The Starry Rift Part 36

"Everything we don't know," sighed Jenny. "What are they, really? Why have they suddenly appeared all over the place in the last ten years, when we all thought they were just . . . just made up."

"They're killing machines," I explained. "Bioengineered self-replicating guerilla soldiers, dropped here kind of by mistake a long time ago. They've been in hiding mostly, waiting for a signal or other stimuli to activate. Certain frequencies of radio waves will do it, and the growth of cell phone use . . ."

"So what, vampires get irritated by cell phones?"

A smile started to curl up one side of her mouth. I smiled too, and kept talking.

"You see, way back when, there were these good aliens and these bad aliens, and there was a gigantic s.p.a.ce battle-"

Jenny started laughing.

"Do you want me to do a personality test before I can hear the rest of the story?"

"I think you'd pa.s.s," I said. I had tried to make her laugh, even though it was kind of true about the aliens and the s.p.a.ce battle. Only there were just bad aliens and even worse aliens, and the vampires had been dropped on Earth by mistake. They had been meant for a world where the nights were very long.

Jenny kept laughing and looked down, just for an instant. I moved at my highest speed-and she died laughing, the splinter working instantly on both human nervous system and the twenty-four-hours-old infestation of vampire nanoware.

We had lost the war, which was why I was there, cleaning up one of our mistakes. Why I would be on Earth for countless years to come.

I felt glad to have my straightforward purpose, my a.s.signed task. It is too easy to become involved with humans, to want more for them, to interfere with their lives. I didn't want to make the boss's mistake. I'm not human, and I don't want to become human or make them better people. I was just going to follow orders, keep cleaning out the infestation, and that was that.

The bite was low on Jenny's neck, almost at the shoulder. I showed it to the VET people and asked them to do the rest.

I didn't stay to watch. My arm hurt, and I could hear a girl laughing, somewhere deep within my head.

GARTH NIX was born in 1963 in Melbourne, Australia, and grew up in Canberra. When he turned nineteen, he left to drive around the UK in a beat-up Austin with a boot full of books and a Silver-Reed typewriter. Despite a wheel literally falling off the car, he survived to return to Australia and study at the University of Canberra. He has since worked in a bookshop, as a book publicist, a publisher's sales representative, an editor, a literary agent, and a public relations and marketing consultant. He was also a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve, but now writes full-time.

His first story was published in 1984 and was followed by novels The Ragwitch, Sabriel, Shade's Children, Lirael, Abhorsen, the six-book YA fantasy series The Seventh Tower, and most recently, the seven-book Keys to the Kingdom series. He lives in Sydney with his wife and their two children.

His Web site is www.garthnix.com.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

I tend to write short stories when I should be working on a novel. "Infestation" was written when I was supposed to be checking page proofs of my novel Sir Thursday, so I guess this story can also be cla.s.sified as the product of an avoidance technique. At least it is a more productive technique than making a cup of tea or reading the newspaper, two activities that often occur when I am supposed to be working on a book.

The image of the out-of-place surfer dude vampire hunter came first with this story. He was all alone, without any context, and the rest came into focus around him as I worked out who (and what) he actually was. Because I wanted to write a story specifically for this collection, it had to be SF, not fantasy (though it could have gone down that road). As Jonathan Strahan was reminding me to hurry up with it, the various elements that were floating around in my head went into a kind of pressure cooker. I had the ingredients, the customer was demanding science fiction, and I just had to cook it right.

As befits the pressure-cooker a.n.a.logy, I wrote the first draft of the story very quickly, in just a couple of days. Then I spent rather more time spread over several months fine-tuning it and ended up (as I usually do) delivering the final version later rather than sooner.

It's not the first "vampires as aliens" story, nor is it the first story to depict major religious figures as interfering aliens, but while it is not particularly original in its big ideas, I hope the smaller ideas and details, the mood, and the style will all make it work for the reader.

PINOCCHIO.

Walter Jon Williams.

Errol has the kind of eagerness that you only see when someone can't wait to tell you the bad news. I can see this even though his hologram, appearing in the corner of my room, is a quarter real size.

"Have you seen Kimmie's flash?" he asks. "It's all about you. And it's, uh-well, you should look at it."

I'm changing clothes and sort of distracted.

"What does she say?" I ask. Because I figure it's going to be, Oh, Sanson didn't pay enough attention to me at the dance, or something.

"She says that you took money for wearing the Silverback body," Errol says. "She says you're a sellout."

Which stops me dead, right in the middle of putting on my new shorts.

"Well," I say as I hop on one foot. "That's interesting."

I can tell that Errol is very eager to know whether Kimmie's little factoid is true.

"Should I get the Pack together?" he asks.

I stop hopping and put my foot on the floor. My shorts hang abandoned around one ankle.

"Maybe," I said, and then decide against it. "No. We're meeting tomorrow anyway."

"You sure?"

"Yeah." Because right now I want a little time to myself. I've got to think.

THINGS TO DO IF YOU'RE A GORILLA * Make a drum out of a hollow log.

* Look under the log for tasty grubs and eat them.

* Pound the drum while your friends do a joyful thumping dance.

* Play poker.

* Make a hut out of branches and native gra.s.ses. Demolish it. Repeat.

* Groom your steady.

* Learn sign language. (It's traditional.) * Do exhibition ballroom dancing.

* Go to the woods with your friends. Lie in a pile in the sun. Repeat.

* Intimidate your friends who are gibbons or chimps.

* Attend a costume party wearing eighteenth-century French court dress.

* Race up and down the exteriors of tall buildings. Extra points for carrying an attractive blonde on your shoulder, but in that case beware of biplanes.

* Join a league and play gorillaball. (Rules follow.) I pull on my shorts and knuckle-walk over to my comm corner. My rig is an eight-year-old San Simeon, a.s.sembled during the fortnight or so when Peru was the place to go for things electronic-it's old, but it's all I need considering that I hardly ever flashcast from my room anyway. I mostly use it for school, and sometimes for editing flashcast material when I'm tired of wearing my headset.

I squat down on a little stool-being gorilloid, I don't sit like normal people-and then turn on the cameras so I can record myself watching Kimmie's broadcast.

I don't think about the cameras much. I'm used to them. I scratch myself as I tell the San Simeon to find Kimmie's flash and show it to me.

Kimmie looks good. She's traded in the gorilloid form for an appealing human body, all big eyes and freckles and sunbleached hair. She's never been blonde before. The hair is in braids.

She seems completely wholesome, like someone in a milk ad. You'd never know that sometime in the last ten days she came out of a vat.

I watch and listen while my former girlfriend tells the world I'm slime. Vacant, useless, greedy slime.

"He's a lot angrier than people think," Kimmie says. "He always hides that."

Unlike someone, I think, who isn't hiding her anger at all.

For a while this doesn't much bother me. Kimmie's body is new and it's like being attacked by a clueless stranger. But then I start seeing things I recognize-the expressions on her face, the way she phrases her words, the body language-and the horror begins to sink in.

It's Kimmie. It's the girl I love. And she hates me now, and she'll be telling the whole world why.

Kimmie lists several more of my deficiencies, then gets to the issue I've been dreading.

"There was a point where I realized I couldn't trust him anymore. He was taking money for the things he used to do for fun. That's when I stopped being in love."

No, I think, you've got the sequence wrong. Because it was when you started pulling away that I got insecure, and in order to restore the kind of intimacy we'd had, I started telling you the things I should have kept to myself.

THINGS TO DO WHEN YOU'VE JUST BEEN DUMPED * Lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.

* Feel as if your heart has been ripped out of your chest by a giant claw.

* Find the big picture of her you kept by your bed and rip it into bits.

* Wonder why she hates you now.

* Beat your chest.

* Try to put the picture back together with tape. Fail.

* Cry.

* Beat your chest.

* Run up into the hills and demolish a tree with your bare hands.

* Watch her flashcast again and again.

When I watch Kimmie's flashcast for the third or fourth time I notice her braids.

Braids. She's never worn braids before. So I watch the image carefully and I see that the braids are woven with some kind of fluorescent thread that glows very subtly through the cooler colors, violet, blue, and green.

And then I notice that there's something going on with her eyes. I thought they were blue at first, but now I realize that the borders of her irises are shifting, and they're shifting through the same spectrum as the threads in her hair.

I had been paying so much attention to what she was saying that I hadn't been looking at the image.

Image, I think. Now I understand what she's trying to do. I was wrong about her all along.

I call my parents. My mom is 140 years old, and my dad is 87, so even though they don't look much older than me, they have a hard time remembering what it was like to be young. But they're smart- Mom is a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the College of Mystery, and Dad is vice president of marketing for Hanan-and they're both good at strategy.

My dad advises me not to try responding to Kimmie directly. "You're a lot more famous than she is," he points out. "If you get involved in a he-said-she-said situation, you're both legitimizing her arguments and putting her on an equal plane with yourself. It's what she wants, so don't play her game."

"I never liked Kimmie," my mom begins.

Hearing my mom speak of Kimmie in that tone makes me want to jump to Kimmie's defense. But that would be idiotic so I don't say anything.

Mom thinks for a moment. "What you should do is be nice to her," she said. "Saint Paul said that doing good for your enemy is like pouring hot coals on her head."

"A saint said that?"

My mom smiled. "He was a pretty angry saint."

The more I thought about Mom's idea, the more I liked it.

I decided to order up a bucket of hot coals.

I became famous more or less by accident. Forming a flashpack was one of the things my friends and I decided to do when we were thirteen, for no more reason than we were looking for something to do and the technology was just sitting there waiting for us to use it. And, of course, everyone and his brother (and his uncles and aunts) were flashcasting, too. Our first flashcasts were about as amateurish and useless as you would expect. But we got better, and after a while the public, which is to say millions of my peers, began to respond.

What the public responded to was me, which I didn't understand and still don't. I would have thought that if people liked anyone, it would have been Ludmila or Tony-Ludmila was much more glamorous, and Tony had led a much more interesting life. But no-I became the star and they didn't.

The others in the pack either accepted the situation or faded away. I think I'm still friends with the ones who left, but I don't see them very often. Being famous has a way of taking you away from one world and putting you in another.

In flashcast after flashcast it turned out that I was good at only one thing, which was explaining to other people what it's like to be me. In our world, where there are very few young people, that turns out to be an important skill.

Kids are pretty thin on the ground. I have a parent who's over a hundred and who looks maybe twenty-five, and who is essentially immortal. If something happens to the body she's in, she'll be reloaded from one of dozens of backups stored on Earth or in s.p.a.ce. She won't die as long as our civilization survives.

Neither will anyone else. That doesn't leave a lot of room on Earth for children.

In order to have me, my parents had to pay a hefty tax, in order to pay for the resources I'd be consuming as I grew up, and then demonstrate that they had the financial wherewithal to support me until I could earn my own living. Financial resources like that take decades to build. That's why my parents couldn't have children when they were younger.

So by the time they had me, my parents had pretty well forgotten what it was like to be young. My friends' parents weren't young either. We were a very few kids trapped in a world of the very old. I regularly hear from kids who are the only person in their town under the age of sixty.

Sometimes it's good to know that you aren't the only kid out there. Sometimes we have to have help to remind us who we are. Sometimes it's good to have someone to aid you with all the rituals of growing up, the problems of dealing with friends and rivals, the difficulties of courtship, the decisions of what body to wear and what shoes to wear with it. It's good to have a friend you can count on.

Well, boys and girls, that friend is me.

Q: Do we really have to play gorillaball naked?

A: We tried it in darling little blue velvet suits with knickers, but the lacy cuffs got all spoiled.

Next day, the pack meets so that we can practice gorillaball. It's a game that we-mostly me-invented, so now we're sort of obliged to play it.