Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (55 page)

“Did you ever stop to consider they probably feel the same way about you?”

“No,” Sarah said coldly, firmly, one-hundred percent shit-sure of herself. “I never have.”

“If those fuckers knock on my door at six o’clock, I swear to god, Sarah, I’ll shoot them.”

“I’ll tell them to wait for you in the lobby.”

“That’s real damn considerate of you.”

There was another static-littered moment of silence then, and I closed my eyes tight. The headache was back and had brought along a few friends for the party. My thoughts were starting to bleed together, and I wondered if I’d vomit before or after Sarah finally let me off the phone. I wondered if cyborgs vomited. I wondered exactly what all those agents in the black Chevy van had seen on their consoles and face screens when I’d walked over and touched a corner of the bed in the apartment on Columbus Avenue.

“I’m going to hang up now, Sarah. I’m going back to sleep.”

“You’re sober.”

“As a judge,” I whispered and glanced back at the window, trying to think about anything at all except throwing up. There were bright lights moving across the sky above the river, red and green and white, turning clockwise; one of the big military copters, an old Phoenix 6-98 or one of the newer Japanese whirlybirds, making its circuit around the Rotten Apple.

“You’re still a lousy liar,” she said.

“I’ll have to try harder.”

“Don’t fuck this up, Mr. Paine. You’re a valued asset. The Agency would like to see you remain that way.”

“I’m going back to sleep,” I said again, disregarding the not-so-subtle threat tucked between her words; it wasn’t anything I didn’t already know. “And I meant what I said about shooting those assholes. Don’t think I didn’t. Anyone knocks on this door before eight sharp, and that’s all she wrote.”

“They’ll be waiting in the lobby when you’re ready.”

“Goodnight, Sarah.”

“Goodnight, Mr. Paine,” she replied, and a second or two later there was only the ragged dial tone howling in my ear. The lights outside the window were gone, the copter probably all the way to Harlem by now. I almost made it to the toilet before I was sick.

If I didn’t keep getting the feeling that there’s someone standing behind me, someone looking over my shoulder as I write this, I’d say more about the dreams. The dreams are always there, tugging at me, insistent, selfish, wanting to be spilled out into the wide, wide world where everyone and his brother can get a good long gander at them. They’re not content anymore with the space
inside
my skull. My skull is a prison for dreams, an enclosed and infinite prison space where the arrows on the number line point towards each other, infinitely converging but never, ever, ever meeting, and so infinite all the same. But I
do
keep getting that feeling, and there’s still the matter of the thing in the apartment. 

The thing on the bed.

The thing that the cop who’d been in Damascus after the Israelis’ 40-megaton fireworks show died for.

My thirteenth and final contact. Lucky thirteen.

After I was finished with the makeshift airlock at the door, one of Templeton’s field medics, safe and snug inside a blue hazmat suit, led me through the brightly-lit apartment. I held one hand cupped over my nose and mouth, but the thick clouds of neon yellow disinfectant seeped easily between my fingers, gagging me. My eyes burned and watered, making it even more difficult to see. I’ve always thought that shit smelled like licorice, fennel, anise – star anise – but it seems to smell like different things to different people. Sarah used to say the gas reminded her of burning tires. I used to know a guy who said it smelled like carnations.

“It’s in the bedroom,” the medic said, his voice flat and tinny through the suit’s audio. “It doesn’t seem to have spread to any of the other rooms. How was the jump from Los Angeles, sir?”

I didn’t answer him, too ripped on adrenaline for small talk and pleasantries, and he didn’t really seem to care, my silence just another part of the routine. I took shallow breaths and followed the medic through the yellow fog, which was growing much thicker as we approached ground zero. The disinfectant was originally manufactured by Dow for domestic bioterrorism clean-up, but the Agency’s clever boys and girls had added a pinch of this, a dash of that, and it always seemed to do the job. We passed a kitchenette, beer cans and dirty dishes and an open box of corn flakes sitting on the counter, then turned left into a short hallway leading past a bathroom too small for a rat to take a piss in, past a framed photograph of a lighthouse on a rocky shore (the bits we remember, the bits we forget), to the bedroom. Templeton was there, of course, decked out in his orange hazmat threads, one hand resting confidently on the butt of the big Beretta Pulse 38A on his hip, and he pointed at me and then pointed at the bed.

Sometimes I’m a deep-sea fish.

Sometimes I’m a savage.

“We’re still running MRS and backtrace on these two,” Templeton said, pointing at the bed again, “but I’m pretty sure the crit’s a local.” His grey eyes peered warily out at me, the lights inside his hood shining bright so I had no trouble at all seeing his face through the haze.

“I figure one of them picked it up from an untagged mobile, probably the woman there, and it’s been hitching dormant for the last few weeks. We’re guessing the trigger was viral. She might have caught a cold. Corona’s always a good catalyst.”

I took a deep breath and coughed. Then I gagged again and stared up at the ceiling for a moment.

“Come on, Deet. I need you frosty on this one. You’re not drunk, are you? Fennimore said – ” 

“I’m not drunk,” I replied, and I wasn’t, not yet. I hadn’t had a drink in almost six months, but, hey, the
good
news was, the drought was almost over.

“That’s great,” Templeton said. “That’s real damn great. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”

I looked back at the bed.

“So, when you gonna tell me what’s so goddamn special about this one?” I asked. “The way Sarah sounded, I figured you’d already lost a whole building.”

“What’s so goddamn special about them, Deet, is that they’re still conscious, both of them. Initial EEGs are coming up pretty solid. Clean alpha, beta, and delta. The theta’s are weakening, but the brain guys say the waves are still synchronous enough to call coherent.”

Temp kept talking, but I tuned him out and forced myself to take a long, hard look at the bed.

Sometimes I’m a deep-sea fish.

The woman’s left eye was still intact, open very wide and wet with tears, her blue iris bright as Christmas Day, and I realized she was watching me.

“It’s pure,” Templeton said, leaning closer to the bed, “more than ninety-percent proximal to the Lælaps strain. Beats the fuck outta me why their brains aren’t soup by now.”

“I’m going to need a needle,” I muttered, speaking automatically, some part of me still there to walk the walk and talk the talk, some part of me getting ready to take the plunge, because the only way out of this hole was straight ahead. A very small, insensate part of me not lost in that pleading blue eye. “Twelve and a half max, okay, and not that fife-and-drum Australian shit you gave me in Boston. I don’t want to feel
anything
in there but the critter, you understand?”

“Sure,” Templeton said, smiling like a ferret.

“I mean it. Whatever’s going through their heads right now, I don’t want to hear it, Temp. Not so much as a peep. Not even a fucking whisper.” 

“Hey, you’re calling the shots, Deet.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Don’t suck my dick, just get me the needle.”

He motioned to a medic, and in a few more minutes the drugs were singing me towards that spiraling ebony pipeline, the Scrubber’s Road, Persephone’s Staircase, the Big Drop, the White Bull, whatever you want to call it, it’s all the same to me. I was beginning to sweat and trying to make it through the procedure checklist one last time. Templeton patted me on the back, the way he always did when I was standing there on the brink. I said a silent prayer to anything that might be listening that one day it’d be his carcass rotting away at the center of the Agency’s invisible clockwork circus. And then I kneeled down at the edge of the bed and got to work.

Sarah sent the goons over, just like she’d said she would, but I ducked out the back and, luckily, she hadn’t seen fit to have any of Temp’s people watching all the hotel’s exits. Maybe she couldn’t pull that many warm bodies off the main gig down on Columbus. Maybe Temp had bigger things on his mind. I caught a cash-and-ride taxi that took me all the way to the ruins along York Avenue. The Vietnamese driver hadn’t wanted to get any closer to the Queensboro Bridge than Third, but I slipped him five hundred, and he found a little more courage somewhere. He dropped me at the corner of Second and East Sixty-First Street, crossed himself twice, and drove away, bouncing recklessly over the trash and disintegrating blacktop. I watched him go, feeling more alone than I’d expected. Overhead, the Manhattan sky was the color of buttermilk and mud, and I wished briefly, pointlessly, that I’d brought a gun. The 9mm Samson-L4 Enforcer I’d bought in a Hollywood pawnshop almost four years before was back at the hotel, hidden in a locked compartment of my suitcase. But I knew it’d be a whole lot worse to be picked up crossing the barricades without a pass if I were also carrying an unregistered weapon, one more big red blinking excuse for the MPs to play a few rounds of Punch and Judy with my face while they waited for my papers and my story about the Agency to check out.

I started walking north, the grey-blue snow crunching loudly beneath my boots, the collar of my coat turned up against the wind whistling raw between the empty, burned-out buildings. I’d heard security was running slack around the Sixty-Third Street entrance. I might get lucky. It had happened before.

“Yes, but what exactly did you think you’d find on the island?” Buddhadev Krishnamurthy asked when he interviewed me for his second book on technoshamanism and the Roosevelt parahumanists, the one that won him a Pulitzer.

“Missing pieces, maybe,” I replied. “I was just following my nose. The Miyake girl turned up during the contact.”

“But going to the island alone, wasn’t that rather above and beyond? I mean, if you hated Templeton and the Agency so much, why stick your neck out like that?”

“Old habits,” I said, sipping at my tequila and trying hard to remember how long it had taken me to find a way past the guards and up onto the bridge. “Old habits and bad dreams,” I added, and then, “But I never said I was doing it for the Agency.” I knew I was telling him more than I’d intended. Not that it mattered. None of my interview made it past the censors and into print.

I kept to the center lanes, except for a couple of times when rusted and fire-blackened tangles of wrecked automobiles and police riot-rollers forced me to the edges of the bridge. The West Channel glimmered dark and iridescent beneath the late February clouds, a million shifting colors dancing lazily across the oily surface of the river. The wind shrieked through the cantilever spans, like angry sirens announcing my trespass to anyone who would listen. I kept waiting for the sound of helicopter rotors or a foot patrol on its way back from Queens, for some sharpshooter’s bullet to drop me dead in my tracks. Maybe it was wishful thinking.

Halfway across I found the access stairs leading down to the island, right where my contact in Street and Sanitation had said they would be. I checked my watch. It was five minutes until noon.

“Will you tell me about the dreams, Mr. Paine?” Krishnamurthy asked, after he’d ordered me another beer and another shot of tequila. His voice was like silk and cream, the sort of voice that seduced, that tricked you into lowering your defenses just long enough for him to get a good peek at all the nasty nooks and crannies. “I hear lots of scrubbers had trouble with nightmares back then, before the new neural-drag sieves were available. The suicide rate’s dropped almost 50 percent since they became standard issue. Did you know that, Mr. Paine?”

“No,” I told him. “Guess I missed the memo. I’m kind of outside the flow these days.”

“You’re a lucky man,” he said. “You should count your blessings. At least you made it out in one piece. At least you made it out sane.”

I think I told him to fuck off then. I know I didn’t tell him about the dreams.

“What do you see down there, Deet? The sensors are getting a little hinky on me,” Sarah said and, in the dreams, back when, in the day, before the tweaker’s silver chip, I took another clumsy step towards the edge of the chasm created by hot water welling up from the deep-sea vents along the Great Charon Ridge. A white plume of salty steam rose high into the thin Europan atmosphere, blotting out the western horizon, boiling off into the indifferent blackness of space. I knew I didn’t want to look over the edge again. I’d been there enough times already, and it was always the same. I reminded myself that no one had ever walked on Europa, no one human, and it was only a dream. Shit. Listen to me.
Only
a dream.

“Am I coming through?” Sarah asked. “Can you hear me?”

I didn’t answer her. My mouth was too dry to speak, bone dry from fear and doubt and the desiccated air circulating through the helmet of my EMU suit.

“I need you to acknowledge, Deet. Can you hear me?”

The mouth of Sakpata, the plague gate, yawning toothless and insatiable before me, almost nine kilometers from one side to the other, more than five miles from the edge of the hole down to the water. I was standing near the center of the vast field of cryovolcanic lenticulae first photographed by the Galileo probe in 1998, on its fifteenth trip around Jupiter. Convection currents had pushed the crust into gigantic pressure domes that finally cracked and collapsed under their own weight, exposing the ocean below. I took another step, almost slipping on the ice, and wondered how far I was from the spot where IcePIC had made landfall.

“Deet, do you copy?”

“Do you believe in sin, Deet?”

Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken –