chest and face felt as light as down. It made her smile as she drifted off.
She awoke in the hospital, a mask on her face, a crucified Jesus across the room from her. Jesus appeared to be an understanding sort-as understanding, she supposed, as one could be hanging in the air from iron nails driven through wrists and feet.
Norma must have been wired. A moment after she awoke a nurse came in the room and started examining her. Ten minutes later Dr. Peabody entered the room.
Dr. Peabody looked as if he'd been waiting for years to tell her she needed his and only his procedures and therapies. Only his surgery would save her.
Norma pulled the mask off her face. “When can I go home?” she wheezed.
Peabody stopped, his mouth open. It was worth the black spots in her vision to see his face. “Miss Carstairs-'
'Yes. I'm dying. I know. Prescribe a home health aide for me so I can get oxygen at home.'
Peabody seemed to gasp for air.
'Is there anything else?” she asked sweetly.
Peabody fled.
Ben came in as Peabody left the room. “Let me guess. You didn't want to do what he said.'
Norma nodded and lay back, spent. “Get me out of here. I'll die at home, thank you very much.'
Lenny told her she was lucky. Norma's pneumonia wasn't difficult. The pain she expected from lung cancer never materialized. She was spared the emphysemic experience of drowning in her own fluids. There was only a deep and abiding weakness. The lifting of an arm or rolling over in bed became too much effort. Lucky? She thought so.
Lenny moved in. Ben visited daily. Every other day, a home health aide came in and helped bathe her and checked the oxygen.
Norma grew accustomed to the oxygen cannula. While it didn't alter the progress of things, it did make them pass more easily. She imagined the mites accepting the help as they worked.
'You said it was the earth,” she said to Ben, smiling. “The earth speaking through me.'
'I changed my mind. This is stupidity given substance,” said Ben, exasperated. “It's not too late. We can use the FTV.'
Lenny was behind him, an anguished look on his face. “Don't leave me, Mama,” he said softly.
'Everything leaves,” she said softly as she drifted off. “Me, too.'
Norma drifted over a forest or factory. She couldn't quite tell. The world was in furious motion: great trees grew and intertwined with one another, their branches mingling without discernible boundaries. Roads melted into bushes melted into seas. The air was filled with the sound of labor: the percussion of hammers, whistling of saws, voices talking. Spider things were working everywhere but turned their faces up to her as she passed in what could only have been a smile, were they so equipped that a smile was possible.
A bench grew out of the earth. She floated down to it and rested.
It's all me, she thought, proud of herself. Every little spider, machine, and factory. All me.
Enrico Caruso sat down next to her. Not the heavy, ham-fisted Caruso of the old photographs. This was a more handsome and gentler looking, Mario Lanza-esque sort of Caruso.
She stared at him. “What? You're a ghost now?'
He laughed, a rich vanilla sound. “Hardly. Your brain cells are dying one by one. We thought this the least we could do.” He waved his gentle hands toward the sea. “Nothing here reflects anything like reality, since you're making it up. But, since you're making it up, it's what you want to see.'
'Ah,” she said and smiled. The music resolved itself into Verdi's Il Trovatore. It seemed appropriate.
She had no desire to sing with it. At this moment, it was enough to listen. “Do you know what's happening in my room?'
Enrico thought for a moment. “I know what you know. You've lapsed into a coma. Lenny is telling Ben what you want done with your remains. Ben is resourceful so it will likely be done.'
'We'll sing for them?'
'All across the net.'
'Is that what you wanted?'
Enrico shrugged. “It's enough. How about you?'
She smiled into the evening sun. “It's enough.'
The dusk was coming. She could see the ocean dim into a gauzy purple haze. Like sunset. Like night. Whatever imaginary vision she had possessed was fading.
The night darkened as she listened to the music of their work.
'You won't be here to see it, of course,” Enrico said regretfully as night fell.
Norma took his hand in the darkness to reassure him. It was a warm, strong hand. She held on strongly and laughed. “Just you wait. You ain't seen nothing yet.'
Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck by NEAL ASHER
From Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)
Born and still living in Essex, England, Neal Asher started writing at the age of sixteen, but didn't explode into public print until a few years ago; a quite prolific author, he now seems to be everywhere at once. His stories have appeared in Asimov's, Interzone, The Agony Column, Hadrosaur Tales, and elsewhere, and have been collected in Runcible Tales, The Engineer, and Masons Rats. His extremely popular novels include Gridlinked, Cowl, The Skinner, The Line of Polity, Brass Man, and, most recently, The Engineer Reconditioned. Coming up are a slew of new novels, including The Voyage of the Sable Keech and Prador Moon: A Novel of the Polity.
In the skin-crawlingly tense adventure that follows, he takes us to a dangerous planet where a party of hunters encounter far bigger-and more enigmatic -game than they ever counted on…
Lost in some perverse fantasy, Tameera lovingly inspected the displays of her Optek rifle. For me, what happened next proceeded with the unstoppable nightmare slowness of an accident. She brought the butt of the rifle up to her shoulder, took careful aim, and squeezed off a single shot. One of the sheq slammed back against a rock face, then tumbled down through vegetation to land in the white water of a stream.
Some creatures seem to attain the status of myth even though proven to be little different from other apparently prosaic species. On Earth, the lion contends with the unicorn, the wise old elephant never forgets, and gentle whales sing haunting ballads in the deeps. It stems from anthropomorphism, is fed by both truth and lies, and, over time, firmly imbeds itself in human culture. On Myral, where I had spent the last ten years, only a little of such status attached to the largest autochthon -not surprising for a creature whose name is a contraction of 'shit- eating quadruped.' But rumors of something else in the wilderness, something that had no right to be there, had really set the myth-engines of the human mind into motion, and brought hunters to this world.
There was no sign of any sheq on the way out over the narrow vegetation-cloaked mounts. They only put in an appearance after I finally moored my blimp to a peak, above a horizontal slab on which blister tents could be pitched. My passengers noticed straight away that the slab had been used many times before, and that my mooring was an iron ring long set into the rock, but then, campsites were a rarity amid the steep slopes, cliffs, and streams of this area. It wasn't a place humans were built for. Sheq country.
Soon after he disembarked, Tholan went over to the edge to try out one of his disposable vidcams. The cam itself was about the size of his forefinger, and he was pointing it out over the terrain while inspecting a palm com he held in his other hand. He had unloaded a whole case of these cams, which he intended to position in likely
