Free Out on Blue Six by Ian McDonald Page A

gone as irrevocably as Apt 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West.
    She sang, attempting to whistle up high spirits. The echoes that scampered back to her along the brick buttresses sounded nothing like her voice. And behind those echoes, something more. A film of water flowing out of somewhere parted around her boots to flow on to somewhere. Her bicycle lamp picked hysterical faces out of the brickwork. A scuttling, scurrying sound that might have been moving air (and just as easily might not) whispered out of the dark.
    “All right. All right, whoever you are.” She did not want to have to say whatever . “Just to let you know that if you’re trying to frighten me, you’re succeeding.”
    She walked one complete slow circle, sending her bicycle beam probing into every dark crevice. The impacter rested snug and comfortable in her hand. “Hello? Anyone there? Hello?” She let the last echo fade into the general silence before concluding, “Okay, so I was talking to myself. So, who’s to hear?”
    … earearearear…
    And they were upon her.
    All over her.
    In her hair, hanging from her clothes, clawing at her hands, her face, her eyes, more and more and more of them, piling onto her, swarming, shrieking, a mass of fur and claws and teeth, throwing themselves out of nowhere, onto her, dragging her down under the weight of their numbers. She screamed and screamed and screamed, flailing at her face, her precious, delicate eyes. The swinging, swooping bicycle lamp gave momentary infernal revelations of ivory needles, matted fur, steaming drool, bulbous light-blinded pink eyes …
    Pets. Dogkits, catkits, monkeykits, cute cuddlesome blobs of genetic ingenuity flushed away, thrown out, refuse-chuted, abandoned by bored creators. Knowing what they had been made them all the more horrifying. Courtney Hall struck free with her left hand and fired the impacter. Blind fear sent shot after shot after shot ricocheting around the chamber, flashing water to steam, blasting shattered bricks from the vaulted ceiling. A wet, soft, bursting sound: a fortunate shot exploded a doggery or kitkin in a shriek of fur and intestines. Teeth met through her gun hand. Howling, she dropped the impacter. Clinging to hands, hair, face, clothes, the genetic menagerie pulled her down, and as teeth tugged flesh, Courtney Hall became aware of a wondrous sense of detachment that said, Well, this is it, isn’t it? This brick sewer is the last, the very last, thing you will ever see.
    A brightening light filled the chamber.
    The Light of Yah ! she thought, grateful that soon this distressing toothy tugging of her body would cease. And it did. And now that she was dead, it seemed that war broke out in heaven, that black-and-white-striped angels in domino masks fell upon the fell beasts with swords and crossbows and left a goodly multitude of cubby-bears and marmosetties lying with her in the stagnant rainwater before the vile pets fled to those vile places from which they had come. And it seemed that a face bent over her body.
    “Lady most lucky,” said the raccoon-faced angel. “Lucky lucky lucky. Still, lady pretty bad, poor lady. Rest awhile, poor lady. Assistance has come.”
    “Are angelic raccoons theologically supportable?” asked Courtney Hall.
    “You tell me, lady,” said the racoon savior, and Courtney Hall dropped off the edge of heaven with a dismal thud to land back in her body again.
    “Raccoons!” she cried. “You are raccoons!”
    “Of course, lady,” said the racoon, peeling the backing from a dermoplast and sticking it to her forehead. “Sleep now.”
    “But …” she asked, and then a fog of theological outrage descended upon her. A last coherent impression was of the racoon absentmindedly stroking a little metal socket in the side of its neck out of which grew a cluster of soft, fungusy biochips. Time then passed, or did not pass, in degrees of awareness from deep sleep to complete consciousness. Upon one such occasion of lucidity,