Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  “Suppose I make my call now—” she started to say, when something about the bulletin caught her attention.

  “Hush up,” she told the others, who were bitterly complaining about the interruption of the story just as the hero had embraced the heroine deep in mag space.

  “I want to hear this,” said Taka.

  After the bulletin the story quickly resumed. Taka thoughtfully retired to her bedroom and sat down on the floor, folded her slim legs gracefully under her, and reached for her compwrite. The compwrite transmitted through the mashina in the other room but gave her privacy to work.

  “A letter,” she said, “to—”

  Who? She wondered. Daddy had always told her to obey the law but have nothing to do with the polizi, who were, he said, scum, gryaz, filth. How then to get her information to them without using the boxcode that had appeared on the screen during the newsflash?

  “To Professor Yang, History Faculty,” she began, rattling off the university address code from memory. “Send this with no return address, oké?”

  “I am waiting, O woman of transcendent beauty,” said the compwrite. Taka herself had taught it to say that and was now trying to make it learn how to giggle.

  “Honoured Professor, I am sending this to you as a person I honour and trust and admire,” she began, laying it on thick.

  “I have always been a law-abiding person and there was a news bulletin just now where the polizi were asking for information about a terrorist group called the Crooks. Well, a student named Ananda, when he was trying to climb aboard—scratch that, make love to me a couple of months ago, stated that he belonged to this group and tried to make it seem incredibly important, though I had never heard of it myself up to that time. In any case my native dialect is English and I happen to know what Crooks means and I was angry that somebody would try to involve me in something criminal.

  “Hoping that you will convey this info to the proper authorities, I remain one of your students choosing to remain anonymous.”

  She viewed this missive on the screen and then added, “PS, this Ananda is an ugly guy with a rosary of some kind he wears on his belt. I think he’s an O.B. He is skinny and wears a funny kind of cross under his jacket. He says it is a symbol of something—I forget what.”

  She added, “Send,” and headed back into the front room, where the current chapter of The Far Side of the Sky had expired in a shudder of Far Space orgasms.

  “Well, I suppose I can make my call now,” she said, and did-so, setting up an appointment for tomorrow with the mashina of a depilator who had promised to leave her arms and legs as smooth as baby flesh, which she thought would look very nice.

  Professor Yang’s infatuation with Selina was leading him deeper and deeper into debt. He tried to stay away from Radiant Love House, but instead found himself dreaming of the White Tiger all day and heading for the District by hovercab at least three times a week.

  He told himself all the usual things—that this was ridiculous in a man his age, that he would lose face if his frequent visits became known, that he couldn’t afford this new extravagance. No argument could sway him; he wanted his woman of ivory in the blue peace of the electronic room where for an hour at least he feasted on the illusion of youth regained.

  He was again in the middling expensive parlour waiting for the White Tiger when Stef lounged in and collapsed on the double divan.

  Ordinarily, Yang would have ignored the fellow, but when Stef said, “How are you, Honoured Professor?” he felt he had to say something in return.

  “Quite well.” Brief, cool.

  “I watched your last lecture,” said Stef, who was inclined to chat, knowing that as usual he had time to kill before Dzhun could receive him.

  “Really,” said Yang, thawing slightly. He was paid .10 khan for every box that tuned in to his lectures. It wasn’t much, but he needed every tenth he could get.

  “Yeah. I’m not a student, but I am ill-educated and I occasionally try to improve my mind, such as it is.”

  Stef pulled over a wheeled censer, dumped a little kif into it from a pouch he carried, and turned on the heating element.

  “Inhale?” he asked, unwinding two hoses and handing one to Yang.

  “The waiting is tiresome,” Yang allowed, and took an experimental puff. Finding the quality acceptable (local kif, not Martian, but pretty good) he took another.

  “May I ask your profession?”

  “Investigative agent. I’m also a licensed member of the Middlemen and Fixers’ Guild.”

  “Ah.” Yang looked at Stef sharply. “Are you good at what you do?”

  “Well, I live by it and have for years. Why? Need something looked into?”

  “Actually,” said Yang slowly, “I received an anonymous letter a few days ago and I’ve been wondering how to handle it. It claims to place in my hands certain information that I, ah, feel somebody in authority ought to know. Yet I have no way of checking it or naming the sender, who claims to be a student of mine. It may be worthless; on the other hand, if it’s useful, well—”

  “You’d like to be paid for it,” said Stef promptly. “I can handle that. Insulate you from the polizi. There are ways to handle it confidentially and at the same time claim a reasonable reward if the information’s good. What’s it all about?”

  Yang thought for a moment and then said, “It concerns something called Crux.”

  All of Stef’s long training was just barely sufficient to enable him to keep a marmolitz—a marble face.

  “Ah,” he said, clearing his throat, “the thing that was on the box a few nights ago?”

  “Yes.”

  Briefly he told Stef about the letter, witholding, however, the name Ananda and his description.

  “What do you think it might be worth?”

  “How happy I am,” interrupted the box in the corner, “to inform you, honoured guest, that Dzhun is now ready to receive you.”

  “Tell her to wait,” said Stef.

  To Yang he said, “Let me try to find out if the matter’s really important. If so, I wouldn’t hesitate to ask ten thousand khans in return for such information.”

  “Ten thousand!”

  The kif pipe fell out of his mouth.

  “It must be something major,” Stef pointed out, “or it wouldn’t have been put on the air. At the same time, I would recommend caution. This is clearly a security matter, and you certainly wouldn’t want to expose yourself to the suspicion of knowing more than you actually do. That’s a short path to the White Chamber. Luckily, I have a friend on the inside who’s not polizi and can make enquiries.”

  “And your, ah, fee?” asked Yang.

  “A flat ten per cent of the award. I’m an ethical investigator.”

  “Good heavens,” said Yang, who was perfectly indifferent to Stef’s professional ethics but whose mind was engaged in dividing K9,000 by 120 to reach the astounding figure of seventy-five hour-long sessions with the White Tiger in the electronic room.

  “What do you need?” he asked.

  “Your chop on my standard contract, one sheet of hardcopy with the message and about two days.”

  “You shall, my friend,” said Professor Yang rather grandly, “have all three.”

  Yama and Stef sat at the duroplast desk in the Lion House staring at the hardcopy.

  “One name. And what a crappy description. Maybe I should turn Yang over to Kathmann just to see if he knows anything more.”

  “An honoured professor? Come on, Yama. Stop thinking like a security gorilla for once. Yang doesn’t know a damn thing except that he needs money to rent his albino. What we need is to find this Ananda.”

  “How? Call in the polizi?”

  “Hell, no. Get the credit yourself. First of all, access the university records. Tell your mashina to search for Ananda as both a family name and a given name. Let’s say for the last two years. Do you have access to the polizi and city records?”

  “That’s Earth Central stuf
f,” said Yama with a cunning look. “It’s off limits to us. Of course I’ve got access.”

  “When you get some names from the university, have the box start calling their numbers and checking the faces of these Anandas. That’ll eliminate some—they can’t all be skinny, ugly guys—and meanwhile you can be having the names checked against the polizi records for arrests and against the city records for everything else—property ownership, energy payments, tax payments, everything. Then there’s the Old Believer angle—”

  Yama was already talking to his box. “I want confidential access to university records. Now.”

  He turned back to Stef. “By the way, how much is this costing me, assuming it leads to anything?”

  “If it leads to Crux, I promised Yang fifteen thousand.”

  “Petty cash,” said Yama. “If it leads to Crux.”

  The box chimed. “Sir, I have accessed the university central administrative files.”

  “Search admission, registration and expulsion records for the name Ananda,” said Yama promptly, “especially expulsion.” He added to Stef, “Terrorists are often students, but very few of them are good students.”

  Dreaming of the money, Stef paced the room impatiently. The university records were voluminous and ill-kept. There was no Ananda as a family name. Searching given names was just getting under way—”This baby does it in nanoseconds,” promised Yama—when the whole university system went down. And stayed down.

  After more than an hour of waiting and pacing and dreaming of kif, Stef lounged out, holding his nose until he was past the Darksider, and took a hovercab home. There he called Earth Central and reported to one of Kathmann’s aides that he and Yama were following down an anonymous tip that a student was a member of Crux.

  Then he called Yang and told him that the money was practically in hand. Yang was ecstatic.

  “You don’t know what this means to me, honoured investigative agent,” he bubbled. “I’ve had so many calls on my purse lately.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “What do you think this Crux organization might be?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” Stef lied. “In English the word means, uh, the essential thing. Like the crux of an argument.”

  “Of course there’s also the Latin meaning.”

  “What’s Latin?”

  “It’s a dead language. The original source of the word. In Latin it means cross. Hence the crossroads, the critical point.”

  “Ananda wears a funny kind of cross,” said Stef slowly.

  “Yes. My informant thought he was an Old Believer.”

  “I wonder—”

  Stef’s box chimed. He quickly made arrangements to bring Yang his payoff and cut the circuit.

  “Say,” he told the box.

  “Stef, I got the names,” said Yama, abrupt as usual. “Got your recorder on? Here they are. Last year, Govind Ananda, withdrawn. This year, Patal Ananda, Nish Ananda, Sivastheni Ananda. That’s all.”

  “Boxcodes?”

  “Got ’em all except Govind. Like so many of those damn students, he may have a pirated mashina. I’m having the box call the ones we’ve got, and at the same time start running through the city records. Got any more bright ideas?”

  “No,” said Stef, “except I want a vacation when this is over. And my pay.”

  “Stop kidding me, I know you’ll take your pay out of old Yang’s reward money. Don’t try to… wait a minute. Box reports Patal and Sivas—whatever don’t resemble the description. Nish is away from home. Wait a minute again. Govind Ananda paid the energy bill on No. 71, Jesus and Buddha Court. Didn’t the letter say something about a rosary? And about him being an O.B.?”

  “Keep trying Nish, Yama, but send three or four of your thuggi to meet me at J and B Court. I’m going to try Govind. I like the smell of that address. It’s near the University and the names would echo for an Old Believer.”

  “You got ’em. Plus a Darksider in case things get rough.”

  “And a gas mask.”

  Stef rang off, plunged into a battered Korean-style chest on his balcony and brought out his one-centimetre impact pistol. He touched the clip control and chambered one of the fat, black-headed rounds.

  Action elated him, freed him from his memories of being beaten, his sense of uselessness. Suddenly he felt wonderful, better than when he was on kif, better than when he was drunk, almost better than when he was about to make love. A flutter of fear in his belly was part of the frisson. So was the taste of iron filings beginning to fill his mouth.

  He rummaged through his closet, dragged out his most ample jacket, tore the right-hand pocket to give him access to the space between cloth and lining. Hand in pocket, he pressed the gun against his ribs to hide any bulge and slipped through the door, listening to it click behind him, wondering if he would ever unlatch it again. He whispered a goodbye to Dzhun. On the roof he signalled for a hovercab.

  “Jesus and Buddha Court,” he said, when one drew up.

  The cab’s black box said, “Gratizor.”

  On Lake Bai in the evening the tinkle of samisen music mixed with the thrumming of a Spanish guitar, the notes falling like lemon and oleander flowers into the dark, cold water.

  Half a click down in the huge lake—really a freshwater inland sea—glacial ice still lingered, surviving into the heat of an earth warmer than it had been since the noontime of the dinosaurs. Shrieking happily, goosepimpled swimmers were leaping into the water from the floating docks of lakeside villas. Further on, strings of Japanese lanterns illuminated teahouses and casinos and slider rinks where the children of grandees cavorted on expensive cushions of air.

  Back in the hills, spotlights illuminated palaces. Bijou villas lined the shores, and on the veranda of one of the smaller ones Stef and Dzhun idled, wearing light evening robes and not much else. Dzhun kept returning to Stef’s account of the raid, trying to get the story straight.

  “So these terrorists—did you shoot them?”

  “Didn’t have to. I’ve seldom felt like such a fool in my life.”

  Stef gestured lazily, and Dzhun disturbed herself long enough to pour champagne. The grapes of Siberia were justly famous, the flavour supposedly improved by the low background radiation.

  “The terrorists weren’t dangerous?”

  “Pair of dumb kids. The boy wearing his funny cross and the girl with the same symbol tattooed on her hand, if you can believe that. The Darksider smashed the door in and let out a roar and they both fainted dead away. Then I jumped in yelling and the thuggi followed, and suddenly the four of us were standing around waving weapons at two unconscious children. Ridiculous scene.

  “I almost puked when I had to hand them over to the polizi. Not that there was anything else I could do, with the thuggi and the Darksider there. I was sure Kathmann would tear them limb from limb, but Yama says they woke up spilling their guts. The polizi have got ’em locked up, of course, but Security got everything they wanted in the first three minutes.”

  “Dyeva.”

  “Absolutely. Iris and Ananda said she’d come in by the Luna shuttle on such and such a day. That was enough. Kathmann called Yama. Yama has shuttle data at his fingertips, there were only four females of the right age on that one, and they all checked out except Akhmatova Maria from a planet called Ganesh, which is, just like it was supposed to be, in the Lion Sector. She stepped off the shuttle and vanished.

  “So now they got her hologram, plus retinographs, voiceprints, DNA, all that stuff they take when you get a passport. The kids have positively identified her. Dyeva’s been made, for whatever good it may do us.

  “It was an eventful day. The kids had met Dyeva at a villa outside town, so the polizi descended on that and bagged the owner. He went straight to the Chamber and promptly gave them the name of another member of the cell, a woman who has so far evaded capture. A demand for information went out to Ganesh at maximum power and with the most awful threats that Yama could think of
on the spur of the moment.

  “He’d just laid all this information on Oleary’s desk when another call comes in from Earth Central. Kathmann’s got the wormholer. Gadget takes a hell of a lot of juice, so his mashini were watching the Ulanor power grid for unusual current surges. Well, a surge of the right size occurred, and Kathmann arrived at the metre with half a dozen Darksiders to find the wormholer standing all by itself in a deserted warehouse in the northwest quadrant.”

  Dzhun was frowning. “Then that means—”

  “You and I may vanish at any moment,” Stef grinned. “Dyeva’s presumably in the twenty-first century trying to prevent the Time of Troubles. I wish her luck. How’s she going to do it?”

  “And we’re here.”

  “And we’re here, relaxing, courtesy of the payoff to Yang. My success in cracking Crux convinced Yama that I’m the guy to stop Dyeva. He offered me a hundred thousand to go after her. I laughed in his face.”

  “Then who’ll do the job?”

  “Some thuggi from Earth Central who’re under military discipline and can’t say no.”

  “And What’ll happen to her?”

  “In the twenty-first century? Probably get killed by the surface traffic. Or catch a fatal disease. Or get lost in the crowds. I wouldn’t trust Kathmann’s idiots to find their peckers when they need to piss. Dyeva’s safe enough from them.”

  Later, he and Dzhun wandered up the shingled beach to a waterside inn that served caviar and Peking duck and other edibles. People of the upper and underworld were crowded together at small tables, eating and drinking. Blue clouds of kif drifted from open censers over the crowd, relaxing everybody.

  Dzhun, who had an indelicate appetite, was just piling into her dessert when the haunting notes of a synthesizer drifted like pollen across vast, cool Lake Bai. A band floated up in an open hovercar, and a sisi with a piercingly sweet voice performed a popular air, “This Dewdrop World”, whose simple theme was eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die. The crowd loved it; silver half-khans and even a few gold khans showered the car. Whenever a coin fell in the water, a musician would jump in after it like a frog and have to be fished out by his friends.