Nebula Awards Showcase 2006

by Gardner Dozois

  Torbiong was fond of discordant wailing noises. As Michelle swam closer, she heard the driving, screeching electronic music that Torbiong loved trickling from the earpieces of his headset—he normally howled it out of speakers, but when sitting still he didn’t want to scare the fish. At night, she could hear Torbiong for miles, as he raced over the darkened sea blasted out of his skull on betel-nut juice with his music thundering and the whistles shrieking.

  He removed the headset, releasing a brief audio onslaught before switching off his sound system.

  “You’re going to make yourself deaf,” Michelle said.

  Torbiong grinned. “Love that music. Gets the blood moving.”

  Michelle floated to the boat and put a hand on the gunwale between a pair of cowries.

  “I saw that boy of yours on the news,” Torbiong said. “He’s making you famous.”

  “I don’t want to be famous.”

  “He doesn’t understand why you don’t talk to him.”

  “He’s dead,” Michelle said.

  Torbiong made a spreading gesture with his hands. “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  “Watch your head,” said Michelle.

  Torbiong ducked as a gust threatened to bring him into contact with a pitcher plant that drooped over the edge of the island’s overhang. Torbiong evaded the plant and then stepped to the bow to haul in his mooring line before the boat’s canopy got caught beneath the overhang.

  Michelle submerged and swam till she reached her banyan tree, then surfaced and called down her rope elevator. By the time Torbiong’s boat hissed up to her, she’d folded away her gills and wings and was sitting in the sling, kicking her legs over the water.

  Torbiong handed her a bag of supplies: some rice, tea, salt, vegetables, and fruit. For the last several weeks Michelle had experienced a craving for blueberries, which didn’t grow here, and Torbiong had included a large package fresh off the shuttle, and a small bottle of cream to go with them. Michelle thanked him.

  “Most tourists want corn chips or something,” Torbiong said pointedly.

  “I’m not a tourist,” Michelle said. “I’m sorry I don’t have any fish to swap—I’ve been hunting smaller game.” She held out the specimen bag, still dripping sea water.

  Torbiong gestured toward the cooler built into the back of his boat. “I got some chai and a chersuuch today,” he said, using the local names for barracuda and mahi mahi.

  “Good fishing.”

  “Trolling.” With a shrug. He looked up at her, a quizzical look on his face. “I’ve got some calls from reporters,” he said, and then his betel-stained smile broke out. “I always make sure to send them tourist literature.”

  “I’m sure they enjoy reading it.”

  Torbiong’s grin widened. “You get lonely, now,” he said, “you come visit the family. We’ll give you a home-cooked meal.”

  She smiled. “Thanks.”

  They said their farewells and Torbiong’s boat hissed away on its jets, the whistles building to an eerie, spine-shivering chord. Michelle rose into the trees and stashed her specimens and groceries. With a bowl of blueberries and cream, Michelle crossed the rope walkway to her deck, and checked the progress of her search spiders.

  There were pointers to a swarm of articles about the death of Terzian’s wife, and Michelle wished she’d given her spiders clearer instructions about dates.

  The spiders had come up with three pictures. One was a not-very-well-focused tourist video from July 10, showing a man standing in front of the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence. A statue of Dante, also not in focus gloomed down at him from beneath thick-bellied rain clouds. As the camera panned across him, he stood with his back to the camera, but turned to the right, one leg turned out as he scowled down at the ground—the profile was a little smeared, but the big, broad-shouldered body seemed right. The software reckoned that there was a 78 percent chance that the man was Terzian.

  Michelle got busy refining the image, and after a few passes of the software, decided the chances of the figure being Terzian were more on the order of 95 percent.

  So maybe Terzian had gone on a Grand Tour of European cultural sites. He didn’t look happy in the video, but then the day was rainy and Terzian didn’t have an umbrella.

  And his wife had died, of course.

  Now that Michelle had a date and a place she refined the instructions from her search spiders to seek out images from Florence a week either way from July 3, and then expand the search from there, first all Tuscany, then all Italy.

  If Terzian was doing tourist sites, then she surely had him nailed. The next two hits, from her earlier research spiders, were duds. The software gave a less than 50 percent chance of Terzian’s being in Lisbon or Cape Sounion, and refinements of the image reduced the chance to something near zero.

  Then the next video popped up, with a time stamp right there in the image—Paris, June 26, 13:41:44 hours, just a day before Terzian bought a bankroll of euros and vanished.

  Michelle’s fingers formed.

  The first thing Michelle saw was Terzian walking out of the frame—no doubt this time that it was him. He was looking over his shoulder at a small crowd of people. There was a dark-haired woman huddled on his arm, her face turned away from the camera. Michelle’s heart warmed at the thought of the lonely widower Terzian having an affair in the City of Love.

  Then she followed Terzian’s gaze to see what had so drawn his attention. A dead man stretched out on the pavement, surrounded by hapless bystanders.

  And then, as the scene slowly settled into her astonished mind, the video sang at her in the piping voice of Pan.

  Terzian looked at his audience as anger raged in his backbrain. A wooden chair creaked, and the sound spurred Terzian to wonder how long the silence had gone on. Even the Slovenian woman who had been drowsing realized that something had changed, and blinked herself to alertness.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in French. “But my wife just died, and I don’t feel like playing this game any more.”

  His silent audience watched as he gathered his papers, put them in his case, and left the lecture room, his feet making sharp, murderous sounds on the wooden floor.

  Yet up to that point his paper had been going all right. He’d been uncertain about commenting on Baudrillard in Baudrillard’s own country, and in Baudrillard’s own language, a cheery compare-and-contrast exercise between Baudrillard’s “the self does not exist” and Rorty’s “I don’t care,” the stereotypical French and American answers to modern life. There had been seven in his audience, perched on creaking wooden chairs, and none of them had gone to sleep, or walked out, or condemned him for his audacity.

  Yet, as he looked at his audience and read on, Terzian had felt the anger growing, spawned by the sensation of his own uselessness. Here he was, in the City of Light, its every cobblestone a monument to European civilization, and he was in a dreary lecture hall on the Left Bank, reading to his audience of seven from a paper that was nothing more than a footnote, and a footnote to a footnote at that. To come to the land of cogito ergo sum and to answer, I don’t care?

  I came to Paris for this? he thought. To read this drivel? I paid for the privilege of doing this?

  I do care, he thought as his feet turned toward the Seine. Desiderio, ergo sum, if he had his Latin right. I am in pain, and therefore I do exist.

  He ended in a Norman restaurant on the Ile de la Cité, with lunch as his excuse and the thought of getting hopelessly drunk not far from his thoughts. He had absolutely nothing to do until August, after which he would return to the States and collect his belongings from the servants’ quarters of the house on Esplanade, and then he would go about looking for a job.

  He wasn’t certain whether he would be more depressed by finding a job or by not finding one.

  You are alive, he told himself. You are alive and in Paris with the whole summer ahead of you, and you’re eating the cuisine of Normandy in the Place Dauphine. And if
that isn’t a command to be joyful, what is?

  It was then that the Peruvian band began to play. Terzian looked up from his plate in weary surprise.

  When Terzian had been a child his parents—both university professors—had first taken him to Europe, and he’d seen then that every European city had its own Peruvian or Bolivian street band, Indians in black bowler hats and colorful blankets crouched in some public place, gazing with impassive brown eyes from over their guitars and reed flutes.

  Now, a couple of decades later, the musicians were still here, though they’d exchanged the blankets and bowler hats for European styles, and their presentation had grown more slick. Now they had amps, and cassettes and CDs for sale. Now they had congregated in the triangular Place Dauphine, overshadowed by the neo-classical mass of the Palais de Justice, and commenced a Latin-flavored medley of old Abba songs.

  Maybe, after Terzian finished his veal in calvados sauce, he’d go up to the band and kick in their guitars.

  The breeze flapped the canvas overhead. Terzian looked at his empty plate. The food had been excellent, but he could barely remember tasting it.

  Anger still roiled beneath his thoughts. And—for God’s sake—was that band now playing Oasis? Those chords were beginning to sound suspiciously like “Wonderwall.” “Wonderwall” on Spanish guitars, reed flutes, and a mandolin!

  Terzian had nearly decided to call for a bottle of cognac and stay here all afternoon, but not with that noise in the park. He put some euros on the table, anchoring the bills with a saucer against the fresh spring breeze that rattled the green canvas canopy over his head. He was stepping through the restaurant’s little wrought-iron gate to the sidewalk when the scuffle caught his attention.

  The man falling into the street, his face pinched with pain. The hands of the three men on either side who were, seemingly, unable to keep their friend erect.

  Idiots, Terzian thought, fury blazing in him.

  There was a sudden shrill of tires, of an auto horn.

  Papers streamed in the wind as they spilled from a briefcase.

  And over it all came the amped sound of pan pipes from the Peruvian band. “Wonderwall.”

  Terzian watched in exasperated surprise as the three men sprang after the papers. He took a step toward the fallen man—someone had to take charge here. The fallen man’s hair had spilled in a shock over his forehead and he’d curled on his side, his face still screwed up in pain.

  The pan pipes played on, one distinct hollow shriek after another.

  Terzian stopped with one foot still on the sidewalk and looked around at faces that all registered the same sense of shock. Was there a doctor here? he wondered. A French doctor? All his French seemed to have just drained from his head. Even such simple questions as Are you all right? and How are you feeling? seemed beyond him now. The first-aid course he’d taken in his Kenpo school was ages ago.

  Unnaturally pale, the fallen man’s face relaxed. The wind floated his shock of thinning dark hair over his face. In the park, Terzian saw a man in a baseball cap panning a video camera, and his anger suddenly blazed up again at the fatuous uselessness of the tourist, the uselessness that mirrored his own.

  Suddenly there was a crowd around the casualty, people coming out of stopped cars, off the sidewalk. Down the street, Terzian saw the distinctive flat-topped kepis of a pair of policemen bobbing toward him from the direction of the Palais de Justice, and felt a surge of relief. Someone more capable than this lot would deal with this now.

  He began, hesitantly, to step away. And then his arm was seized by a pair of hands and he looked in surprise at the woman who had just huddled her face into his shoulder, cinnamon-dark skin and eyes invisible beneath wraparound shades.

  “Please,” she said in English a bit too musical to be American. “Take me out of here.”

  The sound of the reed pipes followed them as they made their escape.

  He walked her past the statue of the Vert Galant himself, good old lecherous Henri IV, and onto the Pont Neuf. To the left, across the Seine, the Louvre glowed in mellow colors beyond a screen of plane trees.

  Traffic roared by, a stampede of steel unleashed by a green light. Unfocused anger blazed in his mind. He didn’t want this woman attached to him, and he suspected she was running some kind of scam. The gym bag she wore on a strap over one shoulder kept banging him on the ass. Surreptitiously, he slid his hand into his right front trouser pocket to make sure his money was still there.

  “Wonderwall,” he thought. Christ.

  He supposed he should offer some kind of civilized comment, just in case the woman was genuinely distressed.

  “I suppose he’ll be all right,” he said, half-barking the words in his annoyance and anger.

  The woman’s face was still half-buried in his shoulder. “He’s dead,” she murmured into his jacket. “Couldn’t you tell?”

  For Terzian, death had never occurred under the sky, but shut away, in hospice rooms with crisp sheets and warm colors and the scent of disinfectant. In an explosion of tumors and wasting limbs and endless pain masked only in part by morphia.

  He thought of the man’s pale face, the sudden relaxation.

  Yes, he thought, death came with a sigh.

  Reflex kept him talking. “The police were coming,” he said. “They’ll—they’ll call an ambulance or something.”

  “I only hope they catch the bastards who did it,” she said.

  Terzian’s heart gave a jolt as he recalled the three men who let the victim fall, and then dashed through the square for his papers. For some reason, all he could remember about them were their black-laced boots, with thick soles.

  “Who were they?” he asked blankly.

  The woman’s shades slid down her nose, and Terzian saw startling green eyes narrowed to murderous slits. “I suppose they think of themselves as cops,” she said.

  Terzian parked his companion in a café near Les Halles, within sight of the dome of the Bourse. She insisted on sitting indoors, not on the sidewalk, and on facing the front door so that she could scan whoever came in. She put her gym bag, with its white Nike swoosh, on the floor between the table legs and the wall, but Terzian noticed she kept its shoulder strap in her lap, as if she might have to bolt at any moment.

  Terzian kept his wedding ring within her sight. He wanted her to see it; it might make things simpler.

  Her hands were trembling. Terzian ordered coffee for them both. “No,” she said suddenly. “I want ice cream.”

  Terzian studied her as she turned to the waiter and ordered in French. She was around his own age, twenty-nine. There was no question that she was a mixture of races, but which races? The flat nose could be African or Asian or Polynesian, and Polynesia was again confirmed by the black, thick brows. Her smooth brown complexion could be from anywhere but Europe, but her pale green eyes were nothing but European. Her broad, sensitive mouth suggested Nubia. The black ringlets yanked into a knot behind her head could be African or East Indian, or, for that matter, French. The result was too striking to be beautiful—and also too striking, Terzian thought, to belong to a successful criminal. Those looks could be too easily identified.

  The waiter left. She turned her wide eyes toward Terzian, and seemed faintly surprised that he was still there.

  “My name’s Jonathan,” he said.

  “I’m,” hesitating, “Stephanie.”

  “Really?” Terzian let his skepticism show.

  “Yes.” She nodded, reaching in a pocket for cigarettes. “Why would I lie? It doesn’t matter if you know my real name or not.”

  “Then you’d better give me the whole thing.”

  She held her cigarette upward, at an angle, and enunciated clearly. “Stephanie América Pais e Silva.”

  “America?”

  Striking a match. “It’s a perfectly ordinary Portuguese name.”

  He looked at her. “But you’re not Portuguese.”

  “I carry a Portuguese passport.”

>   Terzian bit back the comment, I’m sure you do.

  Instead he said, “Did you know the man who was killed?”

  Stephanie nodded. The drags she took off her cigarette did not ease the tremor in her hands.

  “Did you know him well?”

  “Not very.” She dragged in smoke again, then let the smoke out as she spoke.

  “He was a colleague. A biochemist.”

  Surprise silenced Terzian. Stephanie tipped ash into the Cinzano ashtray, but her nervousness made her miss, and the little tube of ash fell on the tablecloth.

  “Shit,” she said, and swept the ash to the floor with a nervous movement of her fingers.

  “Are you a biochemist, too?” Terzian asked.

  “I’m a nurse.” She looked at him with her pale eyes. “I work for Santa Croce—it’s a—”

  “A relief agency.” A Catholic one, he remembered. The name meant Holy Cross.

  She nodded.

  “Shouldn’t you go to the police?” he asked. And then his skepticism returned. “Oh, that’s right—it was the police who did the killing.”

  “Not the French police.” She leaned across the table toward him. “This was a different sort of police, the kind who think that killing someone and making an arrest are the same thing. You look at the television news tonight. They’ll report the death, but there won’t be any arrests. Or any suspects.” Her face darkened, and she leaned back in her chair to consider a new thought. “Unless they somehow manage to blame it on me.”

  Terzian remembered papers flying in the spring wind, men in heavy boots sprinting after. The pinched, pale face of the victim.

  “Who, then?”

  She gave him a bleak look through a curl of cigarette smoke. “Have you ever heard of Transnistria?”

  Terzian hesitated, then decided “No” was the most sensible answer.

  “The murderers are Transnistrian.” A ragged smile drew itself across Stephanie’s face. “Their intellectual property police. They killed Adrian over a copyright.”