The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “You have to see it for yourself, boss,” Bruno told Maris, after they had all used patch cords to link themselves together, so that Barrett couldn’t overhear them.

  “If you guys are setting me up for something, I’ll personally drag your asses rockside.”

  “No joke,” Ty said. “Clan’s honor this is no joke.”

  “Tell us again what you found,” Somerset said calmly. “Think carefully. Describe everything you saw.”

  Ty and Bruno talked: ten minutes.

  When they were finished, Maris said, “If she’s in there, she can’t be alive.”

  “Gang #1 found bodies hung on a bulkhead in one of the freighters,” Ty said. “Bodies with chunks missing from them. They figure that one of the crew killed the rest. They think that he might still be alive.”

  Maris said firmly, “No one could have survived for long in any of these hulks. No power, no food, no air ... it isn’t possible.”

  “You don’t know what the gene wizards made for the war,” Ty said. “No one does.”

  Maris had to admit that Ty had a point. Before the Quiet War, Earth had infiltrated the Outer System colonies with spies, doppelgangers, and suicide artists, most of them clones and most of them gengineered. The suicide artists had been the worst—terror weapons in human form, berserkers, walking bombs. One type had hidden themselves near sensitive installations and simply died; symbiotic bacteria had transformed their corpses into unstable lumps of high explosive. Maris’s younger brother had been killed when one of these corpse-bombs had blown a hole in the agricultural dome where he had been working.

  She said, “Did any of Barrett’s drones follow you?”

  “Not a one,” Ty said.

  “You’re sure.”

  “My suit’s radar can spot a flea’s heartbeat at a hundred klicks. Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “If Barrett suspected anything, boss,” Bruno said, “he would be asking you some hard questions around about now.”

  “We should consider telling him,” Somerset said. “If something dangerous is hiding in there, Symbiosis can provide the appropriate back-up.”

  “Soldiers,” Ty said. “Armed soldiers.”

  “If we could tell anyone other than Barrett, I’d agree with you,” Maris said. “But Barrett can’t make a decision to save his life. Faced with something like this, something that isn’t covered by his precious rule book, he’ll panic. The first thing he’ll do is sling our asses rockside. The second thing he’ll do is, if by some miracle she’s still alive, he’ll kill her. He’ll declare her a saboteur or a spy, kill her, and get promoted for it. Or he’ll simply get rid of her, pretend she never existed. And don’t try and tell me that this is some spook or monster, Ty. This has to be the missing passenger—Alice Eighteen Singh Rai. A person, not a monster.”

  “The boss has a point,” Bruno said. “Barrett does not accept responsibility for his actions. He hides behind his position in the company, and his position in the company is all he is. In the camp, there were many like him, people who told themselves that they must do terrible things to the prisoners because their superiors demanded it, people who refused to see that they were doing these things out of fear and denial. Those people, they made themselves into monsters, and I think Barrett is that kind of monster. He will commit murder rather than risk doing something that might endanger his status, and he will tell himself it is for the good of the company.”

  It was the longest speech any of them had heard Bruno make, and the only time he had ever talked about the labor camp.

  “Aw, shit,” Ty said. “Let’s do it. But if we all get killed by some kind of monster, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “I would like you all to remember that I have expressed my reservations,” Somerset said.

  “If it was a monster,” Maris said, “don’t you think it would have killed us already?”

  They went out together. They carried percussion hammers, bolt cutters, glue guns. Bruno carried a portable airlock kit. Ty carried a switchblade he’d somehow smuggled past Symbiont security. Maris carried a tube of plastic explosive. Somerset carried a portable ultrasonic scanner. They fingertip-flew over the swell of the shuttle’s main body toward the flared skirt of the motor’s radiation shield. Saturn’s pale crescent, nipped like a fingernail paring in the delicate tweezers of its ring system, hung just a few degrees above it. At zenith, the twin stars of the Symbiosis ship, motor and lifesystem linked by a fullerene tether four kilometers long, rotated once a second around their common center.

  Beyond the radiation shield, the bulbous cylinder of the motor and most of its ancillary spheres and spars were coated with the black crust of the vacuum organism, smooth as spilled paint in some places, raised in thin, stiff sheets in others. The biggest sheets clustered like mutant funeral flowers around the mass-reaction tanks, a ring of six aluminum spheres, each three meters in diameter, that were tucked in the lee of the radiation skirt. The tanks contained water that had fuelled superheated steam Venturis used for delicate attitude control; one of the tanks, Ty claimed, was the hiding place of a monster.

  They plugged in patch cords; they went to work.

  While Somerset fiddled with the ultrasonic scanner, Maris used a wand to confirm that the tank was leaking minute traces of an oxyhelium mix. Bruno showed her a clear spot in the otherwise ubiquitous coating of the vacuum organism, hidden behind one of the triangular struts that secured the tank to the motor’s spine. It was like a dull grey eye surrounded by ridged and puckered black tar; in its center, a fine seam defined a circle about half a meter in diameter.

  “That is what gave us the clue,” Bruno said. “The vacuum organism must be an oxygen hater. Also, we find a current flowing in it.”

  “It’s not just photosynthetic,” Ty said. He hung back from the tank as if ready to bolt, the patch cord that connected him to Bruno at full stretch. His white p-suit was painted with swirling lines and dots that echoed his tattoos.

  “It generates electricity,” Bruno said. “Something like ten point six watts over its entire surface. Not very much, but enough—”

  “I’m ahead of you,” Maris said. “It’s enough to run the tank’s internal heaters. Well, but it doesn’t mean that she’s alive. What do you see, Somerset?”

  Somerset, hanging head down close to the tank’s sphere, his orange p-suit vivid against the stiff black sheets of the vacuum organism, was using the ultrasonic scanner. It said, “Nothing at all. It is very well insulated. Maris, you know that we have to tell Symbiosis.”

  “If it is the missing passenger, she has to be crazy,” Bruno said. “Or why would she still be hiding?”

  “She has to be some kind of thing,” Ty said.

  “She has to be dead,” Maris said. “Let’s get her out of there.”

  They set dots of plastic explosive around the almost invisible seam. They rigged the portable airlock over it. They took shelter behind another tank, and Maris blew the charges.

  An aluminum disc, forced out by pressure inside the tank, shot to the top of the transparent tent of the airlock and bounced back to meet something shuddering out of the hole—another portable airlock struggling to fit inside the first. After nothing else happened for a whole minute, Maris sculled over to investigate. She pushed the visor of her helmet against the double layer of taut, transparent plastic, and shone her flashlight inside.

  At the center of the tank, curled up in a nest made from the absorbent material and honeycomb vanes that had channeled the water, was the body of a little girl in a cut-down pressure suit.

  * * *

  They thought at first that she was dead: her p-suit’s internal temperature was just two degrees centigrade, barely above the freezing point of water, and she had no pulse or respiration signs. But a quick ultrasonic scan showed that her blood was sluggishly circulating through a cascade filter pump connected to the femoral artery of her left leg. There was also a small machine attached to the base of her skull, something coiled in her sto
mach, and a line in the vein of her left arm that went through the elbow joint of her p-suit and was coupled to a lash-up of tubing, pumps and bags of clear and cloudy liquids, and the three missing fuel cells.

  “That’s what happened to the foodmaker,” Ty said. “She’s got some kind of continuous culture running.”

  He hung just outside the hatch, watching as Maris and Somerset worked inside the tank, tying off the line into the little girl’s arm, detaching a cable trickling amps to her p-suit.

  “She is hibernating,” Bruno said, his helmet jostling beside Ty’s. “I have heard of the technique. Soldiers on the other side were infected with nanotech that could shut them down if they were badly injured.”

  “Then she’s a spy,” Ty said.

  “I don’t know what she is,” Somerset said, looking across the little girl’s body at Maris, “but I do know that no ordinary child could have rigged this. We should leave her here. Let Symbiosis deal with her as I have already suggested.”

  “I don’t think so,” Maris said. “The temperature inside her suit has risen by five degrees, and it’s still rising. I think she’s waking up.”

  They waited until the Symbiosis ship was eclipsed by a freighter that was slowly rotating end over end thirty klicks beyond the shuttle, and then rode their sled to the hab-module. Halfway there, the little girl’s arms and legs spasmed; Maris held her down, saw that she was dribbling a clear liquid from her mouth and nostrils. Then her eyes opened, and she looked straight at Maris.

  Her eyes were beaten gold, with silvery, pinprick pupils.

  Maris touched her visor to the little girl’s. “It’s okay,” she said. “Everything’s okay, sweetheart. We’ll look after you. I promise.”

  By the time they had bundled her inside the hab-module, the little girl was dazed but fully awake. Out of her p-suit, she stank like a pharm goat and was as skinny as a snake, in a liner that was two sizes too big. Even though the intravenous line had been dripping vitamins, amino acids, and complex carbohydrates from the yeast culture into her blood, she had used up all of her body fat and a good deal of muscle mass in her long sleep. She seemed to be about eight or nine, was completely hairless, and had bronze skin, and those big silver-on-gold eyes that stared boldly at the wrecking crew who hung around her.

  Although she responded to her name, she wouldn’t or couldn’t talk; hardly surprising, Maris said, considering what she had been through. When Bruno tried to examine the blood pump that clung to her leg like a swollen leech, she drew her knees to her chest and carefully detached it, then reached behind her head, plucked the tiny machine from the base of her skull, and nicked it away. Bruno deftly caught it on the rebound, and after a brief examination said it was some kind of Russian Sleep gadget. “Some monster, boss,” he said. “I’m disappointed.”

  “We could throw her back,” Maris said, “and try for something better.”

  Ty laughed, showing for a moment the wad of green gum that lay on his tongue. He was fascinated by the little girl; his fear had transformed directly to excitement and a kind of proprietorial pride. “She’s amazing,” he said. “Could you have done what she did? I couldn’t.”

  “None of us could,” Somerset said. “That’s why she can’t be a normal little girl. That’s why we have taken a very grave risk in bringing her aboard.”

  “Aw, come on,” Ty said. “Look at her. She’s a kid. She’s half-starved to death. She couldn’t harm a blade of grass.”

  “Appearances can be deceptive,” Somerset said.

  Alice Eighteen Singh Rai watched them carefully as they spoke about her, but showed no sign that she understood what they were saying.

  “She would have died if we had not found her,” Bruno said. “Whatever she is, she needs our help.”

  “Of course,” Somerset said. “But we know nothing about her.”

  Ty snorted air through his nose. “What are you saying, we should tie her up?”

  “We should certainly take precautions,” Somerset said, ignoring Ty’s sarcasm.

  Maris decided that Somerset needed something to do, and told him, “Before we can decide anything, I need you to find out everything you can about where Alice came from.”

  “Somewhere on Iapetus, I should think,” Somerset said. “That was the shuttle’s point of departure, according to its manifest. It was on a straight run to Mimas when the emp mine intercepted it.”

  “I’m sure you can find out exactly where on Iapetus.”

  “I will try my best,” Somerset said, and swam off to its cubicle.

  “And take the rod out of your ass while you’re about it,” Ty murmured.

  “Somerset does have a point,” Bruno said. “We have to think very carefully about what we’re going to do.”

  “I’m going to have to come up with some excuse for Barrett,” Maris said. “But first, I’m going to give this little girl her first shower in three hundred days.”

  Alice Eighteen Singh Rai scrubbed up well, submitting docilely to the air-mask necessary in the freefall shower. Enveloped in one of Maris’s jumpers, she refused the bags of chow Ty patiently offered one by one, then suddenly kicked off toward the kitchen nook, quick and agile as an eel. She had ripped open a tube and was cramming black olive paste into her mouth before Ty could pull her away by an ankle.

  “Let her eat,” Maris said. “I think she knows what her body needs.”

  “Man,” Ty said, wonderingly, “she sure is hungry.”

  Bruno said, “I have only a minimum of medical training, boss. I don’t know anything about mental illness or brain damage. The autodoc can work up her blood and urine chemistry for chemical signs of psychosis, but that’s about all. I hate to say it, but the Symbiosis ship has better facilities.”

  “I don’t want to turn her over to Barrett.”

  Bruno nodded. His eyes were dark and solemn under the brim of his knitted cap. “She’s one of us, isn’t she?”

  “She’s no ordinary little girl. Somerset is right about that. But she’s no monster, either.”

  “She sure is hungry,” Ty said again, watching with tender pride as Alice unseamed her third tube of olive paste.

  Maris left her with Ty and Bruno, and, with heavy foreboding, wrote up a false report for the day log and sent it off. Barrett called back almost at once. He said, “I want to believe you, but somehow I’m having a hard time.”

  Maris’s first thought was that one of Barrett’s drones had spotted them working around Alice’s nest. She hunched over the com, sweat popping over her body. Her pulse beat heavily in her temples. She said, “If this is about why we’re still behind—”

  “Of course it is. And I’m very disappointed.”

  “The vacuum organism caused a bigger problem than we anticipated.”

  “All you have to do is cut through it,” Barrett said scornfully. “Cut through it, scorch it off, deal with it.”

  “Can you tell me about the shuttle’s cargo, Barrett? What was it carrying?”

  Barrett gave her a sharp, bright look. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Perhaps the vacuum organism was part of the cargo. If we know what it is, we can deal with it more easily.”

  “The V.O. was checked out when the cargo pods were detached. It’s nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Don’t you have more specific information? The ship was recovered five months ago. Symbiosis must know what was in the cargo pods by now.”

  “That’s none of your business, Delgado. Your business is to render down that shuttle, and your gang is a whole ten hours behind. You have to understand that Symbiosis wrote up these work schedules with generous margins—”

  Relief that Barrett didn’t seem to know about Alice made Maris bold. She said, “The schedules weren’t drawn up with vacuum organism contamination in mind.”

  “Please don’t interrupt me again,” Barrett said, all frosty rectitude. “The margins are there, and you’ve overrun them. You know the contract regs as well as I, Delgado. Wh
at else can I do?”

  “Okay, fine, take off ten hours pay.”

  “A day’s pay plus penalties. The contract is quite specific.”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s wrong, Delgado? Talk to me. Are you having trouble maintaining discipline?” Barrett suddenly mock-solicitous, leaning so close to the camera that his face looked like a pockmarked moon, his silly little braid wagging on his chin.

  “There’s no problem,” Maris said, snapping off the com and instantly regretting it. It was a sign of weakness, and the one skill that Barrett had honed to perfection was sniffing out weaknesses in others.

  She waited five minutes in case he called back, then sculled back to the living quarters. Ty and Alice were watching a TV sheet floating in the air. Both were chewing gum. Bruno and Somerset broke off a whispered conversation, and Somerset told Maris, “I have found out where she came from.”

  * * *

  The Saturn infonet had been badly damaged during the Quiet War, but after running Alice’s name through half a dozen clandestine search engines, Somerset had discovered that the shuttle’s cargo and passenger had both originated in Hawaiki, an agricultural settlement on the great dark plains of Iapetus’s Cassini Regio.

  “I discovered something else, too,” Somerset said. “The settlement was designed by Avernus.”

  The name of the woman who had been the Outer System’s most famous gene wizard, and was now its most wanted so-called war criminal, hung in the air for a moment.

  “Man,” Ty said, “I knew our Alice was something special. Didn’t I say she was special?”

  “Avernus was famous for the totality of her designs,” Somerset said. “She tailored both ecospheres and their inhabitants. Given her appearance and what she did to survive, it seems quite likely that our guest benefited from Avernus’s art.”

  Alice smiled at them all, seemingly quite happy to be the center of their attention.