The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “You had the guy in your stick last year, Roy. He have any enemies you know of?”

  I gave a noncommittal answer. The mutilations described by Mustafa Sesler were straight out of my training in assassination, guerrilla tactics, and black propaganda. I was processing the awful possibility that Goether Lyle had been murdered by someone like me.

  You must know by now what I am. That I am not really human. That I am a doppelganger who was designed by gene wizards, grown in a vat, decanted fully grown with a headful of hardwired talents and traits, trained up, and sent out to kill the person whose exact double I was, and replace him. I do not know how many doppelgangers, berserkers, suicide artists, and other cloned subversives were deployed during the Quiet War, but I believe that our contribution was significant. My target was Sharwal Jah Sharja, a minor gene wizard who lived alone in the jungle in one of the tented crevasses of East of Eden, Ganymede, where he orchestrated the unceasing symphony of the city-state’s closed loop ecosystem. After I took his place, I began a program of ecotage, significantly reducing the circulation of water vapor and increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and toxic trace gases. By the time the Quiet War kicked off, some four weeks later, the population of East of Eden was wearing breathing masks, the forests and parks were beginning to die, and most food animals and crops had died or were badly stricken, forcing the city to use biomass from vacuum organism farms to feed its citizens. A commando force of the Three Powers Alliance annexed East of Eden’s farms in the first few hours of the war, and after two weeks its starving citizens agreed to terms of surrender.

  I was supposed to turn myself in as soon as the city had been secured, but in the middle of the formal surrender, dead-ender fanatics assassinated half the senate and attacked the occupying force. In the subsequent confusion, the tented crevasse where I had been living was blown open to vacuum, Sharwal Jah Sharja was posted as one of the casualties, and I took the opportunity to slip away. I have successfully hidden my true identity and lived incognito amongst ordinary human beings ever since.

  Why did I disobey my orders? How did I slip the bonds of my hardwired drives and instincts? It’s quite simple. While I had been pretending to be Sharwal Jah Sharja, I had come to love life. I wanted to learn as much about it as I could in the brief span I’d been allotted by my designers. And so I adopted the identity of another casualty, and after the war was over and the Three Powers Alliance allowed trade and travel to resume, I left East of Eden and went out into the Solar System to see what I could see.

  In all my wanderings I have never met any others like me, but I did find a hint that at least one of my brothers and sisters of the vat had survived the war. All of us had been imprinted with a variety of coded messages covering a vast range of possibilities, and a year after going on the run I came across one of them in a little used passageway between two chambers of the city of Xamba, Rhea.

  To anyone else it was a meaningless scrawl; to me, it was like a flash of black lightning that branded an enciphered phone number on my brain. The walls of the passageway were thickly scribbled with graffiti, much of it pre-war. The message could have been left there last year or last week; it could have been a trap, left by agents hunting renegades like me. I didn’t have the nerve to find out. I went straight to the spaceport and bought a seat on a shuttle to Phoebe, the gateway port to the other moons of Saturn and the rest of the Outer System. Six months later, wearing the new identity of Roy Bruce, I became a guard at TPA Facility 898.

  That’s why, almost nine years later, I couldn’t be certain that any of my brothers and sisters had survived, and I was able to convince myself that Goether Lyle had been the victim of the vicious internal politics of the prison, killed and mutilated by someone who knew about the black propaganda techniques in which we’d been trained. But that comforting fiction was blown apart the very next day, when another mutilated body was found.

  * * * *

  The victim was a former senator of Baghdad, Enceladus, and a member of the prison gang that was intermittently at war with the gang to which Goether Lyle had belonged. A message written in blood on the ground next to the senator’s body implied that he’d been murdered by Goether Lyle’s cronies, but whoever had killed him must have done the deed in his cell some time between the evening count and the end of the night’s lockdown, spirited his body out of the facility without being detected, and left it within the field of view of a security camera that had been hacked to show a recorded loop instead of a live feed. Members of the rival gangs lived in different blocks, had chips implanted in their skulls that constantly monitored their movements, and in any case were under lockdown all night. If the killer was a prisoner, he would have had to bribe more than a dozen guards; it was far more likely that the senator had been killed by one of the facility’s staff. And when I heard what had been done to the body, I was certain that it was the handiwork of one of my brothers or sisters. The senator had been blinded before he’d been strangled, and his lungs had been pulled through incisions in his back. It was a mutilation called the Blood Eagle that had been invented by the Vikings some two thousand years ago. I remembered the cold, patient voice of the instructor who had demonstrated it to us on a corpse.

  Someone in the warden’s office reached the same conclusion. Posted at the top of our daily orders was an announcement that a specialist team was on its way to Ariel, and emergency security measures were put in place at the spaceport. That evening Willy Gup told the sweat lodge that the warden reckoned that it was possible that the two murders were the work of the kind of vat-grown assassin used in the Quiet War.

  “So if you come across anything suspicious, don’t be tempted to do anything stupidly heroic, my brothers. Those things are smart and deadly and completely without any kind of human feeling. Be like me. Stay frosty, but hang back.”

  I felt a loathsome chill crawl through me. I knew that if Willy and the others realized that one of “those things” was sitting with them in the steamy heat of the lodge, they would fall on me at once and tear me limb from limb. And I knew that I couldn’t hang back, couldn’t let things run their course. No one would be able to leave Ariel for the duration of the emergency security measures, and the specialist team would search every square centimeter of the facility and Herschel City, check the records and DNA profile of every prisoner, member of staff, citizen and visitor, and release a myriad of tiny halflife drones designed to home in on anyone breathing out the combination of metabolic byproducts unique to our kind. The team would almost certainly uncover the assassin, but they would also unmask me.

  Oh, I suppose that I could have hiked out to some remote location on the surface and hunkered down for the duration, but I had no idea how long the search would last. The only way I could be sure of evading it would be to force my pressure suit to put me in deep hibernation for a month or two, and how would I explain my absence when I returned? And besides, I knew that I was dying. I was already taking dangerously large daily doses of steroids to relieve the swelling of my joints and inflammation of my connective tissue caused by my pseudo-lupus. Suspended animation would slow but not stop the progress of my disease. Suppose I never woke up?

  I spent a long, bleak night considering my options. By the time the city had begun to increase its ambient light level and the members of the local troop of spider monkeys were beginning to hoot softly to each other in the trees outside my little cabin, I knew what I would have to do. I knew that I would have to find the assassin before the team arrived.

  My resolve hardened when I started my shift a couple of hours later and learned that there had been two more murders, and a minor riot in the prison library.

  * * * *

  I found it laughably easy to hack into the facility’s files. I had been trained well all those years ago, and the data system was of a similar vintage to my own. To begin with, I checked the dossiers of recently recruited staff, but I found nothing suspicious, and didn’t have any better luck when I examined the
dossiers of friends and family of prisoners, their advocates, and traders and businesspeople currently staying in Herschel City. It was possible that I had missed something—no doubt the assassin’s cover story was every bit as good as the one that had served me so well for so long. But having more or less eliminated the obvious suspects, I had to consider the possibility that, just like me, the assassin had been hiding on Ariel ever since the war had ended. I had so much in common with my brothers and sisters that it would not be a wild coincidence if one of them had come to the same decision as I had, and had joined the staff of the prison. Perhaps he had finally gone insane, or perhaps the hardwired imperatives of his old mission had kicked in. Or perhaps, like me, he had discovered that he was coming to the end of his short life span, and had decided to have some fun…

  In the short time before the specialist team arrived, it would be impossible to check thoroughly the records of over three thousand staff members. I had reached a dead end. I decided that I needed some advice.

  Everyone in Herschel City and the prison was talking about the murders. During a casual conversation with Willy Gup, I found it easy enough to ask my old friend if he had any thoughts on how someone might go about uncovering the identity of the assassin.

  “Anyone with any sense would keep well clear,” Willy said. “He’d keep his nose clean, he’d keep his stick in line, and he’d wait for the specialists.”

  “Who won’t be here for a week. A full-scale war could have broken out by then.”

  Willy admitted that I had a point. One of the original intake of guards, a veteran who’d served in one of the Navy supply ships during the Quiet War, he had led the team that put down the trouble in the library. Three prisoners had died and eighteen had been badly injured—one had gouged out the eyes of another with her thumbs—and the incident had left him subdued and thoughtful. After studying me for a few moments, he said, “If it was me, I wouldn’t touch the files. I hear the warden is compiling a list of people who are poking around, looking for clues and so forth. He tolerates their nonsense because he desperately wants to put an end to the trouble as soon as he can, and he’ll be pretty damn happy if some hack does happen to uncover the assassin. But it isn’t likely, and when this thing is over you can bet he’s going to come down hard on all those amateur sleuths. And it’s possible the assassin is keeping tabs on the files too. Anyone who comes close to finding him could be in for a bad surprise. No, my brother, screwing around in the files is only going to get you into trouble.”

  I knew then that Willy had a shrewd idea of what I was about. I also knew that the warden was the least of my worries. I said, as lightly as I could, “So what would you do?”

  Willy didn’t answer straight away, but instead refilled his bulb from the jar of iced tea. We were sitting on the porch of his little shack, at the edge of a setback near the top of the city’s shaft. Banana plants and tree ferns screened it from its neighbors; the vertical forest dropped away on either side. Willy’s champion cricket, a splendid white and gold specimen in a cage of plaited bamboo, was trilling one of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Willy passed the jar to me and said, “We’re speaking purely hypothetically.”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve always had a wild streak,” Willy said. “I wouldn’t put it past you to do something recklessly brave and dangerously stupid.”

  “I’m just an ordinary hack,” I said.

  “Who goes for long solitary hikes across the surface. Who soloed that route in Prospero Chasma and didn’t bother to mention it until someone found out a couple of years later. I’ve known you almost nine years, Roy, and you’re still a man of mystery.” Willy smiled. “Hey, what’s that look for? All I’m saying is you have character, is all.”

  For a moment, my hardwired reflexes had kicked in. For a moment, I had been considering whether or not this man had blown my cover, whether or not I should kill him. I carefully manufactured a smile, and said that I hadn’t realized that I seemed so odd.

  “Most of us have secrets,” Willy said. “That’s why we’re out here, my brother. We’re just as much prisoners as anyone in our sticks. They don’t know it, but those dumbasses blundering about in the files are trying to find a way of escaping what they are.”

  “And there’s no way you can escape what you are,” I said. The moment had passed. My smile was a real smile now, not a mask I’d put on to hide what I really was.

  Willy toasted me with his bulb of tea. “Anyone with any sense learns that eventually.”

  “You still haven’t told me how you would catch the assassin.”

  “I don’t intend to catch him.”

  “But speaking hypothetically…”

  “For all we know, it’s the warden. He can go anywhere and everywhere, and he has access to all the security systems too.”

  “The warden? Really?”

  Willy grinned. “I’m pulling your chain. But seriously, I’ve done a little research about these things. They’re not only stone killers: they’re also real good at disguising themselves. The assassin could be any one of us. The warden, you, me, anyone. Unless this thing makes a mistake, we haven’t got a hope of catching it. All we can do is what we’re already doing—deploy more security drones, keep the prisoners locked down when they aren’t working, and pray that that’ll keep a lid on any unrest until that team arrives.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said.

  “Don’t try to be a hero, my brother. Not even hypothetically.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said.

  But one of Willy’s remarks had given me an idea about how to reach out to the assassin, and my mind was already racing, grappling with what I had to do.

  * * * *

  I decided that if the assassin really was keeping an eye on the people who were hacking into the files, then he (or at least, his demon), must be lurking in the root directory of the data system. That was where I left an encrypted message explaining what I was and why I wanted to talk, attached to a demon that would attempt to trace anyone who looked at it. The demon phoned me six hours later, in the middle of the night. Someone had spotted my sign and wanted to talk.

  The demon had failed to identify the person who wanted to talk, and it was infected with something, too: a simple communication program. I checked it out, excised a few lines of code that would have revealed my location, and fired it up. It connected me to a blank, two-dimensional space in which words began to appear, emerging letter by letter, traveling from right to left and fading away.

  >>you got rid of the trace function, pretty good for an old guy—if that’s what you really are.

  >>they trained us well, I typed.

  >>you think you know what i am. you think that i am like you.

  Whoever was at the other end of the program wanted to get straight down to business. That suited me, but I knew that I couldn’t let him take the lead.

  >>we are both children of the vat, I typed, that’s why I reached out to you. that’s why i want to help you.

  There was a pause as my correspondent thought this over.

  >>you could be a trap.

  >>the message got your attention because it is hardwired into your visual cortex, just as it is hardwired into mine.

  >>that kind of thing is no longer the secret it once was, but let’s say that i believe you…

  A black disc spun in the blank space for less than a second, its strobing black light flashing a string of letters and numbers, gone.

  >>do you know where that is?

  I realized that the letters and numbers burnt into my brain were a grid reference.

  >>i can find it.

  >>meet me in four hours, i have a little business to take care of first.

  It was the middle of the night; the time when the assassin did his work.

  >>please don’t kill anyone else until we have talked.

  My words faded. There was no reply.

  * * * *

  The grid reference was at the precise center
of a small eroded crater sixty klicks south of the facility, an unreconstructed area in the shadow of the graben’s eastern rimwall. Before I headed out, I equipped myself from the armory and downloaded a hack into the security system so that I could move freely and unremarked. I was oddly happy, foolishly confident. It felt good to be in action again. My head was filled with a fat, contented hum as I drove a tricycle cart along an old construction road. The rendezvous point was about an hour away: I would have plenty of time to familiarize myself with the terrain and make my preparations before the assassin, if that was who I had been talking to, turned up.

  I want to make it clear that my actions were in no way altruistic. The only life I wanted to save was my own. Yes, I knew that I was dying, but no one loves life more than those who have only a little of it left; no one else experiences each and every moment with such vivid immediacy. I didn’t intend to throw away my life in a grand gesture. I wanted to unmask the assassin and escape the special team’s inquisition.