Science Fiction: The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  “The ship doesn’t sound like small potatoes.”

  “They might not even believe the ship exists. Perri wouldn’t be the first perp to falsify events.”

  “Do you think that’s what she’s doing?”

  “No,” Eliot said. “I think she’s telling the absolute truth. I think she’s that rare find, a person incapable of dishonesty. But I don’t think the FBI or the federal attorney will think so. They’re paid not to.”

  “But you think the ship exists,” Dee persisted.

  “Yes. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of them out there, in international waters where it’s much harder to do anything about them. They genemod everything from insect-killing supercrops for idealists who want to save the Earth, to insect-killing supercrops for profiteers who want to own it. And who don’t care if they inadvertently kill off an entire Third World country’s rice crop in the process. Oh, Perri’s ship is out there, all right, with ‘Mike’ running it. Although why he’s also performing abortions is a bit murky. But I’m going to downplay that aspect with the federal attorney. It makes Perri look irresponsible.”

  “She is irresponsible.”

  “Sometimes,” Eliot said, “what looks like irresponsibility is really innocence.”

  Here we go again, Dee thought. But if a ridiculous infatuation would increase Eliot’s work on Perri’s behalf, let the poor sot be infatuated.

  It was ironic. Raising Perri, she was always the one “mother” who wouldn’t let Perri take the bus by herself, walk home from school alone, go downtown. Cops were like that. Unlike the other mothers, Dee had known what was waiting out there in the street. And then the grown-up Perri sought out more trouble than any of her childhood friends.

  Dee said, “So you don’t think the authorities will look for Mike. And even though it would help Perri’s plea, you won’t, either.”

  Eliot said bluntly, “I can’t afford the resources to look. Can you?”

  “No,” Dee said.

  “Also, the case will be heard in under a week, probably. They dispose of these small things as fast as they can, fair or not. You know that, Dee.”

  “Yes, I know that. But finding the ship would aid an appeal for Perri.”

  “Yes. But they’re not going to find it, Dee.”

  “No,” she said. “But I am.”

  THE COAST OF CAROLINA IS THE NEW FLORIDA! blared e-banners at the train station. Dee believed it. Ruin one area, making it so hot the ecology becomes frightening and the people leave, move on to another. Most of Florida was now genuine jungle, teeming with foreign plants and animals escaped from Miami International Airport, always the major import center for such things. Monkeys, caimans, lygodia, alligators, and insects carrying everything from dengue fever to new diseases without names. Some of them, of course, genemod. It was the diseases that had made West Palm retirees, South Beach fun seekers, and the Miami criminal underground all move north.

  She took a cheap motel room far from the action and went shopping. To the experienced, cops were instantly identifiable. That included ex-cops. She bought a modest swimsuit which at least covered her nipples, added a loose sheer robe to veil her forty-four-year-old body, studied the locals and purchased something guaranteed to make her hair lie in flat sculptured loops along one side of her neck. She didn’t overdo it, another classic mistake of undercover cops. Her lipstick wasn’t too gold, her eye makeup not too blue. She bought her beach bag, sandals, and music cube at a used-stuff store. She would do.

  The long stretch of white-sand beach, natural and artificial, turned out to be informally segregated: gay beach, retiree beach, kid beach, sex-and-criminal beach. “I’m looking for Betsy Jefferson,” she told the bartender at the first bar on the right beach.

  The bartender gathered up glasses. He looked like he’d been behind the bar for a very long time. “Why do you want Betsy?”

  “I need to talk to her. Do you know where she is?”

  “No. Last I heard, she’s working someplace for her uncle.”

  Of course. It was the number one response cops heard. You ask anybody what they, or anyone else, did for a living, and they said, “Work for my uncle.” The entire underworld was employed by uncles.

  Dee said, “I’m really looking for Perri Burr. I’m her sister.” Perri had used “Burr” as her “beach key.”

  The bartender squinted at Dee. “Yeah, you look a little like her,” he said, which was either kindness or blindness. “Around the nose. All right. Betsy’s working at the Adams. Out Surf Street.”

  “Thanks.” Adams. Burr. Jefferson. Eighteenth-century WASP aliases for twenty-first-century punks. Dee wondered if they even knew who the originals had been.

  The Adams was a sex-show-and-fizz club that wouldn’t even open until midnight. Dee went back to her motel and shopped again, this time for a cheap e-dress that shimmered strategically on and off around her body. Then she slept.

  At one in the morning Betsy Jefferson started to perform. She was older than Perri, and older than she looked, gyrating her aging flesh through stage sequences as repulsive as anything Dee had seen when she’d worked Vice. Dee, her dress on full coverage, tried to picture Perri in this setting. She failed. Eliot was right: Perri’s fuck-ups had a quality of innocence foreign to the Adams, with its forced glitter and real sadism. Perri fucked up irresponsibly but not cruelly. When Betsy finished, blood from a dead monkey smeared the stage and her own naked body.

  Dee sent a note backstage and the bouncer let her through. Betsy stood in a basin of water sluicing herself down. “Hi. I’ll be done in a minute.”

  “Thanks for seeing me.”

  Off-stage and covered, Betsy Jefferson looked even older and much wearier. “Perri talked about you. She looked up to you. You still work with homeless babies?”

  Actual discretion on Perri’s part. Dee was grateful. “Yes. But it’s Perri I’m here to talk about. You know she was arrested on GMFA.”

  “Yeah.” Betsy didn’t meet Dee’s eyes. “I heard.”

  “She’s disappeared. Got away from a federal marshal. Fucked her way free.”

  Betsy smiled. “Yeah? Good for her.”

  “I think so, too. But I’m worried, Betsy, because she’s flatline broke. I want to give her money so she can go underground armed and flush.”

  Betsy nodded. “She said you always took care of her.”

  “And I always will. Do you know where I can find her? Has she turned up anywhere back on the beach?”

  “Not that I heard.”

  “Then do you know where I can find ‘Mike’? The guy that got her the abortion on the ship?”

  “She told you about that, yeah?”

  “Perri tells me everything,” Dee said. “She knows I just want to take care of her.”

  “Yeah, she said. And you’re fucking right about one thing. Without money, she won’t last long here.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  Betsy studied Dee. Dee didn’t have to fake concern. Abruptly Betsy said, “Perri never worked no place like this, you know.”

  Dee was silent.

  “She didn’t have to, with her looks. Wouldn’t have done it anyway. I told her to go back to you and get a decent life.”

  “Thank you. Too bad she didn’t listen,” Dee said. For the first time, she saw why Perri had trusted Betsy, saw what wasn’t totally extinguished in the older woman. Dee wondered if Betsy had ever had any kids of her own. Who was Perri substituting for?

  “You won’t find Mike, Dee. Not unless he wants to find you.”

  “Can you make it so he does?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I really want Perri to have the money. It’s a lot. All I’ve saved.”

  “Where you staying?”

  Dee told her, and Betsy made a face. “Okay. Go back to Queens.”

  “Back to Queens?”

  “Look,” Betsy said, “You’re new at this. Mike ain’t here anymore, not after Perri’s arrest. Perri ain’t here, either, or
I’d of heard about it. People know I sort of looked out for her. But I know Mike, Mike knows people, people get around. Give me your address in Queens and go home.”

  Dee had wacoed it. Her first contact on the beach and she’d exploded the possibility of more. If she didn’t go back to Queens, Betsy would hear about it and question why. Word would get around much faster than Dee could. Nobody would talk to her. Nobody.

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling at Betsy.

  At her sentencing Perri stood ashen and dry-eyed. She wore a loose gray coverall so old and laundered that the tired cloth draped softly around her body. With her hair unstyled she looked incongruously virginal, a maiden in innocent distress. Dee, the only spectator in the court, grasped the ancient wooden railing so hard that its oily grime became embedded in the creases of her palms. The courtroom was on half AC; apparently somebody had decided that federal judges deserved some relief from New York air, despite the exorbitant cost of all emissions-creating energy. Even so, Dee couldn’t breathe.

  Eliot had made a deal with the feds. Dee suspected it had cost him all his markers. Perri pleaded guilty to class three genemod possession.

  “The court has considered the federal prosecutor’s recommendations in this case,” the judge said in a bored voice, “and accepts them. Six months in prison, no time off for good behavior, followed by six years probation. Counselor, do you have anything to add?”

  “No, your honor,” Eliot said.

  “Bailiff, remove the prisoner.”

  And that was all. Dee had seen it, participated in it, how many times? Dozens, maybe hundreds. But this was Perri.

  “I love you, Dee!” she called as she was led away, and her attempt to smile for her sister’s sake cauterized Dee’s heart.

  “You can visit next month,” Eliot said somberly.

  “If she’s still alive by next month.”

  He was practical. “Did you put the maximum amount allowable in her prison account?”

  “Of course,” Dee snapped. “I know how the system works.”

  “Unfortunately,” Eliot said. “Buy you lunch?”

  “No. You stay inside—it’s a bad air day,” Dee said brutally. “I’m going home.”

  “Dee . . . I did the best I could.”

  He had. She was too enraged to give that to him.

  At home she checked the non-traceable money chips hidden in her apartment, plus the legal surveillance equipment and illegal nerve gas. When Mike showed up, she would either buy her way to the ship, and to evidence for a legal appeal, or bring him down herself and let the authorities pursue it. Once they had a live body, they might actually do that. Maybe.

  The money was safe. As she had done every night for a week, Dee swallowed the foul drink that would neutralize the nerve gas in her own lungs for twelve hours. Military stuff, it was highly illegal for her to have it. She no longer cared.

  Then she tried to sleep.

  The air was exceptionally bad today. Choked with greenhouse gases, CO2 pushing maybe point seven-five, when had it gotten this bad? She was having trouble breathing, she couldn’t breathe . . . .

  Dee awakened strangling. Cord bound her neck, her legs, her arms . . . no, one arm was still free. Desperately she worked a finger between her neck and the tightening cord; it gave slightly and she was able to pull it far enough away from her neck to gasp in a breath of fetid air. But that would only work for a moment, her assailant was sure to . . .

  There was no assailant. She was alone in her apartment, strangled by tough green stems that had almost buried her in foliage. Dee screamed once, but then her cop reflexes kicked in. She flexed everything to see what was loose and found a frond not yet wrapped completely around both her body and her bed. She contorted her body so that her free hand, without removing the index finger from under the noose at her neck, brought the loose frond to her teeth, her only available weapon. She bit hard.

  The stem parted and fell into two parts. She grabbed wildly with her limited reach for another stem. They were growing . . . she could actually see the stems growing around her in tiny, fatal increments. She bit through a second stem and filled her mouth with bitter leaf. What if it was poison? Don’t think about it now. She bit another stem.

  Writhing on the bed, half-pinned, Dee fought the mindless green with everything she had. At one point she thought she’d lost; there were too many tendrils. But the plant was mindless. By calculating where the worst danger was and working her way doggedly toward that point, by reason and strength and sheer luck, she got a hand free enough to break the glass of water by her bedside and attack with the broken glass. Blood streamed over sheets, leaves, herself.

  She was free. She rolled off the bed, leapt away, and collapsed on the floor, panting.

  From here, the plant looked to be growing much more slowly. No more than six inches an hour.

  Six inches an hour. She didn’t know that even the underground genemod labs had achieved that. Splice phototropism genes to growth ones, maybe? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. She had almost died.

  The nutrient box sat under the bed, maybe two feet square, tilted toward the big south window that was the reason she’d taken the apartment. It hadn’t been there when she’d gone to bed. Whoever had put it there had known how to disable the surveillance equipment and nerve gas. The plants had probably grown slowly, if at all, until dawn. Then the light had driven their super-efficient energy use to put everything into growth, a riotous deadly burst of it that had depleted them utterly. Already the oldest leaves were turning yellow at the edges. Live hard, grow fast, die young.

  Dee looked for the patch. She found it on her ankle, peeled it off. Whatever had dripped into her bloodstream had kept her knocked out far into the light-rich morning. It was almost noon.

  She crouched on the floor and watched the spent kamikaze plant die.

  * * *

  “And the money was still there,” Eliot said.

  “Not touched.”

  “So they just wanted to kill you.”

  “Head of the class, counselor,” Dee snarled. She was still shaky. They sat in a coffee shop near Dee’s building. The air was very bad today; some people wore masks even indoors. The room was stifling. Dee could remember when air conditioning didn’t cost the Earth. Literally.

  She continued, “I want to know what’s best to do, Eliot. If I call the authorities and take them up to see the evidence of a murder attempt, will it help Perri’s appeal?”

  “I don’t see how,” Eliot said. He pulled his sticky shirt away from his chest for a moment. “You can’t prove who did it, or even that the murder attempt was in any way connected to Perri’s experiences. Yes, it was a genemod weapon, but that doesn’t link it to any specific illegal organization.”

  “God, do you suppose I’ve got legions of people out to kill me? Who else could it be?”

  “You’re an ex-cop,” Eliot said. “I don’t have to tell you that ex-cops get deviled by people they arrested and sent to jail, sometimes years after the fact. There are a lot of crazies out there. Your ‘evidence’ is circumstantial, Dee, and barely that. There’s no solid link.”

  “And what would be a ‘solid link’? My actually turning up dead?”

  “Not that, either. Dee, you’re being stupid. You of all people ought to know that you can’t play in this league. You just can’t.”

  “And the FBI won’t.”

  “Only if they just happen to stumble across it. Otherwise it’s too small for them, and too big for you. Give up, Dee. Do you want to go with me to see Perri this afternoon?”

  Dee grew still. “I thought she couldn’t have visitors for the first month.”

  “Doesn’t apply to me. I’m her attorney. I’ll get you in as part of her legal team.”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  Eliot opened his mouth as if to say more, closed it again. He finished his coffee.

  Dee sat silent on the train to Cotsworth, preparing herself. Even so, it was a shock.
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  “Hello, Dee. Eliot,” Perri said. She succeeded in smiling through her swollen lips. One eye was completely closed with bruises. Even in the prison coverall it was obvious she’d lost weight.

  “Perri . . . Perri.” Dee pulled herself together. “I told you not to fight back. With anybody.”

  Eliot said gently, “Guards or inmates?”

  “Both. Eliot, don’t file any complaints. It’ll only make it worse on me.”

  He didn’t answer. He knew she was right. So did Dee, but rage rose in her throat, tasting of acid.

  Eliot said, “I’ve filed an appeal, Perri.”

  She brightened. Dee knew the appeal would be denied; there were no grounds. But anything to give her sister a little hope in this hell.

  And Perri was magnificent. She chatted with Dee and Eliot. She asked after their lives. She did everything possible to pretend she was not in pain and despair. When the short visit was over, and all the checkpoints had been passed, Dee turned to Eliot.

  “Don’t ever tell me again to give up. Not ever.”

  She looked two places: the activists and the criminals. She was looking for the overlap.

  The environmental activists were not as numerous or as angry as they’d been before the Crisis, for the simple reason that they’d won. Dee understood that. She also understood what had to be their next move: semi-underground activism.

  It went like this: You spend your life driven by the desire to outlaw genetic engineering, and then it’s outlawed, and you’re spiritually unemployed. For a while you try other causes, but it’s not the same. So you organize groups to attack suspected genemod violations, on the grounds the authorities are (pick one) lazy, corrupt, stupid, burdened by bureaucracy. You then can spend time ferreting out illegal labs and farms and destroying them. You’re back in the game. Of course, you’re also vigilantes and thus must fight the cops as well as the violators, but for a certain type of person, this only makes it more interesting.