The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (103 page)

“It’s the last of its kind,” Bloch said.

The physicist’s back stiffened as he stared at this very odd child, and with a haughty voice, he explained, “But of course the entire world seems to be coming to an end. And I shouldn’t have to point out to you, but this makes each of us the very last of his kind.”

The Pender Monster

Bloch was supposed to be sleeping. Two women sat in the adjoining room, using voices that tried to be private but failed. Fast friends, his mother and his nurse talked about careers and worrisome children and lost men. The nurse’s husband had abandoned her for a bottle and she wanted him to get well but not in her presence, thank you. Bloch’s father died twelve years ago, killed by melanoma, and the widow still missed him but not nearly as much as during those awful first days when she had two young sons and headaches and heartaches, and God, didn’t she sound like every country song?

It was the middle of a very dark night, and the warm ground was shaking more than it stood still. The women used weak, sorry laughs, and the nurse said, “That’s funny,” and then both fell into worried silence.

Bloch didn’t feel like moving. Comfortable and alert, he sat with hard pillows piled high behind him, hands on his lap and eyes half-closed. The fabric hospital walls let in every sound. He listened to his mother sigh, and then the nurse took a breath and let it out, and then the nurse asked his mother about her thoughts.

“My boys,” Mom said. Glad for the topic, she told about when her oldest was ten and happy only when he was causing trouble. But nobody stays ten forever. The Army taught Matt to control his impulses, which was one good thing. “Every situation has its good,” she said, almost believing it. The nurse made agreeable sounds and asked if Matt always wanted to be a soldier, and Mom admitted that he had. Then the nurse admitted that most military men were once that way. They liked playing army as boys, so much so they couldn’t stop when they grew up.

“Does that ever happen?” Mom asked. “Do they actually grow up?”

The women laughed again, this time with heart. Mom kept it up longest and then confessed that she was worried about Bloch but it was Matt that she was thinking of, imagining that big alien ship crashing down on top of him. She gave out one sorry breath after another, and then with a flat, careful voice, she wondered what life was like on the Night Side.

That’s what the other half of the world had been named. The Night Side was mysterious, wrong and lost. For the last few hours, refugees had been coming through town, trading stories for gasoline and working cars. And the stories didn’t change. Bloch knew this because a group of soldiers was standing outside the hospital, gossiping. Every sound came through the fabric walls. Half a dozen men and one woman were talking about impossible things: the land squirming as if it was alive; alien trees black as coal sprouting until they were a mile high, and then the trees would spit out thick clouds that glowed purple and rode the hot winds into the Day Side, raining something that wasn’t water, turning more swathes of the countryside into gelatin and black trees.

What was happening here was different. Everybody agreed about that. The ground shivered, but it was only ground. And people functioned well enough to talk with strained but otherwise normal voices. Concentrating, Bloch could make out every voice inside the hospital and every spoken word for a hundred yards in any direction, and that talent didn’t feel even a little bit peculiar to him.

He heard boots walking. An officer approached the gossiping soldiers, and after the ritual greetings, one man dared ask, “Do we even stand a chance here, lieutenant?”

“A damned good chance,” the lieutenant said loudly. “Our scientists are sitting in a classroom, building us weapons. Yeah, we’re going to tear those aliens some new assholes, just as soon as they find enough glue guns and batteries to make us our death rays.”

Everybody laughed.

One soldier said, “I’m waiting for earth viruses to hit.”

“A computer bug,” somebody said.

“Or AIDs,” said a third.

The laughter ran a time and then faded.

Then the first soldier asked, “So this critter under us, sir . . . what is it, sir?”

There was a pause. Then the lieutenant said, “You want my opinion?”

“Please, sir.”

“Like that zoo teacher says. The monster came from a different part of the sky, and it doesn’t act the same. When you don’t have enough firepower to kick the shit out of your enemy, you dig in. And that’s what I think it is doing.”

“This is some big galactic war, you mean?”

“You wanted my opinion. And that’s my opinion for now.”

One soldier chuckled and said, “Wild.”

Nobody else laughed.

Then the woman soldier spoke. “So what’s that make us?”

“Picture some field in Flanders,” said the officer. “It’s 1916, and the Germans and British are digging trenches and firing big guns. What are their shovels and shells churning up? Ant nests, of course. Which happens to be us. We’re the ants in Flanders.”

The soldiers quit talking.

Maybe Mom and the nurse were listening to the conversation. Or maybe they were just being quiet for a while. Either way, Mom broke the silence by saying, “I always worried about ordinary hazards. For Matt, I mean. Bombs and bullets, and scars on the brain. Who worries about an invasion from outer space?”

Bloch pictured her sitting in the near-darkness, one hand under her heavy chin while the red eyes watched whatever was rolling inside her head.

“It’s hard,” said the nurse.

Mom made an agreeable sound.

Then with an important tone, the nurse said, “At least you can be sure that Matt’s in a good place now.”

Mom didn’t say anything.

“If he’s gone, I mean.”

“I know what you meant,” Mom said.

The nurse started to explain herself.

Mom cut her off, saying, “Except I don’t believe in any of that.”

“You don’t believe in what?”

“The afterlife. Heaven and such.”

The nurse had to breathe before saying, “But in times like this, darling? When everything is so awful, how can you not believe in the hereafter?”

“Well, let me tell you something,” Mom said. Then she leaned forward in her chair, her voice moving. “Long ago, when my husband was dying for no good reason, I realized that if a fancy god was in charge, then he was doing a pretty miserable job of running his corner of the universe.”

The new friendship was finished. The two women sat uncomfortably close to each other for a few moments. Then one of them stood and walked over the rumbling floor, putting their head through the door to check on their patient. Bloch remained motionless, pretending to be asleep. The woman saw him sitting in the bed, lit only by battery-powered night-lights. Then to make sure that she was seeing what she thought she was seeing, she came all the way into the room, and with a high wild voice she began to scream.

The defender had landed far from open water, exhausted and exposed. Fuel was essential and hydrogen was the easy/best solution, but most of the local hydrogen was trapped in the subsurface water or chemically locked into the rock. Every atom had to be wrenched loose, wasting time and focus. Time and focus built a redoubt, but the vagaries of motion and fuel had dropped the defender too close to the great enemy, and there was nothing to be done about that, and there was nothing to work with but the drought and the sediments and genius and more genius.

Emotion helped. Rage was the first tool: a scorching hatred directed at a vast, uncaring enemy. Envy was nearly as powerful, the defender nurturing epic resentments aimed at its siblings sitting behind it in the ocean. Those lucky obscenities were blessed with more resources and considerably more time to prepare their redoubts, and did they appreciate how obscenely unfair this was? Fear was another fine implement. Too much work remained unfinished, grand palisades and serene weapons existing only as dreams; absolute terror helped power the furious digging inside the half-born redoubt.

But good emotions always allowed the bad. That was how doubt emerged. The defender kept rethinking its landing. Easy fuel had been available, but there were rules and codes concerning how to treat life. Some of the local water happened to be self-aware. Frozen by taboos, the defender created a false body and appealing face. The scared little shreds of life were coaxed into helping it, but they were always doomed. It seemed like such a waste, holding sacred what was already dead. One piece of water that was ready to douse the defender with easy water. That first taste of fuel would have awakened every reactor, and the work would have commenced immediately. Yes, radiation would have poisoned the weak life, yes. But that would have given valuable minutes to fill with work and useful fear.

The mad rush was inevitable, and speed always brought mistakes. One minor error was to allow a creative-aspect to escape on the wind. The aspect eventually lodged on the paw of some living water, and then it was injected into a second piece of water, dissolving into the cool iron-infused blood, taking ten thousand voyages about that simple wet body. But this kind of mistake happened quite a lot. Hundreds, maybe thousands of aspects had been lost already. The largest blunder was leaving the aspect active – a totipotent agent able to interface with its environment, ready for that key moment when it was necessary to reshape water and minerals, weaving the best soldier possible from these miserable ingredients.

For every tiny mistake, the entity felt sorry. It nourished just enough shame to prove again that it was moral and right. Then it willfully ignored those obscure mistakes, bearing down on the wild useless sprint to the finish.

Soldiers ran into the hospital and found a monster. Spellbound and fearful, they stared at the creature sitting upright in the bed. Two prayed, the woman talking about Allah being the Protector of those who have faith. Another soldier summoned his anger, aiming at the gray human-shaped face.

“Fucking move and I’ll kill you,” he said.

Bloch wasn’t sure that he could move, and he didn’t try.

“Do you fucking hear me?” the soldier said.

Bloch’s mouth could open, the tongue tasting hot air and his remade self. He tasted like dirty glass. A voice he didn’t recognize said, “I hear you, yeah.” Monsters should have important booming voices. His voice was quiet, crackly, and slow, reminding him of the artificial cackle riding on a doll’s pulled string.

He laughed at the sound of himself.

His mother was kneeling beside his bed, weeping while saying his name again and again. “Simon, Simon.”

“I’m all right,” he said to her.

The nurse stood on the other side of him, trying to judge what she was seeing. The boy’s skin looked like metal or a fancy ceramic, but that was only one piece of this very strange picture. Bloch was big before, but he was at least half a foot taller and maybe half again thicker, and the bed under him looked shriveled because it was. The metal frame and foam mattress were being absorbed by his growing body. Sheets and pillows were melting into him, harvested for their carbon. And the gray skin was hot as a furnace. Bloch was gone. Replacing him was a machine, human-faced but unconvincing, and the nurse felt well within her rights as a good person to turn to the soldiers, asking, “What are you waiting for? Shoot.”

But even the angry soldier wouldn’t. Bullets might not work. And if the gun was useless, then threats remained the best tactic.

“Go get the Colonel,” he said. “Go.”

The Muslim soldier ran away.

Two minutes ago, Bloch had felt awake and alert but normal. Nothing was normal now. He saw his kneeling mother and everything else. There wasn’t any darkness in this room, or anywhere. His new eyes found endless details – the weave of Mom’s blouse and the dust in the air and a single fly with sense enough to hang away from the impossibility that was swelling as the fancy bed dissolved into his carapace.

“It’s still me,” he told his mother.

She looked up, wanting to believe but unable.

Then the colonel arrived, the physicist beside him, and the lieutenant came in with Mr. Rightly.

The colonel was gray and handsome and very scared, and he chuckled quietly, embarrassed by his fear.

Bloch liked the sound of that laugh.

“Can you hear me, boy?”

“No.”

That won a second laugh, louder this time. “Do you know what’s happening to you?”

Bloch said, “No.”

Yet that wasn’t true.

More soldiers were gathering outside the hospital, setting up weapons, debating lines of fire.

The physicist pointed at Bloch, looking sick and pleased in the same moment. “I was right,” he boasted. “There is a contamination problem.”

“Where did this happen?” the colonel asked.

“While people were carting the spaceman around, I’d guess,” said the physicist.

Bloch slowly lifted his arms. The tube from the IV bottle had merged with him. His elbow still felt like an elbow except it wasn’t sore, and the raking marks in his bicep had become permanent features.

“Don’t move,” the angry soldier repeated.