Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

"I did?"

"How do you know what questions he asked me?" said Nancy. She winced, bit her lip, drew blood. But her eyes were bright: the girl was a fighter.

I figured she'd need to be.

"Long story," I said. "I'll tell it when there's more time. But you're right, Pallas Athene was the Macerator. She's always had a violent streak. Comes from her gangster roots-she used to go round wearing a Titan's skin, you know that? Anyway, going respectable must have cramped her style. When you're mayor you can't go around hacking people up any more. So she got herself a hobby."

"A hobby?"

"Some folk surf. Some paint toy soldiers. Pallas Athene-she took up serial killing."

"How come she never got caught?"

"When you're mayor, the cops tend to do what you say. Especially when you've got a gorgon on your chest."

Byron scratched his massive head. "But… if they knew it was her all along, why did they bother coming after me?"

"Who knows? Maybe PA figured it was time the Macerator retired. Maybe it was all a set-up-she did plant that axe with the body, after all. Probably knew a garbage collector would end up taking the heat. Nobody cares if a golem goes down. Tough but true. I figure you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Either way," said Nancy, "that bitch got what she deserved."

"Amen," said Byron.

Then Nancy started screaming. She writhed, tore off my coat, clutched at the scars on her arms and legs. It didn't take a medic to see what was up. Like Arachne said: the poor girl was coming apart at the seams.

"Didn't last as long as Arachne thought," I said.

"What?!" said Byron. "You mean… you knew this would happen? You got her all sewed up and you knew she'd come to pieces again?"

"If it's any consolation," I said, "I wish I hadn't. Seems you can stitch the body but you can't stitch the soul. Still, it got you off the hook."

"I'd rather be on the hook! What can we do?"

Nancy shrieked and snapped her back like a trout. She flipped on her front, landing exactly where she'd first landed when Byron poured her out of the garbage can. That time she'd been in pieces. Any minute now, she'd be in pieces again.

"There's something," I said. "But it's risky. And I've never seen it done. It's… well, call it a hunch."

"What is it!" said Byron. "I'll do anything!"

"You might not want to do this."

He didn't hesitate. He didn't even ask me why. He just lay down and told me to get on with it.

Golems-you think you got them figured, but they just keep pulling surprises.

I'd grabbed Pallas Athene's machete from the street. I used it to cut a deep gouge in Byron's chest. It wasn't hard: there was nothing in there but orange river clay. I groped through silt and grit. I found a pretty shell, left it where it was. At last I found what I'd been looking for. I pulled it out.

A muddy square of parchment. Written on it, in Hebrew binary, was the code that made Byron tick.

"Do… it… quick… " croaked Byron. Without his code, his eyes were rolling. The floor shook as his system crashed.

I tore the parchment in half. Byron convulsed.

I put one half of the parchment back in Byron's open chest. His body went limp. I rolled Nancy on her back. She was blue all over; black fluid leaked from her scars. We were nearly out of time.

I bent over her, latched my fingers into one of the big scars on her chest. Then I peeled her open.

I didn't look inside. The stench of decay was appalling. That and the awful, liquid feel of her. She was going to pieces, fast. Eyes shut, I thrust the second half of the parchment under what was left of her ribs. Her lungs billowed over my knuckles; her heart drummed like a scared rabbit against my wrist. I let go the parchment, pulled my hands out, pressed the edges of the scar together. I opened my eyes, held my breath.

Nancy lay still. Her skin was one big bruise. Her scars looked like a black spider's web.

Then she convulsed, coughed up white froth, started breathing. Pink heat flooded her skin, she opened her eyes and pushed my hands away.

"Get your hands off my chest, pervert!" she said.

I looked over at Byron. He was resculpting his pectorals.

"You okay?" I said.

"I feel… just the same," he said.

"That's the thing with golem binary code," I said. "Ripping it up doesn't hurt it. It's neat technology. Especially since it shouldn't work at all, on account of the Hebrew numerical system not having any zeroes."

"Come again?"

"No zeroes. So they have to make the code nullatorily recursive."

"Huh?"

"It's simple: every phrase in the code points down to a smaller phrase buried in the previous line. And that smaller phrase points down to a smaller phrase still. The recursion is infinite, so even though there's no zeroes you get an infinite number of holes where a zero could fit. So the programmers just write the rest of the code around those holes and the SGOS-that's the standard golem operating system-fills in the gaps. It interpolates the places where the programmers want the zeroes to be and bingo-you get Hebrew binary. All of which is irrelevant."

"It is?"

"Yeah. But the side-effect isn't."

"What side-effect?"

"All that recursion means a golem's code parchment is like one big hologram. Every piece holds all the information contained by the whole. So you can rip a parchment in half and still have two complete pieces of golem code. It's a fractal thing-don't ask me, ask Mandelbrot."

"So… Nancy's running my code?"

"You got it."

"Doesn't mean we're engaged or anything," said Nancy. Then she fell, sobbing, into Byron's enormous clay arms.

They left hand in hand, like unmatched bookends. Without any books. I watched them disappear into the rain and tried to puzzle it out.

Did the shared code mean they were brother and sister now? Soul mates? Clones? But Nancy still had her memories, her personality. And Byron had his. They hadn't changed.

Which made me think back to what Arachne had said about Nancy:

My needlework is good, but it cannot repair her soul.

So if I'd managed to fix Nancy up with golem code, that could only mean one thing: by opening up Byron's chest I hadn't got my hands on a scrap of parchment at all.

I'd got my hands on a soul.

Byron was right after all.

I spent a while scrubbing the stains on the floor. The silt washed out okay. The gore took longer. Neither went completely. I wondered if I should get a new carpet. But, like I said, that old carpet's got a lot of stories to tell. And it goes with the drapes.

I closed the trapdoor, fixed myself a coffee. I slipped the dimension-die back in my collar. Good job I'd remembered to get it back. You never know when you'll need a spare dimension. Shame there were only five sides left.

Outside, a municipal garbage truck had arrived to clear away the petrified zombies. I watched the golems work in their yellow municipal jackets. They trudged and, where the rain lashed them, they went soft round the edges.

I wondered if I should tell them what I knew.

One of the golems bent to pick up something from the gutter. It was a flower from Pallas Athene's crown. The golem straightened the petals and tucked the flower in his jacket pocket. Then he went back to work.

I closed the drapes. They'd figure it out for themselves, sooner or later.

In the moonlight, in the starlight, the churning waves seemed white with laundry soap. They crashed against the shore and the dark rocks there, and when they rolled back they left wads of seaweed and driftwood and all the tossed garbage and chunks of sewage that man had given the sea.

All the early night and into the midnight hour, the junk washed up, and then, a minute past one, when the sea rolled out and took its laundry soap waves with it, a wad of seaweed from which clinging water dripped like shiny pearls, moved. It moved and it stood up and the shiny pearls of water rolled over the seaweed, and the sewage clung tight and the thing took shape, and the shape was that of a man, featureless and dark and loose as the wind.