The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  “This is worth more than ten cartloads of base plastic,” she told the man. “Electronics companies use it in their smart phones and slates. No one knows how to make it, so they pay big money. We live off this for two, three weeks.”

  She didn’t think he’d understand, but he walked up and down the tide-line all that day and found two more slivers of superconductor, and the next day found five. Amazing. Like the other prospectors who mined the beach and the ruins in the forests, she’d tried and failed to train her dogs to sniff out the good stuff, but the man was like a trufflehound. Single-minded, sharp-eyed, eager to please.

  “You did good,” she told him. “I think I might keep you.”

  She tried to teach him t’ai chi exercises, moving him into different poses. His smooth cool skin. No heartbeat that she could find. She liked to watch him trawl along the beach, the dogs trotting alongside him. She’d sit on the spur of a tree trunk and watch until the man and the dogs disappeared from sight, watch as they came back. He’d come to her with his hands cupped in front, shyly showing her the treasures he’d found.

  After ten days, the snow had melted and the muddy roads were more or less passable again, and Ziyi drove into town in her battered Suzuki jeep. She’d locked the man in the shed and left Jung and Cheung roaming the compound, to guard him.

  In town, she sold her load of plastic at the recycling plant, saving the trove of superconducting plastic until last. Unfolding a square of black cloth to show the little heap of silvery stuff to the plant’s manager, a gruff Ukranian with radiation scars welting the left side of his face.

  “You got lucky,” he said.

  “I work hard,” she said. “How much?”

  They settled on a price that was more than the rest of her earnings, that year. The manager had to phone Sergey Polzin to authorise it.

  Ziyi asked the manager if he’d heard of any trouble, after the storm. A missing prospector, a bandit attack, anything like that.

  “Road got washed out twenty klicks to the east is all I know.”

  “No one is missing?”

  “Sergey might know, I guess. What are you going to do with all that cash, Ziyi?”

  “Maybe I buy this place one day. I’m getting old. Can’t spend all my life trawling for junk on the beach.”

  Ziyi visited the hardware store, exchanged scraps of gossip with the store owner and a couple of women who were mining the ruins out in the forest. None of them had heard anything about a bandit attack, or an accident on the coast road. In the internet café, she bought a mug of green tea and an hour on one of the computers. Searched the local news for a bandit attack, some prospector caught in the storm, a plane crash, found nothing. No recent reports of anyone missing or vehicles found abandoned.

  She sat back, thinking. So much for her theory that the man was some kind of Jackaroo spy who’d been travelling incognito and had got into trouble when the storm hit. She widened her search. Here was a child who had wandered into the forest. Here was a family, their farm discovered deserted, doors smashed down, probably by sasquatch. Here was the road train that had been attacked by bandits, two years ago. Here was a photograph of the man.

  Ziyi felt cold, then hot. Looked around at the café’s crowded tables. Clicked on the photo to enlarge it.

  It was him. It was the man.

  His name was Tony Michaels. Twenty-eight years old, a petrochemist. One of three people missing, presumed taken by the bandits after they killed everyone else. Leaving behind a wife and two children, in the capital.

  A family. He’d been human, once upon a time.

  Someone in the café laughed; Ziyi heard voices, the chink of cutlery, the hiss of the coffee urn, felt suddenly that everyone was watching her. She sent Tony Michaels’ photo to the printer, shut down the browser, snatched up the printout and left.

  She was unlocking her jeep when Sergey Polzin called her. The man stepping towards her across the slick mud, dressed in his usual combat gear, his pistol at his hip. He owned the recycling plant, the internet café, and the town’s only satellite dish, and acted as if he was the town’s unelected mayor. Greeting visitors and showing off the place as if it was something more than a squalid street of shacks squatting amongst factory ruins. Pointing out where the water treatment plant would be, talking about plans for concreting the air strip, building a hospital, a school, that would never come to anything.

  Saying to Ziyi, “Heard you hit a big find.”

  “The storm washed up a few things,” Ziyi said, trying to show nothing while Sergey studied her. Trying not to think about the printout folded into the inside pocket of her parka, over her heart.

  He said, “I also heard you wanted to report trouble.”

  “I was wondering how everyone was, after the storm.”

  He gazed at her for a few moments, then said, “Any trouble, anything unusual, you come straight to me. Understand?”

  “Completely.”

  When Ziyi got back to the cabin she sat the man down and showed him the printout, then fetched her mirror from the wall and held it in front of him, angling it this way and that, pointing to it pointing to the paper.

  “You,” she said. “Tony Daniels. You.”

  He looked at the paper and the mirror, looked at the paper again and ran his fingertips over his smooth face. He didn’t need to shave, and his hair was exactly as long as it was in the photo.

  “You,” she said.

  That was who he had been. But what was he now?

  The next day she coaxed him into the jeep with the two dogs, and drove west along the coast road, forest on one side and the sea stretching out to the horizon on the other, until she spotted the burnt-out shells of the road train, overgrown with great red drapes of bubbleweed. The dogs jumped off and nosed around; the man slowly climbed out, looked about him, taking no especial notice of the old wreckage.

  She had pictured it in her head. His slow recognition. Leading her to the place where he’d hidden or crawled away to die from grievous wounds. The place that had turned him or copied him or whatever it was the factory had done.

  Instead, he wandered off to a patch of sunlight in the middle of the road and stood there until she told him they were going for a walk.

  They walked a long way, slowly spiralling away from the road. There were factory ruins here, as in most parts of the forest. Stretches of broken wall. Chains of cubes heaved up and broken, half-buried, overgrown by the arched roots of spine trees, and thatches of copperberry and bubbleweed, but the man seemed no more interested in them than in the wreckage of the road train.

  “You were gone two years. What happened to you?”

  He shrugged.

  At last, they walked back to the road. The sun stood at the horizon, as always, throwing shadows over the road. The man walked towards the patch of sunlight where he’d stood before, and kept walking.

  Ziyi and the two dogs followed. Through a thin screen of trees to the edge of a sheer drop. Water far below, lapping at rocks. No, not rocks. Factory ruins.

  The man stared down at patches of waterweed rising and falling on waves that broke around broken walls.

  Ziyi picked up a stone and threw it out beyond the cliff edge. “Was that what happened? You were running from the bandits, it was dark, you ran straight out over the edge . . .”

  The man made a humming sound. He was looking at Sauron’s fat orange disc now, and after a moment he closed his eyes and stretched out his arms.

  Ziyi walked along the cliff edge, looking for and failing to find a path. The black rock plunged straight down, a sheer drop cut by vertical crevices that only an experienced climber might use to pick a route down. She tried to picture it. The roadtrain stopping because fallen trees had blocked the road. Bandits appearing when the crew stepped down, shooting them, ordering the passengers out, stripping them of their clothes and belongings, shooting them one by one. Bandits didn’t like to leave witnesses. One man breaking free, running into the darkness. Running through th
e trees, running blindly, wounded perhaps, definitely scared, panicked. Running straight out over the cliff edge. If the fall hadn’t killed him, he would have drowned. And his body had washed into some active part of the factory, and it had fixed him. No, she thought. It had duplicated him. Had it taken two years? Or had he been living in some part of the factory, out at sea, until the storm had washed him away and he’d been cast up on the beach . . .

  The man had taken off his clothes and stood with his arms out and his eyes closed, bathing in level orange light. She shook him until he opened his eyes and smiled at her, and she told him it was time to go.

  Ziyi tried and failed to teach the man to talk. “You understand me. So why can’t you tell me what happened to you?”

  The man humming, smiling, shrugging.

  Trying to get him to write or draw was equally pointless.

  Days on the beach, picking up flotsam; nights watching movies. She had to suppose he was happy. Her constant companion. Her mystery. She had long ago given up the idea of selling him.

  Once, Ziyi’s neighbour, Besnik Shkelyim, came out of the forest while the man was searching the strandline. Ziyi told Besnik he was the son of an old friend in the capital, come to visit for a few weeks. Besnik seemed to accept the lie. They chatted about the weather and sasquatch sightings and the latest finds. Besnik did most of the talking. Ziyi was anxious and distracted, trying not to look towards the man, praying that he wouldn’t wander over. At last, Besnik said that he could see that she was busy, he really should get back to his own work.

  “Bring your friend to visit, some time. I show him where real treasure is found.”

  Ziyi said that she would, of course she would, watched Besnik walk away into the darkness under the trees, then ran to the man, giddy and foolish with relief, and told him how well he’d done, keeping away from the stranger.

  He hummed. He shrugged.

  “People are bad,” Ziyi said. “Always remember that.”

  A few days later she went into town. She needed more food and fuel, and took with her a few of the treasures the man had found. Sergey Polzin was at the recycling plant, and fingered through the stuff she’d brought. Superconductor slivers. A variety of tinkertoys, hard little nuggets that changed shape when manipulated. A hand-sized sheet of the variety of plastic in which faint images came and went . . . It was not one tenth of what the man had found for her—she’d buried the rest out in the forest—but she knew that she had made a mistake, knew she’d been greedy and foolish.

  She tried her best to seem unconcerned as Sergey counted the silvers of superconducting plastic three times. “You’ve been having much luck, recently,” he said, at last.

  “The storm must have broken open a cache, somewhere out to sea,” she said.

  “Odd that no one else has been finding so much stuff.”

  “If we knew everything about the factory, Sergey Polzin, we would all be rich.”

  Sergey’s smile was full of gold. “I hear you have some help. A guest worker.”

  Besnik had talked about her visitor. Of course he had.

  Ziyi trotted out her lie.

  “Bring him into town next time,” Sergey said. “I’ll show him around.”

  A few days later, Ziyi saw someone watching the compound from the edge of the forest. A flash of sunlight on a lens, a shadowy figure that faded into the shadows under the trees when she walked towards him. Ziyi ran, heard an engine start, saw a red pickup bucket out of the trees and speed off down the track.

  She’d only had a glimpse of the intruder, but she was certain that it was the manager of the recycling plant.

  She walked back to the compound. The man was facing the sun, naked, arms outstretched. Ziyi managed to get him to put on his clothes, but it was impossible to make him understand that he had to leave. Drive him into the forest, let him go? Yes, and sasquatch or wargs would eat him, or he’d find his way to some prospector’s cabin and knock on the door . . .

  She walked him down to the beach, but he followed her back to the cabin. In the end, she locked him in the shed.

  Early in the afternoon, Sergey Polzin’s yellow Humvee came bumping down the track, followed by a UN Range Rover. Ziyi tried to be polite and cheerful, but Sergey walked straight past her, walked into the cabin, walked back out.

  “Where is he?”

  “My friend’s son? He went back to the capital. What’s wrong?” Ziyi said to the UN policewoman.

  “It’s a routine check,” the policewoman, Aavert Enger, said.

  “Do you have a warrant?”

  “You’re hiding dangerous technology,” Sergey said. “We don’t need a warrant.”

  “I am hiding nothing.”

  “There has been a report,” Aavert Enger said.

  Ziyi told her it was a misunderstanding, said that she’d had a visitor, yes, but he had left.

  “I would know if someone came visiting from the capital,” Sergey said. He was puffed up with self-righteousness. “I also know he was here today. I have a photograph that proves it. And I looked him up on the net, just like you did. You should have erased your cache, by the way. Tony Daniels, missing for two years. Believed killed by bandits. And now he’s living here.”

  “If I could talk to him I am sure we can clear this up,” Aavert Enger said.

  “He isn’t here.”

  But it was no good. Soon enough, Sergey found the shed was locked and ordered Ziyi to hand over the keys. She refused. Sergey said he’d shoot off the padlock; the policewoman told him that there was no need for melodrama, and used a master key.

  Jung and Cheung started to bark as Sergey led the man out. “Tony Daniels,” he said to the policewoman. “The dead man Tony Daniels.”

  Ziyi said, “Look, Sergey Polzin, I’ll be straight with you. I don’t know who he really is or where he came from. He helps me on the beach. He helps me find things. All the good stuff I brought in, that was because of him. Don’t spoil a good thing. Let me use him to find more stuff. You can take a share. For the good of the town. The school you want to build, the water treatment plant in a year, two years, we’ll have enough to pay for them . . .”

  But Sergey wasn’t listening. He’d seen the man’s eyes. “You see?” he said to Aavert Enger. “You see?”

  “He is a person,” Ziyi said. “Like you and me. He has a wife. He has children.”

  “And did you tell them you had found him?” Sergey said “No, of course not. Because he is a dead man. No, not even that. He is a replica of a dead man, spun out in the factory somewhere.”

  “It is best we take him to town. Make him safe,” the policewoman said.

  The man was looking at Ziyi.

  “How much?” Ziyi said to the policewoman. “How much did he offer you?”

  “This isn’t about money,” Sergey said. “It’s about the safety of the town.”

  “Yes. And the profit you’ll make, selling him.”

  Ziyi was shaking. When Sergey started to pull the man towards the vehicles, she tried to get in his way. Sergey shoved at her, she fell down, and suddenly everything happened at once. The dogs, Jung and Cheung, ran at Sergey. He pushed the man away and fumbled for his pistol and Jung clamped his jaws around Sergey’s wrist and started to shake him. Sergey sat down hard and Jung held on and Cheung darted in and seized his ankle. Sergey screaming while the dogs pulled in different directions, and Ziyi rolled to her feet and reached into the tangle of man and dogs and plucked up Sergey’s pistol and snapped off the safety and turned to the policewoman and told her to put up her hands.

  “I am not armed,” Aavert Enger said. “Do not be foolish, Ziyi.”

  Sergey was screaming at her, telling her to call off her dogs.

  “It’s good advice,” Ziyi told the policewoman, “but it is too late.”

  The pistol was heavy, slightly greasy. The safety was off. The hammer cocked when she pressed lightly on the trigger.

  The man was looking at her.

  “I’m sorry,
” she said, and shot him.

  The man’s head snapped back and he lost his footing and fell in the mud, kicking and spasming. Ziyi stepped up to him and shot him twice more, and he stopped moving.

  Ziyi called off the dogs, told Aavert Enger to sit down and put her hands on her head. Sergey was holding his arm. Blood seeped around his fingers. He was cursing her, but she paid him no attention.

  The man was as light as a child, but she was out of breath by the time she had dragged him to her jeep. Sergey had left the keys in the ignition of his Humvee. Ziyi threw them towards the forest as hard as she could, shot out one of the tyres of Aavert Enger’s Range Rover, loaded the man into the back of the jeep. Jung and Cheung jumped in, and she drove off.

  Ziyi had to stop once, and throw up, and drove the rest of the way with half her attention on the rear-view mirror. When she reached the spot where the roadtrain had been ambushed, she cradled the man in her arms and carried him through the trees. The two dogs followed. When she reached the edge of the cliff her pulse was hammering in her head and she had to sit down. The man lay beside her. His head was blown open, showing layers of filmy plastics. Although his face was untouched you would not mistake him for a sleeper.

  After a little while, when she was pretty certain she wasn’t going to have a heart attack, she knelt beside him, and closed his eyes, and with a convulsive movement pitched him over the edge. She didn’t look to see where he fell. She threw Sergey’s pistol after him, and sat down to wait.

  She didn’t look around when the dogs began to bark. Aavert Enger said, “Where is he?”

  “In the same place as Sergey’s pistol.”

  Aavert Enger sat beside her. “You know I must arrest you, Ziyi.”

  “Of course.”

  “Actually, I am not sure what you’ll be charged with. I’m not sure if we will charge you with anything. Sergey will want his day in court, but perhaps I can talk him out of it.”

  “How is he?”

  “The bites are superficial. I think losing his prize hurt him more.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Ziyi said. “Sergey knew he was valuable, knew I would not give him up, knew that he would be in trouble if he tried to take it. So he told you. For the reward.”