The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “We could kill you, Mr. Weil,” the artificial voice crackled. “But that would be wasteful. Every hand, every mind is needed. We must all pull together in our time of need.”

  The G5 suit stood alone and motionless in the center of the room.

  “Watch.”

  Two of the Hyundai suits stepped up to the G5 suit. Four hands converged on the helmet seals. With practiced efficiency, they flicked the latches and lifted the helmet. It happened so swiftly the occupant could not have stopped it if he’d tried.

  Beneath the helmet was the fearful, confused face of a flick.

  “Sanity is a privilege, Mr. Weil, not a right. You are guilty as charged. However, we are not cruel men. This once we will let you off with a warning. But these are desperate times. At your next offense – be it only so minor a thing as reporting this encounter to the Little General – we may be forced to dispense with the formality of a hearing.” The judge paused. “Do I make myself clear?”

  Reluctantly, Gunther nodded.

  “Then you may leave.”

  On the way out, one of the suits handed him back his peecee.

  Five people. He was sure there weren’t any more involved than that. Maybe one or two more, but that was it. Posner had to be hip-deep in this thing, he was certain of that. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out the others.

  He didn’t dare take the chance.

  At shift’s end he found Ekatarina already asleep. She looked haggard and unhealthy. He knelt by her, and gently brushed her cheek with the back of one hand.

  Her eyelids fluttered open.

  “Oh, hey. I didn’t mean to wake you. Just go back to sleep, huh?”

  She smiled. “You’re sweet, Gunther, but I was only taking a nap anyway. I’ve got to be up in another fifteen minutes.” Her eyes closed again. “You’re the only one I can really trust anymore. Everybody’s lying to me, feeding me misinformation, keeping silent when there’s something I need to know. You’re the only one I can count on to tell me things.”

  You have enemies, he thought. They call you the Little General, and they don’t like how you run things. They’re not ready to move against you directly, but they have plans. And they’re ruthless.

  Aloud, he said, “Go back to sleep.”

  “They’re all against me,” she murmured. “Bastard sons of bitches.”

  The next day he spent going through the service spaces for the new air-handling system. He found a solitary flick’s nest made of shredded vacuum suits, but after consultation with the CMP concluded that nobody had lived there for days. There was no trace of Sally Chang.

  If it had been harrowing going through the sealed areas before his trial, it was far worse today. Ekatarina’s enemies had infected him with fear. Reason told him they were not waiting for him, that he had nothing to worry about until he displeased them again. But the hindbrain did not listen.

  Time crawled. When he finally emerged into daylight at the end of his shift, he felt light-headedly out of phase with reality from the hours of isolation. At first he noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Then his suit radio was full of voices, and people were hurrying about every which way. There was a happy buzz in the air. Somebody was singing.

  He snagged a passing suit and asked, “What’s going on?”

  “Haven’t you heard? The war is over. They’ve made peace. And there’s a ship coming in!”

  The Lake Geneva had maintained television silence through most of the long flight to the Moon for fear of long-range beam weapons. With peace, however, they opened direct transmission to Bootstrap.

  Ezumi’s people had the flicks sew together an enormous cotton square and hack away some hanging vines so they could hang it high on the shadowed side of the crater. Then, with the fill lights off, the video image was projected. Swiss spacejacks tumbled before the camera, grinning, all denim and red cowboy hats. They were talking about their escape from the hunter-seeker missiles, brash young voices running one over the other.

  The top officers were assembled beneath the cotton square. Gunther recognized their suits. Ekatarina’s voice boomed from newly erected loudspeakers. “When are you coming in? We have to make sure the spaceport field is clear. How many hours?”

  Holding up five fingers, a blond woman said, “Forty-five!”

  “No, forty-three!”

  “Nothing like that!”

  “Almost forty-five!”

  Again Ekatarina’s voice cut into the tumult. “What’s it like in the orbitals? We heard they were destroyed.”

  “Yes, destroyed!”

  “Very bad, very bad, it’ll take years to—”

  “But most of the people are—”

  “We were given six orbits warning; most went down in lifting bodies, there was a big evacuation.”

  “Many died, though. It was very bad.”

  Just below the officers, a suit had been directing several flicks as they assembled a camera platform. Now it waved broadly, and the flicks stepped away. In the Lake Geneva somebody shouted, and several heads turned to stare at an offscreen television monitor. The suit turned the camera, giving them a slow, panoramic scan.

  One of the spacejacks said, “What’s it like there? I see that some of you are wearing space suits, and the rest are not. Why is that?”

  Ekatarina took a deep breath. “There have been some changes here.”

  There was one hell of a party at the Center when the Swiss arrived. Sleep schedules were juggled, and save for a skeleton crew overseeing the flicks, everyone turned out to welcome the dozen newcomers to the Moon. They danced to skiffle, and drank vacuum-distilled vodka. Everyone had stories to tell, rumors to swap, opinions on the likelihood that the peace would hold.

  Gunther wandered away midway through the party. The Swiss depressed him. They all seemed so young and fresh and eager. He felt battered and cynical in their presence. He wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake them awake.

  Depressed, he wandered through the locked-down laboratories. Where the Viral Computer Project had been, he saw Ekatarina and the captain of the Lake Geneva conferring over a stack of crated bioflops. They bent low over Ekatarina’s peecee, listening to the CMP.

  “Have you considered nationalizing your industries?” the captain asked. “That would give us the plant needed to build the New City. Then, with a few hardwired utilities, Bootstrap could be managed without anyone having to set foot inside it.”

  Gunther was too distant to hear the CMP’s reaction, but he saw both women laugh. “Well,” said Ekatarina. “At the very least we will have to renegotiate terms with the parent corporations. With only one ship functional, people can’t be easily replaced. Physical presence has become a valuable commodity. We’d be fools not to take advantage of it.”

  He passed on, deeper into shadow, wandering aimlessly. Eventually, there was a light ahead, and he heard voices. One was Krishna’s, but spoken faster and more forcefully than he was used to hearing it. Curious, he stopped just outside the door.

  Krishna was in the center of the lab. Before him, Beth Hamilton stood nodding humbly. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’ll do that. Yes.” Dumbfounded, Gunther realized that Krishna was giving her orders.

  Krishna glanced up. “Weil! You’re just the man I was about to come looking for.”

  “I am?”

  “Come in here, don’t dawdle.” Krishna smiled and beckoned, and Gunther had no choice but to obey. He looked like a young god now. The force of his spirit danced in his eyes like fire. It was strange that Gunther had never noticed before how tall he was. “Tell me where Sally Chang is.”

  “I don’t – I mean, I can’t, I—” He stopped and swallowed. “I think Chang must be dead.” Then, “Krishna? What’s happened to you?”

  “He’s finished his research,” Beth said.

  “I rewrote my personality from top to bottom,” Krishna said. “I’m not half-crippled with shyness anymore – have you noticed?” He put a hand on Gunther’s shoulder, and it was re
assuring, warm, comforting. “Gunther, I won’t tell you what it took to scrape together enough messenger engines from traces of old experiments to try this out on myself. But it works. We’ve got a treatment that among other things will serve as a universal cure for everyone in Bootstrap. But to do that, we need the messenger engines, and they’re not here. Now tell me why you think Sally Chang is dead.”

  “Well, uh, I’ve been searching for her for four days. And the CMP has been looking too. You’ve been holed up here all that time, so maybe you don’t know the flicks as well as the rest of us do. But they’re not very big on planning. The likelihood one of them could actively evade detection that long is practically zilch. The only thing I can think is that somehow she made it to the surface before the effects hit her, got into a truck and told it to drive as far as her oxygen would take her.”

  Krishna shook his head and said, “No. It is simply not consistent with Sally Chang’s character. With all the best will in the world, I cannot picture her killing herself.” He slid open a drawer: row upon row of gleaming canisters. “This may help. Do you remember when I said there were canisters of mimetic engines missing, not just the schizomimetic?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “I’ve been too busy to worry about it, but wasn’t that odd? Why would Chang have taken a canister and not used it?”

  “What was in the second canister?” Hamilton asked.

  “Paranoia,” Krishna said. “Or rather a good enough chemical analog. Now, paranoia is a rare disability, but a fascinating one. It’s characterized by an elaborate but internally consistent delusional system. The paranoid patient functions well intellectually, and is less fragmented than a schizophrenic. Her emotional and social responses are closer to normal. She’s capable of concerted effort. In a time of turmoil, it’s quite possible that a paranoid individual could elude our detection.”

  “Okay, let’s get this straight,” Hamilton said. “War breaks out on Earth. Chang gets her orders, keys in the software bombs, and goes to Bootstrap with a canister full of madness and a little syringe of paranoia – no, it doesn’t work. It all falls apart.”

  “How so?”

  “Paranoia wouldn’t inoculate her against schizophrenia. How does she protect herself from her own aerosols?”

  Gunther stood transfixed. “Lavender!”

  They caught up with Sally Chang on the topmost terrace of Bootstrap. The top level was undeveloped. Someday – so the corporate brochures promised – fallow deer would graze at the edge of limpid pools, and otters frolic in the streams. But the soil hadn’t been built up yet, the worms brought in or the bacteria seeded. There were only sand, machines, and a few unhappy opportunistic weeds.

  Chang’s camp was to one side of a streamhead, beneath a fill light. She started to her feet at their approach, glanced quickly to the side and decided to brazen it out.

  A sign reading EMERGENCY CANOPY MAINTENANCE STATION had been welded to a strut supporting the stream’s valve stem. Under it were a short stacked pyramid of oxytanks and an aluminum storage crate the size of a coffin. “Very clever,” Beth muttered over Gunther’s trance chip. “She sleeps in the storage crate, and anybody stumbling across her thinks it’s just spare equipment.”

  The lavender suit raised an arm and casually said, “Hiya, guys. How can I help you?”

  Krishna strode forward and took her hands. “Sally, it’s me – Krishna!”

  “Oh, thank God!” She slumped in his arms. “I’ve been so afraid.”

  “You’re all right now.”

  “I thought you were an Invader at first, when I saw you coming up. I’m so hungry – I haven’t eaten since I don’t know when.” She clutched at the sleeve of Krishna’s suit. “You do know about the Invaders, don’t you?”

  “Maybe you’d better bring me up to date.”

  They began walking toward the stairs. Krishna gestured quietly to Gunther and then toward Chang’s worksuit harness. A canister the size of a hip flask hung there. Gunther reached over and plucked it off. The messenger engines! He held them in his hand.

  To the other side, Beth Hamilton plucked up the near-full cylinder of paranoia-inducing engines and made it disappear.

  Sally Chang, deep in the explication of her reasonings, did not notice. “. . . obeyed my orders, of course. But they made no sense. I worried and worried about that until finally I realized what was really going on. A wolf caught in a trap will gnaw off its leg to get free. I began to look for the wolf. What kind of enemy justified such extreme actions? Certainly nothing human.”

  “Sally,” Krishna said, “I want you to entertain the notion that the conspiracy – for want of a better word – may be more deeply rooted than you suspect. That the problem is not an external enemy, but the workings of our own brains. Specifically that the Invaders are an artifact of the psychotomimetics you injected into yourself back when this all began.”

  “No. No, there’s too much evidence. It all fits together! The Invaders needed a way to disguise themselves both physically, which was accomplished by the vacuum suits, and psychologically, which was achieved by the general madness. Thus, they can move undetected among us. Would a human enemy have converted all of Bootstrap to slave labor? Unthinkable! They can read our minds like a book. If we hadn’t protected ourselves with the schizomimetics, they’d be able to extract all our knowledge, all our military research secrets . . .”

  Listening, Gunther couldn’t help imagining what Liza Nagenda would say to all of this wild talk. At the thought of her, his jaw clenched. Just like one of Chang’s machines, he realized, and couldn’t help being amused at his own expense.

  Ekatarina was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Her hands trembled noticeably, and there was a slight quaver in her voice when she said, “What’s all this the CMP tells me about messenger engines? Krishna’s supposed to have come up with a cure of some kind?”

  “We’ve got them,” Gunther said quietly, happily. He held up the canister. “It’s over now, we can heal our friends.”

  “Let me see,” Ekatarina said. She took the canister from his hand.

  “No, wait!” Hamilton cried, too late. Behind her, Krishna was arguing with Sally Chang about her interpretations of recent happenings.

  Neither had noticed yet that those in front had stopped.

  “Stand back.” Ekatarina took two quick steps backward. Edgily, she added, “I don’t mean to be difficult. But we’re going to sort this all out, and until we do, I don’t want anybody too close to me. That includes you too, Gunther.”

  Flicks began gathering. By ones and twos they wandered up the lawn, and then by the dozen. By the time it was clear that Ekatarina had called them up via the CMP, Krishna, Chang and Hamilton were separated from her and Gunther by a wall of people.

  Chang stood very still. Somewhere behind her unseen face, she was revising her theories to include this new event. Suddenly, her hands slapped at her suit, grabbing for the missing canisters. She looked at Krishna and with a trill of horror said, “You’re one of them!”

  “Of course I’m not—” Krishna began. But she was turning, stumbling, fleeing back up the steps.

  “Let her go,” Ekatarina ordered. “We’ve got more serious things to talk about.” Two flicks scurried up, lugging a small industrial kiln between them. They set it down, and a third plugged in an electric cable. The interior began to glow. “This canister is all you’ve got, isn’t it? If I were to autoclave it, there wouldn’t be any hope of replacing its contents.”

  “Izmailova, listen,” Krishna said.

  “I am listening. Talk.”

  Krishna explained, while Izmailova listened with arms folded and shoulders tilted skeptically. When he was done, she shook her head. “It’s a noble folly, but folly is all it is. You want to reshape our minds into something alien to the course of human evolution. To turn the seat of thought into a jet pilot’s couch. This is your idea of a solution? Forget it. Once this particular box is opened, there’ll be no putting its c
ontents back in again. And you haven’t advanced any convincing arguments for opening it.”

  “But the people in Bootstrap!” Gunther objected. “They—”

  She cut him off. “Gunther, nobody likes what’s happened to them. But if the rest of us must give up our humanity to pay for a speculative and ethically dubious rehabilitation . . . Well, the price is simply too high. Mad or not, they’re at least human now.”

  “Am I inhuman?” Krishna asked. “If you tickle me, do I not laugh?”

  “You’re in no position to judge. You’ve rewired your neurons and you’re stoned on the novelty. What tests have you run on yourself? How thoroughly have you mapped out your deviations from human norms? Where are your figures?” These were purely rhetorical questions; the kind of analyses she meant took weeks to run. “Even if you check out completely human – and I don’t concede you will! – who’s to say what the long-range consequences are? What’s to stop us from drifting, step by incremental step, into madness? Who decides what madness is? Who programs the programmers? No, this is impossible. I won’t gamble with our minds.” Defensively, almost angrily, she repeated, “I won’t gamble with our minds.”

  “Ekatarina,” Gunther said gently, “how long have you been up? Listen to yourself. The wire is doing your thinking for you.”

  She waved a hand dismissively, without responding.

  “Just as a practical matter,” Hamilton said, “how do you expect to run Bootstrap without it? The setup now is turning us all into baby fascists. You say you’re worried about madness – what will we be like a year from now?”

  “The CMP assures me—”

  “The CMP is only a program!” Hamilton cried. “No matter how much interactivity it has, it’s not flexible. It has no hope. It cannot judge a new thing. It can only enforce old decisions, old values, old habits, old fears.”

  Abruptly Ekatarin a snapped. “Get out of my face!” she screamed. “Stop it, stop it, stop it! I won’t listen to any more.”

  “Ekatarina—” Gunther began.