The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  And then, of course, I see it’s not a boar or anything else I’ve ever known. Long claws instead of trotters. Muscled forelimbs adept for walking or climbing. Imagine a big bear crossed with a swine, crossed with … what? Something.

  In the dark this triumph of natural genetic manipulation claws at the thick transplast with twenty-centimeter talons that make a nerve-jangling skreek. Lightning flashes. It exposes the full length of its twelve-centimeter tusks and turns away, frustrated.

  Lightning flashes. The animal’s gone.

  Somewhat shaken, I continue my search, find a switch on the wall and touch it. Yes, praise whatever gods may be, the window darkens. I go to bed again and try to fall asleep.

  Processions of feathered creatures march through my head, tracked by two-legged pigs and by Mayakovsky’s medvedi, the bearlike animals that ambushed his people seventy years ago when it was wintertime on Bela …

  Why do all these strange critters seem vaguely alike?

  ITEM (4) From the Written Report of Li, Anna M., M.D.

  I spent that evening in my laboratory, meaning to work on my project. But my mind kept drifting to the body in my freezer.

  At length I gave up, dragged poor Mr. Thoms onto an examining table, and began to explore his wound. Almost at once I found something odd.

  Perhaps I should have called the Colonel at once, but I decided he was probably asleep. So I promised myself to speak to him at breakfast, not realizing that tired as I was after our adventures of the day, I might oversleep and miss him in the morning. And that is exactly what happened.

  ITEM (5) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  “So,” says Mr. Krebs, champing his jaws, “what’ve you learned so far?”

  His windowless office gives me a feeling of premature burial. The man himself, with his piranha profile and billowing stomach and weak little hands, manages to look dangerous and helpless at the same time.

  “Who do you think tried to hit you with a missile?” I respond conversationally. This is a question I (literally) dreamed up last night, when the old subconscious finally did something useful.

  “I want answers, not questions.”

  “Well, I don’t have any, yet. But you haven’t just had twenty murders here. You’ve had that plus an attempted assassination of the colony’s executive head. I’m curious as to whether there might be a connection.”

  He growls. Literally—grrrrr. Like a dog.

  “Talk to Captain Mack,” he says. “That’s her department.”

  “I’m surprised you’ve kept her in such an important position after all the things that’ve gone wrong here,” I say frankly.

  “I trust her absolutely.”

  I take this as an admission that anybody appointed in her place might use Security’s armory to try to kill him—again.

  “Now, if you don’t mind answering my original question, what’ve you found out about the murders?”

  I open my notebook and set it humming. Briefly I outline the events of the day before. At the end I summarize, “The Arkies have joined the fun.”

  “But they’re all dead!” he almost yells.

  “No more than Mayans or Egyptians or Celts or Cambodians or any of the other builders of abandoned cities on the Earth are dead. They just moved away. Their descendants live on. Spring brought the Arkies out of hiding, and what did they find? Their Acropolis, their temple mount, had been desecrated by aliens—us. That pissed them off, and they’ve just killed their first human.”

  I think that’s kind of a neat theory—much too neat to be true.

  “You’re saying none of our people killed anybody?”

  Patiently I explain the difficulties in trying to blame the first nineteen killings on the natives.

  “So you’re telling me we’ve got two killers, in two different places, killing people in the same bizarre way, and one’s a human and other’s a whatchacallit. That’s the dumb-assedest notion I ever heard.”

  “Sir, you’ve summed up the problem,” I tell him. “The evidence is unreasonable. But it’s still evidence.”

  The rest of the interview’s a total waste of time. We just yell at each other, accomplishing nothing. A supply ship’s due pretty soon and I guess he’ll send me home, as he’s authorized to do. That will make both of us happy.

  Needing time to cool off a bit after the shouting match, I set out to find Anna’s lab and promptly get lost.

  I don’t know if I’ve made this clear, but Main Base is a hopeless maze. The buildings were put up at different times for different purposes out of whatever materials were at hand. Meanwhile the population increased to a high of two thousand or so and then declined as mines were worked out and abandoned. Now a dozen buildings are permanently vacant, and a tangle of corridors lead here and there with no rhyme or reason, often ending in blank walls where an abandoned structure’s been sealed off.

  Adding to the general confusion, about half the people are absent at any one time. Some at mining camp Alfa—the only site that’s presently active—the rest at the smelter, or exploring for new sites. Then they come back to work at administration or housekeeping. The idea is to train the youngsters in all phases of running a colony.

  But that also means they rotate in and out, causing ceaseless turbulence. I’ve got a near-photographic memory for faces, and yet I’ve never seen many of the people I encounter.

  Two I do recognize are Vizbee and Smelt, the guards from the shuttleport, who must have rotated back. Vizbee’s as near insolent as he dares to be. “Enjoying Bela, Sir?” he asks with a nasty smile.

  At least he’s learned the word sir since I saw him last.

  “You’re looking a bit lost, Sir,” Smelt chimes in, with a washed-out smile. Someday I will deal with this pair.

  Actually, getting lost turns out to be one of the more useful things I’ve done. I’ve been dealing with facts, which are fine as far as they go. Now I’m getting the feel of the situation, too. The killer’s been hunting his victims in a kind of indoor jungle. Add the fact that he doesn’t seem to care who gets bashed as long as somebody does, and the bloody orgy becomes comprehensible.

  I spend a couple of hours wandering, asking directions, finding the directions don’t work, and getting lost again. Periodically I come across a sealed window and look out on the river valley. Or a landside enclosure with high fences and shrouded machinery on duroplast skids. Or a big cube sprouting thick cables—the main generator, a primitive fission-type reactor. Bela, I perceive, is run on the economy plan.

  But I can’t get out, and soon I’m wandering the maze again like a baffled rat.

  Finally admitting I’m lost for the nth time, I ask directions from a pretty dark-haired engineer named Eloise. We chat, and she invites me to visit her room, explaining that she and her boyfriend are “on off-rotation” — awkward phrase—from the mines.

  The boyfriend’s named Jamal, and he’s solidly built and dark and bitter as a cup of Turkish coffee. He and Eloise share a very cramped room, which they consider themselves lucky to get. I ask why space is so tight when, with all the empty buildings, it should be just the opposite.

  “Mack says it’s for security,” growls Jamal. “Stay where the cameras can watch your every move, including when you shower and make love. I can just see her and Krebs lying in bed—incredible as it seems, a lot of people think they sleep together—and peeping at us like the swine they are.”

  My own impression is that Mack and Krebs are both asexual beings, but I don’t argue the point. Instead I remark that morale in the colony is close to rock-bottom.

  “It’s dying,” says Jamal, now sounding weary rather than bitter. “Everybody hates the leadership and everybody’s scared to death.”

  I’m sitting with Eloise on the edge of their bed. Jamal is sitting on the floor.

  “See, you haven’t been here the last two years,” he goes on. “You look at the number of victims and think, ‘Oh, well, ninety-eight percent of the people are still alive.’ But w
hen you live through a campaign of murder, the effect is cumulative. I never leave El without wondering if I’ll ever see her again, and she wonders the same thing about me.”

  She strokes his coarse black hair and nods. She has an inner stillness that he completely lacks, yet she backs him up.

  “It’s been hard,” she says simply. “I’m sure nobody will want to come here again, and everybody who’s here already is counting the days until they can leave. Bela will have to be abandoned.”

  She’s less bitter than he is and makes an effort to be fair, even to Mack, whom everybody else blames for their miseries.

  “She’s in a terrible situation. If she’s afraid of anything, it’s having to leave Bela. I’m sure she’s doing her best to find the killer, and I’m not sure anybody else could do any better. I mean, how do you catch somebody who doesn’t care who dies as long as somebody does?”

  “Some goddamn maniac,” Jamal mutters.

  “I don’t think so,” says Eloise thoughtfully. “The killing’s random, yet at the same time it’s calculated and deliberate. It’s … cold. Somebody’s aiming at something, and it can only be to drive us all away.”

  “Why would a human want to drive humans away?” asks Jamal, and neither of us has an answer.

  There is, of course, the big exception — Thoms’ murder. My hosts haven’t heard about that yet. But the conversation starts me brooding about it once again.

  Feeling a strong urge to revisit Alfa, I thank the young folks and ask them to show me an exit to the pad. They do so, and my luck’s in, because on the pad the flyer’s revving up. It’s a dull trip, and everything seems normal until we arrive.

  Then I ask for Ted Szczech, and learn that he won’t be taking any more pictures. Ever.

  No, he didn’t die by the customary head-bashing.

  Less than an hour before, something resembling a two-legged boar grabbed him when he was outside working on a stuck valve of a slurry pipe, and dragged him away—presumably to eat.

  They’re getting up a search party to try and recover his remains. I ask to go along and they say sure.

  As I’m suiting up, a call comes in from Anna. She’s been hunting me, called Michel in the security office and asked if I was on any of his monitors. He told her he’d seen me with Eloise and Jamal, so she called them and they told her they’d seen me catch the flyer. Then Michel called her back and said he needed to see me, too.

  Funny, all you have to do to get popular is to go away.

  Anna’s full of her latest discovery. “Last night I found bronze fragments embedded in Thoms’s skull. I’m not set up to do metallurgical analysis, so I asked one of our engineers to check the fragments out.”

  “Why?”

  “I think the bronze was smelted by some very crude, primitive process. The alloy’s soft and that’s why the skull did almost as much damage to the weapon as it did to the skull. Or maybe it was meant for use on a softer, thinner cranium.”

  “In short, it was made by an Arkie to smack other Arkies and the hardness of the human head took its wielder by surprise.”

  “Something like that. When are you coming back?”

  “They’re sending out a party to search for Ted Szczech, and I’m going along. A wild animal got him.”

  “Great Tao. What kind of animal?”

  I describe it.

  “Oh, that’s Ursasus terribilis,” she says.

  “Meaning?”

  “Terrible bearpig. I started doing taxonomy on the local fauna, giving Latin names and so on. Then stopped, because it seemed so futile. Oh, poor Ted.”

  “We may find him yet.”

  Somebody’s yelling for me. Michel will have to wait.

  We put on transparent rain gear, the kind that breathes so you don’t drown in your own sweat, and water-repellent goggles. We’re all armed to the teeth. The flyer takes off to circle over the search area. Nobody’s expecting it to find anything; the jungle’s too full of big organic molecules that confuse the bioscanner.

  Down below, it’s exciting at first — walking in the deep wet woods of Bela. Up to now its green/blue/purple colors seen through misty rain didn’t look especially strange. Close up it’s a crawly place. Everything drips; every step squishes. Vines are in motion, like the hands of an antique clock; you can’t see them move, but if you look away and look back, yes, they’ve changed.

  The trees form short, twisty lattices of rope-like growths with trunks not much thicker than limbs. No large trees — there’s been no time for them to grow yet. Leaves of all shapes stretch up and out toward the little light that’s available, ruthlessly shading each other out so that the understory is choked with masses of dead and rotting vegetation.

  No flowers. Everything in monotone. Things buzz around that look like flying crayfish. In glimpses of the sky, we see dashing small shadows that somebody on my intercom calls daybats. Hunting the crayfish, I suppose. Now and then I catch sight of an elaborately feathered creature crawling through the branches with its beak and talons, like a parrot. The usual little white worms are crawling around the wet ground, millions of them. My feet squash them at every step. I begin to feel like I’m walking through the innards of a dead, decaying beast. Even through the filters in my breathing apparatus I catch whiffs of decay, not quite like decay on Earth; a sharp touch of ammonia, stench of methane, a gagging bubble of—what? Chlorine? Plus that smell like a lion cage I sniffed before on the terrace at Zamók.

  Lasers hiss in the murky air and slashed limbs fall smoking to the ground where the wet extinguishes them. The ground’s like a spongy mattress and I sink knee-deep at every step. Soon my legs ache and my knees are quivering. We circle the whole camp, finding nothing.

  Ted’s just gone. Period.

  Back at Alfa, I’m bushed. Fall on somebody’s cot and snooze for about two hours. When I awaken, one of the guys tells me Zamók’s been buzzing me.

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “Easier said than done, old-timer. You were out.”

  First time anybody’s called me old-timer to my face.

  I stagger to the nearest monitor and press the return-call button. Michel’s image says he’d like to see me as soon as possible. I call his code but get only his image again, promising to return my call at the earliest possible moment.

  I have ersatz coffee and another plastic-mayo sandwich and think it over. If Michel wants to see me, why hasn’t he called again and why doesn’t he answer my call?

  I call Captain Mack and ask if she knows where he is. She’s looking, if possible, grimmer than usual. No, he’s off duty until tomorrow. Where’s he sleep? Impatiently she gives me the code for the room he shares with two girls and another guy. I call and his roommates are there, but he isn’t. I call Anna and ask her to look for him.

  “I’m waiting for the analysis of the bronze.”

  “Look for Michel, please.”

  I go to Alfa’s commandant and ask to borrow the flyer. No, he says, it’s on a regular schedule.

  When will it be going back to Zamók? Tomorrow noon, he says. Thank you, I say.

  I walk out onto the pad and find a tech just finishing his service routine. I tell him Hi, and when he goes back inside, I climb in and tell the black box to take me to Zamók.

  “Hearing and obeying,” says the gadget.

  “Accept no calls from any source until we arrive,” I add.

  “Hearing and obeying,” says the gadget.

  I settle back in the seat and wonder how I can explain snatching this machine if, after all, Michel meets me alive and well.

  I needn’t have worried.

  By the time I arrive he’s been found, and Main Base is in the state of an overturned anthill.

  As startling as the murder itself is the way it was done: Michel Verray has been shot in the back in the same chicken-run where Cabrera’s body was found almost two standard years ago.

  There was no approach, no hands-on attack. An impact slug was fired from th
e far end of the corridor. His beltpouch has been roughly opened, breaking the catch, suggesting robbery. His pistol’s missing. Was he killed with his own weapon?

  A scenario flits through my mind: Michel confronts the killer, draws his weapon, has it knocked out of his hand—maybe by somebody who’s been taking those martial-arts classes Anna talked about. He turns and runs away, and the killer picks it up and coolly takes aim and shoots him …

  But I’m not even sure he was running when he was shot. Mack thinks so, but the holograms she took of the body seem ambiguous to me. A runner hit from the rear in midstride on a smooth surface slams down and slides. I think the abrasions on his face are insufficient for that. I’d say he was hurrying but not running, and Anna’s inclined to agree.

  In her clinic she starts crying, the first time I’ve seen her do so. She has Michel’s body on her examining table, and it’s a horrible mess. As usual with that type of ammo, the entry wound near the spine is the size of my little finger and the exit wound through the chest is the size of my head. The slug, of course, disintegrated as it’s supposed to do, leaving no evidence.

  “Even Mack’s shaken up,” she tells me when she’s cried on my shoulder. “I saw her when they brought the body in, and she looked paralyzed. She kept saying, ‘Oh no. Not him. Oh no.’ He was kind of a substitute son, you know. Now she’s really alone.”

  Well, murder gets to the toughest of us, sooner or later.

  Anna washes her face at a laboratory sink and says dolefully, “I have to do the autopsy.”

  “Not now, you don’t. Tomorrow’s fine. Michel won’t run away. Come on, I’ll help you put him on ice.”

  I hate to touch the body, but as soon as I do, it’s okay. Michel is gone; the good mind, the lively wit, the Gallic accent, the future he had sketched out for himself—none of that exists anymore. The corpse is merely evidence.

  We wrap it up and put it in the freezer next to Thorns. We’re getting quite a collection of dead youth.