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

by Gardner Dozois

  This was the last day. The cutting would be finished, and the story, too. The last day, she thought hard, repetitively. All my decisions should be easier, easier than hers.

  Molly rinsed the tools at the sink, patted them dry, and treated them with antiseptic wipes. The stainless steel gleamed, wickedly sharp. Jada had arranged herself lying on the table, her heels hanging off the edge. She’d even put the towel down already.

  Molly pressed one hand over Jada’s to keep her from moving and traced the first beading red line. It curved up to meet the older wounds in an arc, tying it all together, making it one. Jada flexed her hand under Molly’s. Molly squeezed it in return.

  “I was still lying there with him, sure that I was never going to move again,” Jada said.

  I couldn’t survive it, I wasn’t that tough. No one is that tough. I’d carved out a piece of myself and left it cold and crumpled in the fucking foyer. But at least, I thought, my boss and my family, my syndicate, they would be fine. I was old, anyway, as old as he was. It was time. I was okay with that. We’d go out in our private glory—it wasn’t like I would die alone, not really. So I grabbed the knife in my leg and pulled it out. That hurt, but not enough to wake me up. There’s a reason you see so many murder-suicides with couples. They always say it’s possessive, on the newsfeeds, but that’s not right—it’s that you realize a minute too late what you’ve done, and there’s no going back.

  A call came through right then, while I was weighing his knife in my hand and considering how to finish myself off. I had no way to block calls from my boss. The holo popped up from my wristband and he was staring, his mouth open, because there I was in the dark, covered in blood and crying.

  “There are police here,” he said to me. “They’ve got recorded video testimony.”

  Suddenly I knew why Eten was late getting home. I laughed, because what else was I going to do? He’d gotten us. He well and truly had. Killing him hadn’t done a damn thing. I’d choked his life out of him for no reason.

  Maybe he’d bargained for immunity for us both, but I hadn’t asked.

  I hadn’t asked. I just acted, because I’m stupid that way.

  I ripped that wristband off and threw it. The syndicate was dead. Eten was dead. I was dead, but I owed him something.

  —“This,” Molly said.

  “Yeah,” she answered.—

  We had spent fifteen years together. Almost every day, I saw his face when I woke up and when I went to sleep. We ate from the same table. We shared the same bed. We did each other’s most important scars. I knew every inch of him, and he of me. Fifteen years is a long time when it’s half your whole life. I used my own hands to end that.

  Maybe he’d arranged immunity. Maybe that was his deal, and he was afraid to tell me. Maybe I killed our future, or maybe he was planning on taking us both out, together. You understand, I’m fair game—not just to the police, but to any syndicate with a grudge against good old dead Dawnslight. There’s no running away. They catch you when you run, they do. There’s only running as far as you need to, and finishing your business. I’m old enough. I did enough. I made the choice, and rolled those dice, and there’s nothing else.

  That’s just how stories like mine end.

  * * *

  Molly finished a last swirl and peeled it up, away.

  “Are you sure?” she asked as she set aside the tools.

  “Positive,” Jada murmured.

  Molly picked up the steel tray and put it on the edge of the sink. She ran the taps cool, rinsing the scalpel of its gory coating and the tweezers as well. The water ran pink down the drain. She’d forgotten her gloves; her fingernails were caked with blood. She frowned, scrubbing at them. The weight of her tablet dragged at her skirt like a stone.

  “I need to take this out to the incinerator,” she said, gesturing to the tray. “Do you mind?”

  “No,” Jada said. She lifted her arm above her head, turning it to and fro.

  Molly pushed the door open with her elbow, holding the tray away from her body. She walked under the minimal shadow of the side of the building, through dry and cakey dirt that came up in clouds under her shoes. Half-dead scrub bushes were barely managing to grow at the back of the building by the incinerator, more branch than leaf, brown and crisped. Molly dumped the contents of the tray into the mouth of the machine—the whole town used it, but it was located behind the clinic for medical convenience—and closed its lid. She punched the button with a quivering finger and closed her eyes, listening to the whoosh of the core heating.

  Her red-crusted fingernails drew her accusatory gaze when she slipped her tablet into her hand. She pulled up the “Wanted” ad. It was one of those impossible decisions you just have to make, because not making it is the same as making it, Jada had said. There was a link at the bottom to the police hotline. She tapped it and put the tablet in whisper-mode, lifting it to her ear.

  “May I help you?” a cool voice on the other end asked.

  “I have this woman in my clinic,” she murmured. “The one from the ad.”

  “Excellent,” he said, no warmer. “Our patrol is nearby. Stall her for twenty minutes, ma’am, if you can safely do so.”

  “The money,” she hissed. “I’ll tell her to run for the hills if you don’t promise me they’ll give me the money the moment—”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “They will be authorized to transfer funds upon their successful operation. If you do your part.”

  “Thank you,” Molly gasped and shut the link.

  Her breath stuck in her throat. She put a hand to her mouth, pressing hard enough to cut her lips on her teeth in a burst of pain, as if she could physically hold in a scream. Fifteen thousand, instead of three; fifteen thousand could buy so much more than the gene therapy. Fifteen thousand could buy air-conditioning, could buy clothes, could buy food. Fifteen thousand was a life.

  She wanted to laugh at herself—of course it was a life. Jada’s, specifically.

  Molly’s heart hammered against her ribs as she walked around the side of the building. What if Jada had heard her somehow, had picked up her bag and left already? The door would have made a sound, she was sure, but—it hadn’t been so long ago that Jada had pressed fingers to her vulnerable spine in threat, real or fake. There were uglier possibilities than her leaving without a goodbye, if she had heard.

  Twenty minutes, Molly thought wildly as she came inside with the empty tray. Jada was sitting on the table, dabbing sealant on her wounds with a wad of gauze. She flicked her eyes up, cataloguing Molly in a way that made her cold to her toes—a sharp focus, predatory—then looked back down at her arm.

  “You did a good job,” she said.

  “For a doctor,” Molly replied.

  Her voice was steady. She had assumed it would come out as tight as her throat felt, or raw like it was full of barbs. Jada was right, though; the lines made a macabre but beautiful painting on her skin, red and white, a canvas of flesh. She briefly regretted not fitting Eten’s name in somewhere, but perhaps that would have been too obvious.

  “My name isn’t Molly,” she said into the budding silence, refusing to let it settle.

  Jada put aside the gauze pad. “I assumed.”

  “You gave me a story,” she said.

  “You want to give me one, too?” Jada asked.

  Molly pulled the chair out from her desk and yanked it across the floor with a screech of wood on tile. She thumped it in front of the examination table and sat, hands in her lap.

  “You don’t have to listen,” she said, looking at the dried blood again. “You could leave. You’ve finished your—business, your responsibility.”

  I’m giving you a chance, she thought desperately.

  “Tell me,” Jada said, her posture sagging into a slump. She cradled the wounded arm over her lap, and neither woman moved to bandage it. The cuts told a tale, of and between them.

  Molly reached up, tentative, and put her hand on Jada’s. Her finge
rs were still red with her sunburn, peeling finally. She didn’t pull away. Molly tilted her head back and their eyes met, locking, as their hands did also. She wet her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, tasting the sharp tang of the wounds she’d made with her teeth.

  “Molly isn’t short for anything,” she said. “I picked it out of a book.”

  “I was from the E-6 station,” she said.

  My name was Sharad Rathore, and I was a doctor. I had money but not enough money to pay for the school I’d been through, and my father had lost his job.

  I was a good daughter. Doctors have access to all kinds of things—especially in a big hospital where it’s always busy, where people fail to fill out necessary paperwork all the time, and where the security checks are very lax. So, I thought I would sell. Just a little. Enough to make ends meet.

  —“Oh, that was—” Jada

  began. “Stupid, I know,” Molly

  said.—

  I didn’t know that the syndicates did not appreciate freelancing. It messed with their business, threw off their sales. I was too cheap and too accessible. I realize they could have just killed me, but instead, they set me up. That last meeting I had wasn’t with a buyer. It was a police officer, and the judge they sent me to was syndicate-owned. I went to the court and watched them decide what was going to happen to me without saying a word, shaking in my shoes. The courtroom turned me into a little girl again. But they said they were being very lenient, and it was to be exile instead of prison.

  Lenient, to give the worst possible punishment. Lenient. That was when I knew that I’d been set up.—

  The door burst inward, wood slats shattered and skittering across the floor with the force of the kick. Jada wrenched her hand free and dove for her bag, spilling the contents on the floor; Molly kicked her chair backward and lifted her hands in the air. As the police poured inside—four of them, menacing in identical black body armor and faceplates, shouting over one another—Jada pressed her back to the exam table and lifted a compact pistol from the clothes and tech scattered across the tile. She bared her teeth and stood, the gun sweeping toward Molly. Blood spattered from her wounded arm where it hung useless at her side.

  Molly’s heart stopped at the sight of the gun, her gaze meeting Jada’s through a hot blur of tears. She opened her mouth to say anything—I’m sorry, I love you, you told me to do this—but the barrel moved past her completely and the roar of shots filled the tiny space. Molly screamed, hands flying to her ears. Her defensive curl obscured her vision for a span of seconds and so she missed Jada’s fall until she hit the floor at her feet.

  Blood poured out of her like a river of red ore, viscous and hot. It spread in runnels between Molly’s feet. She pressed her hands to her mouth again, helpless, a high sound escaping between her fingers.

  I’m old, Jada had said. That’s just how stories like mine end, Jada had said.

  Molly took a shaking step back, and another, until she hit the wall. The blood followed her, grasping, and she rose up on her toes to get away.

  “Ma’am,” one of the officers said. She half heard him through the ringing in her ears. “Are you all right?”

  She tore her eyes from the blood only to see the terrible stillness of Jada’s flower-carved arm with its pale white fingers unfurled like petals. Old-fashioned bullets had torn into her torso, shredding cloth and flesh alike, a ruin of meat. Her face was strangely untouched, eyes open, lips parted as if to take breath.

  “We apologize for firing in the closed space,” he said. “We have authorization to confirm your payment. Do you have your account information?”

  Molly fumbled her tablet from her skirt and handed it to him. He tapped the screen several times, held his wristband to it for a flash of infrared, and handed it back.

  “Thank you for your services,” he said. “We’ll handle the cleanup free of charge.”

  “Yes,” she said numbly. “Yes, of course. Fifteen thousand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  The other officers were gathering Jada’s body between them onto a foldable stretcher. Molly’s knees knocked together and she nearly fell, a wave of vertigo smashing through her. Jada, vital and truthful and so fucking beautiful, was now a cold and crumpled thing, carved out of her and left on the floor. The officers hefted the stretcher between them. The same hand that had palmed burning-hot trails over Molly’s hip, her ribs, her stomach, lolled boneless in the air. The officers left as if assuming she would follow. Instead she collapsed into her chair and put her hands on the examination table, still warm. So was the sticky pool of rapidly darkening, drying blood under her feet.

  “Fifteen thousand,” Molly said aloud.

  It had happened faster than she’d anticipated. Her balance hadn’t returned; there was shock in its place, where the memory of Jada’s lips twisted in a final snarl had burned into her. She stood, jerky as if she were a puppet on strings, and went to the sink. She rinsed the scalpel again, and the tweezers, and the pan. She plucked a disinfectant wipe from the box and ran it over the utensils, then dropped them onto the exam table with a rattle. Making the decision—rolling the dice—hadn’t broken her. What that said about her, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  Molly who was not named Molly ran the wipe over her own forearm, cleaning the prickles of sweat from her skin. She took the scalpel in her free hand and traced a line that felt at first like nothing more than cold before it blossomed into a sharp hurt. There was a tale to tell, and a badge she had earned with murder.

  “Her name was Jada,” she whispered to the empty room as she began her own work with her own canvas. “I don’t know if this is the proper way to do it, but this was her story. I think she wanted me to kill her.”

  STEAMGOTHIC

  Sean McMullen

  As the ingenious story that follows demonstrates, history can turn on the smallest of details—and just because it hasn’t turned yet, doesn’t mean it still couldn’t.

  Australian author Sean McMullen is a computer systems analyst with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, and has been a lead singer in folk and rock bands as well as singing with the Victoria State Opera. He’s also an acclaimed and prolific author whose short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone, Analog, and elsewhere. He has written a dozen novels, including Voices in the Light, Mirrorsun Rising, Souls in the Great Machine, The Miocene Arrow, Eyes of the Calculor, Voyage of the Shadowmoon, Glass Dragons, Void Farer, The Time Engine, The Centurion’s Empire, and Before the Storm. His most recent novel is Changing Yesterday. Some of his stories have been collected in Call to the Edge, and he wrote a critical study, Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction, with Russell Blackford and Van Ikin. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

  THERE IS SOMETHING special about things that changed the world. I cannot say what it is, but I can feel it. I have stood before the Vostok capsule that carried the first man into space. Influence glowed from it; I knew where it was even with my eyes closed. In the Spurlock Museum I saw the strange, twisted, lumpy thing that was the first transistor. The significance that it radiated was like the heat from a fire. The Babbage Analytical Engine of 1871 had no such aura, yet the whole of Bletchley Park did. There was no doubt in my mind about which of them had really launched the age of computers.

  The Wright Brother’s Flyer had no feeling of significance for me either. This made no sense. It was the first heavier-than-air machine to fly, it proved the principle, it changed the world, yet my strange intuition said otherwise. Then I saw the Aeronaute, and everything should have become clear to me.

  There was an 1899 Daimler parked across the road from my flat when I arrived home from work. Admirers were milling around it, and a security guard was making sure that nobody took any liberties. I knew early model cars fairly well after being dragged along to countless car shows by my father, but cars are not my thing. Pausing only to admire the Daimler as something Art Nouveau that actually
worked, I opened my front door.

  On top of several packages of things ordered online was a large envelope. I seldom get letters. Anything that can be turned into text or pixels comes over the Internet. The address on the envelope was handwritten, and the handwriting was clear, elegant copperplate. A genuine penny stamp was at the top right-hand corner, but there was no postmark. This had been delivered by hand. Who writes copperplate in the second decade of the twenty-first century? I wondered. Picking it up was like stepping back in time, and it begged to be opened by something with more class than my front door key.

  Going upstairs, I found a real letter opener in the shape of a medieval sword, bought on some trip to the British Museum. The covering note merely said “Dear Mr. Chandler, can I have your opinion on the enclosed photos? Yours sincerely, Louise Penderan.” There were four photographs with the note, all color prints on A4 paper. They were of the wreckage of an aircraft that had never existed.

  Take a modern ultralight, describe it verbally to a mid-nineteenth-century engineer, have him build one, then crash it. That was the subject of the first photo. Unlike most nineteenth-century machines, this aircraft seemed not to have an ounce of excess weight. The background suggested that it was in a barn.

  The second photograph showed four lightweight cylinders that were connected in a spiral pattern to a crankshaft. This was a steam engine, and it was also built to minimize weight. The next photograph showed a propeller that resembled a windmill with two blades. The last picture featured what was left of a cloth panel with the word AERONAUTE painted in silver.

  The doorbell chimed while I was still examining the photos. It was 6 p.m., not the usual time for people pedaling telco plans or religious salvation, and my friends always texted me before coming over. As I walked down the stairs I had a feeling that whoever was outside was connected with the envelope. It had been just five minutes since I had arrived home. Perhaps they had been waiting in the café over the road, giving me those minutes to examine the photographs. Perhaps they even owned the 1899 Daimler.