The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  Patiently I explain the difficulties in trying to blame the first nineteen killings on the natives.

  “So you’re telling me we’ve got two killers, in two different places, killing people in the same bizarre way, and one’s a human and other’s a whatchacallit. That’s the dumb-assedest notion I ever heard.”

  “Sir, you’ve summed up the problem,” I tell him. “The evidence is unreasonable. But it’s still evidence.”

  The rest of the interview’s a total waste of time. We just yell at each other, accomplishing nothing. A supply ship’s due pretty soon and I guess he’ll send me home, as he’s authorized to do. That will make both of us happy.

  Needing time to cool off a bit after the shouting match, I set out to find Anna’s lab and promptly get lost.

  I don’t know if I’ve made this clear, but Main Base is a hopeless maze. The buildings were put up at different times for different purposes out of whatever materials were at hand. Meanwhile the population increased to a high of two thousand or so and then declined as mines were worked out and abandoned. Now a dozen buildings are permanently vacant, and a tangle of corridors lead here and there with no rhyme or reason, often ending in blank walls where an abandoned structure’s been sealed off.

  Adding to the general confusion, about half the people are absent at any one time. Some at mining camp Alfa – the only site that’s presently active – the rest at the smelter, or exploring for new sites. Then they come back to work at administration or housekeeping. The idea is to train the youngsters in all phases of running a colony.

  But that also means they rotate in and out, causing ceaseless turbulence. I’ve got a near-photographic memory for faces, and yet I’ve never seen many of the people I encounter.

  Two I do recognize are Vizbee and Smelt, the guards from the shuttleport, who must have rotated back. Vizbee’s as near insolent as he dares to be. “Enjoying Bela, Sir?” he asks with a nasty smile.

  At least he’s learned the word sir since I saw him last.

  “You’re looking a bit lost, Sir,” Smelt chimes in, with a washed-out smile. Someday I will deal with this pair.

  Actually, getting lost turns out to be one of the more useful things I’ve done. I’ve been dealing with facts, which are fine as far as they go. Now I’m getting the feel of the situation, too. The killer’s been hunting his victims in a kind of indoor jungle. Add the fact that he doesn’t seem to care who gets bashed as long as somebody does, and the bloody orgy becomes comprehensible.

  I spend a couple of hours wandering, asking directions, finding the directions don’t work, and getting lost again. Periodically I come across a sealed window and look out on the river valley. Or a landside enclosure with high fences and shrouded machinery on duroplast skids. Or a big cube sprouting thick cables – the main generator, a primitive fission-type reactor. Bela, I perceive, is run on the economy plan.

  But I can’t get out, and soon I’m wandering the maze again like a baffled rat.

  Finally admitting I’m lost for the nth time, I ask directions from a pretty dark-haired engineer named Eloise. We chat, and she invites me to visit her room, explaining that she and her boyfriend are “on off-rotation” – awkward phrase – from the mines.

  The boyfriend’s named Jamal, and he’s solidly built and dark and bitter as a cup of Turkish coffee. He and Eloise share a very cramped room, which they consider themselves lucky to get. I ask why space is so tight when, with all the empty buildings, it should be just the opposite.

  “Mack says it’s for security,” growls Jamal. “Stay where the cameras can watch your every move, including when you shower and make love. I can just see her and Krebs lying in bed – incredible as it seems, a lot of people think they sleep together – and peeping at us like the swine they are.”

  My own impression is that Mack and Krebs are both asexual beings, but I don’t argue the point. Instead I remark that morale in the colony is close to rock-bottom.

  “It’s dying,” says Jamal, now sounding weary rather than bitter. “Everybody hates the leadership and everybody’s scared to death.”

  I’m sitting with Eloise on the edge of their bed. Jamal is sitting on the floor.

  “See, you haven’t been here the last two years,” he goes on. “You look at the number of victims and think, ‘Oh, well, ninety-eight percent of the people are still alive.’ But when you live through a campaign of murder, the effect is cumulative. I never leave El without wondering if I’ll ever see her again, and she wonders the same thing about me.”

  She strokes his coarse black hair and nods. She has an inner stillness that he completely lacks, yet she backs him up.

  “It’s been hard,” she says simply. “I’m sure nobody will want to come here again, and everybody who’s here already is counting the days until they can leave. Bela will have to be abandoned.”

  She’s less bitter than he is and makes an effort to be fair, even to Mack, whom everybody else blames for their miseries.

  “She’s in a terrible situation. If she’s afraid of anything, it’s having to leave Bela. I’m sure she’s doing her best to find the killer, and I’m not sure anybody else could do any better. I mean, how do you catch somebody who doesn’t care who dies as long as somebody does?”

  “Some goddamn maniac,” Jamal mutters.

  “I don’t think so,” says Eloise thoughtfully. “The killing’s random, yet at the same time it’s calculated and deliberate. It’s . . . cold. Somebody’s aiming at something, and it can only be to drive us all away.”

  “Why would a human want to drive humans away?” asks Jamal, and neither of us has an answer.

  There is, of course, the big exception – Thoms’ murder. My hosts haven’t heard about that yet. But the conversation starts me brooding about it once again.

  Feeling a strong urge to revisit Alfa, I thank the young folks and ask them to show me an exit to the pad. They do so, and my luck’s in, because on the pad the flyer’s revving up. It’s a dull trip, and everything seems normal until we arrive.

  Then I ask for Ted Szczech, and learn that he won’t be taking any more pictures. Ever.

  No, he didn’t die by the customary head-bashing.

  Less than an hour before, something resembling a two-legged boar grabbed him when he was outside working on a stuck valve of a slurry pipe, and dragged him away – presumably to eat.

  They’re getting up a search party to try and recover his remains. I ask to go along and they say sure.

  As I’m suiting up, a call comes in from Anna. She’s been hunting me, called Michel in the security office and asked if I was on any of his monitors. He told her he’d seen me with Eloise and Jamal, so she called them and they told her they’d seen me catch the flyer. Then Michel called her back and said he needed to see me, too.

  Funny, all you have to do to get popular is to go away.

  Anna’s full of her latest discovery. “Last night I found bronze fragments embedded in Thoms’s skull. I’m not set up to do metallurgical analysis, so I asked one of our engineers to check the fragments out.”

  “Why?”

  “I think the bronze was smelted by some very crude, primitive process. The alloy’s soft and that’s why the skull did almost as much damage to the weapon as it did to the skull. Or maybe it was meant for use on a softer, thinner cranium.”

  “In short, it was made by an Arkie to smack other Arkies and the hardness of the human head took its wielder by surprise.”

  “Something like that. When are you coming back?”

  “They’re sending out a party to search for Ted Szczech, and I’m going along. A wild animal got him.”

  “Great Tao. What kind of animal?”

  I describe it.

  “Oh, that’s Ursasus terribilis,” she says.

  “Meaning?”

  “Terrible bearpig. I started doing taxonomy on the local fauna, giving Latin names and so on. Then stopped, because it seemed so futile. Oh, poor Ted.”

  “We ma
y find him yet.”

  Somebody’s yelling for me. Michel will have to wait.

  We put on transparent rain gear, the kind that breathes so you don’t drown in your own sweat, and water-repellent goggles. We’re all armed to the teeth. The flyer takes off to circle over the search area. Nobody’s expecting it to find anything; the jungle’s too full of big organic molecules that confuse the bioscanner.

  Down below, it’s exciting at first – walking in the deep wet woods of Bela. Up to now its green/blue/purple colors seen through misty rain didn’t look especially strange. Close up it’s a crawly place. Everything drips; every step squishes. Vines are in motion, like the hands of an antique clock; you can’t see them move, but if you look away and look back, yes, they’ve changed.

  The trees form short, twisty lattices of rope-like growths with trunks not much thicker than limbs. No large trees – there’s been no time for them to grow yet. Leaves of all shapes stretch up and out toward the little light that’s available, ruthlessly shading each other out so that the under-story is choked with masses of dead and rotting vegetation.

  No flowers. Everything in monotone. Things buzz around that look like flying crayfish. In glimpses of the sky, we see dashing small shadows that somebody on my intercom calls daybats. Hunting the crayfish, I suppose. Now and then I catch sight of an elaborately feathered creature crawling through the branches with its beak and talons, like a parrot. The usual little white worms are crawling around the wet ground, millions of them. My feet squash them at every step. I begin to feel like I’m walking through the innards of a dead, decaying beast. Even through the filters in my breathing apparatus I catch whiffs of decay, not quite like decay on Earth; a sharp touch of ammonia, stench of methane, a gagging bubble of – what? Chlorine? Plus that smell like a lion cage I sniffed before on the terrace at Zamók.

  Lasers hiss in the murky air and slashed limbs fall smoking to the ground where the wet extinguishes them. The ground’s like a spongy mattress and I sink knee-deep at every step. Soon my legs ache and my knees are quivering. We circle the whole camp, finding nothing.

  Ted’s just gone. Period.

  Back at Alfa, I’m bushed. Fall on somebody’s cot and snooze for about two hours. When I awaken, one of the guys tells me Zamók’s been buzzing me.

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “Easier said than done, old-timer. You were out.”

  First time anybody’s called me old-timer to my face.

  I stagger to the nearest monitor and press the return-call button. Michel’s image says he’d like to see me as soon as possible. I call his code but get only his image again, promising to return my call at the earliest possible moment.

  I have ersatz coffee and another plastic-mayo sandwich and think it over. If Michel wants to see me, why hasn’t he called again and why doesn’t he answer my call?

  I call Captain Mack and ask if she knows where he is. She’s looking, if possible, grimmer than usual. No, he’s off duty until tomorrow. Where’s he sleep? Impatiently she gives me the code for the room he shares with two girls and another guy. I call and his roommates are there, but he isn’t. I call Anna and ask her to look for him.

  “I’m waiting for the analysis of the bronze.”

  “Look for Michel, please.”

  I go to Alfa’s commandant and ask to borrow the flyer. No, he says, it’s on a regular schedule.

  When will it be going back to Zamók? Tomorrow noon, he says. Thank you, I say.

  I walk out onto the pad and find a tech just finishing his service routine. I tell him Hi, and when he goes back inside, I climb in and tell the black box to take me to Zamók.

  “Hearing and obeying,” says the gadget.

  “Accept no calls from any source until we arrive,” I add.

  “Hearing and obeying,” says the gadget.

  I settle back in the seat and wonder how I can explain snatching this machine if, after all, Michel meets me alive and well.

  I needn’t have worried.

  By the time I arrive he’s been found, and Main Base is in the state of an overturned anthill.

  As startling as the murder itself is the way it was done: Michel Verray has been shot in the back in the same chicken-run where Cabrera’s body was found almost two standard years ago.

  There was no approach, no hands-on attack. An impact slug was fired from the far end of the corridor. His beltpouch has been roughly opened, breaking the catch, suggesting robbery. His pistol’s missing. Was he killed with his own weapon?

  A scenario flits through my mind: Michel confronts the killer, draws his weapon, has it knocked out of his hand – maybe by somebody who’s been taking those martial-arts classes Anna talked about. He turns and runs away, and the killer picks it up and coolly takes aim and shoots him . . .

  But I’m not even sure he was running when he was shot. Mack thinks so, but the holograms she took of the body seem ambiguous to me. A runner hit from the rear in midstride on a smooth surface slams down and slides. I think the abrasions on his face are insufficient for that. I’d say he was hurrying but not running, and Anna’s inclined to agree.

  In her clinic she starts crying, the first time I’ve seen her do so. She has Michel’s body on her examining table, and it’s a horrible mess. As usual with that type of ammo, the entry wound near the spine is the size of my little finger and the exit wound through the chest is the size of my head. The slug, of course, disintegrated as it’s supposed to do, leaving no evidence.

  “Even Mack’s shaken up,” she tells me when she’s cried on my shoulder. “I saw her when they brought the body in, and she looked paralyzed. She kept saying, ‘Oh no. Not him. Oh no.’ He was kind of a substitute son, you know. Now she’s really alone.”

  Well, murder gets to the toughest of us, sooner or later.

  Anna washes her face at a laboratory sink and says dolefully, “I have to do the autopsy.”

  “Not now, you don’t. Tomorrow’s fine. Michel won’t run away. Come on, I’ll help you put him on ice.”

  I hate to touch the body, but as soon as I do, it’s okay. Michel is gone; the good mind, the lively wit, the Gallic accent, the future he had sketched out for himself – none of that exists anymore. The corpse is merely evidence.

  We wrap it up and put it in the freezer next to Thoms. We’re getting quite a collection of dead youth.

  Anna needs company, so I take her to my suite and, after I check my weapon – in case of bearpigs – we step out on the terrace.

  Rain’s falling in the distance, but a gap has opened in the clouds and pale sunset colors, lemon and rose, are showing. It’s the first sunshine I’ve seen on the surface of Bela. I begin to see what this world will be like in those magical decades – between spring and summer, again between autumn and winter – when it’s neither savagely cold, nor unbearably hot, nor a sodden mess. It’ll be gorgeous.

  For a while we stand there like a young couple holding hands. Anna needs distraction, so I begin telling her about the wet wild woods around Alfa, about the strange creatures and the restless trees. Her mood lightens a little.

  “I want to do some real science here,” she says. “I just won’t let myself keep getting sucked into the routine. I’ve been doing a little work on these larvae.”

  She gestures at the worms crawling on the terrace. “They’re all over the place and they’re genuinely weird. A human has maybe forty thousand genes, but they’ve got five times as many.”

  “What, those little worms? Why?”

  “I don’t know. They’re about as simple creatures as you could imagine – a kind of motile gut. And think about all the chances for genetic errors, for destructive variations – it’s too much information.”

  She added, “Rather like the murders. Where we’ve also got too much information and can’t make any sense out of it, either.”

  She’s back on that subject now, and with a sigh I admit to myself there’s no avoiding it. Now she’s mourning Michel, who evidently
had a gift for making older women want to take care of him.

  “Such a nice young man. A little while and he’d have been headed home. It’s terrible, all these young people dying.”

  She starts to cry again. I put my arms around her, and she’s so small that for all the gray in her hair it’s like holding a child. I’m just about to embark on some serious comforting when intuition – as usual – seizes an inconvenient moment to strike.

  “Anna, listen. Tell me this: Why was Michel hurrying down that particular corridor?”

  She looks up at me, eyes bleary, mind as usual clear. “Oh. Sure, it leads to my lab. You mean he couldn’t find you, so he was coming to see me.”

  We stare at each other for a few seconds.

  “Come on,” I say.

  “Where?”

  “I just saw a ray of light. This time internal. I think I know what the killer was looking for in Michel’s beltpouch. Let’s go talk to his roommates.”

  Vengeance is on my mind.

  Anna’s an unusual woman. Asks no questions, just leads the way through the maze of shoddy construction. I stumble a few times because my mind’s elsewhere, thinking of a lot of things that at last, dimly, seem to be making some kind of sense.

  Michel’s room is in an outlying building: large, clean, well-lighted; semiplast partitions between four bunks; a bouquet of artificial flowers lying on Michel’s pillow.

  His roommates are all drinking something with the sour smell of home brew and talking together in low voices. I ask to see Michel’s belongings.

  “Captain Mack took them all,” says a young Eurasian woman named Jospin, who seems to be the spokesperson for the group. “She and those two characters Vizbee and Whatever practically turned the place upside down.”

  “She said,” adds the guy, “that she was looking for evidence.”

  That starts an argument between those who say Mack was just doing her duty and those who say she was harsh and unfeeling. I short-circuit this argument.

  “Listen. You all know who I am and what I’m doing on Bela. Now I need something and one of you may have it. I hope you do.”