The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (76 page)

Then she had grasped the girl’s wrist, and had knocked the teapot from her grasp; and, as quickly as she could, was turning on the cold-water-faucet and holding the girl’s hand beneath the resultant flow. Gloria made no attempt to resist. She simply observed the process, as though it were not her hand at all, but someone else’s, despite the fact that the pain must certainly have been very great indeed.

“What has happened? We heard a crash!” Mrs Chaudhury appeared at the door, Uncle Saavit close behind her. At a glance she noted the teapot, which had shattered upon the floor in its fall; the spreading pool of hot tea; the sodden detritus of steeped leaves; Gloria’s reddened wrist. “My God! Are you all right? Here, girl, let me. Saavit, get the mop!” She interposed herself between Amrit and Gloria and took the girl’s hand into her own. “Amrit, the aloe.” Dumbly Amrit turned and left the kitchen, pushing past Saavit’s concerned bluster. In the windowbox on the fire escape, aloe plants were growing; Amrit snapped off three large leaves and hurried back with them.

Meera had come out of her room and was standing in the middle of the parlor. She looked pale, but red around the eyes, as though she had been crying. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s wrong, Mama?”

“Nothing, Meera,” Amrit said over her shoulder. “There’s been a little accident, that is all. Return to your room; I shall be with you momentarily. I wish to speak with you.” She went back into the kitchen. Saavit was busily mopping up the spilled tea and rounding up pieces of broken pot, but otherwise the tableau was the same as when she had left it: her mother-in-law bent over Gloria’s raw wrist, laving it, while Gloria looked on, placidly unconcerned. “The aloe,” Amrit said.

Mrs Chaudhury did not look up. “Thank you, Daughter. If you would be so kind as to split the leaves and scrape the gel into a bowl.”

“Yes,” Amrit said, “Mother.” She took a knife from the drawer, sat down at the kitchen table, and carefully halved the aloe leaves, revealing their glistening interiors. Scoring the gel with the knife, she took the spoon from her saucer and used it to scrape the innards of the leaves into her teacup. Then she conveyed the cup to her mother-in-law, who took it from her without comment. Amrit stood there for a moment, uncertain what to do next; then she turned and left the kitchen.

Meera had left the sitting room. In the hallway outside of Meera’s closet, Amrit hesitated, then knocked. “Meera?”

“I’m here, Mama.”

She sounds so tired, thought Amrit. She pulled the door ajar. Meera was sitting crosslegged on her carpet. A schoolbook lay opened upon her lap. She looked up, saw her mother standing there, and burst into tears. Amrit went over to her and sat down on the carpet beside her. “I’m sorry, Mama,” Meera said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Don’t let them chip me. Please, Mama, don’t let them, please don’t let them, I’ll be good, I’ll do anything, only don’t let them chip me, please please.”

“Hush now, hush.” Amrit took her daughter into her arms and pressed her head against her chest. “Hush, now. Nobody’s going to let anybody chip anybody.”

“But Assistant Vice-Principal said—”

“The Assistant Vice-Principal can go suck a mango,” said Amrit, “and for that matter, so can Vice-Principal Mehta. No one is going to nannychip my daughter, and that is the end of it.”

“But he said – they will expel me – and you work so hard—”

“Yes, yes, your mama works so very hard in her foolish pride to give her daughter the opportunities she was too timid to seek for herself. There are other schools, perhaps not as famous nor as fine. What of it?”

“But, Mama—”

“That is the end of it, Meera. There will be no nannychipping and that is that.” She kissed her daughter upon the top of her sweet head. Then she placed her lips close to Meera’s beautiful ear. “Do not stop feeling, Meera,” she whispered fiercely. “It is good to feel, however inconvenient those feelings may happen to be. For if you cease to feel, you are as good as dead, bugger the bloody Buddha. Do not forget, Meera. Promise me.”

“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.

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.