Finch by Jeff VanderMeer Read online

  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.

  One man's face held Finch's attention. Salt-and-pepper beard, creases in his forehead, wrinkles that made him look as if he were squinting. A red patch on his cheek. Body slumped, then tensed, against the lurching of the tank. A gaunt hand clutching his Lewden rifle, knuckles prominent. Gaze turned forward, as if unwilling to acknowledge the present.

  Which had made Finch realize again that these men and women leaving, they were the same ones who had fought one another during more than three decades of the War of the Houses, broken only by armistices, cease-fires, and the dream of empire. The ones who had brought ruination upon Ambergris in so many ways before the Rising.

  Yet they were still from Ambergris, of Ambergris, and even Finch felt it in his chest, Wyte standing there beside him with his Emily. Almost as if Ambergris itself was retreating, leaving behind only ghosts and children. But also leaving a perverse giddiness. A sense of celebration at seeing such a mighty force. The retreat portrayed as a new beginning. The lull before the launching of a great offensive.

  Even the tanks were part of Ambergris. They'd come out of the eighty-year-old metal deposits found in eastern Ambergris that had catapulted the city out of the past but not yet into the future.

  Rebel tanks had two turrets: one pointed ahead, one unseen beneath that pointed at the ground. Specially built to open up and deliver bombs to underground gray cap enclaves. Once, their rough syncopated song had been heard all over the city. Juddered through the ground into the walls of buildings and tunnels alike. Like a kind of defiant echoing growl.

  In retreat, though, it was the singing of the troops as they left that Finch heard, their voices ragged over the rumble of the tanks. Patriotic songs composed long centuries before. A refrain that had started as a prayer by the Truffidian monks.

  Holy city, majestic, banish your fears. Arise, emerge from your sleeping years. Too long have you dwelt in the valley of tears. We shall restore you with mercy and grace.

  City of wounds. City of wounding. For a moment, Finch had felt the urge to climb up onto one of the tanks, to join them in what was then the wilderness of North Ambergris. But Finch wasn't one of them. He'd had no officer to report to. Had bought his own weapon. Off the books, off the record. An Irregular, fighting alongside other Irregulars in his neighborhood. Defending their sisters, brothers, parents, and neighbors against the invaders.

  After the last tank had rumbled past, Finch had gone back with Wyte and Emily. To await the next thing. No matter what it might be. The need to work. To eat. To have shelter. People were already telling themselves things might still be better under the gray caps than during the War of the Houses, at least. Joked about it. Like you might about a passing storm.

  Waiting it out at Wyte's house. By candlelight. Drinking. Laughing nervously. Trying to forget. Finch's father dead almost two years.

  Just after midnight: a sound like a giant flame opening up and then winking out. A devastating whump, as of something hitting the ground or rising from it. When they looked outside, they'd seen a dome-like haze above the north part of the bay. Green-orange discharge like sunspots. They'd just watched it. Watched it and not known what to say. What to do. Barricaded the house. Spent the rest of the night with weapons within reach.

  In the morning, a paralyzing horror. Across the bay, when they slipped out through back alleys to get a clear view: the seething area that became known as the HFZ, and no sign of anyone alive. No sign of the tanks. No messages from the rebel leadership.

  Thought but not said: Abandoned. Gone. On our own.

  Then the realization, as the gray caps began to appear in numbers in the streets, and as their surrogates the Partials began to help occupy the city, that the war was over for now. That each citizen of Ambergris would need to make some kind of peace with the enemy.

  Always with the hope sent out across the water toward the HFZ: that the tanks, the men, might come back. Might re-emerge. That the rebels were not dead. Destroyed.

  Lost.

  Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

  4

  id-afternoon. A soft, wet, sucking sound came from the .memory hole beside his desk. Finch shuddered, put aside his notes. A message had arrived.

  Some detectives positioned their desks so they could see their memory holes. Finch positioned his desk so he couldn't see it without leaning over. Tried never to look at it when he walked into the station in the morning. Still, the memory hole was better than the dead cat reanimated on Skinner's doorstep, message delivered in screeched rhyming couplets. Or the mushroom that walked onto Dapple's desk, turning itself inside out. To reveal the message.

  Exhaled sharply. Peered around the left edge of the desk. Glanced down at the glistening hole. It was about twice the size of a man's fist. Lamprey-like teeth. Gasping, pink-tinged maw. Foul. The green tendrils lining the gullet had pushed up the dirty black spherical pod until it lay atop the mouth.

  Finch sat up. Couldn't see it. Just heard its breathing. Which was worse.

  The gray caps always called them “message tubes,” but the term “memory hole” had stuck. Memory holes allowed the detectives to communicate during the day with their gray cap superiors. Finch had no idea if the memory holes were living creatures or only seemed alive. Fluid leaked out of them sometimes.

  Once, impulsive, Finch had crumpled up the wrapper around the remains of his lunch and shoved it down the hole. Lived in fear the rest of the day. But nothing had happened. When he'd thought about it since, it had made him laugh. Heretic, down there, hit in the head with a piece of garbage. Maybe cursing Finch's name.

  Now Heretic's message vibrated atop writhing tendrils.

  Finch leaned over. Grabbed the pod. Slimy feel. Sticky.

  Tossed the pod onto his desk. Pulled out a hammer from the same drawer where he kept his limited supply of dormant pods. Split Heretic's pod wide open. Spraying slime.

  Beside Finch, Wyte winced, got up for some coffee.

  Disgusted, or was it too close to home?

  “There's no pretty way to do it, my friends,” Finch called out. “Just look away.” No one acknowledged him this time. Too usual. Even Finch's refrain.

  In amongst the fragments: a few copies of a photograph of the dead man, compliments of the Partial.

  And a message.

  Pulsing yellow. An egg of living paper. He pulled the egg out of the shattered pod. Began to massage it until it spread out flat. Kept spreading, to Finch's surprise. Then began to unspool. Like a long, wide tongue. And kept on growing.


  That was unusual enough for the other detectives to gather round.

  “What in the hell is that?” Blakely asked, Gustat beside him. Dapple shyly peeked over Blakely's shoulder. Albin and Skinner were out on a call or they'd have been right there too. Anything to waste time.

  “Looks like Heretic's given you a long to-do list,” Gustat said. Too young to have known anything but war and the Rising.

  Finch said nothing. By now, the pliant paper had grown to drape itself over both sides of Finch's desk, sliding into his lap. Clutched at it. Saw the rows of information in the reed-thin, spidery print common to gray cap documents. He let out a long, deep breath.

  “It's the records of everyone who ever lived in the apartment of the double murder I was at this morning. Going back. . .” He checked as the paper finished unspooling. “Going back over a century. More.”

  Pulse quickening. How am I supposed to investigate that?

  MORDEN, JONATHAN, OCCUPANCY 3 MONTHS, 2 DAYS, 11 MINUTES, 5 SECONDS-WORKED IN FOOD DISTRIBUTION IN THE CAMPS ...

  WILDEN, SARAH, OCCUPANCY 8 MONTHS, 3 DAYS, 2 MINUTES, 45 SECONDS-NEVER LEFT THE APARTMENT EXCEPT FOR GETTING FOOD. HAD THREE CATS. LIKED TO READ ...

  A sudden panic. Smothered by the past. Lost in it.

  Tried to get a grip. Wadded the paper up, pocketed the photographs. While the other detectives gave out nervous laughs. Returned to their desks. Frightened again.

  No one wanted this kind of case.

  A sudden anger rose in Finch. Did Heretic really think that this list would be helpful? It was scaring the shit out of him.

  Wyte had been standing behind the others, holding his coffee mug. Loomed now like an actor from backstage, suddenly revealed.

  “A lot of information,” Wyte said.

  Finch glared at him. Hands splattered with yellow and green. “Find me a towel.”

  Wyte put down his coffee, rummaged in a desk drawer.

  SILVAN, JAMES, OCCUPANCY 15 MONTHS, 3 DAYS, I HOUR, 50 MINUTES, 2 SECONDS-COLLABORATOR WITH A SPLINTER REBEL FACTION ...