Finch by Jeff VanderMeer (33 page)

"We're in an underground cave system," a voice said from nearby.

He sat up. The walls of the cavern glowed a deep, dark gold. Traveling
across them, in the waves of illumination, Finch saw what looked like
strobing starfish. A smell like and unlike brine came to him. Colder,
more muted. He still didn't have his gun. Felt vulnerable, small. She
knows I'm Crossley. And she doesn't care. Which meant she was going
to ask him for something big.

The Lady in Blue stood beside him. Wearing the plain uniform
of a private or Irregular, all in muted green. Short-sleeved shirt.
Tapered pants. Holding a lantern, staring across an underground sea.
It stretched out into a horizon of swirling black shadows and glints
like newborn stars. A rowboat was tethered to the shore.

"Stop drugging me," Finch said. He felt sluggish.

"The less you know, the better."

"How long was I out for?"

"It doesn't matter."

"It does to me."

"We drug you because there are things we can't let you know."

"You mean if I'm interrogated. By someone else."

She ignored him, indicated the cave with a sweep of her hand.
"This is where the gray caps left Samuel Tonsure," she said. "You
know who Tonsure is? Not everyone does."

He nodded. "The monk Shriek was obsessed with. The one who
disappeared."

"They took his journal from him right here. Left him to make his
own way in their world."

Duncan, in his book: "I became convinced that the journal formed
a puzzle, written in a kind of code, the code weakened, diluted, only
hinted at, by the uniform color of the ink in the copies, the dull sterility
of set type."

"And where exactly is that?" Finch managed with a thick tongue. His
head felt heavy. Whatever they'd drugged him with had quieted the pain
in his shoulder.

"You might be better off asking when, but it's your question. Answer:
we're everywhere. But at this moment, we're deep beneath the city. Or, at
least, a city."

The Lady in Blue stepped into the boat, hung the lantern on a hook
in the prow. "Come on," she said. "We're going on a journey."

Finch hesitated. Suffered from too many journeys. From a shoot-out
on an Ambergris street to falling through a door in time and space.
Stepping onto the boat felt like a kind of slow drowning. Into yet
another dream.

"You don't have a choice," the Lady in Blue growled. "I don't want
to have to force you. But I will."

She was alone. Finch couldn't see a weapon, though she'd picked up
a long pole from the boat. But he didn't doubt she could hurt him.

Awkwardly, he got to his feet. Stepped into the boat behind the
Lady in Blue. It wobbled beneath his weight.

"Sit down," she said. He sat.

She began to pole them across the little sea, with a strength he
hadn't noticed before. He could see the outline of her triceps as she
pushed off with the pole.

Over the side, by the lantern light, needle-thin fish with green fins
shot through the water. More starfish. A couple of delicate red shrimp.
It wasn't very deep; he could see the silver-gold flash of the bottom.
The unreal translucent light confounded him. A glimpse of a kind of
peace. Fought against relaxing. Was still in danger.

"Where are we going?" he asked. "What does this have to do with
Duncan Shriek?"

"Eat something," she said. "Drink something."

Sandwiches and a flask by his feet. He unwrapped a sandwich.
Chicken and egg. Ordinary. Normal. Tasted good. The flask had a
refreshing liquor in it. It warmed him as it spread through his body.

"And while you eat, listen to me. Don't talk. Just listen ..."

[She said:] For a moment, imagine everything from the gray caps' point
of view, John Finch. James Scott Crossley.

In the beginning. Once upon a time. A small group of you became
separated from your world while on an expedition. In a word, lost.
A problem or mistake in the doors between places. Suddenly there
are hundreds or thousands of doors between you and home. Suddenly
you're adrift. You find yourselves washed up on an alien shore, along
the banks of a strange and magnificent river. You can't find your way
back to where you came from, even though at first all you do is try.
And try and try.

After awhile of trying and failing, you decide to settle down where
you are, establish a colony that we will later call "Cinsorium." It's a
better place for you than other choices for exile. You live a long time
but procreate slowly so the isolation is good. No competition. No real
threats. You create buildings that remind you of home. No corners.
All circles. You bend the local fungus to your will, because you're
spore-based and everything you do is based on this fact. Plenty of raw
material to use in and around Cinsorium.

But, still, you're always looking for a way back, a way out. You might
even have been close at one point-right before Cappan Manzikert
sails upriver with his brigands. Because as soon as Manzikert appears,
it's back to square one for you. Even less than square one. He destroys
your colony, drives you underground. He burns your records, all of the
information in your library. Not just the clues you've gathered of how to
get home, but your whole knowledge base. Essential things.

Ironic, really, Finch. Because Manzikert's a barbarian. Yet as far as
I can tell, he saved us all with that one brutal act. Something even
Duncan Shriek didn't understand.

So you stay underground to rebuild. You're cautious, you're far from
home, and there aren't very many of you. Will never be very many of you, no matter what you do. You let the people above become comfortable.
You lie low, so to speak.

Then you try again. At last. And because you're cautious you build
it underground. A door. A machine.

But the door doesn't work. Something goes wrong. Who knows what?
It could've been anything. Maybe it's the wrong location. Maybe it was
always a long shot. Many of your own people are killed. And everyone
in Ambergris disappears, except the ones in the fishing fleet. Either dead
or taken elsewhere. Scattered across worlds and time. Unable to get back.
(Think about that, Finch-somewhere out there, there must be a colony
or two of Ambergrisians who survived. Can you imagine what they might
be like now, after so long? Stranded. Vague tales of another place, one
crueler, kinder, more hospitable, less so.)

Maybe it's then that you believe, this is the end. We're doomed to die
out here, in this backwater. We'll never be found. But, still, you're patient.
You're clever. You're hard working. You spend a long time learning from
your mistakes. Sometimes you venture out during festival nights. You do
experiments related to your goal. You even kidnap humans, use them as
test subjects. Always trying to convey a sense of dread in those who live
aboveground, always trying to make yourself larger in their minds-like
a wild cat that puffs itself up in front of an enemy.

When the opportunity comes, it's because Hoegbotton and Frankwrithe
have exhausted themselves against each other-sometimes even using
weapons you provided to them-and the city lies in ruins. You take a
huge gamble. Why a gamble? Because there still aren't enough of you,
not compared to the human population.

You pour all of your resources into the Rising. You're hard to
kill, but you can't possibly hold a whole city for long against an
armed resistance, not if it means a true occupation. But you don't
need it to last for long. You just need to create the impression of
overwhelming force.

And it works. You Rise. You use your re-engineering skills and
knowledge of the underground to flood the city. You use your spores
like a kind of diversion, a magic show. Yes, you can kill people,
but not all of them, and not as fast as the enemy thinks. Besides,
fear is even more useful to you-it's how your agents have worked throughout Ambergrisian history. Preying on the imaginations of a
people raised to fear you. (Often for good reason.)

You force the combined Hoegbotton and Frankwrithe army
arrayed against you to fight on your terms, on your turf. You even
leave an escape route so that no one needs to fight to survive. They
can just flee.

Again, it works. The resistance retreats-and when they're far
enough away, in one more spasm of energy and expertise, you cast
the HFZ over your enemy, like a net, and you disperse them across
the doors. Thus ending effective armed resistance, and creating
more fear.

For the actual occupation, you are clever and resourceful. You enlist
the remaining population to police itself, to govern itself-as much
as it is able. When the situation is stable except for isolated pockets
of unrest, you start to build your final attempt at a door. A way home.
Two towers, which aren't really towers but a kind of complex gateway.
Situated precisely where you need them to be for success.

Meanwhile, you stall. You go through the motions. You provide
electricity, food, drugs on the one hand. Camps, the Partials, and
repression on the other. You don't need to control territory in the
normal way. You don't see the city from the sky looking down, like
humans. You see it from the underground looking up. And you control
the underground. That's your homeland away from home. You can
choose what you hold onto aboveground and what you don't. So
long as you rule everything below. So long as you can block access to
whatever you like.

You leave the burnt-out tanks on the streets, don't clean up the
HFZ not as a warning to the human population, but because you don't
have the personnel to do that and keep working on the towers, too.
And because, on some level, you don't really care about any of it. Not
any of it. Especially not governing. All you care about are the two
towers.

And do you know why? Because we might have called it a door all
this time. "A window. A machine." But it's more complex than that.
It's not just a door. It's a beacon. Because, you see, Finch, they don't
need a huge door if they've found a way home. Not according to our intelligence. No, they only need a door this big if they're planning to
use it to bring more over here. To Ambergris. To the world.

The Silence? All of what Duncan Shriek said in those old booksit's true. Except he was wrong about this one thing. They've found they
like it here. They want to stay. Permanently. In numbers.

Now, is that exactly what happened, and how it happened? No,
probably not, because we can't actually imagine how they think, or
what they think about. And it might not even be a door yet. It might
just be a beacon. If they haven't found their home yet.

But what I've told you is close. Close enough, according to our
sources.

... You may not believe me, Finch-Crossley, but I don't take any
of it personally. Not really. They behave as their nature and their
situation warrants. I can respect that. There's a sick kind of honor in
that, really. But that still doesn't mean I don't plan on finishing what
Manzikert started. Because, as you've guessed, we now have a new
weapon. A new weapon that is very old.

They'd reached the far shore, the sea giving way to land. The boat
nudged up against a lip of flat rock. Which led to an overhang carved
out of the black stone. The ancient fossilized remains of a fireplace out
front. Beyond the fireplace, evidence of habitation.

Almost as unreal as the story the Lady in Blue had told him. The air
moist and cold. Finch shivered.

Didn't know whether to believe her or not. Didn't know if it
mattered. Nothing she'd said sounded any more or less plausible than
what Duncan Shriek had written in his books. Understood, too, the
weight of everything she had shown him. Knew it in his gut.

Wanted to tell her he lived in a different world. The world where
Stark wanted to hurt people he loved, where Heretic could have him
killed on a whim. Where Wyte's condition went from bad to worse.
All of it gritty and immediate, with immediate consequences. He
wasn't Crossley's son anymore. He was Finch, and there was a reason
for that. Survival.

"You're too quiet," she said.

"I've heard worse theories," Finch said. Because he felt he had to say
something. Because he felt overwhelmed.

The Lady in Blue gave him a curious look, head tilted to the side.
"Not convinced? That's a shame, because you can disbelieve it all you
want. It'll get you nowhere. Now get out of the boat and help me,"
she said.

The shocking cold of the shallow water woke him up. They pushed
the rowboat up onto the shore. The Lady in Blue unhooked the
lantern, walked forward.

"What is this place?" Finch asked as his boots found dry land.

"Wait and see," she said. Ushered him toward the overhang.

A cozy little space, sheltered by the rock. A thick layer of dust
covered the uneven floor. Looked fuzzy in the lantern light. A welter
of numbers and words had been carved into the far wall, all the way up
to the ceiling. So many marks that they struck Finch like a cacophony
of noise. Made him claustrophobic.

In the far corner, a skeleton on top of a blanket had disintegrated into
a thicket of fibers and fragments. Intact. Yellowing. Human. Delicate,
almost birdlike. Curled up in a position of sleep. On its side.

Looking at those small bones, Finch felt a sudden, inexplicable
sadness. "Is that the monk?"

Words from the man's mouth in the clicks and whistles of the gray caps'
language. And then, a sudden and monstrous clarity that can never be put
into words.

"Yes, according to Shriek, that's Samuel Tonsure," the Lady in Blue
said. "This is where he died. A hermit. In exile. Truff knows why the
gray caps left him to this fate. Blind. Alone. He must have gone mad
in his last years."

She pointed to the other corner. To a large pockmark in the floor.
Light green. With rings within rings. Like a cross section of tree
trunk. "And that's where Duncan was found. We didn't even know
that he was human, or alive. He looked to us like a gray cap whose
legs had been fused into the ground. When he was brought to me, I
don't think he even knew who he was. He'd learned to walk among
gray caps undetected. He'd traveled through the doors for many, many
years. And then he'd come home here, alone, lonely. To give up being human. Half out of his mind. Attuned to the rhythms of mushroom
and spore. Here, by Tonsure's side. Like a dog guarding the grave of
its master. I think he thought he'd wake up in a thousand years and
everything would be different. Or that he'd never wake up at all."