The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Here he takes us to the inimical surface of a very inhospitable Venus for a deadly game of cat and mouse.

  * * * *

  It was hot coming down into the valley. The sun was high in the sky, a harsh white dazzle in the eternal clouds, strong enough to melt the lead out of the hills. They trudged down from the heights, carrying the drilling rig between them. A little trickle of metal, spill from a tanker bringing tin out of the mountains, glinted at the verge of the road.

  A traveler coming the other way, ten feet tall and anonymous in a black muscle suit, waved at them as they passed, but, even though it had been weeks since they’d seen another human being, they didn’t wave back. The traveler passed them and disappeared up the road. The heat had seared the ground here black and hard. They could leave the road, if they wanted, and make almost as good time.

  Patang and MacArthur had been walking for hours. They expected to walk for hours more. But then the road twisted and down at the bottom of the long decline, in the shadow of a basalt cliff, was an inn. Mostly their work kept them away from roads and inns. For almost a month they’d been living in their suits, sleeping in harness.

  They looked warily at each other, mirrored visor to mirrored visor. Heat glimmered from the engines of their muscle suits. Without a word, they agreed to stop.

  The inn radioed a fee schedule at their approach. They let their suits’ autonomic functions negotiate for them, and carefully set the drilling rig down alongside the building.

  “Put out the tarp,” MacArthur said. “So it won’t warp.”

  He went inside.

  Patang deployed the gold foil tarp, then followed him in.

  MacArthur was already out of his suit and seated at a cast-iron table with two cups of water in front of him when Patang cycled through the airlock. For an instant she dared hope everything was going to be all right.

  Then he looked up at her.

  “Ten dollars a cup.” One cup was half empty. He drank the rest down in one long gulp, and closed a hairy paw around the second cup. His beard had grown since she had last seen it, and she could smell him from across the room. Presumably he could smell her too. “The bastards get you coming and going.”

  Patang climbed down out of her suit. She stretched out her arms as far as they would go, luxuriating in the room’s openness. All that space! It was twenty feet across and windowless. There was the one table, and six iron chairs to go with it. Half a dozen cots folded up against the walls. A line of shelves offered Company goods that neither of them could afford. There were also a pay toilet and a pay shower. There was a free medical unit, but if you tried to con it out of something recreational, the Company found out and fined you accordingly.

  Patang’s skin prickled and itched from a month’s accumulation of dried sweat. “I’m going to scratch,” she said. “Don’t look.”

  But of course MacArthur did, the pig.

  Ignoring him, Patang slowly and sensuously scratched under her blouse and across her back. She took her time, digging in with her nails hard enough almost to make the skin bleed. It felt glorious.

  MacArthur stared at her all the while, a starving wolf faced with a plump rabbit.

  “You could have done that in your suit,” he said when she was done.

  “It’s not the same.”

  “You didn’t have to do that in front of—”

  “Hey! How’s about a little conversation?” Patang said loudly. So it cost a few bucks. So what?

  With a click, the innkeeper came on. “Wasn’t expecting any more visitors so close to the noon season,” it said in a folksy synthetic voice. “What are you two prospecting for?”

  “Gold, tin, lead, just about anything that’ll gush up a test-hole.” Patang closed her eyes, pretending she was back on Lakshmi Planum in a bar in Port Ishtar, talking with a real, live human being. “We figured most people will be working tracts in the morning and late afternoon. This way our databases are up-to-date—we won’t be stepping on somebody’s month-old claim.”

  “Very wise. The Company pays well for a strike.”

  “I hate those fucking things.” MacArthur turned his back on the speaker and Patang both, noisily scraping his chair against the floor. She knew how badly he’d like to hurt her.

  She knew that it wasn’t going to happen.

  * * * *

  The Company had three rules. The first was No Violence. The second was Protect Company Equipment. The third was Protect Yourself. All three were enforced by neural implant.

  From long experience with its prospectors, the Company had prioritized these rules, so that the first overruled the second, the second overruled the third, and the third could only be obeyed insofar as it didn’t conflict with the first two. That was so a prospector couldn’t decide—as had happened—that his survival depended on the death of his partner. Or, more subtly, that the other wasn’t taking proper care of Company equipment, and should be eliminated.

  It had taken time and experience, but the Company had finally come up with a foolproof set of algorithms. The outback was a functioning anarchy. Nobody could hurt anybody else there.

  No matter how badly they needed to.

  The ‘plants had sounded like a good idea when Patang and MacArthur first went under contract. They’d signed up for a full sidereal day—two hundred fifty-five Earth days. Slightly longer than a Venusian year. Now, with fifty-nine days still to go, she was no longer certain that two people who hated each other as much as they did should be kept from each other’s throats. Sooner or later, one of them would have to crack.

  Every day she prayed that it would be MacArthur who finally yanked the escape cord, calling down upon himself the charges for a rescue ship to pull them out ahead of contract. MacArthur who went bust while she took her partial creds and skipped.

  Every day he didn’t. It was inhuman how much abuse he could absorb without giving in.

  Only hatred could keep a man going like that.

  * * * *

  Patang drank her water down slowly, with little slurps and sighs and lip-smackings. Knowing MacArthur loathed that, but unable to keep herself from doing it anyway. She was almost done when he slammed his hands down on the tabletop, to either side of hers, and said, “Patang, there are some things I want to get straight between us.”

  “Please. Don’t.”

  “Goddamnit, you know how I feel about that shit.”

  “I don’t like it when you talk like that. Stop.”

  MacArthur ground his teeth. “No. We are going to have this out right here and now. I want you to—what was that?”

  Patang stared blankly at her partner. Then she felt it—an uneasy vertiginous queasiness, a sense of imbalance just at the edge of perception, as if all of Venus were with infinitesimal gentleness shifting underfoot.

  Then the planet roared and the floor came up to smash her in the face.

  * * * *

  When Patang came to, everything was a jumble. The floor was canted. The shelves had collapsed, dumping silk shirts, lemon cookies, and bars of beauty soap everywhere. Their muscle suits had tumbled together, the metal arm of one caught between the legs of the other. The life support systems were still operational, thank God. The Company built them strong.

  In the middle of it all, MacArthur stood motionless, grinning. A trickle of blood ran down his neck. He slowly rubbed the side of his face.

  “MacArthur? Are you okay?”

  A strange look was in his eyes. “By God,” he said softly. “By damn.”

  “Innkeeper! What happened here?”

  The device didn’t respond. “I busted it up,” MacArthur said. “It was easy.”

  “What?”

  MacArthur walked clumsily across the floor toward her, like a sailor on an uncertain deck. “There was a cliff slump.” He had a Ph.D. in extraterrestrial geology. He knew things like that. “A vein of soft basalt weakened and gave way. The inn caught a glancing blow. We’re lucky to be alive.”

  He knelt beside
her and made the OK sign with thumb and forefinger. Then he flicked the side of her nose with the forefinger.

  “Ouch!” she said. Then, shocked, “Hey, you can’t ... !”

  “Like hell I can’t.” He slapped her in the face. Hard. “Chip don’t seem to work anymore.”

  Rage filled her. “You son of a bitch!” Patang drew back her arm to slug him.

  Blankness.

  * * * *

  She came to seconds later. But it was like opening a book in the middle or stepping into an interactive an hour after it began. She had no idea what had happened or how it affected her.

  MacArthur was strapping her into her muscle suit.

  “Is everything okay?” she murmured. “Is something wrong?”

  “I was going to kill you, Patang. But killing you isn’t enough. You have to suffer first.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Then she remembered.

  MacArthur had hit her. His chip had malfunctioned. There were no controls on him now. And he hated her. Bad enough to kill her? Oh, yes. Easily.

  MacArthur snapped something off her helmet. Then he slapped the power button and the suit began to close around her. He chuckled and said, “I’ll meet you outside.”

  * * * *

  Patang cycled out the lock and then didn’t know what to do. She fearfully went a distance up the road, and then hovered anxiously. She didn’t exactly wait and she didn’t exactly go away. She had to know what MacArthur was up to.

  The lock opened, and MacArthur went around to the side of the tavern, where the drilling rig lay under its tarp. He bent down to separate the laser drill from the support struts, data boxes, and alignment devices. Then he delicately tugged the gold foil blanket back over the equipment.

  He straightened, and turned toward Patang, the drill in his arms. He pointed it at her.

  The words LASER HAZARD flashed on her visor.

  She looked down and saw the rock at her feet blacken and smoke. “You know what would happen if I punched a hole in your shielding,” MacArthur said.

  She did. All the air in her suit would explode outward, while the enormous atmospheric pressure simultaneously imploded the metal casing inward. The mechanical cooling systems would fail instantly. She would be suffocated, broiled, and crushed, all in an instant.

  “Turn around. Or I’ll lase you a new asshole.”

  She obeyed.

  “Here are the rules. You get a half-hour head start. Then I come for you. If you turn north or south, I’ll drill you. Head west. Noonward.”

  “Noonward?” She booted up the geodetics. There was nothing in that direction but a couple more wrinkle ridges and, beyond them, tesserae. The tesserae were marked orange on her maps. Orange for unpromising. Prospectors had passed through them before and found nothing. “Why there?”

  “Because I told you to. Because we’re going to have a little fun. Because you have no choice. Understand?”

  She nodded miserably.

  “Go.”

  * * * *

  She walked, he followed. It was a nightmare that had somehow found its way into waking life. When Patang looked back, she could see MacArthur striding after her, small in the distance. But never small enough that she had any kind of chance to get away.

  He saw her looking and stooped to pick up a boulder. He windmilled his arm and threw.

  Even though MacArthur was halfway to the horizon, the boulder smashed to the ground a hundred yards ahead of her and to one side. It didn’t come close to striking her, of course. That wasn’t his intent.

  The rock shattered when it hit. It was terrifying how strong that suit was. It filled her with rage to see MacArthur wielding all that power, and her completely helpless. “You goddamned sadist!”

  No answer.

  He was nuts. There had to be a clause in the contract covering that. Well, then ... She set her suit on auto-walk, pulled up the indenture papers, and went looking for it. Options. Hold harmless clauses. Responsibilities of the Subcontractor—there were hundreds of those. Physical care of the Contractor’s equipment.

  And there it was. There it was! In the event of medical emergency, as ultimately upheld in a court of physicians ... She scrolled up the submenu of qualifying conditions. The list of mental illnesses was long enough and inclusive enough that she was certain MacArthur belonged on it somewhere.

  She’d lose all the equity she’d built up, of course. But, if she interpreted the contract correctly, she’d be entitled to a refund of her initial investment.

  That, and her life, were good enough for her.

  She slid an arm out of harness and reached up into a difficult-to-reach space behind her head. There was a safety there. She unlatched it. Then she called up a virtual keyboard, and typed out the SOS.

  So simple. So easy.

  DO YOU REALLY WANT TO SEND THIS MESSAGE? YES NO

  She hit YES.

  For an instant, nothing happened.

  MESSAGE NOT SENT

  “Shit!” She tried it again. MESSAGE NOT SENT A third time. MESSAGE NOT SENT A fourth. MESSAGE NOT SENT She ran a trouble-shooting program, and then sent the message again. MESSAGE NOT SENT

  And again. And again. And again.

  MESSAGE NOT SENT

  MESSAGE NOT SENT

  MESSAGE NOT SENT

  Until the suspicion was so strong she had to check.

  There was an inspection camera on the back of her suit’s left hand. She held it up so she could examine the side of her helmet.

  MacArthur had broken off the uplink antenna.

  “You jerk!” She was really angry now. “You shithead! You cretin! You retard! You’re nuts, you know that? Crazy. Totally whack.”

  No answer.

  The bastard was ignoring her. He probably had his suit on auto-follow. He was probably leaning back in his harness, reading a book or watching an old movie on his visor. MacArthur did that a lot. You’d ask him a question and he wouldn’t answer because he wasn’t there; he was sitting front row center in the theater of his cerebellum. He probably had a tracking algorithm in the navigation system to warn him if she turned to the north or south, or started to get too far ahead of him.

  Let’s test that hypothesis.

  She’d used the tracking algorithm often enough that she knew its specs by heart. One step sidewards in five would register immediately. One in six would not. All right, then ... Let’s see if we can get this rig turned around slowly, subtly, toward the road. She took seven strides forward, and then half-step to the side.

  LASER HAZARD

  Patang hastily switched on auto-walk. So that settled that. He was watching her every step. A tracking algorithm would have written that off as a stumble. But then why didn’t he speak? To make her suffer, obviously. He must be bubbling over with things to say. He must hate her almost as much as she did him.

  “You son of a bitch! I’m going to get you, MacArthur! I’m going to turn the goddamned tables on you, and when I do—!”

  It wasn’t as if she were totally hopeless. She had explosives. Hell, her muscle suit could throw a rock with enough energy to smash a hole right through his suit. She could—

  Blankness.

  * * * *

  She came to with the suit auto-walking down the far slope of the first wrinkle ridge. There was a buzzing in her ear. Somebody talking. Mac-Arthur, over the short-range radio. “What?” she asked blurrily. “Were you saying something, MacArthur? I didn’t quite catch that.”

  “You had a bad thought, didn’t you?” MacArthur said gleefully. “Naughty girl! Papa spank.”

  LASER HAZARD

  LASER HAZARD

  Arrows pointed to either side. She’d been walking straight Noonward, and he’d fired on her anyway.

  “Damn it, that’s not fair!”

  “Fair! Was it fair, the things you said to me? Talking. All the time talking.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “You did! Those things ... the things y
ou said ... unforgivable!”

  “I was only deviling you, MacArthur,” she said placatingly. It was a word from her childhood; it meant teasing, the kind of teasing a sister inflicted on a brother. “I wouldn’t do it if we weren’t friends.”

  MacArthur made a noise he might have thought was laughter. “Believe me, Patang, you and I are not friends.”