Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

“No wonder she left you, you indifferent fuck.”


Marshall massages his temples, then changes the subject. For all his faults, he’s pretty good at sensing thin ice beneath his feet. “It’s your first time to the Kasei though, that’s true, yeah?”

“That’s true, yeah.”

“You can and will and no doubt already have done worse than the Kasei ’tats.”

“I hear good things,” she says, but her mind’s elsewhere, and she’s hoping Marshall grows tired of talking soon so she can get back to ? 174 ?

? Caitlín R. Kiernan ?

her quarters and pop a few pinks for six or seven hour’s worth of sleep.

“Down on the north end of Cattarinetta Boulevard—in Scarlet Quad—there’s a brothel. Probably the best on the whole rock. I happen to know the proprietress.”

Nix isn’t so much an angel she’s above the consolation of whores when away from Shiloh. All those months pile up. The months between docks, the interminable Phobos reroutes, the weeks of red dust and colonist hardscrabble.

“Her name’s Paddy,” he continues, “and you just tell her you’re a high fella to Marshall Mason Choudhury, and she’ll see you’re treated extra right. Not those half-starved farm girls. She’ll set you up with the pinnacle merch.”

“That’s kind of you,” and she stands. “I’ll do that.”

“Not a trouble,” he says and waves a hand dismissively. “And look, as I said, don’t you fret over the cargo. Terra’s no different than aluminum and pharmaceuticals.”

“It’s not my first goddamn terra run. How many times I have to—”

But she’s thinking, Then why the extra seven-percent hazard commission, if terras are the same as all the rest? Nix would never ask such a question aloud, anymore than she can avoid asking it of herself.

“Your Oma, she’ll—”

“Fella, I’ll see you later,” she says, and walks quickly towards the cafeteria door before he can get another word or ten out. Sometimes, she’d lay good money that the solitudes are beginning to gnaw at the man’s sanity. That sort of shit happens all too often. The glare in the corridor leading back to the housing module isn’t quite as bright as the lights in the cafeteria, so at least she has that much to be grateful for.





6.


Muddy, sweat-soaked, insect-bitten and insect-stung, eyes and lungs and nostrils smarting from the hundreds of millions of gametophytes ? 175 ?

? The Road of Needles ?

she breathed during her arduous passage through each infested isotainer, arms and legs weak, stomach rolling, breathless, Nix Severn has finally arrived at the bottom of the deep shaft leading down to Oma’s dormant CPU. The bzou has kept up with her the entire, torturous way. Though she didn’t realize that it was a bzou until halfway through the second ’tainer. Sentient viruses are so rare that the odds of Oma’s crash having triggered the creation (or been triggered by) bzou has a probability risk approaching zero, at most a negligent threat to any transport. But here it is, and the hallucination isn’t a hallucination.

An hour ago, she finally had the presence of mind to scan the thing, and it bears the distinctive signatures, the unmistakable byte sequence of a cavity-stealth strategy.

“A good quarter of an hour’s walk further in the forest, under yon three large oaks. There stands her house. Further beneath are the nut trees, which you will see there,” it said when the scan was done. “Red Hood! Just look! There are such pretty flowers here! Why don’t you look round at them all? Methinks you don’t even hear how delightfully the birds are singing! You are as dull as if you were going to school, and yet it is so cheerful in the forest!”