Джон Адамс: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

You could leave it at that. You could be that great a bastard. You have been before. But you have time for curiosity. So you lean in close and you stare into those unseeing eyes from a distance of inches and you look past the clouded corneas and you drink deep of the lonely desperation that once upon a time drove her to this cold and twisted place. You ask in a whisper just how she knows you. She closes those blind eyes, as if to block out even the pretense of sight, and she murmurs, “He’s been waiting for you.” A deep breath. “Do you know where he found me? Before he cleaned me up and brought me here? Do you know?” You know, of course, but you let her speak. “Assaulted and left for dead, that’s where. I was so far gone I didn’t even hurt; I was looking up at the sky, my left leg twisted beneath me, watching the rain fall down upon my face, feeling only annoyance at the wet. I didn’t realize I’d been shot. I’d gone past pain, you know; past caring. I didn’t even care that my baby daughter was beside me, wailing, thumping me with that little fist of hers, trying to get her mommy to wake up, not understanding why I wouldn’t. I had nothing left to me, not even my love for her. All I felt was cold.”

It’s remarkable, but as frightened as she is, as helpless as she is, as difficult as it might be for her, she still speaks these words with a detached amazement, as if unable to believe they apply to her. “After all that, I lived. She died.” Which, of course, you also know. She takes one deep shuddering breath. “It was a war, you son of a bitch. You bastard. You cruel worthless piece of shit bastard. Of course I know you. Don’t you think I’ve been waiting all this time for you? Don’t you know he’s been waiting all this time for you?” Her sac of a breast rises, falls, shudders. “Don’t you understand that he built this house for you?” The weeping resumes. You lift her withered arm and place it across her chest, crossing it, with perfect precision, with the other. She trembles, waiting for you to do what it’s only reasonable for you to do. When you do nothing more she cries out, damning you, cursing your nonexistent heart. But she’s still breathing when you leave. This isn’t about her. It’s about him.

You find a hallway, lined with more books. Unlike the decorative volumes below, these look like they’ve been read. There are thousands of them, most gray old hardcovers with paper just starting to turn brown and brittle at the edges. You recognize the names on the spines. You pick up a volume at random, one written by an author long forgotten: a novel of adventurers, traveling lands that no longer exist, in the service of a cause that history discarded. A quick flip through the dense antiquated prose is enough to make you chuckle at its irrelevancy. All books are irrelevancies. Like the shifting walls of this very structure, they’re attempts to defy you, to keep you at bay, to maintain some part of their respective authors alive even as their flesh and bone crumbles to inanimate ash. But they die too, most before their authors do, the words fading from memory even as they struggle for physical permanency on the impermanent medium of paper. They’re jokes, the biggest joke you know, out of the many you have encountered since the world began. They annoy you. You consider the book in your hand for one more second, weighing the possibility of mercy, and then you flex your fingers, exerting what for you is just the slightest amount of pressure. The paper explodes. The novel becomes a mushroom cloud of dust and ash. The words vanish into the empty air, never to be seen again. You release what’s left in a trickle of silt, which gathers on the floor at your feet, and then you turn to what’s left, the millions of empty words all long past their prime, and you speak a word that only you know. The other books all crumble into dust, as all books must, and then you move on, further down the hallway, through more corridors that shift their geography each time you take another step.

Beyond that room, the nursery: a place that smells of sweet flesh and sour milk, that rings with the never-ending wails of its sole occupant. The opening is a curtain of stringed beads, the only item of furniture a flat wooden counter, the only cradle a thick glass jar filled with something yellow and inhabited by a wide-eyed fetus who glares at you with a look too unformed to be identified by attitude. It opens its mouth and says something, releasing a stream of bubbles that rise through the murk only to be swallowed by the maze of tubing attached to the narrowed lid, which extends well past the baby’s home to a network of incomprehensible machinery on the opposite wall. There is no way of knowing what the baby just tried to say. Even if it has lived long enough to develop its own vocabulary—and you have no doubt that it has lived untold lifetimes past the hour when it would have been delivered stillborn—they are not words but the embryos of words, not pleas for blessed release but the aimless rambles of a thing that never had the chance to know a life in the world beyond the glass. It never should have known life at all; that it lives and suffers now is a travesty. But you are not here for it. You are here for the architect, who placed it here for you to find.

The next room of note is a repository of skulls: thousands of them, all bleached, all blank-eyed and staring, stacked in pyramids and situated to grin at you as you walk past. Some hang from the ceiling on strings and spin, forever, surveying their brethren from every possible angle. The floor is a tilework of femurs. Before you take three steps you trip a lever or other activator of some kind, and a recorded voice begins to play: deep, resonant, filled with dust, with every word a measured condemnation. You recognize the voice. You know it well because you have heard it cursing you an untold number of times, most recently telling you a story about a cat. You have wasted so many years, called away by other duties, looking forward to the day when it would be your pleasure to hear that voice stilled.

Today, as you pick your way through the maze of remains, it says, “Do you recognize any of them? I do. I know every name, every face; every dream deferred by a sudden ending; every soul that plummeted into despair because the owners of these beauties saw you coming and knew that there was nothing left for them, not on this world or any other. I can tell you how many cursed your name and how many wished they had never been born. I understand them so well that it’s almost as if I killed them myself. I didn’t, of course; you, of all creatures, know that. I would have had to tear out my own heart before I could do such an evil thing. But I came upon all of them after you were already done; I took what you see all around you because I thought it would be instructive to show you all these faces again, when the time finally came for us to meet. I want you to know how seriously I took my awareness that someday I’d be meeting you too. Of course, if any of this gives you any pause whatsoever, please feel free to get the hell out; it’d be easiest for both of us if you just gave up on the idea of taking me where you took them. I have no problem doing without that pleasure. I just want you to recognize, if you haven’t already, that it might be best for you too. Leave here. Go away. Don’t come back. Forget this place. Vanish, if you don’t want to confront me.”

The floor ends in a precipice. The drop before you seems endless, the walls extending downward, well below the ambient light’s ability to reveal anything that might be waiting for you down below. The darkness has no terrors for you, of course. You’ve always been the presence that lurks unseen in most dark places. But things have been done to this particular blackness, enhancing it, making it opaque even to you. Nothing has been done to hide the sounds, the shifting moaning mechanical sounds, testifying to the great mechanisms that drive this structure and keep it shifting between one form and another with every moment it continues to sit on this earth. There must be gears below, and pistons, and tense uncoiling springs, and even things more sorcery than engineering, all locked together in combination to lift that wall, erase this door, force the windows to race around the outside walls like creatures pursued by monsters. The design and construction strike you as a project capable of consuming more than normal lifetimes. The arrogance that would lead the unseen architect to believe that even these efforts would be enough to drive you away is enough to drive you to rage. It is hubris great enough to offend the gods, as indeed you, as one of them, are offended. You step out into the abyss and let yourself fall.