Are You There and Other Stories (8 page)

Cab backed slowly down the hall, his leg throbbing where talon had spiked him. Goetz whimpered and thrashed helplessly on the floor, the cuff rattling loosely on the neck of the doorknob. Cab proceeded to the open door through which he’d seen Nancy disappear. He paused outside the room, his nerve beginning to fray. He could hear her in there, a chitinous scrabble on the wood floor. For a moment he couldn’t move. He had to force a rational calm over himself. He counted five deep breaths, and then he strode into the room and kicked the door shut behind him.

There was a window but by now the twilight had failed. He swept the room with his flashlight. She could be anywhere, anywhere. “Nancy, goddamn it.” His light touched the closet door, the windowsill, the counterpane, a pillow without a slipcover, the nightstand, the bare floor, the steam radiator with its elaborate scrollwork, sweeping around, back and forth, a nervous searchlight. He couldn’t see her, but she
had
to be in the room. Then his light fell on a Coleman kerosene lantern sitting on top of the dresser. He set the flashlight down, dug a book of matches out of his shirt pocket, primed the wick and lit it. The room filled with hissing lantern light.

He heard the scrape of one of her legs on the floor and turned in time to catch a glimpse of her retreating beneath the bed, like some gigantic, loathsome insect. He cursed under his breath, steeling himself. Plenty of times since he’d taken over guardianship of Nancy she had driven him to the brink of rage with her smart mouth and stubborn refusal to obey his reasonable restrictions. But he had never allowed her to see his anger. At the most trying times he mentally cut her off, completely blocked the annoying teenager she was and cast back into memory for a picture of her as she’d been when their father died. The innocent toddler, the little girl who held his hand to cross the street, who begged him to read stories to her and push her in the swing. He had been the man of the house. Now, getting down on his knees with the flashlight, he used the mental trick again, imagining Nancy as a child, remembering how it had felt to look out for her, to be the man.

“Come out of there, Nancy.”

Her words, blurred with sobs, nevertheless sounded human. “I can’t stand myself like this.”

“We’ll get you back to normal somehow. I promise.”

“You can’t.”

A hard knot bulged in Cab’s throat. He had been the man in the house but he’d been a child, too, a boy unfairly pushed toward maturity. He had tried, God he had tried. But always, dogging him like a shadow demon, had been the cruel fear of failing his mother and sister—of letting his father down.

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” he said.

He moved the flashlight and she cringed back, holding up two of her knobby, triple-jointed arms to shield her eyes.

“Come out,” he said. “All I want to do is help you.”

She only sobbed louder. Cab had to get her away from here, back to the Jeep, and he didn’t want to waste any more time doing it. He stripped the bedspread from the mattress. Nancy shifted nervously under the box springs.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I’m taking you out of here.” He spoke in a flat, no nonsense tone, deliberately purging his voice of emotion. He couldn’t afford to waver, not now. He had to concentrate, keep his head. He had made mistakes with Nancy, he could see that with shocking clarity. The horrors he’d encountered this day seemed to have released all his deepest fears, throwing them up in hideous relief. All his life, since the death of his father, he had been so frightened of failing to live up to his responsibility that he had gone overboard, pushing, pushing until he had pushed Nancy out of his life altogether. But it might not be too late to put things right; he had to try.

Cab set his booted foot on the edge of the bed frame and shoved hard. The bed scraped away from the wall. Nancy tried to dart between his legs but he threw down the bedspread and gathered her up. She fought but he had her, wrapping the spread tight around her, confining her movement. “Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t fight me, Nancy.”

Her struggles grew less frenzied.

He tucked her under his right arm, hating the sharp little twitches of her alien limbs. Gripping the big flashlight in his left hand he started down the hall.

Goetz, too, had ceased struggling. Shackled by his wrist to the doorknob, his face lowered, Goetz muttered in a strange, contorted language as Cab stepped past him. The atmosphere was suddenly hushed, expectant. He could feel Nancy breathing inside the bedspread.

He opened the front door with the hand holding the flashlight. Something whipped out of the darkness, striking him across the chest like a stiff yard of rubber hose. Cab staggered back, grunting. Whatever it was crowded itself into the doorway, hissing and muttering alien syllables. At once Nancy went wild trying to kick free of the bedspread, responding to the thing in the doorway. Cab brought the flashlight up.

Joe was still alive, all right—or the thing that had been Joe. It lurched toward him, mostly human from the waist down, but from the belt upward it was a writhing Medusa of tentacles. Rodriguez’s face clenched and gasped in the dead gray bulk of its torso.

Cab backed away. It was
speaking
to him, though the words were alien. He could barely hold onto Nancy in her frenzy to get away. Her muffled voice called out to the advancing creature in its own language. The Peter Goetz monstrosity swiped at Cab and he dodged out of the way, retreating down the hall.

He switched Nancy to his left arm. It was more difficult to hold onto her and he couldn’t direct the flashlight where he wanted it, but it freed up his right hand. He drew his 9mm but didn’t shoot. He
couldn’t
shoot, not Joe. The Rodriguez-thing waved its tentacles, whacking against the walls in the narrow hallway. Cab backed into the bedroom he’d only moments ago quit, and slammed the door.

Immediately, Nancy wrenched free and hit the floor, frantically disentangling herself from the bedspread. Before he could stop her she skittered up on the bed and launched herself at the window.

“Nancy!”

The glass shattered and she was gone. Snow breezed into the room.

The Rodriguez-thing crashed through the door, shrieking like a banshee, Joe’s human mouth stretched impossibly wide. Cab threw the flashlight. A tentacle sent it pinwheeling into the wall. Cab leveled his automatic but hesitated to fire. If there was one chance in a million of restoring his friend . . .

A tentacle lashed out and wrapped around Cab’s ankle, another seized him tightly around his left thigh, while a third waved by his neck, seeking purchase. Cab was out of options. The tentacles tightened down. Cab’s femoral artery pounded as if to burst under the pressure. He thrust the Beretta forward. At the same moment a flailing tentacle brushed against the lantern, coiled around its fuel tank and lifted it off the dresser.

Pain hazing his vision, Cab cried out, “Joe, I’m sorry,” and squeezed off two quick rounds. They splatted into the gray flesh. All the grasping tentacles squeezed in spasmodic reaction. Cab screamed, fired twice more, but it didn’t matter. The lantern burst under the pressure, dousing the Rodriguez-thing with flaming kerosene. Instantly it released Cab, and he was able to push himself away and stumble to the window. The monster’s many tentacles waved helplessly. Joe Rodriguez’s face became more prominent, stretching out of the hot core of yellow fire. And then it began to melt.

Tears streaming from his eyes, the heat baking over him, Cab shoved the wooden sash up, dislodging a rain of broken glass. He clambered over the sill and pitched face down in the snow that had drifted against the side of the cabin.

He lay there for some moments, his face half buried in the snow, his cheek turning numb, breathing hard, trying to gather his will. What a mess he had made of things. It was all coming apart now. Joe was finished, the cabin was burning—and with it the machinery that had created this nightmare.

Now only Nancy was left.

It was just the two of them, like when they were kids. The way she was now she needed him even more than she had back then. In her present form she was helpless in the world. She would have to understand that. She was going to be depending on him a lot. Who else could bear to love her? He wouldn’t screw up again. He was all she had now, but first he had to find her.

He got up and began to walk, favoring his left leg. The jumpy glare from the burning cabin revealed Nancy’s tracks in the snow, each peculiar impression a tiny cup of shadow in the red light. She was fast and had a good lead; finding her wouldn’t be easy. He set his jaw and slogged forward, determined. He wasn’t letting anybody down, not ever again.

As he reached the very limit of the firelight he saw her, squatting on a stump as if she had been waiting for him. Cab halted ten feet from the stump, his instinct warning him to approach no closer. She was barely visible in the weak, red glare, but what he could see was terrible. Oh yes, she was going to need him again. And he would handle things differently this time. He wasn’t his father and he didn’t have to be. All he wanted was to be good, to do the right thing.

“Nancy.”

“I don’t belong to you, Cab.”

Funny. It was what she had said so many times before, since he had taken responsibility for her. To hear the same words in that tortured rasp her voice was becoming, to
see
her as she now was, a freakish thing. But it wasn’t going to be the old battle of wills. He wouldn’t let it be that way. He moved closer.

“Let me help you,” he said.

“I won’t.” She turned and sprang from the stump.

Cab lunged after her, but she was right there on the other side of the stump, not really trying to escape. In a moment he knew why. He found himself hung up in a net of invisible threads. Sticky. A trap. The gun, which he’d still been holding, slipped out of his hand. The more he struggled the more entangled he became. Where the threads touched his exposed skin—on his hands and face—they burned like acid.

Not a net . . . a web.

“I pick my own friends now, Cab.
Gah ’Sogoth!”

There was a vibration in the web. Cab remembered what Peter Goetz had said about bringing one of the Ancient Ones through before his machine overloaded. And Nancy’s hysterical call about a
thing
biting Goetz.

Cab pulled wildly at the complex web that ensnared him, but it was useless. Finally he sagged, exhausted, and looked up. A pair of yellow eyes centered with pinpoints of blood glowed in the dark above him. “
Sig na’getha.”
The eyes twitched closer, and Cab strained to reach his automatic. It lay in the snow, just beyond his grasp.

“Nancy help me!”

The gun was right in front of her; she might have pushed it closer to him, but she didn’t. And Cab knew it really was too late. Nancy, the creature that had been Nancy, cocked her strange little head and regarded him with cold, inhuman detachment. Cab never looked away from her again. In his final seconds he had to accept it. After all, he was responsible.

The Chimera Transit

A
fter sex the stranger, whose name was Rebecca, cuddled under my arm. I transmitted seretonin—enough to raise my mood above depression without inviting further arousal. The stranger moved against me, her leg slung over my hip, her hand on my chest, breath in my face. She had a mouth like Lynn’s, the shape of it. I waited until she was asleep then carefully extricated myself from her body and her bed.

I walked home in the rain. It was past two a.m. The gloom came upon me again. Looking up, rain anointing my face, I transmitted a dopamine and norepinephin brain cocktail. My mood soared, and for a moment I was infatuated with the sky, as I used to be. A distant roll of thunder reminded me of the Outbound shuttle launches I used to watch with my dad when I was a kid, daydreaming stars. My mind felt nimble. Jazzed. City lights underlit the cloud cover. I thought of starships, which led to my father and the Big Bang (weapon discharge in the basement), which led to Lynn, and I wondered what she was to me.

A woman laughed. I looked across the street. She wore a long coat and floppy hat and she was with a man, hanging on his arm, ducking. A green Tinkerbelle Flirt hovered around her, flew away, returned. The man reached out and captured it in his hand. They bent over it together, their faces illuminated by a green flicker. I heard her say, “It’s beautiful, I love you!” She moved her face under his and kissed his mouth. I looked away.

What Lynn was to me: gone.

*

The next evening as I was dressing to go out a fairy light hovered in close to my window. I stared at it, my shirt hanging open. I thought of half a dozen women who knew my name and could access my People Finder code. But none of them possessed a romantically flirtatious disposition. They might call, or pop me an EyeText on my retinal repeater. Fairy Flirts were kid stuff. I whacked the window with a rolled up
New Yorker
. The Flirt drifted back, flimmering wings making a ruby nimbus in the rain.

*

I sat by the window in a coffee bar on lower Queen Anne, sipping espresso and reading a flashprint copy of a faux Updike novel. The style and plot were perfect Updike (Rabbit in the 22nd century) but thin under the surface, like all program-written books. I read the sentences and listened to the words in my head. It improved when I transmitted some phenylethylamine into my limbic system. A boost of joy surged through me. The words glowed. Analog or not, it didn’t matter.

A pretty girl sitting alone at the next table suddenly
ooo
-ed in my direction. Her hair was styled into glossy blue spear points. I tried a tentative smile, but the
ooo
wasn’t for me. Ruby light shimmered on the other side of the window.

“You have an admirer,” the pretty girl said.

“So it seems.”

I stowed the fake Updike in my overcoat and went out of the bar. The Fairy did a couple of loops around my head. I was conscious of people watching me through the window.

“Okay, okay,” I said to the Fairy. It darted off. Too fast if it expected me to keep up. The pretty girl inside the bar made a shooing motion at me. It was idiotic but I started after the Flirt.

Really it seemed determined to evade me. I picked up the pace. The Fairy veered down an alley. It was running out of juice, skimming low, ruby flimmer reflected in rain-stippled puddles. I splashed after it in hot pursuit. It tried to soar up the side of the building on my right, winked out suddenly, and dropped like a dead clinker. I caught it in my hand.

I looked up at the lighted and unlighted windows. The little Flirt was warm in my palm but the rain was cold and I’d left my umbrella in the bar. I started to walk out of the alley. A window opened.

“Hey—” Tentative female voice, almost apologetic. A slight figure backlit by the apartment light.

“Yeah?”

“That’s mine.” Some kind of accent. Eastern European? “Toss it up?”

I could have, maybe. She was on the second floor. But I shook my head. “Nope.”

*

Her name was Anca. Romanian born. She was fluent in three languages—four if you counted an obscure source code imbedded in a thousand or so of the early DAT model implants. The tech in those old implants was so clunky that you couldn’t remove them from the host brain without risking serious tissue damage. I knew these facts because I knew Anca, slightly. My partner at NanOptions, Dario Crow, had one of the old implants.
Dario
was old, that’s why he had one. He and my father had been partners. Until dad’s single-minded pursuit of a workable neuro-stim device collapsed under the weight of his misconceived approach and bankrupted the first incarnation of NanOptions. Twenty years or so later I came along, little Jackie all grown up and twice as clever as his old man. Or so I thought.

Anyway, Dario introduced me to Anca who was helping correct a glitch that had occurred between his DAT and his more contemporary retinal repeater. That was weeks ago.

“Hey, I know you,” I said when she opened the door to her apartment. She smiled shyly and didn’t meet my eyes.

“And I know you too, Jack Porter.”

“Ah, here’s your Flirt.” I handed it to her.

“Thanks. It’s not really mine. I borrowed it. How can I afford such silliness? And I asked Dario for your People Finder number, for the little Fairy to know where to go. So you see it’s a grand conspiracy.”

“You think it’s grand, huh?”

She giggled, quirking her lips as if the giggle were a bug that wanted to get out—a bug that she was fond of keeping
in
.

“Would you—?” She opened the door wider.

I stepped past her into the room. I’m no giant at five ten, but Anca was boyishly small, almost frail and no taller than a twelve year old. She looked starved but cooking smells wafted from the efficiency kitchen. Something boily with cabbage. Her apartment was like the rest of the building. Old, run down, reasonably clean, and too dark. It was the brown carpet and all that stained wood. Lamp light absorbed into it. The overall effect was a little depressing. I resisted transmitting.

“Some wine?” she said.

“Sure.”

When she handed me the glass she met my eyes briefly then looked away again.

“That Flirt. I’m not for fads, I mean I would never—”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Do you want to watch the review?”

“Absolutely.”

It was one of those cheap liquid screens. It rippled like wind over a puddle, then a jerky image appeared. Me waving a magazine, being dive-bombed, etc. Anca suddenly turned it off.

“Oh, well,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s so silly. I liked you, you know. So—”

I touched her hand.

*

She clung to me in the dark of the bedroom, her boyish chest crushed against me. I could feel her bones. Her fingers were cold. Rain popped on a fabric awning outside her window.
Don’t go
, she’d whispered before falling asleep, as though she knew me.

I caused endorphins to occur and eventually slept.

*

She caught me at it over orange juice the next morning. Caught me adjusting brain chemistry.

“What are you doing when you close your eyes like that?”

“It’s a neuro stimulation device.” I tapped my forehead with two fingers.

“Oh. Dario told me about that. You’re going to make millions, yes?”

“Maybe. We’re at the experimental stage. I’m the guinea pig. Just like your old DATS, only this thing can be easily removed. NanoBotz lay a gossamer web over the brain, attaching to axon fibers. Consciously directed electrical microbursts release chemical molecules from the neuron sacks at the end of the fibers, transmitting them to receiving neurons. It’s great tech.”

“Hmm.” She bit into an apple slice and chewed slowly.

“What?”

“How do you know what you really feel?”

“It’s not that dramatic. It just allows you to have more of what you already possess.”

“It sounds a little terrible, though.”

“God I hope not. It was my dad’s idea to begin with, only he never really got it off the ground.”

“Okay,” Anca said. She put down her half-eaten apple slice. “Do you want to see something with me?”

“Sure.”

*

It was a little museum of oddities near The Pike Place Market. She led me to a trembling holo of a Martian desert. A sign with a down-pointing arrow said: LISTEN. Anca nudged me. I leaned into the aural sphere and heard . . . wind. After a moment I drew back and made a question mark face. Anca shook her hands like she was trying to dry them.

“It’s the wind on Mars.”

“Okay.”

“From the first times, before there were any people. From a robot lander. A digital recording. So
old
.”

“It’s nice.”

“Oh you’re dense.” She giggled, quirking her lips, holding in the happy bug. “It’s the idea. The way it was so distant you could never be there, the way the wind was blowing on another planet and there was only a little robot to record it. A whole empty world. It’s
romantic
, Jack.”

I leaned forward again and listened to the lost romantic wind of Mars.

*

“Who is she?” Anca said a month later.

“Who’s who?”

We were walking in bright October sunlight in an urban park not far from NanOptions’s offices.

“The woman, the one you can’t let go,” Anca said.

“Whoever said—”

“Shhh.”

“Well.”

“Of course you don’t have to tell me.”

The sidewalk was plastered with wet leaves gone an ugly dun color.

“It’s irrelevant who she is,” I said. “And besides I have let her go. Mostly.”

“You haven’t.”

I scraped some leaf slime off the path with the heel of my shoe.

“Why don’t you call her?” Anca said.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“She’s Outbound to Tau Boo.”

“Oh.” Anca became thoughtful then said, “Oh,” again.

“Yeah.”

“And you didn’t go with her.”

“I couldn’t. You only get one shot at the qualifying exam.”

“I see. And you failed but she passed. How terrible, but why didn’t she stay with you if she loved you? Why—”

“Anca. I didn’t fail the exam.”

“No?”

“No. I haven’t taken it yet.”

“But why not?”

I transmitted and felt better about not answering.

“But how long?”

“Since she left? Two years, almost.”

“Two years,” Anca said.

I transmitted until the two years didn’t matter.

*

She came back to bed with two glasses of wine. It was that uncomfortable stage in the relationship. The stage where I wanted to go home by myself even before the sex. Transmitting oxytonin helped by producing hormonal arousal, but on the down side was a concurrent feeling of emotional attachment. Anca handed me my glass and slid under the covers with me.

“I lost mine, too,” she said. “But it happened in a different way.”

“Lost your—?”

“My beloved. Perhaps I was mistaken and he wasn’t my beloved, or supposing I wasn’t his is more truthful. He said he loved me, from all our talking and virtual intimacy, while I was in Bucharest. But when I came, at my own expense and using everything I had, things were different. So. I warned him I was not what he might want in a woman. This happened in San Diego. He flew away to Tokyo and stopped calling. I did make a fool of myself but it didn’t help. When my money was almost gone I began offering my DAT skills on the Ethricnet. That’s how I came to Seattle after my beloved abandoned me.”

She had finished her wine. She reached around to put her glass on the end table and it tipped off the edge and fell empty to the carpet. Her reaching arm, the way her shoulder blade slid under the skin, like bird bones.

“Oopsie,” she said. And: “Aren’t you going to drink that?”

I gave her my glass.

*

“I challenge you to something,” Anca said.

We were drinking Guinness in an Irish Bar called McGerry’s and it was a mistake. The bar, not the Guinness. Lynne and I had spent one of our last nights out in this same bar. McGerry’s was saturated with her presence.

“What kind of challenge?” I asked.

“I challenge you to spend one entire night with me and not adjust your chemistry to do it.”

“Anca.”

“Never mind. I know you can’t.”

I sipped at my second Guinness and resisted an urgent impulse to transmit.

“You are never in the place you are,” Anca said.

I smiled. “I’m here right now.”

She shook her head. “You are always thinking about someplace else or somebody else or some other time. There
is
no now for you, I believe.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“I think you are too afraid of making even one permanent decision. You always want to take it back, whatever it is, or not give it in the first place, so you can think of the possibility of giving it. Oh I’m not making sense, am I? What are you doing giving this black beer to a little person?”

*

Around three a.m. Anca woke up next to me in bed. I was staring at the ceiling, not transmitting, my arm loosely around her. She rubbed her eyes. “Aren’t you going? You always go lately.”

“No, I’m staying.”

“You don’t act like it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Whenever you stay you are like this,” she said, and she flung herself around on her left side, facing away from me and as near to the edge of the mattress as possible.

“Hey come back here.”

“And why?”

“Because I’m not done with you yet.”

“You can’t make me,” she said.

I grabbed at her waist, which must have tickled. Anca shrieked and jerked away but had nowhere to go but the floor. She didn’t make a very big crash. She said “Ouch,” and we both laughed, and I pulled her back onto the bed.

*

You aren’t allowed any enhancements when you take the Outbound exam. They want the unadulterated best and brightest. So one day an army of NanoBotz disconnected and devoured my neuro-stimulation web and then dutifully dissolved into my blood, eventually to exit in a stream of piss. A month later I arrived at the Outbound Center with a dozen other hopeful-but-not-too-likelies. Exam questions routed directly to our retinal repeaters. Two hundred questions, each set tailored to the individual’s specialties, mine being nano technology and biochemistry. At the end my score was instantly tabulated.