pulse of agreement.
Black Alice thought about the Lavinia Whateley’s teeth. “How much me are we talking about here?”
And now she had to decide what to do.
She figured she had two choices, really. One, walk back down the Lavinia Whateley and find out if the Mi-Go believed in surrender. Two, walk around the Lavinia Whateley and into her toothy mouth.
Black Alice didn’t think the Mi-Go believed in surrender.
She tilted her head back for one last clear look at the s
hining black infinity of space. Really, there wasn’t any choice at all. Because even if she’d misunderstood what Vinnie seemed to be trying to tell her, the worst she’d end up was dead, and that was light-years better than what the Mi-Go had on offer.
Black Alice Bradley loved her ship.
She turned to her left and started walking, and the Lavinia Whateley’s bioluminescence followed her courteously all the way, vanes swaying out of her path. Black Alice skirted each of Vinnie’s eyes as she came to them, and each of them blinked at her. And then she reached Vinnie’s mouth and that magnificent panoply of teeth.
“Make it quick, Vinnie, okay?” said Black Alice, and walked into her leviathan’s maw.
* * *
Picking her way delicately between razor-sharp teeth, Black Alice had plenty of time to consider the ridiculousness of worrying about a hole in her suit. Vinnie’s mouth was more like a crystal cave, once you were inside it; there was no tongue, no palate. Just polished, macerating stones. Which did not close on Black Alice, to her surprise. If anything, she got the feeling the Vinnie was holding her … breath. Or what passed for it.
The Boojum was lit inside, as well—or was making herself lit, for Black Alice’s benefit. And as Black Alice clambered inward, the teeth got smaller, and fewer, and the tunnel narrowed. Her throat, Alice thought. I’m inside her.
And the walls closed down, and she was swallowed.
Like a pill, enclosed in the tight sarcophagus of her space suit, she felt rippling pressure as peristalsis pushed her along. And then greater pressure, suffocating, savage. One sharp pain. The pop of her ribs as her lungs crushed.
Screaming inside a space suit was contraindicated, too. And with collapsed lungs, she couldn’t even do it properly.
* * *
alice.
She floated. In warm darkness. A womb, a bath. She was comfortable. An itchy soreness between her shoulder blades felt like a very mild radiation burn.
alice.
A voice she thought she should know. She tried to speak; her mouth gnashed, her teeth ground.
alice. talk here.
She tried again. Not with her mouth, this time.
Talk … here?
The buoyant warmth flickered past her. She was … drifting. No, swimming. She could feel currents on her skin. Her vision was confused. She blinked and blinked, and things were shattered.
There was nothing to see anyway, but stars.
alice talk here.
Where am I?
eat alice.
Vinnie. Vinnie’s voice, but not in the flatness of the heads-up display anymore. Vinnie’s voice alive with emotion and nuance and the vastness of her self.
You ate me, she said, and understood abruptly that the numbness she felt was not shock. It was the boundaries of her body erased and redrawn.
!
Agreement. Relief.
I’m … in you, Vinnie?
=/=
Not a “no.” More like, this thing is not the same, does not compare, to this other thing. Black Alice felt the warmth of space so near a generous star slipping by her. She felt the swift currents of its gravity, and the gravity of its satellites, and bent them, and tasted them, and surfed them faster and faster away.
I am you.
!
Ecstatic comprehension, which Black Alice echoed with passionate relief. Not dead. Not dead after all. Just, transformed. Accepted. Embraced by her ship, whom she embraced in return.
Vinnie. Where are we going?
out, Vinnie answered. And in her, Black Alice read the whole great naked wonder of space, approaching faster and faster as Vinnie accelerated, reaching for the first great skip that would hurl them into the interstellar darkness of the Big Empty. They were going somewhere.
Out, Black Alice agreed and told herself not to grieve. Not to go mad. This sure beat swampy Hell out of being a brain in a jar.
And it occurred to her, as Vinnie jumped, the brainless bodies of her crew already digesting inside her, that it wouldn’t be long before the loss of the Lavinia Whateley was a tale told to frighten spacers, too.
Hair
ADAM ROBERTS
Adam Roberts is the author of many novels, short stories, and various works of academic criticism. Recent works include The Palgrave History of Science Fiction, 2nd edition, and his latest novel, The Real-Town Murders). He lives a little way west of London, with his wife and two children.
Cosmetic fashions sometimes sweep the globe, but as the sly story that follows demonstrates, sometimes they have a particularly good reason for doing so.…
I
It seems to me foolish to take a story about betrayal and call it—as my sponsors wish me to—The Hairstyle That Changed The World. All this hairdressing business, this hair-work. I don’t want to get excited about that. To see it as those massed strands of electricity shooting up from the bald pate of the vandegraaff machine. And whilst we’re on the subject of haircuts: I was raised by my mother alone, and we were poor enough that, from an early stage, she was the person who cut my hair. For the sake of simplicity, as much as economy, this cut would be uniform and close. To keep me quiet as the buzzer grazed, she used to show me the story about the mermaid whose being-in-the-world was confused between fishtail and feet. I’m sure she showed me lots of old books, but it was that one that sticks in my head: the singing crab, more scarab than crustacean; the wicked villainess able to change not only her appearance but, improbably, her size—I used to puzzle how she was able to generate all her extra mass as she metamorphosed, at the end, into a colossal octopus. Mostly I remember the beautiful young mermaid; she had the tempestuous name Ariel. The story hinged on the notion that her tail might vanish and reform as legs, and I used to worry disproportionately about those new feet. Would they, I wondered, smell of fish? Were the toenails actually fish-scales? Were the twenty-six bones of each foot (all of which I could name) formed of cartilage, after the manner of fish bones? Or human bone? The truth is, my mind is the sort that is most comfortable finding contiguities between different states, and most uncomfortable with inconsistencies. Hence my eventual choice of career, I suppose. And I don’t doubt that my fascination with the mermaid story had to do with a nascent erotic yearning for Ariel herself—a very prettily drawn figure, I recall.
This has nothing to do with anything. I ought not digress. It’s particularly vulgar to do so before I have even started; as if I want to put off the task facing me. Of course this account is not about me. It is enough, for your purposes, to locate your narrator, to know that I was raised by my mother alone; and that after she died (of newstrain CF, three weeks after contracting it) I was raised by a more distant relative. We had enough to eat, but nothing else in my life was enough to. To know that my trajectory out of that world was hard study, a scholarship to a small college, and the acquisition of the professional skills that established me in my current profession. You might also want to know where I first met Neocles (long final e—people sometimes get that wrong) at college, although what was for me dizzying educational altitude represented, for him, a sort of slumming, a symptom of his liberal curiosity about how the underprivileged live.
Above all, I suppose, you need to know that I’m of that generation that thinks of hair as a sort of excrescence, to be cropped to make it manageable, not indulged at length. And poverty is like the ore in the stone; no matter how you grind the rock and refine the result it is always poverty that comes out. Thinking again about my mother, as here, brings her colliding painfully against the membrane of memory. I suppose I find it hard to forgive her for being poor. She loved me completely, and I loved her back, as children do. The beautiful mermaid, seated on a sack-shaped rock, combing her long, coral-red hair whilst porpoises jump through invisible aerial hoops below her.
II
To tell you about the hairstyle that changed the world, it’s back we go to Reykjavik, five years ago, now: just after the Irkutsk famine, when the grain was devoured by that granulated agent
manufactured by—and the argument continues as to which terrorists sponsored it. It was the year the World Cup descended into farce. Nic was in Iceland to answer charges at the Product Protection Court, and I was representing him.
A PPC hearing is not much different to any other court hearing. There are the rituals aping the last century, or perhaps the century before that. There’s a lot of brass and glass, and there is a quantity of waxed, mirrorlike darkwood. I had represented Nic at such hearings before, but never one quite so serious as this. And Nic had more to lose than most. Because I had itemized his assets prior to making our first submission before the Judicial Master I happened to know exactly how much that was: five apartments, one overlooking Central Park; a mulberry farm; forty assorted cars and flitters; more than fifty percent shares in the Polish National Museum—which although it didn’t precisely mean that he owned all those paintings and statues and whatnots at least gave him privileged access to them. The Sydney apartment had a Canova, for instance, in the entrance hall, and the Poles weren’t pressing him to return it any time soon.
He had a lot to lose.
In such circumstances insouciance is probably a more attractive reaction than anxiety, although from a legal perspective I might have wished for a more committed demeanor. He lounged in court in his Orphic shirt—very stylish, very allah-mode—and his hair was a hundred years out of date. It was Woodstock. Or English Civil War aristocrat.
“When the J.M. comes in,” I told him, “you’d better get off your gluteus maximus and stand yourself straight.”
Judicial Master Paterson came in, and Nic got to his feet smartly enough and nodded his head, and then sat down himself perfectly properly. With his pocketstrides decently hidden by the table he looked almost respectable. Except for all the hair, of course.
The Very Best of the Best Page 57
