The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (64 page)

“I won’t forget, Mama, I promise,” said her daughter, who, though perhaps not quite understanding, showed no signs of inclination to break the embrace they shared. So Amrit continued to hold her, for the longest time, thinking in her own mind how many forces in her own life had conspired to deaden her own passions. Then she had another thought, which made her pull herself from Meera’s grasp and hold her at elbow’s length. “However,” Amrit added, in a fierce voice, “if you are going to quarrel with every bully who accosts you, you had best become more proficient at fisticuffs. While we are seeking another school in which to place you, you will resume your boxing lessons with your Uncle Saavit. Am I understood?”

“Yes, Mama!” cried her fierce young troublemaker. “Yes!” And they held one another again until old Mrs Chaudhury came into the room, took in the scene, and asked in a very mild tone if, now that the storm of crises appeared to have passed, anyone in this mad house would mind if she attempted to make another pot of tea.

MONGOOSE

Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette

Elizabeth Bear was born in Connecticut, where she’s now returned to live after several years in the Mohave Desert near Las Vegas. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005, and in 2008 took home a Hugo Award for her short story “Tideline”, which also won her the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (shared with David Moles). In 2009, she won another Hugo Award for her novelette “Shoggoths in Bloom”. Her short work has appeared in
Asimov’s, Subterranean, Sci Fiction, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Strange Horizons, On Spec
, and elsewhere, and has been collected in
The Chains That You Refuse
and
New Amsterdam.
She is the author of three highly acclaimed SF novels,
Hammered, Scardown
, and
Worldwired
, and of the alternate history “Promethean Age” fantasy series, which includes the novels
Blood and Iron, Whiskey and Water, Ink and Steel
, and
Hell and Earth.
Her other books include the novels
Carnival, Undertow, Chill, Dust
, and
All the Windwracked Stars.
Her most recent works are a new novel,
By the Mountain Bound
, and a chapbook novella,
Bone and Jewel Creatures.
Her website is elizabethbear.com

Sarah Monette was born and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the secret cities of the Manhattan Project. Having completed her Ph.D. in Renaissance English drama, she now lives and writes in a ninety-nine-year-old house in the Upper Midwest. Her “Doctrine of Labyrinths” series consists of the novels
Melusine, The Virtu
, and
The Mirador.
Her short fiction has appeared in many places, including
Strange Horizons, Aeon, Alchemy
, and
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
, and has been collected in
The Bone Key.
Upcoming is a new novel in the “Doctrine of Labyrinths” sequence,
Corambis.
Her website is sarahmonette.com.

Bear and Monette have collaborated before, on the stories “The Ile of Dogges” and “The Boojum” and on the novel
A Companion to Wolves.
Here they join forces again with a chilling story about an interdimensional pest-control officer and his very unusual helper.

I
ZRAEL IRIZARRY STEPPED
through a bright-scarred airlock onto Kadath Station, lurching a little as he adjusted to station gravity. On his shoulder, Mongoose extended her neck, her barbels flaring, flicked her tongue out to taste the air, and colored a question. Another few steps, and he smelled what Mongoose smelled, the sharp stink of toves, ammoniac and bitter.

He touched the tentacle coiled around his throat with the quick double tap that meant soon. Mongoose colored dis pleasure, and Irizarry stroked the slick velvet wedge of her head in consolation and restraint. Her four compound and twelve simple eyes glittered and her color softened, but did not change, as she leaned into the caress. She was eager to hunt and he didn’t blame her. The boojum Manfred von Richthofen took care of its own vermin. Mongoose had had to make do with a share of Irizarry’s rations, and she hated eating dead things.

If Irizarry could smell toves, it was more than the “minor infestation” the message from the station master had led him to expect. Of course, that message had reached Irizarry third or fourth or fifteenth hand, and he had no idea how long it had taken. Perhaps when the station master had sent for him, it had been minor.

But he knew the ways of bureaucrats, and he wondered.

People did double-takes as he passed, even the heavily-modded Christian cultists with their telescoping limbs and biolin eyes. You found them on every station and steelships too, though mostly they wouldn’t work the boojums. Nobody liked Christians much, but they could work in situations that would kill an unmodded human or even a gilly, so captains and station masters tolerated them.

There were a lot of gillies in Kadath’s hallways, and they all stopped to blink at Mongoose. One, an indenturee, stopped and made an elaborate hand-flapping bow. Irizarry felt one of Mongoose’s tendrils work itself through two of his earrings. Although she didn’t understand staring exactly – her compound eyes made the idea alien to her – she felt the attention and was made shy by it.

Unlike the boojum-ships they serviced, the stations – Providence, Kadath, Leng, Dunwich, and the others – were man-made. Their radial symmetry was predictable, and to find the station master, Irizarry only had to work his way inward from the Manfred von Richthofen’s dock to the hub. There he found one of the inevitable safety maps (you are here; in case of decompression, proceed in an orderly manner to the life vaults located here, here, or here) and leaned close to squint at the tiny lettering. Mongoose copied him, tilting her head first one way, then another, though flat representations meant nothing to her. He made out station master’s office finally, on an oval bubble, the door of which was actually in sight.

“Here we go, girl,” he said to Mongoose (who, stone-deaf though she was, pressed against him in response to the vibration of his voice). He hated this part of the job, hated dealing with apparatchiks and functionaries, and of course the Station Master’s office was full of them, a receptionist, and then a secretary, and then someone who was maybe the other kind of secretary, and then finally – Mongoose by now halfway down the back of his shirt and entirely hidden by his hair and Irizarry himself half stifled by memories of someone he didn’t want to remember being – he was ushered into an inner room where Station Master Lee, her arms crossed and her round face set in a scowl, was waiting.

“Mr Irizarry,” she said, unfolding her arms long enough to stick one hand out in a facsimile of a congenial greeting.

He held up a hand in response, relieved to see no sign of recognition in her face. It was Irizarry’s experience that the dead were best left to lie where they fell. “Sorry, Station Master,” he said. “I can’t.”

He thought of asking her about the reek of toves on the air, if she understood just how bad the situation had become. People could convince themselves of a lot of bullshit, given half a chance.

Instead, he decided to talk about his partner. “Mongoose hates it when I touch other people. She gets jealous, like a parrot.”

“The cheshire’s here?” She let her hand drop to her side, the expression on her face a mixture of respect and alarm. “Is it out of phase?”

Well, at least Station Master Lee knew a little more about Cheshire cats than most people. “No,” Irizarry said. “She’s down my shirt.”

Half a standard hour later, wading through the damp bowels of a ventilation pore, Irizarry tapped his rebreather to try to clear some of the tove-stench from his nostrils and mouth. It didn’t help much; he was getting close.

Here, Mongoose wasn’t shy at all. She slithered up on top of his head, barbels and graspers extended to full length, pulsing slowly in predatory greens and reds. Her tendrils slithered through his hair and coiled about his throat, fading in and out of phase. He placed his fingertips on her slick-resilient hide to restrain her. The last thing he needed was for Mongoose to go spectral and charge off down the corridor after the tove colony.

It wasn’t that she wouldn’t come back, because she would – but that was only if she didn’t get herself into more trouble than she could get out of without his help. “Steady,” he said, though of course she couldn’t hear him. A creature adapted to vacuum had no ears. But she could feel his voice vibrate in his throat, and a tendril brushed his lips, feeling the puff of air and the shape of the word. He tapped her tendril twice again – soon – and felt it contract. She flashed hungry orange in his peripheral vision. She was experimenting with jaguar rosettes – they had had long discussions of jaguars and tigers after their nightly reading of Pooh on the Manfred von Richthofen, as Mongoose had wanted to know what jagulars and tiggers were. Irizarry had already taught her about mongooses, and he’d read
Alice in Wonderland
so she would know what a Cheshire cat was. Two days later – he still remembered it vividly – she had disappeared quite slowly, starting with the tips of the long coils of her tail and tendrils and ending with the needle-sharp crystalline array of her teeth. And then she’d phased back in, all excited aquamarine and pink, almost bouncing, and he’d praised her and stroked her and reminded himself not to think of her as a cat. Or a mongoose.

She had readily grasped the distinction between jaguars and jagulars, and had almost as quickly decided that she was a jagular; Irizarry had almost started to argue, but then thought better of it. She was, after all, a Very Good Dropper. And nobody ever saw her coming unless she wanted them to.

When the faint glow of the toves came into view at the bottom of the pore, he felt her shiver all over, luxuriantly, before she shimmered dark and folded herself tight against his scalp. Irizarry doused his own lights as well, flipping the passive infrared goggles down over his eyes. Toves were as blind as Mongoose was deaf, but an infestation this bad could mean the cracks were growing large enough for bigger things to wiggle through, and if there were raths, no sense in letting the monsters know he was coming.

He tapped the tendril curled around his throat three times, and whispered, “Go.” She didn’t need him to tell her twice; really, he thought wryly, she didn’t need him to tell her at all. He barely felt her featherweight disengage before she was gone down the corridor as silently as a hunting owl. She was invisible to his goggles, her body at ambient temperature, but he knew from experience that her barbels and vanes would be spread wide, and he’d hear the shrieks when she came in among the toves.

The toves covered the corridor ceiling, arm-long carapaces adhered by a foul-smelling secretion that oozed from between the sections of their exoskeletons. The upper third of each tove’s body bent down like a dangling bough, bringing the glowing, sticky lure and flesh-ripping pincers into play. Irizarry had no idea what they fed on in their own phase, or dimension, or what ever.

Here, though, he knew what they ate. Anything they could get.

He kept his shock probe ready, splashing after, to assist her if necessary. That was sure a lot of toves, and even a Cheshire cat could get in trouble if she was outnumbered. Ahead of him, a tove warbled and went suddenly dark; Mongoose had made her first kill.

Within moments, the tove colony was in full warble, the harmonics making Irizarry’s head ache. He moved forward carefully, alert now for signs of raths. The largest tove colony he’d ever seen was on the derelict steelship
Jenny Lind
, which he and Mongoose had explored when they were working salvage on the boojum Harriet Tubman. The hulk had been covered inside and out with toves; the colony was so vast that, having eaten everything else, it had started cannibalizing itself, toves eating their neighbors and being eaten in turn. Mongoose had glutted herself before the Harriet Tubman ate the wreckage, and in the refuse she left behind, Irizarry had found the strange star-like bones of an adult rath, consumed by its own prey. The bandersnatch that had killed the humans on the Jenny Lind had died with her reactor core and her captain. A handful of passengers and crew had escaped to tell the tale.

He refocused. This colony wasn’t as large as those heaving masses on the
Jenny Lind
, but it was the largest he’d ever encountered not in a quarantine situation, and if there weren’t raths somewhere on Kadath Station, he’d eat his infrared goggles.

A dead tove landed at his feet, its eyeless head neatly separated from its segmented body, and a heartbeat later Mongoose phased in on his shoulder and made her deep clicking noise that meant, Irizarry! Pay attention!

He held his hand out, raised to shoulder level, and Mongoose flowed between the two, keeping her bulk on his shoulder, with tendrils resting against his lips and larynx, but her tentacles wrapping around his hand to communicate. He pushed his goggles up with his free hand and switched on his belt light so he could read her colors.

She was anxious, strobing yellow and green. Many, she shaped against his palm, and then emphatically, R.

“R” was bad – it meant rath – but it was better than “B.” If a bandersnatch had come through, all of them were walking dead, and Kadath Station was already as doomed as the
Jenny Lind.
“Do you smell it?” he asked under the warbling of the toves.

“Taste,” said Mongoose, and because Irizarry had been her partner for almost five Solar, he understood: the toves tasted of rath, meaning that they had recently been feeding on rath guano, and given the swiftness of toves’ digestive systems, that meant a rath was patrolling territory on the station.

Mongoose’s grip tightened on his shoulder. “R,” she said again. “R. R. R.”

Irizarry’s heart lurched and sank. More than one rath. The cracks were widening.