The Best of Elizabeth Bear, page 48
“Now’d be a good time to run,” Flora said, her posse arrayed behind her, as Ringo stood there disbelieving, shaking his bloody, numb right hand.
He stood rooted on the spot, though, until the moon man turned its head and clamped that wide, lipless slash of a mouth closed on Ringo’s arm.
They let him run. Miss Lil moved to the moon man, her hands outstretched, her voice soft. As she crouched down beside it, it didn’t flinch.
“Victory?” Bill said to Missus Shutt.
“Victory,” she agreed.
John Henry Holliday looked down at the spatter of red blood on orange rust and shook his head. “I’m damned tired.”
Flora and her partners left Holliday at the last fork in the road, their little gray guest bundled up in concealing clothes and riding crunched up on the brown mare behind Miss Lil. Before she’d left, Flora pulled Doc aside to pay him the second half of his money, and a little bonus, and to share a private word or two.
He’d been the one who’d spoken first, though. “So. You really are from the future.”
“Something like that, Doc,” she said. “But not exactly. It’s against the rules to explain.”
He looked her in the eye. “Call me John,” he’d said. “I haven’t much use for rules, Miss Flora.”
“John,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to meet you.”
1.
A dusty sun crested the rooftops of Tombstone on the first day of November, 1881. Doc Holliday staggered across the vacant lot next to Fly’s boarding house. There was nothing in his life so pressing as the idea of a shot of whiskey to ease the ice-pick of pain through and behind his left eye.
And nothing in his life so unwelcome as the spectre of John Ringo strolling down Fremont Street in a yellow check shirt that needed washing. Or maybe burning.
Ringo turned his head and spat in the dust between Doc’s boots.
Another day, Holliday might have stepped over it.
This particular day, he stopped dead in the street. Having been deputized, he had the right to carry a firearm in the streets of Tombstone. Not every man did.
His hand hovered over his holster as he turned and faced Ringo. The sun stabbed through his pupils until he thought the back of his head might explode off from the pressure, but he kept his voice level and full of the milk of human kindness and the venom of sweet reason.
“You son of a bitch,” Doc said. “If you ain’t heeled, you go and heel yourself.”
But Ringo just turned and showed him an empty right hip, hands spread mockingly wide.
Doc said, “Ringo, all I want out of you is ten paces in the street. And mark my words, someday I will get them.”
“You better hope not, Holliday,” Ringo said, spinning on the ball of one foot.
Impotently, Doc watched him stagger away. By the gait, Ringo was still drunk from the night before.
A solution Doc wished he’d embraced his own self. Instead, he kept walking, intent on undertaking the next best option—getting drunk again.
He was seated staring at the ornate back bar of the Alhambra Saloon when John Ringo walked in. Still unarmed, still with the rolling gait of a sailor off the sea or a man on a bender. He pretended not to see Doc, and Doc pretended not to see him.
Doc was on his second whiskey when three men and a woman came up on his left side. The leader—or at least the one in the front—was careful to keep a respectful distance.
“Doctor Holliday?” the lead man asked.
He was tall, broad, red-cheeked behind gingery stubble. A healthy-looking fellow with his shirt collar open in the heat. Doc’s hand crept up to check his own button.
“I am,” Doc said. “But I’m pretty sure I don’t owe you any money.”
The man said, “The opposite, sir. We are hoping for the opportunity to pay you some.”
Doc let his hand rest on the sides of his whiskey glass, but didn’t lift it. The pain in his head wasn’t going away.
He asked, “Who might you be?”
“Reuben,” the man said. “Jeremy. We hear there’s an old wreck out in the desert. We hear you’ve been there.”
“Once,” Doc allowed, cautiously. “On my way into Tombstone.”
“We want to hire you to take us there.”
“Not up to it today, I’m afraid.”
“Doctor Holliday—”
But Doc turned back to the bar, and the man didn’t persist. He and his friends formed a huddle by the vacant faro table, whispering an argument Doc was pleased to ignore until he spotted a flash of dirty yellow and black. Headed that way.
Ringo stopped about four feet off from Reuben and his group and cleared his throat. “I can take you out to the wreck.”
Doc put his forehead on his palm.
“And you would be?”
“John Ringo,” Ringo said. “I know this desert like my hand.”
Doc took a deep breath and let it out again. He still had half a glass of whiskey.
And he had half a mind to let Ringo try it. These men might be easterners, but the leather on their holsters was worn soft and slick. They might give the cowboy a harder accounting than he was reckoning on if he lured them into an ambush.
He managed to make himself wait another three whole seconds with that line of thought before turning his stool. “Reuben.”
Reuben looked up from haggling with Ringo. “Doctor Holliday.”
Ringo shot Doc a wild look full of bitter promises. Doc shrugged. “You better run along, Johnny.”
Ringo opened his mouth—Doc could almost see him forming the words You haven’t heard the last of me. And then he shut it on silence, squared his shoulders, and stalked off like a wet cat.
Doc said, “I’ll go. This once. I won’t make it a habit, sir.”
One of the men behind Reuben leaned to another and said something excitedly, incomprehensibly, making Doc want to blow his nose to clear his ears.
Neither that nor Ringo’s performance were what sent the chill of recognition through Doc. He winced and rubbed his eyes.
Reuben said, “What?”
“Déjà vu. Damn. That’s funny.” Doc heard his own tones ring flat as the rattle of a captured snake. A sinking and inexplicable sense of futility sucked at him. “I’d swear I’ve had every word of this conversation some damn other time.”
The Heart’s Filthy Lesson
The sun burned through the clouds around noon on the long Cytherean day, and Dharthi happened to be awake and in a position to see it. She was alone in the highlands of Ishtar Terra on a research trip, five sleeps out from Butler base camp, and—despite the nagging desire to keep traveling—had decided to take a rest break for an hour or two. Noon at this latitude was close enough to the one hundredth solar dieiversary of her birth that she’d broken out her little hoard of shelf-stable cake to celebrate. The prehensile fingers and leaping legs of her bioreactor-printed, skin-bonded adaptshell made it simple enough to swarm up one of the tall, gracile pseudo-figs and creep along its gray smooth branches until the ceaseless Venusian rain dripped directly on her adaptshell’s slick-furred head.
It was safer in the treetops, if you were sitting still. Nothing big enough to want to eat her was likely to climb up this far. The grues didn’t come out until nightfall, but there were swamp-tigers, damnthings, and velociraptors to worry about. The forest was too thick for predators any bigger than that, but a swarm of scorpion-rats was no joke. And Venus had only been settled for three hundred days, and most of that devoted to Aphrodite Terra; there were still plenty of undiscovered monsters out here in the wilderness.
The water did not bother Dharthi, nor did the dip and sway of the branch in the wind. Her adaptshell was beautifully tailored to this terrain, and that fur shed water like the hydrophobic miracle of engineering that it was. The fur was a glossy, iridescent purple that qualified as black in most lights, to match the foliage that dripped rain like strings of glass beads from the multiple points of palmate leaves. Red-black, to make the most of the rainy grey light. They’d fold their leaves up tight and go dormant when night came.
Dharthi had been born with a chromosomal abnormality that produced red-green colorblindness. She’d been about ten solar days old when they’d done the gene therapy to fix it, and she just about remembered her first glimpses of the true, saturated colors of Venus. She’d seen it first as if it were Earth: washed out and faded.
For now, however, they were alive with the scurryings and chitterings of a few hundred different species of Cytherean canopy-dwellers. And the quiet, nearly-contented sound of Dharthi munching on cake. She would not dwell; she would not stew. She would look at all this natural majesty, and try to spot the places where an unnaturally geometric line or angle showed in the topography of the canopy.
From here, she could stare up the enormous sweep of Maxwell Montes to the north, its heights forested to the top in Venus’s deep, rich atmosphere—but the sight of them lost for most of its reach in clouds. Dharthi could only glimpse the escarpment at all because she was on the “dry” side. Maxwell Montes scraped the heavens, kicking the cloud layer up as if it had struck an aileron, so the “wet” side got the balance of the rain. Balance in this case meaning that the mountains on the windward side were scoured down to granite, and a nonadapted terrestrial organism had better bring breathing gear.
But here in the lee, the forest flourished, and on a clear hour from a height, visibility might reach a couple of klicks or more.
Dharthi took another bite of cake—it might have been “chocolate;” it was definitely caffeinated, because she was picking up the hit on her blood monitors already—and turned herself around on her branch to face downslope. The sky was definitely brighter, the rain falling back to a drizzle and then a mist, and the clouds were peeling back along an arrowhead trail that led directly back to the peak above her. A watery golden smudge brightened one patch of clouds. They tore and she glimpsed the full unguarded brilliance of the daystar, just hanging there in a chip of glossy cerulean sky, the clouds all around it smeared with thick unbelievable rainbows. Waves of mist rolled and slid among the leaves of the canopy, made golden by the shimmering unreal light.
Dharthi was glad she was wearing the shell. It played the sun’s warmth through to her skin without also relaying the risks of ultraviolet exposure. She ought to be careful of her eyes, however: a crystalline shield protected them, but its filters weren’t designed for naked light.
The forest noises rose to a cacophony. It was the third time in Dharthi’s one hundred solar days of life that she had glimpsed the sun. Even here, she imagined that some of these animals would never have seen it before.
She decided to accept it as a good omen for her journey. Sadly, there was no way to spin the next thing that happened that way.
“Hey,” said a voice in her head. “Good cake.”
“That proves your pan is malfunctioning, if anything does,” Dharthi replied sourly. Never accept a remote synaptic link with a romantic and professional partner. No matter how convenient it seems at the time, and in the field.
Because someday they might be a romantic and professional partner you really would rather not talk to right now.
“I heard that.”
“What do you want, Kraken?”
Dharthi imagined Kraken smiling, and wished she hadn’t. She could hear it in her partner’s “voice” when she spoke again, anyway. “Just to wish you a happy dieiversary.”
“Aw,” Dharthi said. “Aren’t you sweet. Noblesse oblige?”
“Maybe,” Kraken said tiredly, “I actually care?”
“Mmm,” Dharthi said. “What’s the ulterior motive this time?”
Kraken sighed. It was more a neural flutter than a heave of breath, but Dharthi got the point all right. “Maybe I actually care.”
“Sure,” Dharthi said. “Every so often you have to glance down from Mount Olympus and check up on the lesser beings.”
“Olympus is on Mars,” Kraken said.
It didn’t make Dharthi laugh, because she clenched her right fist hard enough that, even though the cushioning adaptshell squished against her palm, she still squeezed the blood out of her fingers. You and all your charm. You don’t get to charm me any more.
“Look,” Kraken said. “You have something to prove. I understand that.”
“How can you possibly understand that? When was the last time you were turned down for a resource allocation? Doctor youngest-ever recipient of the Cytherean Award for Excellence in Xenoarcheology? Doctor Founding Field-Martius Chair of Archaeology at the University on Aphrodite?”
“The University on Aphrodite,” Kraken said, “is five Quonset huts and a repurposed colonial landing module.”
“It’s what we’ve got.”
“I peaked early,” Kraken said, after a pause. “I was never your rival, Dharthi. We were colleagues.” Too late, in Dharthi’s silence, she realized her mistake. “Are colleagues.”
“You look up from your work often enough to notice I’m missing?”
There was a pause. “That may be fair,” Kraken said at last. “But if being professionally focused—”
“Obsessed.”
“—is a failing, it was hardly a failing limited to me. Come back. Come back to me. We’ll talk about it. I’ll help you try for a resource voucher again tomorrow.”
“I don’t want your damned help, Kraken!”
The forest around Dharthi fell silent. Shocked, she realized she’d shouted out loud.
“Haring off across Ishtar alone, with no support—you’re not going to prove your theory about aboriginal Cytherean settlement patterns, Dhar. You’re going to get eaten by a grue.”
“I’ll be home by dark,” Dharthi said. “Anyway, if I’m not—all the better for the grue.”
“You know who else was always on about being laughed out of the Academy?” Kraken said. Her voice had that teasing tone that could break Dharthi’s worst, most self-loathing, prickliest mood—if she let it. “Moriarty.”
I will not laugh. Fuck you.
Dharthi couldn’t tell if Kraken had picked it up or not. There was a silence, as if she were controlling her temper or waiting for Dharthi to speak.
“If you get killed,” Kraken said, “make a note in your file that I can use your DNA. You’re not getting out of giving me children that easily.”
Ha ha, Dharthi thought. Only serious. She couldn’t think of what to say, and so she said nothing. The idea of a little Kraken filled her up with mushy softness inside. But somebody’s career would go on hold for the first fifty solar days of that kid’s life, and Dharthi was pretty sure it wouldn’t be Kraken.
She couldn’t think of what to say in response, and the silence got heavy until Kraken said, “Dammit. I’m worried about you.”
“Worry about yourself.” Dharthi couldn’t break the connection, but she could bloody well shut down her end of the dialogue. And she could refuse to hear.
She pitched the remains of the cake as far across the canopy as she could, then regretted it. Hopefully nothing Cytherean would try to eat it; it might give the local biology a belly ache.
It was ironically inevitable that Dharthi, named by her parents in a fit of homesickness for Terra, would grow up to be the most Cytherean of Cythereans. She took great pride in her adaptation, in her ability to rough it. Some of the indigenous plants and many of the indigenous animals could be eaten, and Dharthi knew which ones. She also knew, more importantly, which ones were likely to eat her.
She hadn’t mastered humans nearly as well. Dharthi wasn’t good at politics. Unlike Kraken. Dharthi wasn’t good at making friends. Unlike Kraken. Dharthi wasn’t charming or beautiful or popular or brilliant. Unlike Kraken, Kraken, Kraken.
Kraken was a better scientist, or at least a better-understood one. Kraken was a better person, probably. More generous, less prickly, certainly. But there was one thing Dharthi was good at. Better at than Kraken. Better at than anyone. Dharthi was good at living on Venus, at being Cytherean. She was more comfortable in and proficient with an adaptshell than anyone she had ever met.
In fact, it was peeling the shell off that came hard. So much easier to glide through the jungle or the swamp like something that belonged there, wearing a quasibiologic suit of super-powered armor bonded to your neural network and your skin. The human inside was a soft, fragile, fleshy thing, subject to complicated feelings and social dynamics, and Dharthi despised her. But that same human, while bonded to the shell, ghosted through the rain forest like a native, and saw things no one else ever had.
A kilometer from where she had stopped for cake, she picked up the trail of a velociraptor. It was going in the right direction, so she tracked it. It wasn’t a real velociraptor; it wasn’t even a dinosaur. Those were Terran creatures, albeit extinct; this was a Cytherean meat-eating monster that bore a superficial resemblance. Like the majority of Cytherean vertebrates, it had six limbs, though it ran balanced on the rear ones and the two forward pairs had evolved into little more than graspers. Four eyes were spaced equidistantly around the dome of its skull, giving it a dome of monocular vision punctuated by narrow slices of depth perception. The business end of the thing was delineated by a sawtoothed maw that split wide enough to bite a human being in half. The whole of it was camouflaged with long draggled fur-feathers that grew thick with near-black algae, or the Cytherean cognate.
Dharthi followed the velociraptor for over two kilometers, and the beast never even noticed she was there. She smiled inside her adaptshell. Kraken was right: going out into the jungle alone and unsupported would be suicide for most people. But wasn’t it like her not to give Dharthi credit for this one single thing that Dharthi could do better than anyone?
