The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Before everything changed.

  The driver has left me. He will be back in two days, he says, waiting for me near the checkpoint, but I do not believe him. My trust only goes so far, and I will not pay him in advance for the privilege of ferrying me out of this place. So he will forget, or die, or think I have forgotten, or died, whatever eases his conscience if a shred of his conscience still remains.

  I walk deep into the camp, my pack slung over my shoulder. My easy walk, my relatively clean clothing, and my pack mark me as a newcomer, as someone who doesn’t belong.

  The heat is oppressive. There’s no place out of the sun except the tents the Red Cross and its relative out here, the Red Crescent, have put up. People sit outside those tents, some clutching babies, other supervising children who dig in the dirt.

  Rivulets of mud run across the path. Judging by the flies and the smell, the mud isn’t made by water. It’s overflowing sewage, or maybe it’s urine from the lack of a good latrine system, or maybe it’s blood.

  There’s a lot of blood here.

  I do no filming, record no images. The Western world has seen these places before, countless times. When I was a child, late-night television had infomercials featuring cheerful men who walked through such places with a single well-dressed child, selling some religious charity that purported to help people.

  Charities don’t help people here. They merely stem the tide, stop the preventable deaths, keep the worst diseases at bay. But they don’t find real homes for these people, don’t do job training, don’t offer language lessons, and more importantly, don’t settle the political crises or the wars that cause the problems in the first place.

  The aid worker has a harder job than I do, because the aid worker—the real aid worker—goes from country to country from camp to camp from crisis to crisis, knowing that for each life saved a thousand more will be lost.

  I prefer my work, focused as it can be.

  I have been on this assignment for six months now. Writing side pieces. Blogging about the bigger events. Uploading pieces that give no hint of my actual purpose.

  My editors fear it will make me a target.

  I know that I already am.

  Whoever called these places camps had a gift for euphemism. These are villages, small towns with a complete and evolved social system.

  You learn that early, in your first camp, when you ask the wrong person the wrong question. Yes, violence is common here—it’s common in any human enclave—but it is also a means of crowd control.

  Usually you have nothing to do with the extended social system. Usually you speak to the camp leaders—not the official leaders, assigned by the occupying power (whoever that may be), but the de facto leaders, the ones who ask for extra water, who discipline the teenagers who steal hydrogen from truck tanks, who kill the occasional criminal (as an example, always as an example).

  You speak to these leaders, and then you leave, returning to the dumpy hotel in the dumpy (and often bombed-out) city, and lie on the shallow mattress behind the thin wooden door, and thank whatever god you know that you have a job, that your employer pays the maximum amount to ensure your safety, that you are not the people you visited that afternoon.

  But sometimes, you must venture deep into the enclave, negotiate the social strata without any kind of assistance. You guess which tents are the tents of the privileged (the ones up front, nearest the food?), which tents are the tents of the hopelessly impoverished (in the middle, where the mud runs deep and the smells overwhelm?), and which tents belong to the outcasts, the ones no one speaks to, the ones that make you unclean when you speak to them.

  Never assume they’re the tents farthest away from the entrance. Never assume they’re the ones nearest the collapsing latrines.

  Never assume.

  Watch, instead. Watch to see which areas the adults avoid, which parts the parents grab their children away from in complete and utter panic.

  Watch.

  It is the only way you’ll survive.

  The people I have come to see live in a row near the back of the medical tent. The medical tent has open sides to welcome easy cases, and a smaller, air-conditioned tent farther inside the main one for difficult cases. There is no marking on the main tent—no garish red cross or scythe-like red crescent. No initials for Doctors Without Borders, no flag from some sympathetic and neutral country.

  Just a medical tent, which leads me to believe this camp is so unimportant that only representatives from the various charitable organizations come here. Only a few people even know how bad things are here, are willing to see what I can see.

  Even though I will not report it.

  I’m here for this group within the camp, an enclave within the enclave. I must visit them and leave. I have, maybe, eight hours here—seven hours of talk, and one hour to get away.

  I’m aware that when I’m through, I may not be able to find a ride close to the camp. I must trust again or I must walk.

  Neither is a good option.

  The tents in this enclave are surprisingly clean. I suspect these people take what they need and no one argues with them. No children lay outside the flaps covered in bugs. No children have distended stomachs or too-thin limbs.

  But the parents have that hollow-eyed look. The one that comes when the illusions are gone, the one that comes to people who have decided their god has either asked too much of them or has abandoned them.

  I stand outside the tent, my questions suddenly gone. I haven’t felt real fear for twenty years. It takes a moment to recognize it.

  Once I go inside one of these tents, I cannot go back. My interest—my story—gets revealed.

  Once revealed, I am through here. I cannot stay in this camp, in this country, in this region. I might even have to go stateside—some place I haven’t been in years—and even then I might not be safe.

  When I came here, I was hoping to speak a truth.

  Now I’m not even sure I can.

  6:15 UPLOAD: SUICIDE SQUADRON PART 2 BY MARTHA TRUMANTE

  Two other devastating explosions occurred in Paris that day: 150 people died as the elevator going up the Eiffel Tower exploded; and another 20 died when a bomb went off in one of the spires near the top of Notre Dame Cathedral.

  France went into an unofficial panic. The country had just updated all its security systems in all public buildings. The systems, required by the European Union, were state-of-the-art. No explosives could get into any building undetected—or so the creators of the various systems claimed.

  Armand de Monteverde had supervised the tests. He is a systems analyst and security expert with fifteen years experience in the most volatile areas—Iraq, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. The United States hired him to establish security at its borders with Mexico and Canada, as well as oversee security at the various harbors along the East, West, and Gulf Coasts.

  He consulted with the French, went in as a spoiler—someone who tried to break the system—and declared the new process temporarily flawless.

  “Why temporarily?” some British tabloid reporter asked him.

  “Because,” Monteverde said, “systems can always be beat.”

  But not usually so quickly, and not without detection. What bothered Monteverde as he pored over the data from all three Paris explosions was that he couldn’t find, even then, the holes in the system.

  He couldn’t find who had brought the explosives in, how they’d been set off, or even what type they were.

  No one else had those answers either, and they should have.

  Until the Paris bombings, explosives left traces—some kind of fingerprints or signature. Until the Paris bombings, explosives were easy to understand.

  I slip into the third tent to my left. It’s cool inside, not just from the lack of sun, but also because some tiny computerized system runs air-conditioning out of mesh covering the canvas. It’s a rich person’s tent, installed at great expense.

  The tent has furniture, which surprises me. C
hairs, blanket-covered beds, two small tables for meals. A woman, sitting cross-legged on a rug near the back, wears western clothing—a thin black blouse and black pants—her black hair cut in a stylish wedge. An eleven-year-old boy, clearly her son, sits beside her. He glances at me, his eyes dark and empty, then goes back to staring straight ahead.

  I know he has no internal downloads. The camp doesn’t allow any kind of net coverage, even if he has the personal chips. There’s some kind of blocking technology that surrounds everything, including the medical tent. International agreements allow medical facilities to have net links at all times, but these camps often exist outside an established international perimeter. Even though it straddles the borders of three separate countries, it is in none or all of them, depending on which international law the people in charge of the camp are trying to avoid.

  I introduce myself. The woman gives me the look of disbelief that the soldiers should have given me. I slide her my plastic i.d., since we have no systems to log on to here.

  She stares at it, then turns it over, sees the hologram of the woman who plays me on the vids, and sighs.

  “They warned me,” she says, and I do not ask who they are. They are the people who arranged our meeting, the ones who use dozens of intermediaries, and who probably, even now, believe they are using me for some nefarious purpose. “They warned me you would not be what I expect.”

  A shiver runs through me. Even though I am impersonated on purpose so that the “bad guys,” as our president calls them, do not know who I am, someone out there does. Maybe many someones. Maybe many someones connected to the “bad guys.”

  We go through preliminaries, she and I. I sit across from her, slightly out of range of her child’s empty eyes. She offers tea, which I take but do not intend to drink. The cup is small and dainty, trimmed with gold. She has not yet had to trade it for a meal.

  Then she slides a chip to me. I press it. A smiling man wearing a western business suit, his head uncovered, his hair as stylishly cut as the woman’s, grins at me. He holds the hand of a young girl, maybe five, who is the image of her mother. The girl laughs, one of those floaty childish laughs that some people never outgrow. The sound fills the tent, and the boy, sitting across from me, flinches.

  “That’s her?” I ask.

  “Them,” she says. “He died too.”

  I made it a point to know the case. There are so many cases that sometimes the details are irrelevant to all except the people involved. He had just parked his car outside a café in Cairo. He had told his wife he was taking his daughter to a special class—and indeed, an English-language class for the children of businessmen who had dealings with the West, was meeting just a block away.

  He opened his door and the car exploded, killing him, his daughter, and three people on the sidewalk. If they had made it to class as was the plan, over fifty children would have died.

  “She’s so beautiful,” I say. Hard to believe, even now, that a child like that can carry a bomb inside her. Hard to believe she exists only to kill others, at a specified place, at her own designated time.

  I have promised myself I will not ask the standard question—how can you do this? How can you do this to your own child?

  Instead, I say, “Did you know?”

  “None of us knew.” Her gaze meets mine. It is fierce, defiant. She has answered this question a hundred times, and her answer has never varied. Like so many survivors, she cannot believe her husband doomed his own child.

  But I have promised myself I will get the real story, the story no one else has told. I want to know what it’s like to be part of a society where children are tools, not people to be loved. I want to know how these people believe so much in a cause—any cause—that it is worth not only their own lives, but their child’s as well.

  So I must take her initial answers at face value. Perhaps I will challenge them later, but for now, I will see where they lead.

  “If neither you nor your husband knew,” I say.

  “My son didn’t know either.” Just as fierce. Maybe fiercer. She puts her hand on her son’s head. He closes his eyes, but doesn’t acknowledge her in any other way.

  “If none of you knew,” I say, trying hard not to let my disbelief into my voice, “then how did this happen?”

  “Like it always does,” she snaps. “They put the chips in at the hospital. On the day she was born.”

  The job is strange. It cannot be work because you cannot leave at the end of the day. It becomes part of you and you become part of it. That’s why you and your colleagues label it a calling, put it on par with other religions, other callings that deal with ethics.

  You sit across from murderers and ask, what made you decide to kill? as if that’s a valid question. You sit across from mass murderers and ask, what is it about your political philosophy that makes your methods so attractive to others? as if you care about the answer.

  You think: we need to know, as if knowing’s enough to make the problem go away. As if you did the right thing when you were granted the only meeting ever with some charismatic leader—this generation’s Vlad the Impaler or Hitler or Osama bin Laden—and interviewed him as if he were a reasonable person. As if you did the right thing when you failed to grab a guard’s old-fashioned pistol, and blow the charismatic leader away.

  Later you discuss ethics as if they are an important concept.

  You say: your job prevents you from judging other people.

  You say: other reporters could not get interviews if we take such lethal sides.

  You do not say: I lacked the courage to die for my beliefs.

  And that is the bottom line. Behind the talk of ethics and jobs and callings lies a simple truth.

  You can look. You can see.

  But you cannot feel.

  If you feel, you will see that your calling is simply a job, a dirty and often disgusting one at that, and you realize there were times when you should have acted. When you could have saved one life or a dozen or maybe even a hundred, but you chose not to.

  You chose not to—you say—for the greater good.

  7:15 UPLOAD: SUICIDE SQUADRON PART 3 BY MARTHA TRUMANTE

  Investigations always seem to hinge on luck. The Paris investigations are no different.

  Three months into sorting the Louvre wreckage, the authorities find a chip, its information largely undamaged. Curiously, its technology was five years old, a detail that stumped the investigators more than anything else.

  But not General Pedersen.

  “I was watching the news that day,” she says. “I don’t know why. It’s not something I normally do. I usually scan the relevant feeds. But that day, I was watching, and it hit me. I had seen the bomb come into the museum. I’d seen him laugh and rock back and forth and smile in anticipation. I’d thought he was looking forward to his day when really, he was looking forward to his death.”

  At first, other security experts would not listen to Pedersen. In a world where suicide bombers had become commonplace — when child suicide bombers packed with explosives were part of the norm—no one could believe that a child could have had a chip implanted years before with enough high density explosives to destroy an entire building.

  People could not plan ahead that far, the common wisdom went. People could not be that cruel.

  But they were. That was the new truth—or maybe it was an old truth.

  They were.

  She shows me the documents the hospital had her sign. She shows me the diagrams, the little marking some doctor made on a chart of a newborn baby, showing where the chips would be—“chips that will enable her to live in the modern world,” the doctors told her.

  She shows me computer downloads, bank accounts her husband set up in her daughter’s name, the college enrollment forms—required for a wealthy child of age four to get into some of Cairo’s best private schools—the plans she and her husband had for her daughter’s future, her son’s future, their future.

  The author
ities, she tells me, believe her husband created all these accounts and family documents to protect her, to prove that she and her son had nothing to do with the family’s patriotic explosion.

  Only he is not political, she tells me. He never was, and no one believes her.

  They believe her enough to send her here instead of kill her as so many other families have been killed in the past. They don’t even try or imprison her. They just disown her, her and her son, make them people without a country, refugees in a world filled with refugees.

  She can afford this tent on this sandy piece of land. She pays for the space closest to the medical tent. She hoped that someone would befriend her, that the medical personnel—the aid workers—would help her and her unjustly accused son.

  Instead, they shun her like everyone else does. They shun her for failing to protect her daughter. They shun her for failing to participate in her husband’s crime. They shun her for being naïve, for forcing the so-called patriots to ignore her husband and daughter’s martyrdom, for failing to die with her family.

  They shun her because they cannot understand her.

  Or because they do not want to.

  8:15 UPLOAD: SUICIDE SQUADRON PART 4 BY MARTHA TRUMANTE

  Experts spend their entire career studying this new bombing phenomenon. Some experts who specialized in suicide bombing have moved to this new area of research.

  One, Miguel Franq, wanted to know how three families decided to murder their five-year-olds in well-known Paris landmarks on the same day. Initially, he believed he would find a link that would lead him to a terror cell.

  When he did not find the link, he worked with some of the scientists to see if the bomb-chips were set to activate on a certain day, then detonate when they were hit with X-rays, laser beams, or sonar equipment—all three being the main items used in security scans.

  The intact chip revealed nothing like that. Only a detonator that was set to go off on a particular time on a particular day.