The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “Born here,” she proclaims, her voice overfilling the cabin. “Only human that ever was. Against company policy, of course; Mama was on the pill, but something went wrong. Folks died in a mining accident and the colony raised me. Now, with these murders, they’re talking about closing down the mines. People say we’re going home – but for me, this is home.”

  “If I can help you catch the killer,” I tell her, “the mines will stay open.”

  The smell of disbelief mingles with the odor of mildew from her uniform and lacquer from her regulation black wig. Christ, what a huge woman – must weigh close to ninety kilos. Yet not flabby. Her haunch pressed against me is solid as a buffalo’s.

  We turn west – or is it north? – above the estuary of a wide river where it swirls into the sea, spreading crescents of foam. A pod of enormous sea creatures rises all together, like dancers, and submerges again. I spot the gleam of tusks. Then we’re skating in toward a cliff covered with a cluster of domes, semiplast storehouses, and connecting corridors like chicken-runs.

  Whoa . . . what the hell?

  Beneath the clutter lie huge blocks of stone shaped and fitted together like a puzzle. Did I come four-point-something light years to find the Incas have been here before me?

  “Welcome to Zamók, Colonel,” says Captain Mack, expertly bringing us in to a landing on the gray circle of a rain-slick pad.

  As a boy I loved listening to the adventures of old Navigator Mayakovsky – the Explorer of a Thousand Worlds, as one of my textbooks used to say in the clear neutral voice I still hear in dreams.

  He named this one Bela, meaning white. When I saw it from space, I thought the reason was the clouds of water vapor that make it glow almost like Venus. But I was wrong.

  “Some information for you,” says Mack, handing me a memory cube as we stand at the Entries and Departures desk. I plug it into my notebook and listen idly while an autoclerk enters my essential data into the colony’s mainframe.

  The cube tells me much I already knew. About Bela’s wildly eccentric orbit. About the 241 standard years it takes to make its awesome trek. About its endless seasons, whose radical heat and cold result from the orbital path, not the tilt of its axis, which is only about two degrees. Earthlike features: It rotates west to east and its day is 22.7 hours, which ought to be easy to adapt to, even for somebody like me (I have trouble with circadian rhythms).

  Then the cube recites the text of Mayakovsky’s original report. The great Russian arrived in late winter, finding the skies ice-blue and clear, the surface a white wilderness – hence the name. His scanners spotted an artificial shape and he investigated and found an abandoned city.

  “Who could have built this huge stone platform and the lovely temples that bedeck it?” he demanded. “This world is dead. Beings like ourselves, alien wanderers, must have built this place. But why, in this endless Antarctic?”

  He named it Zamók, the castle, and the unknown builders arkhitektori. Hence the slang term Arkies.

  Exploring the castle led to a nasty encounter with carnivores laired in the temples. At first the species seemed merely interesting, a rough parallel to the Earth’s polar bears – and what Russian doesn’t like bears? So that was the name he gave them, medvedi.

  “Their long fur changes from dark to white as they move from shadow to sunlight,” murmurs the cube. “Tusks and claws are formidable.”

  Then a blizzard blew in. With complete white-out at seventy below and all bioscanners inoperative due to cold, the beasts ambushed an exploring party. “Two crewmen dead. Skulls crushed. Another vanished, probably eaten. A dangerous degree of cunning and intelligence in these animals.”

  That of course was a mere incident. The ores his deep metal-scanners found brought the mining cartel. The miners bulldozed off the lovely temples and built the current trashy hovels instead. Meantime winter had ended, and Bela turned out to be anything but dead. Thousands of species swarmed out of hiding and billions of seeds and spores sprouted, to thrive until summer arrived and turned the surface into a howling desert.

  A banal thought: How fragile life is, and how tough. Once it gets started, seemingly it can survive anything.

  At this point I have to turn off the cube. The local doc’s arrived, a tiny energetic Chinese woman named Anna Li.

  She puts me through the usual mediscan. Odd business she’s in, meeting so many naked strangers – probably wondering later on, when she sees them clothed: Is this the guy with the birthmark on his butt?

  I tell her I’m not bringing in any dreadful diseases, unless being over-the-hill is a disease. She smiles automatically, pays no attention.

  “You’re okay,” she says, studying the printout, “but stay off sweets.” Then dashes away.

  When I’m dressed, Captain Mack takes charge again, leading me through bilious green corridors crowded with people in gray coveralls. Name tags echo all the tribes of Earth: Jiang, Grinzshpan, Basho, Mbasa, Jones.

  To my surprise, my quarters are in the executive suite. A comfortable bedroom, an opulent private bath. On a broad terrace outside, the Inca-like stonework lies bare and gleaming in the rain. The view over the river valley to the distant mountains would be spectacular, except for a heavy steel screen that obstructs it. What look like maggots are inching their way around in the wet.

  “Somebody’ll bring your luggage,” Mack tells me. “Security Central’s right next door if you need anything. Like your suite, it has two doors, corridor and terrace. The Controller will see you in the morning after you’ve rested.”

  She turns to go. But I’ve got a question: “What’s the screen out there for?”

  Mack frowns. “Mr. Krebs used to sleep in here, until somebody fired a missile at him. Fortunately he was in the Security office chatting with me, and he wasn’t hurt.”

  “A missile?”

  “Just a shoulder-fired job,” she says defensively, as if a small missile makes you less dead than a big one. “Some disgruntled employee. That’s when we put the screens up. There’s one in front of the Security office, too.”

  “Was the missile stolen from your armory?”

  Mack glares and says, “Yes.”

  “And where does the Controller sleep now?”

  “Someplace else.”

  She closes the door firmly, leaving me to rest as well as I can – in the middle of a bull’s-eye.

  Supper’s in the dining hall. Mack guides me to the head table in a private room. I’m hoping to see Mr. Krebs. But the Controller dines alone.

  Instead I meet a dozen or so executives and engineers. English is everybody’s second language, and I listen to a babel of accents expressing fervent hope that I can find the killer. His current score is nineteen dead – almost 2 percent of the population of 1,042. Dr. Li again bustles in, wearing a laboratory smock, and tells me she has holograms of the bodies and all the autopsy data. I can see them after dinner.

  “Hope you’ve got a strong stomach,” says the senior engineer, a guy named Antonelli. Making a face.

  “Actually, there’s not much mess,” says Li. “Always one blow through the top of the skull with a sharp instrument. Odd way to kill someone, but it’s silent and effective.”

  “Any particular sort of victims?” I ask. “Men or women, old or young, homs or hets?”

  “No. If somebody was trying to wipe out a statistical cross-section of the colony, you couldn’t get much more variety. True, they’re nearly all young people. But that’s just demographics.”

  Right. Mining colonies are like that: a few seniors to run the show, many young vigorous people to do what’s often hard and dangerous work.

  “There is one pattern. The crimes all happen here,” puts in Captain Mack, who up to this point has sat silent, stuffing her face. “Never at the mining camp. For the first time, people are volunteering for extra duty at the mines.”

  A grim chuckle goes around the table.

  When the meal’s over, I ask Doctor Li to introduce me to the younger
people. I stroll through the main dining room, shaking hands and gazing into a kaleidoscope of faces having nothing in common but underthirtyish freshness. These youngsters probably all think of themselves as larval executives, here to punch their tickets, then home to climb the promotion ladder. I wonder how many will make it.

  A few minutes later, I’m walking with Anna – we’ve quickly gotten on first-name terms – down a chicken-run leading to her clinic. When we’re halfway through, she stops and says, “The first killing took place right here.”

  “Here?”

  We’re standing in the middle of a perfectly blank, empty corridor about twenty meters long – windowless, well lit and devoid of the slightest concealment. I ask about the victim.

  “A woman named Cabrera. Athlete – good runner; life’s so dull here that anybody who doesn’t take to drink takes to athletics. She could’ve escaped, I’m sure of it, if she’d seen him coming.”

  “What was she hit with?”

  “Probably a mountaineer’s pickaxe – short handle, easily concealed. The point penetrated the longitudinal fissure of the cranium and sank about seven centimeters into the midbrain. Cabrera lived a few hours in a comatose state, then died.”

  “Does the killer have to be a man?”

  “Not with all the girls who take martial arts classes. We’re outnumbered by the men and there’d be a rape a week if we couldn’t defend ourselves.”

  “You’re implying that not all miners are gentlemen?”

  “They’re gentlemen in about the same proportion that cops are.”

  A woman of spirit, I see.

  ITEM (2)

  From the Written Report of Anna Li, D.Sc., M.D.

  This person met Robert – Colonel Kohn – on the evening of his first day on Bela.

  I remembered nothing from doing his mediscan except that he was uncircumcised. At dinner I noted that he was a large man with prematurely white hair.

  Our initial talk was useful, I think, in helping him understand the situation here on Bela. He seemed interested in the data I was able to show him. Whether he was intelligent I could not at first decide, though he spoke like a cultured man. I admit that intellectual arrogance is one of my grave flaws. We professionals always look down a bit at policemen, whatever we may claim to the contrary.

  When he left, I locked the laboratory door. I had begun investigating a common worm or larva, hoping that unraveling the structure of its genome might provide a model for later work on Bela’s more complex and interesting creatures.

  Wishing the colonel well in my thoughts, I settled down to quiet, enthralling work that took my mind far away from corpses and those who make them.

  ITEM (3)

  From the Notebook of Colonel Kohn

  The cool voices of clocks are announcing midnight, but of course it doesn’t feel like midnight. I’m ready for bed but not, it would seem, for sleep. The old brain keeps cycling in the dry tedium of fatigue.

  I’m glad I had this chip implanted in my larynx so I don’t have to speak out loud to record my thoughts. You never know who’s listening. The technique is somewhat like ventriloquism, and not hard to learn. All the rubbish from my stream of consciousness winds up in my notebook, buried deep in a coded memory.

  Anna’s pictures are moderately gruesome and not very helpful. Mack’s notes on the murders are much the same. The killer’s efficient. The MO’s bizarre. The victims are anybody.

  The crimes began in the corridors, shifted briefly to the hydroponics nurseries, then everywhere. Joggers were struck down on running trails, late workers in machine shops and offices.

  Even after Mack issued orders that people were not to go anywhere without a companion, the killings went on. A woman was using a toilet stall while another stood guard outside. When she tried to open the door, it hit an obstruction that proved to be her friend’s body.

  Customary methods of investigation have failed. Tests for occult bloodstains, hair, and fibers turned up nothing. The colony lacks the equipment for sophisticated psych tests. Mack’s methods have been rough-hewn; after the first crime she grilled everybody, eliminated those with solid alibis, then arrested three people who lacked them.

  The results were not happy. After two more murders, the suspects had to be set free.

  Now everybody has an alibi for at least one, and usually for several, of the crimes. No trace of the weapon has been found. Despite the prevalence of mining engineers, it wasn’t standard issue; somebody whose hobby was mountain climbing might have brought it in their personal baggage. Mack’s computers have searched personal-baggage invoices as far back as they go, but found no record of such an implement.

  The stone platform under our feet is seamed with narrow passages. When stories sprang up about alien killers, the Controller first ridiculed the notion, then ordered Mack to explore. Almost any adult human would be too big to go down there, so she used a bot.

  The memory cube contains a few images of wall paintings it found down below – the first ever seen of Zamók’s Arkies, little hunchbacked brownish bipeds with three-toed feet and gourd-shaped heads and serious dental problems. But no sign of any recent presence except the scat and bones of small animals.

  None of this surprised Anna. From the circumstances of the crime, she’d already concluded that the killer, like the victims, must be human . . .

  Oh, hell. I’m still trying to sleep, but no luck. Just too tired, and the old brain keeps churning.

  Seeking air, I put on a robe and open a thick transplant door onto the terrace and edge around the screen. A tremulous roar rises from the river. A few chilly raindrops are falling. Thunder grumbles among distant hills.

  The air tastes good up here – phytoplankton in the sea and greenstuff in the jungle are hard at work excreting the poison gas we love to breathe. I can feel my heart beat a bit faster. I suppose when you’re down in the jungle among all the rotting stuff, it stinks. Most jungles do.

  My bare feet are cold – forgot to pack slippers. The blocks of stone are smooth and slick. Little worms squish nastily underfoot. I cross the terrace to a low parapet and look down. Lightning flickers on a dense black jungle lining the riverbank below. Then I smell something like the lion cage at a zoo –

  Aghh!

  Phew. Rude shock.

  Let me catch up. Light was emanating from the Security office and I’d turned that way and was padding along toward it when somebody flung open the door, pointed an impact pistol at me and yelled, “À bas!”

  I hit the wet stones just as a shot whanged by. I twisted around in time to see something big that had been coming over the parapet tumble back and vanish.

  Feeling better now. I’m in Security and a young guy in uniform is offering me a towel, which I need.

  “Sir,” he says politely, “I don’t think you ought to be outside at night. Wild ahn-ee-mahls sometimes climb the walls.”

  A skinny little watchspring of a guy with a blue chin and dancing black eyes. His English is fluent but sometimes original. He’s Security Officer Lt. Michel Verray.

  All around us monitors are blinking and humming to themselves. A voyeur’s dream of heaven. In one bedroom, a tumultuous pile of bedclothes suggests a couple trying for a little privacy as they make love. One of the least interesting scenes – an empty bedroom – is my own.

  Michel is Captain Mack’s only full-time assistant at Main Base. He calls her, with ironic inflection, Maman.

  “Here, Colonel,” he says. “Let me give you a key to the security office. I’m sure Maman wants you to have one. And I’ll sign you out with a pistol.”

  We chat while completing this transaction. I heft the pistol, check the load, press the recognition stud until it memorizes the pattern of capillaries in my hand. Hi, pistol. Hi, Colonel.

  We chat some more. “I presume she’s not really your mother?”

  He makes a comical face. “Non. But I think she would like to be.”

  If he’s right about that, it’s the first sign o
f human feeling I’ve noticed in Mack. Michel shows me around, explaining that the monitors were installed after the early killings.

  “We try to persuade people to keep to areas under surveillance. I wish we had more equipment. We don’t have enough cameras and anybody could be prowling the dark areas, looking for a chance to attack.”

  “Do people complain that you’re spying on them?”

  “They did at first. Not so much now they are scared. Anyway, we spy on ourselves, too. There’s my room, with my roommates. And in that one you will be thrilled to observe Maman reading in bed.”

  Mack has her wig off and her hair is close cropped. She looks like Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. I ask if the dozen or so weapons in the rack are the only ones in the colony. No, of course not. The Security people – Mack and Michel and Vizbee and Smelt – all carry guns. So does Mr. Krebs and Senior Engineer Antonelli and one or two other top dogs. In fact, everybody wants one, but Mack’s resisting and so far Krebs has backed her up.

  Damn right, too. Armed civilians can be more dangerous than the murderer.

  “How about the missiles?” I ask.

  Michel grins, knowing what I’m thinking. “All five that remain are here locked up, and only Maman has the key.”

  “I suppose the attack on the controller made her look bad.”

  “The whole situation makes her look bad. She gets grimmer every day it goes on. She may look like Mont Blanc but actually she suffers from the stress. And refuses to take the medications Dr. Li offers her.”

  Michel fetches a bottle of cognac and two plastic cups from a supply room. The drink lights a welcome fire in my gut. We chat and soon get chummy. It turns out that Michel did the exploration of the subsurface passages.

  “You built the bot?”

  “Non. Miners already had them to explore places too narrow or dangereuse for people. Call them Spiders [he said speed-airs] – little guys, walk on three legs, carry a digicam and an HI-light. I guided it through the passages, made Maman a memory cube and sneaked a copy for myself.”