The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Varley remained an important figure in the genre throughout the rest of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, with novels such as Ophiuchi Hotline, Titan, Wizard, Demon, and Millennium, and collections such as The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, Picnic on Nearside, and Blue Champagne, winning three Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards for stories such as “Press Enter,” “The Persistence of Vision,” and “The Pusher.” By the middle 1980s, though, Varley had moved away from the print world to develop a number of screenplays for Hollywood producers, most of which were never produced.

  Disillusioned with Hollywood, Varley returned to print in 1992 with his novel Steel Beach, which Varley fanciers hoped would represent the start of a Varley renaissance, but then fell silent again for the rest of the decade. Here in the early years of a new century, though, there are encouraging signs that Varley may be coming back to stay, including novels such as The Golden Globes and, most recently, 2003’s Red Thunder, and a number of new short fiction sales. Coming up is his first new collection in years, The John Varley Reader.

  Here he takes us to the Moon for a suspenseful and fast-paced murder mystery, where a resourceful cop must track a brutal serial killer through the warrens and gloomy underground passageways of a domed Lunar city, while the clock is running out in more ways than one . . .

  THE WOMAN STUMBLED down the long corridor, too tired to run. She was tall, her feet were bare, and her clothes were torn. She was far advanced in pregnancy.

  Through a haze of pain, she saw a familiar blue light. Airlock. There was no place left to go. She opened the door and stepped inside, shut it behind her.

  She faced the outer door, the one that led to vacuum. Quickly, she undogged the four levers that secured it. Overhead, a warning tone began to sound quietly, rhythmically. The outer door was now held shut by the air pressure inside the lock, and the inner door could not be opened until the outer latches were secured.

  She heard noises from the corridor, but knew she was safe. Any attempt to force the outer door would set off enough alarms to bring the police and air department.

  It was not until her ears popped that she realized her mistake. She started to scream, but it quickly died away with the last rush of air from her lungs. She continued to beat soundlessly on the metal walls for a time, until blood flowed from her mouth and nose. The blood bubbled.

  As her eyes began to freeze, the outer door swung upward and she looked out on the lunar landscape. It was white and lovely in the sunlight, like the frost that soon coated her body.

  Lieutenant Anna-Louise Bach seated herself in the diagnostic chair, leaned back, and put her feet in the stirrups. Doctor Erikson began inserting things into her. She looked away, studying the people in the waiting room through the glass wall to her left. She couldn’t feel anything – which in itself was a disturbing sensation – but she didn’t like the thought of all that hardware so close to her child.

  He turned on the scanner and she faced the screen on her other side. Even after so long, she was not used to the sight of the inner walls of her uterus, the placenta, and the fetus. Everything seemed to throb, engorged with blood. It made her feel heavy, as though her hands and feet were too massive to lift; a different sensation entirely from the familiar heaviness of her breasts and belly.

  And the child. Incredible that it could be hers. It didn’t look like her at all. Just a standard squinch-faced, pink and puckered little ball. One tiny fist opened and shut. A leg kicked, and she felt the movement.

  “Do you have a name for her yet?” the doctor asked.

  “Joanna.” She was sure he had asked that last week. He must be making conversation, she decided. It was unlikely he even recalled Bach’s name.

  “Nice,” he said, distractedly, punching a note into his clipboard terminal. “Uh, I think we can work you in on Monday three weeks from now. That’s two days before optimum, but the next free slot is six days after. Would that be convenient? You should be here at 03:00 hours.”

  Bach sighed.

  “I told you last time, I’m not coming in for the delivery. I’ll take care of that myself.”

  “Now, uh . . .” he glanced at his terminal. “Anna, you know we don’t recommend that. I know it’s getting popular, but – ”

  “It’s Ms. Bach to you, and I heard that speech last time. And I’ve read the statistics. I know it’s no more dangerous to have the kid by myself than it is in this damn fishbowl. So would you give me the goddam midwife and let me out of here? My lunch break is almost over.”

  He started to say something, but Bach widened her eyes slightly and her nostrils flared. Few people gave her any trouble when she looked at them like that, especially when she was wearing her sidearm.

  Erikson reached around her and fumbled in the hair at the nape of her neck. He found the terminal and removed the tiny midwife she had worn for the last six months. It was gold, and about the size of a pea. Its function was neural and hormonal regulation. Wearing it, she had been able to avoid morning sickness, hot flashes, and the possibility of miscarriage from the exertions of her job. Erikson put it in a small plastic box, and took out another that looked just like it.

  “This is the delivery midwife,” he said, plugging it in. “It’ll start labor at the right time, which in your case is the ninth of next month.” He smiled, once again trying for a bedside manner. “That will make your daughter an Aquarius.”

  “I don’t believe in astrology.”

  “I see. Well, keep the midwife in at all times. When your time comes, it will re-route your nerve impulses away from the pain centers in the brain. You’ll experience the contractions in their full intensity, you see, but you won’t perceive it as pain. Which, I’m told, makes all the difference. Of course, I wouldn’t know.”

  “No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Is there anything else I need to know, or can I go now?”

  “I wish you’d reconsider,” he said, peevishly. “You really should come into the natatorium. I must confess, I can’t understand why so many women are choosing to go it alone these days.”

  Bach glanced around at the bright lights over the horde of women in the waiting room, the dozens sitting in examination alcoves, the glint of metal and the people in white coats rushing around with frowns on their faces. With each visit to this place the idea of her own bed, a pile of blankets, and a single candle looked better.

  “Beats me,” she said.

  There was a jam on the Leystrasse feeder line, just before the carousel. Bach had to stand for fifteen minutes wedged in a tight mass of bodies, trying to protect her belly, listening to the shouts and screams ahead where the real crush was, feeling the sweat trickling down her sides. Someone near her was wearing shoes, and managed to step on her foot twice.

  She arrived at the precinct station twenty minutes late, hurried through the rows of desks in the command center, and shut the door of her tiny office behind her. She had to turn sideways to get behind her desk, but she didn’t mind that. Anything was worth it for that blessed door.

  She had no sooner settled in her chair than she noticed a handwritten note on her desk, directing her to briefing room 330 at 14:00 hours. She had five minutes.

  One look around the briefing room gave her a queasy feeling of disori-entation. Hadn’t she just come from here? There were between two and three hundred officers seated in folding chairs. All were female, and visibly pregnant.

  She spotted a familiar face, sidled awkwardly down a row, and sat beside Sergeant Inga Krupp. They touched palms.

  “How’s it with you?” Bach asked. She jerked her thumb toward Krupp’s belly. “And how long?”

  “Just fightin’ gravity, trying not to let the entropy get me down. Two more weeks. How about you?”

  “More like three. Girl or boy?”

  “Girl.”

  “Me, too.” Bach squirmed on the hard chair. Sitting was no longer her favorite position. Not that standing was all that great. “What is this? Some kind of medical thing?”

&
nbsp; Krupp spoke quietly, from the corner of her mouth. “Keep it under your suit. The crosstalk is that pregnancy leave is being cut back.”

  “And half the force walks off the job tomorrow.” Bach knew when she was being put on. The union was far too powerful for any reduction in the one-year child-rearing sabbatical. “Come on, what have you heard?”

  Krupp shrugged, then eased down in her chair. “Nobody’s said. But I don’t think it’s medical. You notice you don’t know most of the people here? They come from all over the city.”

  Bach didn’t have time to reply, because Commissioner Andrus had entered the room. He stepped up to a small podium and waited for quiet. When he got it, he spent a few seconds looking from face to face.

  “You’re probably wondering why I called you all here today.”

  There was a ripple of laughter. Andrus smiled briefly, but quickly became serious again.

  “First the disclaimer. You all know of the provision in your contract relating to hazardous duty and pregnancy. It is not the policy of this department to endanger civilians, and each of you is carrying a civilian. Participation in the project I will outline is purely voluntary; nothing will appear in your records if you choose not to volunteer. Those of you who wish to leave now may do so.”

  He looked down and tactfully shuffled papers while about a dozen women filed out. Bach shifted uncomfortably. There was no denying she would feel diminished personally if she left. Long tradition decreed that an officer took what assignments were offered. But she felt a responsibility to protect Joanna.

  She decided she was sick to death of desk work. There would be no harm in hearing him out.

  Andrus looked up and smiled bleakly. “Thank you. Frankly, I hadn’t expected so many to stay. Nevertheless, the rest of you may opt out at any time.” He gave his attention to the straightening of his papers by tapping the bottom edges on the podium. He was a tall, cadaverous man with a big nose and hollows under his cheekbones. He would have looked menacing, but his tiny mouth and chin spoiled the effect.

  “Perhaps I should warn you before – ”

  But the show had already begun. On a big holo screen behind him a picture leaped into focus. There was a collective gasp, and the room seemed to chill for a moment. Bach had to look away, queasy for the first time since her rookie days. Two women got up and hurried from the room.

  “I’m sorry,” Andrus said, looking over his shoulder and frowning. “I’d meant to prepare you for that. But none of this is pretty.”

  Bach forced her eyes back to the picture.

  One does not spend twelve years in the homicide division of a metropolitan police force without becoming accustomed to the sight of violent death. Bach had seen it all and thought herself unshockable, but she had not reckoned on what someone had done to the woman on the screen.

  The woman had been pregnant. Someone had performed an impromptu Caesarian section on her. She was opened up from the genitals to the breastbone. The incision was ragged, hacked in an irregular semi-circle with a large flap of skin and muscle pulled to one side. Loops of intestine bulged through ruptured fascial tissue, still looking wet in the harsh photographer’s light.

  She was frozen solid, posed on a metal autopsy table with her head and shoulders up, slumped against a wall that was no longer there. It caused her body to balance on its buttocks. Her legs were in an attitude of repose, yet lifted at a slight angle to the table.

  Her skin was faint blue and shiny, like mother-of-pearl, and her chin and throat were caked with rusty brown frozen blood. Her eyes were open, and strangely peaceful. She gazed at a spot just over Bach’s left shoulder.

  All that was bad enough, as bad as any atrocity Bach had ever seen. But the single detail that had leaped to her attention was a tiny hand, severed, lying frozen in the red mouth of the wound.

  “Her name was Elfreda Tong, age twenty-seven, a life-long resident of New Dresden. We have a biographical sheet you can read later. She was reported missing three days ago, but nothing was developed.

  “Yesterday we found this. Her body was in an airlock in the west quadrant, map reference delta-omicron-sigma 97. This is a new section of town, as yet underpopulated. The corridor in question leads nowhere, though in time it will connect a new warren with the Cross-Crisium.

  “She was killed by decompression, not by wounds. Use-tapes from the airlock service module reveal that she entered the lock alone, probably without a suit. She must have been pursued, else why would she have sought refuge in an airlock? In any case, she unsealed the outer door, knowing that the inner door could not then be moved.” He sighed, and shook his head. “It might have worked, too, in an older lock. She had the misfortune to discover a design deficiency in the new-style locks, which are fitted with manual pressure controls on the corridor phone plates. It was simply never contemplated that anyone would want to enter a lock without a suit and unseal the outer door.”

  Bach shuddered. She could understand that thinking. In common with almost all Lunarians, she had a deep-seated fear of vacuum, impressed on her from her earliest days. Andrus went on.

  “Pathology could not determine time of death, but computer records show a time line that might be significant. As those of you who work in homicide know, murder victims often disappear totally on Luna. They can be buried on the surface and never seen again. It would have been easy to do so in this case. Someone went to a lot of trouble to remove the fetus – for reasons we’ll get to in a moment – and could have hidden the body fifty meters away. It’s unlikely the crime would have been discovered.

  “We theorize the murderer was rushed. Someone attempted to use the lock, found it not functioning because of the open outer door, and called repair service. The killer correctly assumed the frustrated citizen in the corridor would go to the next lock and return on the outside to determine the cause of the obstruction. Which he did, to find Elfreda as you see her now. As you can see,” he pointed to a round object partially concealed in the wound, “the killer was in such haste that he or she failed to get the entire fetus. This is the child’s head, and of course you can see her hand.”

  Andrus coughed nervously and turned from the picture. From the back of the room, a woman hurried for the door.

  “We believe the killer to be insane. Doubtless this act makes sense according to some tortured pathology unique to this individual. Psychology section says the killer is probably male. Which does not rule out female suspects.

  “This is disturbing enough, of course. But aside from the fact that this sort of behavior is rarely isolated – the killer is compelled eventually to repeat it – we believe that Ms. Tong is not the first. Analysis of missing persons reveals a shocking per centage of pregnant females over the last two years. It seems that someone is on the loose who preys on expectant mothers, and may already have killed between fifteen and twenty of them.”

  Andrus looked up and stared directly at Bach for a moment, then fixed his gaze on several more women in turn.

  “You will have guessed by now that we intend using you as bait.”

  * * *

  Being bait was something Bach had managed to avoid in twelve eventful years on the force. It was not something that was useful in homicide work, which was a gratifyingly straightforward job in a world of fuzzy moral perplexities. Undercover operations did not appeal to her.

  But she wanted to catch this killer, and she could not think of any other way to do it.

  “Even this method is not very satisfactory,” she said, back in her office. She had called in Sergeants Lisa Babcock and Erich Steiner to work with her on the case. “All we really have is computer printouts on the habits and profiles of the missing women. No physical evidence was developed at the murder scene.”

  Sergeant Babcock crossed her legs, and there was a faint whirring sound. Bach glanced down. It had been a while since the two of them had worked together. She had forgotten about the bionic legs.

  Babcock had lost her real ones to a gang who cut the
m off with a chain knife and left her to die. She didn’t, and the bionic replacements were to have been temporary while new ones were grown. But she had liked them, pointing out that a lot of police work was still legwork, and these didn’t get tired. She was a small brunette woman with a long face and lazy eyes, one of the best officers Bach had ever worked with.

  Steiner was a good man, too, but Bach picked him over several other qualified candidates simply because of his body. She had lusted after him for a long time, bedded him once, thirty-six weeks before. He was Joanna’s father, though he would never know it. He was also finely muscled, light brown, and hairless, three qualities Bach had never been able to resist.

  “We’ll be picking a place – taproom, sensorium, I don’t know yet – and I’ll start to frequent it. It’ll take some time. He’s not going to just jump out and grab a woman with a big belly. He’ll probably try to lure her away to a safe place. Maybe feed her some kind of line. We’ve been studying the profiles of his victims – ”

  “You’ve decided the killer is male?” Babcock asked.

  “No. They say it’s likely. They’re calling him ‘The Bellman.’ I don’t know why.”

  “Lewis Carroll,” Steiner said.

  “Huh?”

  Steiner made a wry face. “From ‘The Hunting of the Snark.’ But it was the snark that made people ‘softly and suddenly vanish away,’ not the Bellman. He hunted the snark.”