The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  It was a ritual, she decided, even though it really was some kind of occult science, and not mere magic at all. It was an initiation ceremony: a symbolic process of existential transition, like marriage or graduation, but a million times better and more accurate.

  Whether she had turned out to be one of the Immortals of Atlantis or not, Sheila knew that she would have become somebody. She would have become a butterfly-person instead or a caterpillar-person—or maybe, even better, a dragonfly-person or someone equipped with a deadly sting. She had not seen anything distinctly when she had sucked those first few wisps of vapour number five avidly into her aching lungs, but she had felt such a yearning for sight as she had never conceived before, or ever thought conceivable—and still did.

  But she had lost the opportunity, probably forever.

  When the police eventually turned up, in the wake of the ambulance she summoned to dispose of the body, she told them what had happened. She didn’t identify the boys, of course, but it didn’t take long for the police to figure out who had done what to whom, and why. When all the statements had been collected, all the stories matched—which made the police furious, because they really wanted to put the boys away for something meatier than possession of illegal weapons, and Sheila, too, for perverting the course of justice, if nothing else, but they knew that they wouldn’t be able to make anything heavy stick, even though the victim had once been a respectable oceanographer before he had flipped his lid and gone round the bend.

  In the end, the body was taken away. Sheila was kicked out of the flat, because it was a crime scene, and because the bloodstains and all the “miscellaneous potentially toxic contaminants” would need the careful attention of a specialist cleaning squad before the council could “deem it fit for rehabitation.” Darren couldn’t be found, but Social Services managed to locate Tracy so that she could be “temporarily rehoused,” along with her mother, in a single room in a run-down B and B.

  In the twenty minutes or so before Tracy skipped out again to find somewhere less suitable to sleep, Sheila gave her a big hug.

  “There’s no need to worry about me, love,” she said, unnecessarily. “I’m okay; really I am. But I want you to know, before you go, that I love you very much.”

  There was, of course, much more that she might have said. She might have said that she also wanted her daughter to know that she was the flesh of her flesh, and that it was very special flesh, and that if ever a mysterious man came into her life who’d been messing about with ooze dragged up from the remote ocean bed, and had picked up some sort of infection from it that had driven him completely round the twist, then maybe she should show a little patience, because it would probably be Sarmerodach, reincarnate again and trying heroically to fulfill his age-long mission, just like the freak in bandages from The Mummy, but in a smoother sort of way. She didn’t, of course. That would have been ridiculous, and Tracy wouldn’t have taken a blind bit of notice.

  Once Tracy had gone, though, and Sheila was alone in her filthy and claustrophobic room, with the TV on for company but not really watching it, she couldn’t help wondering whether there might be a glimmer of hope, not just for her and Tracy, or Darren, but for the whole ecocatastrophe-threatened world.

  She decided, eventually, that she might as well believe that there was.

  Nothing Personal

  PAT CADIGAN

  Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and now lives in London with her family. She made her first professional sale in 1980 and has subsequently come to be regarded as one of the best new writers of her generation. Her story “Pretty Boy Crossover” has appeared on several critics’ lists as among the best science-fiction stories of the 1980s, and her story “Angel” was a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award (one of the few stories ever to earn that rather unusual distinction). Her short fiction—which has appeared in most of the major markets, including Omni, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—has been gathered in the collections Patterns and Dirty Work: Stories. Her first novel, Mindplayers, was released in 1987 to excellent critical response, and her second novel, Synners, released in 1991, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award as the year’s best science-fiction novel, as did her third novel, Fools, making her one of only two writers (the other is China Mieville) to win the Clarke Award twice. Cadigan’s other books include the novels Tea from an Empty Cup and Dervish Is Digital and, as editor, the anthology The Ultimate Cyberpunk. Her most recent book is a new novel, Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine. Her stories have appeared in our First through Sixth and Ninth through Thirteenth Annual Collections.

  In the suspenseful story that follows, she takes us on a tour of cyberspace, which turns out to be every bit as dangerous a place as the real world, if not more so.

  Detective Ruby Tsung could not say when the Dread had first come over her. It had been a gradual development, taking place over a period of weeks, possibly months, with all the subtlety of any of the more mundane life processes—weight gain, graying hair, aging itself. Time marched on and one day you woke up to find you were a somewhat dumpy, graying, middle-aged homicide detective with twenty-five years on the job and a hefty lump of bad feeling in the pit of your stomach: the Dread.

  It was a familiar enough feeling, the Dread. Ruby had known it well in the past. Waiting for the verdict in an officer-involved shooting; looking up from her backlog of paperwork to find a stone-faced IAD officer standing over her; the doctor clearing his throat and telling her to sit down before giving her the results of the mammogram; answering an unknown trouble call and discovering it was a cop’s address. Then there were the ever-popular rumors, rumors, rumors: of budget cuts, of forced retirement for everyone with more than fifteen years in, of mandatory transfers, demotions, promotions, stings, grand jury subpoenas, not to mention famine, war, pestilence, disease, and death—business as usual.

  After a while she had become inured to a lot of it. You had to or you’d make yourself sick, give yourself an ulcer, or go crazy. As she had grown more experienced, she had learned what to worry about and what she could consign to denial even just temporarily. Otherwise, she would have spent all day with the Dread eating away at her insides and all night with it sitting on her chest crushing the breath out of her.

  The last ten years of her twenty-five had been in Homicide, and in that time she had had little reason to feel Dread. There was no point. This was Homicide—something bad was going to happen, so there was no reason to dread it. Someone was going to turn up dead today, tomorrow it would be someone else, the next day still someone else, and so forth. Nothing personal, just Homicide.

  Nothing personal. She had been coping with the job on this basis for a long time now and it worked just fine. Whatever each murder might have been about, she could be absolutely certain that it wasn’t about her. Whatever had gone so seriously wrong as to result in loss of life, it was not meant to serve as an omen, a warning, or any other kind of signifier in her life. Just the facts, ma’am or sir. Then punch out and go home.

  Nothing personal. She was perfectly clear on that. It didn’t help. She still felt as if she had swallowed something roughly the size and density of a hockey puck.

  There was no specific reason that she could think of. She wasn’t under investigation—not as far as she knew, anyway, and she made a point of not dreading what she didn’t know. She hadn’t done anything (lately) that would have called for any serious disciplinary action; there were no questionable medical tests to worry about, no threats of any kind. Her son, Jake, and his wife, Lita, were nested comfortably in the suburbs outside Boston, making an indecent amount of money in computer software and raising her grandkids in a big old Victorian house that looked like something out of a storybook. The kids e-mailed her regularly, mostly jokes and scans of their crayon drawings. Whether they were all really as happy as they appeared to be was another matter, but she was fairly certain they weren’t suffering. But even if s
he had been inclined to worry unduly about them, it wouldn’t have felt like the Dread.

  Almost as puzzling to her as when the Dread had first taken up residence was how she had managed not to notice it coming on. Eventually she understood that she hadn’t—she had simply pushed it to the back of her mind and then, being continuously busy, had kept on pushing it all the way into the Worry About Later file, where it had finally grown too intense to ignore.

  Which brought her back to the initial question: when the hell had it started? Had it been there when her partner Rita Castillo had retired? She didn’t remember feeling anything as unpleasant as the Dread when Rita had made the announcement or later on, at her leaving party. Held in a cop bar, the festivities had gone on till two in the morning, and the only unusual thing about it for Ruby had been that she had gone home relatively sober. Not by design and not for any specific reason. Not even on purpose—she had had a couple of drinks that had given her a nice mellow buzz, after which she had switched to diet cola. Some kind of new stuff—someone had given her a taste and she’d liked it. Who? Right, Tommy DiCenzo; Tommy had fifteen years of sobriety, which was some kind of precinct record.

  But the Dread hadn’t started that night; it had already been with her then. Not the current full-blown knot of Dread, but in retrospect, she knew that she had felt something and simply refused to think about the bit of disquiet that had sunk its barbed hook into a soft place.

  But she hadn’t been so much in denial that she had gotten drunk. You left yourself open to all sorts of unpleasantness when you tied one on at a cop’s retirement party: bad thoughts, bad memories, bad dreams, and real bad mornings after. Of course, knowing that hadn’t always stopped her in the past. It was too easy to let yourself be caught up in the moment, in all the moments, and suddenly you were completely shitfaced and wondering how that could have happened. Whereas she couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard of anyone staying sober by accident.

  Could have been the nine-year-old that had brought the Dread on. That had been pretty bad even for an old hand like herself. Rita had been on vacation and she had been working alone when the boy’s body had turned up in the Dumpster on the south side—or south town, which was what everyone seemed to be calling it now. The sudden name change baffled her; she had joked to Louie Levant at the desk across from hers about not getting the memo on renaming the ’hoods. Louie had looked back at her with a mixture of mild surprise and amusement on his pale features. “South town was what we always called it when I was growing up there,” he informed her, a bit loftily. “Guess the rest of you finally caught on.” Louie was about twenty years younger than she was, Ruby reminded herself, which meant that she had two decades more history to forget; she let the matter drop.

  Either way, south side or south town, the area wasn’t a crime hotspot. It wasn’t as upscale as the parklike west side or as stolidly middle/working class as the northland grid, but it wasn’t east midtown, either. Murder in south town was news; the fact that it was a nine-year-old boy was worse news, and worst of all, it had been a sex crime.

  Somehow she had known that it would be a sex crime even before she had seen the body, lying small, naked, and broken amid the trash in the bottom of the Dumpster. Just what she hadn’t wanted to catch—kiddie sex murder. Kiddie sex murder had something for everyone: nightmares for parents, hysterical ammunition for religious fanatics, and lurid headlines for all. And a very special kind of hell for the family of the victim, who would be forever overshadowed by the circumstances of his death.

  During his short life, the boy had been an average student with a talent for things mechanical—he had liked to build engines for model trains and cars. He had told his parents he thought he’d like to be a pilot when he grew up. Had he died in some kind of accident, a car wreck, a fall, or something equally unremarkable, he would have been remembered as the little boy who never got a chance to fly—tragic, what a shame, light a candle. Instead, he would now and forever be defined by the sensational nature of his death. The public memory would link him not with little-kid stuff like model trains and cars but with the pervert who had killed him.

  She hadn’t known anything about him, none of those specific details about models and flying, when she had first stood gazing down at him; at that point, she hadn’t even known his name. But she had known the rest of it as she had climbed into the Dumpster, trying not to gag from the stench of garbage and worse and hoping that the plastic overalls and booties she had on didn’t tear.

  That had been a bad day. Bad enough that it could have been the day the Dread had taken up residence in her gut.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Thinking about it, remembering the sight, the smell, the awful way it felt when she had accidentally stepped on the dead boy’s ankle, she knew the Dread had already been with her. Not so cumbersome at the time, still small enough to snub in favor of more immediate problems, but definitely there.

  Had it been Ricky Carstairs, then? About a month before the nine-year-old, she had been on her way out of the precinct house when she had passed two uniformed officers bringing him in and recognized him immediately. She had no idea how she had managed that mental feat—he had been skinny, dirty, and obviously strung out, and she hadn’t seen him since he and Jake had been in the seventh grade together, but she had known him at once and it hadn’t been a good moment.

  “It’s just plain wrong,” she had said when Rita asked her why she looked as if she had just found half a worm in the middle of an apple. “Your kid’s old school friends are supposed go away and live lives with no distinguishing characteristics. Become office workers in someplace like Columbus or Chicago or Duluth.”

  “And that’s just plain weird,” Rita replied, her plump face wearing a slightly alarmed expression. “Or maybe not weird enough—I don’t know. You been watching a lot of TV lately? Like the Hallmark Channel or something?”

  “Never mind,” she said, making a short dismissive wave with one hand. “It made more sense before I said it out loud.”

  Rita had burst into hearty laughter and that had been that; they’d gone with the rest of the day, whatever that had involved. Probably a dead body.

  The dismaying sight of one of Jake’s old school friends sweating in handcuffs had lodged in her mind more as a curiosity than anything else. Uncomfortable but hardly critical—not the fabled moment of clarity, not a short sharp shock or a reality check or a wake-up call from Planet Earth. Just a moment when she hoped that poor old Ricky hadn’t recognized her, too.

  So had the Dread already been lodged in her gut then?

  She tried, but she honestly couldn’t remember one way or the other—the incident was just that too far in the past and it had lasted only a minute, if that—but she thought it was very possible that it had.

  It was unlikely, she realized, that she would ever pinpoint the exact moment when something had shifted or slipped or cracked—gone faulty, anyway—and let a sense of something wrong get in and take root. And for all she knew, it might not even matter. Not if she were in the first stage of one of those on-the-job crack-ups that a lot of cops fell victim to. Just what she needed—a slow-motion train wreck. Christ, what the hell was the point of having a breakdown in slow motion unless you could actually do something about it, actually prevent it from happening? Too bad it didn’t work that way—every cop she knew who had come out the other side of a crash described it as unstoppable. If it had to happen, why couldn’t it be fast? Crack up quick and have an equally rapid recovery, get it over with. She pictured herself going to the department shrink for help: Overclock me, Doc—I got cases to solve and they’re gaining on me.

  Ha-ha, good one; the shrink might even get a chuckle out of it. Unless she had to explain what overclocking was. Would a shrink know enough about computers to get it? Hell, she wouldn’t have known herself if she hadn’t picked things up from Jake, who had blossomed into a tech head practically in his playpen.

  Her mind snagged on the idea
of talking to the shrink and wouldn’t let go. Why not? She had done it before. Granted, it had been mandatory, then—all cops involved in a shooting had to see the shrink—but she’d had no problem with that. And what the hell, it had done her more good than she’d expected it to. She had known at the time that she’d needed help and if she was honest with herself, she had to admit that she needed help now. Going around with the lead weight of the Dread dragging on her wasn’t even on the extreme ass end of acceptably screwed up that was in the range of normal for a homicide detective.

  The more she thought about it, the more imperative it seemed that she talk to the department shrink, because she sure hadn’t talked to anyone else about it. Not her lieutenant, not Tommy DiCenzo, not even Rita.

  Well, she wouldn’t have talked to Lieutenant Ostertag—that was a no-brainer. Throughout her career, she had always had the good sense never to believe any my-door-is-always-open bullshit from a superior officer. Ostertag hadn’t even bothered with the pretense.

  Tommy DiCenzo, on the other hand, she could have talked to and counted on his complete confidence. They’d gone through the academy together and she’d listened to plenty from him, both before and after he’d dried out. Tommy might even have understood enough to tell her whether she was about to derail big-time or just experiencing another side effect of being middle-aged, overworked, and underpaid. But every time she thought about giving him a call or asking him to go for coffee, something stopped her.

  Maddeningly, she couldn’t think of a single good reason why. Hell, she couldn’t even think of a crappy reason. There was no reason. She simply could not bring herself to talk to him about the Dread and that was all there was to it.

  And Rita—well, there had been plenty of reasons not to talk to her. They were busy, far too busy to devote any time to anything that didn’t have a direct bearing on the cases piling up on their respective desks. Not that Rita wouldn’t have listened. But whenever she considered bringing it up, saying, You know, Rita, lately I’ve had the damnedest feeling, a sense of being in the middle of something real bad that’s about to get a whole lot worse, the image of the nine-year-old boy in the Dumpster would bloom in her brain and she would clench her teeth together.