The road ran across a flat terrain blanketed in vacuum-cemented grey-brown dust and littered with big blocks that over the eons had been eroded into soft shapes by impact cratering. The rimwall reared up to my left, its intricate folds and bulges like a frozen curtain. Steep cones and rounded hills of mass-wasted talus fringed its base. To my right, the land sloped away toward a glittering ribbon of fences and dykes more than a kilometer away, the boundary of the huge patchwork of fields. It was two in the morning by the clock, but the suspensor lamps were burning as brightly as they always did, and above the western horizon the sun’s dim spark was almost lost in their hazy glow.
I was a couple of klicks from the rendezvous, and the road was cutting through a steep ridge that buttressed a great bulge in the rimwall, when the assassin struck. I glimpsed a hitch of movement high in a corner of my vision, but before I could react, a taser dart struck my cart and shorted its motor. A second later, a net slammed into me, slithering over my torso as muscular threads of myoelectric plastic tightened in constricting folds around my arms and chest. I struggled to free myself as the cart piddled to a halt, but my arms were pinned to my sides by the net and I couldn’t even unfasten the safety harness. I could only sit and watch as a figure in a black pressure suit descended the steep side of the ridge in two huge bounds, reached me in two more. It ripped out my phone, stripped away my utility belt, the gun in the pocket on the right thigh of my pressure suit and the knife in the pocket on the left thigh, then uncoupled my main air supply, punched the release of my harness and dragged me out of the low-slung seat and hauled me off the road. I was dumped on my back near a cart parked in the shadow of a house-sized block and the assassin stepped back, aiming a rail-gun at me.
The neutron camera I’d fitted inside my helmet revealed scant details of the face behind the gold-filmed mirror of my captor’s visor; its demon made an extrapolation, searched the database I’d loaded, found a match. Debra Thorn, employed as a paramedic in the facility’s infirmary for the past two years, twenty-two, unmarried, no children… I realized then that I’d made a serious mistake. The assassin was a doppelganger, all right, but because she was the double of someone who hadn’t been an adult when the war had ended she must have been manufactured and decanted much more recently than me. She wasn’t insane, and she hadn’t spent years under cover. She was killing people because that was what she’d been sent here to do. Because it was her mission.
A light was winking on my head-up display—the emergency short-range, line-of-sight walkie-talkie. When I responded, an electronically distorted voice said, “Are you alone?”
“Absolutely.”
“Who are you?”
I’d stripped all identifying tags from my suit before setting off, but the doppelganger who had killed Debra Thorn and taken her place was pointing a gun at my head and it seemed advisable to tell her my name. She was silent for a moment, no doubt taking a look at my file. I said, “I’m not the doppelganger of Roy Bruce, if that’s what you’re thinking. The person I killed and replaced was a gene wizard by the name of Sharwal Jah Sharja.”
I briefly told the assassin the story I have already told you. When I was finished, she said, “You’ve really been working here for eight years?”
“Eight and a half.” I had made a very bad mistake about my captor’s motives, but I must have piqued her curiosity, for otherwise I would already be dead. And even if I couldn’t talk my way out of this and persuade her to spare me, I still had a couple of weapons she hadn’t found… I risked a lie, said that her net had compromised my suit’s thermal integrity. I told her that I was losing heat to the frozen ground, that I would freeze to death if I didn’t get up.
She told me I could sit up, and to do it slowly.
As I got my feet under me, squatting on my haunches in front of her, I glanced up at the top of the ridge and made a crucial triangulation.
She said, “My instructors told me that I would live no more than a year.”
“Perhaps they told you that you would burn briefly but very brightly—that’s what they told me. But they lied. I expect they lied about a lot of things, but I promise to tell you only the truth. We can leave here, and go anywhere we want to.”
“I have a job to finish.”
“People to kill, riots to start.”
The assassin took a long step sideways to the cart, took something the size of a basketball from the net behind its seat, bowled it toward me. It bounced slowly over the dusty ground and ended up between my legs: the severed head of an old woman, skin burnt black with cold, eyes capped by frost.
“The former leader of the parliament of Sparta, Tethys,” the assassin said. “I left the body pinned to the ground in one of the fields where her friends work, with an amusing little message.”
“You are trying to start a war amongst the prisoners. Perhaps the people who sent you here are hoping that the scandal will close the facility. Perhaps they think it is the only chance they’ll have of freeing their comrades. Who are you working for, by the way?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” the assassin said.
I asked her how she would escape when she was finished. “There’s a special team on the way. If you’re still here when they arrive, they’ll hunt you down and kill you.”
“So that’s why you came after me. You were frightened that this team would find you while they were hunting me.”
She may have been young, but she was smart and quick.
I said, “I came because I wanted to talk to you. Because you’re like me.”
“Because after all these years of living amongst humans, you miss your own kind, is that it?”
Despite the electronic distortion, I could hear the sneer in the assassin’s voice. I said carefully, “The people who sent you here—the people who made you—have no plans to extract you when you are finished here. They do not care if you survive your mission. They only care that it is successful. Why give your loyalty to people who consider you expendable? To people who lied to you? You have many years of life ahead of you, and it isn’t as hard to disobey your orders as you might think. You’ve already disobeyed them, in fact, when you reached out to me. All you have to do is take one more step, and let me help you. If we work together, we’ll survive this. We’ll find a way to escape.”
“You think you’re human. You’re not. You’re exactly like me. A walking dead man. That’s what our instructors called us, by the way: the dead. Not ‘Dave.’ Not anything cute. When we were being moved from one place to another, they’d shout out a warning: ‘Dead men walking.’ “
It is supposed to be the traditional cry when a condemned person is let out of their cell. Fortunately, I’ve never worked in Block H, where prisoners who have murdered or tried to murder fellow inmates or guards await execution, so I’ve never heard it or had to use it.
The assassin said, “They’re right, aren’t they? We’re made things, so how can we be properly alive?”
“I’ve lived a more or less ordinary life for ten years. If you give this up and come with me, I’ll show you how.”
“You stole a life, just as I did. Underneath your disguise, you’re a dead man, just like me.”
“The life I live now is my own, not anyone else’s,” I said. “Give up what you are doing, and I’ll show you what I mean.”
“You’re a dead man in any case,” the assassin said. “You’re breathing the last of your air. You have less than an hour left. I’ll leave you to die here, finish my work, and escape in the confusion. After that, I’m supposed to be picked up, but now I think I’ll pass on that. There must be plenty of people out there who need my skills. I’ll work for anyone who wants some killing done, and earn plenty of money.”
“It’s a nice dream,” I said, “but it will never come true.”
“Why shouldn’t I profit from what I was made to do?”
“I’ve lived amongst people for more than a decade. Perhaps I don’t know them as well as I should, but I do know
that they are very afraid of us. Not because we’re different, but because we’re so very much like a part of them they don’t want to acknowledge. Because we’re the dark side of their nature. I’ve survived this long only because I have been very careful to hide what I really am. I can teach you how to do that, if you’ll let me.”
“It doesn’t sound like much of a life to me,” the assassin said.
“Don’t you like being Debra Thorn?” I said.
And at the same moment, I kicked off the ground, hoping that by revealing that I knew who she was I’d distracted and confused her, and won a moment’s grace.
In Ariel’s microgravity, my standing jump took me high above the assassin’s head, up and over the edge of the ridge. As I flew up, I discharged the taser dart I’d sewn into the palm of one of my pressure suit’s gloves, and the electrical charge stored in its super-conducting loop shorted out every thread of myoelectric plastic that bound my arms. I shrugged off the net as I came down and kicked off again, bounding along the ridge in headlong flight toward the bulging face of the cliff wall and a narrow chimney pinched between two folds of black, rock-hard ice.
I was halfway there when a kinetic round struck my left leg with tremendous force and broke my thigh. I tumbled over hummocked ice and caught hold of a low pinnacle just before I went over the edge of the ridge. The assassin’s triumphant shout was a blare of electronic noise in my ears; because she was using the line-of-sight walkie-talkie I knew that she was almost on me. I pushed up at once and scuttled toward the chimney like a crippled ape. I had almost reached my goal when a second kinetic round shattered my right knee. My suit was ruptured at the point of impact, and I felt a freezing pain as the smart fabric constricted as tightly as a tourniquet, but I was not finished. The impact of the kinetic round had knocked me head over heels into a field of fallen ice-blocks, within striking distance of the chimney. As I half-crawled, half-swam toward it, a third round took off the top of a pitted block that might have fallen from the cliffs a billion years ago, and then I was inside the chimney, and started to climb.
The assassin had no experience of freestyle climbing. Despite my injuries I soon outdistanced her. The chimney gave out after half a kilometer, and I had no choice but to continue to climb the naked iceface. Less than a minute later, the assassin reached the end of the chimney and fired a kinetic round that smashed into the cliff a little way above me. I flattened against the iceface as a huge chunk dropped past me with dreamy slowness, then powered straight through the expanding cloud of debris, pebbles and icegrains briefly rattling on my helmet, and flopped over the edge of a narrow setback.
My left leg bent in the middle of my thigh and hurt horribly; my right leg was numb below the knee and a thick crust of blood had frozen solid at the joint. But I had no time to tend my wounds. I sat up and ripped out the hose of the water recycling system as the assassin shot above the edge of the cliff in a graceful arc, taser in one hand, rail gun in the other. I twisted the valve, hit her with a high-pressure spray of water that struck her visor and instantly froze. I pushed off the ground with both hands (a kinetic round slammed into the dusty ice where I’d just been), collided with her in midair, clamped my glove over the diagnostic port of her backpack, and discharged my second taser dart.
The dart shorted out the electronics in the assassin’s suit, and enough current passed through the port to briefly stun her. I pushed her away as we dropped toward the setback, but she managed to fire a last shot as she spun into the void beyond the edge of the setback. She was either phenomenally lucky or incredibly skillful: it took off my thumb and three fingers of my right hand.
She fell more than a kilometer. Even in the low gravity, it was more than enough to kill her, but just to make sure I dropped several blocks of ice onto her. The third smashed her visor. You’ll find her body, if you haven’t already, more or less directly below the spot where you found mine.
The assassin had vented most of my air supply and taken my phone and emergency beacon; the dart I’d used on her had crippled what was left of my pressure suit’s life support system. The suit’s insulation is pretty good, but I’m beginning to feel the bite of the cold now, my hand is growing pretty tired from using the squeeze pump to push air through the rebreather, and I’m getting a bad headache as the carbon dioxide concentration in my air supply inexorably rises. I killed the ecosystem of East of Eden by sabotaging the balance of its atmospheric gases, and now the same imbalance is killing me.
Just about the only thing still working is the stupid little chip I stuck in my helmet to record my conversation with the assassin. By now, you probably knew more about her than I do. Perhaps you even know who sent her here.
I don’t have much time left. Perhaps it’s because the increasing carbon dioxide level is making me comfortably stupid, but I find that I don’t mind dying. I told you that I confronted the assassin to save myself. I think now that I may have been wrong about that. I may have gone on the run after the Quiet War, but in my own way I have served you right up until the end of my life.
I’m going to sign off now. I want to spend my last moments remembering my freestyle climb up those twenty kilometers of sheer ice in Prospero Chasma. I want to remember how at the end I stood tired and alone at the top of a world-cleaving fault left over from a shattering collision four billion years ago, with Uranus tilted at the horizon, half-full, serene and remote, and the infinite black, starry sky above. I felt so utterly insignificant then, and yet so happy, too, without a single regret for anything at all in my silly little life.
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HOME MOVIES
Mary Rosenblum
One of the most popular and prolific of the new writers of the nineties, Mary Rosenblum made her first sale, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, in 1990, and has since become a mainstay of that magazine, and one of its most frequent contributors, with more than thirty sales there to her credit. She has also sold to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Pulphouse, New Legends, and elsewhere.
Rosenblum produced some of the most colorful, exciting, and emotionally powerful stories of the nineties, such as “The Stone Garden.” “Synthesis.” “Flight.” “California Dreamer.” “Casting at Pegasus.” “Entrada,” and many others, earning her a large and devoted following of readers. Her novella Gas Fish won the Asimov’s Readers Award Poll in 1996, and was a finalist for that year’s Nebula Award. Her first novel, The Drylands, appeared in 1993 to wide critical acclaim, winning the prestigious Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel of the year; it was followed in short order by her second novel, Chimera, and her third, The Stone Garden. Her first short story collection, Synthesis and Other Virtual Realities, was widely hailed by critics as one of the best collections of 1996. She has also written a trilogy of mystery novels under the name Mary Freeman. Her most recent book is a major new science fiction novel, Horizons. Coming up is a new collection, Drylands. A graduate of Clarion West, Mary Rosenblum lives in Portland, Oregon.
The intriguing story that follows—one that is, appropriately enough, filled with intricate intrigues—reaffirms that memory can be something worth hanging on to at all costs -the question is, whose?
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Her broker’s call woke Kayla from a dream of endless grass sprinkled with blue and white flowers. A fragment of client memory? Sometimes they seeped into her brain even though they weren’t supposed to. She sat up, groggy with sleep, trying to remember if she’d ever visited one of the prairie preserves as herself. “Access,” she said, yawned, and focused on the shimmer of the holo-field as it formed over her desktop.
“Usually, you’re up by now.” Azara, her broker, gave her a severe look from beneath a decorative veil, woven with shimmering fiber lights.
“I’m not working.” Kayla stretched. “I can sleep late.”
“You’re working now.” Azara sniffed. “Family wedding, week-long reunion, the client wants the whole affair, price is no object. Ple
ase cover yourself.”
“Your religion is showing.” But Kayla reached for the shift she’d shed last night, pulled it over her head. “A whole week?” She yawned again. “I don’t know. I met this cool guy last night and I don’t know if I want to be gone a whole week.”
“If you want me as a broker you’ll do it.” Azara glared at her. “This client is the most picky woman I have had dealings with in many years. But she is paying a bonus and you are my only chameleon who matches her physical requirements.” She clucked disapproval.
One of those. Kayla sighed and turned to the tiny kitchen wall. “Did you tell her it’s not our age or what we look like or even our gender that makes us see what they want us to see?”
“Ah.” Azara rolled her eyes. “I gave her the usual explanation. Several times.” She stretched her very red lips into a wide smile. “But she was willing to pay for her eccentricities, so we will abide by them.”
“She must be rich.” Kayla spooned Sumatran green tea into a cup, stuck it under the hot water dispenser. “How nice for her.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 70
