The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “Within a century these people will probably have sold off their stakes and retired,” Thalia said, “but I take your point.”

  Then she shook her head.

  “This is mad,” she said. “Even if it’s all true, you can’t possibly think Dr. Cicero is one of them.”

  It would explain so much – Cicero’s hard-to-place foreignness, his indifference to convention, the way he combined an understanding of the most esoteric things with an ignorance of the most trivial ones. But while it was no trouble for Thalia to imagine Cicero as an alien, the idea of Cicero as an avaricious colonial speculator was laughable.

  The Special stood up. He was silent for a moment, pacing, looking out into the corridor.

  “The Marginal expedition arrived about three years ago,” he began. “They came straight to the Senate and announced themselves; explained where they came from and what they proposed to do for us. The Senate wanted proof, naturally. They showed us plenty of gadgets and trinkets, but the Senate – Senator Oradour-Monatte, actually, the man you see in the picture – wanted more; some taste of all this knowledge they were proposing to sell us. ‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Something I don’t know.’ And do you know what they told him?”

  The Special stopped his pacing and turned to face her.

  “They told him, miss, that there was another expedition, already here. A different lot of space-people, from some other – some other constellation, I suppose – altogether.”

  Thalia stared at him for a moment, then nodded, slowly. “You, think Cicero’s one of them,” she said.

  “Miss,” the Special said, “I’m quite sure of it. That thing I cut out of his ear proves he’s not from this world, but even without it, I have plenty of evidence.” He pulled out the other chair again and sat down. “Don’t waste my time pretending you don’t believe me,” he said.

  Thalia shook her head. Cicero was going to tell me, she thought. He almost did, this morning, when he talked about leaving. He must have thought I wouldn’t believe him.

  Would I have believed him?

  “So what do they want?” she said.

  In answer, the Special took out another photograph. She couldn’t tell where or when it had been taken. It showed Cicero, in the clothes of a common dockworker, in conversation with another man, similarly dressed. He might have been Cicero’s brother, though his features were heavier and his hair was not so straight; at any rate, he was from the same part of the world – whatever that world was.

  “Have you seen this man before?” the Special said.

  “Never,” said Thalia.

  “He goes by the name of Philip Marius,” the Special said. “Nasty piece of work. He’s a saboteur and an anarchist, among other things. It’s the talkers in the workers’ movement, men like Maspero and Coser, that get their names in the newspapers, but it’s our boy Marius who gets things done. Sure you haven’t seen him?”

  “I’m sure,” Thalia said.

  The Special sighed. “Well, miss,” he said, “the gentlemen from Marginal may be bent on enslaving us all, in the end, but they’re men of business. By the standards of men of business, they’ve been quite amicable – negotiating directly with the Senate, providing the state with the odd bit of helpful information now and then.” He tapped the photograph of Cicero and the anarchist, Marius. “But your professor’s lot – they’ve been much less polite. Ten years and more they’ve been watching us, without so much as an introduction; five years they’ve walked among us in secret, stirring up civil unrest, corrupting our poor and our young folk. Infiltrating factories, hospitals, churches . . . and universities.”

  “Teaching political economy to the children of the upper classes hardly qualifies as corrupting young folk,” Thalia said. “If it does, the entire University faculty is guilty.”

  The Special smiled knowingly. “We can leave the professor’s private life – and yours – alone for now,” he said. “What’s been keeping me awake nights – and what I wanted to know from you – isn’t that; it’s the thought that your professor, and his friend Marius, and the rest of their friends, might have been working with Mr. Macleane and his lot. Playing both ends against the middle, you see – against us.”

  “And have they?” Thalia said.

  “I wish I knew, miss.” The Special shook his head. “But I don’t think so. I find your witness to Dr. Cicero’s character oddly persuasive. He may be a liar, a murderer” – he drew the word slowly out, and Thalia flinched – “an anarchist sympathizer and an alien spy, but he’s not a capitalist. And besides – ”

  A tentative knock came at the door.

  “Come in,” the Special said sharply.

  A uniformed prison guard entered.

  “The van’s ready, sir,” he said.

  “Right,” said the Special. “I’ll be along in just a moment.”

  “Yes, sir.” The door closed.

  The Special gathered up the photographs and put them back in the folder. He put the folder back in his bag and stood up.

  “ ‘And besides’?” Thalia prompted.

  “What?” the Special said.

  “Besides what?” Thalia said. “What’s the other reason you don’t think Cicero’s friends and this Marginal Corporation are working together?”

  “Ah, that.” The Special knocked on the door, and the guard opened it. “Well, miss, between arresting your young man and a few of his friends, arranging a little riot outside Marginal’s offices in the City, and a few other pieces of misdirection . . . Assuming they’re not just staging it for our benefit, it looks as though we’ve had the two sides shooting at each other for the past hour and a half.”

  He tipped his hat to Thalia.

  “Ta, miss,” he said, and she heard the click of the lock behind him.

  The guards maneuvered Cicero – with some difficulty, because of the manacles and leg irons – through the narrow corridors, and down several flights of stairs. He tried to count the number of flights, and to remember how tall the Alicata Prison was, how many stories, but he couldn’t keep the figures in his head. He kept seeing the gables of Trilisser House, counting the steps of the spiral staircase up to his rooms. His ear was bleeding again, but with his hands bound there was no way for him to do anything about it.

  They came out into a covered carriageway, so long and dark that it seemed to be underground. Both ends of the arched passage were sheets of rainwater, and what daylight made it through was gray-green and cheerless.

  A van was waiting, windowless and unmarked. The Special took a seat up front, beside the driver. The guards bundled Cicero into the back, and climbed in behind him. He was not entirely surprised to find the compartment’s opposite bench already occupied, and the slumped figure of Marius wedged there between two other guards. Marius was in a bad way. Unlike Cicero, who was still in the academic robes he’d been wearing when he was arrested, Marius was dressed in green prison coveralls, patched and stained, and some of the stains were fresh. Bloody bandages covered his right eye and right ear; his right side was bloody as well, and there was dried blood and vomit down the front of his chest. Cicero couldn’t tell whether he was even conscious.

  The engine started, and the van lurched into motion. There was a brief rattle of rain on the roof, and the van stopped again; the doors were opened, and Cicero had a quick glimpse of a wide courtyard, enclosed by high walls and overlooked by towers. Then his view was blocked by the Special again, and two more guards, draped in rain capes and carrying carbines. One of the guards had a tablet and a pen.

  “Prisoner number 91264, alias Philip Marius,” that one said. The Special gestured to Marius, and the guard looked up, making a note on the tablet. “Prisoner 91186, alias Alexander Cicero.” The guard on Cicero’s right took Cicero’s manacled hands and raised them. The guard with the tablet made another note.

  “To be taken from the Alicata Prison to the Imaz Prison,” the Special said.

  “That’s what it says here,” the guard w
ith the tablet said. He tore off a sheet and handed it to the Special. “There you go.”

  “Ta,” said the Special.

  They closed the doors again, and the van started moving. The storm was blowing in earnest now. Cicero could hear it, the wind shrieking across the roof of the van, throwing rain against the sides like handfuls of gravel. Between the wind and the state of the road, evident in the jouncing of the seat and the noises of complaint from the suspension, he half expected the van to tip over at any moment. It was hot and close, and he found it hard to breathe.

  The Imaz. The Alicata was an ordinary prison, for ordinary criminals. The Imaz was where they took the dangerous prisoners, the ones who had tried to escape, and the sort of political prisoners whose allies or followers might be expected to attempt a rescue. He fell into all three categories, he supposed.

  How did they get people out to the Imaz, anyway? It was on an island, he knew that, the prison built within the walls of an old medieval seafort. Storm-season waves in the inland sea, funneled by the narrow, cliff-steep shores, regularly topped fifty meters. No boat could survive those waters, and only a brave fool would trust himself to Salomé’s rickety, experimental dirigibles – certainly the police, even the Specials, had none.

  The van’s journey seemed to be tending up, into the hills, not down to the port. Maybe they weren’t being taken to the Imaz at all; at least not directly.

  The van came to a stop, and, from the cab, Cicero heard muffled conversation. There was the metallic clang of a gate being opened, then the van jerked into motion again, but only for a little while. The wind died down, and the rain on the roof ceased, as they came into a tunnel, or a garage. Where were they?

  The door opened on a dark, clanking space that smelled of machinery and of the storm. The guards hauled Marius out, and one of them told Cicero: “Out you go, then.”

  The van was parked beneath a wide sheet-metal awning supported by steel girders. They were at the top of the kilometer-high cliffs that made up most of the inland sea’s southern shore, looking out into the storm. Far out to sea, across the white-topped, gray-green waves, the sharp rock of the Imaz emerged from the dark, wind-whipped clouds like the prow of a warship in the fog.

  Four cobweb-thin cables, two above and two below, stretched toward them. On the far end they faded into the rain, invisible, but closer by Cicero could see that they were in fact thick as a man’s wrist, and steel. Next to the van beneath the awning was a mass of machinery, man-high wheels and pulleys and a clattering steam engine, and Cicero saw that it was drawing in the upper pair of cables, and paying out the lower. He looked out into the storm again and saw a car, suspended between the cables, slowly making its way toward them. Cicero was suddenly overwhelmed with vertigo.

  The Special caught his eye and smiled.

  “All right with heights, are we, professor?”

  Cicero didn’t answer.

  The car was the size of a railway carriage and crudely streamlined, its corners smoothed and sides rounded by bolted sheets of rust-streaked metal. Despite that, it swayed alarmingly as it approached the cliffs, pulling the cables back and forth, and Cicero could hear the wind shrieking across the car’s metal skin. The noise abated as the car came under the awning and thumped to a stop. A hatch opened downward, becoming a short flight of steps, and two guards came out, both of them wearing rain capes and carrying heavy machine pistols.

  The Special presented his paperwork, and after a quick examination of it the guards stood respectfully aside.

  “After you, professor,” the Special said.

  The Alicata guards pushed Cicero up the steps and into the car. The interior was lit by a line of incandescent bulbs in wire cages, bolted to the roof. There were four more guards inside, and a number of bare steel benches. The windows of the car were heavily barred.

  Marius was brought in on a stretcher, and taken to the other end of the car. Cicero was handed over to the Imaz guards and made to sit, while they fastened his manacles and leg irons to eyebolts beneath the bench.

  The Special climbed in, followed by the two Imaz guards, who pulled the door up and dogged it shut. With a lurch, the car began to move, and the wind quickly rose to a screech.

  “Time was,” the Special said, taking the bench across from Cicero, “the Imaz was cut off from the mainland ten weeks out of the year. The old kings used to hole up there, during their wars; took the Senate four years to winkle them out of there, during the Reunion. This thing – ” he tapped the bench “ – was put up thirty years ago, after some rioting prisoners managed to set fire to the grain store during storm season. Most of the guards made it through, holed up in the citadel with their own stores. But there wasn’t one prisoner in twenty left alive by winter when the boats made it across.” He gave Cicero a ghoulish smile and added: “Nor many bodies left, neither.”

  Cicero turned his head away and closed his eyes. The car was dropping swiftly – there was quite a bit of slack in the cables – and it pitched and swayed as the storm winds pushed and lifted it. Cicero’s stomach heaved in sympathy, and he realized suddenly why the seats were all bare metal: for ease of cleaning. He opened his eyes again, which was a slight improvement. The Special, Cicero was annoyed to see, looked quite cheerful; he might have been sitting in a parkside café on a sunny day in spring.

  The uniformed guards, though, looked more than a little green around the gills. Cicero tried to estimate his chance of disarming one of them and turning his weapon on the others, and thought that without the manacles and leg irons it might be as high as one in three; but the bolts that held the chains were quite secure.

  The Special met his eye, and smiled, and Cicero had the uncomfortable feeling that his mind was being read.

  Then the car gave a great lurch, sending the Special and all six guards sprawling, and only the prisoners’ chains prevented them from being thrown from their seats as well. The lights went out, and the pitch of the wind rose to a scream.

  “Fucking hell,” growled the Special as he picked himself up. “That happen often?”

  “No, sir,” one of the Imaz guards said.

  “We’ve stopped moving,” said another, looking out the window.

  It was true. Not only had they stopped moving out toward the island, but the seasick pitching of the car had died as well.

  “Get the emergency lamp,” the Special ordered. “Signal the station and find out what the hell’s happened.”

  One of the guards opened a locker beneath one of the benches and took out a battery-operated signal lamp. He went to the end of the car, looking back toward the cliff, and flashed the lamp into the rain.

  “It’s awful thick out there, sir,” he said doubtfully. He turned around. “I don’t know if – ”

  The window behind him imploded, knocking him flat and sending shards of glass and fragments of metal through the car. At the same moment, something – several somethings – hit the sides of the car, and the door blew outward off its hinges.

  The Special yelled something, his words impossible to hear over the sudden roar of wind and water, and the car was lit by a white flash as he fired his pistol over the head of the fallen guard. The bullet struck something that Cicero could not quite see, and ricocheted away, shattering another window.

  “GET DOWN!” bellowed a woman’s amplified voice, a Community voice.

  Cicero did his best, leaning forward over his manacled hands. He heard the cracks of electrostatic stunners, and then one of the Imaz guards opened up with his machine pistol; in the muzzle flashes Cicero glimpsed the glassy shape of a suited Outreach missionary, the figure’s optical camouflage not quite able to keep up with the rapidly changing light inside the car. The figure went down in a shower of bullets, but more were coming in through the door and the blown-out windows. In moments all the guards were down, and the missionaries – four of them, men and women – were shutting off their camouflage, the suits turning to bright solid colors.

  The missionary who had b
een knocked down, his suit now spring green, came over and knelt in front of Cicero. He took out a tool, and in a moment the bolts that secured Cicero’s chains began to smoke and glow red.

  The missionary lifted his mask to reveal a dark, bearded face.

  “Lucius,” said Cicero.

  “You all right, then?” the man said. Not waiting for an answer, he took out a medical scanner and ran it quickly over Cicero from head to toe.

  “I’m fine,” Cicero said. “See to Marius.”

  Lucius smiled. “You’re not fine,” he said. “But you’ll do.” He moved back to examine Marius.

  A bright yellow suit proved to be Livia, a very unhappy Livia.

  “Led us a chase, didn’t you?” she said.

  “Pressure of circumstance,” said Cicero. “Are the others all right?”

  “Everyone in Thyatira and the Archipelago got out,” Livia said. “We picked Megaera off a hospital roof and Cassia out of the harbor. But Solon’s dead; killed resisting arrest. I don’t know about Mus and the others in the southeast; one of the other landers was supposed to go after them.”

  Cicero tried to remember Solon’s face, and found that he couldn’t, for all that they, and all the on-world missionaries, had trained together for the better part of five subjective years. A small man, Solon, with a highly refined sense of outrage that had served him well in his cover as a muckraking journalist; that was all Cicero could remember.

  Livia glanced down, at a display on the inside of her wrist.

  “Come on,” she said. “Equity’s coming for us; we’ve got twenty minutes, no more.” She turned away. To someone unseen, she said: “Drop the rescue lines.”

  I can’t let them take me away, Cicero thought.

  As much as he wanted to relax, to let himself be bundled aboard Equity like a tired child carried home from a dinner party, he couldn’t do that. He realized that, terrible as the idea was to contemplate, on his way to the interrogation rooms of the Imaz he had actually been better off. From there, he at least would have had some chance to turn the Travallese state around, to help Salomé resist the dealers; some chance to see Thalia again.