Finch by Jeff VanderMeer (3 page)

Finch tamped down on his irritation. Tried to remember that, in
a way, none of the Partials were more than six years old. Disaffected
youths no matter what their age. All pale. Or made pale. Humans
who'd gotten fungal infections and liked it, Truff help them. Got
an adrenaline rush from heightened powers of sight. Enhanced by
fungal drugs autogenerated inside the eye. Pumped into the brain. In
a sense, their eye was always looking back at them.

I'll never know what you think. Not in a million years.

"You volunteered for that," Finch said. Pointed at the Partial's eye.
"That makes you crazy. So I don't need to know what you think."

The Partial snickered. "I've heard it all before. And you'll never
know what you're missing ... But here's what I think, whether you
want it or not. That man's not really human. Not really. I should
know, right? And something went wrong. And maybe they didn't die
here but were, I don't know, moved."

Finch gave the Partial a long glance. Turned to kneel again by the
man's body. The second half of what the Partial had said made less sense
than the first.

"Just do your job." I'll do mine.

The Partial fell silent. Hurt? Seduced by something new to click?

Finch really didn't care. Something had caught his attention. Two
fingers of the man's left hand. Curled tight into the palm. Grit or
sand under the fingernails. Finch got to his knees, leaned forward,
took the man's hand in his. The warmth of it surprised him, the
green spores already ghosting into the flesh. He pried the fingers
back. Revealed a ragged piece of paper. A pulse-pounding moment
of excitement.

Then he pulled it out. Released the fingers. Let the arm fall.
Shielding the paper from the Partial with his body.

Normal paper, not fungal. Old and stained. Torn from a book? He
unfolded it. Two words, written hurriedly, in black ink: Never Lost. And
below that some gibberish that looked something like bellum omnium
contra omnes. Self-contained, or once part of a longer message?

Definitely torn from a book. On the back a printed sentence
fragment, "the future can hold when the past holds ambiguity such as
this," and a symbol. Somehow familiar to Finch. Although he didn't
know from where.

Stuck the paper in his boot before the Partial could blink that he'd
found something. Got up. Pulled gloves from his jacket pocket and
put them on. Opened the pouch at his belt.

Heretic had forgotten the preservatives, but would blame Finch if
it wasn't done. Corpses didn't last long otherwise. Within forty-eight
hours, you'd be breathing them, as the spores did their work.

Carefully, he sprinkled a blue powder across both corpses. Not
spores this time, but tiny fruiting bodies. The powder smelled like
smoke from the camps to the south. Or the camps smelled like the
powder. Pointless to wear the gloves after the hundreds of fungal
toxins and experiments that had been released into the air. The
millions of floating spore-eyes. Yet still he did it.

Blue mingled with green. The green disappeared as he watched,
colonized by the blue. The two bodies would not decay now. They
would linger, suspended, until Finch returned to collect their
memories.

"... and know you don't want to eat the memories," the Partial said
to Finch's back. Sounding triumphant.

Finch's thoughts had been so far away he'd missed the first part.

"Is that all?" Wanted to laugh.

Did they talk this way together in the barracks near the camps
where the gray caps housed them like weapons? Spewing out each day
and night like black ants. Foraging on the flesh of the city. Observers
and security both.

"You're afraid of change," the Partial said. "Of being changed. That's
why you hate me."

Swiveled abruptly in his crouch, hand on his gun. Met the
Partial's corrupted gaze.

"Is that all?" Finch repeated. "I mean, are you done with your picturetaking?"

No skill when every blink was an image. No honor in a perpetual
voyeurism. A kind of treason against your own kind. "It warps
the privacy of your own life," Wyte had said once, as if he knew.
"Permanent occupation. I wouldn't want to live that way." Yet now
Wyte did. And so did Finch. In a sense.

"I'm never done," the Partial said. "And if you've got a past, you
should be worried. They'll work through all the records some day.
Maybe they'll find you."

Funny thing is, Partial, Heretic already knows my past. Most of it. And he
doesn't give a fuck. That's not who I'm worried about.

Wanted to say it but didn't. Unsnapped the clasp on his holster. The
fungal gun trembled there like a live thing. Wet. Dripping. Useless
against a gray cap. Very useful against a Partial. Still human, no matter
how much you pretend.

"Get the fuck out of here."

"I see everything," the Partial said. "Everything."

"Yes," Finch said, "but that's unavoidable, isn't it?"

The Partial stared at Finch. Seemed about to say something. Bit
down on it, hard. Walked out into the hall. Slammed the door
behind him.

Leaving Finch alone with the bodies.

Now Finch can see the frailty death has lent them. Now Finch can see
the vulnerability. The way the light uses them in the same way it uses
him. He walks to the window. Looks out across the damaged face of
Ambergris.

Six years and I can't recognize a goddamn thing from before.

Harsh blue sprawl of the bay, bled from the River Moth. Carved from
nothing. The first thing the gray caps did when they Rose, flooding
Ambergris and killing thousands. Now the city, riddled through with
canals, is like a body that was once drowned. Parts bleached, parts
bloated. Metal and stone for flesh. Places that stick out and places
that barely touch the surface.

In the foreground of the bay stands the scaffolding for the two tall
towers still being built by the gray caps. A rough pontoon bridge
reaches out to them, an artificial island surrounding the base. The
scaffolding rises twenty feet above the highest tower. Hard to know
if they are almost complete or will take a hundred years more. Great
masses of green fungus cling to the tops. It makes the towers look
shaggy, almost as if they had fur, were flesh and blood. A smell like
oil and sawdust and frying meat. At dusk each day the gray caps lead a
work force from the camps south of the city. All night, the sounds of
hammering and construction. Emerald lights moving like slow stars.
Screams of injury or punishment. To what purpose? No one knows.
While along the lip of the bay, monstrous fungal cathedrals rise under
cover of darkness, replacing the old, familiar architecture. Skyline like
a jagged wound.

Twenty years of civil war. Six years of the gray caps.

To Finch's left, southwest: smudges of smoke, greasy and gray, above
the distant mottled spectacle of the Spit, an island made of lashedtogether boats. A den for spies. A sanctuary for the desperate and the
lawless.

Beyond the Spit, the silhouette of the two living domes covering the
detention camps. Broken by the smoke, hidden by debris. Built over
a valley of homes. Built atop the remains of the military factories that
had allowed the two great mercantile companies, House Hoegbotton
and the invading House Frankwrithe & Lewden, to dream of empire,
to destroy each other. And the city with them. Finch had fought for
Hoegbotton. Once upon a time.

Between the domes, the fiery green glitter and minarets of the
Religious Quarter, occupied by the remnants of native tribes.
Adapting. Struggling. Destined someday to be wiped out. He can see
the exposed crater at the top of the Truffidian Cathedral. Cracked. All
the prayers let out. Nothing left.

To Finch's right, on the north shore: the Hoegbotton & Frankwrithe
Zone. Huge tendrils of reddish-orange fungus vein into the rocks lining
the water. A green haze obscures any view of what might be left on the
north shore. Six years ago, the HFZ had just been northern Ambergris:
wild, yes, but not infected. Then, under sustained attack by the gray caps, the rebel army had retreated there. So much heavy armor,
munitions, and ordnance had gone in, along with twenty thousand
soldiers, that it is hard for Finch to believe all of it could just vanish or
molder. Yet, apparently, it had. They'd gone in and the gray caps had
created the Zone around them. Only the rebel commander they called
the Lady in Blue and some of her soldiers had escaped the trap.

Once, the HFZ had grown in size every day. Now, it has stopped,
covers about ten square miles. Almost every citizen can see it. For
all the good that did. Will the rebels return? is the question everyone
asks, even now. When the wind is strange-gusting this way and
that without purpose-great glittering particles from the north drift
orange and purple and blue across the bay into Ambergris. Even the
gray caps don't enter the HFZ except by proxy. Content to let the
remnants of the rebels wander through a toxic fungal stew, goes the
theory. Almost like another camp, without fences or guards.

Except, no one comes out of the HFZ.

Beyond the towers, beyond the bay, the far shore of the River Moth.
Distant. Unattainable. Beyond that, although Finch can't see it, just
feels it: the eastern-most edge of the Kalif's empire, the Stockton
Commonwealth to the south, the Morrow Protectorate to the north.
Between them and Finch: security zones. Blockades. Set up by the
surrounding countries. All three as determined as the gray caps that
no one gets out of Ambergris. Even as they send in their spies to steal
the city's secrets.

Finch turns away from the window. It leaves him sad and cold and
frightened. The towers especially. What will happen when the gray
caps have finished them?

A view like that could drive a person mad.

hen the time comes, right, Finch?"

Back at the station, which used to be Hoegbotton & Sons'
headquarters. High ceilings. Hints of gold leaf and mosaic. Dull light
from tiny round windows set in rows across both side walls. A tortured
light that never gave any hint of the weather outside. Sometimes in
the early morning and late afternoon they had to use old lanterns. The
chandeliers had been ripped out long ago.

Back at his desk with the other detectives. The must of fungal rot
from the green strip of carpet running from the front door down the
middle. The whole back of the room hidden by a curtain. Smell of bad
coffee from the table that also housed their only typewriter. Shoved
up against the far wall. Next to the holding cell.

Ten desks. Seven detectives. Skinner, Gustat, Blakely, Dapple,
Albin, and Wyte furiously scritching away on their notepads with
sharp pencils. Some on the phone. All of them like schoolboys in
an incomprehensible class. None of them likely to ask questions of
the teacher.

Only a weak hello when Finch had walked in. Too much effort. Not
yet over the paranoid morning jitters. Ever more difficult to know
what to say. How to act. They all assumed the gray caps spied on
them. Difficult to remember all day long. Especially when strange
things happened with just enough irregularity to make them think
that was the last time. The air pungent with old and new sweat. Laced
with some underlying funk that was almost sweet.