Ruby shook her head, not understanding.
“It’s how Betty Mura ended up on a rooftop in midtown,” he clarified. “She just went there, from wherever she had been at the time. Undoubtedly the shock blew out the weakness in her brain and killed her.”
“Jesus,” Ruby muttered under her breath. “Don’t think I’ll be including that in my report—” Abruptly, the memory of Rafe Pasco lying in bed with her, his head resting on the pillow and looking at her with profound regret, lit up in her mind. So sorry to have dropped in from nowhere without calling first. Not a dream? He might tell her if she asked him, but she wasn’t sure that was an answer she really wanted.
“That’s all right,” Pasco said. “I will. Slightly different case, of course, and the report will go elsewhere.”
“Of course.” Ruby’s knees were aching. She finally gave up and sat down on the edge of the chair. “Should I assume that all the information you showed me about the Nakamuras—passports, the IRS, all that—was fabricated?”
“I adapted it from their existing records. Alice’s passport worried me, though. It’s not exactly a forgery—they brought it with them and I have no idea why they left it or any other identifying materials behind.”
“You don’t have kids, do you,” Ruby said, amused in spite of everything.
“No, I don’t,” he said, mildly surprised.
“If you did, you’d know why they couldn’t just leave her to go nameless into an unmarked grave.”
Pasco nodded. “The human factor.” Outside, a horn honked. “It’s time to go. Or do you want to stay here?”
Ruby stood up, looking around. “What’s going to happen to this place? And all the other things in the Muras’ lives?”
“We have ways of papering over the cracks and stains, so to speak,” he told her. “Their daughter was just found dead. If they don’t come back here for a while and then decide not to come back at all, I don’t think anyone will find that terribly strange.”
“But their families—”
“There’s a lot to take care of,” Pasco said, talking over her. “Even if I had the time to cover every detail for you, I would not. It comes dangerously close to providing information that doesn’t belong here. I could harm the system. I’m sure I’ve told you too much as it is.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Take me to ‘court,’ too?”
“Only if you do something you shouldn’t.” He ushered her through the house to the front door.
“OK, but just tell me this, then.” She put her hand on the doorknob before he could. “What are you going to do when the real Rafe Pasco comes back from the Bahamas?”
He stared at her in utter bewilderment. “What?”
“That is what you did, isn’t it? Waited for him to go on vacation and then borrowed his identity so you could work on this case?” When he still looked blank, she told him about listening to the message on his cell phone.
“Ah, that,” he said, laughing a little. “No, I am the real Rafe Pasco. I forgot to change my voice-mail message after I came back from vacation. Then I decided to leave it that way. Just as a joke. It confuses the nuisance callers.”
It figured, Ruby thought. She opened the door and stepped outside, Pasco following. Behind his car was a small white van; the print on the side claimed that it belonged to Five-Star Electrical Services, Re-Wiring Specialists, which Ruby thought also figured. Not-Rita was sitting in the driver’s seat, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. The tall guy was sitting in the SUV.
“So that’s it?” Ruby said, watching Pasco lock the front door. “You close down your case and I just go home now, knowing everything that I know, and that’s all right with you?”
“Shouldn’t I trust you?” he asked her.
“Should I trust you?” she countered. “How do I know I’m not going to get a service call from an electrician and end up with all new wiring, too?”
“I told you,” he said patiently, “only if you use any of what you know to engage in something illegal. And you won’t.”
“What makes you so goddam sure about that?” she demanded.
Forehead creasing with concern, Pasco looked into her face. She was about to say something else when something happened.
All at once, her mind opened up and she found that she was looking at an enormous panorama—all the lost possibilities, the missed opportunities, the bad calls, a lifetime of uncorrected mistakes, missteps, and fumbles. All those things were a single big picture—perhaps the proverbial big picture, the proverbial forest you sometimes couldn’t see for the proverbial trees. But she was seeing it now and seeing it all at once.
It was too much. She would never be able to recall it as an image, to look at it again in the future. Concentrating, she struggled to focus on portions of it instead:
Jake’s father, going back to his wife, unaware that she was pregnant—she had always been sure that had been no mistake, but now she knew there was a world where he had known and stayed with her, and one where he had known and left anyway—
Jake, growing up interested in music, not computers; getting mixed up with drugs with Ricky Carstairs; helping Ricky Carstairs straighten out; coming out to her at sixteen and introducing his boyfriend; marrying his college sweetheart instead of Lita; adopting children with his husband, Dennis; getting the Rhodes Scholarship instead of someone else; moving to California instead of Boston—
The mammogram and the biopsy results; the tests left too late—
Wounding the suspect in the Martinez case instead of killing him; missing her shot and taking a bullet instead while someone else killed him; having the decision by the shooting board go against her; retiring after twenty years instead of staying on; getting fed up and quitting after ten; going to night school to finish her degree—
Jury verdicts, convictions instead of acquittals and vice versa; catching Darren Hightower after the first victim instead of after the seventh—
Or going into a different line of work altogether—
Or finding out about all of this before now, long before now when she was still young and full of energy, looking for an edge and glad to find it. Convincing herself that she was using it not for her own personal gain but as a force for good. Something that would save lives, literally and figuratively, expose the corrupt, and reward the good and the worthy. One person could make a difference—wasn’t that what everyone always said? The possibilities could stretch so far beyond herself:
Government with a conscience instead of agendas; schools and hospitals instead of wars; no riots, no assassinations, no terror, no Lee Harvey Oswald, no James Earl Ray, no Sirhan Sirhan, no 9/11—
And maybe even no nine-year-old boy found naked and dead in a Dumpster—
Abruptly she found herself leaning heavily against the side of the Mura house, straining to keep from falling down while the Dread tried to turn her inside out.
Rafe Pasco cleared his throat. “How do you feel?”
She looked at him, miserable.
“That’s what makes me so certain,” he went on. “Your, uh, allergic reaction. If there’s any sort of disruption here, no matter how large or small, you’ll feel it. And it won’t feel good. And if you tried to do something yourself—” He made a small gesture at her. “Well, you see what happened when you only thought about it.”
“Great,” she said shakily. “What do I do now, spend the rest of my life trying not to think impure thoughts?”
Pasco’s expression turned sheepish. “That’s not what I meant. You feel this way because of the current circumstances. Once the alien elements have been removed from your world”—he glanced at the SUV—“you’ll start to feel better. The bad feeling will fade away.”
“And how long is that going to take?” she asked him.
“You’ll be all right.”
“That’s no answer.”
“I think I’ve given you enough answers already.” He started for his car and she caught his a
rm.
“Just one more thing,” she said. “Really. Just one.”
Pasco looked as if he was deciding whether to shake her off or not. “What?” he said finally.
“This so-called allergic reaction of mine. Is there any reason for it or is it just one of those things? Like hay fever or some kind of weakness.”
“Some kind of weakness.” Pasco chuckled without humor. “Sometimes when there’s been a divergence in one’s own line, there’s a certain … sensitivity.”
Ruby nodded with resignation. “Is that another way of saying that you’ve given me enough answers already?”
Pasco hesitated. “All those could-have-beens, those might-have-dones and if-I-knew-thens you were thinking.”
The words were out of her mouth before she even knew what she was going to say. “They all happened.”
“I know you won’t do anything,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning toward her slightly, “because you have. And the conscience that bothers you still bothers you, even at long distance. Even in the hypothetical.”
Ruby made a face. “My guilty conscience? Is that really what it is?”
“I don’t know how else to put it.”
“Well.” She took a breath, feeling a little bit steadier. “I guess that’ll teach me to screw around with the way things should be.”
Pasco frowned impatiently. “It’s not should or shouldn’t. It’s just what is.”
“With no second chances.”
“With second chances, third chances, hundredth chances, millionth chances,” Pasco corrected her. “All the chances you want. But not a second chance to have a first chance.”
Ruby didn’t say anything.
“This is what poisons the system and makes everything go wrong. You live within the system, within the mechanism. It’s not meant to be used or manipulated by an individual. To be taken personally. It’s a system, a process. It’s nothing personal.”
“Hey, I thought it was time to go,” the man in the SUV called impatiently.
Pasco waved at him and then turned to Ruby again. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You will?” she said, surprised. But he was already getting into his car and she had no idea whether he had heard her or not. And he had given her enough answers already anyway, she thought, watching all three vehicles drive away. He had given her enough answers already and he would see her tomorrow.
And how would that go, she wondered, now that she knew what she knew? How would it be working with him? Would the Dread really fade away if she saw him every day, knowing and remembering?
Would she be living the rest of her life or was she just stuck with it?
Pasco had given her enough answers already and there was no one else to ask.
Ruby walked across the Muras’ front lawn to her car, thinking that it felt as if the Dread had already begun to lift a little. That was something, at least. Her guilty conscience; she gave a small, humorless laugh. Now that was something she had never suspected would creep up on her. 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 guilty conscience and regret. And if you wanted to know why, to understand, well, that was just too bad because you had already been given too many answers already. Nothing personal.
She started the car and drove away from the empty house, through the meandering streets, and did no better finding her way out of the west side than she had finding her way in.
Tideline
ELIZABETH BEAR
Here’s the poignant story of a battered and limping robot warrior who must struggle to perform one last task for her fallen human comrades … .
New writer Elizabeth Bear was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and now lives in the Mohave Desert near Las Vegas. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. Her short work has appeared in SCI FICTION, Interzone, The 3rd Alternative, On Spec, and elsewhere, and she is the author of three highly acclaimed SF novels, Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired. Her other books include a novel, Carnival, and a collection of her short works, The Chains That You Refuse. Her most recent books include the novels Dust, Undertow, Whiskey & Water, and, with Sarah Monette, A Companion to Wolves, as well as a new collection, New Amsterdam. Coming up are more new novels, including Ink & Steel and Hell & Earth.
Chakdony wasn’t built for crying. She didn’t have it in her, not unless her tears were cold tapered glass droplets annealed by the inferno heat that had crippled her.
Such tears as that might slide down her skin over melted sensors to plink unfeeling on the sand. And if they had, she would have scooped them up, with all the other battered pretties, and added them to the wealth of trash jewels that swung from the nets reinforcing her battered carapace.
They would have called her salvage, if there were anyone left to salvage her. But she was the last of the war machines, a three-legged oblate teardrop as big as a main battle tank, two big grabs and one fine manipulator folded like a spider’s palps beneath the turreted head that finished her pointed end, her polyceramic armor spiderwebbed like shatterproof glass. Unhelmed by her remote masters, she limped along the beach, dragging one fused limb. She was nearly derelict.
The beach was where she met Belvedere.
Butterfly coquinas unearthed by retreating breakers squirmed into wet grit under Chalcedony’s trailing limb. One of the rear pair, it was less of a nuisance on packed sand. It worked all right as a pivot, and as long as she stayed off rocks, there were no obstacles to drag it over.
As she struggled along the tideline, she became aware of someone watching. She didn’t raise her head. Her chassis was equipped with targeting sensors which locked automatically on the ragged figure crouched by a weathered rock. Her optical input was needed to scan the tangle of seaweed and driftwood, Styrofoam and sea glass that marked high tide.
He watched her all down the beach, but he was unarmed, and her algorithms didn’t deem him a threat.
Just as well. She liked the weird flat-topped sandstone boulder he crouched beside.
The next day, he watched again. It was a good day; she found a moonstone, some rock crystal, a bit of red-orange pottery, and some sea glass worn opalescent by the tide.
“Whatcha picken up?”
“Shipwreck beads,” Chalcedony answered. For days, he’d been creeping closer, until he’d begun following behind her like the seagulls, scrabbling the coquinas harrowed up by her dragging foot into a patched mesh bag. Sustenance, she guessed, and indeed he pulled one of the tiny mollusks from the bag and produced a broken-bladed folding knife from somewhere to prize it open with. Her sensors painted the knife pale colors. A weapon, but not a threat to her.
Deft enough—he flicked, sucked, and tossed the shell away in under three seconds—but that couldn’t be much more than a morsel of meat. A lot of work for very small return.
He was bony as well as ragged, and small for a human. Perhaps young.
She thought he’d ask what shipwreck, and she would gesture vaguely over the bay, where the city had been, and say there were many. But he surprised her.
“Whatcha gonna do with them?” He wiped his mouth on a sandy paw, the broken knife projecting carelessly from the bottom of his fist.
“When I get enough, I’m going to make necklaces.” She spotted something under a tangle of the algae called dead man’s fingers, a glint of light, and began the laborious process of lowering herself to reach it, compensating by math for her malfunctioning gyroscopes.
The presumed-child watched avidly. “Nuh uh,” he said. “You can’t make a necklace outta that.”
“Why not?” She levered herself another decimeter down, balancing against the weight of her fused limb. She did not care to fall.
“I seed what you pick up. They’s all different.”
“So?” she asked, and managed another few centimeters. Her hydraulics whined. Someday, those hydraulics or her fuel cells would fail and
she’d be stuck this way, a statue corroded by salt air and the sea, and the tide would roll in and roll over her. Her carapace was cracked, no longer watertight.
“They’s not all beads.”
Her manipulator brushed aside the dead man’s fingers. She uncovered the treasure, a bit of blue-gray stone carved in the shape of a fat, merry man. It had no holes. Chalcedony balanced herself back upright and turned the figurine in the light. The stone was structurally sound.
She extruded a hair-fine diamond-tipped drill from the opposite manipulator and drilled a hole through the figurine, top to bottom. Then she threaded him on a twist of wire, looped the ends, work-hardened the loops, and added him to the garland of beads swinging against her disfigured chassis.
“So?”
The presumed-child brushed the little Buddha with his fingertip, setting it swinging against shattered ceramic plate. She levered herself up again, out of his reach. “I’s Belvedere,” he said.
“Hello,” Chalcedony said. “I’m Chalcedony.”
By sunset, when the tide was lowest, he scampered chattering in her wake, darting between flocking gulls to scoop up coquinas by the fistful, which he rinsed in the surf before devouring raw. Chalcedony more or less ignored him as she activated her floods, concentrating their radiance along the tideline.
A few dragging steps later, another treasure caught her eye. It was a twist of chain with a few bright beads caught on it—glass, with scraps of gold and silver foil imbedded in their twists. Chalcedony initiated the laborious process of retrieval—
Only to halt as Belvedere jumped in front of her, grabbed the chain in a grubby broken-nailed hand, and snatched it up. Chalcedony locked in position, nearly overbalancing. She was about to reach out to snatch the treasure away from the child and knock him into the sea when he rose up on tiptoe and held it out to her, straining over his head. The floodlights cast his shadow black on the sand, illumined each thread of his hair and eyebrows in stark relief.
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 77
