The Best of Elizabeth Bear, page 19
Cautiously, Black Alice dropped a hand on it. She found the access panel, and flipped it open: more red lights than green. A tongue-click, and she began withdrawing her tethered tools from their holding pouches and arranging them so that they would float conveniently around.
She didn’t hear a thing, of course, but the hide under her boots vibrated suddenly, sharply. She jerked her head around, just in time to see one of Vinnie’s feelers slap her own side, five or ten meters away. And then the whole Boojum shuddered, contracting, curved into a hard crescent of pain the same way she had when the Henry Ford had taken that chunk out of her hide. And the lights in the access panel lit up all at once—red, red, yellow, red.
Black Alice tongued off the send function on her headset microphone, so Wasabi wouldn’t hear her. She touched the bruised hull, and she touched the dented edge of the console. “Vinnie,” she said, “does this hurt?”
Not that Vinnie could answer her. But it was obvious. She was in pain. And maybe that dent didn’t have anything to do with space debris. Maybe—Black Alice straightened, looked around, and couldn’t convince herself that it was an accident that this box was planted right where Vinnie couldn’t…quite…reach it.
“So what does it do?” she muttered. “Why am I out here repairing something that fucking hurts?” She crouched down again and took another long look at the interface.
As an engineer, Black Alice was mostly self-taught; her implants were second-hand, black market, scavenged, the wet work done by a gilly on Providence Station. She’d learned the technical vocabulary from Gogglehead Kim before he bought it in a stupid little fight with a ship named the V. I. Ulyanov, but what she relied on were her instincts, the things she knew without being able to say. So she looked at that box wired into Vinnie’s spine and all its red and yellow lights, and then she tongued the comm back on and said, “Wasabi, this thing don’t look so good.”
“Whaddya mean, don’t look so good?” Wasabi sounded distracted, and that was just fine.
Black Alice made a noise, the auditory equivalent of a shrug. “I think the node’s inflamed. Can we pull it and lock it in somewhere else?”
“No!” said Wasabi.
“It’s looking pretty ugly out here.”
“Look, Blackie, unless you want us to all go sailing out into the Big Empty, we are not pulling that governor. Just fix the fucking thing, would you?”
“Yessir,” said Black Alice, thinking hard. The first thing was that Wasabi knew what was going on—knew what the box did and knew that the Lavinia Whateley didn’t like it. That wasn’t comforting. The second thing was that whatever was going on, it involved the Big Empty, the cold vastness between the stars. So it wasn’t that Vinnie wanted to go home. She wanted to go out.
It made sense, from what Black Alice knew about Boojums. Their infants lived in the tumult of the gas giants’ atmosphere, but as they aged, they pushed higher and higher, until they reached the edge of the envelope. And then—following instinct or maybe the calls of their fellows, nobody knew for sure—they learned to skip, throwing themselves out into the vacuum like Earth birds leaving the nest. And what if, for a Boojum, the Solar System was just another nest?
Black Alice knew the Lavinia Whateley was old, for a Boojum. Captain Song was not her first captain, although you never mentioned Captain Smith if you knew what was good for you. So if there was another stage to her life cycle, she might be ready for it. And her crew wasn’t letting her go.
Jesus and the cold fishy gods, Black Alice thought. Is this why the Marie Curie ate her crew? Because they wouldn’t let her go?
She fumbled for her tools, tugging the cords to float them closer, and wound up walloping herself in the bicep with a splicer. And as she was wrestling with it, her headset spoke again. “Blackie, can you hurry it up out there? Captain says we’re going to have company.”
Company? She never got to say it. Because when she looked up, she saw the shapes, faintly limned in starlight, and a chill as cold as a suit leak crept up her neck.
There were dozens of them. Hundreds. They made her skin crawl and her nerves judder the way gillies and Boojums never had. They were man-sized, roughly, but they looked like the pseudoroaches of Venus, the ones Black Alice still had nightmares about, with too many legs, and horrible stiff wings. They had ovate, corrugated heads, but no faces, and where their mouths ought to be sprouted writhing tentacles.
And some of them carried silver shining cylinders, like the canisters in Vinnie’s subhold.
Black Alice wasn’t certain if they saw her, crouched on the Boojum’s hide with only a thin laminate between her and the breathsucker, but she was certain of something else. If they did, they did not care.
They disappeared below the curve of the ship, toward the airlock Black Alice had exited before clawing her way along the ship’s side. They could be a trade delegation, come to bargain for the salvaged cargo.
Black Alice didn’t think even the Mi-Go came in the battalions to talk trade.
She meant to wait until the last of them had passed, but they just kept coming. Wasabi wasn’t answering her hails; she was on her own and unarmed. She fumbled with her tools, stowing things in any handy pocket whether it was where the tool went or not. She couldn’t see much; everything was misty. It took her several seconds to realize that her visor was fogged because she was crying.
Patch cables. Where were the fucking patch cables? She found a two-meter length of fiberoptic with the right plugs on the end. One end went into the monitor panel. The other snapped into her suit comm.
“Vinnie?” she whispered, when she thought she had a connection. “Vinnie, can you hear me?”
The bioluminescence under Black Alice’s boots pulsed once.
Gods and little fishes, she thought. And then she drew out her laser cutting torch, and started slicing open the case on the console that Wasabi had called the governor. Wasabi was probably dead by now, or dying. Wasabi, and Dogcollar, and…well, not dead. If they were lucky, they were dead.
Because the opposite of lucky was those canisters the Mi-Go were carrying.
She hoped Dogcollar was lucky.
“You wanna go out, right?” she whispered to the Lavinia Whateley. “Out into the Big Empty.”
She’d never been sure how much Vinnie understood of what people said, but the light pulsed again.
“And this thing won’t let you.” It wasn’t a question. She had it open now, and she could see that was what it did. Ugly fucking thing. Vinnie shivered underneath her, and there was a sudden pulse of noise in her helmet speakers: screaming. People screaming.
“I know,” Black Alice said. “They’ll come get me in a minute, I guess.” She swallowed hard against the sudden lurch of her stomach. “I’m gonna get this thing off you, though. And when they go, you can go, okay? And I’m sorry. I didn’t know we were keeping you from…” She had to quit talking, or she really was going to puke. Grimly, she fumbled for the tools she needed to disentangle the abomination from Vinnie’s nervous system.
Another pulse of sound, a voice, not a person: flat and buzzing and horrible. “We do not bargain with thieves.” And the scream that time—she’d never heard Captain Song scream before. Black Alice flinched and started counting to slow her breathing. Puking in a suit was the number one badness, but hyperventilating in a suit was a really close second.
Her heads-up display was low-res, and slightly miscalibrated, so that everything had a faint shadow-double. But the thing that flashed up against her own view of her hands was unmistakable: a question mark.
“Vinnie?”
Another pulse of screaming, and the question mark again.
“Holy shit, Vinnie!… Never mind, never mind. They, um, they collect people’s brains. In canisters. Like the canisters in the third subhold.”
The bioluminescence pulsed once. Black Alice kept working.
Her heads-up pinged again: A pause.
“Um, yeah. I figure that’s what they’ll do with me, too. It looked like they had plenty of canisters to go around.”
Vinnie pulsed, and there was a longer pause while Black Alice doggedly severed connections and loosened bolts.
said the Lavinia Whateley.
“Want? Do I want…?” Her laughter sounded bad. “Um, no. No, I don’t want to be a brain in a jar. But I’m not seeing a lot of choices here. Even if I went cometary, they could catch me. And it kind of sounds like they’re mad enough to do it, too.”
She’d cleared out all the moorings around the edge of the governor; the case lifted off with a shove and went sailing into the dark. Black Alice winced. But then the processor under the cover drifted away from Vinnie’s hide, and there was just the monofilament tethers and the fat cluster of fiber optic and superconductors to go.
“I’m doing my best here, Vinnie,” Black Alice said through her teeth.
That got her a fast double-pulse, and the Lavinia Whateley said,
And then,
“You want to help me?” Black Alice squeaked.
A strong pulse, and the heads-up said,
“That’s really sweet of you, but I’m honestly not sure there’s anything you can do. I mean, it doesn’t look like the Mi-Go are mad at you, and I really want to keep it that way.”
said the Lavinia Whateley.
Black Alice came within a millimeter of taking her own fingers off with the cutting laser. “Um, Vinnie, that’s um…well, I guess it’s better than being a brain in a jar.” Or suffocating to death in her suit if she went cometary and the Mi-Go didn’t come after her.
The double-pulse again, but Black Alice didn’t see what she could have missed. As communications went, EAT ALICE was pretty fucking unambiguous.
the Lavinia Whateley insisted. Black Alice leaned in close, unsplicing the last of the governor’s circuits from the Boojum’s nervous system.
“By eating me? Look, I know what happens to things you eat, and it’s not…” She bit her tongue. Because she did know what happened to things the Lavinia Whateley ate. Absorbed. Filtered. Recycled. “Vinnie…are you saying you can save me from the Mi-Go?”
A pulse of agreement.
“By eating me?” Black Alice pursued, needing to be sure she understood.
Another pulse of agreement.
Black Alice thought about the Lavinia Whateley’s teeth. “How much me are we talking about here?”
said the Lavinia Whateley, and then the last fiber-optic cable parted, and Black Alice, her hands shaking, detached her patch cable and flung the whole mess of it as hard as she could straight up. Maybe it would find a planet with atmosphere and be some little alien kid’s shooting star.
And now she had to decide what to do.
She figured she had two choices, really. One, walk back down the Lavinia Whateley and find out if the Mi-Go believed in surrender. Two, walk around the Lavinia Whateley and into her toothy mouth.
Black Alice didn’t think the Mi-Go believed in surrender.
She tilted her head back for one last clear look at the shining black infinity of space. Really, there wasn’t any choice at all. Because even if she’d misunderstood what Vinnie seemed to be trying to tell her, the worst she’d end up was dead, and that was light-years better than what the Mi-Go had on offer.
Black Alice Bradley loved her ship.
She turned to her left and started walking, and the Lavinia Whateley’s bioluminescence followed her courteously all the way, vanes swaying out of her path. Black Alice skirted each of Vinnie’s eyes as she came to them, and each of them blinked at her. And then she reached Vinnie’s mouth and that magnificent panoply of teeth.
“Make it quick, Vinnie, okay?” said Black Alice, and walked into her leviathan’s maw.
Picking her way delicately between razor-sharp teeth, Black Alice had plenty of time to consider the ridiculousness of worrying about a hole in her suit. Vinnie’s mouth was more like a crystal cave, once you were inside it; there was no tongue, no palate. Just polished, macerating stones. Which did not close on Black Alice, to her surprise. If anything, she got the feeling the Vinnie was holding her…breath. Or what passed for it.
The Boojum was lit inside, as well—or was making herself lit, for Black Alice’s benefit. And as Black Alice clambered inward, the teeth got smaller, and fewer, and the tunnel narrowed. Her throat, Alice thought. I’m inside her.
And the walls closed down, and she was swallowed.
Like a pill, enclosed in the tight sarcophagus of her space suit, she felt rippling pressure as peristalsis pushed her along. And then greater pressure, suffocating, savage. One sharp pain. The pop of her ribs as her lungs crushed.
Screaming inside a space suit was contraindicated, too. And with collapsed lungs, she couldn’t even do it properly.
alice.
She floated. In warm darkness. A womb, a bath. She was comfortable. An itchy soreness between her shoulderblades felt like a very mild radiation burn.
alice.
A voice she thought she should know. She tried to speak; her mouth gnashed, her teeth ground.
alice. talk here.
She tried again. Not with her mouth, this time.
Talk…here?
The buoyant warmth flickered past her. She was…drifting. No, swimming. She could feel currents on her skin. Her vision was confused. She blinked and blinked, and things were shattered.
There was nothing to see anyway, but stars.
alice talk here.
Where am I?
eat alice.
Vinnie. Vinnie’s voice, but not in the flatness of the heads-up display anymore. Vinnie’s voice alive with emotion and nuance and the vastness of her self.
You ate me, she said, and understood abruptly that the numbness she felt was not shock. It was the boundaries of her body erased and redrawn.
!
Agreement. Relief.
I’m…in you, Vinnie?
=/=
Not a “no.” More like, this thing is not the same, does not compare, to this other thing. Black Alice felt the warmth of space so near a generous star slipping by her. She felt the swift currents of its gravity, and the gravity of its satellites, and bent them, and tasted them, and surfed them faster and faster away.
I am you.
!
Ecstatic comprehension, which Black Alice echoed with passionate relief. Not dead. Not dead after all. Just, transformed. Accepted. Embraced by her ship, whom she embraced in return.
Vinnie. Where are we going?
out, Vinnie answered. And in her, Black Alice read the whole great naked wonder of space, approaching faster and faster as Vinnie accelerated, reaching for the first great skip that would hurl them into the interstellar darkness of the Big Empty. They were going somewhere.
Out, Black Alice agreed and told herself not to grieve. Not to go mad. This sure beat swampy Hell out of being a brain in a jar.
And it occurred to her, as Vinnie jumped, the brainless bodies of her crew already digesting inside her, that it wouldn’t be long before the loss of the Lavinia Whateley was a tale told to frighten spacers, too.
The Bone War
Bijou the Artificer had seen many bones in her time, but never one larger or even close to the size of the monstrous object lying on the floor before her, supported by a plaster cradle. The thing was behemothic, easily longer than she was tall. It had an antediluvian appearance, stained an orange color as if from immersion in a peat bog. Fine dark brown cracks hairlined the surface, reminding Bijou of an egg cooked in spiced tea.
She stepped forward, supporting herself with her filigreed cane, and peered at the bone. Her familiar creature Ambrosias curled in the hood of her robe so he could rear over her shoulder and disconcert folks. He rattled as she bent down: a jeweled, silver-chased giant centipede constructed from a ferret skull mounted on the spine of a horse with the ribs of cats for legs—the whole geared and wired for movement and animated by Bijou’s signature magic.
She said, “May I touch it, Doctor?”
The answer came in Amjada Munquidh’s no-nonsense tones. “That is why the Trustees have charged me with the honor of bringing you here, Wizard Bijou.”
Bijou pushed herself upright and looked across the skid the thing rested upon—and, on two sides, protruded well beyond. The woman facing her had thick black hair, cropped short as a foreign man’s, and a clear olive complexion. Rectangular black-rimmed spectacles flashed on an upturned, sun-freckled nose that might have fooled somebody less observant into using adjectives such as cute, but her shoulders strained the rolled-up sleeves of her men’s khaki shirt and her trouser cuffs were stuffed into rock-marred hiking boots.
Bijou felt a touch of unease. Academic politics being what they were, she knew there had to be a catch somewhere.
“You brought me here to touch your humerus, Doctor Munquidh?” Bijou asked roguishly.
“It’s probably a tibia.” But Dr. Munquidh winked.
Bijou swapped her cane to her right hand and reached out with her left. The bone had a peculiar agate luster as she leaned close. When she laid her hand on it, she realized why. The wizard’s intuition tingled up her fingertips and told her that the enormous appendage laid out before her partook of the nature of both bone and stone.
Ambrosias glided over her shoulder, rib-legs prickling, the semiprecious stones in his ferret-skull glinting in the museum lights. He poured down her arm quick as water and arced his limber skeletal body to examine the relic.
“Are there giants made of rock?” Bijou joked, then shook her head. “A fossil? Is this a dragon bone?”
“It is a type of…what we call a ‘dinosaur,’ actually. An ancient beast that lived long before men. Or dragons, for that matter. The discoverer of this particular bone dubbed it the ‘Tidal Titan’ because the stones from which it was recovered appeared to have been laid down in a mangrove swamp.”
“A swamp? Here?”
“The world was once a very different place,” Dr. Munquidh said. She rubbed a hand across her thick dark hair. “Even in historic memory, there was a time when this city sat surrounded by rich farmland. Before the desert sands rolled in.”
She didn’t hear a thing, of course, but the hide under her boots vibrated suddenly, sharply. She jerked her head around, just in time to see one of Vinnie’s feelers slap her own side, five or ten meters away. And then the whole Boojum shuddered, contracting, curved into a hard crescent of pain the same way she had when the Henry Ford had taken that chunk out of her hide. And the lights in the access panel lit up all at once—red, red, yellow, red.
Black Alice tongued off the send function on her headset microphone, so Wasabi wouldn’t hear her. She touched the bruised hull, and she touched the dented edge of the console. “Vinnie,” she said, “does this hurt?”
Not that Vinnie could answer her. But it was obvious. She was in pain. And maybe that dent didn’t have anything to do with space debris. Maybe—Black Alice straightened, looked around, and couldn’t convince herself that it was an accident that this box was planted right where Vinnie couldn’t…quite…reach it.
“So what does it do?” she muttered. “Why am I out here repairing something that fucking hurts?” She crouched down again and took another long look at the interface.
As an engineer, Black Alice was mostly self-taught; her implants were second-hand, black market, scavenged, the wet work done by a gilly on Providence Station. She’d learned the technical vocabulary from Gogglehead Kim before he bought it in a stupid little fight with a ship named the V. I. Ulyanov, but what she relied on were her instincts, the things she knew without being able to say. So she looked at that box wired into Vinnie’s spine and all its red and yellow lights, and then she tongued the comm back on and said, “Wasabi, this thing don’t look so good.”
“Whaddya mean, don’t look so good?” Wasabi sounded distracted, and that was just fine.
Black Alice made a noise, the auditory equivalent of a shrug. “I think the node’s inflamed. Can we pull it and lock it in somewhere else?”
“No!” said Wasabi.
“It’s looking pretty ugly out here.”
“Look, Blackie, unless you want us to all go sailing out into the Big Empty, we are not pulling that governor. Just fix the fucking thing, would you?”
“Yessir,” said Black Alice, thinking hard. The first thing was that Wasabi knew what was going on—knew what the box did and knew that the Lavinia Whateley didn’t like it. That wasn’t comforting. The second thing was that whatever was going on, it involved the Big Empty, the cold vastness between the stars. So it wasn’t that Vinnie wanted to go home. She wanted to go out.
It made sense, from what Black Alice knew about Boojums. Their infants lived in the tumult of the gas giants’ atmosphere, but as they aged, they pushed higher and higher, until they reached the edge of the envelope. And then—following instinct or maybe the calls of their fellows, nobody knew for sure—they learned to skip, throwing themselves out into the vacuum like Earth birds leaving the nest. And what if, for a Boojum, the Solar System was just another nest?
Black Alice knew the Lavinia Whateley was old, for a Boojum. Captain Song was not her first captain, although you never mentioned Captain Smith if you knew what was good for you. So if there was another stage to her life cycle, she might be ready for it. And her crew wasn’t letting her go.
Jesus and the cold fishy gods, Black Alice thought. Is this why the Marie Curie ate her crew? Because they wouldn’t let her go?
She fumbled for her tools, tugging the cords to float them closer, and wound up walloping herself in the bicep with a splicer. And as she was wrestling with it, her headset spoke again. “Blackie, can you hurry it up out there? Captain says we’re going to have company.”
Company? She never got to say it. Because when she looked up, she saw the shapes, faintly limned in starlight, and a chill as cold as a suit leak crept up her neck.
There were dozens of them. Hundreds. They made her skin crawl and her nerves judder the way gillies and Boojums never had. They were man-sized, roughly, but they looked like the pseudoroaches of Venus, the ones Black Alice still had nightmares about, with too many legs, and horrible stiff wings. They had ovate, corrugated heads, but no faces, and where their mouths ought to be sprouted writhing tentacles.
And some of them carried silver shining cylinders, like the canisters in Vinnie’s subhold.
Black Alice wasn’t certain if they saw her, crouched on the Boojum’s hide with only a thin laminate between her and the breathsucker, but she was certain of something else. If they did, they did not care.
They disappeared below the curve of the ship, toward the airlock Black Alice had exited before clawing her way along the ship’s side. They could be a trade delegation, come to bargain for the salvaged cargo.
Black Alice didn’t think even the Mi-Go came in the battalions to talk trade.
She meant to wait until the last of them had passed, but they just kept coming. Wasabi wasn’t answering her hails; she was on her own and unarmed. She fumbled with her tools, stowing things in any handy pocket whether it was where the tool went or not. She couldn’t see much; everything was misty. It took her several seconds to realize that her visor was fogged because she was crying.
Patch cables. Where were the fucking patch cables? She found a two-meter length of fiberoptic with the right plugs on the end. One end went into the monitor panel. The other snapped into her suit comm.
“Vinnie?” she whispered, when she thought she had a connection. “Vinnie, can you hear me?”
The bioluminescence under Black Alice’s boots pulsed once.
Gods and little fishes, she thought. And then she drew out her laser cutting torch, and started slicing open the case on the console that Wasabi had called the governor. Wasabi was probably dead by now, or dying. Wasabi, and Dogcollar, and…well, not dead. If they were lucky, they were dead.
Because the opposite of lucky was those canisters the Mi-Go were carrying.
She hoped Dogcollar was lucky.
“You wanna go out, right?” she whispered to the Lavinia Whateley. “Out into the Big Empty.”
She’d never been sure how much Vinnie understood of what people said, but the light pulsed again.
“And this thing won’t let you.” It wasn’t a question. She had it open now, and she could see that was what it did. Ugly fucking thing. Vinnie shivered underneath her, and there was a sudden pulse of noise in her helmet speakers: screaming. People screaming.
“I know,” Black Alice said. “They’ll come get me in a minute, I guess.” She swallowed hard against the sudden lurch of her stomach. “I’m gonna get this thing off you, though. And when they go, you can go, okay? And I’m sorry. I didn’t know we were keeping you from…” She had to quit talking, or she really was going to puke. Grimly, she fumbled for the tools she needed to disentangle the abomination from Vinnie’s nervous system.
Another pulse of sound, a voice, not a person: flat and buzzing and horrible. “We do not bargain with thieves.” And the scream that time—she’d never heard Captain Song scream before. Black Alice flinched and started counting to slow her breathing. Puking in a suit was the number one badness, but hyperventilating in a suit was a really close second.
Her heads-up display was low-res, and slightly miscalibrated, so that everything had a faint shadow-double. But the thing that flashed up against her own view of her hands was unmistakable: a question mark.
“Vinnie?”
Another pulse of screaming, and the question mark again.
“Holy shit, Vinnie!… Never mind, never mind. They, um, they collect people’s brains. In canisters. Like the canisters in the third subhold.”
The bioluminescence pulsed once. Black Alice kept working.
Her heads-up pinged again:
“Um, yeah. I figure that’s what they’ll do with me, too. It looked like they had plenty of canisters to go around.”
Vinnie pulsed, and there was a longer pause while Black Alice doggedly severed connections and loosened bolts.
“Want? Do I want…?” Her laughter sounded bad. “Um, no. No, I don’t want to be a brain in a jar. But I’m not seeing a lot of choices here. Even if I went cometary, they could catch me. And it kind of sounds like they’re mad enough to do it, too.”
She’d cleared out all the moorings around the edge of the governor; the case lifted off with a shove and went sailing into the dark. Black Alice winced. But then the processor under the cover drifted away from Vinnie’s hide, and there was just the monofilament tethers and the fat cluster of fiber optic and superconductors to go.
“I’m doing my best here, Vinnie,” Black Alice said through her teeth.
That got her a fast double-pulse, and the Lavinia Whateley said,
And then,
“You want to help me?” Black Alice squeaked.
A strong pulse, and the heads-up said,
“That’s really sweet of you, but I’m honestly not sure there’s anything you can do. I mean, it doesn’t look like the Mi-Go are mad at you, and I really want to keep it that way.”
Black Alice came within a millimeter of taking her own fingers off with the cutting laser. “Um, Vinnie, that’s um…well, I guess it’s better than being a brain in a jar.” Or suffocating to death in her suit if she went cometary and the Mi-Go didn’t come after her.
The double-pulse again, but Black Alice didn’t see what she could have missed. As communications went, EAT ALICE was pretty fucking unambiguous.
“By eating me? Look, I know what happens to things you eat, and it’s not…” She bit her tongue. Because she did know what happened to things the Lavinia Whateley ate. Absorbed. Filtered. Recycled. “Vinnie…are you saying you can save me from the Mi-Go?”
A pulse of agreement.
“By eating me?” Black Alice pursued, needing to be sure she understood.
Another pulse of agreement.
Black Alice thought about the Lavinia Whateley’s teeth. “How much me are we talking about here?”
And now she had to decide what to do.
She figured she had two choices, really. One, walk back down the Lavinia Whateley and find out if the Mi-Go believed in surrender. Two, walk around the Lavinia Whateley and into her toothy mouth.
Black Alice didn’t think the Mi-Go believed in surrender.
She tilted her head back for one last clear look at the shining black infinity of space. Really, there wasn’t any choice at all. Because even if she’d misunderstood what Vinnie seemed to be trying to tell her, the worst she’d end up was dead, and that was light-years better than what the Mi-Go had on offer.
Black Alice Bradley loved her ship.
She turned to her left and started walking, and the Lavinia Whateley’s bioluminescence followed her courteously all the way, vanes swaying out of her path. Black Alice skirted each of Vinnie’s eyes as she came to them, and each of them blinked at her. And then she reached Vinnie’s mouth and that magnificent panoply of teeth.
“Make it quick, Vinnie, okay?” said Black Alice, and walked into her leviathan’s maw.
Picking her way delicately between razor-sharp teeth, Black Alice had plenty of time to consider the ridiculousness of worrying about a hole in her suit. Vinnie’s mouth was more like a crystal cave, once you were inside it; there was no tongue, no palate. Just polished, macerating stones. Which did not close on Black Alice, to her surprise. If anything, she got the feeling the Vinnie was holding her…breath. Or what passed for it.
The Boojum was lit inside, as well—or was making herself lit, for Black Alice’s benefit. And as Black Alice clambered inward, the teeth got smaller, and fewer, and the tunnel narrowed. Her throat, Alice thought. I’m inside her.
And the walls closed down, and she was swallowed.
Like a pill, enclosed in the tight sarcophagus of her space suit, she felt rippling pressure as peristalsis pushed her along. And then greater pressure, suffocating, savage. One sharp pain. The pop of her ribs as her lungs crushed.
Screaming inside a space suit was contraindicated, too. And with collapsed lungs, she couldn’t even do it properly.
alice.
She floated. In warm darkness. A womb, a bath. She was comfortable. An itchy soreness between her shoulderblades felt like a very mild radiation burn.
alice.
A voice she thought she should know. She tried to speak; her mouth gnashed, her teeth ground.
alice. talk here.
She tried again. Not with her mouth, this time.
Talk…here?
The buoyant warmth flickered past her. She was…drifting. No, swimming. She could feel currents on her skin. Her vision was confused. She blinked and blinked, and things were shattered.
There was nothing to see anyway, but stars.
alice talk here.
Where am I?
eat alice.
Vinnie. Vinnie’s voice, but not in the flatness of the heads-up display anymore. Vinnie’s voice alive with emotion and nuance and the vastness of her self.
You ate me, she said, and understood abruptly that the numbness she felt was not shock. It was the boundaries of her body erased and redrawn.
!
Agreement. Relief.
I’m…in you, Vinnie?
=/=
Not a “no.” More like, this thing is not the same, does not compare, to this other thing. Black Alice felt the warmth of space so near a generous star slipping by her. She felt the swift currents of its gravity, and the gravity of its satellites, and bent them, and tasted them, and surfed them faster and faster away.
I am you.
!
Ecstatic comprehension, which Black Alice echoed with passionate relief. Not dead. Not dead after all. Just, transformed. Accepted. Embraced by her ship, whom she embraced in return.
Vinnie. Where are we going?
out, Vinnie answered. And in her, Black Alice read the whole great naked wonder of space, approaching faster and faster as Vinnie accelerated, reaching for the first great skip that would hurl them into the interstellar darkness of the Big Empty. They were going somewhere.
Out, Black Alice agreed and told herself not to grieve. Not to go mad. This sure beat swampy Hell out of being a brain in a jar.
And it occurred to her, as Vinnie jumped, the brainless bodies of her crew already digesting inside her, that it wouldn’t be long before the loss of the Lavinia Whateley was a tale told to frighten spacers, too.
The Bone War
Bijou the Artificer had seen many bones in her time, but never one larger or even close to the size of the monstrous object lying on the floor before her, supported by a plaster cradle. The thing was behemothic, easily longer than she was tall. It had an antediluvian appearance, stained an orange color as if from immersion in a peat bog. Fine dark brown cracks hairlined the surface, reminding Bijou of an egg cooked in spiced tea.
She stepped forward, supporting herself with her filigreed cane, and peered at the bone. Her familiar creature Ambrosias curled in the hood of her robe so he could rear over her shoulder and disconcert folks. He rattled as she bent down: a jeweled, silver-chased giant centipede constructed from a ferret skull mounted on the spine of a horse with the ribs of cats for legs—the whole geared and wired for movement and animated by Bijou’s signature magic.
She said, “May I touch it, Doctor?”
The answer came in Amjada Munquidh’s no-nonsense tones. “That is why the Trustees have charged me with the honor of bringing you here, Wizard Bijou.”
Bijou pushed herself upright and looked across the skid the thing rested upon—and, on two sides, protruded well beyond. The woman facing her had thick black hair, cropped short as a foreign man’s, and a clear olive complexion. Rectangular black-rimmed spectacles flashed on an upturned, sun-freckled nose that might have fooled somebody less observant into using adjectives such as cute, but her shoulders strained the rolled-up sleeves of her men’s khaki shirt and her trouser cuffs were stuffed into rock-marred hiking boots.
Bijou felt a touch of unease. Academic politics being what they were, she knew there had to be a catch somewhere.
“You brought me here to touch your humerus, Doctor Munquidh?” Bijou asked roguishly.
“It’s probably a tibia.” But Dr. Munquidh winked.
Bijou swapped her cane to her right hand and reached out with her left. The bone had a peculiar agate luster as she leaned close. When she laid her hand on it, she realized why. The wizard’s intuition tingled up her fingertips and told her that the enormous appendage laid out before her partook of the nature of both bone and stone.
Ambrosias glided over her shoulder, rib-legs prickling, the semiprecious stones in his ferret-skull glinting in the museum lights. He poured down her arm quick as water and arced his limber skeletal body to examine the relic.
“Are there giants made of rock?” Bijou joked, then shook her head. “A fossil? Is this a dragon bone?”
“It is a type of…what we call a ‘dinosaur,’ actually. An ancient beast that lived long before men. Or dragons, for that matter. The discoverer of this particular bone dubbed it the ‘Tidal Titan’ because the stones from which it was recovered appeared to have been laid down in a mangrove swamp.”
“A swamp? Here?”
“The world was once a very different place,” Dr. Munquidh said. She rubbed a hand across her thick dark hair. “Even in historic memory, there was a time when this city sat surrounded by rich farmland. Before the desert sands rolled in.”
