Year's Best SF 8

by David G. Hartwell

  David Songrel was a family man. Snow had observed him lifting a child high in the air while a woman looked on. Snow wondered why Aleen wanted him dead. As the owner of the water station she had power here, but little influence over the proctors who enforced planetary law. Perhaps she had been involved in illegalities of which Songrel had become aware. No matter, for the present. He rapped on the door and when Songrel opened it he stuck the pistol in the man’s face and walked him back into the apartment, closing the door behind him with his stump.

  “Daddy!” the little girl yelled, but the mother caught hold of her before she rushed forward. Songrel had his hands in the air, his eyes not leaving the pistol. Shock there, knowledge.

  “Why,” said Snow, “does the Androche want you dead?”

  “You’re…the albino.”

  “Answer the question please.”

  Songrel glanced at his wife and daughter before he replied, “She is a collector of antiquities.”

  “Why the necessity for your death?”

  “She has killed to get what she wants. I have evidence. We intend to arrest her soon.”

  Snow nodded, then holstered his pistol. “I thought it would be something like that. She had two proctors come for me, you know.”

  Songrel lowered his hands, but kept them well away from the stun gun hooked on his belt. “As Androche she has the right to some use of the proctors. It is our duty to guard her and her property. She does not have the freedom to commit crime. Why didn’t you kill me? They say you have killed many.”

  Snow glanced at Songrel’s wife and child. “My reputation precedes me,” he said, and stepped past Songrel to drop onto a comfortable sofa. “But the stories are in error. I have killed no one who has not first tried to kill me…well, mostly.”

  Songrel turned to his wife. “It’s Tamtha’s bedtime.”

  His wife nodded and took the child from the room. Snow noted the little girl’s fascinated stare. He was used to it. Songrel sat down in an armchair opposite Snow.

  “You have a nice family.”

  “Yes…will you testify against the Androche?”

  “You can have my testimony recorded under seal, but I cannot stay for a trial. Were I to stay this place would be crawling with Andronache killers in no time. I might not survive that.”

  Songrel nodded. “Why did you come here if it was not your intention to kill me?” he asked, a trifle anxiously.

  “I want you to play dead while I go back and see the Androche.”

  Songrel’s expression hardened. “You want to collect your reward.”

  “Yes, but my reward is not money, it is information. The Androche knows why Merchant Baris wants me dead. It is a subject I am understandably curious about.”

  Songrel interlaced his fingers and stared down at them for a moment. When he looked up he said, “The reward is for your stasis-preserved testicles. Perhaps he is a collector like Aleen, but that is beside the point. I will play dead for you, but when you go to see Aleen I want you to carry a holocorder.”

  Snow nodded once. Songrel stood up and walked to a wall cupboard. He returned with the device, rested it on the table and turned it on.

  “Now, your statement.”

  “He is dead,” Aleen said, smiling.

  “Yes,” Snow confirmed, dropping Songrel’s identity tag on the table, “yet I get the impression you knew before I came here.”

  Aleen went to the drinks cabinet, poured Snow a whiskey and brought it over to him. “I have friends among the proctors. As soon as his wife called in the killing—she was hysterical apparently—they informed me.”

  “Why did you want him killed?”

  “That is none of your concern. Drink your whiskey and I will get you the promised information.”

  Aleen turned away from him and moved to a computer console elegantly concealed in a Louis XIV table. Snow had the whiskey to his lips just as his suspicious nature cut in. Why was it necessary to get the information from the computer? She could just tell him. Why had she not poured a drink for herself? He set the drink down on a table, unsampled. Aleen looked up, a dead smile on her face, and as her hand came up over the console Snow dived to one side. On the wall behind him a picture blackened, then burst into oily flames. He came up on one knee and fired once. She slammed back out of her chair onto the floor, her face burning like the picture.

  Snow searched hurriedly. Any time now the proctors would arrive. In the bathroom he found a device like a chrome penis with two holes in the end. One hole spurted out some kind of fluid and the other hole sucked. Some kind of contraceptive device? He traced tubes back from it to a unit that contained the bottle of fluid and some very complicated straining and filtering devices. To his confusion he realized it was for removing the contents of a woman’s uterus, probably after sex. She collected men’s semen? Shortly after, he found a single stasis bottle containing that substance. It had to be his own. He suddenly he had an inkling of an idea—a possible explanation for his situation of the last five years. He took the bottle and poured its contents down the sink before turning to leave the apartment, but the delay had been enough.

  Hirald looked at the man in the condensation bottle, her expression revealing nothing. He was alive beyond his time; some sadist had dropped a bottle of water in with him to prolong his suffering. He stared at Hirald with drying eyes, the empty bottle by his head, his body shrunken and badly sunburned, his black tongue protruding. Hirald looked around carefully—there were harsh penalties for what she was about to do—then placed a small chrome cylinder against the glass near the man’s head. There was a brief flash. The man convulsed and the bottle was misted with smoke and steam. Hirald replaced the device in her pocket, stood and walked on. Her masters would not have been pleased at her risking herself like this, but they did not have complete control over her actions.

  The gray-bearded proctor was crouched behind the sofa, his short-barreled riot gun resting on the back and sighted on the bathroom door. Songrel stood by the moisture lock, his own weapon also trained on Snow.

  Songrel glanced across at the Androche’s corpse. “You will be staying for the trial,” he said, nodding to the proctor.

  The man stood and moved across the room, not letting Snow out of his sights for a moment. Even as the barrel of the riot gun was pushed up under Snow’s chin he noted how the man was careful not to block Songrel’s field of fire. Snow allowed his weapon to be taken. Maybe he could have dealt with the proctor, but not Songrel as well. Now the proctor backed off, flicking one puzzled glance at the weapon he had taken before pocketing it.

  Songrel opened the moisture lock and gestured Snow over. There, maybe, Snow thought. He walked over, stepped through the lock and glanced behind him. The proctor, staying well back, shook his head and grinned. Swearing under his breath, Snow shut his plastron mask and ducked out into the arid day.

  They gave him no openings, not on the stairs nor out on the dusty street. Always, one of them would be covering him from a distance of two or three paces. Snow was fast; faster than most people had reason to suspect, but not fast enough to outrun a bullet or energy charge.

  “You know you’re killing me,” he said to Songrel.

  “There’ll be guards during the trial, and we’ll give you an escort after…if you’re released,” Songrel replied.

  Opening his dust robes so both of them could see clearly what he was doing, he reached to the back of his belt and removed the holocorder Songrel had given him.

  “You’ve got all the evidence you need here, and I have to wonder how many of your guards might be tempted by the merchant’s reward.”

  Songrel appeared pained at this; he stepped closer to take the recording device, his weapon directed at Snow’s mask.

  The woman seemed to come out of nowhere: one moment all movement in the street was warily distant, then she was there, holding the proctor’s riot gun as he stumbled and went face down. Songrel’s aim slid aside to track her.

  That was enoug
h of an opening for Snow. He snapped his boot forward, catching the man in the gut, then chopped down on the back of his neck as he bowed forward. Songrel’s gun thudded into the dust. Snow dropped, snatched and rolled, coming up to get the woman in his sights. She wasn’t there.

  “I think this is yours,” she said, to one side of him.

  Turning his head only, he observed her. With one hand she was covering him with the riot gun. In her other hand she was holding his own weapon. She lowered the riot gun.

  “Perhaps now would be a good time to leave?”

  By the condensation jar Snow paused for breath. The woman, he noted, seemed not to need the rest, hardly seemed to be breathing at all. He shook his head and studied the jar. The man was now dead, his body giving up the last of its water for the public good. Snow paused for a moment longer to observe the greasy film on the inside of the jar before moving on. Someone had finished the poor bastard off.

  “Why did you help me?” he asked the woman.

  “Because you needed help.”

  Snow contained his annoyance. With a glance back toward the station he set out again, the woman easily keeping pace with him. She’d had her opportunity to kill him, so it was not the reward she was after. Time enough to find out what her angle was when they had put some distance between themselves and potential pursuit.

  Once out of sight of the station they left the road, setting out across a spill of desert to a distant rock field. There, Snow felt, they would be able to lose themselves, unless a sand shark got them first. He drew his pistol as he walked and kept his eyes open. One sand shark twitched its motion-detecting palps above the sand, but shortly subsided. It must have fed in the last year; it would be quiescent for another year to come.

  Having reached the rocks and firmer ground without event Snow slowed his pace while studying his companion. She was incongruously attractive and clean-looking and he found himself staring in fascination, reluctant to tell her, after what she had done for him, that he normally traveled alone. That, he supposed was the problem—he traveled alone by necessity, not choice. He gave an open-handed gesture and she walked on a pace ahead of him. Whatever danger she represented to him, at least he had her in sight.

  Now studying her from the side he said, “I won’t be going much farther. I want to set up camp before the Thira.”

  The woman nodded, but made no comment.

  Snow made a fire from old carapaces and removed his mask in the light of evening. He was curious to note that the woman had not replaced her mask, yet her skin was clear and unblemished. She sank down next to him by the fire, with a grace that could only reflect superb physical condition.

  “You never answered my question,” he said.

  With her head bowed the woman said, “You owe me, perhaps for your life. For that will you allow me to tell you in my own time?”

  “People have been trying to kill me. I’m not sure I can afford to be that generous.”

  She shrugged. “I could have killed you.”

  Snow bit down on frustration: he did owe her for his life. She could have killed him and, without her help, killers would have gathered at the water station while slow due process brought him to court. He took a deep breath and searched for some stillness.

  “What do I call you?” he asked eventually.

  “Hirald.”

  He struggled on, “Where did you come from…before?”

  “Across the Thira.”

  Snow had his doubts about that reply. He had crossed the Thira a couple of times and knew it to be rough going. Hirald looked like someone fresh from a month’s sojourn in a water station.

  “I see,” he said.

  “You are Snow,” she said, turning and fixing him with blue eyes that appeared violet in the fading red light.

  He felt his stomach lurch at that look, and then he immediately felt self-contempt. After all these years he was still susceptible to physical attraction…to beauty…“Yes, I am.”

  “I would like to travel with you for a while.”

  “You know who I am, and I suspect you know why I am suspicious of your motives.”

  She smiled at him and he felt that lurch again. He turned and spat in the fire.

  “I’m crossing the Thira,” he said.

  “I have no problem with that.”

  Snow lay back and rested his head on one of the packs. He pulled a thermal sheet across his body and stared up at the sky. The red-tinted swathe of stars was being encroached on by the asteroids of the night—all that remained of Vatch’s moon after some long-ago cataclysm. A single sword of light from an ion drive cut the sunset.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because I’m lonely, and I feel like a change.”

  Snow grunted and closed his eyes. She was not out to kill him, but her motives remained unrevealed. Whatever, she could never keep to the pace he set and would soon abandon him, and the unsettling things he was feeling would soon go away. He slept.

  Sunlight on his face, bringing the familiar tingling prior to burning, had his hand up and closing his mask across before he was fully awake. He looked at Hirald across the dead ashes of the fire and got the unsettling notion that she had not changed position all night. He sat up, then after a muttered good morning, went behind a rock and urinated into his condenser pack. Following the ritual of every morning for many years now, he then emptied the moisture-collectors of his undersuit into it as well. The collector bottle he emptied into his drinking bottle before dipping his toothbrush and cleaning his teeth. By the time he had finished his ablutions and come out from behind the rock, Hirald had opened a breakfast-soup ration pack and it was bubbling under its lid. Snow reached for another pack, but she held up her hand.

  “This is for you. I have already eaten.”

  “Did you sleep at all?”

  “A little. Tell me, how do you come to be in possession of proscribed weaponry?”

  “Took it off someone who tried to kill me,” he lied. He could hardly tell her he had brought it here before the runcible proscription and modified it himself over many years thereafter. He sat down to drink his breakfast.

  When he had finished they set out across the Thira. Hirald noted him looking at her after an hour’s walking and closed her mask. He thought no more of it—lots of people disliked the masks, and were prepared to pay the price of water-loss not to wear them so much.

  By midmorning the temperature had reached forty-five degrees and was still rising. A sand shark broke from the surface of a dune and came scuttling after them for a few meters, then halted, panting like a dog, tired or too well fed to continue—that, or it had sampled human flesh before.

  When the temperature reached fifty and the cooling units of Snow’s undersuit were laboring under the load, he noted that Hirald still easily matched his pace. When a crab-bird dropped clacking out of the sky at them she brought it down with one shot before Snow could even think of reaching for his weapon, and before he saw what weapon she shot the creature with. She was a remarkable woman.

  Shortly after midday Snow called a halt. “We’ll rest until evening, then continue through the night and tomorrow morning. The following night should bring us out the other side.”

  Hirald nodded in agreement, seemingly unconcerned.

  They slept under the reflective shelter of Snow’s day tent, then moved on at sunset after Snow had checked their position. They walked all night and most of the following morning, and when they finally set up the tent again Snow was exhausted. With a hint of irritation he told Hirald he wanted privacy in the tent and suggested she set up her own. Once inside his tent he sealed up and stripped naked. He then cleaned himself and the inside of his undersuit with a cycle sponge—a device that made it possible to stay clean with a quarter liter of water and little spillage. After this he pulled on a pair of toweling shorts and lay back with his miniature air cooler humming away at full power. It was luxury of a kind. After half an hour’s sleep he woke and opened the tent to look outside.
Hirald was sitting in the sand with her mask open. She was watching the horizon intently, her stillness quite unnatural.

  “Don’t you have a day tent?” Snow asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Come and join me then,” he said, reversing back into his tent. Hirald stood and walked over, apparently unaffected by the baking sun. She entered the tent and closed it behind her, then, after a glance at Snow, she began to remove her survival suit. Snow turned away for a moment, then thought, what the hell, and turned back to watch. She had not asked him to turn his head. Under her suit she wore a single, skin-hugging garment. The material was like white silk, and almost translucent. Snow swallowed dryly, then tried to distract himself by wondering about her sanitary arrangements. As she lifted her legs up to remove her trousers from her feet he saw then how the matter was arranged and wondered if a blush was evident on his white skin. The garment was slit from the lower part of her pale pubic hair round to the top crease of her buttocks.

  As she finally removed her trousers Hirald looked at him and noted the direction of his attention. He raised his gaze and met her eye to eye. She smiled at him and, still smiling, stretched the sleeves of the garment down and off over her hands and rolled it down below her breasts. Snow cleared his throat and tried to think of something witty to say. She was a succubus, a lonely desert man’s fantasy. Still smiling she came across the tent on her hands and knees, put her hand against his chest and pushed him back, sat astride him, and with her pale hair falling either side of his head she leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. Her mouth was sweet and warm. Snow was thoroughly aware of her hard little nipples sliding from side to side against his chest. He touched the skin of her shoulders and found it dry and warm. She sat back then and looked down at him for a moment. There was something strange about that look—a kind of cold curiosity. She slid forward onto his stomach, then turned and reached back to pull his shorts down and off his legs. He was amazed at just how far she could twist and bend her body. Once his shorts were removed she slid back until his penis rested between her buttocks, then, after raising herself a little, she continued to push back, bending it over until it hurt, then with a swift movement of her pelvis, took it inside her. Snow groaned, then gritted his teeth as she started to move, still staring down at him with that strange expression.