Year's Best SF 8

by David G. Hartwell

  “What did it look like?”

  “Hard to say—it brought some fog with it, like a plasma? Couldn’t make out the shape.”

  I nodded, picturing it in my mind: the surrounding haze aglare in the work lights, the rough sphere of spacesuited jacks, that unknown and unknowable blob dashing around between them.

  “So the rest of the shift comes around the funnel—”

  “I saw this part!”

  “It went straight at Morg—”

  “And he let it through.”

  I contemplated that for a moment. They watched me in something approaching anxiety. Finally I nodded.

  “Then Pasha started yelling—”

  “Yeah, and Wit, back in the hall. Wanting to know what was goin’ on—”

  “—thing just zipped off, jamming every possible freq—”

  “It was fast—”

  “Then you busted Morgan.” They looked at each other.

  “Right.”

  “He say anything?”

  They shook their heads. “No idea what the AI was doing?”

  “It was up to something—”

  “You can’t tell. They get too strange. They need humans around to keep ’em straight—”

  “None of you guys thought of making a recording?”

  “Oh yeah!”

  “Sure we did. The remotes copied. That’s SOP in case of a mishap. Wit confiscated ’em all.”

  “Witcove did?”

  “Right. Said he wanted to keep the evidence clean.”

  I was thinking of a reply when the helmetless one slipped off the railing and shot toward me. Halting himself with one foot, he glared at me from a yard away.

  “You guys got remotes too?”

  I touched the unit at my ear. “Uhh…yeah. Sometimes. Not everybody.”

  He frowned. “What make is that?”

  “Ah, that’s a Kiwi,” the second jack said. “Remi’s got one of them.”

  Mr. No-Helmet nodded. “Good unit. High-density, lotta options.”

  “Uh-huh,” I told him. “They mentioned that at the outlet.”

  Satisfied, he resumed his silent perch.

  “Tell me something…” I looked between them. “What if Morgan was guilty?”

  Making a slicing noise, No-Helmet pulled a finger across his throat, with a smile I could have done without.

  “Yeah,” the leader agreed. “I hate to say it, but—”

  “Once they touch a guy, he’s no good anymore.”

  I was prepared to ask where they’d ever come across anyone who’d been “touched,” but decided to pass. All I’d succeed in doing would be to release the entire corpus of impi campfire lore, and there was no point in that.

  “So where you guys headed?”

  “Oh, we just finished shift,” second helmet said.

  “We’re going to eat some real food.”

  “Just did three 24s in vac,” second helmet said proudly.

  “Three straight?” I understood that a lot of jacks actually like spending time in vacuum. “That’s pretty good.”

  The leader swung around without using his hands, the way jacks do. Second helmet followed him with a pleased-to-meet-ya thrown in my direction. But no-helmet remained where he was. I waited a moment, and was about to ask what his immediate plans were when he bent forward.

  “Whatcha gotta do to become a cop?”

  Act sane, for starters. “Fill out an ap, send it in. They’ll get in touch.”

  “Where I get an ap?”

  I had him give me his address and ordered my ship to send him one. “You can put my name on it,” I told him.

  “Deep,” he said. His head swung toward a spot over my right shoulder. “He’s right up there,” he said. “Ha.”

  Behind what appeared to be an open-vacuum junk drawer two levels up rose a small boxlike shape with a single lit window. When I turned back no-helmet too had kicked off. I watched him go, thinking about scapegoats, the pressures of living in this kind of truncated society, and what happened to people who break the unwritten but unbendable rules. But mostly I thought about the possible reasons why Witcove had kept the recordings from me.

  “Hey, mandy.” I touched the remote. “Yeah, Remi.” He chuckled. “Mind I stay down, eh?” “Suit yourself. Lot of traffic. Now…Morgan had just passed out.”

  “You sharp. He did pass out.”

  It doesn’t take much in the way of sharpness to grasp how a man dying of starvation and cold would react on hearing a voice where no voice was possible.

  When he awoke, he was in a room that was comfortable for all its unfamiliarity. He was lying on a cot of some sort, and for reasons he didn’t bother to examine, he felt no urge to get up. It wasn’t that he was too weak, he simply wasn’t inclined, and that was all. He heard music, melodies of Earth, almost recognizable though he couldn’t quite place them. He had a memory—an impression—that one had been playing while he was being brought there.

  It occurred to him to look around. He took in the sight of the medical drip with no surprise. Even after centuries of advances, there’s no better method of getting a lot of material into the bloodstream fast than a tube in a vein. He clenched his fist, smiled at the wave of tiredness that overcame him and closed his eyes. When he opened them again she was standing there.

  You can imagine what she looked like to him, after all the way he’d come, after what he’d been through. Women aren’t common in the Halo. They’re not rare either, but time often passes before a jack encounters one. And to put it gently, many of them are the female equivalents of the type of male yoyo that calls Kuio home. But nothing ever destroys the deep, instinctive connection of the human female with safety and security. That’s the way she appeared to him, symbol made flesh, a saint in stained glass.

  With later developments in mind, it’s easy to speculate that she molded the image to match Morgan’s own expectations, working from cues he was unaware of and wouldn’t have been able to change if he had been. The room was dark, and though he could clearly see the silver bracelets on her wrists, the necklace, the pair of roses growing from her scalp and intertwined with her hair in that old style that often fades but always returns, her face was clouded, her features hazy.

  “How you feeling?” was the first thing she said. Morgan didn’t remember what he replied, but it pleased her; her wide smile made that clear. He made an attempt at the usual questions, but she just lay a hand on the blanket, and told him, “You rest.”

  He reached for that hand but wasn’t quick enough to grasp it before she turned and walked away. She looked back only once, when he asked her name.

  He lay down in pain, in disorientation, in discomfort, but beneath it all with that indescribable sensation that assured him he was going to live.

  She returned the next day, and he saw that she looked exactly as he might have guessed. When he answered her questions about how he felt, she cocked her head in a way that he almost recognized. He didn’t remain awake very long that day, or the next either, just long enough for her to tell him a story about where he was and what had happened that isn’t worth repeating because it wasn’t true. But that didn’t matter to him at the time, nor did he suspect it. Because he was in no concrete place at all, really. He was in that safe place we leave behind in childhood, and revisit only in memory.

  He remained there two weeks. He slept most of the next few days—he assumed there was a sedative in the feed coming down that tube. Whenever he awoke she was there, or arrived momentarily. Never anyone but her, though he had the impression—gained he didn’t know how—that others were around. But it was she who examined him, who checked the medical machinery, who talked to him, who read to him, who helped him pass the time required for him to regain his strength.

  It was the better part of a week before he could eat. She let him feed himself—a bowl of clear broth. He kept it down, and there was solid food to come, small portions so he wouldn’t be tempted to stuff. She didn’t eat anything
.

  At last, the time came for him to get up and exercise the muscles wasted by the weeks of his scarcely-remembered ordeal. She encouraged him to get up by himself, stepping back to give him room. He did well, taking five full steps to a chair and then back to the bed after resting a bit. She was pleased with him, enough so that he wanted to try it again right away. She told him it was better to wait.

  He must have been a touch overconfident the next day. That or wanting to please her or maybe a mix of both. He went a step further than he should have, a little faster than was necessary. She was living out her own fantasy too, in whatever way an AI does, because when he lost his balance, she moved to catch him, and her hand went straight through his outstretched arm.

  “Wait one,” I muttered. More alert now, I’d spotted a movement below as a figure appeared over the curve of the tank. Even at that distance I knew it was Witcove. I gestured Remi to remain down.

  I maintained a blank expression as Witcove approached. He landed with a grunt. “So…how’s it going?”

  “Out catching a little sun.”

  “Little…” he frowned. “Oh…little sun. Sure. Hehheh…Say, I was taking a look at your ship. Quite a bird.”

  “Gets me around.”

  “Surprised how quick you got here, but…this is kind of an important thing, I guess. I mean, lot of people interested, right? Might go straight back to Charon, or maybe even deeper.”

  I nodded.

  “So…word will get around. People will talk. Unless they maybe…classify it? But there’s such things as leaks, too. See, you can’t win.”

  He shook his head and sighed. “Y’know, you get work out here by rep. Word of mouth. Somebody says, Powder Monkeys do a great job, never have to tell ’em things twice…That’s how you get hired. No other way—advertising, bidding, forget about it. You need a good rep. And you don’t get one overnight see, takes decades of hard, solid work. We got a good rep, the Monkeys. And we get our share of contracts. But here’s the thing…”

  He bent close, his grotesque, vacuum-adapted face all intent. “People hear there’s runaways hanging around the hall, and one of the Monkeys well, working with it. Now that wouldn’t be so good. For the reputation, see. So I been thinking about that.”

  “Go on.”

  “What I was thinking, what if it happened different. What if Morgan quit. A few weeks back. Not too long ago, month or two. What if nobody could say, ‘Rog Morgan, Powder Monkey.’ What about that?”

  “You’re saying you want me to falsify a report.”

  “Noooo—I’m not saying that.” Witcove snorted at my obtuseness. “But if you waited a bit, so I could mess with Morgan’s files, see, I could make it look like he was forty AUs from here, with another outfit, or prospecting on his own…yeah, that’d be best. He quit and went out on his own. Come back to trade for supplies. Say, I ever tell you that the Monkeys are a public company?”

  He bobbed his head. “That’s right. PM plc. Traded on all the big boards. Stock went up another tick last week. Never drops. Better than blue chip. We got a pretty good-size block of unassigned certificates right in my office and what do you say about that report?”

  “I could change it.” I pronounced the words carefully, trying to hide the disgust I felt. Witcove seemed to shrink into himself with relief. “Sure. Or I could bust you and lock you up in my ship this minute.”

  He stared at me in utter silence. “Or maybe freeze your systems and let you wait six or seven months for a magistrate to come by.”

  His eye membranes flicked once, as if he was blinking. “Nah—we’ll go for the bust.” Raising my voice as if it could, in fact, carry through vacuum, I contacted the ship. “…prepare space for a single perp, charge attempted bribery of a Mandate law enforcement officer, that calls for maximum security, I believe.”

  Witcove came back to life, waving his arms wildly, swinging his head in all directions as if to catch the ship sneaking up on him. I watched him for a moment.

  “Or maybe we won’t do that either.” He went still, arms extended. “Instead, maybe you’ll give me the recordings you held back, you simple SOB.”

  His arms fell and he recited the codes in a monotone. He remained silent as I sent them on to the ship with instructions to go through them for anomalies. “Wasn’t just for me,” he muttered after I finished. “I was thinking of the guys—”

  “I know that.”

  Witcove wasn’t bad. There were any number worse scattered across the Halo. Foremen and plant owners who didn’t think of the guys at all, or thought of them only to cheat them, terrorize them, abuse them, let them down in every conceivable way. Whatever Witcove might be, he wasn’t one of them. He was on the high end, as such things are graded. “Now go on.”

  I stopped him as he swung over the railing. “What’s the code to that shed lock?”

  He gave it to me and left without another word.

  Remi chuckled. “Knew you’d do that,” I grimaced. As if I’d take a bribe in front of a witness.

  “Go on with the story, Remi.”

  “Not much to tell. When he looked up she was gone, and he went back to bed lay there thinking. You know that old story about the guy the munchkins took away to Manhattan? Only there couple weeks but when he got back it was centuries and everybody was dead, and he had him a long beard. Ever hear that one?”

  “Something like it, yeah.”

  “I mean, duppies. What they want? Who knows? Who’s gonna hang around find out? So he waited til it was real quiet, and got up. His suit was right outside the door, like it was waiting for him. He put it on, ran a check. All powered up, reservoirs full, and there was extra supply packs stacked on the floor. He went down this hallway, and round the corner the lights were on, leading to what sure as hell looked like a lock. He went over, and he’s just about to step in and he stops, ’cause he’s sure, see, they gonna grab him…”

  Right then I got a buzz from the ship. Slipping the handset from my belt, I read a message about the recorder footage. I told it to play.

  “…got in the lock, about to shut the door and he stops again. Helmet still open, see. Heard a sound from inside. A song, way quiet, like she was saying goodbye…”

  The scene playing on my handset was much as I’d imagined it: the brightly-lit haze, the jacks spread out, that unwelcome entity feinting between them. A flashing caret marked Rog Morgan. I watched as the impi swung toward him, as his hands rose, as the thing slipped past into open sky.

  “And whacha think he did?”

  The screen displayed another angle of the same scene: Jacks, Morgan, the impi…I lifted the set, paying close attention to his hands. “Turned around, went back.”

  “You got it!” Remi sounded delighted.

  I called for a closeup of Morgan’s hands, went through it twice in slow motion. “Yeah, that’s what he did. And she came in a few minutes later, and he was on the bed in his suit, and he said, ‘I like that song.’ I’da kept going.”

  “So would I.”

  The screen began another replay. I canceled and it went dark. No point in watching it again. There was not a single doubt in my mind as to what had occurred. “Remi…I thank you, the Mandate thanks you…”I looked up at the shed’s single lonely window. I didn’t think Morgan was going to thank him.

  I started toward the shed, muscles quivering, mind ablaze with that feeling you get only when a case is coming together. A warning notice flashed as I approached the next level. I kicked up and over, barely pausing to catch my balance as I landed.

  The impis had gotten to him. There was no way around it; the footage was clear. Morgan was in full and witting contact with rogue entities and all that implied. It was the break we’d been waiting for, the first sign of an active human/impi organization.

  I needed immediate backup, every ship within a month’s radius. The hall’s higher-level activities would have to be frozen, to make sure it didn’t wander off. A lot of people would be coming to look the place ov
er. They’d be studying this hall down all the way down to the gluons for years to come. As for Morgan…I didn’t want to think about that part.

  I paused at the door, almost breathless. With quick stabs I punched in the code. I charged inside before it was half open. “Okay, ace—what did she pass to you?”

  Morgan barely started. He gave me a mournful look, then reached into his jacket pocket. He gazed down at the object in his hand and with a sigh tossed it to me.

  It was a piece of scrim. I’d seen that even as he took it out. I hefted it. Some kind of metal, an alloy I couldn’t identify. The bust of a woman, head cocked to one side, a smile on her face, hair lifting away as if blown by an invisible breeze.

  I raised my eyes to Morgan. “She went…You’re telling me the impi went after this for you.”

  “No.” Morgan shook his head. “Alerted some others. They picked it up.”

  I turned the statuette over in my hand. It’s hollow, I told myself. Imprinted on the molecular level with some message, some command…

  I examined the face once again, the laughing eyes, the lips so lifelike they seemed about to speak, to give word to everything Morgan had left behind: light, and warmth, air to breathe. He’d put a lot of work into the thing. It occurred to me, somewhat belatedly, that it was a portrait of someone he knew. Had once known. No wonder he wanted it back.

  For a second or two my mind struggled against the evidence of simple kindness, desperate for a reason to raise the alarm after all. But it wasn’t hollow, and contained nothing, and it wouldn’t take me anywhere. I tossed it back to Morgan. “Nice piece.” I got out of my handset. “Okay—does our little pal have a name?”

  “Isis,” he said softly. I had to ask him to repeat it.

  I left the door unlocked. The hall’s top level was only a few yards overhead. I kicked off for it, setting down amidst a jungle of antennas and cables and junk. That grand glowing tube of dirty-yellow muck towered above me. I eyed it with the weariness of years, seeing my own youth vanish over that bright curve, its roaring song fading relentlessly into gray. Some are meant for the sunlight and some for the shadowed places. It was pretty clear to me which portion was mine.