The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  “Not really. Done a lot of virtual reality sims, but that’s not the same thing.”

  “Close enough. Anyway, we only need you to get the thing to the reactor site. We’ve got an explosives expert on call who’ll take over once you get there and deactivate the bombs. If there are any.”

  “So he’s coming with me?”

  “Not exactly, no. He’ll be riding in on a satellite link. You’re to establish that link in Pripyat, drive the RPV to the reactor, and he’ll jack in to do the actual assessment. Then you pull out. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Why can’t somebody pilot it in from outside the city?”

  “It’s only works on a short-range link. You’ll have to get within two miles of the sarcophagus.”

  “Great. Just great. When do you want this to happen?”

  “Immediately. I’m having your RPV flown in; it’ll arrive tonight. Can you set out in the morning?”

  “Depends on what you’re willing to pay me.”

  “Double your last fee.”

  “Triple.”

  “Done.”

  Shit, he thought. Should have gone for more. “All right, Merrick, you’ve got yourself an RPV driver. For a day.”

  Gennady debated whether to call Lisa. On the one hand, there was obviously more to this than Merrick was admitting. On the other, she would tell him not to go back to Pripyat. He wanted to avoid that particular conversation, so he didn’t call.

  Instead he took a cab down to a Trust warehouse at six o’clock to inspect his RPV. The warehouse was a tall anonymous metal-clad building; his now practised eye told him it might remain standing for twenty or thirty years if abandoned. Except that the roof would probably cave in . . .

  “You Malianov?” The man was stocky, with the classic slab-like Russian face. He wiped his hands on an oily rag as he walked out to meet Gennady. Gennady shook his hand, smiling as he remembered Bogoliubov, and they went in to inspect the unit.

  “What the hell is that?” Whatever it was, it was not just a remotely piloted vehicle. Standing in a shaft of sunlight was an ostrich-like machine at least three metres tall. It sprouted cameras and mikes from all over, and sported two uncannily human arms at about shoulder level. Gennady’s guide grinned and gave it a shove. It shuffled its feet a little, regaining balance.

  “Military telepresence. Latest model.” The man grabbed one of its hands. “We’re borrowing it from the Americans. You like?”

  “Why do we need this?”

  “How the hell should I know? All I know is you’re reconnoitering the sarcophagus with it. Right?”

  Gennady nodded. He kept his face neutral, but inside he was fuming. Merrick was definitely not telling him everything.

  That evening he went on a supply run downtown. He bought all the things he hadn’t on his first trip out, including a lot more food. Very intentionally, he did not pause to ask himself why he was packing a month’s worth of food for a two-day trip.

  He was sitting in the middle of the living room floor, packing and repacking, when Lisa phoned. He took it as a voice-only call; if she asked, he’d say he wasn’t dressed or something.

  “Remember what you said about how Druschenko would have to have had a satellite link to run the dragon?”

  “Yeah.” He hopped onto the arm of his couch. He was keyed up despite the lateness of the hour.

  “Well, you got me thinking,” she said. “And guess what? There’s a connection. Not with Druschenko, though.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite.”

  “Can you jack in? I’ll have to do some show and tell here.”

  “Okay.” He made sure the apartment cameras were off, then went into the Net. Lisa was there in full avatar – visible head to foot, in 3-D – grinning like the proverbial cat with the canary.

  “So I thought, what if Druschenko did have a satellite link to the sarcophagus? And lo and behold, somebody does.” She called up some windows that showed co-ordinates, meaningless to Gennady. “At least, there’s traffic to some kind of transceiver there. I figured I had Druschenko right then – but the link’s still live, and traffic goes way up at regular intervals. During the night, your time. So we’re dealing with a night-hawk, I thought. Except he wouldn’t have to be a night-hawk if he was calling from, say, North America.”

  “Wait, wait, you’re getting way ahead of me. What’s this traffic consist of? You intercepted it, didn’t you?”

  “Well, not exactly. It’s heavily encrypted. Plus, once it’s in the Net it goes through a bunch of anonymous rerouters, gets split up and copies sent to null addresses, and so on. Untraceable from this end, at least so far.”

  “Ah, so if he’s from North America, that narrows it down a bit. To only about half a billion possibilities.”

  “Ah, Gennady, you have so little faith. It’s probably a telepresence link, right? That’s your dragon. Nothing big was brought in, so it’s got to be an adaptation of the existing Chernobyl designs. So whoever it is, they should be familiar with those designs, and they’d have to know there were still some RPVs in Pripyat, and they should have a connection to Druschenko. And – here’s the topper – they had a lot of start-up capital to run this scam. Had to, with the satellite link, the souping-up of the RPV, and the missiles.”

  “Missiles? What missiles?”

  “Haven’t you checked the news lately? One of the Trust’s helicopters crashed yesterday. It was doing a low-level pass over the sarcophagus, and wham! down it goes. Pilot was killed. An hour after the news was released I started seeing all sorts of traffic on my secure Interpol groups, police in Kiev and Brussels talking about ground-to-air missiles.”

  “Oh, shit,” he said.

  “So anyway, I just looked for somebody involved in the original sarcophagus project, on the RPV side, who was American and rich. And it popped out at me.”

  Gennady was barely listening, but his attention returned when she brought up a window with a grainy photo of a thin-faced elderly man. It was hard to tell, but he appeared to be lying on a bed. His eyes were bright and hard, and they stared directly out at Gennady.

  “Trevor Jaffrey. He got quite rich doing RPVs and telepresence about twenty years ago. The Chernobyl project was his biggest contract. A while after that he became a recluse, and began wasting his money on some pretty bizarre projects.”

  “Dragons?”

  “Well, Jaffrey’s a quadraplegic. He got rich through the Net, and he lived through it too. When I say he became a recluse, he already was, physically. He dropped out of Net society too, and spent all his time and money on physical avatars – telepresences. I’ve got access to a couple of them, because he had to sell them when he couldn’t pay his bills. Want to see one?”

  “What, now?”

  “I’ve got a temporary pass. This one’s being used as a theme park ride now. At one time Jaffrey must have spent all his free time in it. The mind boggles.”

  She had his entire attention now. “Okay. Show me.”

  “Here’s the address, name and password. Just take a quick peek. I’ll wait.”

  He entered the commands, and waited as a series of message windows indicated a truly prodigious data pipe opening between his little VR setup and some distant machine. Then the world went dark, and when it came back again he was underwater.

  Gennady was standing on the ocean floor. All around were towers of coral, and rainbow fishes swam by in darting schools. The ocean was brilliant blue, the sunlight above shattered into thousands of crystal shards by the waves. He turned his head, and felt the water flow through his hair. It was warm, felt silky against his skin. He could breathe just fine, but he also felt completely submerged.

  Gennady raised a hand. Something huge and metal lifted up, five steel fingers on its end. He waggled them – they moved.

  This is not a simulation, he realized. Somewhere, in one of the Earth’s seas, this machine was standing, and he was seeing through its eyes and hearing through its ears.

  He took a step.
He could walk, as easily as though he were on land.

  Gennady knelt and ran his fingers through the fine white sand. He could actually feel it. Black Sea? More likely the Caribbean, if this Jaffrey was American.

  It was achingly beautiful, and he wanted to stay. But Lisa was waiting. He logged out, and as he did caught a glimpse of a truly huge number in American dollars, which flashed paid in full then vanished.

  Lisa’s avatar was smiling, hands behind her back and bobbing on the balls of her feet. “Jaffrey can’t pay his bills. And he’s addicted to his telepresences. You should see the arctic one. He even had a lunar one for a while. See the common thread?”

  “They’re all places nobody goes. Or nobody can go,” he said. He was starting to feel tired.

  “Jaffrey hates people. And he’s being driven out of his bodies, one after the other. So he turns in desperation to an old, reliable one – the Chernobyl RPV. Designed to survive working conditions there, and there’s still parts, if he can pay off an old acquaintance from the project to bring them in.”

  “So he does, and he’s got a new home.” He nodded. “And a way of making more money. Extort the Trust.”

  “Exactly. Aren’t I smart?”

  “You, Lisaveta, are a genius.” He blew her image a kiss. “So all we need to do is shut him down, and the crisis is over.”

  “Hmm. Well, no, not exactly. American law is different, and the Net connections aren’t proven to go to him. We can’t actually move on him until we can prove it’s him doing it.”

  “Well, shut down the feed from the satellite, then.”

  “We were about to do that,” she said with a scowl. “When we got a call from Merrick. Seems the extortionist contacted him just after the missile thing. Warned that he’d blow the sarcophagus if anybody cut the link or tried to get near the place.”

  “A dead-man switch?”

  “Probably. So it’s not so simple as it looks.”

  He closed his eyes and nodded.

  “How about you?” she asked. “Anything new?”

  “Oh, no, no. Not really. Same old thing, you know?”

  It was raining when he reached his apartment building. Gennady had driven the motorcycle in, leaving all his other supplies by the city gates. He wanted to try something.

  The rain was actually a good thing; it made a good cover for him to work under. He parked his bike in the foyer, and hauled a heavy pack from the sidecar, then up twelve floors to the roof. Panting and cursing, he paused to rest under a fibre-glass awning. The roof was overgrown with weeds. The sarcophagus was a distant grey dome in a pool of marshland.

  He hooked up the satellite feed and aimed it. Then he unreeled a fibre-optic line down the stairs to the sixth floor, and headed for his old place.

  Somebody had trashed it. Bogoliubov, it had to be. The piano had bullet holes in it, and there was shit smeared on the wall. The words “Stay away” were written in the stuff.

  “Jesus.” Gennady backed out of the room.

  Scratching his stubble nervously, he shouldered his way into the next apartment. This one was empty except for some old stacking chairs, and had a water-damaged ceiling and one broken window. Radiation was higher than he would have found acceptable a week ago – but after he finished here he could find a better place. Then think what to do about Bogoliubov.

  He secured the door and set up his generator and the rest of the computer equipment. He needed a repeater for the satellite signal, and he put that on the balcony. Then he jacked in, and connected to his RPV.

  At first all he saw was dirt. Gennady raised his head, and saw the road into town, blurred by rain. He stood up, and felt himself rise to more than man-height. This was great! He flexed his arms, turned his torso back and forth, then reached to pick up his sacks of supplies.

  It was a bit awkward using these new arms, but he got the hang of it after spilling some groceries and a satchel of music disks into the mud. When it was all hanging from his mantis-like limbs, he rose up again and trotted towards town.

  The RPV drank gas to feed its fuel cells. Bogoliubov had shown Gennady some full tanks on the edge of town, enough to keep the thing going for months or years. Thinking of the old man, Gennady decided that as soon as they were done with Jaffrey, he would visit Bogoliubov with the RPV, and confiscate his rifle.

  He jogged tirelessly through the rain until he came to his building. There he paused to hide the bike, in case the old man did come around today, then bumped his way into the stairwell and went up.

  Gennady paused in front of the apartment door. He hadn’t counted on the eeriness of this moment. He listened, hearing only the faint purr of the generator inside. Hesitantly, he reached to turn the knob with a steel hand, and eased the door open.

  A man crouched on the floor near one wall. He was stocky and balding, in his late thirties. He was dressed in a teal shirt and green slacks. His eyes were closed, and small wires ran from his temples to a set of black boxes near the balcony door. He was rocking slowly back and forth.

  Jesus, am I doing that? Gennady instantly cut the link. He blinked and looked up, to find the doorway blocked by a monstrous steel and crystal creature. Its rainbow-beaded lenses were aimed at him. Plastic bags swayed from its clenched fists. Gennady’s heart started hammering, as though the thing had somehow snuck up on him.

  Swearing, he hastily unloaded the supplies from its arms. After putting the stuff away he found himself reluctant to re-enter the living room. Under this low roof the RPV looked like a metal dinosaur ready to pounce. It must weigh two hundred kilos at least. He’d have to remember that, and avoid marshy ground or rotten floors when he used it outside.

  He linked to it again just long enough to park it down the hall. Then he shut the door and jammed a chair under the knob.

  The morning birds woke Gennady. For a long time he just lay there, drinking in the peace. In his half-awake state, he imagined an invisible shield around this small apartment, sheltering him from any sort of pain, aggravation or distraction. Of all places in the world, he had finally found the one where he could be fully, completely carefree. The hot spots of radiation could be mapped and avoided; he would deal with Bogoliubov in time; Jaffrey would not be a problem for long.

  No one would ever evict him from this place. No one would come around asking after him solicitously. No noisy neighbours would move in. And yet, as long as he had fuel to run the generator, he could step into the outside world as freely as ever, live by alias in any or all of the thousands of worlds of the Net.

  Be exactly who he wanted to be . . .

  Feel at home at last.

  But finally he had to rise, make himself a meagre breakfast and deal with the reality of the situation. His tenancy here was fragile. Everything would have to go perfectly for him to be able to take advantage of the opportunity he had been given.

  First he phoned Merrick. “You never told me about the helicopter.”

  “Really? I’m sure I did.” It was only a voice line; Gennady was sure Merrick wouldn’t have been so glib if they’d been able to make eye contact.

  Gennady would feel absolutely no guilt over stealing the RPV from him.

  “Forget it, except let me say you are a bastard and I’ll join the Nazis before I work for you after this,” he said. “Now tell me what we’re doing. And no more surprises or I walk.”

  Merrick let the insult pass. They set the itinerary and time for the reconnoitering of the sarcophagus. Gennady was to use the RPV’s full set of sensors to ensure there were no tripwires or mines on the approach. Druschenko had denied knowledge of anything other than Jaffrey’s RPV. Certainly hearing about the missiles beforehand would have been nice.

  “You’re to do the initial walking inspection this afternoon at 2:00. Is that enough time for you to familiarize yourself with the RPV?”

  Gennady glanced at the apartment door. “No problem.”

  With everything set, Merrick rang off and Gennady, stretching, stepped onto the balcony to
watch the morning sun glow off the sarcophagus. It was an oval dome made of interlocking concrete triangles. Rust stains spread down the diamonds here and there from the heavy stanchions that held it all together. Around the circumference of the thing, he knew, a thick wall was sunk all the way to bedrock, preventing seepage of the horrors within. It was supposed to last ten thousand years; like most people, Gennady assumed it would crumble in a century. Still, one had to be responsible to one’s own time.

  Humming, he groped for his coffee cup. Just as it reached his lips the computer said, “Lisaveta is calling you.”

  He burned his tongue.

  “Damn damn damn. Is it voice or full-feed? Full-feed. Shit.”

  He jacked in. He hoped she would match his laconic tone as he said, “Hello, Lisa.”

  “You asshole.”

  He found it difficult to meet her gaze. “Are we going to get into something pointless here?”

  “No. I’m going to talk and you’re going to listen.”

  “I see.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were going back?”

  “You’d have told me not to go. I didn’t want an argument.”

  “So you don’t respect me enough to argue with me?”

  “What?” The idea made no sense to him. He just hadn’t seen what good it would do to fight. And, just maybe, he had been afraid she might talk him out of it. But he would never admit that to her.

  “Gennady. I’m not trying to run your life. If you want to throw it away that’s your business. But I’m your friend. I care about you. I just . . . just want to know, that’s all.”

  He frowned, staring out the window. Dozens of empty apartment windows stared back. For an instant he imagined dozens of other Gennadys, all looking out, none seeing the others.

  “Maybe I don’t want to be known,” he said. “I’m tired of this world of snoops and gossips. Maybe I want to write my memoirs in a private language. Apparently that’s not allowed.”

  “Pretty ironic for you to be tired of snoops,” she said, “inasmuch as that’s what you do for a living. And me too . . .” She blinked, then scowled even harder. “Are you referring to –”