The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Not all intuits went into police work. Cardenas knew of one who did nothing but interview for major corporations, checking on potential employees. As living lie detectors, their findings were not admissible in court, but that didn’t prevent others from making use of their talents.

  Six years of blindness had only sharpened Cardenas’s talents.

  He’d attended a few intuit conferences, where the talk was all about new vorec circuits and semantics. Little was said. Little had to be, since there were no misunderstandings between speakers. Among the attendees had been other cops, translators for multinats and governments, and entertainers. He remembered with special pleasure his conversation with the famous Eskimo Billy Oomigmak, a lieutenant with the Northwest Territories Federales. An Innuit intuit would be an obvious candidate for celebrity status and Billy Oo had taken full advantage of it. Cardenas had no desire to trade places with him.

  “Can you read my thoughts?”

  “No, no. That’s a common misconception. All I can do is sense the real meaning of a statement, detect if what’s being said is what’s being meant. If somebody utilizes phraseology to conceal something either in person or through an artvoc, I can often spot it. That’s why there are so many intuit judges. Why do you think…?”

  He stopped. Hypatia had a hand over her mouth, stifling a laugh. Obviously, she knew intuits weren’t mind readers. She’d been teasing him. He pouted without realizing how silly it made him look.

  “Why’d you take me out, anyway? Charliebo aside.”

  Her hand dropped. She wasn’t smiling now, he saw. “Because it’s been a long time since I was out with a real grown-up, Angel. I like children, but not as dates.”

  He eyed her sharply. “Is that what this is? A date?”

  “Fooled you, didn’t I? All this time you thought it was a continuation of business. Tell me: how’d they let somebody as small as you on the force?”

  He almost snapped at her, until he realized she was still teasing him. Well, he could tease, too. But all he could think of to say was “Because there’s nobody better at breaking into a Box.”

  “Is that so? You haven’t proven that to my satisfaction. Listening and probing at triple verbal’s impressive, but you still didn’t find anything.”

  “We don’t know yet that there’s anything to find.”

  “If there isn’t?”

  He shrugged. “I go back to Nogales where I can’t hear GenDyne scream.”

  “Dinner,” she said as their main course arrived. Cardenas’s chicken was simply and elegantly presented. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. Eight hours of sponging had left him drained. He hardly heard her as he reached for his silverware.

  “Maybe later we’ll see how efficient a prober you really are.”

  He intuited that easily, but didn’t let on that he had. Steam hissed from the chicken as he sliced into it.

  * * *

  Each day he went into the GenDyne Box, and each evening he left the corporate offices, feeling more baffled and disturbed than when he’d gone in. Not that Mermaid wasn’t full of accessible, fascinating information: it was. It was just that none of it was of the slightest use.

  Hypatia was of inestimable help, explaining where he didn’t understand, patiently elaborating on concepts he thought he understood but actually did not. GenDyne assigned her to him for the duration of his investigation. It pleased him. He thought it might have pleased her. After a week, even she couldn’t keep his spirits up. He could be patient, he was methodical, but he was used to progressing, even at a creep. They weren’t learning anything. It was worse than going nowhere; he felt as if they were going backward. Nor could he escape the feeling that somebody somewhere was laughing at him. He didn’t like it. Cardenas had a wry, subtle sense of humor, but not where his work was concerned.

  Anything that smelled of potential he recorded for playback at half-speed, then quarter-speed. His senses were taut as the high string on a viola. He listened for the slightest off-pronunciation, the one quirky vowel that might suggest an amorphous anomaly in the data. He found nothing. Mermaid was clean, neat, tidy, and innocuous as baby powder.

  On the eight day he gave up. The solution to Crescent’s murder wasn’t going to be found in his files.

  It was time to look for parallels. He’d spent too much time at GenDyne, but he was used to finding hints, clues, leads wherever he searched, and this utter failure rankled. Perhaps the Parabas Box would be more revealing. It was time to access Noschek’s work.

  Half on a whim, he requested Hypatia’s assistance. It was a measure of the importance GenDyne attached to his work that they agreed immediately. As for Spango, she was delighted, though she concealed her pleasure from the dour company official who pulled her off her current project to give her the news. It was like a paid vacation from designing.

  When the people at Parabas were told, they went spatial. They’d sooner shut down than let a GenDyne designer into their Box. Important people in LaLa talked reassuringly to their counterparts in São Paulo. It was agreed that finding out what had happened to the two designers was paramount. There were certain safeguards that could be instituted to ensure that Parabas’s visitor saw only the contents of Noschek’s files. Parabas consented. Agua Pri was overruled. Hypatia would be allowed in. But nobody smiled when Cardenas and his GenDyne “spy” were admitted to the dead designer’s office.

  It was larger than Crescent’s, and emptier. No charming domestic scenes floating above this desk. No expensive colorcrawl on the walls. Noschek had been a bachelor. Barely out of design school, top of his class, brilliant in ways his employers hadn’t figured out how to exploit before his death, he’d been the object of serious executive headhunting by at least two European and one Soviet multinat in the three years he’d been at Parabas.

  Hypatia’d read his history, too. As she looked around the spartan office, her voice was muted. “Nobody becomes a senior designer before thirty. Let alone twenty-five.”

  Cardenas called up the pictures they’d been shown of the vacuumed designer. Noschek was tall and slim, still looked like a teenager, a beautiful Slav with delicate features and the soulful dark eyes of some Kafkaesque antihero. Something in all the holos struck Cardenas the instant he saw them, but he couldn’t stick a label on it.

  The Parabas Box was approximately the same size as GenDyne’s. Noschek’s key was Delphi Alexander Philip. The voice of the wallscreen was deep and resonant, instantly responsive to his sponging, as he scanned the meteoric career of the young designer. Parabas’s security team had been at work ’round the clock. Some of the information would reveal itself only when Hypatia was out of the room. The South Americans might be cooperative, but they weren’t stupid.

  Each time Hypatia left, she took Charliebo with her for company. She liked playing with the dog, and the hair she scratched out of him gave Parabas’s cleanteam fits. Each day brought them closer together. Her and Charliebo, that is. Cardenas still wasn’t sure about her and himself.

  It didn’t matter whether she was present or not. Three days of hard sponging saw him no nearer any answers than when he’d stepped off the induction shuttle from Nogales.

  On the fourth day the screen went hostile and nearly took him with it.

  He was sponging off a hard-to-penetrate corner of Philip, down in the lower right corner of the Box. Hypatia had gone outside with Charliebo. Biocircuits spawned the same steady, sonorous flow of information he’d been listening to for hours, revealing themselves via concomitant word streams and images on the wallscreen. If he’d been watching intently, he might have had time to see a flicker before it declared itself, but as usual, he was most attuned to aural playout. Maybe that saved him. He never knew.

  Wind erupted into the office, blasting his thinning hair back across his head. On the screen the visual had gone berserk, running at ten speed through emptiness, reason gone, bereft of logic and organization. A dull roaring pounded in his ears. Dimly, he thought he could hear Charlieb
o frantically howling outside the door. There was a hammering, though whether outside the screen-secured door or inside his brain he couldn’t tell. He pressed his palms over his ears, letting the vorec spill to the floor.

  Something was coming out of the wall.

  A full-sense holo, a monstrous alien shape thick with slime and smelling of ancient foulness, an oozing shifting mass of raw biocircuitry-generated false collagen that pulsed slowly and massively, booming with each heave. Reflective pustules lining its epidermis bristled with raw neural connectors that reached for him. The hammering on the door was relentless now, and he thought he could hear people shouting. They’d have to be shouting very loudly indeed to make their presence known through the sound-dampened barrier.

  He tried to block out sight and sound of the ballooning apparition. The door was security-sealed to prevent unauthorized access. Where was the override? It was manual, he remembered. He fought the sensorial assault, tears streaming from his eyes, as he struggled to locate the switch.

  Bits and pieces of the false collagen were sloughing away from the nightmare’s flanks as it drifted toward him. The amount of crunch required to construct a projection of such complexity and reality had to be astronomical, Cardenas knew. He wondered how much of Parabas’s considerable power had suddenly gone dead as it was funneled into this single gate.

  As it drew near, it became mostly mouth, a dark, bottomless psychic pit that extended back into the wall, lined with teeth that were twitching, mindless bio-growths.

  He stumbled backward, keeping the desk between the projection and himself. Near the center of the desk a line of contact strips was glowing brightly as a child’s toy. The expanding mouth was ready to swallow him, the steady roar from its nonexistent throat like the approach of a train inside a tunnel.

  Hit the release. The voice that screamed at him was a tiny, fading squeak. His own. The yellow strip. He extended a shaky hand. He thought he touched the right strip. Or maybe he fell on it.

  * * *

  When he regained consciousness, he was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling of Vladimir Noschek’s office. Someone said two words he would never forget.

  “He’s alive.”

  Then hands, lifting him. The view changing as he was raised. He broke free, staggering away from his saviors, and they waited silently while he heaved into a wastebasket. When someone pressed a mild sting against his right arm, he looked around sharply.

  There must have been something in his expression that made the man retreat. His expression, however, was reassuring. “No combinants. Just a pick-me-up. To kill the nausea and dizziness.”

  He managed to nod. The Brazilian turned to whisper to his companion. Like images drawn on transparent gels, Cardenas saw collagen teeth bursting before his retinas as the afterimage of the monster continued to fade from his memory.

  “You scared the shit out of us.” Hypatia was watching him carefully. She looked worried.

  Something heavy and warm pressed against his legs. He glanced down, automatically stroked Charliebo’s spine. The shepherd whined and tried to press closer.

  “What happened?” one of the medicos asked as he closed his service case.

  Somehow Cardenas managed to keep down the anger that was building inside him. “It was a psychomorph. Full visual, audio, collagenic presence. The works. Sensorium max. Why the hell didn’t somebody tell me this was a tactile screen?”

  “Tac…?” Both medicos turned dumbfounded stares on the east wall. It was Hypatia who finally spoke.

  “Can’t be, Angel. Designers aren’t given access to tactile. Nobody is. Uses too much crunch. Besides, that’s strictly military stuff. Even somebody as valued as Noscheck wouldn’t be allowed near it.”

  The chief medico looked back at him. “No tactiles in Parabas S.A. I’d know, my staff would know. You sure it was a psychomorph?” Cardenas just stared at him until the man nodded. “Okay, so it was a psychomorph. I don’t know how, but I’m not in a position to argue with you. I wasn’t here.”

  “That’s right, compadre,” Cardenas told him softly. “You weren’t here.”

  “You gonna be all right?” The same stare. The medico shrugged, spoke to his assistant. “So okay. So we’ll sort it out later. Come on.” They left, though not without a last disbelieving glance in the direction of the now-silent wallscreen.

  As soon as the door shut behind them and sealed, Hypatia turned on him. “What’s going on here? That couldn’t have been a psychomorph that hit you. There isn’t enough crunch in the whole Parabas Box to structure one!”

  “That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking,” he told her quietly. “But it was a psychomorph. The most detailed one I’ve ever seen. I do not want to see it again. It was a trap, a guard, something to wipe out the nosy. It almost wiped me.”

  She was watching him closely. “If it was as bad as you claim, how come you’re standing there talking to me instead of lying on the floor babbling like a spastic infant?”

  “I—felt it coming. Intuition. Just in time to start closing down my perception. I can do that, some. When you’re blind for six years, you get practice in all sorts of arcane exercises. I sidestepped it right before it could get a psychic fix on me, and managed to cue the door. It must have cycled when you all came in. They can’t fix on more than one person at a time. Takes too much crunch.”

  “I thought that kind of advanced tech was beyond you.”

  He met her gaze. “Did I ever say that?”

  “No. No, you didn’t. I just assumed, you being a duty cop and all—people do a lot of assuming about you, don’t they?”

  He nodded tersely. “It helps. People like to think of cops as dumber than they are. Some of us are. Some of us aren’t. I don’t discourage it.”

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Fifty-three in two months.”

  “Shit. I thought you were my age. I’m forty-one.”

  “Part of it’s being small. You always look younger.”

  “What kind of cop are you, anyway, Cardenas?”

  He was searching beneath the desk, straightened when he found the vorec mike. “A good one.”

  You just didn’t brew a full-scale sensorium-max hostile psychomorph out of a standard industrial Box, no matter how big the company. Hypatia knew that. Not unless Parabas was into illegal military design, and under questioning the company reps did all but cut their wrists to prove their innocence. Cardenas believed them. They had more to lose by lying than by telling the truth.

  He was beginning to think brilliant was too feeble a word to use to describe the talents of the late Vladimir Noscheck.

  But Noscheck had made a mistake. By slipping something as powerful as the psychomorph into Philip storage, he’d as much as confessed to having something to hide, something to protect. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have mattered because the sponger discovering it would have been turned to mental jelly. Only Cardenas’s training and experience had saved him. With Hypatia at his side he continued to probe.

  They solved the secret of the commercial wallscreen quickly enough. It was numb as a sheet of plywood—until you went someplace you weren’t wanted. Then you tripped the alert and the screen went tactile. It was one hell of a modification, worth plenty. Cardenas could have cared less. He wasn’t interested in how it was done as much as he was why. The camouflage was perfect.

  A tactile screen could spit back at you. One that looked normal and then suddenly became tactile was unheard of. The Parabas executives went silly when the medicos made their report. They wanted to take the screen apart immediately, resorting to furious threats when Cardenas refused. Gradually, they gave up and left him alone again. They’d get their hands on Noschek’s last innovation soon enough.

  If it was Vladimir Noschek’s last innovation, Cardenas thought.

  There was also the possibility that the dual tactile-numb screen wasn’t the work of Noschek at all, that it had been set up by whoever had vacuumed him. The psychomorph could
have been inserted specifically to deal with trackers like Angel Cardenas. Or it could be a false lead, spectacular enough to divert any probers from the real answers.

  Answers hell. He wasn’t sure he knew the right questions yet.

  They’d find them.

  First, he needed to know how a max psychomorph had been inserted into a conventional industrial Box. Hypatia confirmed his suspicions about the requisite parameters.

  “If you saw what you say you saw, then Noschek or whoever built the insert needed a lot more crunch than Parabas employs here in Agua Pri.”

  “How do you know how much crunch Parabas has here?”

  “It gets around. No reason to keep it a deep dark secret.”

  “Assuming for the sake of discussion that it’s Noschek’s toy we’re dealing with, could he have drawn on crunch from the home office?”

  “Possible, but considering the distance, it would’ve been mighty risky. Would make more sense to steal locally.”

  “How much would he have had to steal?”

  “Based on what you describe, I’d say he would’ve needed access to at least one Cray-IBM.”

  “GenDyne?”

  She laughed. “That’s more crunch than our whole installation would use in a year. No way. Though I’d love to have the chance to play with one.”

  “So who on the Strip uses a Cribm?”

  “Beats the hell out of me, Angel. You’re the cop. You find out.”

  He did. Fast, using Parabas’s circuits to access the major utility files for the whole Southwest Region in Elpaso Juarez. His opto police security clearance let him cut through normal layers of bureaucratic infrastructure like a scalpel through collagen.

  “Sony-Digital,” he finally told her as the records flashed on screen. The wall’s audio checked his pronunciation. “Telefunken. Fordmatsu. That’s everybody.”