A Charles Stross Collection by Charles Stross

Author:Charles Stross [Stross, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-07-26T06:00:00+00:00

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The safe house is another inflatable, half-buried in sand and ringed with memory-wire fencing some shepherd's noisesome cache of GM

livestock—cows that give chocolate milk, goats that eat scrap plastic and excrete a soft spun cotton analogue, miniature hamster-sized chickens that seem even stupider than real chickens and swarm like tropical fish. Adrian's already waiting for them when they arrive, standing over the remains of Huw's bicycle.

"Guess you get to keep the hash, old son," Adrian says, kicking the wreckage. "Too bad—it was a lovely ride. I see you've met Maizie and Becky. Becky, love, would you mind setting Huw down now? He's looking a little green and I'm sure he'd appreciate some terror firmer and the removal of that horrid gag."

Neat as that, Huw is sitting plonk on his bottom in the sand, helping Adrian laboriously pry back and snap off each of the golem's fingers. Adrian tosses them to the goats and Maizie says something to him that Huw can't understand.

Adrian shakes his head. "You worry too much—those buggers'll eat anything."

Once he's free of the gag, Huw give his jaw an experimental wiggle, then opens his mouth in a wide gasp. Quick as that, the whistle—which has been hiding cannily behind his left ear—circumnavigates his jaw and climbs into his mouth, darting down his throat. "Shit!" Huw says, around the harmonics of the whistle now nestled back in his larynx.

"Aha!" says Adrian. "You're the carrier all right. We read about you online. The sisters want samples, later. You're going to need a bath first, I think. No offense. Come on in," he says, kicking away sand to reveal a trap-door. Hosting it open, Adrian exposes a helical slide into the bounce-house's depths; he slides in feet-first and spirals down into the safe-house.

Huw gasps for breath, balanced on the fine edge between nervousness and stark screaming terror. Normalcy wins: the whistle doesn't hurt, indeed barely feels as if it's there. A goat sidles up behind him with evil in its eyes and leans over his shoulder, snorting, to see if he's edible; the hot breath on his ear reminds him that he's still alive, and not even unable to talk. One of the Libyan Goth ninjettes is squatting patiently by the door. "Hello?" he says, experimentally rubbing his throat.

She shrugs and emits a rapid-fire stream of Arabic. Then, seeing he doesn't understand she shrugs again and points at the slide. "Oh, I get it," says Huw. He peers at her closely. "Do I know you from somewhere?"

She says something else, this time sharply. Huw sighs. "Okay, I don't know you." His throat feels a bit odd, but not as odd as it ought to for someone who's just swallowed an alien communications protocol. I need to know what's going on, he realizes, eyeing the trapdoor uneasily. Oh well. Steeling himself, he lowers his legs into the slide and forces himself to let go. The room at the bottom is a large bony cavern, its ceiling hung with what look like gigantic otoliths, floored with pink sensory fronds.

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