Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (54 page)

I’m too far up to guess which hole is Sakpata’s mouth, and I don’t try.

I don’t want to know.

A different sort of god is patiently waiting for me on the horizon.

“They started screaming,” Ronnie says. “Man, I’ll never forget that sound, no matter how many pills these assholes feed me. We all sat there, too fucking stunned to move, and this skinny little guy from CNN – ”

“Last time he was from
Newsweek,
” I say, interrupting her, and she shakes her head and takes another drag, coughs and rubs at her bloodshot eyes.

“You think it makes any goddamned difference?”

“No,” I reply dishonestly, and she stares at me for a while without saying anything else.

“When’s the last time you got a decent night’s sleep?” she asks me, finally, and I might laugh, or I might shrug. 

“Yeah,” she says. “That’s what I thought.”

She starts rattling on about the hydrobot, then, the towering black smokers, thermal vents, chemosynthesis, those first grainy snatches of video, but I’m not listening. I’m too busy zipping helplessly along above buckled Europan plains and vast stretches of blocky, shattered chaos material; a frozen world caught in the shadow of Big Daddy Jupiter, frozen for ages beyond counting, but a long fucking way from dead, and I would wake up screaming or crying or, if I was lucky, too scared to make any sound at all.

“They’re ready for you now, Mr. Paine,” the cop said, plain old NYPD street blue, and I wondered what the fuck he was doing here, why the Agency was taking chances like that. Probably the same poor bastard who’d found the spooch, I figured. Templeton had told me that someone in the building had complained about the smell and, so, the super buzzed the cops, so this was most likely the guy who answered the call. He might have a partner around somewhere. I nodded at him, and he glanced nervously back over his shoulder at the open door to the apartment, the translucent polyurethane iso-seal curtain with its vertical black zipper running right down the middle, all the air hoses snaking in and out of the place, keeping the pressure inside lower than the pressure outside. I doubted he would still be breathing when the sweeper crews were finished with the scene. The Agency has a low tolerance for loose ends.

“You see this sort of shit very often?” he asked, and it didn’t take a particularly sensitive son of a bitch to hear the fear in his voice, the fear and confusion and whatever comes after panic. I didn’t respond. I was busy checking the batteries in one of my cameras and, besides, I had the usual orders from Templeton to keep my mouth shut around civvies. And knowing the guy was probably already good as dead, that he’d signed his death warrant just by showing up for work that morning, didn’t make me particularly eager to chat.

“Well, I don’t mind telling you, I’ve never seen shit like that thing in there,” he said and coughed. “I mean, you see some absolutely fucked-up shit in this city, and I even did my four years in the army – hell, I was in fucking Damascus after the bomb, but holy Christ Almighty.”

“You were in Damascus?” I asked, but didn’t look up from my equipment, too busy double-checking the settings on the portable genetigraph clipped to my belt to make eye contact.

“Oh yeah, I was there. I got to help clean up the mess when the fires burned out.”

“Then that’s something we have in common,” I told him and flipped my cam’s on switch and the grey OLED screen showed me five zeros. I was patched into the portable lab down on the street, a black Chevy van with Maryland plates and a yellow ping-pong ball stuck on the antenna. I knew Sarah would be in the van, waiting for my feed, jacked in, riding the amps, hearing everything I heard, seeing everything I saw through her perfectly calibrated eyes.

“You were in Syria?” the cop asked me, glad to have something to talk about besides what he’d seen in the apartment.

“No, I clean up other people’s messes.”

“Oh,” he said, sounding disappointed. “I see.”

“Had a good friend in the war, though. But he was stationed in Cyprus, and then the Taurus Mountains.”

“You ever talk with him? You know, about the war?”

“Nope. He didn’t make it back,” I said, finally looking up, and I winked at the cop and stepped quickly past him to the tech waiting for me at the door. I could see she was sweating inside her hazmat hood, even though it was freezing in the hallway. Scrubbers don’t get hazmat suits. It interferes with the contact, so we settle for a couple of hours in decon afterwards, antibiotics, antitox, purgatives, and hope we don’t come up red somewhere down the line.

“This is bad, ain’t it?” the cop asked. “I mean, this is something
real
bad.” I didn’t turn around, just shrugged my shoulders as the tech unzipped the plastic curtain for me.

“Is that how it looked to you?” I replied. I could feel the gentle rush of air into the apartment as the slit opened in front of me.

“Jesus, man, all I want’s a straight fucking answer,” he said. “I think I deserve that much. Don’t you?” and since I honestly couldn’t say one way or the other, since I didn’t even care, I ignored him and stepped through the curtain into this latest excuse for Hell.

There’s still an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, on the fourth floor with the old Hall of Vertebrate Origins and all the dinosaur bones. The Agency didn’t shut it down after the first outbreaks, the glory spooches that took out a whole block in Philadelphia and a trailer park somewhere in West Virginia, but the exhibit’s not as popular as you might think. A dark, dusty alcove crowded with scale models and dioramas, monitors running clips from the IcePIC’s hydrobot, endless black and white loops of grey seafloors more than half a billion kilometers from earth. When the exhibit first opened, there were a few specimens on loan from NASA, but those were all removed a long time ago. I never saw them for myself, but an acquaintance on staff at the museum, a geologist, assures me they were there. A blue-black bit of volcanic rock sealed artfully in a Lucite pyramid, and two formalin-filled specimen canisters, one containing a pink worm-like organism no more than a few centimeters in length, the other preserving one of the ugly little slugs that the mission scientists dubbed “star minnows.”

“Star leeches” would have been more accurate.

On Tuesday afternoon, the day after I’d worked the scene on Columbus, hung over and hoping to avoid another visit from Sarah, I took the B-Line from my hotel to the museum and spent a couple of hours sitting on a bench in that neglected alcove, watching the video clips play over and over again for no one but me. Three monitors running simultaneously – a NASA documentary on the exploration of Europa, beginning with Pioneer 10 in 1973, then a flyover of the moon’s northern hemisphere recorded shortly before the IcePIC orbiter deployed its probes, and, finally, a snippet of film shot beneath the ice. That’s the one I’d come to see. I chewed aspirin and watched as the hydrobot’s unblinking eyes peered through veils of silt and megaplankton, into the interminable darkness of an alien ocean, the determined glare of the bot’s lights never seeming to reach more than a few feet into the gloom. Near the end of the loop, you get to see one of the thermal vents, fringed with towering sulfide chimneys spewing superheated, methane- and hydrogen-rich water into the frigid Europan ocean. In places, the sides of the chimneys were completely obscured by a writhing, swaying carpet of creatures. Something like an eel slipped unexpectedly past the camera lens. A few seconds later, the seafloor was replaced by a brief stream of credits and then the NASA logo before the clip started itself over again. 

I tried hard to imagine how amazing these six minutes of video must have seemed, once upon a time, how people must have stood in lines just to see it, back before the shit hit the fan and everyone everywhere stopped wanting to talk about IcePIC and its fucking star minnows. Before the government axed most of NASA’s exobiology program, scrapped all future missions to Europa, and cancelled plans to further explore Titan. Back before ET became a four-letter word. But no matter how hard I tried, all I could think about was that thing on the bed, the crap growing from the walls of the apartment and dripping from the goddamn ceiling.

In the museum, above the monitor, there was a long quote from H. G. Wells printed in red-brown ink on a clear Lexan plaque, and I read it several times, wishing that I had a cigarette – “We look back through countless millions of years and see the great will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to power, crawling and then walking confidently upon the land, struggling generation after generation to master the air, creeping down into the darkness of the deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself anew, we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless inconceivable purpose, until at last it reaches us and its being beats through our brains and arteries.”

I’ve never cared very much for irony. It usually leaves a sick, empty feeling in my gut. I wondered why no one had taken the plaque down.

By the time I got back to my room it was almost dark, even though I’d splurged and taken a taxi. After the exhibit, the thought of being trapped in the crowded, stinking subway, hurtling along through the city’s bowels, through those tunnels where the sun never reaches, gave me a righteous fucking case of the heebie-jeebies and, what the hell, the Agency was picking up the tab. All those aspirin had left my stomach aching and sour, and hadn’t done much of anything about the hangover, but there was an unopened pint waiting for me beneath the edge of the bed.

I was almost asleep when Sarah called.

Here’s a better quote. I’ve been carrying it around with me for the last few years, in my head and on a scrap of paper. It showed up in my email one day, sent by some anonymous someone or another from an account that turned out to be bogus. Scrubbers get a lot of anonymous email. Tips, rumors, bullshit, hearsay, wicked little traps set by the Agency, confessions, nightmares, curses, you name it and it comes rolling our way, and after a while you don’t even bother to wonder who sent the shit. But this one, this one kept me awake a few nights:

But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of a wrecked vessel above him should drop and bump him on the nose? 

Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost impenetrable density. 

Sometimes I’m a savage who has found something on the beach of his island. Sometimes I’m a deep-sea fish with a sore nose. 

The greatest of mysteries: 

Why don’t they ever come here, or send here, openly? 

Of course, there’s nothing to that mystery if we don’t take so seriously the notion – that we must be interesting. It’s probably for moral reasons that they stay away – but even so, there must be some degraded ones among them.

It’s that last bit that always sinks its teeth (or claws or whatever the fuck have you) into me and hangs on. Charles Hoyt Fort.
The Book of the Damned.
First published in 1919, a century and a half before IcePIC, and it occurs to me now that I shouldn’t be any less disturbed by prescience than I am by irony. But there you go. Sometimes I’m a savage. Sometimes I’m a deep-sea fish. And my life is become the sum of countless degradations.

“You’re not going down there alone,” Sarah said, telling, not asking, because, like I already noted, Sarah stopped being the kind of girl who asks questions when she signed on with the Agency for life, plus whatever else they could milk her biomeched cadaver for. I didn’t reply immediately, lay there a minute or three, rubbing my eyes, waiting for the headache to start in on me again, listening to the faint, insistent crackle from the phone. Manhattan’s landlines were shit and roses that February, had been that way for years, ever since some Puerto Ricans in Brooklyn had popped a homemade micro-EMP rig to celebrate the Fourth of July. I wondered why Sarah hadn’t called me on my thumbline while I looked about for the scotch. Turned out, I was lying on the empty bottle, and I rolled over, wishing I’d never been born. I held the phone cradled between my left shoulder and my cheek and stared at the darkness outside the window of my hotel room.

“Do you even know what time it is?” I asked her.

“Templeton said you were talking about going out to Roosevelt. He said you might have gone already.”

“I didn’t say dick to Templeton about Roosevelt,” I said, which was the truth – I hadn’t – but also entirely beside the point. It was John Templeton’s prerogative to stay a few steps ahead of his employees, especially when those employees were scrubbers, especially freebie scrubbers on the juice. I tossed the empty bottle at a cockroach on the wall across the room. The bottle didn’t break, but squashed the roach and left a satisfying dent in the drywall.

“You know Agency protocol for dealing with terrorists.”

I rubbed at my face.

“They went and stuck something in your head so you don’t
have
to sleep anymore, is that it?”

“You can’t go to the island alone,” she said. “I’m sending a couple of plain-clothes men over. They’ll be at your hotel by six A.M., at the latest.”

“Yeah, and I’ll be fucking asleep at six,” I mumbled, more interested in watching the roaches that had emerged to feed on the remains of the one I’d nailed than arguing with her.

“We can’t risk losing you, Mr. Paine. It’s too late to call in someone else if anything happens. You know that as well as I do.”

“Do I?”

“You’re a drunk, not an idiot.”

“Look, Sarah, if I start scutzing around out there with two of Temp’s goons in tow, I’ll be lucky if I
find
a fucking stitch, much less get it to talk to me.”

“They’re all animals,” Sarah said, meaning the stitches and meatdolls and genetic changelings that had claimed Roosevelt Island a decade or so back. There was more than a hint of loathing in her voice. “It makes me sick, just thinking about them.”