The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Ethan rose. He had to steady himself with one hand on the game console. Laura’s hand on his arm felt warm through his damp shirt. He didn’t, he realized, know any of them, not really: not Laura, not MAIP, not Jamie. Not himself. Especially not himself.

  He would have to learn everything all over again, reassess everything, forge new algorithms. Starting with this moment, here, now, to the sound of rain on the roof of the building.

  Inhuman Garbage

  KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

  Here’s a nicely done murder mystery/police procedural set on the Moon, when a dead body shows up in the recycling system of a domed Lunar city, and the subsequent investigation of the crime leads the investigator to become ever more-deeply embroiled in a sinister conspiracy with wide-reaching political implications … one that could destroy her career, and maybe even cost her her life …

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch started out the decade of the ’90s as one of the fastest-rising and most prolific young authors on the scene, took a few years out in mid-decade for a very successful turn as editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and, since stepping down from that position, has returned to her old standards of production here in the twenty-first century, publishing a slew of novels in four genres, writing fantasy, mystery, and romance novels under various pseudonyms as well as science fiction. She has published more than twenty novels under her own name, including The White Mists of Power, The Disappeared, Extremes, and Fantasy Life, the four-volume Fey series, the Black Throne series, Alien Influences, and several Star Wars, Star Trek, and other media tie-in books, both solo and written with husband, Dean Wesley Smith, and with others. Her most recent books (as Rusch, anyway) are the SF novels of the popular “Retrieval Artist” series, which include The Disappeared, Extreme, Consequences, Buried Deep, Paloma, Recovery Man, and a collection of “Retrieval Artist” stories, The Retrieval Artist and Other Stories. Her copious short fiction has been collected in Stained Black: Horror Stories, Stories for an Enchanted Afternoon, Little Miracles: And Other Tales of Murder, and Millenium Babies. In 1999, she won Readers Award polls from the readerships of both Asimov’s Science Fiction and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, an unprecedented double honor! As an editor, she was honored with the Hugo Award for her work on The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and shared the World Fantasy Award with Dean Wesley Smith for her work as editor of the original hardcover anthology version of Pulphouse. As a writer, she has won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery (for A Dangerous Road, written as Kris Nelscott) and the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award (for Utterly Charming, written as Kristine Grayson); as Kristine Kathryn Rusch, she won the John W. Campbell Award, been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and took home a Hugo Award in 2000 for her story “Millennium Babies,” making her one of the few people in genre history to win Hugos for both editing and writing. Her most recent books include the novels Sole Survivor, The Application of Hope, The Really Big Ka-Boom, Vigilantes, Masterminds, and Starbase Human.

  Detective Noelle DeRicci opened the top of the waste crate. The smell of rotting produce nearly hid the faint smell of urine and feces. A woman’s body curled on top of the compost pile as if she had fallen asleep.

  She hadn’t, though. Her eyes were open.

  DeRicci couldn’t see any obvious cause of death. The woman’s skin might have been copper colored when she was alive, but death had turned it sallow. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, undisturbed by whatever killed her. She wore a gray and tan pantsuit that seemed more practical than flattering.

  DeRicci put the lid down, and resisted the urge to remove her thin gloves. They itched. They always itched. Because she used department gloves rather than buying her own, and they never fit properly.

  She rubbed her fingers together, as if something from the crate could have gotten through the gloves, and turned around. Nearly one hundred identical containers lined up behind it. More arrived hourly from all over Armstrong, the largest city on Earth’s Moon.

  The entire interior of the warehouse smelled faintly of organic material gone bad. She was only in one section of the warehouse. There were dozens of others, and at the end of each was a conveyer belt that took the waste crate, mulched it, and then sent the material for use in the Growing Pits outside Armstrong’s dome.

  The crates were cleaned in a completely different section of the warehouse, and then sent back into the city for reuse.

  Not every business recycled its organic produce for the Growing Pits, but almost all of the restaurants and half of the grocery stores did. DeRicci’s apartment building sent organic food waste into bins that came here as well.

  The owner of the warehouse, Najib Ansel, stood next to the nearest row of crates. He wore a blue smock over matching blue trousers, and blue booties on his feet. Blue gloves stuck out of his pocket, and a blue mask hung around his neck.

  “How did you find her?” DeRicci asked.

  Ansel nodded at the ray of blue light that hovered above the crate, then toed the floor.

  “The weight was off,” he said. “The crate was too heavy.”

  DeRicci looked down.

  “I take it you have sensors in the floor?” she asked.

  “Along the orange line.”

  She didn’t see an orange line. She moved slightly, then saw it. It really wasn’t a line, more a series of orange rectangles, long enough to hold the crates, and too short to measure anything beside them.

  “So you lifted the lid…” DeRicci started.

  “No, sir,” Ansel said, using the traditional honorific for someone with more authority.

  DeRicci wasn’t sure why she had more authority than he did. She had looked him up on her way here. He owned a multimillion-dollar industry, which made its fortune charging for waste removal from the city itself, and then reselling that waste at a low price to the Growing Pits.

  She had known this business existed, but she hadn’t paid a lot of attention to it until an hour ago. She had felt a shock of recognition when she saw the name of the business in the download that sent her here: Ansel Management was scrawled on the side of every waste container in every recycling room in the city.

  Najib Ansel had a near monopoly in Armstrong, and had warehouses in six other domed communities. According to her admittedly cursory research, he had filed for permits to work in two new communities just this week.

  So the fact that he was in standard worker gear, just like his employees, amazed her. She would have thought a mogul like Ansel would be in a gigantic office somewhere making deals, rather than standing on the floor of the main warehouse just outside Armstrong’s dome.

  Even though he used the honorific, he didn’t say anything more. Clearly, Ansel was going to make her work for information.

  “Okay,” DeRicci said. “The crate was too heavy. Then what?”

  “Then we activated the sensors, to see what was inside the crate.” He looked up at the blue light again. Obviously that was the sensor.

  “Show me how that works,” she said.

  He rubbed his fingers together—probably activating some kind of chip. The light came down and broadened, enveloping the crate. Information flowed above it, mostly in chemical compounds and other numbers. She was amazed she recognized that the symbols were compounds. She wondered where she had picked that up.

  “No visuals?” she asked.

  “Not right away.” He reached up to the holographic display. The numbers kept scrolling. “You see, there’s really nothing out of the ordinary here. Even her clothes must be made of some kind of organic material. So my people couldn’t figure out what was causing the extra weight.”

  “You didn’t find this, then?” she asked.

  “No, sir,” he said.

  “I’d like to talk with the person who did,” she said.

  “She’s over there.” He nodded toward a small room off to the side of the crates.

  DeRicci suppressed a sigh. Of course he cleared the employee o
ff the floor. Anything to make a cop’s job harder.

  “All right,” DeRicci said, not trying to hide her annoyance. “How did your ‘people’ discover the extra weight?”

  “When the numbers didn’t show anything,” he said, “they had the system scan for a large piece. Sometimes, when crates come in from the dome, someone dumps something directly into the crate without paying attention to weight and size restrictions.”

  Those were hard to ignore. DeRicci vividly remembered the first time she tried to dump something of the wrong size into a recycling crate. She dumped a rotted roast she had never managed to cook (back in the days when she actually believed she could cook). She’d put it into the crate behind her then-apartment building. The damn crate beeped at her, and when she didn’t remove the roast fast enough for the stupid thing, it actually started to yell at her, telling her that she wasn’t following the rules.

  There was a way to turn off the alarms, but she and her building superintendent didn’t know it. Clearly, someone else did.

  “So,” DeRicci said, “the system scanned, and…?”

  “Registered something larger,” he said somewhat primly. “That’s when my people switched the information feed to visual, and got the surprise of their lives.”

  She would wager. She wondered if they thought the woman was sleeping. She wasn’t going to ask him that question; she’d save it for the person who actually found the body.

  “When did they call you?” she asked.

  “After they visually confirmed the body,” he said.

  “Meaning what?” she asked. “They saw it on the feed or they actually lifted the lid?”

  “On the feed,” he said.

  “Where was this?” she asked.

  He pointed to a small booth that hovered over the floor. The booth clearly operated on the same tech that the flying cars in Armstrong used. The booth was smaller than the average car, however, and was clear on all four sides. Only the bottom appeared to have some kind of structure, probably to hide all the mechanics.

  “Is someone in the booth?” she asked.

  “We always have someone monitoring the floor,” he said, “but I put someone new up there, so that the team which discovered the body can talk to you.”

  DeRicci supposed he had put the entire team in one room, together, so that they could align their stories. But she didn’t say anything like that. No sense antagonizing Ansel. He was helping her.

  “We’re going to need to shut down this part of your line,” she said. “Everything in this part of the warehouse will need to be examined.”

  To her surprise, he didn’t protest. Of course, if he had protested, she would have had him shut down the entire warehouse.

  Maybe he had dealt with the police before.

  “So,” she said, “who actually opened the lid on this container?”

  “I did,” he said quietly.

  She hadn’t expected that. “Tell me about it.”

  “The staff contacted me after they saw the body.”

  “On your links?” she asked. Everyone had internal links for communication, and the links could be set up with varying degrees of privacy. She would wager that the entire communication system inside Ansel Management was on its own dedicated link.

  “Yes,” he said. “The staff contacted me on my company link.”

  “I’d like to have copies of that contact,” she said.

  “Sure.” He wasn’t acting like someone who had anything to hide. In fact, he was acting like someone who had been through this before.

  “What did your staff tell you?” she asked.

  His lips turned upward. Someone might have called that expression a smile, but it wasn’t. It was rueful.

  “They told me that there was a woman in crate A1865.”

  DeRicci made a mental note about the number. Before this investigation was over, she’d learn everything about this operation, from the crate numbering system to the way that the conveyer worked to the actual mulching process.

  “That’s what they said?” she asked. “A woman in the crate?”

  “Crate A1865,” he repeated, as if he wanted that detail to be exactly right.

  “What did you think when you heard that?” DeRicci asked.

  He shook his head, then sighed. “I—we’ve had this happen before, Detective. Not for more than a year, but we’ve found bodies. Usually homeless people in the crates near the Port, people who came into Armstrong and can’t get out. Sometimes we get an alien or two sleeping in the crates. The Oranjanie view rotting produce as a luxury, and they look human from some angles.”

  The Port of Armstrong was the main spaceport onto the Moon, and also functioned as the gateway to Earth. Member species of the Earth Alliance had to stop in Armstrong first, before traveling to Earth. Some travelers never made it into Earth’s protected zone, and got stuck on the Moon itself.

  Right now, however, she had no reason to suspect alien involvement in this crime. She preferred working human-on-human crime. It made the investigation so much easier.

  “You’ve found human bodies in your crates before,” she clarified.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “And the police have investigated?”

  “All of the bodies, alien and human,” he said. “Different precincts, usually, and different time periods. My grandmother started this business over one hundred years ago. She found bodies even way back then.”

  DeRicci guessed it would make sense to hide a body in one of the crates. Or someone would think it made sense.

  “Do you think that bodies have gotten through the mulching process?” It took her a lot of strength not to look at the conveyer belt as she asked that question.

  “I don’t think a lot got through,” he said. “I know some did. Back in my grandmother’s day. She’s the one who set up the safeguards. We might have had a few glitches after the safeguards were in place, before we knew how well they worked, but I can guarantee nothing has gone through since I started managing this company twenty-five years ago.”

  DeRicci tried not to shudder as she thought about human flesh serving as compost at the Growing Pits. She hated Moon-grown food, and she had a hunch she was going to hate it more after this case.

  But she had to keep asking questions.

  “You said you can guarantee it,” she repeated.

  He nodded.

  “What if someone cut up the body?” she asked.

  He grimaced. “The pieces would have to be small to get past our weight and size restrictions. Forgive me for being graphic, but no full arms or legs or torsos or heads. Maybe fingers and toes. We have nanoprobes on these things, looking for human DNA. But the probes are coating the lining of the crates. If someone buried a finger in the middle of some rotting lettuce, we might miss it.”

  She turned so that he wouldn’t see her reaction. She forced herself to swallow some bile back, and wished she had some savings. She wanted to go home and purge her refrigerator of anything grown on the Moon, and buy expensive Earth-grown produce.

  But she couldn’t afford that, not on a detective’s salary.

  “Fair enough,” she said, surprised she could sound so calm when she was so thoroughly grossed out. “No full bodies have gone through in at least twenty-five years. But you’ve seen quite a few. How many?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have to check the records.”

  That surprised her. It meant there were enough that he couldn’t keep track. “Any place where they show up the most often?”

  “The Port,” he said. “There’s a lot of homeless in that neighborhood.”

  Technically, they weren’t homeless. They were people who lived on the city’s charity. A lot of small cubicle-sized rooms existed on the Port blocks, and anyone who couldn’t afford their own home or ended up stranded and unemployable in the city could stay in one of the cubicles for six months, no questions asked.

  After six months, they needed to move to long-term city servi
ces, which were housed elsewhere. She wanted to ask if anyone had turned up in those neighborhoods, but she’d do that after she looked at his records.

  “I’m confused,” she said. “Do these people crawl into the crates and die?”

  The crate didn’t look like it was sealed so tightly that the person couldn’t get oxygen.

  “Some of them,” he said. “They’re usually high or drunk.”

  “And the rest?” she asked.

  “Obviously someone has put them there,” he said.

  “A different someone each time, I assume,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I let the police investigate. I don’t ask questions.”

  “You don’t ask questions about dead people in your crates?”

  His face flushed. She had finally gotten to him.

  “Believe it or not, Detective,” he snapped, “I don’t like to think about it. I’m very proud of this business. We provide a service that enables the cities on the Moon to not only have food, but to have great food. Sometimes our system gets fouled up by crazy people, and I hate that. We’ve gone to great lengths to prevent it. That’s why you’re here. Because our systems work.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” she lied. “This is all new to me, so I’m going to ask some very ignorant questions at times.”

  He looked annoyed, but he nodded.

  “What part of town did this crate come from?” she asked.

  “The Port,” he said tiredly.

  She should have expected that, after he had mentioned the Port a few times.

  “Was the body in the crate when it was picked up at the Port?” she asked.

  “The weight was the same from Port to here,” he said. “Weight gets recorded at pickup but flagged near the conveyer. The entire system is automated until the crates get to the warehouse. Besides, we don’t have the ability to investigate anything inside Armstrong. There are a lot of regulations on things that are considered garbage inside the dome. If we violate those, we’ll get black marks against our license, and if we get too many black marks in a year, we could lose that license.”

  More stuff she didn’t know. City stuff, regulatory stuff. The kinds of things she always ignored.