Элинор Арнасон: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

The pungshi vaporizes something akin to a muscle group, laming the creature in her left forward leg. She staggers and shakes Annie from what is not actually her rear just as Zendahl and Janet open fire from her quarters.

“It’s weapon is like a Tazer,” Zendahl cries. “But a very low-powered one.”

“But it obviously considered it a debilitating blow,” adds Annie Troy, who desperately tries to add two and two.

Jim-7 knows the agony of defeat. Hurting from her wounds, surrounded by hostile indigenes, his goal just ahead of him, it makes one last desperate lunge for what appears to be an open doorway.

And Nagkmur leaps aside.

Zendahl snarls and calls him a coward and empties his clip into the massive headball. The creature is like a bomber from the world war, with tail and side gunners operating in all directions. It zaps the colonel again and though it stings rather sharply, he shakes it off and stuffs another clip into his pistol.

Janet Murchison smiles and withholds her fire.

Jim-7 does not know how the two survived her deadly blasts, but he pushes the mystery into a backroom of his mind. The way is clear! Already, she can hear the chords of triumph from her welcoming nest. From the depths of despair, she has seized triumph and the means to return to her folk!

It is just as well she treasures this glorious thought, for it is the last one she forms. When she touches the hull of the strange machine, unimaginable voltages course through her, shorting what she has for nerves, disrupting what serves as brains—there are two of them, actually—and igniting the sacs of hydrogen gas that permeate its body. All thought dissipates into a kaleidoscope of impressions, perceptions, concepts, none of them connected one with another.

Smoke filters from its eyes, and from a few other orifices that are less easily catalogued. Flames begin to consume its insides. It does not fall. Its five legs flex and it settles to the ground much as a zeppelin. Something within it bursts, though the pop is muffled by its bulk.

The electrical charge of the time machine’s skin was enough to knock a Chicago gangbanger senseless. Imagine what it does to a creature far more sensitive to electrical fluids.

The headwalker is settling now like a deflating balloon, the escaping gasses conjuring dying chords. Both Janet and Nagkmur wonder if they are “last words.” Annie deduces that they are only mechanical. Zendahl empties another clip into the carcass, Some of the bullets pierce what might have been vital organs before they were fricasseed, but the body is now inert. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that this particular headwalker is of another species than the Ancient Enemy. The fear and loathing is inbred.

Janet, who overhears all this, wonders if the creature they have slain deserved its fate. The attack on Nagkmur seemed to indicate hostility, but perhaps they had all misinterpreted desperation as hostility.

They had been wrong in one sense. Jim-7 had held no hostility toward any of them. Simply a brusque impatience. There was something he had needed, and there were obstacles in the way of getting it. That was all. But try telling that to the obstacles.

A moment of crisis is followed oft by one of reflection; and so the participants in the fight stand about in solitary attitudes as they contemplate what they have done. For one thing, they have blown out a candle, and that is no small matter even if the candle had promised to set fire to the house.

Zendahl, for one, has no doubt that it was absolutely necessary. That a headwalker could have any motive for coming to New Apkal other than to scout for a conquering fleet is beyond question. After all, the creature had opened fire, and what good reason might there have been for that?

In all her career, Janet has never before shot a suspect and she wonders whether too much time sharing Zendahl’s thoughts has subtly influenced her. The corpse continues to make organ-like sounds as its air-sacs subside, but the cessation of the corresponding mental chords is proof enough not only that the thing is most sincerely dead, but also that it had been a thinking being and not a mere monster. What did any of them really know about the creature? They had deduced that it was marooned, that it needed a component of Nagkmur’s time machine and was desperate enough to try seizing it by force, but had it been any more than a terrified castaway in need of succor? She studies the massive corpse and shakes her head. It is going to be one hell of an inquest.

Annie, properly speaking, is not thinking anything; but she does process the data and reaches a number of conclusions regarding future courses of action. One is that it would be prudent to disassociate herself from the battle. A system analyst for CYBERCOM has no good reason to come to New York and fight aliens. It is not in her job description.

In fact, she had come not to kick alien butt, but to make contact with Stacey Papandreou. That purpose is now moot. Whatever else Stacey is, she is not an android.

Her current position gives Annie access to an enormous amount of data, and her tropism for data is the one thing about her that approaches a sensitive appetite. To become ensnared in the upcoming investigation would put her access, and even her identity, at risk. So to ensure its continuance, she must conceal her participation in this mess, and she immediately begins to catalog the actions that might be taken to secure those ends.

One possibility is that she should create a reserve identity in case her current one becomes unsustainable.

Another is that she should kill all the witnesses.

Nagkmur, for his part, has knelt by the body of Stacey Papandreou and holds her limp hand in his own. Now he is truly alone. He takes refuge in the ancient Texts.

Fire ascends above the Water. The Superior Man examines the nature of things and keeps each in its proper place. The young fox wets his tail just as he completes his river crossing. Do not rush to completion before absorbing lessons of journey. This Quest ends only at threshold of next.

But he senses a change in the second line.

Water recedes. Sun shines down upon Earth. Constantly honing and refining his brilliance, the Superior Man is a salvation to his people. They repay his benevolence with a herd of horses, and he is granted audience three times in single day.

Nagkmur takes comfort in the verse. He is not sure why a herd of horses is an accolade. It adds up to a lot of horse manure when you think about it. But the ancient Texts are often obscure, and he imagines the gratitude of his restored people: the adulation of the lowly, the rewards from the high.

He must not rush into his next task. He knows what he must do but has not yet decided how he must do it. That is, he has the science but not the art of the matter. Act in haste and like the young fox, he will wet his tail just as he has successfully crossed the river.

He becomes aware that the white-haired woman has come to stand beside him. The Patrolman releases Stacey’s hand, rises, brushes his knees. “She was brave woman,” he says. “Risk everything, save me.”

Janet too stands over the broken body—and smiles.

Nagkmur sees no prospect of achieving the quiet he needs to meditate on his plans. He cannot stay here, but if he jumps too far into the past, he might not have the wireless access he needs for research. He could confine himself to the “internet” nexus, but who knows how long that monster had lurked in orbit searching for a wake in the time stream? On the other hand, if he jumps to the future, he might find the authorities there alert for his arrival. How he envies the young fox!