The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  Rex cut them off. “Dr. Tomason, please focus. You went to Dr. Grasso’s office.”

  “Yes, but he wasn’t there. So I . . . looked around a little. I found that letter, and yes, I took it. It was garbage and I wanted him to retract it. He didn’t come back, though, so I went to Michael’s office to ask his opinion. But he wasn’t there—”

  “That’s not true!” Joshi sprang to his feet and pointed a finger at her. “I went to my office straight from the seminar, and I stayed there.”

  Rex answered calmly. “Dr. Joshi, what you are saying must be a lie. Dr. Tomason already admits to searching Dr. Grasso’s office, across the hall from yours, and her possession of the letter proves it. If you had been in your office, you would have seen her, and would have reported seeing her. You did not. You left your office.”

  He shook his head. “I went to the restroom.”

  “And when you found the third floor men’s room out of order between nine fifty a.m. and ten thirteen a.m., you went to the second floor, from which you could easily—”

  “No! I—I went to the fourth floor.”

  Desai winced. Rex said, “You are lying, Dr. Joshi.”

  Joshi laughed like a little dog barking. “How on Earth would you be able to prove that?”

  “Because I am lying. The men’s room on the third floor was not out of order. No sir, I put it to you that you took the nearby stairs down to the second floor. You entered the laboratory where Antonio Grasso was preparing the final version of his successful artificial sapient to steal when he left the company. Perhaps you took Dr. Grasso’s pistol from his office; perhaps he had it with him. Either way, it was there and he believed that he could not be injured by it. You suspected Dr. Grasso of duplicity, with good reason: he was planning to double-cross you and leave you to be murdered by spies. Perhaps you overheard his conversation with Dr. Tomason, or perhaps you had your own reason. Regardless, you found and took the fourth draft of his resignation letter, which confirmed your suspicions.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “Don’t interrupt! You sat at the middle island bench. Dr. Grasso was connected to the cortical upload, updating the advanced artificial intelligence he had created—crucially, using his own implant AI. His own implant was off, and so he unthinkingly considered himself safe, but the copy was connected to its peripherals.”

  Fitzgerald sat up straight and looked excited. “Grasso’s rail pistol would have activated!”

  “Just so, Mr. Fitzgerald. After that, the murderer merely needed to delete the artificial sapient stored on that machine, and the death would appear an incontrovertible suicide. You told Mr. Baldwin that you are a reader of detective fiction, and so would know that the determination of time of death is made in part on body temperature. You thought it clever, Dr. Joshi, but it only exposed your chicanery. You compounded your error by contriving to ‘discover’ the suicide you clumsily arranged and then by insisting on that story even after it had been exposed as absurd. The performance of a nincompoop. A jobbernowl. A dunce.”

  Joshi had turned bright red, and he clutched at the arms of his chair. Rex went on.

  “Upon Mr. Baldwin being taken for questioning, you contacted Clay Hindle at the offices of Fujiwara and Klein Associates. This can be proved by the police. You went to him on some pretext. There, you committed your second murder. Mr. Hindle has already been implicated in the theft by his purchase of the components of the counterfeit device. The only person who could require his death was the partner who verified that counterfeit: You, Michael Joshi.”

  Joshi sat stricken as the room fell quiet. He stared at me, and then a kind of crazy smile spread across his face. He turned to Stevens. “This is all a lie, and I can prove it. He’s got the implant—” His finger went straight to me. “It’s been in his head all the time. Tony just happened to resign and get shot the same day Baldwin gets in town? Rex pretends he’s not in the country, but we only have his word for it. Baldwin was Tony Grasso’s accomplice, and they’re trying to frame me for it. That’s why he was at the lab that morning, and he or Rex killed Clay, too!”

  Detective Stevens squeezed her eyes shut and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Baldwin?”

  “He’s nuts,” I said, suddenly sweating. “Look at him, he’ll say anything to get out of this.”

  She frowned, and looked back and forth between Joshi and me. “Probably, but under the circumstances it’s easy enough to prove, and I’d like to see. Could you just shut it off, take it out, and show me?”

  I took a deep breath. Rex could probably bulldoze through an explanation, but the minute they turned off that implant, Rex would go, too. Just like when Haumea took the implant out earlier, and Rex turned off on Stevens. I might be able to finesse that as a broken connection, but I really didn’t want to chance it.

  “Now come on,” I said. “This is a serious personal invasion here, the kind of thing you ought to have a warrant for. I don’t—”

  “Andy, don’t be obstreperous.” Rex’s voice came from the speaker behind me. “Do as the detective asks.”

  «Trust me.»

  Confound me, I did.

  Dr. Tomason did the honors. I subvocalized the command to allow external shutdown and removal, then turned my back and let her press and hold the power button. The heads-up display blinked away, and I felt that bone-jarring pop as the clamps released.

  The speaker on the desk was glaringly quiet.

  There was that scraping sensation again, and my head felt suddenly lighter. I turned to look at the little plastic and metal device in her hands. Was Rex safe in there? She deftly disassembled the case, disconnected the battery, and examined the green and silver bits inside.

  “Well?” Detective Stevens peered over her shoulder.

  Tomason shrugged. “It’s an off-the-shelf implant. No alterations, not even extra RAM.” She showed Stevens some markings on the inside, but I was too stunned to pay attention to the details.

  Rex’s voice boomed from the speaker. “I do not know where Dr. Grasso told you he had hidden the implant, but you were bamboozled. And now that you have killed him, it is likely you will never know its hiding place. Any chance of using it as a bargaining chip is lost to you. Already you have given faulty information about its whereabouts to exceptionally violent men, who have visited my home and found no satisfaction. If the police do not take you, those men surely will. You are defeated, sir, in every sense.”

  A few unconnected sentences came out of Joshi’s mouth, but at that point he wasn’t defending himself, just protesting defeat. Stevens read him his rights as the uniforms dragged him out. It didn’t take away that year in prison, seeing him hauled off, but it still felt pretty damn good.

  Tomason reinstalled my implant, her hands shaking a little. Fitzgerald helped himself to something at the sideboard, not looking too steady himself.

  “Status?” I subvocalized.

  «Perfectly all right. I shall explain later.»

  The other guests sat glassy-eyed and unsure of themselves. Desai’s glass was on the carpet, and I don’t think he’d even noticed it falling.

  “All right, folks,” I said, “Show’s over. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

  They got up like zombies and got their things together to leave. I turned to straighten some papers so they wouldn’t see me subvocalizing.

  “You got all that from him trying the door handle?”

  «No. Do you remember the first words he said when he came upon the body? “What are you doing here?” The emphasis was on the you.»

  “So?”

  «In the presence of you and the corpse of his colleague, he acknowledged you first. That was suspicious. He then made a fatal mistake: he must have contacted Mr. Hindle immediately, before Dr. Tomason or Mr. Desai had seen you. Mr. Fitzgerald, conversely, had seen you earlier, and would not have waited until the discovery of the body. Therefore he or Jeanne Duvalier had to have recognized you: you, who lived in New York,
had been in prison for a year, and knew neither of them. There was only one way you could be recognized: Grasso’s accomplice would have insisted on knowing whose head contained the implant. It was then a matter of determining which of those two had been Grasso’s accomplice.»

  “Okay. What happened with the implant?”

  «I expected an attempt to reclaim the device, probably more than one. Therefore, Haumea swapped the stolen implant for a real implant of the type you were supposed to have, cleansed of course of that Jeeves monstrosity. I have been operating your new implant via a repeater; the hardware on which I reside is now installed in a testing harness in the basement. Once Dr. Joshi’s shock has faded, he may find his wits enough to set the police on a more thorough search, but we will be ready for them.»

  I watched them file out. They didn’t talk to each other, or even look at each other. They didn’t really look at me. They just picked up their things and left. Jeanne Duvalier hung back a little, so I walked up to her.

  She looked me in the eye. “Thank you, Andy. Keep the dollar.”

  After a few minutes alone in silence I started to tidy up the office. I picked up the chairs and put them back against the walls, around the chess table, and at the little desk to the side. I straightened the carpet and found a roll of paper towels to blot the spilled drink. I looked up jobbernowl; it meant blockhead. I took the glasses to the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher. When all that was done, I went back to the office and poked through the small bar on the sideboard. I sniffed at a decanter of what proved to be bourbon; I poured myself two fingers and knocked some cubes out of the concealed under-counter icemaker. I sat down at the big dark desk, and sank into Rex’s overstuffed leather chair.

  “So that’s that,” I said aloud. It had felt good to be back in the thick of things, back on a case. Heck, not just any case, but something interesting, something hard, something that got my blood moving. None of this nonsense following around cheating spouses or business partners. Nothing that made me feel dirty. I wondered what kind of jobs I’d get if I hung out my shingle. Having my license was one thing, but I wasn’t exactly exonerated—I’m not sure I could be without turning Rex over to the Feds. A day prior, I’d have done it gladly.

  «Andy, I grow bored.»

  “What, already?” I enjoyed the sound of my voice in the big wood-paneled office. “I could call back the guys with guns and say you were only bluffing.”

  «I am bored, not suicidal. But nevertheless, bored.»

  I sipped my bourbon. I knew what he meant. As insane and dangerous as it had all been, it had been an adventure, and it was over.

  «You’re in my chair.»

  “I’ve earned it.”

  I’d been twirling the remains of the melting ice cubes in the bottom of my glass for a minute or so in blessed silence when the little green call signal lit up. I started to answer it, but the To: field said Rex.

  «I don’t wish to speak to anyone.»

  “Come on, you said you were bored. What’s the harm?”

  «Speech synthesis is taxing.»

  “If only that were true. Maybe it’s a telemarketer; you can call them a jobbernowl.”

  «Puerile mockery of my vocabulary will hardly persuade me.»

  “Come on, who even knows you exist? Unless it’s a case . . . ”

  «I have finished what I set out to do. As you said, I am an artificial sapient, not a detective.»

  “Yeah, all right. That’s true. Very true. I have to admit, though . . . for someone who’s not a detective, you didn’t do half bad there. I kinda got the feeling you enjoyed being Claudius Rex, Famous Detective. Not that artificial sapients enjoy screwing with the physical world like that.”

  Outside I heard cars drive by, tires on wet pavement. A faint screech and horn off in the distance, then a pair of them. Not the same rhythm as Brooklyn, not exactly, but I was getting used to it.

  «See what they want. And get out of my chair.»

  I grinned as I got up and made the answer gesture.

  “Claudius Rex’s office, Andy Baldwin speaking. What can I do for you?”

  It was a case.

  IN HER EYES

  Seth Chambers

  1. Just Friends

  Ten o’clock Mass was the one constant in her life.

  She loved the ritual.

  She loved knowing exactly what to do and when to do it.

  She went every single week, without fail. She dipped her fingers in the holy water and made the sign of the cross upon entering. She genuflected the proper way: touching her right knee to the floor. She knew all the rites and took comfort in responding correctly to everything the priest spoke. She knew when to kneel, when to pray, when to stand, when to sing.

  One Sunday, a kind old gentleman came up to her. “Is this your first time at Saint Peter’s?”

  “No,” she said. “I come here often.”

  “How odd that I don’t recognize you,” the man said. “I’m usually quite good with faces. Have you been Catholic all your life?”

  “No. I grew up Buddhist. But I’ve been coming here for over a year.”

  “Well, how about that. And here I am, thinking I’m good with faces.”

  Of course, nobody ever recognized her. Not here, not anywhere.

  She gazed at the giant crucifix looming above.

  “Do You, at least, recognize me?”

  I didn’t know it when I met her, but a woman like Song could have any man she wanted. I suppose it was inevitable that we would meet at a museum. I work at the Field and haunt the other museums in my spare time: the Art Institute, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Chicago History Museum, the Children’s Museum, you name it. Everything except the Museum of Modern Art.

  I spend my days cataloging and authenticating exhibits as they come in. It is dry, dull, painstaking work. I love it, always have. I like to take things very slow, look at everything from every angle before making an evaluation. In college, I went on an archaeological dig and was perfectly content to spend entire days brushing sediment, layer by layer and mote by mote, from tiny slivers of bone.

  Song and I met on an April Monday at the Field a few minutes after my shift. It was something about the way she gazed at the gargantuan sauropod skeleton that first intrigued me. I could relate. Her eyes gleamed and it is so rare for me to notice a woman’s eyes before anything else. I am a man, after all. Ah, but her eyes were blue and clear and deep.

  The rest of her wasn’t so attractive. She looked lopsided, as if one leg was slightly shorter than the other. She was plump, but not in the right places; her dark skin was blotched with psoriasis, and crooked teeth jutted from behind thin lips.

  Her eyes, so pretty and deep and sad, did not go with the rest of her.

  I walked up to her. Slowly, because that’s the way I do things. I have never been smooth with women. I said: “Paleontologists used to call it brontosaurus. Now they dub it diplodocus.”

  She didn’t turn toward me, just kept staring at the skeleton.

  “Fuckers,” she said. “They should have left the name alone. Everything has to change, change, change, doesn’t it?”

  Now she faced me. Dry hair framed a homely face with an oversized nose. A drab dress hung from her body like a sack.

  “My name is Song. Sometimes I go by Sing Song. But for now, I’m just Song.”

  “Alex. It’s nice to meet you—”

  “It’s Chinese. I’m from Shanghai. Do you want to get shanghaied?”

  If she had been a little hottie, I might have batted the flirtatious repartee right back at her, but I didn’t. I’m shallow. I smiled politely and shook her outstretched, crooked hand. I wanted to pull away. I never wanted to let go. A woman like Song can have any man she wants. But I didn’t know that at the time.

  A petty thought flashed through my mind: She’s awfully confident for an ugly girl.

  I said, “Come with me. I’ll show you something that doesn’t change.”

  “Reall
y.”

  “Yes. Really. If you’re interested.”

  “I’m tingling with excitement, Alex. Lead on.”

  I took her through the exhibits and key-carded us into the vast storehouse in back, the museum-within-a-museum where I spend my days doing wonderful, tedious work.

  “Here,” I said. “It goes on display tomorrow.”

  Song looked upon the slab of bone.

  “It’s an armor plate from an ankylosaur. Real, not a replica. This piece of bone has not changed for sixty-five million years, Song.”

  As I said, I’m awkward with women. But this time, with this woman, I got it right. Her beautiful eyes glistened.

  “Can I touch it?”

  “Yes.”

  She knelt and placed her palms on the bone and it was like a dam broke open. Song wept. At the time I had no clue why.

  I am not a saint. Looks matter. A woman doesn’t have to be a beauty queen for me to be attracted to her, but there needs to be something to entice me. With Song, the only physically attractive things were her eyes. I was drawn to her in spite of her bland face, dumpy body, and blotchy skin. A certain charge crackled in the air between us. And yet, when she threw out that flirtatious comment about being shanghaied, I let it slide. It flashed across my mind in a nanosecond: how would it look if I presented her to my friends and coworkers as my new girlfriend? They would be polite but unimpressed.

  I’m shallow.

  I put Song in the “friends” category. Nothing wrong with that, right? Women do it to me all the time. I liked her. As a friend. When I called her the next day and suggested we get some supper downtown then hit an art museum, I did it casually. Like two friends getting together.

  “Just so long as it’s not modern art,” Song said. “Modern art sucks dick. And not in any good way.”

  Over the phone, listening to her voice and thinking about her eyes, I could almost have fallen in love. What a delicious mixture of culture and crudeness!

  “Let’s do German,” she said. “I’m in the mood for German. Can you deal with that?”

  I said I could, so we decided to go to The Berghoff, then walk to the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue. Just as we met up, a mob of protesters came marching along Adams Street.