Finch by Jeff VanderMeer (4 page)

Albin, just off the phone, out of the corner of his mouth: "I'm not
risking my life for a lost dog. Too many Partials there. Besides, it's an
old Hoegbotton neighborhood." Albin, the Frankwrithe & Lewden
man. Finch might've shot at him back during the war. Former scientist. One of the few not killed by the gray caps or snatched by
foreign powers in the chaos of the Rising.

Finch's mood had soured on the way back to the station. A tortuous
route. The gray caps had banned bicycles and motored vehicles four
years ago. Too many suicide bombings by rebel sympathizers. Not
much fuel anyway, and no one outside the city willing to resupply,
even on the black market. Too dangerous. And few alternatives since
the horses had been eaten long ago.

Instead, makeshift bridges over the canals. Through a sector where a
lot of gray cap buildings had gone up, scrambling the landscape. Changes
didn't correspond to any map. Sliced through existing apartment
complexes, divided or blocked streets. Displayed an arrogance about
the way things had been and were now that angered Finch.

Then a mob to avoid at the corner of Albumuth and Lake, when
he'd almost made it back. One of the huge blood-red drug mushrooms
hadn't yet released the morning ration. Not Finch's problem. But the
addicts were mad. They wanted their fix. Wanted out. They stood
beneath the slow-breathing dead-white gills waiting for the purple
nodules that also fed them. Wanted oblivion. A nice trip into waves of
light and a past that didn't include dead bodies and nightmares.

Maybe someday he'd join them. Instead, another rickety bridge
over another canal. Had looked down at his frowning reflection
in the silver-gray water and hadn't recognized it. Broad shoulders.
Still muscular but losing some of it. Too much alcohol. Not enough
nutrients in the gray caps' food. The man lingering in the water
seemed at least forty-five, not forty. The hooded eyes. The paleness of
the face. Wavery. Indistinct. Never in focus.

"When the time comes, right, Finch?"

"Sure, Wyte," Finch said. "When the time comes."

"You'll know what to do." The voice, once so deep and gravelly, had
changed since Finch had first met Wyte. Become soft and liquid, lighter
yet thicker.

"I'll know what to do."

The ritual conversation.

Ritual had a purpose. Ritual cordoned off fear. Ritual made the
abnormal ordinary. The memory hole beside each of the desks. The deep green vein running the length of Wyte's arm. Pushing up ridgelike against the fabric of Wyte's long sleeve. Like the green carpet
leading back to the curtains and what lay beyond.

Finch took his gun from its holster. Recoiled from the touch of
the grip.

"For Truff's sake," Finch said. Laid it on his desk with a squelch.

The gun had been issued by the gray caps. Dark green exoskeleton,
soft interior. Its guts stained his hand. Reloading didn't seem like an
option. It had been seeping a lot lately.

"I wonder if it's dying on me," Finch said. To Wyte, who sat at the
desk to his left.

Should I have been feeding it?

Wyte grunted. Reflexively writing up reports on nothing in
particular. Lost husbands. Unidentifiable corpses. Vandalism. Finch
had cases, too, but nothing that couldn't wait.

"Hate these things," he said, again to Wyte. Again, to indifference.

Heard Blakely muttering to Gustat: ". . . they're saying that we're
addicted to a special mushroom that grows out of our brains." Gustat
chuckled but it wasn't funny. Rumors could get a detective killed by
some desperate citizen. Any excuse that didn't slip through the fingers.

Finch rummaged in a drawer. Found a worn handkerchief. It predated
the war. He'd gotten it from an expensive clothing store further up the
boulevard. Didn't know why he kept it. Luck? Grimacing, he picked up
the gun with the handkerchief. Shoved the thing into a space under his
desk. Next to the box with the ceremonial sword his father had given him.
Brought back from the Kalif's empire twenty years before. Wrapped in
cloth. Finch could always get to it in a pinch. Made him feel perversely
safer knowing it was there. In its gleaming scabbard.

"I'd rather get shot than use that gun," Finch said, too loud. Not
sure if he meant it.

Gustat and Blakely, joined at the hip, looked up, glared. Both had a
flushed look. Like they'd been drinking.

"Shut up, Finch," Blakely said.

"Yeah, shut up," Gustat echoed. Fiercely.

This caused Dapple to bring a case file so close to his eyes it hid
his face. Dapple was the worst of them. He'd been an artist once. Landscape painter. Watercolors. Popular with the tourists. No
market for that now. No landscapes to speak of that you could spend
hours painting without taking a bullet for your troubles. Sure to
become a druggie, or a creature of the gray caps in his cringing way.
At least Gustat and Blakely, even though they annoyed Finch, still
had their wits about them.

Almost as if to cover for Finch, Wyte asked, "So, Finchy, just how
bad was it?" "Finchy" sounded closer to his real last name, so Wyte
often called him that. To avoid slipping up.

Finch turned toward Wyte. Hadn't wanted to. No telling what he
looked like.

Wyte: a tall man, late forties, with a handsome face, powerful
shoulders and chest. Tattered olive suit. Eyes gray. A spark of
green colonizing the brown of each pupil. Right temple: a purple
birthmark that hadn't been there yesterday. Smelled of cigarette
smoke to cover the stench of mushrooms. Even though cigs were
hard to come by. Once, he could have entered a crowded bar and all
the women would have found a way to stare at him.

"A double," Finch said. "In an abandoned apartment. One gray cap.
One male human." Then told Wyte the rest.

"Dancing lessons gone terribly wrong," Wyte said. His grin only
manifested on the left side of his mouth.

Skinner, next to Wyte, hazarded a snicker. But Skinner snickered
at everything. Finch didn't find it funny. He was still seeing the
bodies. Skinner expressed too much zeal pursuing cases that involved
the rebels. Why hadn't Skinner become a Partial?

"This is nothing good, Wyte." Good equaled will go away quickly.
This could linger.

Wyte, as if realizing his mistake: "Do you want me to take the
memory bulbs?"

"No thanks."

Who knew what a memory bulb would do to Wyte in his state? Finch
didn't want to find out. The late Richard Dorn had sat at his desk for nine
months after the gray caps had forced him to eat a memory bulb despite
his wasting disease. Dead. Turning into a tower of emerald mold. The desk
sat in a corner now, abandoned, a smudge on the seat of the chair.

Worse for suspects kept in the holding cell. Bring in a thief, do the
paperwork, then the gray caps decided. Attempted murder? Might be
disappeared by morning. Or sent to the camps. Or let off with a fine.
The guy Blakely had brought in the other day was still there. Slumped
in a corner. Clearly thought his life was over.

Never bring anyone in unless you have to. Unless you're certain.

"Are we in trouble on this one?" Wyte asked. Black patch on his
neck, slowly moving. Nails a faint green. A whiff of something toxic.

Not the same kind of trouble.

Finch shrugged. "Who knows?" A routine call could turn into
disaster. A disaster could go away overnight.

Wyte leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head. Red stains on
the shirt's underarms.

Finch had known Wyte for more than twenty years. They'd fought in
the wars together. Known the same people before the Rising. Played darts
at the pub. Had drinks. Sudden gut-punching vision: of his girlfriend
back then, a slender brunette who'd worked as a nurse. Laughing at
some joke Wyte had made one night, the days of Comedian Wyte now
long past except for the occasional flare-up that just made it worse.

Some cosmic mistake or cruelty, to work cases together when Finch
had once worked for Wyte as a courier for Hoegbotton. Each a reminder
to the other of better times. Since then, Wyte's wife Emily had left
him. He'd taken up in a crappy apartment just north of the station.
Never saw his two daughters. They'd been smuggled out to relatives
in Stockton before the Rising. Finch couldn't work out how old they
might be now.

Someday Wyte will be a silhouette on the horizon. Someone familiar
made distant.

And Wyte sensed it.

"You can help with the fieldwork going forward, Wyte," Finch said.
If you don't become the fieldwork.

"No problem. Be happy to."

"I'll put my notes in order," Finch said, "and after I use the memory
bulbs, we'll start in on it. Tomorrow."

Wyte wasn't listening anymore. Gaze far away. Disengaged. Apocalyptic
thoughts? Or maybe he was just registering the inside of the building. They all conducted an unspoken war against the station. It tried to
make them forget its strangeness. They tried not to forget.

Finch turned back to his desk and started sorting through the mess.
Hadn't organized it in a week. Hadn't had the energy.

Mirror. Pills to protect against infection. Spore mask for purified
breathing. Writing pad. Pencils. Telephone. Broken telephone.
Folders on open crimes. Folders on closed crimes. Paper clips across
the bottom of drawers. A list he'd made of complaints from people
who had called him, thinking he could help. Usually he couldn't.

Maybe once, early on, he had convinced himself he could do some
good, sometimes even imagined he was a mole, getting close so he could
strike a blow. Imagined he was in it to defend Ambergris from the enemies
that surrounded it. Imagined he was protecting ordinary citizens.

But the truth was he'd been tired, had stopped caring. Broken
down from too much fighting, too many things connected to his
past. And when that spark, that impulse, had returned, it was too
late: he was trapped.

"I'm not a detective."

Heretic: "You're whatever we want you to be, now."

If he just left one day, what would happen to Wyte? To his other
friends? To Sintra?

And: Did they know about Sintra?

Nothing seemed missing from his desk. Still, a good idea to take stock.
Lots of things disappeared during the night, or were replaced by mimics.
More than one detective had screamed, picking up a pencil that was not
a pencil. Finch took out the piece of paper he'd found in the dead man's
hands. Placed it in front of him. What could the words mean? Finch took
out a writing pad, scrawled

Never Lost.

Bellum omnium contra omnes

across the top. Stared at the strange symbol. It looked oddly like a
baby bird to him.

Randomly ripped from a book to write on? Or something more?
Abandoned the question. Wrote:

two bodies

fell

Thought about the Partial, daring to contradict Heretic. Heretic's
secret amusement. What did that mean? At least he knew what
Heretic on the scene meant: the gray cap must suspect the case had
some connection to the rebels and their elusive commander, the Lady
in Blue. She who was now larger than the city and yet not of the city.
Most saw her hand in any act that seemed to cause the gray caps grief.
Although such acts of resistance seemed rarer and rarer. Some thought
she didn't exist. Or was dead.

The trapped rebel soldiers. The Lady in Blue.

Was the fate of either better or worse than his?

Finch sees again, back across six long years, the columns of tanks and
infantry in retreat, traveling through the city toward the north.
Recognizes with hindsight that the path they took had been chosen
by the gray caps. Forced by the rising water.

Distant explosions had split the air as the gray caps attacked
stragglers at the end of the column. Even then, small-arms fire no
longer registered with Finch unless it was close by.

Despite the risk, many people had come out to watch the rebels.
From the roadside. From balconies. Peering out of windows reinforced
with metal bars. To bear witness to the rumbling tread of the tanks.
To remember the faces of the troops: pale and dark, old and young
and middle-aged. Beneath green helmets with the intertwined
H&S/F&L insignia that rankled so many. Armed with automatic
weapons, bayonets, knives. Most in uniform. Many damaged. A welter of bandages on heads, legs, arms, that hid evidence of strange
fungal wounds.