“It doesn’t mean that she’s a monster,” Maris said forthrightly, although she had to admit that Somerset’s discovery was disquieting. Avernus had dedicated her considerable skills to pushing the envelope of humanity’s range. Some of her commissions—a sect in which adults lost the use of their limbs and eyes and grew leathery, involuted integuments stained purple with photosynthetic pigment, becoming sessile eremites devoted to praising God; a community with a completely closed ecosystem, the bellies of its citizens swollen with sacs of symbiotic bacteria—had tested even the generously inclusive tolerance of the outers.
“Aw, hell,” Ty said, “according to the flatlanders, we’re all monsters. And you know what? It’s true. We’re all tweaks, and we’re all proud to be tweaks! Flatlanders need drugs and nanotech to live here, but we’re gengineered for low-gravity. Maybe Avernus gave Alice a few extra special abilities, but so what?”
Maris asked Somerset, “Can we get in touch with Alice’s home?”
“Hawaiki no longer exists,” Somerset said. “It was captured and destroyed during the war.”
“There must be survivors,” Maris said.
“They were probably put in a camp,” Bruno said darkly. “One of those experimental camps.”
“Hey,” Ty said, “not in front of Alice.”
“The TPA must know,” Somerset said, “but there are no records that I can access.”
“One thing is certain,” Maris said. “We were absolutely right not to tell Barrett about Alice.”
She remembered with a chill the supervisor’s sudden bright look when she had asked about the shuttle’s cargo, and knew that he knew all about the shuttle’. passenger, knew that she was valuable.
“You’re going to stay here,” Ty told the golden-eyed little girl. “Stay here with us, until we find a way of getting you back to your family.”
“I would like to know,” Somerset said, “how we can keep Barrett from finding out about her.”
“We just don’t tell him,” Maris said.
“I’m relieved to see that you have thought it through,” Somerset said.
Bruno said, “The boss is right, Somerset. Barrett hardly ever leaves his ship. If we don’t tell him about Alice, he’ll never know.”
“This isn’t like playing around in your garden,” Ty said. “This is for real.”
“My garden has nothing to do with this,” Somerset said.
“Ty didn’t mean anything by it,” Maris said.
“I meant,” Ty said doggedly, “that this is the real world, where what you do has real consequences for real people. We rescued Alice, Somerset, so it’s up to us to look after her.”
“I believe that we have all agreed that Barrett would almost certainly kill Alice if he found out about her,” Somerset said, with acid patience. “It follows that the only morally correct course of action is to assume responsibility for her care. I merely point out that it is also a very dangerous course of action.”
“Nevertheless, we’re all in this together,” Maris said.
Everyone looked at everyone else. Everyone said yes. Alice smiled.
Maris, strung out by anxiety and the physical exhaustion of zero-gravity work, fell asleep almost as soon as she wriggled into her sleeping bag. She slept deeply and easily, and when she woke in the middle of the night, it took her a little while to realize what was wrong.
The spavined rattle and bone-deep thrum of the air conditioning was gone.
Maris pushed up her mask, hitched out of the sleeping bag, and ducked through her privacy curtain. Ty and Bruno hung in midair, watching Alice mime something in the soft red light of the hab-module’s sleep-cycle illumination. Ty spun around as Maris caught a rung. He was chewing gum and grinning from ear to ear. “She fixed the air conditioning,” he said.
“You mean she broke it.”
“She fixed it,” Ty insisted. “Listen.”
Ty and Bruno and Alice watched as Maris concentrated on nothing but the sound of her own ragged breath ... and heard, at the very edge of audibility, a soft pulsing hum, a whisper of moving air.
Somerset shot through its privacy curtain, caught a rung, reversed. Its crest of white hair was all askew. It said, “What did she do?”
Bruno said, “She altered the rate of spin of every fan in the system, tuning them to a single harmonic. No more vibration.”
“Alice knows machines,” Ty said proudly.
“It seems she does not sleep,” Bruno said. “So, while we slept, she fixed the air conditioning.”
Swaddling,” Somerset said. “Or a tether. I am serious. Suppose she meddles with something else? We do not know what she can do.”
“Alice knows machines,” Ty insisted, proud as a new parent.
Which, in a sense, he was, Maris thought. Which, in a sense, they all were. She sculled through the air until her face was level with Alice’s. Those strange silver-on-gold eyes, unreadable as coins, stared into hers. She said gently, “You did a good job, but you mustn’t touch anything else. Do you understand?”
The little girl nodded—a fractional movement, but a definite assent.
“If she did a good job,” Ty said, “what’s the problem?”
“We hardly know anything about her,” Somerset said. “That’s the problem.”
“You can find out,” Bruno told Somerset. “Use those data mining skills of yours to dig deeper.”
“I have found all there is to find,” Somerset said. “The war wrecked most of the infonet. I am surprised that I found anything at all.”
“Let’s all get some rest,” Maris said. “We have to start work in three hours. A lot of work.”
She did not think that she would get back to sleep, but she did, and slept peacefully in the harmonious murmur of the fans.
They started their shift early. As they all sucked down a hasty breakfast of gritty, fruit-flavored oat paste and lukewarm coffee, Somerset made it clear just how unhappy it was about leaving Alice alone in the hab-module.
“We should take her with us,” the neuter said. “If she is as good with machines as Ty claims, she can be of some help.”
“No way,” Maris said. “Even Barrett can count up to five. What do you think he’ll do if he spots an extra body out there?”
“Then someone should stay behind with her,” Somerset said stubbornly.
“If Barrett can count up to five,” Maris said, “he can also count up to three. None of us can afford to lose any more pay, and we’ll never catch up on our schedule if we’re one body short.”
Ty said, “Alice, honey, you know we have to go out, don’t you? You promise you’ll be good while we’re away?”
Alice was floating in midair with her arms hooked under her knees, watching TV; when she heard her name, she looked over at Ty, eyes flashing in the half-dark, and nodded once.
“You see,” Ty said. “It’s not a problem.”
“I don’t like what she did to the air,” Somerset said. “It smells strange.”
“If by strange you mean it doesn’t smell of crotch-sweat and stale farts anymore,” Ty said, “then I don’t think it’s strange—I think it’s an improvement!”
“The temperature is higher, too,” Somerset said.
“Yeah,” Ty said. “Nice and comfortable, isn’t it? Look, Somerset, Alice is just a kid. I guess, what with your religious bent and all, you might not know much about kids, but I do. I used to look after a whole bunch of them back in the clan. Trust me on this. There’s no problem.”
“She is not merely—”
Maris flicked her empty paste and coffee tubes into the maw of the disposal. “No time for argument, gentlemen. Suit up and ship out. We have plenty of work to do.”
For a little while, absorbed in the hard, complicated job of dismounting the shuttle’s fusion plant, they all forgot their worries. Clambering about the narrow crawlspaces around the plant’s combustion chamber, they severed cables and pipes, sheared bolts and cut through supports, strung temporary tethers. They worked wel
l; they worked as a team; they made good time. Maris was beginning to plan the complicated pattern of explosive charges that would pop the fusion plant out of its shaft when her radio shrieked, a piercing electronic squeal that cut off before she could access her suit’s com menu.
Everyone shot out of the access hatch, using their suit thrusters to turn toward the hab-module.
“Alice,” Ty said, his voice sounding hollow in the echo of the radio squeal. “She’s in trouble.”
Bruno, his p-suit painted, Jupiter-system style, with an elaborate abstract pattern, spun around and shot off toward the sled. Maris saw the black sphere of Barrett’s pressurized sled clinging like a blood-gorged tick to one of the hatches of the hab-module’s airlock, and chased after him.
Bruno took the helm of the sled, told them all to hang on, and punched out with a hard continuous burn. Directly ahead, the hab-module expanded with alarming speed.
“You’ll overshoot,” Somerset said calmly.
“Saint Isaac Newton, bless me now in my hour of need,” Bruno said. He flipped the sled with a nicely judged blip of its attitude jets, opened the throttle in a hard blast of deceleration that seemed to squeeze every drop of Maris’s blood into her boots, and fired off tethers whose sticky pads slapped against the airlock and jerked the sled to a halt.
Maris signed for radio silence. They fanned out, peering through view-ports into the red-lit interiors of the two cylinders. Somerset’s orange-suited figure, at the far end of the workspace, raised a hand, pointed down. The others clustered around him.
Alice stared up at them through the little disc of scratched, triple-layered plastic. After a moment, she smiled.
They opened the airlock’s secondary hatch and cycled through, the four of them crowding each other in the little spherical space as they shucked helmets and gloves. Alice was waiting placidly in the center of the cluttered workroom, floating as usual in midair, hands hooked under her knees.
“Oh my,” Maris said in dismay.
Still in its yellow p-suit, Symbiosis’s sunburst-in-a-green-circle logo on its chest-plate, Barrett’s body was strung against the bulkhead behind Alice. Its arms were bound to its sides by a whipcord tether; a wormy knot of patch sealant filled the broken visor of its helmet. The end of Barrett’s braided beard stuck out of the hard white foam like a mountaineer’s flag on a snowy peak. Maris didn’t need Bruno’s pronouncement to know that the supervisor was dead.
It took Ty ten minutes to get the story from Alice. He asked questions; she answered by nods or shakes. Apparently, Barrett had come looking for her after his AI had decrypted and audited Somerset’s infonet usage records; he’d boasted about his cleverness. He had been friendly at first, but when Alice had refused to answer his questions, he had threatened to kill her. That was when she had immobilized him with the tether and suffocated him with the sealant.
Somerset found Barrett’s weapon. It had fetched up against one of the air-conditioning outlets.
Ty asked Alice, “Did he threaten to kill you, honey?”
A quick nod.
“Why did he want to kill you? Was he scared of you?”
Alice nodded, then shook her head.
“Okay, he was scared of you, but that wasn’t why he wanted to kill you.”
A nod.
“He wanted something from you.”
A nod.
“He probably wanted Alice,” Bruno said. “She has been gengineered by Avernus. Her genome, it must be very valuable.”
Alice shook her head.
Ty said, “What did he want, honey?”
Alice put a finger to her lips, assumed a sudden look of inward concentration, and started, very delicately, to choke. She shook her head when Ty reached for her, coughed, and started to pull something from her mouth.
Blue plastic wire, over two meters of it.
Maris’s parents had owned a vacuum organism farm before the war; she knew at once what the wire was. “That’s how vacuum organism spores are packaged.”
Alice smiled and nodded.
Maris said, “Does it contain spores of the vacuum organism growing on the shuttle?”
Alice nodded again, then held up her right hand, opened and closed it half a dozen times.
Ty said, “It contains all kinds of spores?”
Bruno said, “This is why you were a passenger. You were carrying it all the time.”
“Symbiosis knew about it,” Maris said. “They must have had the complete cargo inventory. When they didn’t find it in the cargo pods, they searched the lifesystem for the only passenger. And Barrett knew about it too, or found out about it. That’s why he sent drones to watch us as we stripped out the lifesystem.”
“He did not watch us work outside,” Bruno said.
“Barrett is a flatlander,” Maris said. “It didn’t occur to him that the passenger might be hiding outside. Outside is a bad, scary place, as far as flatlanders are concerned; that’s why he hardly ever left his ship. But then he discovered Somerset’s trail in the infonet, and worked out that we had found Alice. He wanted her for himself, so he couldn’t confront us directly; he waited until we went to work, got up his nerve, and came here.”
Somerset was hanging back from the others, near the hatch to the airlock. It said, “You grow an intricate story from only a few facts.”
Ty told the neuter, “Don’t you realize it’s your fault Barrett found out about Alice?”
“I asked Somerset to make a search on the infonet,” Maris said. “It isn’t its fault that Barrett’s AI was able to break into its records. And I was stupid enough to ask Barrett about the shuttle’s cargo, which probably made him suspicious in the first place.” She took a breath to center herself, called up every gram of her resolve. “Listen up, you three. We all brought Alice back; we all decided that we couldn’t give her up to Barrett; we’re all in this together. We have to decide what to do, and we have to do it quickly, before the crew of the Symbiosis ship start to worry about their boss.”
“Somerset has a point,” Bruno said. “We don’t know what happened between Alice and Barrett.”
“He didn’t come over for a social visit,” Ty said. “He wanted these spores, he threatened her with the weapon. That’s why she killed him.”
Somerset said calmly, “I am not sure that Symbiosis will believe your story.”
Ty knuckled his tattooed scalp. “Fuck you, Somerset! I know Alice is no murderer, and that’s all that matters to me.”
“That’s the problem,” Somerset said, and pointed Barrett’s weapon at Ty. It was as black and smooth as a pebble, with a blunt snout that nestled between the neuter’s thumb and forefinger.
Maris said, “What are you doing, Somerset?”
Somerset’s narrow face was set with cold resolve. It looked wholly masculine now. It said, “This fires needles stamped from a ribbon of smart plastic. Some of the needles are explosive; others sprout hooks and barbs when they strike something; they all cause a lot of damage. It is a disgusting weapon, but I will use it if I have to, for the greater moral good.”
“Stay calm, Somerset,” Maris said. “Don’t do anything foolish.”
“Yeah,” Ty said. “If you want to play with that, go outside.”
“I want you all to listen to me. Ty, before we found Alice, you were convinced that she was a monster. I believe that you were right. Because she looks like a little girl, she triggers protective reflexes in ordinary men and women, and they do not realize that they are being manipulated. I, however, am immune. I see her for what she is, and I want you all to share this clear, uncomfortable insight.”
Ty said, “She killed Barrett in self-defense, man!” He had drifted in front of Alice, shielding her from Somerset.
“We do not know what happened,” Somerset said. “We see a dead man. We see what looks like a little girl. We make assumptions, but how do we know the truth? Perhaps Barrett drew this weapon in self-defense.”
Maris said, “You don’t like violence, Some
rset. I understand that. But what you’re doing now makes you as bad as Barrett.”
“Not at all,” Somerset said. “As I believe I have said before, if you take the side of a murderer with no good reason, then you are as morally culpable as she is.”
“She isn’t a murderer,” Ty said.
“We do not know that,” Somerset insisted calmly.
“You fucking traitor!” Bruno said, and dove straight at the neuter.
Somerset swung around. The weapon in his fist made a mild popping sound. Bruno bellowed with pain and clutched at his right arm. Suddenly off-balance, he missed Somerset entirely, slammed against the edge of the airlock hatch, and tumbled backward. And Alice spun head-over-heels and threw something with such force that Maris only saw it on the rebound, after it had sliced through Somerset’s fingers. It was a power saw blade, a diamond disc that ricocheted sideways and lodged in the door of a locker with an emphatic thud. Somerset, its truncated right hand pumping strings of crimson droplets into the air, made a clumsy grab for the weapon; Maris snatched the black pebble out of the air, and Ty knocked the neuter through the airlock hatch.
Ty and Maris trussed Somerset with tethers, and Bruno staunched its bleeding finger stumps and gave it a shot of painkiller before allowing Maris to bandage his own, much more superficial wound. Alice hung back, calm and watchful.
“I am lucky,” Bruno said. “It was not an explosive needle.”
“You’re lucky Somerset couldn’t shoot straight,” Maris told him.
“I don’t think Somerset wanted to kill me, boss.”
“We should make the fucker take the big walk without its suit,” Ty said, glaring at Somerset.
“You know we can’t do that,” Maris said.
“I can do it,” Ty said grimly.
Somerset returned Ty’s angry glare with woozy equanimity, and said, “If you kill me, you will only prove that I was right all along.”
“Then we’ll both be happy,” Ty said.
“She’s using us,” Somerset said, slurring every s, “and no one sees it but me.”
Maris grabbed the hypo from the medical kit and swam up to Somerset. “You can’t keep quiet, can you?”
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 21