The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  Anna turned off her screen and shifted. Her movements were awkward, disjointed. Her face was pinched and oddly expressionless. He smiled and lifted a bottle of soda. She shook her head – the movement took a second to get going, and it took a second to stop.

  “Douglas Harper had Hulme’s Palsy too,” she said.

  “The serial killer?”

  “Yup,” she said. “Apparently it’s old news. Everyone in the support group knew about it. I’m still green compared to all of them. He wasn’t symptomatic. They didn’t diagnose it until after he’d been executed.”

  Renz pulled out a chair and sat, his heels on the kitchen table. The air conditioner kicked on with a decrepit hum.

  “Do they think what . . . I mean, was killing people related?”

  Anna laughed. Her eyes wide, she made an overhand stabbing motion like something out of a murder flick. Renz laughed, surprised to find his amusement was genuine.

  “They just think if it had progressed faster, some of those girls might have lived,” she said.

  Renz took a sip of his soda. It was too sweet, and the fizz was already gone, but it was cold. There wasn’t more he could ask than cold. Anna dropped her hands to the table.

  “I was going to make dinner for you,” she said. “But . . . well, I didn’t.”

  “No trouble. I can make something,” he said. Then, “Bad week?”

  She sighed. She was too thin. He could see her collarbone, the pale skin stretched tight over it.

  “The new immunosuppressants gave me the shits,” she said, “and I think I’m getting another fucking cold. Other than that, just another thrilling week of broadcast entertainment and small town gossip.”

  “Any good gossip, then?”

  “Someone’s screwing someone else even though they’re both married. I didn’t really pay attention to the details. You? The news feeds made things look pretty good.”

  Anna’s eyes were blue and so light that they made him think of icicles when they caught the light from the side. He’d fallen in love with her eyes as much as her tits and the taste of her mouth. He pushed the sorrow away before she could see it.

  “We killed a kid. But things went pretty well otherwise.”

  “Only one kid? That thing with the preschool . . .”

  “Yeah, them too. I mean we killed a kid. My guys.”

  Anna nodded, then reached awkwardly across the table. Her fingertips touched his wrist. He didn’t look up, but he let the tears come. He could pretend they were for the dud.

  “So, not such a good week for you either, huh?”

  “Had its rough parts,” he said.

  “You’re too good for this,” she said. “You’ve got to stop it.”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  He spoke before he thought. Truth came that way; sudden, unexpected. Like illness. “We’d lose the medical coverage.”

  Her fingertips pulled back. Renz watched them retreat across the table, watched them fold into her flat, crippled fist. The air conditioner hummed, white noise as good as silence. Renz swung his legs down.

  “I wouldn’t change anything,” he said.

  “I fucking would.” There was pain in her voice, and it pressed down on him like a hand.

  “You know, boss, I’m not really hungry,” he said. “Let’s go to bed. We can eat a big breakfast in the morning.”

  Once she was asleep – her breath slow and deep and even – he got gently out of bed, pulled on his robe, and took himself out the front door to sit on the rotting concrete steps. The lawn was bare grass, the street empty. Renz ran his hands over his close-cropped hair and stared up at the moon, blue-white and pale in the sky. After a while, he turned up his link, seeing if there was anyone online.

  Paasikivi and Thorn were both disconnected.

  Pauel’s link was open with the video feed turned off, but it had been idle for three and a half hours – he was probably asleep. Only Marquez was awake and connected. Renz excluded the other three feeds, considering the world from Marquez’s point of view. It looked like he was in a bar. Renz turned up the volume and thin country-pop filled his ears.

  “Hey, Marquez,” he said.

  The video feed jumped and then settled.

  “Ah! Renz. I thought you were actually here. Is that your street?”

  He looked up and down the empty asphalt strip – block houses and thin, water-starved trees. Buffalo grass lawns that never needed mowing. His street.

  “I guess so,” he said, then more slowly, “I guess so.”

  “Looks like the same shit as last time.”

  “It’s hotter. There’s more bugs.”

  Marquez chuckled, and Renz wasn’t really on the step outside his shitty base housing, Anna dying by inches behind him. Marquez wasn’t entirely in the cheap bar. They were on the link together, in the unreal, private space it made, and it removed the distance between them.

  “How’s Anna?” Marquez asked.

  “She’s all right. I mean her immune system’s still eating her nerves, but apart from that.”

  “You sound bitter. You’re not cutting out on her, are you?”

  “No. I said I’d stay, and this time I will. It just sucks. It all just sucks.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry. It’s hard when your woman’s down.”

  “Not just that. It all sucks. That girl we killed. We call her a dud like she wasn’t a kid. What’s that about?”

  “It’s about how a lot of those kids have mommies who strap them up with cheap dynamite. You know that.”

  “Are we soldiers, Marquez? Are we cops? What the fuck are we doing out there?”

  “We’re doing whatever needs to get done. That’s not what’s chewing you, and you know it.”

  It was true, so he ignored it.

  “I’ve been doing this for too many years,” Renz said. “I’m getting burned out. When I started, every operation was like an adventure from start to stop. Half the time I didn’t even know how what I was doing fit in, you know? I just knew it did. Now I wonder why we do it.”

  “We do it because they do it.”

  “So why do they do it?”

  “Because of us,” Marquez said, and Renz could hear the smile. “This is the way it is. It’s the way it’s always been. You put people out in the world, and they kill each other. It’s the nature of the game. Your problem, man, you never read Hobbes.”

  “The pissing cartoon kid?”

  “Five hundred years ago, this guy named Hobbes wrote a book about how the only way to get peace was to give up all your rights to the state – do what the king said, whether it was crazy or not. Fuck justice. Fuck whether it made sense. Just do what you’re told.”

  “And you read this thing.”

  “Shit no. There was this lecture I saw on a philosophy site. The guy said you build a government so motherfucking huge, it can make peace. Grind peace into people with a fucking hammer. Crush everyone, all the time. He called it Leviathan. He thought it was the only way to stop war.”

  “Sounds like hell.”

  “Maybe. But you got a better idea?”

  “So we’re making them be part of our government. And when we get them all in on it, this’ll stop.”

  Marquez’s window panned slowly back and forth – the man shaking his head.

  “This shit isn’t going to stop until Jesus comes back.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “Come on, man. You know all this. I said it before; it’s not what’s really on your mind.”

  “And what do you know about my mind?”

  “I spend a lot of time there is all.”

  Renz sighed and scratched at the welt on his arm growing where a mosquito had drunk from him. The moon sailed slowly above him, the same as it always had, seen or unseen. He swallowed until his throat wasn’t so tight.

  “She still turns me on,” he said at last. “It makes me feel like I’m . . . she’s crippled. She’s dying and I can�
�t fix it, and all I want to do when I see her is fuck.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “Don’t be gross.”

  “She might want to, you know. It’s not like she stopped being a woman. Knowing you still want her like that . . . might be the kind of thing she needs.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “There is no sorrow so great it cannot be conquered by physical pleasure,” Marquez said.

  “That Hobbes?”

  “Nah. French girl named Colette. Just the one name. Wrote some stuff was supposed to be pretty racy at the time. It was a long time ago, though. Doesn’t do much compared to net porn.”

  “You read the weirdest shit.”

  “I don’t have anyone to come home to. Makes for a lot of spare time,” Marquez said, his voice serious. Then, “Go inside, Renz. Sleep next to your wife. In the morning, make her a good breakfast and screw her eyes blue.”

  “Her eyes are blue,” he said.

  “Then keep up the good work.”

  “Fuck off,” Renz said, but he was smiling.

  “Good night, man.”

  “Yeah,” Renz said. “Hey, Marquez. Thanks.”

  “De nada.”

  Renz dropped the link but sat still in the night for a while, trailing his fingers over flakes of concrete and listening to the crickets. Before he went to bed again, he ate a bowl of cereal standing up in the kitchen and then used her toothbrush to scrape the milk taste off his tongue. Anna had shifted in her sleep, taking up the whole bed. He kissed her shoulder as he rolled her back to her side. To his surprise, he slept.

  At 6:30 in the morning, central time, a school bus packed with diesel-soaked fertilizer exploded in California, killing eighteen people and taking out civilian network access for half of the state. At 6:32, a fifteen-year-old girl detonated herself twenty feet away from the CEO of the EU’s biggest bank while he was finishing his breakfast at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan. At 6:35, simultaneous brushfires started outside ten major power transmission stations along the Eastern Seaboard. At 7:30, Renz was on a plane to New York. At ten minutes before ten, a ground car met him at the airport, and by noon, he was at the site of the attack.

  The street should have been beautiful. The buildings soared up around them; nothing in Manhattan was built on less than a cathedral scale – it was the personality of the city. From the corner, he could just catch sight of the Chrysler Building. The café had been elegant once, not very long before. Two blackened, melted cars squatted at the curbside. The bodies had been taken away long before Renz and the others arrived, but the outlines were there, not in chalk but bright pink duct tape.

  “Hey, Renz,” Paasikivi said as they took in the carnage. “Sorry about this. I know you wanted to see Anna.”

  “Don’t let it eat you,” he said. “This is what they pay me for, right?”

  Inside, the window of the café had blown in. Chunks of bulletproof glass three fingers thick lay on the starched linen, the wooden floors polished to a glow. The air still smelled like match heads.

  The briefing had been short. OG 47 had done this kind of duty before. Renz pulled up an off-cell window on the right margin of his visual field so the forensics experts could demonstrate what they wanted. The feeds from his cell were stacked on the left. OGs 34 and 102 were security, keeping the area clear while they worked, but he didn’t open links to them; things were cluttered enough as it was.

  Renz and his cell were the eyes and hands of the deep forensics team – men and women too valuable to risk in the field. A second attack designed to take out agents at the scene was a common tactic. Pauel, still in Paris, joined in not because he was useful, but because he was a part of the cell and so part of the operation. He was good to talk with during the quiet times.

  The next few hours were painfully dull. Paasikivi and Thorn, Marquez and himself – the expendables – all took simple instructions from the experts, measuring what they were told to, collecting samples of scorched metal and stained linen, glass and shrapnel in self-sealing bags, and waiting for the chatter of off-cell voices to agree on the next task to be done.

  Renz and his cell were the eyes and hands, not the brain. He found he could follow the directions he was given without paying much attention. They drove his body; he waited.

  They finished just after 8 p.m. local. There were flights out that night, but Paasikivi argued for a night in the city. Renz could feel Marquez’s attention on him like the sensation of being watched as Paasikivi and Thorn changed reservations for the whole cell. Renz almost stopped them, almost said he needed to go home and be with his wife. When he didn’t, Marquez didn’t mention it. With the forensics team gone, Renz arranged the other in-cell windows at the four corners of his visual field. An hour later, they were scattered over the island.

  Marquez was on the edge of Central Park, his window showing Renz vistas of thick trees, their leaves black in the gloom of night. Paasikivi was sitting in a coffee shop at the top of a five-story bookstore, watching the lights of the city as much as the people in the café. Thorn sat in a sidewalk restaurant. Renz himself was walking through a subway station, heading south to SoHo because Pauel told him he’d like it. And Pauel, in the small hours of Paris morning, had taken himself out to an all-night café just to be in the spirit of things.

  “I’ve always wanted to walk through Central Park,” Marquez said. “It’s probably safe enough, don’t you think?”

  “Wait until morning,” Pauel said. “It’s too dangerous at night.”

  Renz could hear the longing in Marquez’s sigh, imagined the way he would stuff his hands into his pockets to hide the disappointment, and found to his amusement that he’d done the same. Marquez’s gesture seemed to fit nicely on his own evening. The first breeze of the incoming train started to wash the subway platform, fluttering the fabric of his pants.

  “I hate days like this,” Thorn said, cutting into a steak. In that window, Renz watched the blood well up around the knife and wondered what it smelled like. “The nights, however, go a long way toward making up for it.”

  Marquez had turned and was walking now, people on the streets around him that would have been a crowd anywhere else. Paasikivi pushed her coffee cup away, stood and glanced back into the bookstore. In Paris, Pauel’s waitress – a young woman with unlikely red hair – brought him his eggs Benedict and poured him a cup of coffee. Thorn lifted a fork of bleeding steak to his mouth. The train slid up to the platform, the doors opening with a hiss and a smell of fumes and ozone.

  “All I really want . . .” Renz began, and then let the sentence die.

  The girl came out of the bathroom in Pauel’s Parisian diner at the same moment Renz saw her sitting in the back of his half-full subway car. Paasikivi caught sight of her near the music department, looking over the shoulder of a man who was carrying her – he might have been her father. Thorn, looking out the restaurant window saw her on the street. Marquez saw her staring at him from the back seat of a taxi.

  In all four windows and before him in the flesh, the same girl or near enough, was staring at him. Pale skin, dark eyes, shoulder-length hair that rounded in at the neck. Samara Hamze. The dead girl. The dud.

  As one, the five girls raised a hand and waved. Renz’s throat closed with fear.

  Thorn’s voice, deceptively calm, said, “Well that’s odd.”

  “Pull back,” Paasikivi snapped, “all of you get out of there.”

  “I’m on a moving train,” Renz said.

  “Then get to a different car.”

  The others were already in motion. Walking quietly, quickly, efficiently away from the visitations toward what they each hoped might be safety. He heard Paasikivi talking to an off-cell link, calling in the alert. Renz moved to the shaking doors at the front of the car, but paused and turned, his eyes on the girl at the back. There were differences. This girl had a longer face, eyes that made him think of Asia. The woman beside her – the girl’s mother, he guessed – saw hi
m staring and glared back, pulling the girl close to her.

  “Renz!” Paasikivi said, and he realized it hadn’t been the first time she’d said it.

  “Sorry. I’m here. What?”

  “The transit police will be waiting for you at the next station. We’re evacuating the train, but before we start that, I want you out of there.”

  “This isn’t an attack,” Renz said, unsure how he knew it. The mother’s glare, the protective curve of her body around her child. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not an attack.”

  “Renz,” Marquez said. “Don’t get heroic.”

  “No, guys, really,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  He stood and walked down the trembling car. Mother and child watched him approach. The mother’s expression changed from fierce to frightened and then back to a different, more sincere fierceness. Renz smiled, trying to seem friendly, and squatted in front of them. He took out his CATC agent’s ID and handed it to the mother. The darkness outside the windows gave way to the sudden blurred pillars of a station.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “I’m afraid you and your girl are going to have to come with me.”

  The doors hissed open. The police rushed in.

  “I don’t like where this is going,” Marquez said.

  “Some of you may have heard of the singularity,” the man on the stage said. “It’s one of those things that people keep saying is just about to happen, but then seems like it never does. The singularity was supposed to be when technology became so complex and so networked, that it woke up. Became conscious. It was supposed to happen in the 1990s and then about once every five years since then. There’s a bunch of really bad movies about it.

  “But remember what I said before. Levels can’t communicate. So, what if something did wake up – some network with humans as part of it and computers as part of it. Planes, trains, and automobiles as part of it. This girl is like an individual human cell – a neuron, a heart cell. That man over there is another one. This community is like an organ or a tissue; even before we were linked, there’ve been constant communications and interactions between people. What if conscious structures rose out of that. Maybe they got a boost when we started massive networking, or maybe they were always there. Call them hive minds. We might never know, just like our cells aren’t aware that they’re part of us.