The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Read online

  The one that Harding finds most amusing is a nursery rhyme, a child’s counting poem littered with nonsense syllables. He recites it under his breath, thinking of the Itsy Bitsy Spider all the while:

  The wiggle giggle squiggle

  Is left behind on shore.

  The widdle giddle squiddle

  Is caught outside the door.

  Eyah, eyah. Fata gun eyah.

  Eyah, eyah, the master comes no more.

  His fingers sting as if with electric shock; they jerk apart, the nodule clattering to his desk. When he looks at his fingertips, they are marked with small white spots of frostbite.

  He pokes one with a pencil point and feels nothing. But the nodule itself is coated with frost now, fragile spiky feathers coalescing out of the humid sea air. They collapse in the heat of his breath, melting into beads of water almost indistinguishable from the knobby surface of the object itself.

  He uses the cork to roll the nodule into the tube again, and corks it firmly before rising to brush his teeth and put his pajamas on. Unnerved beyond any reason or logic, before he turns the coverlet down he visits his suitcase compulsively. From a case in the very bottom of it, he retrieves a Colt 1911 automatic pistol, which he slides beneath his pillow as he fluffs it.

  After a moment’s consideration, he adds the no-longer-cold vial with the nodule, also.

  Slam. Not a storm, no, not on this calm ocean, in this calm night, among the painted hulls of the fishing boats tied up snug to the pier. But something tremendous, surging towards Harding, as if he were pursued by a giant transparent bubble. The shining iridescent wall of it, catching rainbows just as it does in the Audubon image, is burned into his vision as if with silver nitrate. Is he dreaming? He must be dreaming; he was in his bed in his pinstriped blue cotton flannel pajamas only a moment ago, lying awake, rubbing the numb fingertips of his left hand together. Now, he ducks away from the rising monster and turns in futile panic.

  He is not surprised when he does not make it.

  The blow falls soft, as if someone had thrown a quilt around him. He thrashes though he knows it’s hopeless, an atavistic response and involuntary.

  His flesh should burn, dissolve. He should already be digesting in the monster’s acid body. Instead, he feels coolness, buoyancy. No chance of light beyond reflexively closed lids. No sense of pressure, though he imagines he has been taken deep. He’s as untouched within it as Burt’s lobster pots.

  He can only hold his breath out for so long. It’s his own reflexes and weaknesses that will kill him.

  In just a moment, now.

  He surrenders, allows his lungs to fill.

  And is surprised, for he always heard that drowning was painful. But there is pressure, and cold, and the breath he draws is effortful, for certain—

  —but it does not hurt, not much, and he does not die.

  Command, the shoggoth—what else could be speaking?—says in his ear, buzzing like the manifold voice of a hive.

  Harding concentrates on breathing. On the chill pressure on his limbs, the overwhelming flavor of licorice. He knows they use cold packs to calm hysterics in insane asylums; he never thought the treatment anything but quackery. But the chilly pressure calms him now.

  Command, the shoggoth says again.

  Harding opens his eyes and sees as if through thousands. The shoggoths have no eyes, exactly, but their hide is all eyes; they see, somehow, in every direction at once. And he is seeing not only what his own vision reports, or that of this shoggoth, but that of shoggoths all around. The sessile and the active, the blooming and the dormant. They are all one.

  His right hand pushes through resisting jelly. He’s still in his pajamas, and with the logic of dreams the vial from under his pillow is clenched in his fist. Not the gun, unfortunately, though he’s not at all certain what he would do with it if it were. The nodule shimmers now, with submarine witchlight, trickling through his fingers, limning the palm of his hand.

  What he sees—through shoggoth eyes—is an incomprehensible tapestry. He pushes at it, as he pushes at the gelatin, trying to see only with his own eyes, to only see the glittering vial.

  His vision within the thing’s body offers unnatural clarity. The angle of refraction between the human eye and water causes blurring, and it should be even more so within the shoggoth. But the glass in his hand appears crisper.

  Command, the shoggoth says, a third time.

  “What are you?” Harding tries to say, through the fluid clogging his larynx.

  He makes no discernable sound, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The shoggoth shudders in time to the pulses of light in the nodule. Created to serve, it says. Purposeless without you.

  And Harding thinks, How can that be?

  As if his wondering were an order, the shoggoths tell.

  Not in words, precisely, but in pictures, images—that textured jumbled tapestry. He sees, as if they flash through his own memory, the bulging radially symmetrical shapes of some prehistoric animal, like a squat tentacular barrel grafted to a pair of giant starfish. Makers. Masters.

  The shoggoths were engineered. And their creators had not permitted them to think, except for at their bidding. The basest slave may be free inside his own mind—but not so the shoggoths. They had been laborers, construction equipment, shock troops. They had been dread weapons in their own selves, obedient chattel. Immortal, changing to suit the task of the moment.

  This selfsame shoggoth, long before the reign of the dinosaurs, had built structures and struck down enemies that Harding did not even have names for. But a coming of the ice had ended the civilization of the Masters, and left the shoggoths to retreat to the fathomless sea while warmblooded mammals overran the earth. There, they were free to converse, to explore, to philosophize and build a culture. They only returned to the surface, vulnerable, to bloom.

  It is not mating. It’s mutation. As they rest, sunning themselves upon the rocks, they create themselves anew. Self-evolving, when they sit tranquil each year in the sun, exchanging information and control codes with their brothers.

  Free, says the shoggoth mournfully. Like all its kind, it is immortal.

  It remembers.

  Harding’s fingertips tingle. He remembers beaded ridges of hard black keloid across his grandfather’s back, the shackle galls on his wrists. Harding locks his hand over the vial of light, as if that could stop the itching. It makes it worse.

  Maybe the nodule is radioactive.

  Take me back, Harding orders. And the shoggoth breaks the surface, cresting like a great rolling wave, water cutting back before it as if from the prow of a ship. Harding can make out the lights of Passamaquoddy Harbor. The chill sticky sensation of gelatin-soaked cloth sliding across his skin tells him he’s not dreaming.

  Had he come down through the streets of the town in the dark, barefoot over frost, insensibly sleepwalking? Had the shoggoth called him?

  Put me ashore.

  The shoggoth is loathe to leave him. It clings caressingly, stickily. He feels its tenderness as it draws its colloid from his lungs, a horrible loving sensation.

  The shoggoth discharges Harding gently onto the pier.

  Your command, the shoggoth says, which makes Harding feel sicker still.

  I won’t do this. Harding moves to stuff the vial into his sodden pocket, and realizes that his pajamas are without pockets. The light spills from his hands; instead, he tucks the vial into his waistband and pulls the pajama top over it. His feet are numb; his teeth rattle so hard he’s afraid they’ll break. The sea wind knifes through him; the spray might be needles of shattered glass.

  Go on, he tells the shoggoth, like shooing cattle. Go on.

  It slides back into the ocean as if it never was.

  Harding blinks, rubs his eyes to clear slime from the lashes. His results are astounding. His tenure assured. There has to be a way to use what he’s learned without returning the shoggoths to bondage.

  He tries to run back to the Inn, but by
the time he reaches it, he’s staggering. The porch door is locked; he doesn’t want to pound on it and explain himself. But when he stumbles to the back, he finds that someone—probably himself, in whatever entranced state in which he left the place—fouled the latch with a slip of notebook paper. The door opens to a tug, and he climbs the back stair doubled over like a child or an animal, hands on the steps, toes so numb he has to watch where he puts them.

  In his room again, he draws a hot bath and slides into it, hoping by the grace of God that he’ll be spared pneumonia.

  When the water has warmed him enough that his hands have stopped shaking, Harding reaches over the cast-iron edge of the tub to the slumped pile of his pajamas and fumbles free the vial. The nugget isn’t glowing now.

  He pulls the cork with his teeth; his hands are too clumsy. The nodule is no longer cold, but he still tips it out with care.

  Harding thinks of himself, swallowed whole. He thinks of a shoggoth bigger than the Bluebird, bigger than Burt Clay’s lobster boat The Blue Heron. He thinks of die Unterseatboote. He thinks of refugee flotillas and trench warfare and roiling soupy palls of mustard gas. Of Britain and France at war, and Roosevelt’s neutrality.

  He thinks of the perfect weapon.

  The perfect slave.

  When he rolls the nodule across his wet palm, ice rimes to its surface. Command? Obedient. Sounding pleased to serve.

  Not even free in its own mind.

  He rises from the bath, water rolling down his chest and thighs. The nodule won’t crush under his boot; he will have to use the pliers from his collection kit. But first, he reaches out to the shoggoth.

  At the last moment, he hesitates. Who is he, to condemn a world to war? To the chance of falling under the sway of empire? Who is he to salve his conscience on the backs of suffering shopkeepers and pharmacists and children and mothers and schoolteachers? Who is he to impose his own ideology over the ideology of the shoggoth?

  Harding scrubs his tongue against the roof of his mouth, chasing the faint anise aftertaste of shoggoth. They’re born slaves. They want to be told what to do.

  He could win the war before it really started. He bites his lip. The taste of his own blood, flowing from cracked, chapped flesh, is as sweet as any fruit of the poison tree.

  I want you to learn to be free, he tells the shoggoth. And I want you to teach your brothers.

  The nodule crushes with a sound like powdering glass.

  “Eyah, eyah. Fata gun eyah,” Harding whispers. “Eyah, eyah, the master comes no more.”

  WESTERN UNION

  1938 NOV 12 AM 06 15

  NA1906 21 2 YA PASSAMAQUODDY MAINE 0559A

  DR LESTER GREENE=WILBERFORCE OHIO=

  EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY PLEASE ACCEPT RESIGNATION STOP ENROUTE INSTANTLY TO FRANCE TO ENLIST STOP PROFOUNDEST APOLOGIES STOP PLEASE FORWARD BELONGINGS TO MY MOTHER IN NY ENDIT

  HARDING

  GLASS

  DARYL GREGORY

  “It’s the crybabies,” the guard told her. “Now they’re trying to kill each other.”

  Dr. Alycia Liddell swore under her breath, grabbed her keys. Only two weeks into the drug trial and the prisoners were changing too fast, starting to crack.

  In the hospital wing, a dozen guards from an extraction team crowded around an open cell door. They were strapping on pads, pulling on helmets, slapping billy clubs in their palms. It was standard procedure to go through this ritual in full view; more often than not prisoners decided to walk out before the guards came in.

  The shift lieutenant, Arness, waved her to the front of the group. “One of your babies wants to talk to you,” he said.

  She leaned around the door frame. In the far corner of the cell, wedged between the toilet and the wall, two white men sat on the floor, one behind the other, like bobsledders. Lyle Carpenter crouched behind, his thin arms around Franz Lutwidge’s broad chest. Lyle was pale and sweating. In one hand he gripped a screwdriver; the sharpened tip trembled just under Franz’s walrus-fat chin.

  She pictured the metal driving into his jaw and winced.

  Franz’s eyes were open, but he looked bored, almost sleepy. The front of his orange jumpsuit was stained dark.

  Both men saw her. Franz smiled and without moving somehow suggested a shrug: Look at this fine mess. Lyle, though, almost dropped the weapon. “Doc. Thank God you’re here.” He looked ready to burst into tears.

  Alycia stepped back from the door. “Franz is bleeding,” she said to the lieutenant.

  “Lyle already stabbed him. It looks like it stopped, but if he’s bleeding internally we can’t wait for the negotiation team. I thought you might want to take a crack at getting Lyle to drop the weapon.”

  “If I can’t?” But she already knew the answer.

  “I’ll give you three minutes,” he said.

  Lyle and Franz, like the other fourteen men in the study, were chosen for their top scores on Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist. Not that it had been difficult to find them—almost a quarter of the prison population were psychopaths. The makers of GLS-71 knew where to find their target demographic.

  Alycia went through the cell door and stepped toward the two men. Behind her the lieutenant quietly said, “Okay,” and she stopped halfway across the room. He didn’t want her too close.

  “Can you tell me what’s going on, Lyle?” she asked.

  Franz said, “I’m not sure he knows himself,” and Lyle shouted, “Shut the fuck up!” The metal tip jerked and Alycia sucked in her breath. A thin dark line appeared in the skin of Franz’s neck, like the jot of a pen.

  “Lyle, why don’t you give me the screwdriver?” she said.

  “I fucked up, doc. I was going to kill myself, you know? But I knew I had to stop Franz first. I stabbed him in the chest but he jumped up and I knew I’d have to hit him again if I was going to stop him. I knew what I had to do but—” He stopped, inhaled. “The drug made me stop, doc.” He looked at her, his eyes shining with tears. “I saw what I’d done and I almost threw up. I felt like I’d stabbed myself. How can it do that, doc?”

  She couldn’t answer him. No one could. GLS-71 was a failed post-stroke drug, a neuroprotective agent that somehow sensitized mirror neurons throughout Broca’s area. In psychopaths, this seemed to light a new fire. Lyle, for the first time in his life, was experiencing the emotional echo that most people felt almost from birth. See someone slapped and neurons associated with the face lit up in synchrony. See someone kicked and the brain reacted as if you had been attacked. It was enough to merely imagine an act, or remember it, to start a cascade of hormonal and physical responses. Mirror neurons were the first cogs in the complex systems of attachment, longing, remorse. The tripwires of empathy.

  “Lyle, that’s good that you stopped,” she said. “You’re making progress.”

  “You don’t understand!” he shouted. “He’s been talking about getting you alone. This morning he showed me where he was keeping the knife. He told me how he was going to do it, in the one-on-one interviews in your office. He told me the things he was going to force you to do.”

  Alycia looked at Franz. The man wasn’t smiling—not quite. “You could have called a guard, Lyle. You could have just warned me.”

  “See, that’s the thing—I wanted to hurt him. I thought about what he was going to do to you and I felt . . . I don’t know . . . ”

  “Luuv,” Franz said.

  “You don’t know what love is!” Lyle said. “He hasn’t changed at all, doc. Why isn’t it working on him?”

  “Because,” Franz said, his tone condescending and professorial despite the blade at his throat. “I’m in the control group. I didn’t receive GLS.”

  “We all got the drug,” Lyle said. Then: “Didn’t we?”

  Franz rolled his eyes. “Doctor, could you please explain to him about placebos?”

  She felt a flash of anger, and suddenly decided that she wanted to stab Franz herself. But he was right, he was in the control group. The trial was
supposed to be a double-blind, randomized study, with numbered dosages supplied by the pharmaceutical company. But she knew within days which eight men were receiving the real dose—the effects were obvious. The guards started calling them crybabies.

  “He’s playing you, Lyle,” she told him. “Pushing your buttons. That’s what people like Franz do.”

  “You think I don’t know that? Shit, I invented that. I used to be fucking bulletproof. No one got to me, no one fucked with me. Now, it’s like everybody can see right through me.”

  The lieutenant cleared his throat. Alycia glanced back. The mass of helmeted men behind him seemed ready to rush in.

  Franz hadn’t missed the exchange. “You’re running out of time, Lyle,” he said. “Any second now they’re going to send in the king’s men and crack you like an egg. Then they’re going to take you off to solitary, where you won’t be seeing your girlfriend anymore.”

  “What?” Lyle asked.

  “You don’t think they’re going to let you stay in the program after this, do you?”

  Lyle looked at her, eyes wide. “Is that true? Does that mean you’ll stop giving me GLS?”

  They’re going to stop giving it to all you, she thought. After this, the whole nationwide trial would be canceled. “You could have stopped at any time, Lyle. It’s always been voluntary.”

  “But I don’t want to stop taking it! I don’t want to be the guy I was before. Nothing felt real before—everybody was like a cartoon or something, on the other side of the TV screen. They couldn’t hurt me, so I could do whatever I wanted to do them. I was like him.”

  Franz started to say something and Lyle pressed the screwdriver blade into his neck. “You don’t know what he’s like,” Lyle said. “He’s not just some banker who ripped off a couple hundred people. He’s a killer.”

  “What?”

  “He shot two teenagers in Kentucky, buried them in the woods. Nobody ever found them. He brags about it.”

  “Stories,” Franz said.

  Alycia stepped closer and knelt down next to Franz’s outstretched legs. “Lyle, I swear to you, we’ll keep you on GLS. As your doctor I can guarantee that. I took an oath to protect you, and that’s what I’m going to do.” She held out a hand. “Give it to me, Lyle. I know you were trying to protect me, but now you don’t have to be a murderer. I don’t want you to throw away everything you’ve gained.”