Adam's Ladder

  ADAM’S LADDER

  An anthology of dark science fiction

  Co-edited by Michael Bailey

  & Darren Speegle

  ADAM’S LADDER © 2017 by Written Backwards

  Anthology edited by Michael Bailey and Darren Speegle

  Cover and interior design by Michael Bailey

  Individual works © 2017 by individual authors

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, scanning, recording, broadcast or live performance, or duplication by any information storage or retrieval system without permission, except for the inclusion of brief quotations with attribution in a review or report. Requests for reproductions or related information should be addressed to written@nettirw.com.

  The stories within this anthology are works of fiction. All characters, products, corporations, institutions, and/or entities of any kind in this book are either products of the respected authors’ twisted imaginations or, if real, used fictitiously without intent to describe actual characteristics. All lyrics are what you make of them.

  Published by Written Backwards - www.nettirw.com

  ISBN: 978-1-62641-268-2

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CH-CH-CHANGES

  Chaz Brenchley

  FILIGREE, MINOTAUR, CYANIDE, BLOOM

  Damien Angelica Walters

  HOW HE HELPED

  Ramsey Campbell

  SPIRITS

  Gene O’Neill

  THE MYTHIC HERO MOST LIKELY TO SQEEZE A STONE

  B.E. Scully

  MY FATHER, DR. FRANKENSTEIN

  John Langan

  UNDERSOUND

  Mark Morris

  A LAUGHING MATTER

  Erinn L. Kemper

  THE SERILE

  Paul Meloy

  EYES OF THE BEHOLDERS

  Lisa Morton

  STRINGS

  Tim Lebbon

  SLICED BREAD

  Jeffrey Thomas

  I WILL BE THE MAKING OF YOU

  Rena Mason

  NAMELESS CITIZEN

  Brian Evenson

  PAINTING THE BURNING FENCE

  Roberta Lannes

  PITY THIS BUSY MONSTER NOT

  Scott Edelman

  AN END TO PERPETUAL MOTION

  Mark Samuels

  SWIFT TO CHASE

  Laird Barron

  CONTRIBUTORS

  CH-CH-CHANGES

  Chaz Brenchley

  all art aspires

  to the condition of music

  The rules are few, at Parry’s. Indeed, they’re barely rules at all, so much as customs observed—but they are scrupulously observed, and they can be rigorously enforced at need. Don’t make that necessary. That’s Rule One.

  Rule Two? Don’t call it a bar. Parry’s quite clear about that; it’s an establishment.

  Don’t let that stop you paying for your drinks. He’s quite clear about that, too.

  If you must kick up a ruckus, keep it quieter than the pilots’. They’re privileged; you’re not. And whatever else you do, don’t approach the pilots. If one of them brings you in, that’s fine: join their table, cling close, and welcome. If they beckon you over, the same applies. But always, always wait to be invited. Don’t ever try to push in.

  Actually, that’s what most of the rules boil down to. It’s the pilots’ place of choice, and Parry means to keep it that way. Which means they get to do what they want, and you don’t. That’s it.

  ~

  To be fair, that’s more or less the rule all over the Margin, all along the Limb, all through human space. With them so few and the need so great, who’s ever going to say no to a pilot? Whoever they are, whatever they ask? Pilots are the new black: they are always in order and may never be debated.

  Actually, that last is a joke, mostly. Pilots make a disordered crew by definition, and they’ll cheerfully debate with each other or with anyone, if ‘debate’ means argue stubbornly or viciously or relentlessly, up to the very edge of fighting. Pilots don’t fight each other, and you never, ever fight with a pilot. Not in Parry’s, certainly, but not actually anywhere.

  Actually, maybe that’s Rule One. Maybe that’s all the rules there are, all over. Let pilots be, let them find their own ways to damnation.

  Trust me, they’ll do that. They will.

  ~

  Tonight, they’re being peaceable enough. Parry’s all but slumbers under the dead weight of their sobriety. That’s literal, more or less—pilots don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t drug when they’re in port: they’re trying to come down, to remember what it’s like to live with all the limits of a body and claim it as their own, to stop at the inside of their skin—but it’s also situational. Out beyond Parry’s door lie the lights and noise and reckless abandonment of the Margin, every twisted thing that humans find or do for fun compressed into a mile or two of sheetwalk, into a few thousand urgent transient bodies. Pilots are all about the body, this side of n-space: they’ll do most of what’s available out there. And then they’ll come in here, because Parry’s is quiet and comfortable, a place to catch their breath and touch base with their inner selves in the company of colleagues.

  They come in here a lot. Which is why anybody else comes too, why everybody else looks in: just to drink where pilots are and watch how pilots sit, listen to the murmur—or the yelling—of their voices and breathe a little of their rarefied air. Nothing rubs off and no one would want it to, and even so. This is still the place to be, and here they are.

  Not all, of course. Not most, for human space is a skein stretched fine and far; not even most of those you might have hoped to see hereabouts, if you were that kind of fan, if hope was still a thing for you. By definition, pilots are a fly-by-night crew, here and gone, always in demand. Some like the long haul, one end of the Limb to the other; they might not show their faces in Parry’s from one year’s end to the next. Some are in and out, barely flitting outside this system before they’re back, barely pausing before they’re off again, barely worth the effort and the risk.

  And n-space is another variable, as whimsical as they are. Some times, some places—if there’s a difference, if you could ever confidently divide time from space and say which was which—it may be slick as oil, squeezing ships through, spitting them out; or else it can be thick as porridge, clinging, close to impassable. And some pilots are cautious by nature, taking it slow and sweating all the way, while some are devil-may-care, slapdash, heroic in the worst way. Not noticeably dead yet, but even so. Mostly those get the cargo runs; passengers would sooner wait for someone steadier. Relatively steadier.

  ~

  So, yes: Parry’s is quiet just now. Some of the regulars are out. Mercy Mercy and Ferrel have been gone so long, people are starting to think them lost, adrift in n-space. Irrecoverable. No surprise in Ferrel’s case, but Mercy would be a real loss. Everyone loves Mercy Mercy; she’s the acceptable face, the people’s pilot, the single splendid example you can point to.

  Could point to. Maybe. They’ve not been gone long enough to be certain, but the question’s in the air now, whether they’re ever coming back. The strangest thing, of course, is that they went together in the first place. Pilots never do that. They’re too rare to risk, and if one gets into trouble the other can’t get them out of it. Navigation isn’t a science. It isn’t even an art: it’s an embedding, an act of faith written in the body, inherently individual. Impossible to repeat, almost—almost!—impossible to survive.

  Which of course is why and how pilots are what they are, and why we put up with them.

  ~
br />   This night—it’s always night on the Margin, if “night” means “time to be out on the sheetwalk, looking for trouble,” which it always, always does—there’s the one settled table in Parry’s, as so often, with the onlookers coming and going, staring and pretending not to stare, never quite daring to cross that gap that pilots create and Parry enforces, that narrow space between one table and the next, that unbridgeable gulf.

  You want to cross that gulf, you’ll need to fly. Unless you’re lifted over.

  This is Brone’s table, by custom and practice and—well, by mere occupation. Brone the Shutterself entity, the pilot who never flies, who almost never leaves Parry’s. It migrates in a slow shuffle between a room in the back and a table, this table, its table out here in the front where everyone can see, for values of seeing that include being baffled by layers of swaddling drab duffel. It has a head by courtesy, by inference alone, that hooded peak that’s narrower than what might be its shoulders. It has a drinking tube of sorts, that emerges to suck at whatever’s in its glass; some people think that’s a finger. Hollow and translucent and plumbed in, but a finger none the less.

  None the less: Brone is as human as any of them, these pilots that we’ve made by luck and guesswork, great endeavour and great loss. So many have been lost in n-space, lost to us, despite our need; none has ever—quite—lost their humanity, despite the changes bred into them, the wild experimentation, the slow gestation over generations. Despite random mutation and surgical intervention, despite mind-altering treatments and mind-altering drugs, despite it all. They’re still human, if only because we say so. Because we could not bear for them to give that up, or because we could not bear to be the ones who made them or named them something other, or because we could not trust them after.

  ~

  “Bodies like ships like buildings, machines for living in,” says Ferenor who has never seen a building, who was bred in a bottle and hatched in orbit, cultivated for this life she leads. One of the rare successes, a design for a pilot that actually worked. Once, it worked once. All her litter-mates died or grew strange, strange as she, without the benefit of her ability. An unreproducible result; an experimental method recorded, remembered, not to be repeated. You can’t call it science, if it never works again.

  As usual, Brone says nothing. Does it even listen? Who can, who could possibly say? There’s no standard measure for a pilot, any pilot; but whatever concept you have of what it means to be a pilot—or what it means to be human—the Shutterself entities are far and far beyond that. Far and far.

  Ferenor wears her body as lightly and as fleetingly as she does her opinions—unless that’s the other way around—whereas everything in Brone is slow and fixed and solid. If it knows change, that could only be on a geologic scale. Ferenor is air, limitless and uncontained, a breeze across Brone’s mountain. Here and gone. Perhaps that’s what it cherishes in her. Perhaps it likes them fickle, transient, departed.

  Perhaps that’s why it stays.

  “Living is incidental.” So says Ten Barry, the devolved clone. His—brother? twin? simulacrum?—who answers to the same name is for once absent from his side. They’re doing their bewildering double act solo, perhaps simply to mystify twice as many people at once. One thing for sure, he won’t be flying a ship alone. It takes them both: that much we know. Not much more, for some pilots are open and some have been thoroughly exposed, but the clone gestalt holds its secrets close. Are there ten? Were there ten? No one has ever seen more than two abroad, and they’re believed to be the same two, though how would you, how would anyone know? And are they a single distributed individual, or a family? Or worse? And above all, of course, how does the flying happen, what’s the methodology, how is it achieved?

  They—or he—won’t say, and there is no power and no law that might compel them. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of such laws exist in draft, all through human space; no jurisdiction has ever dared enact them. Of course it’s for the greater good, we could learn so much, enhance our chances of making another generation of pilots—but what if this generation responded with a blockade, an absolute refusal to fly into that region of space? No government could survive that, however strong or secure their grip. The hold that pilots have on their privacy is so much stronger, it has never been tested. They’ve never even needed to threaten such a blockade. A politician’s imagination is enough. More than enough. Pilots get what they want, here as everywhere. In Ten Barry’s case, that means he—or they, or what you will—can be oblique, obstructive and infuriatingly unforthcoming, to their dual hearts’ content.

  “How incidental?” Ferenor asks.

  “A ship is a machine, yes—not built for living in, no. Built to journey, to endure n-space, to come out elsewhere, with goods or passengers or war or what you will. The same is true of us: built to journey, built to survive, built to be going somewhere else. If they could make machines instead, they would do that, and do without us gladly. The living are inconvenient, and not at all to the purpose.”

  It’s true enough, and hardly a new argument. In honesty, it’s hardly an argument at all. No autopilot yet attempted has even found a way into n-space, never mind emerging otherwhere. Those that have been taken into n-space by human pilots and triggered there have never found their way out, despite the best of planning. Either the pilot has abandoned the experiment and taken control again, or else the ship has been lost entirely, to our great cost. One pilot down, each time. Very few such experiments occur. We can’t afford them.

  But if Ten Barry’s not speaking metaphorically, at least he’s told us something about his own origins. Built to journey, he said. If that’s to say the devolved clone was created to pilot a ship, if this is someone’s private and successful experiment—well, that’s something we didn’t know before. It might have been happenstance; many pilots are completely unprepared, unschooled, unexpected. Most, perhaps.

  Perhaps that’s why you rarely see Ten Barry—either Ten Barry, or any—without the other, or one other, at his side. Perhaps they act as a guard on each other’s tongue, and here’s this one free tonight, saying more than he meant, perhaps.

  Saying it to pilots, though. There’s no one else at Brone’s table today, and no one close enough to overhear. Parry has a brisk way with eavesdroppers, be they human or mechanical or something other.

  Pilots don’t care, particularly. They’re not big on origin stories from others, when they all have their own; and nor are they particularly big on posterity, that relentless search for the next generation, for more and more reliable and better pilots, better controlled. They like themselves pretty much the way they are. For sure they like the life, the privilege, the freedom.

  For sure, Maellelin was never built to be a pilot. If she had been, they’d have built her to a standard measure; she wouldn’t need a booster-seat just to join the pilots’ table. She had the gift of it, that feeling, a sense of n-space unfolding all about her; it wasn’t enough, so she had herself rebuilt. Not to scale, no. Just everything she needed, to suit her particular vision. Eyes seven times the size, and so forth. It’s said that there are other changes, less clear to be seen: at the molecular level, her brain and nerves rewired. She doesn’t need drugs to ease her passage through n-space, nor devices to find her way about. She only has to look. That she comes with her own ship—bespoke again, with a cockpit tailored to her size—is just a bonus.

  She’s promised that scientists can have her blueprints, her biotech and her body, once she’s gone. If they can figure out what she was or what she had to start with, and then the nature and scope of her alterations, see what she made of herself, maybe she’ll be replicable. That’s if she dies within reach, within our knowledge. If she doesn’t lose herself out there somewhere, beyond recall or investigation. We speak of human space as though it were coherent and within bounds, as though we were secure in our holding and in our travelling back and forth, known roads swept free of danger, b
ut none of that is true. Not many pilots die in their beds, in port, convenient for autopsy and study.

  A lot of them may not be dead at all. Adrift in n-space, beyond all understanding—who knows, who can tell?

  Just how late are Ferrel and Mercy Mercy, anyway?

  They’re not here, that’s all we know. Not here now. Maybe they’ll blow in tomorrow, all smiles and ease, full of news and great occasions. A shipful of cargo and great expectations, a new route won, a new system discovered. Something.

  Maybe not. Magical thinking is endemic, where pilots are concerned. Their whole process, their individual processes seem halfway to magic at least. People say that it’s unlucky to wish them well: that the harder you struggle to believe they’ll bring their ships in safe, the less likely that is to happen. Scientists say that. It’s been measured. People try not to think about it, mostly.

  Murun is here, has brought his ship in safe. To everyone’s always surprise. Murun is really not what you’d look for, in a pilot. He does not inspire confidence. Really not. The best of Murun is his companion Telfer, always at his side, calm and cooling and engaged. Telfer’s the one you’d want in control, except that Telfer is no pilot. Telfer’s just the rock, the counterweight, ballast or reaction mass or whatever metaphor you like: what allows Murun to work, that’s Telfer. Possibly also what keeps Murun sane, if sane he be. Pilots don’t usually fly with a partner—come to that, pilots don’t usually have a partner—but every one’s exceptional in some way, and this is Murun’s.

  Also he’s an asshole and no one knows why Telfer stays with him, but there it is. Here they are.