The Hugo Awards Showcase - 2010 Volume

by John Kessel

  “Your first name,” I interrupted. “What do friends call you?”

  “Jim.”

  “Hi, Jim. I’m Carmen.”

  To the boy’s credit, he saw through me. “You already know my name. Don’t you, ma’am?”

  “Carmen,” I insisted.

  But he wouldn’t say it. He reeled in his feathery fly, pinning the hook to the largest eyelet, and then he did a modestly convincing job of packing up his tackle. He didn’t want to stop fishing, but my presence made him uncomfortable.

  “So you know who I am?”

  Jim nodded.

  “And maybe you’re wondering if this is a coincidence, our paths crossing in the park like this?”

  “It isn’t,” he stated.

  “Probably not,” I agreed.

  Surrounding the stock tank was a narrow cedar deck. I happened to be blocking the stairs leading down.

  “Talk to me for a minute,” I said.

  Not as an order, just a request.

  Jim hesitated. Then with a nervous grin, he said, “Yeah. I found him.”

  “Collins?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I didn’t react.

  “Is that what you wanted to ask me?”

  I nodded. “You found him inside his apartment.”

  “Yes.”

  My sense of the moment was that the young man was embarrassed, first and foremost. Security was his duty, and one of the most important citizens of this nameless, unmapped town died during his watch.

  “I read your report,” I mentioned.

  The boy’s eyes were open but blind. He was gazing back in time, crossing a little more than a week, standing before a long dark pool of congealed blood leading to a pale corpse sitting in bathwater that had turned chill.

  “Did you know Collins very well, Jim?”

  “Yeah. Sort of.”

  “As a friend,” I continued. “Did you talk with him much?”

  “I didn’t see it coming, if that’s what you mean. Ma’am.”

  “We often don’t with suicides,” I assured him. “People expect depression, despair. Afterwards, we try to remember a telltale noose hanging from the high beam. But that’s usually not the case. And do you know why?”

  He blinked, watching me.

  “A person is miserable, let’s say. Sad and sick of being alive. Then one day, he finds the perfect solution to his terrible problems. ‘I’ll just kill myself,’ he says. And in that moment, his miseries are cured. He can suddenly smile through his final days, knowing that every pain will soon be left behind.”

  Jim shook his head slowly, probably wondering if this middle-aged woman was as bat-crazy as she sounded.

  “I knew Collins too,” I admitted.

  He sighed, looking at me with curious eyes. The two of us had something in common, it seemed.

  “I’ll miss him,” I offered.

  The man’s face dipped.

  Then before I could ask my next question, he looked up. “Salt Lake City,” he mentioned.

  “What about it?”

  “How is it, ma’am?”

  “Carmen,” I insisted.

  “Carmen.”

  “Salt Lake is just fine.”

  He said, “Good.”

  I waited.

  He took a deep breath, drinking in the negative ions that were being generated by a filtration system stolen from NASA. Then with a trace of frustration, he admitted, “We don’t get much news down here.”

  “I know that.”

  “It’s hard. You can never tell what they’re holding back. It’s done for good reasons, I know. But we always have to wonder.”

  “Indian Point,” I offered.

  “Yeah, it was four days before we heard anything about that. And then only because somebody with clearance decided to jump protocols and tell us.”

  “Collins did.”

  “I’m not saying,” he said. Which was the same as, “Yes.”

  “Did he explain how awful Indian Point would be?”

  Jim didn’t answer, carefully turning his reel two clicks.

  “The reactors and storage facilities obliterated, all of those poisons thrown up by the mushroom cloud.” My voice broke—an honest shattering. Then I managed to add, “I watched it all on the news. That wind carried that shit right over New York, and then Washington and Philadelphia, and all the mayhem that resulted . . . ”

  “Yeah,” Jim whispered.

  “And then to learn that it wasn’t just some crude uranium bomb that killed twenty million, no. But a fat fusion monster that led straight back to Russia . . . ”

  With a nudge, I could have knocked Jim off his feet. Almost two years had passed, and the memory was still that raw.

  I promised, “Nothing big has happened lately.”

  Jim needed a couple of deep breaths. “But at least . . . are things starting to simmer down?”

  I shrugged. Honestly, how could anyone assess the state of our world?

  “What about the wars?” he asked.

  “Some are worse, some better. It just depends, Jim.”

  He gave me a long, studious stare. “You know what? You don’t really look like a Carmen.”

  “I need a tall hat covered with fruit?”

  “Ma’am?” he muttered, puzzled by the cultural reference.

  I stepped away from the steps, allowing him enough room to escape.

  But he didn’t move, and with a soft, importunate voice admitted, “Some of us are wondering. What is your mission, ma’am?”

  “To replace Collins.”

  That’s what he wanted me to say, because the other possibilities were too hard to measure, and probably even more terrible.

  “I’ll meet our prisoner tomorrow,” I confessed.

  Jim nodded, trying to show nothing with his face.

  “You often stand guard over Ramiro,” I mentioned.

  “Everybody gets that duty.”

  “Of course.”

  He glanced at the stairs.

  “So what do you think about the man, Jim?”

  “I don’t know anything about him,” he said too quickly.

  I said, “Good,” and left it there.

  Then he added, “He seems smart, I guess. But odd.”

  “Odd how?”

  He had a guard’s burly shoulders. He used them to shrug, saying nothing else.

  “I was hoping, Jim. Maybe you can help me.” I paused, just for a moment. Just to let him wonder what I might say next. “What was Collins’ mood when you walked him back to his apartment?”

  And now the shoulders tightened, just a little.

  “I saw you two on the security videos. Walking and talking.”

  “I was going off-duty, ma’am. Carmen.”

  “Collins didn’t visit Ramiro again.”

  The young man seemed surprised. “No?”

  “Didn’t he see the prisoner almost every day?”

  “Most days, I guess.”

  “But that was three days before he killed himself.”

  “I’ll trust you on that.”

  “So I’m going to ask you. Officially. What was Collins’ state of mind when you walked with him back to his quarters?”

  Jim’s eyes gazed into the past.

  “Did he say anything?”

  “I did most of the talking.”

  “Was that normal?”

  “Not particularly. No, ma’am.”

  “You stopped at his front door for a minute,” I said.

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Did he show you anything, Jim?”

  “Like what?”

  “Papers. Something with writing on it.”

  “Well, Collins had his black case with him.”

  “But you didn’t see a legal pad, or anything like that?”

  Jim tried to see yellow paper, but he couldn’t make himself.

  “Under the blood,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Papers got burned. Somebody i
ncinerated them at least twice, to make sure every mark was erased.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “How about the coin?”

  “I saw that.”

  “Beside the bath?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “A dollar president’s coin.”

  “I noticed it, sure.”

  I waited a moment. Then I said, “So you walked him and his attaché case back to his apartment. And Collins said nothing that you can remember?”

  “Just . . . ” Jim held his mouth closed for a moment. Then he forced himself to look at me, and with an impressive talent for mimicry, he used the dead man’s voice. Deeply, with an appealingly slight Southern drawl, he said, “ ‘Want to hear something funny?’ ”

  “He asked you that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did he tell you what was funny?”

  Jim shook his head. “Which was too bad, I thought at the time. Collins was real good at jokes, when he wanted to be . . . ”

  4

  Healthful food and regular rest, plus years of tempered exercise, showed in the prisoner’s fit body and the youthful face. He was wearing beige trousers, a clean white polo shirt and sandals that looked comfortably broken down. It was easy to confuse him for a middle-management worker in the final days of a long vacation. When he heard the reinforced door being unbolted, he stood up. Ramiro didn’t seem at all surprised to find a strange woman walking into his home. “Hello,” he said with a voice that had grown almost American over the years. Then he offered a warm smile and his right hand.

  I introduced myself.

  “A lovely name,” was his response. Then the spirit of generosity took hold. He surrendered his favorite chair and asked what I would like to drink. Coffee? Tea? Or perhaps the blue Gatorade he kept cold inside his little refrigerator.

  I took the chair and requested green tea.

  There wasn’t any stove, so he heated the water inside the microwave. Staring at the revolving mug, he told me, “It’s very sad about Collins.”

  “It was,” I agreed.

  “In a sense, he was my best friend.”

  “This must be hard for you.”

  “Not particularly.” Ramiro seemed to relish how cold that sounded. He pursed his lips and shrugged, giving me a momentary glance. Measuring my reaction, no doubt.

  I stared at the wall behind him, gazing at an enormous photograph of the snow-clad Himalayas.

  “By any chance, did you know Collins?”

  I waited for a moment. Then I said, “Yes.”

  That delay piqued his interest. Ramiro invested the next several moments studying my face. “How well did you know him?”

  I said nothing.

  “Were you lovers?”

  “Guess,” I told him.

  That earned an easy laugh. “I know you weren’t.”

  “Why not?”

  With a calm voice, he asked, “Do you like honesty, Carmen?”

  “Always.”

  “You aren’t pretty enough for Collins. Or young enough, frankly.”

  “Fair points,” I agreed. “But how do you know this?”

  “Occasionally the man would entertain me with his stories.” Ramiro glanced at the mug and then stared at me. “I don’t have a passionate life, I’m sure you know. But if only half of his stories were true, then the young pretties didn’t have much chance against his charms.”

  “Local girls, were they?”

  “I shouldn’t say. Your fraternization rules are ridiculously strict.”

  I said nothing else.

  Then the microwave beeped, and Ramiro set a tea bag into the plain white mug before bringing both to me. He didn’t use the handle, and when I touched the mug’s body, just for an instant, my fingertips came close to burning.

  He pulled his office chair out from under his little desk and sat before me, the right leg crossed over his left.

  “Collins and I enjoyed some professional moments,” I began. “In fact, we met long before you happened along.”

  He nodded, smiled.

  I waited him out.

  Then with a sharp grin, he mentioned, “You must be exceptionally qualified to receive this posting.”

  “I must be.”

  “May I ask a few questions?”

  “By all means.”

  “Without giving away secrets,” he began, “what kinds of experiences have you suffered during these hard years?”

  “Are they hard?”

  “I hear little news, and who knows if it’s complete.” Ramiro shrugged, laughing softly. “Which is Jefferson’s idea, I think. Give the subject just enough information to tease out a few fresh, hopefully useful opinions.” Then he sat back, a good-natured sigh rising out of him. “But yes, Carmen. From what I have learned, I think these times are genuinely terrible.”

  “Montana,” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “The day you were found beside the road and captured . . . I was stationed outside Kabul.”

  When interested in any subject, Ramiro leaned forward and stopped blinking, his black eyes filling up his face. One examining physician had proposed that the microchines inside his brain were boosting his neurological capacities, and the eyes were a kind of tell. Others thought it was just a personal quirk. Whatever the reason, he was using his interested gaze on me now.

  “Then the following year,” I continued, “they stationed me in Iraq.”

  “Of course.”

  “I was sent to help hunt for WMDs. My assignment was to interrogate the old Baathists and such.”

  A thin smile surfaced; he saw the punch line coming.

  “Of course there weren’t any nukes or biological nightmares. But we didn’t know that yet. And by ‘we,’ I mean the people on the ground. Washington had strung together the ridiculous intelligence, and the media beat the drums, and we went into Baghdad and kicked Saddam out of his palaces. Victory was declared. But then during that window between the celebrations and the first car bombs, my assignment shifted. That country was collapsing. Our soldiers were pretty much letting it happen, as far as I could tell. But someone gave me dozens and then hundreds of shackled bodies, plus an ever-changing checklist that made no sense to me.”

  My host leaned back, his chair offering a comfortable creaking. “I can appreciate your confusion.”

  “You understand how my game works,” I said. “I try to know more than I’d ever admit to my subject. But when it suits me, I can be very stupid. And if she gives me something . . . most of my prisoners were female, I should mention . . . if she offers some bit of intelligence that I didn’t have, my first response is to say, ‘Oh, yes. We know all about the cement mixer with the fertilizer bomb. You can’t help yourself with that crumb of old news.’ ”

  I had shifted into my best Arabic.

  Ramiro was fluent in Arabic and English, Portuguese and Spanish. But his natural tongue was an odd Creole that borrowed from each language, plus a rich seasoning of peculiar syllables and tech-terms that wouldn’t exist for another hundred-plus years.

  I wished I knew his native tongue. But I was too old and cranky to learn it in a workable span of time.

  The prisoner stuck to his Americanized English, asking, “With that checklist, Carmen . . . what sorts of items made no sense to you?”

  “Individually? Nothing was blatantly strange. But it was the whole goofy package. My bosses were hunting people who didn’t belong in Baghdad. Who weren’t native to Iraq, and maybe not even to the Middle East. I made some discreet inquiries, asking for clearer instructions. But nobody knew the sense behind any of our orders. One of my prisoners would eventually stand out—that’s what the generals promised. She would be in her late twenties or thirties, or maybe her forties. Her accent might be wrong. Unless she was exceptionally good with languages, which was another key to watch for. There wouldn’t be any genuine records showing her whereabouts more than five years earlier. And a three-star general confided
to me—to all of us—that in the worst interrogations, my phantom would enjoy an extraordinary tolerance for pain and drugs and boredom. And the general promised that when I finally found my girl, she was going to be worth a hundred bloodied mistakes.”

  With a dismissive gesture, Ramiro said, “I told Collins. I told everybody. As a young man, I purchased a cheap package of tailored genes and various nano-organs.”

  “Of course.”

  “Common add-on talents popular in my world.”

  “To insulate your poor citizens from the ravages of poverty,” I said, nodding agreeably.

  “My warnings were explicit,” Ramiro told me. “I couldn’t be certain about the genetics of the other warriors, or their current identities, much less how well or how poorly they would blend into any local population.”

  “You gave us Iraq,” I mentioned.

  He bristled. Then after a moment, he said, “This is very old ground.”

  “It is,” I agreed.

  “Iraq,” he repeated. “Over twenty million people, most of them young. And what percentage of that population did your colleagues and you process? One percent? Was it that much?”

  “We tried our best,” I claimed.

  “I told Collins. One of the voices mentioned Iraq to me, in passing.”

  “It wasn’t Abraham?”

  “No, it was one of his associates. He said Iraq was our focus. But even if that was the case, and even if Abraham and his people didn’t slip out of the country before your noisy invasion . . . well, I was always critical of your clumsy methods and your very poor odds for success.”

  “I know. You gave Collins ample warnings.”

  “Even in the smallest country,” said Ramiro, “there are so many dark corners in which to hide.”

  “You warned everybody,” I said.

  “And you were following orders,” he said flatly. Then he added, “Carmen,” with a suddenly friendly, familiar tone. “But really, how could your masters expect you to find anybody of substance?”

  I paused, just for a moment. “Yes, it was a difficult assignment.”

  He didn’t seem to notice my careful tone. “What about blood and skin?” he asked. “Were you taking samples?”

  “I wasn’t. But some med-techs were doing just that.” I finally pulled the soggy tea bag into the air and sipped from the cooling mug. “Everybody had their own secrets to keep. Nobody knew more than a sliver of the whole incredible story. I didn’t know samples were being sent back home, thousands of them, and being tested for key genes.”