The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  He shrugs, rolling his eyes upward in comic alarm. “Boy, she’d be pissed if she knew that.”

  “Why?”

  “Like many mamans, she’s difficult. She thinks knowledge is power. Okay, she’s right. She wants to know everything that goes on here. Okay, that’s her job. But she also wants to monopolize information, store it up to use against her enemies.”

  “She has enemies, then.”

  “Mais oui,” says my new friend cheerfully, tossing off the last of his drink. “Everybody but me and Krebs hates her comme la peste.”

  Like the plague, eh? Well, I never imagined she’d be wildly popular. Michel’s becoming franker (and also Frencher) as he absorbs alcohol. While he refills our glasses, I ask, “What do you want the cube for, Michel?”

  “When I get home, I want to get a degree in Alien Civ and start teaching. I’ve started going over the cube frame by frame, and I think I can get my whole tay-seize [thesis?] from it. Le bon Dieu didn’t mean me to be a cop,” he added, then blushes, thinking I may take this as an insult to my profession.

  “I agree with God,” I assure him solemnly, and say good night. Now armed, I cross the terrace without incident.

  Good kid, I think, turning in. He’s saved me a lot – my life, plus a ton of post-mortem embarrassment. Wouldn’t that have been a fine terminal note in my personnel file? On the first day of his last assignment, KOHN, Robert R., COL, SN 52.452.928, contrived to get himself eaten.

  Good night, all. And pleasant dreams.

  Morning comes with rain, thunder, lightning, and a nasty shock.

  Early on I’m summoned to Krebs’s office. Captain Mack pounds on the door and, when I stagger out with eyelids still stuck together, leads me in grim silence through a labyrinth of corridors.

  We’re somewhere deep inside Main Base when we reach the new executive suite – so deep that the noise of the storm has faded into silence. Clearly, Mr. Krebs does not intend his quarters to be hit by any more missiles if he can help it.

  His office is large, blank, and ugly, and so is the occupant thereof. Mack withdraws without a word and a spongy, grim-faced man leans forward in a tall executive chair and gives me two weak-feeling fingers to shake.

  The chief feature of his face is a jaw like an excavator. His lower right canine sticks up outside. His gut billows over the edge of the desk, but his arms are thin and look unused. I typecast him as the perfect executive, a fat guy with a stone behind, good for nothing but giving orders to people smarter and stronger than he is.

  “You’ll be going in half an hour,” is his greeting.

  “Going where?”

  “Why, to check the body,” he growls, relapsing against the back of the chair. “Take Li with you. Third-rate doctor, but she’s all we’ve got.”

  “There’s been another killing?”

  “Mack didn’t tell you? Goddammit, I got to do everything around here. Yeah, it’s at Mining Camp Alfa.”

  “The first at a mining camp.”

  “Right. Now these cowardly shits I got working for me won’t want to go to the field at all. They all think they’re here to eat company food and punch their tickets and do as little work as possible.”

  I begin to see why somebody might fire a missile at Mr. Krebs. He seems to have a similarly unkind view of me. He sits there glaring for a few seconds, then demands suddenly, “Are you piggybacking on my budget?”

  Sticking his jaw out even further.

  “No. HQ pays me and the mining cartel reimburses them.”

  “Well, thank God for small favors,” says Mr. Krebs. “The dead guy was nobody special. Another small favor.”

  That ends the interview.

  I collect my notebook, put in a new battery and meet Anna outside her clinic. She has an overnight bag full of specimen bottles and a medical chest, which I carry for her.

  “I met your boss,” I tell her as we hasten to the pad.

  “To know him is to hate him,” she says. “Hurry up, only one flyer’s working and this is it.”

  Ten minutes later we’re taking off into the very teeth of the storm.

  What a flight. It lasts one hour or one eternity, however you choose to look at it. The damn black box piloting us has been programmed to take the most direct route – misplaced notion of fuel economy, I suppose – and that involves crossing a wide bay full of churning black water. A squall is barreling toward the shore, and we fly directly into it.

  I feel sure the lightning’s going to fry the black box and send us careening down into the sea. Haven’t had breakfast, so there’s nothing to come up except, of course, my stomach itself.

  Anna takes all the pounding and shaking stoically, or seems to. Still, I notice she too heaves a sigh of relief when at last we leave the bay behind and bounce down onto another rain-scoured concrete circle near another clutter of domes and sheds.

  “Well, here’s Alfa,” she says.

  People come running with umbrellas – yes, real Earth-type umbrellas – but of course we get soaked anyway. Two dozen people are stationed here, but three guys are away fixing a slurry pump, whatever that is. So I get introduced to twenty live people and one corpse.

  The latter is a young man named Thoms. He’s lying facedown on the poured-stone floor of the machine shop. At first glance the only difference in MO was the fact that he’d been hit on the base of the skull instead of the top.

  “Weapon appears to have penetrated the posterior median sulcus of the medulla,” Anna tells her notebook.

  But then she puts on a headset with a xenon lamp and high-power 3D magnifier, lowers the lenses over her eyes, and kneels down, her nose almost touching the dead man’s blood-stiff hair.

  When I help her up, she’s frowning. “The wounds at Zamók were punched through,” she mutters. “But this time . . . the wound’s not nearly so neat. As if the weapon flattened on impact. I’ll have to check when I’ve got the body back at the lab. Help me turn him over.”

  Somehow, handling a dead body has a calming effect on me. When I first see a corpse I’m always shocked, even after so many years of looking at violent death. But when I handle the body and feel that special weight, especially – as now – with rigor setting in, I know I’m dealing with earth and stone, not a person, and I can treat it like any other forensic exhibit.

  Superficial examination shows that except for being dead Thoms’ body is not, as Anna puts it, remarkable in any way. After taking a bunch of holograms, we bag it and the miners help us put it in their freezer.

  The rest of the day I spend in a small, bare office with a single monitor bleeping on a chipped duroplast desk. I’m sipping coffee, noshing on bad sandwiches covered with some kind of ghastly synthetic mayo, and interviewing survivors.

  Nobody saw or heard anything. Thoms was well liked, with no known enemies, and every single person at Alfa was under observation by others at the most probable hour of death, which Anna puts between 6.30 and 8.00. I reach the last name on my list before Madam Justice lifts her blindfold and peeks at me.

  The witness – named Ted Szczech, pronounced Sheck – is a pale, twitchy, skinny kid who looks about sixteen and wears coveralls that could serve him for a tent. He shuffles into the room carrying an envelope.

  “I’ve uh, uh, uh, got something for you, sir,” he stutters.

  “Oh yeah? What?” Bad food plus no progress has put me in a foul humor.

  Ted spends the next five minutes tripping over his own tongue. The story gradually emerges that he worked with Thoms in the machine shop and so was the first to spot the body. Before sounding the alarm he ran for his digicam, rightly anticipating that everybody in Alfa soon would swarm in and obliterate every clue.

  “Why didn’t you bring me the pictures at once?” I demand in my growliest voice. Actually, I’m impressed by his initiative.

  “I w-w-was w-w-w-waiting my turn,” Ted explains. “And uh, uh, uh – ”

  “What?” I say, beginning to pull the printouts from the envelope.
>
  “Well, you can see the f-f-f-footprints pretty clear.”

  “Footprints?”

  “Yeah. They showed up when I used the infrared flash. Standard light don’t show n-n-nothing. I never even knew they were there until I p-p-p-printed out.”

  I stare at dim little three-toed marks around a corpse so fresh that under black light it still glows with the warmth of life. In the early morning the stone floor was cold and the killer’s body heat created just enough transient warming for the cam to register.

  “It probably ran away when you started to open the door,” I comment. That seems to scare Ted.

  “You think so?” he asks, eyes bugging out. “You really think so?” Not a single stutter.

  When I show the pictures to Anna, she looks ready to tear out her graying hair. “Oh, great Tao. We got it settled. The killer has to be human,” she moans.

  “Okay, a human did it. And then Threetoes walks in, trots over to body, trots away again and disappears into the jungle, and – ”

  My voice dies in midpassage. Anna looks at me. I look at Anna. We’re both remembering where we’ve seen three-toed feet before.

  “We’d better get back to Zamók,” she says. “Now.”

  The storm’s abated and the trip back is a bit tedious, which certainly was not a problem on the trip out. Lying behind us wrapped in translucent plastic the corpse reminds me unpleasantly of a giant fetus swathed in its placenta.

  Back at the Castle we hump our gear across broad puddles and down gray corridors into Anna’s lab. I retrieve my infopack and we check the pictures the Spider took underground. And yes, the Arkies have three-toed feet that resemble Ted’s blurry images.

  While I make tea on a hotspot under a vacuum hood, Anna calls Mack and asks for the memory cube containing the full exploration of the subsurface passages.

  “You’re not authorized to see it,” that ungracious woman growls.

  “What do you mean?” snaps Anna. “I’ve got top clearance. I need it for the work I do.”

  “You’re a penis machinist, not a security officer. You don’t have a security-type clearance.”

  At this point I step forward. “I’m cleared for everything you are, Captain, and a lot more. Send that goddamn cube and send it now.”

  That makes me feel pretty good. Pulling rank may not be nice, but it’s effective.

  We relax until Michel appears with a sealed container, for which Anna and I both have to sign. He gives me a wink, then heads back to his job. A couple of minutes later, she and I are head to head, staring into the image box of her computer.

  The solid-looking forms jounce, steady, fuzz out, clarify. We’re entering a narrow slot between two of Zamók’s cyclopean stone blocks. We descend steep narrow steps. The high-intensity light swivels back and forth, its movement complicated by the robot’s walk. Anna’s forever freezing a frame here and there so we can get a fairly clear picture.

  Along walls of smooth stone marches a painted procession of Arkies wearing fantastic outfits of skins and feathers. Projecting teeth give their heads a spiky appearance. At the foot of the steps a narrow corridor splits left and right and the robot begins to explore. Passages divide and subdivide and it pokes into small rooms covered with garish paintings that make me think of Mayan art at Tikal and Dzibilchaltun.

  It’s all quite fascinating and, as far as our current problems are concerned, absolutely useless. When the show’s over, our tea has gotten cold. “So what’s your conclusion, Colonel Sir?” asks Anna with ungentle irony.

  “An alien – ” I begin.

  “The Arkies are natives,” she corrects me. “We’re the aliens.”

  “Okay, okay. First of all, you were right. An Arkie couldn’t have done the killings at Zamók. You turn around in a corridor and see a strange creature, you run, you scream, you fight back, you do something the victims didn’t do. The killings here were done by a human. So we have an anomaly.”

  We sit staring at each other. Feeling around helplessly in my empty head, I ask, “What do we know about the Arkies?”

  She gestures. “What you’ve seen.”

  “I mean – ” I don’t know what I mean. “How’d they survive in this world? It’s so bizarre, radical cold, radical heat, seasons that last for decades . . . how’d they get along?”

  She sighs. “Nobody knows. We’re like a pimple on the body of the planet. We came here with typical engineer’s tunnel vision, to dig and smelt and ship the ingots home and follow them when the mines play out.”

  She spends a while reheating the tea, then goes on: “I’m as bad as the rest of them. Spend my days doing routine physicals and treating orthopedic injuries from the mines. That’s where the crack about me being a penis machinist comes from. And there’s truth in it. I try to do some real science after hours.”

  “Anything helpful?”

  “For solving the murders? No. On the contrary – it’s as far as possible from anything to do with them. I’m trying to get a start on understanding the molecular biology of – ”

  “Oh,” I say. “Okay.”

  “Anyway, you asked me how the natives fit into their world. Answer: I don’t know how anything really functions on Bela. We’re all so busy being practical that we don’t have time to be intelligent.”

  So we give up; I send Michel the info we gathered at Alfa, and then we go to dinner.

  Replay of last night – Mack feeding her face, the engineers eyeing me, wondering if I know something they don’t about the latest atrocity. To avoid questions I don’t want to (meaning: can’t) answer, I avoid socializing, say good night to Anna and as soon as possible drag my aging butt off to bed.

  Through the door to the terrace I see that another storm’s moving in. The cube says the “spring rains” are scheduled to last about forty standard years. What would Noah say to that?

  Hit the hay but again can’t sleep, this time because the lightning keeps waking me up. Cursing, I get up and start searching for a way to darken the window.

  Lightning flashes. Inside the screen a monster stares at me.

  Lightning flashes. I stare back. Oh come on, it’s only an animal.

  But it’s impressive. Standing upright, bowlegged, body covered with rough fur of indefinite color. It’s a boar, by God – a huge two-legged boar. The hairy ears, the little red eyes with startling piggish intelligence in them – and the tusks, two down and two up, dirty orange but rubbed white where they cross each other – and especially the flat snout, quivering, with the hairy nostrils spread . . .

  And then, of course, I see it’s not a boar or anything else I’ve ever known. Long claws instead of trotters. Muscled forelimbs adept for walking or climbing. Imagine a big bear crossed with a swine, crossed with . . . what? Something.

  In the dark this triumph of natural genetic manipulation claws at the thick transplast with twenty-centimeter talons that make a nerve-jangling skreek. Lightning flashes. It exposes the full length of its twelve-centimeter tusks and turns away, frustrated.

  Lightning flashes. The animal’s gone.

  Somewhat shaken, I continue my search, find a switch on the wall and touch it. Yes, praise whatever gods may be, the window darkens. I go to bed again and try to fall asleep.

  Processions of feathered creatures march through my head, tracked by two-legged pigs and by Mayakovsky’s medvedi, the bearlike animals that ambushed his people seventy years ago when it was wintertime on Bela . . .

  Why do all these strange critters seem vaguely alike?

  ITEM (4)

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

  I spent that evening in my laboratory, meaning to work on my project. But my mind kept drifting to the body in my freezer.

  At length I gave up, dragged poor Mr. Thoms onto an examining table, and began to explore his wound. Almost at once I found something odd.

  Perhaps I should have called the Colonel at once, but I decided he was probably asleep. So I promised myself to speak to him at brea
kfast, not realizing that tired as I was after our adventures of the day, I might oversleep and miss him in the morning. And that is exactly what happened.

  ITEM (5)

  From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  “So,” says Mr. Krebs, champing his jaws, “what’ve you learned so far?”

  His windowless office gives me a feeling of premature burial. The man himself, with his piranha profile and billowing stomach and weak little hands, manages to look dangerous and helpless at the same time.

  “Who do you think tried to hit you with a missile?” I respond conversationally. This is a question I (literally) dreamed up last night, when the old subconscious finally did something useful.

  “I want answers, not questions.”

  “Well, I don’t have any, yet. But you haven’t just had twenty murders here. You’ve had that plus an attempted assassination of the colony’s executive head. I’m curious as to whether there might be a connection.”

  He growls. Literally – grrrrr. Like a dog.

  “Talk to Captain Mack,” he says. “That’s her department.”

  “I’m surprised you’ve kept her in such an important position after all the things that’ve gone wrong here,” I say frankly.

  “I trust her absolutely.”

  I take this as an admission that anybody appointed in her place might use Security’s armory to try to kill him – again.

  “Now, if you don’t mind answering my original question, what’ve you found out about the murders?”

  I open my notebook and set it humming. Briefly I outline the events of the day before. At the end I summarize, “The Arkies have joined the fun.”

  “But they’re all dead!” he almost yells.

  “No more than Mayans or Egyptians or Celts or Cambodians or any of the other builders of abandoned cities on the Earth are dead. They just moved away. Their descendants live on. Spring brought the Arkies out of hiding, and what did they find? Their Acropolis, their temple mount, had been desecrated by aliens – us. That pissed them off, and they’ve just killed their first human.”

  I think that’s kind of a neat theory – much too neat to be true.

  “You’re saying none of our people killed anybody?”