Ezekiel looked at him without expression. His face was metal smooth. It never smiled. His body was mostly metal. It was rusted. It creaked when he walked. He ignored the proffered offerings. Turned his head. “You brought her?” he said. “Here?”

  Carmel stared at the robotnik in curiosity. They were at the heart of the old station, a burned down ancient bus platform open to the sky. Achimwene knew platforms continued down below, that the robotniks—ex-soldiers, cyborged humans, preset day beggars and dealers in Crucifixation and stolen goods—made their base down there. But there he could not go. Ezekiel met him above-ground. A drum with fire burning, the flames reflected in the dull metal of the robotnik’s face. “I saw your kind,” Carmel said. “On Mars. In Tong Yun City. Begging.”

  “And I saw your kind,” the robotnik said. “In the sands of the Sinai, in the war. Begging. Begging for their lives, as we decapitated them and stuck a stake through their hearts and watched them die.”

  “Jesus Elron, Ezekiel!”

  The robotnik ignored his exclamation. “I had heard,” he said. “That one came. Here. Strigoi. But I did not believe! The defence systems would have picked her up. Should have eliminated her.”

  “They didn’t,” Achimwene said.

  “Yes…”

  “Do you know why?”

  The robotnik stared at him. Then he gave a short laugh and accepted the bottle of vodka. “You guess they let her through? The Others?”

  Achimwene shrugged. “It’s the only answer that makes sense.

  “And you want to know why.”

  “Call me curious.”

  “I call you a fool,” the robotnik said, without malice. “And you not even noded. She still has an effect on you?”

  “She has a name,” Carmel said, acidly. Ezekiel ignored her. “You’re a collector of old stories, aren’t you, Achimwene,” he said. “Now you came to collect mine?”

  Achimwene just shrugged. The robotnik took a deep slug of vodka and said, “So, nu? What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me about Nosferatu,” Achimwene said.

  * * *

  SHANGRI-LA VIRUS, the. Bio-weapon developed in the GOLDEN TRIANGLE and used during the UNOFFICIAL WAR. Transmission mechanisms included sexual intercourse (99%-100%), by air (50%-60%), by water (30%-35%), through saliva (15%-20%) and by touch (5%-6%). Used most memorably during the LONG CHENG ATTACK (for which also see LAOS; RAVENZ; THE KLAN KLANDESTINE). The weapon curtailed aggression in humans, making them peaceable and docile. All known samples destroyed in the Unofficial War, along with the city of Long Cheng.

  * * *

  “We never found out for sure where Nosferatu came from,” Ezekiel said. It was quiet in the abandoned shell of the old station. Overhead a sub-orbital came in to land, and from the adaptoplant neighbourhoods ringing the old stone buildings the sound of laughter could be heard, and someone playing the guitar. “It had been introduced into the battlefield during the Third Sinai Campaign, by one side, or the other, or both.” He fell quiet. “I am not even sure who we were fighting for,” he said. He took another drink of vodka. The almost pure alcohol served as fuel for the robotniks. Ezekiel said, “At first we paid it little enough attention. We’d find victims on dawn patrols. Men, women, robotniks. Wandering the dunes or the Red Sea shore, dazed, their minds leeched clean. The small wounds on their necks. Still. They were alive. Not ripped to shreds by Jub Jubs. But the data. We began to notice the enemy knew where to find us. Knew where we went. We began to be afraid of the dark. To never go out alone. Patrol in teams. But worse. For the ones who were bitten, and carried back by us, had turned, became the enemy’s own weapon. Nosferatu.”

  Achimwene felt sweat on his forehead, took a step away from the fire. Away from them, the floating lanterns bobbed in the air. Someone cried in the distance and the cry was suddenly and inexplicably cut off, and Achimwene wondered if the street sweeping machines would find another corpse the next morning, lying in the gutter outside a shebeen or No. 1 Pin Street, the most notorious of the drug dens-cum-brothels of Central Station.

  “They rose within our ranks. They fed in secret. Robotniks don’t sleep, Achimwene. Not the way the humans we used to be did. But we do turn off. Shut-eye. And they preyed on us, bleeding out minds, feeding on our feed. Do you know what it is like?” The robotnik’s voice didn’t grow louder, but it carried. “We were human, once. The army took us off the battlefield, broken, dying. It grafted us into new bodies, made us into shiny, near-invulnerable killing machines. We had no legal rights, not any more. We were technically, and clinically, dead. We had few memories, if any, of what we once were. But those we had, we kept hold of, jealously. Hints to our old identity. The memory of feet in the rain. The smell of pine resin. A hug from a newborn baby whose name we no longer knew.

  “And the strigoi were taking even those away from us.”

  Achimwene looked at Carmel, but she was looking nowhere, her eyes were closed, her lips pressed together. “We finally grew wise to it,” Ezekiel said. “We began to hunt them down. If we found a victim we did not take them back. Not alive. We staked them, we cut off their heads, we burned the bodies. Have you ever opened a strigoi’s belly, Achimwene?” he motioned at Carmel. “Want to know what her insides look like?”

  “No,” Achimwene said, but Ezekiel the robotnik ignored him. “Like cancer,” he said. “Strigoi is like robotnik, it is a human body subverted, cyborged. She isn’t human, Achimwene, however much you’d like to believe it. I remember the first one we cut open. The filaments inside. Moving. Still trying to spread. Nosferatu Protocol, we called it. What we had to do. Following the Nosferatu Protocol. Who created the virus? I don’t know. Us. Them. The Kunming Labs. Someone. St. Cohen only knows. All I know is how to kill them.”

  Achimwene looked at Carmel. Her eyes were open now. She was staring at the robotnik. “I didn’t ask for this,” she said. “I am not a weapon. There is no fucking war!”

  “There was—”

  “There were a lot of things!”

  A silence. At last, Ezekiel stirred. “So what do you want?” he said. He sounded tired. The bottle of vodka was nearly finished. Achimwene said, “What more can you tell us?”

  “Nothing, Achi. I can tell you nothing. Only to be careful.” The robotnik laughed. “But it’s too late for that, isn’t it,” he said.

  * * *

  Achimwene was arranging his books when Boris came to see him. He heard the soft footsteps and the hesitant cough and straightened up, dusting his hands from the fragile books and looked at the man Carmel had come to Earth for.

  “Achi.”

  “Boris.”

  He remembered him as a loose-limbed, gangly teenager. Seeing him like this was a shock. There was a thing growing on Boris’ neck. It was flesh-coloured, but the colour was slightly off to the rest of Boris’s skin. It seemed to breathe gently. Boris’s face was lined, he was still thin but there was an unhealthy nature to his thinness. “I heard you were back,” Achimwene said.

  “My father,” Boris said, as though that explained everything.

  “And we always thought you were the one who got away,” Achimwene said. Genuine curiosity made him add, “What was it like? In the Up and Out?”

  “Strange,” Boris said. “The same.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “So you are seeing my sister again.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve hurt her once before, Boris. Are you going to do it again?”

  Boris opened his mouth, closed it again. He stood there, taking Achimwene back years. “I heard Carmel is staying with you,” Boris said at last.

  “Yes.”

  Again, an uncomfortable silence. Boris scanned the bookshelves, picked a book at random. “What’s this?” he said.

  “Be careful with that!”

  Boris looked startled. He stared at the small hardcover in his hands. “That’s a Captain Yuno,” Achimwene said, proudly. “Captain Yuno on a Dangerous Mission, the second of the three Sagi novels. The least rare of the three, admittedly, but still … priceless.”

  Boris looked momentarily amused. “He was a kid taikonaut?” he said.

  “Sagi envisioned a solar system teeming with intelligent alien life,” Achimwene said, primly. “He imagined a world government, and the people of Earth working together in peace.”

  “No kidding. He must have been disappointed when—”

  “This book is pre-spaceflight,” Achimwene said. Boris whistled. “So it’s old?”

  “Yes.”

  “And valuable?”

  “Very.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “I read.”

  Boris put the book back on the shelf, carefully. “Listen, Achi—” he said.

  “No,” Achimwene said. “You listen. Whatever happened between you and Carmel is between you two. I won’t say I don’t care, because I’d be lying, but it is not my business. Do you have a claim on her?”

  “What?” Boris said. “No. Achi, I’m just trying to—”

  “To what?”

  “To warn you. I know you’re not used to—” again he hesitated. Achimwene remembered Boris as someone of few words, even as a boy. Words did not come easy to him. “Not used to women?” Achimwene said, his anger tightly coiled.

  Boris had to smile. “You have to admit—”

  “I am not some, some—”

  “She is not a woman, Achi. She’s a strigoi.”

  Achimwene closed his eyes. Expelled breath. Opened his eyes again and regarded Boris levelly. “Is that all?” he said.

  Boris held his eyes. After a moment, he seemed to deflate. “Very well,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I guess I’ll see you.”

  “I guess.”

  “Please pass my regards to Carmel.”

  Achimwene nodded. Boris, at last, shrugged. Then he turned and left the store.

  * * *

  There comes a time in a man’s life when he realises stories are lies. Things do not end neatly. The enforced narratives a human impinges on the chaotic mess that is life become empty labels, like the dried husks of corn such as are thrown down, in the summer months, from the adaptoplant neighbourhoods high above Central Station, to litter the streets below.

  He woke up in the night and the air was humid, and there was no wind. The window was open. Carmel was lying on her side, asleep, her small, naked body tangled up in the sheets. He watched her chest rise and fall, her breath even. A smear of what might have been blood on her lips. “Carmel?” he said, but quietly, and she didn’t hear. He rubbed her back. Her skin was smooth and warm. She moved sleepily under his hand, murmured something he didn’t catch, and settled down again.

  Achimwene stared out of the window, at the moon rising high above Central Station. A mystery was no longer a mystery once it was solved. What difference did it make how Carmel had come to be there, with him, at that moment? It was not facts that mattered, but feelings. He stared at the moon, thinking of that first human to land there, all those years before, that first human footprint in that alien dust.

  Inside Carmel was asleep and he was awake, outside dogs howled up at the moon and, from somewhere, the image came to Achimwene of a man in a spacesuit turning at the sound, a man who does a little tap dance on the moon, on the dusty moon.

  He lay back down and held on to Carmel and she turned, trustingly, and settled into his arms.

  Pathways

  NANCY KRESS

  Here’s a suspenseful story about a smart but uneducated woman taking part in an experimental program that’s attempting to find a cure for the degenerative inherited disease that will inevitably kill her—with the clock rapidly running out.

  Nancy Kress began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-seventies. Her books include the novel version of her Hugo– and Nebula–winning story, Beggars in Spain, and a sequel, Beggars and Choosers, as well as The Prince of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brain Rose, Oaths & Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, Crossfire, Nothing Human, The Flowers of Aulit Prison, Crucible, Dogs, Steal across the Sky, and the space opera trilogy Probability Moon, Probability Sun, and Probability Space. Her short work has been collected in Trinity and Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, Beaker’s Dozen, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories, The Fountain of Age, Future Perfect, AI Unbound, and The Body Human. Her most recent books are the novels Flash Point, and, with Therese Pieczynski, New Under the Sun. In addition to the awards for “Beggars in Spain,” she has also won Nebula awards for her stories “Out of All Them Bright Stars” and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2003 for her novel Probability Space, and another Hugo in 2009 for “The Erdmann Nexus.” Most recently, she just won another Nebula Award in 2013 for her novella After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead.

  The Chinese clinic warn’t like I expected. It warn’t even Chinese.

  I got there afore it opened. I was hoping to get inside afore anybody else came, any neighbors who knew us or busybodies from Blaine. But Carrie Campbell was already parked in her truck, the baby on her lap. We nodded to each other but didn’t speak. The Campbells are better off than us—Dave works in the mine up to Allington—but old Gacy Campbell been feuding with Dr. Harman for decades and Carrie was probably glad to have someplace else to take the baby. He didn’t look good, snuffling and whimpering.

  When the doors opened, I went in first, afore Carrie was even out of the truck. It was going to take her a while. She was pregnant again.

  “Yes?” said the woman behind the desk. Just a cheap metal desk, which steadied me some. The room was nothing special, just a few chairs, some pictures on the wall, a clothes basket of toys in the corner. What really surprised me was that the woman warn’t Chinese. Blue eyes, brown hair, middle-aged. She looked a bit like Granmama, but she had all her teeth. “Can I help you?”

  “I want to see a doctor.”

  “Certainly.” She smiled. Yeah, all her teeth. “What seems to be the problem, miss?”

  “No problem.” From someplace in the back another woman came out, this one dressed like a nurse. She warn’t Chinese either.

  “I don’t understand,” the woman behind the desk said. From her accent she warn’t from around here—like I didn’t already know that. “Are you sick?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then how can I—”

  Carrie waddled into the door, the baby balanced on her belly. Now my visit would be table-talk everywhere. All at once I just wanted to get it over with.

  “I’m not sick,” I said, too loud. “I just want to see a doctor.” I took a deep breath. “My name is Ludmilla Connors.”

  The nurse stopped walking toward Carrie. The woman behind the counter half stood up, then sat down again. She tried to pretend like she hadn’t done it, like she warn’t pleased. If Bobby were that bad a liar, he’d a been in jail even more than he was.

  “Certainly,” the woman said. I didn’t see her do nothing, but a man came out from the back, and he was Chinese. So was the woman who followed him.

  “I’m Ludmilla Connors,” I told him, and I clenched my ass together real hard to keep my legs steady. “And I want to volunteer for the experiment. But only if it pays what I heard. Only if.”

  * * *

  The woman behind the desk took me back to a room with a table and some chairs and a whole lot of filing cabinets, and she left me there with the Chinese people. I looked at their smooth faces with those slanted, mostly closed eyes, and I wished I hadn’t come. I guess these two were the reason everybody hereabouts called it the “Chinese clinic,” even if everybody else there looked like regular Americans.

  “Hello, Ms. Connors,” the man said and he spoke English real good, even if it was hard to understand some words. “We are glad you are here. I am Dr. Dan Chung and this is my chief technician Jenny.”

  “Uh huh.” He didn’t look like no “Dan,” and if she was “Jenny,” I was a fish.

  “Your mother is Courtney Connors and your father was Robert Connors?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “We have family trees for everyone on the mountain. It’s part of our work, you know. You said you want to aid us in this research?”

  “I said I want to get paid.”

  “Of course. You will be. You are nineteen.”

  “Yeah.” It warn’t a question, and I didn’t like that they knew so much about me. “How much money?”

  He told me. It warn’t as much as the rumors said, but it was enough. Unless they actually killed me, it was enough. And I didn’t think they’d do that. The government wouldn’t let them do that—not even this stinking government.

  “Okay,” I said. “Start the experiment.”

  Jenny smiled. I knew that kind of smile, like she was so much better than me. My fists clenched. Dr. Chung said, “Jenny, you may leave. Send in Mrs. Cully, please.”

  I liked the surprised look on Jenny’s face, and then the angry look she tried to hide. Bitch.

  Mrs. Cully didn’t act like Jenny. She brought in a tray with coffee and cookies: just regular store-bought Pepperidge Farm, not Chinese. Under the tray was a bunch of papers. Mrs. Cully sat down at the table with us.

  “These are legal papers, Ms. Connors,” Dr. Chung said. “Before we begin, you must sign them. If you wish, you can take them home to read, or to a lawyer. Or you can sign them here, now. They give us permission to conduct the research, including the surgery. They say that you understand this procedure is experimental. They give the university, myself, and Dr. Liu all rights to information gained from your participation. They say that we do not guarantee any cure, or even any alleviation, of any medical disorder you may have. Do you want to ask questions?”

  I did, but not just yet. Half of me was grateful that he didn’t ask if I can read, the way tourists and social workers sometimes do. I can, but I didn’t understand all the words on this page: indemnify, liability, patent rights. The other half of me resented that he was rushing me so.