The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  So planets didn’t have to work like Earth, and the Centauri water world was another example. It rotated slowly, taking eight days to get around its giant neighbor. It had no continents, only strings of islands. And it was old—more than a billion years older than Earth. Life arose there from nothing more than chemicals meeting in a warm sea while sunlight boomed through a blanket of gas.

  “So they got no idea about continents?” McKenna put in.

  Herb said. He sure seemed to miss lecturing, ever since he retired, and it made him a dinner companion not exactly sought after here among the Pizottis. McKenna had never thought he could be useful, like now. “They took one up in an airplane, with window blinds all closed, headphones on its ears. Turns out it liked Bach! Great, huh?”

  McKenna nodded, kept quiet. None of the other Pizottis was paying any attention to Herb. They seemed to be moving away, even.

  “The blindfold was so it wouldn’t get scared, I guess. They took off the blindfold and showed it mountains, river valleys, all that. Centauris got no real continents, just strings of islands. It could hardly believe its clamshell eyes.”

  “But they must’ve seen those from space, coming in. Continents and all.”

  “Not the same, close up.”

  “So maybe they’re thinking to move inland, explore?”

  “I doubt it. They got to stick close to warm, salty water.”

  McKenna wondered if they had any global warming there and then said, “They got no oil, I guess. No place for all those ferns to grow, so long ago.”

  Herb blinked. “Hadn’t figured that. S’pose so. But they say they got hurricanes alla time, just the way we do now.”

  McKenna poked a finger up and got them another glass of the Chianti. Herb needed fueling.

  “It’s cloudy alla time there, the astro boys say. They can never see through the clouds. Imagine, not knowing for thousands of years that there are stars.”

  McKenna imagined never having a sunny day. “So how’d they ever get a space program going?”

  “Slow and steady. Their civilization is way old, y’know, millions of years. They say their spaceships are electric, somehow.”

  McKenna couldn’t imagine electric rockets. “And they’ve got our kind of DNA.”

  Herb brightened. “Yeah, what a surprise. Spores brought it here, Scientific American figures.”

  “Amazing. What sort of biology do amphibians have?”

  Herb shrugged and pushed a hush puppy into his mouth, then chewed thoughtfully. The fish fry was a babble all around them and McKenna had to concentrate. “Dunno. There’s nothing in the science press about that. Y’know, Centauris are mighty private about that stuff.”

  “They give away plenty of technology, the financial pages say.”

  “You bet, whole new products. Funny electrical gadgets, easy to market.”

  “So why are they here? Not to give us gifts.” Might as well come out and say it.

  “Just like Carl Sagan said, right? Exchange cultures and all. A great adventure, and we get it without spending for starships or anything.”

  “So they’re tourists? Who pay with gadgets?”

  Herb knocked back the rest of his Chianti. “Way I see it, they’re lonely. They heard our radio a century back and started working on a ship to get here.”

  “Just like us, you think about it. Why else do we make up ghosts and angels and the like? Somebody to talk to.”

  “Only they can’t talk.”

  “At least they write.”

  “Translation’s hard, though. The Feds are releasing a little of it, but there’ll be more later. You see those Centauri poems?”

  He vaguely recalled some on the front page of the paper. “I couldn’t make sense of it.”

  Herb grinned brightly. “Me either, but it’s fascinating. All about the twin suns. Imagine!”

  When he got home he showered, letting the steam envelop him and ease away the day. His mind had too much in it, tired from the day. Thinking about sleep, when he often got his best ideas, he toweled off.

  The shock came when he wiped the steam from the mirror and saw a smeary old man, blotchy skin, gray hair pasted to the skull, ashen whiskers sprouting from deep pores. He had apparently gone a decade or two without paying attention to mirrors.

  Fair enough, if they insult you this deeply. He slapped some cream on the wrinkles hemming in his eyes, dressed, sucked in his belly, and refused to check himself out in the mirror again. Insults enough, for one day. Growing older he couldn’t do much about, but Buddy Johnson was another matter.

  At dawn he quite deliberately went fishing. He needed to think.

  He sat on his own wharf and sipped orange juice. He had to wash off the reels with the hose from the freshwater tank as waves came rolling in and burst in sprays against the creaking pilings. He smelled the salty tang of bait fish in his bucket and, as if to tantalize him, a speckled fish broke from a curling wave, plunging headfirst into the foam. He had never seen a fish do that and it proved yet again that the world was big and strange and always changing. Other worlds, too.

  He sat at his desk and shuffled paper for the first hour of the morning shift. He knew he didn’t have long before the Ethan Anselmo case hit a dead end. Usually a homicide not wrapped up in two weeks had a less-than-even chance of ever getting solved at all. After two weeks the case became an unclaimed corpse in the files, sitting there in the dark chill of neglect.

  Beyond the autopsy you go to the evidence analysis reports. Computer printouts, since most detectives still worked with paper. Tech addenda and photos. All this under a time and cost constraint, the clock and budget always ticking along. “Investigative prioritizing,” the memos called it. Don’t do anything expensive without your supe’s nod.

  So he went to see his supe, a black guy two months in from Vice, still learning the ropes. And got nothing back.

  “The Feds, you let them know about the Centauri connection, right?” the supe asked.

  “Sure. There’s a funnel to them through the Mobile FBI office.”

  Raised eyebrows. “And?”

  “Nothing so far.”

  “Then we wait. They want to investigate, they will.”

  “Not like they don’t know the Centauris are going out on civilian boats.” McKenna was fishing to see if his supe knew anything more but the man’s eyes betrayed nothing.

  The supe said, “Maybe the Centauris want it this way. But why?”

  “Could be they want to see how ordinary people work the sea?”

  “We gotta remember they’re aliens. Can’t think of them as like people.”

  McKenna couldn’t think of how that idea could help so he sat and waited. When the supe said nothing more, McKenna put in, “I’m gonna get a call from the Anselmo widow.”

  “Just tell her we’re working on it. When’s your partner get back?”

  “Next week. But I don’t want a stand-in.”

  A shrug. “Okay, fine. Just don’t wait for the Feds to tell you anything. They’re just like the damn FBI over there.”

  McKenna was in a meeting about new arrest procedures when the watch officer came into the room and looked at him significantly.

  The guy droning on in front was a city government lawyer and most of his audience was nodding off. It was midafternoon and the coffee had long run out but not the lawyer.

  McKenna ducked outside and the watch officer said, “You got another, looks like. Down in autopsy.”

  It had washed up on Orange Beach near the Florida line, so Baldwin County Homicide had done the honors. Nobody knew who it was and the fingerprints went nowhere. It had on jeans and no underwear, McKenna read in the Baldwin County report.

  When the Baldwin County sheriff saw on the Internet cross-correlation index that it was similar to McKenna’s case they sent it over for the Mobile ME. That had taken a day, so the corpse was a bit more rotted. It was already gutted and probed, and the ME had been expecting him.

  “Same as you
r guy,” the ME said. “More of those raised marks, all over the body.”

  Suited up and wearing masks, they went over the swollen carcass. The rot and swarming stink caught in McKenna’s throat but he forced down the impulse to vomit. He had never been good at this clinical stuff. He made himself focus on what the ME was pointing out, oblivious to McKenna’s rigidity.

  Long ridges of reddened, puckering flesh laced around the trunk and down the right leg. A foot was missing. The leg was drained white, and the ME said it looked like a shark bite. Something had nibbled at the genitals. “Most likely a turtle,” the ME said. “They go for the delicacies.”

  McKenna let this remark pass by and studied the face. Black eyes, broad nose, weathered brown skin. “Any punctures?”

  “Five, on top of the ridges. Not made by teeth or anything I know.”

  “Any dental ID?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I need pictures,” McKenna said. “Cases like this cool off fast.”

  “Use my digital, I’ll e-mail them to you. He looks like a Latino,” the ME said. “Maybe that’s why no known fingerprints or dental. Illegal.”

  Ever since the first big hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, swarms of Mexicans had poured in to do the grunt work. Most stayed, irritating the working class who then competed for the construction and restaurant and fishing jobs. The ME prepared his instruments for further opening the swollen body and McKenna knew he could not take that. “Where … where’s the clothes?”

  The ME looked carefully at McKenna’s eyes. “Over there. Say, maybe you should sit down.”

  “I’m okay.” It came out as a croak. McKenna went over to the evidence bag and pulled out the jeans. Nothing in the pockets. He was stuffing them back in when he felt something solid in the fabric. There was a little inner pocket at the back, sewed in by hand. He fished out a key ring with a crab-shaped ornament and one key on it.

  “They log this in?” He went through the paperwork lying on the steel table. The ME was cutting but came over. Nothing in the log.

  “Just a cheap plastic thingy,” the ME said, holding it up to the light. “Door key, maybe. Not a car.”

  “Guy with one key on his ring. Maybe worked boats, like Anselmo.”

  “That’s the first guy, the one who had those same kinda marks?”

  McKenna nodded. “Any idea what they are?”

  The ME studied the crab ornament. “Not really. Both bodies had pretty rough hands, too. Manual labor.”

  “Workin’ stiffs. You figure he drowned?”

  “Prob’ly. Got all the usual signs. Stick around, I’ll know soon.”

  McKenna very carefully did not look back at the body. The smell was getting to him even over the air conditioning sucking air out of the room with a loud hum. “I’ll pick up the report later.” He left right away.

  His supe sipped coffee, considered the sound-absorbing ceiling, and said, “You might see if VICAP got anything like this.”

  The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program computer would cross-filter the wounds and tell him if anything like that turned up in other floaters. “Okay. Thought I’d try to track that crab thing on the key chain.”

  The supe leaned back and crossed his arms, showing scars on both like scratches on ebony. “Kinda unlikely.”

  “I want to see if anybody recognizes it. Otherwise this guy’s a John Doe.”

  “It’s a big gulf. The ME think it could’ve floated from Mexico?”

  “No. Local, from the wear and tear.”

  “Still a lot of coastline.”

  McKenna nodded. The body had washed up about forty miles to the east of Bayou La Batre, but the currents could have brought it from anywhere. “I got to follow my hunches on this.”

  The supe studied McKenna’s face like it was a map. He studied the ceiling again and sighed. “Don’t burn a lot of time, okay?”

  There were assorted types working in homicide but he broke them into two different sorts.

  Most saw the work as a craft, a skill they learned. He counted himself in those, though wondered lately if he was sliding into the second group: those who thought it was a mission in life, the only thing worth doing. Speakers for the dead, he called them.

  At the crime scene a bond formed, a promise from the decaying corpse to the homicide detective: that this would be avenged. It went with the job.

  The job was all about death, of course. He had shot only two perps in his career. Killed one in a messy attempt at an arrest, back when he was just getting started. A second when a smart guy whose strategy had gone way wrong decided he could still shoot his way out of his confusion. All he had done was put a hole through McKenna’s car.

  But nowadays he felt more like an avenging angel than he had when young. Closer to the edge. Teetering above the abyss.

  Maybe it had something to do with his own wife’s death, wasting away, but he didn’t go there anymore. Maybe it was just about death itself, the eternal human problem without solution. If you can’t solve it you might as well work at it anyway.

  Murderers were driven, sometimes just for a crazed moment that shaped all the rest of their lives. McKenna was a cool professional, calm and sure—or so he told himself.

  But something about the Anselmo body—drowned and electrocuted both—got to him. And now the anonymous illegal, apparently known to nobody, silent in his doom.

  Yet he, the seasoned professional, saw no place to go next. No leads. This was the worse part of any case, where most of them went cold and stayed that way. Another murder file, buried just like the bodies.

  McKenna started in the west, at the Mississippi state line. The Gulf towns were much worse off after getting slammed with Katrina and Rita and the one nobody could pronounce right several years after. The towns never got off the ropes. The Gulf kept punching them hard, maybe fed by global warming and maybe just out of some kind of natural rage. Mother Earth Kicks Ass, part umpty-million.

  He had the tech guy Photoshop the photos of the Latino’s face, taking away the swelling and water bleaching. With eyes open he looked alive. Then he started showing it around.

  He talked to them all—landlords and labor in-between men, Mexicans who worked the fields, labor center types. Nothing. So he went to the small-time boosters, hookers, creeps in alleys, button men, strong-arm types slow and low of word, addicts galore, those who thrived on the dark suffering around them—the underlife of the decaying coast. He saw plenty of thick-bodied, smoldering anger that would be bad news someday for someone, of vascular crew-cut slick boys, stained jeans, arms ridged with muscle that needed to be working. Some had done time in the bucket and would again.

  Still, nothing. The Latino face rang no bells.

  He was coming out of a gardening shop that used a lot of Latinos when the two suits walked up. One wore a Marine-style bare-skull haircut and the other had on dark glasses and both those told him Federal.

  “You’re local law?” the Marine type said.

  Without a word McKenna showed them his badge. Dark Glasses and Marine both showed theirs, FBI, and Dark Glasses said, “Aren’t you a long way beyond Mobile city lines?”

  “We’re allowed to follow cases out into the county,” McKenna said levelly.

  “May we see the fellow you’re looking for?” Mr. Marine asked, voice just as flat.

  McKenna showed the photo. “What did he do?” Mr. Marine asked.

  “Died. I’m Homicide.”

  “We had a report you were looking in this community for someone who worked boats,” Dark Glasses said casually.

  “Why would that interest the FBI?”

  “We’re looking for a similar man,” Mr. Marine said. “On a Federal issue.”

  “So this is the clue that I should let you know if I see him? Got a picture?”

  Dark Glasses started a smile and thought better of it. “Since there’s no overlap, I think not.”

  “But you have enough sources around here that as soon as I show up, you get word.” McKe
nna said it flatly and let it lie there in the sun.

  “We have our ways,” Dark Glasses said. “How’d this guy die?”

  “Drowned.”

  “Why think it’s homicide?” Mr. Marine came in.

  “Just a hunch.”

  “Something tells me you have more than that,” Mr. Marine shot back.

  “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”

  They looked at each other and McKenna wondered if they got the joke. They turned and walked away without a word.

  His bravado with them made him feel good but it didn’t advance his case. His mind spun with speculations about the FBI and then he put them away. The perpetual rivalry between local and federal always simmered, since the Feds could step in and capture a case when they thought they could profit from it. Or solve it better. Sometimes they were even right.

  He prowled the Latino quarters. Hurricane damage was still common all along the Gulf Coast, years after the unpronounceable hurricane that had made Katrina and Rita look like mere overtures. He worked his way east and saw his fill of wrecked piers, abandoned houses blown out when the windows gave in, groves of pines snapped off halfway up, roofs ripped away, homes turned to flooded swamps. Weathered signs on damaged walls brought back to mind the aftermath: LOOTERS SHOT; on a roof: HELP; a plaintive WE’RE HERE; an amusing FOR SALE: SOME WATER DAMAGE on a condo completely gutted. Historical documents, now.

  Hurricanes had hammered the coast so hard that in the aftermath businesses got pillaged by perfectly respectable people trying to hang on, and most of those stores were still closed. Trucks filled with scrap rumbled along the pitted roads. Red-shirted crews wheelbarrowed dark debris out of good brick homes. Blue tarpcovered breached roofs, a promise that eventually they would get fixed. Near the beaches, waterline marks of scummy yellow remained, head high.