Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 80

Where am I?

eat alice.

Vinnie. Vinnie's voice, but not in the flatness of the heads-up display anymore. Vinnie's voice alive with emotion and nuance and the vastness of her self.

You ate me, she said, and understood abruptly that the numbness she felt was not shock. It was the boundaries of her body erased and redrawn.

Agreement. Relief.

I'm... in you, Vinnie?

Not a "no." More like, this thing is not the same, does not compare, to this other thing. Black Alice felt the warmth of s.p.a.ce so near a generous star slipping by her. She felt the swift currents of its gravity, and the gravity of its satellites, and bent them, and tasted them, and surfed them faster and faster away.

I am you.

Ecstatic comprehension, which Black Alice echoed with pa.s.sionate relief. Not dead. Not dead after all. Just, transformed. Accepted. Embraced by her ship, whom she embraced in return.

Vinnie. Where are we going?

out, Vinnie answered. And in her, Black Alice read the whole great naked wonder of s.p.a.ce, approaching faster and faster as Vinnie accelerated, reaching for the first great skip that would hurl them into the interstellar darkness of the Big Empty. They were going somewhere.

Out, Black Alice agreed and told herself not to grieve. Not to go mad. This sure beat swampy h.e.l.l out of being a brain in a jar.

And it occurred to her, as Vinnie jumped, the brainless bodies of her crew already digesting inside her, that it wouldn't be long before the loss of the Lavinia Whateley was a tale told to frighten s.p.a.cers, too.

Annie Webber Because I'm an idiot-and because my friend Allan is the coffee shop owner and my girlfriend Reesa works there-the Monday after Thanksgiving was my first day at a new job.

Total madhouse. Me and Pat foamed milk and drew shots like a flight line team while Reesa ran the register. It only worked because I'd barista'd at Starbucks and most of the customers were regulars, so they either had their order ready or Reesa already knew it and called it out before they paid. Never underestimate a good cashier.

Allan's has a thing, a frequent customer plan. So Reesa knows the regulars by name.

"Hey, Annie," Reesa said. "Medium cappuccino?"

Annie was pet.i.te, ash-blond hair escaping a seriously awful baby blue knit cap. She handed Reesa four dollars, then dropped the change into the tip jar.

Cappuccino is nice to make, but it's amazing how badly some people butcher it. I ground beans and drew the espresso. Then I foamed cold milk, feeling the pitcher for heat. When the volume tripled, the temperature was right. The sound of the steam changed pitch. I poured milk over the shot, ladled on foam, and sleeved the cup. "Cinnamon?"

"I'll get my own." She held out her hand. I put the cappuccino in it and set the shaker on the counter.

"You're new here?"

"First day."

"You're good." She sipped the drink. "Annie Webber."

"Zach Jones."

I'd have shaken her hand but there was a coffee in it, and another customer was coming.

That night, Reesa's cat Maggie tried to dig me out of bed by pulling at the comforter. I pushed her off, which woke Reesa. "Wha?"

Which is all the erudition you can expect at two in the morning. "d.a.m.n cat," I explained.

Reesa pushed her face against my neck. "I only keep her because of the toxoplasmosis."

Running joke. Toxoplasma is a parasite that makes rats love cat urine.

The parasite continues its life cycle in the cat after the cat eats the rat.

According to some show we saw, it affects people too. And the same show had this amazing stop-motion photography of dying bugs, moist fungus fingers uncurling from their bodies. The fungus makes the infected ants do things so it can infect more ants.

The fungus was awful, and gorgeous. One shot showed a moth, dead-I hope dead-on a leaf, netted with silver lace like a bridal veil.

The next morning Reesa said, "Hi, Annie," but a different voice answered, "Hi, Reesa."

I looked up from the steamer nozzle. A big guy, wearing a padded down coat. "Free coffee today?"

Reesa checked the system. "You guys have ten."

He dropped coins in the tip jar. "Medium cappuccino?"

Pat moved to draw it. I gave her a look. "They're all Annie Webber," she said. "By courtesy. Sharing the account."

"Oh."

By the sound, I was scalding the milk. By the time I'd salvaged it, Annie Webber was gone. Reesa waved a pinkish hexagon like a foreign coin. "Zach, what's this?"

I didn't even recognize the metal, let alone the writing.

On day three, the original Annie Webber returned. Day four was number two. On Friday both came, not together. Then half an hour after the second, I served a third. Cappuccino, let me put on my own cinnamon. "Do you guys all drink the same thing?" I asked.

"You guys?" This Annie was a woman, with hazel eyes and crooked nose.

"The Annie Webbers."

She licked foam off her lip. "Nature's perfect food."

I caught Pat's elbow. "How many Annie Webbers are there? How long before I meet them all?"

She counted in her head. "Five come in regular. The blond and her partners."

"Partners? Like she's poly?"

She shrugged. "I never asked. Maybe they're a cult."

I groped the pinkish coin out. I'd looked it up online, and couldn't find it anywhere.

Sat.u.r.day, Annie wandered in around ten. The original in the awful toque, scarf snugged under her chin.

I handed her the cup and cinnamon. It takes just seconds to get a good foam with a commercial machine. "You left this Tuesday." I laid the coin down.

"That should have been a quarter. Sorry." She traded for a dollar bill. "Put that in the jar?"

"Annie. It wasn't you here on Tuesday."

"Wasn't it?"

She winked and turned, leaving the money. I yelled, "Break!" and dove under the counter. Her heels clicked, but this was the smallest Annie. I caught up. Coat flaring, she turned.

"Where do you go?" I asked.

"Excuse me?"

"You. Annie. Where did the coin come from?"

"It was a mistake. I should have looked at the change, but I was out of you-money."

"So you use the free coffees when you've just come back? When you don't have any, what, local money?"

She stared. "I've been coming to that coffee shop since it opened. You're the first to ask."

"You go other places."

"Other ... places?"

"Other dimensions."

"You read a lot of science fiction, Zach?"

"You're what, kind of multiple bodies one mind?"

"Star Trek," she said.

"Am I wrong? Why us?" I wondered if I sounded as jealous as I felt.

"Best coffee in the universe." She kissed me on the mouth, with tongue.

I woke itching. My tongue, my hands. The soles of my feet.

When I stumbled to the kitchen, Reesa gave me scrambled eggs, but all I wanted was coffee. Coffee and milk and cinnamon. "Zach?" she asked. I had to bite my lip not to correct her.

That's not my name.

I have to go.

I think I've finally met all of Annie Webber.

Faster Gun It's hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, and a hundred times too big to be a ship. It looks like nothing anyone ever saw. And it's crashed just outside Tombstone with something alive inside.

2.

Doc Holliday leaned his head way back, tilting his hat to shade his eyes from the glare of the November sun and said, "Well, that still looks like some Jules Verne s.h.i.t to me."

The hulk that loomed over, curving gently outward to a stalklike prow, could have been the rust-laceworked, rust-orange hulk of any derelict ironclad. Except it was a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, and a hundred times too big to be a ship. It was too big, in fact, to be an opera hall, and that was where Doc's imagination failed him.

Behind him, four women and a man shifted in their saddles, leather creaking. None of them spoke. Doc figured they were just as awed as he was. More, maybe: he'd stopped here once before, when he rode into Tombstone the previous year. None of them had ever seen it.

One of the horses whuffed, stamping baked caliche. A puff of dust must have risen from the impact. Doc could smell it, iron and salt and grit. His own mount picked its way between crumbling chunks of metal and some melted, scorched substance with the look of resin or tortoisesh.e.l.l.

One of the women said something pleased and indistinct to her companions. Doc didn't strain too hard to overhear.

A hot wind dried the sweat on his face beneath the scruff of a three-day beard as his own bay gelding fidgeted. Doc settled it with a touch of his leg. The gelding's sweat soaked the inseam of his trousers between saddle-skirt and boot-top.

Doc let the silence drag, contemplating the great plates and icicles of rust armoring the surface of the whatever-it-was. Its broken spine zig-zagged off into the heat shimmer. A long furrowed sc.r.a.pe marred the desert behind the hulk. That impact-or just the desert-had gnawed several holes in its flanks, revealing buckled decks, dangling pipe and wiring, stretched and twisted structural members.

Here and there in its shadowed depths, blue-white lights still burned, as they had when Doc first saw it.

The other five came up alongside Doc, their horses indolent in the heat. In all honesty, he hadn't been sanguine about bringing four ladies into the trackless desert-even the kind of ladies that wore trousers and went heeled and rode astride like men-but they had been determined on riding out with him or without. He figured "without" was a h.e.l.l of a lot less safe than "with," and in the end chivalry had won. Chivalry, and the need for some ready cash to settle at the faro table, where he owed a debt to that d.a.m.ned John Ringo.

Ringo-and not just the debt-was another reason. Because if Doc hadn't taken the job as a ladies' touring guide, Ringo in his yellow-and-black check shirt sure as h.e.l.l would have. And then Doc might as well have these tenderfoots' deaths on his conscience, as if he had shot them with his own gun. Ringo would have no qualms about relieving them of their horses and cash by any means possible ... shy of earning it fairly.

The horses drifted to a stop again, scuffing and shuffling in a ragged arc: one chestnut, one gray, one dun, and three a.s.sorted browns and bays. For now, Doc's charges-he wasn't sure yet if you could call them companions-were content to stare up at the wreck in silence and awe. Which suited Doc just fine. The dust was making his chest ache, and he didn't feel like talking.

He reached into his pocket for a stick of h.o.r.ehound, peeled the waxed paper back, and bit off a chip to suck on. The last thing he needed now was a G.o.dd.a.m.ned coughing fit.

On Doc's left, the lone other man lifted his hat off a grizzled head. He mopped the sweat from his bald spot with a once-red kerchief that had faded to the color of the dull yellow earth. His name was Bill. He was quiet and needed a shave. Doc hadn't learned too much else about him.

Bill said, "I reckon we should ride around it first?"

"Before we dismount?" The woman who gave him a sideways nod was tall, skinny. Doc thought she might be his wife, but he and all the others called her Missus Shutt. She had long wrists and long hands, and her steel-colored hair was clipped shorter at her nape than most men's. Her gray eyes snapped with charisma and intelligence. She would have been beautiful, Doc thought, but her nose was too small.

The little blonde on her left almost got lost under a wavy, ill-contained billow of caramel-colored hair-the kind of hair that belonged spread out on a man's pillow. Pigeon-breasted, with a rump like a punching pony poured into her shiny-seated trousers, she sat her red gelding with the erect spine and lifted chin of one of Doc's girl cousins back home, as if she was not accustomed to the relaxed Western seat. Her name was Missus Jorgensen.

Beyond her was Miss Lil, the big one who looked to have some Mexican in her. Or maybe some Indian. Or maybe both. It wasn't so different. Miss Lil wasn't just big for a woman-she was broad shouldered and had about a half foot on Doc's five-ten. Her hair twisted in a black braid that snaked out from under her chapeau fat as a well-fed rattler.

The sixth person-and fourth woman-in their little group of adventurers was a beautiful quadroon with a long, elegant jaw and crooked teeth. The Negress's name was Flora. Despite the heat, she wore a fringed suede jacket. It matched the sheath on the saddle by her knee that held the coach gun she seemed to prefer to the pistols all the others carried.