Paul McAuley: Residuals

“Mitchellite is strange stuff, Ray. Strange matter. It shouldn’t exist, not in our universe, at least. It’s a mixture of elements all with atomic weights more than ten times that of uranium. It shouldn’t even get together in the first place without tremendous energies forcing the quarks together, and it should fly apart in a picosecond after its creation. But it doesn’t. It’s metastable. It makes holes in reality, increases quantum tunneling so that things can leak through from one universe to another. That’s how they probed us. Sent a probe through on the atomic scale and let it grow. Maybe they sent millions of probes, and only one hit the right configuration. Before we sent up astronauts, we sent up chimps and dogs. That’s what they did. They sent through seeds of the things we saw, and they lodged and grew.”

“In the cows.”

Great chunks had been ripped out of the cows I found. Nyquist thought it was chainsaw butchers, until I dug around and found the blisters inside the meat. Like tapeworm cysts. And Susan, Susan, when we got her out…

“In the cows,” Mitchell says. “That was the first stage. And then they took Susan. That was the second stage, Ray. First chimps, then the astronauts. But we stopped it.”

“Yeah. We stopped it.”

Mitchell doesn’t hear me. He’s caught up in his own story.

He says, “They gave the first astronauts ticker-tape parades down Wall Street, but what happened to the chimps? First time around they picked us up and husked us of our stories and forgot us. Second time is the ticker-tape parade.”

Susan never came around. That was a blessing at least. Doc Jensen wouldn’t believe me when I told him that I figured what had happened to the cattle was happening to her. Not until that night, when the things started moving under her skin. He tried to cut them out then, but they were all through her. So I did the right thing. Doc Jensen couldn’t, even though he saw what was inside her. He’d still stuck with his oath, even though he had a bottle of whiskey inside him. So I did what had to be done, and then we went out and blew up the ship.

Mitchell tells me, “You have to believe it, Ray. This time they won’t forget us. This time we’ll control it. They tried to discredit me. They stole my records, they said I was as crazy as Nyquist and tried to section me, they made up stories about finding terrestrial deposits of Mitchellite. Well, maybe those were real. Maybe those were from previous attempts. It’s a matter of configuration.”

He gestures with the shotgun again, and that’s when I cold-cock him.

He thought I’d be on his side. He thought I wanted nothing more than fame, than to get back the feeling we had in those two days. He was right. I did. His mistake was that he thought I’d pay any price. And forgetting to put on a shirt.

The crowbar bounces off his skull, and he falls like an unstrung puppet. I kick the shotgun off the domed roof and then he looks up at me and I see what he’s done to himself. The sunglasses have come off, and his left eye is a purple mandala.

When I finish, there isn’t much left of the top of his head. In amongst the blood and brains: glittering purple-sheened strands, like cords of fungus through rotten wood. A couple of the things inside him try to get out through the scars on his back, but I squash them back into Mitchell’s flesh.

After I kill Mitchell, I take the gasoline from his generator and burn the dome without looking to see what’s inside it, and smash as much of the whole center of the maze as I can. I work in a kind of cold fury, choking in the black smoke pouring out of the dome, until I can hardly stand. Then I toss the crowbar into the flames and walk out of there.

There’s no sign of the FBI agents, although their car is still there when I get out. Winter and Bissette are still back there, incorporated. I hope to God they’re dead, although it isn’t likely. But the maze has stopped growing, I know that. The hght’s gone from it. There’s a cell phone in the glove compartment, and I use the redial button and tell the guy on the other end that Winter and Bissette are lost, that the whole place has to be destroyed.

“Don’t go in there to look for them. Burn it from the air, it would give them a kindlier death. Burn it down and blow it up. Do the right thing. I made a start. They won’t come back.”

When I say it, for the first time, it sounds finished.