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

by Gardner Dozois

  “No.”

  “Are you?”

  “No!” He flushed pink from forehead to toes.

  “Good. Don’t start until you’re healed.” Next she sprayed a thin mist up and down his body. Beading on his skin, it dispersed quickly, spreading like oil. “This’ll die off in a day or so.”

  “It tickles.”

  “It devours any dead skin cells you happen to be shedding; also hairs, sweat, tears, blood—anything that might leave trace. Squid forensics labs developed it to keep their investigators from contaminating crime scenes. Not that they cry tears, of course, this is a variant they developed for working with human cops . . .”

  As she hoped, her patter soothed him, the matter-of-fact voice easing his nerves and the peculiarity of his nakedness.

  “Where’d you get the spray?”

  “Black market lab in Little Canada,” she said, handing him a smock. “Here, get dressed. Watch the edges of that synthetic skin on your chest.”

  He took the clothes with visible relief. “You just keep stuff around for covering up crimes?”

  “As a precaution.”

  “Against what? Everyone here fought alongside the Kabu. Why would anyone need to cover up a . . .”

  “A justifiable homicide?”

  He swallowed. “You used to be a cop. Used to solve this kind of thing.”

  “And now I work in an umbrella factory. Listen, sweetheart. You tried to save the girl. A nice thing to do . . . and killing the squid was purely fair play.”

  “You’d cover it up even if I’d murdered him. If I wasn’t your nephew I’d be sunk.”

  “Sure, I suppose that’s true.”

  “So really, whether I did the right thing or not is beside the point.”

  “You’re gonna go killing squid for fun now?”

  He glared. “It wasn’t fun.”

  “I’m not trying to offend you, Rav. I know anger feels better than being scared or freaked out.”

  “Don’t tell me what I’m feeling!”

  “You can yell at me later if you need to, all you want, anytime you want, about anything you think I’ve done wrong.”

  “That’s not—”

  She interrupted. “You’ll have to yell at me, because as long as we’re on Kabuva, you’re never going to mention what happened here to another living soul. Ever, Rav.”

  He jerked the smock up over his hips, stretching the fabric, his hands trembling.

  “Right now we have to get rid of the evidence. So I’m asking—do you need a pacifier, or can you hold it together?”

  Rav frowned, confused, and she held up a patch

  “I don’t need drugs,” he said.

  “Good. Put on my cloak and remember to keep your face down in case there are fixed cameras.”

  “We’re walking away? But my blood, and the bodies . . .”

  “We’ll come back and get rid of it all.”

  “How? All this . . . evidence.”

  “Dust it,” Ruthless said, and Rav’s face went so slack she might as well have pacified him. Head lowered, he shuffled after her as she headed down the hall.

  * * * *

  The Kabu had interested themselves in Earth’s civil war early on, throwing technology, medical aid, and eventually even soldiers into the Democratic Army’s global fight against the fascist Friends of Liberation. In the end it cost the offworld sentients an uncountable fortune as well as the lives of over a million young squid . . . a million, that is, if one didn’t count the conscripts who went home alive but just as thoroughly destroyed, body and soul, as their dusted kelpmates.

  The Friends—Fiends, their enemies had called them—had alien backers too. Over the course of seventy grinding years they and their allies beat the Democratic/Squid alliance soundly. The Fiends devoured the world mile by bloody mile, starting in Asia and taking North America last of all.

  The most terrible weapon of the war was dust, a nanotech agent that took everything in its path apart molecule by molecule. Equally useful for structural targets or as an anti-personnel weapon, dust erased its victims from existence. Direct hits left no trace. Nothing to bury, no DNA, just oddly sterile battlefields—overlapping craters filled with thin, rust-colored powder, sometimes edged with pieces of bodies. Arms, legs and heads, usually—it was the extremities that most often escaped the blast perimeters.

  A child of the Setback, Rav had grown up dreading the very thought of dust. It was the bogeyman of his generation: go to sleep, kid, or the Fiends will come and dust you.

  That threat hadn’t kept him from pestering his mother and aunt for war stories: his fascination with the past was morbid and insatiable. Maybe now that will change, Ruthless thought, despite the guilty pang at her selfishness.

  They arrived at the Rialto just after midnight, creeping in through a back door. “Go put on a smock that fits. Bring back the one you’re wearing,” Ruthless said.

  “Okay.”

  “Before you go up, give me access to your pantry.”

  “It’s fingerprinted.”

  “Scan in and authorize me,” she said, nudging him toward a terminal.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Delete the feed and anything associated with it.”

  “I’ll do that later.”

  “Just get your clothes.”

  “Fine.” Scanning his thumb and keying in the authorization, Rav vanished upstairs to his room.

  Ruthless found the right directory easily enough: it was packed with video feeds. Feeds of feeler pickups—half-smocked women and men lurking in building lobbies. Human-chauffeured cars cruising slowly to allow the squid riding in the water tank in back to extend their tentacles, tasting the wares on offer. Feeds of quickie feels—an old squid with two burned tentacles slowly removing a woman’s mask, delicately tasting her lips and the corners of her eyes. A human male guiding a tentacle delicately over his groin as he drank some concoction that made him break out in a heavy sweat.

  The same man showed up in the next feed too—he was working a tentacle in and around his ear. And another; he was putting on a breathing rig that would allow a client to probe his throat without suffocating him.

  Blind as kittens, the Kabu were taste-oriented: with each other, they probed and suckled with abandon. Humans who dealt with them wore smocks that sealed off their crotches, wore masks to protect their faces. The squid were supposed to content themselves with the scent and taste of human feet, palms, and underarms, a prohibition that worked about as well as any other taboo.

  Ruthless never saw the Kabu in her day-to-day life if she could avoid it. Masks made her claustrophobic. And even after so many years there was something about the memory of a tentacle draping over her wrist, of small suckers tasting her palm, that made her stomach turn.

  She reached the most recent feed. It began with the duo she had seen dead in the apartment, arriving at the building on Phoenix Street. As the car drove away, the woman looked upward, just for a second, gazing into the greenish light of Tumbler Moon.

  Following them inside, the camera dipped and hovered, seeking a good vantage point. By the time it was settled the woman had stripped, leaning back against a wall so the squid could taste her various scent zones.

  Why had Rav wanted this, Ruthless wondered, feeling queasy as the tentacles explored the woman’s body, poking at her ears, the corners of her eyes, eventually probing into her vagina and anus. It went bad quickly after that: the squid yanked her tongue, pulling with brutal force before sliding another tentacle down the woman’s throat.

  As she began to choke, Rav burst in.

  Mother-bear rage built within Ruthless as her nephew and the squid collided, as its beak slashed open Rav’s chest and the blood sprayed. Rav thrust his arm past its maw, digging for the sentient’s vulnerable palate. With a convulsive jerk, he punched through the gelatinous flesh, squeezing brain. The squid thrashed and then went limp.

  Heaving free, Rav crawled to the woman, drawing a bloodied
tentacle out of her throat. He checked her pulse; he started CPR. Good boy, Ruthless thought, running the feed forward. He gave resuscitation a good solid try before collapsing, curling in a spreading puddle of black blood, vomiting and weeping. It was some time before he recovered and shut off the camera.

  Ruthless deleted the files and poked through the data pantry, searching for copies. The old feeds had been backed up, but not this newest. Relieved, she wiped the backups, fished up a couple of Elva’s most aggressive security programs, and set them to disassembling every trace of the deleted feeds.

  Then, trotting down the hall, she peeked into the theater.

  Her sister-in-law had come to Earthtown wearing one formal smock and nothing else. In the two suitcases permitted to each Exile—and in one of Rav’s—Elva had stuffed movie feeds, hundreds of them: blockbusters and art films and cartoons and classics, any entertainment data she could get her hands on. She had marched straight off the ship and demanded to see the licensing bureau. Within a day she had a business charter, sole control over a large theater space, and an extra-large apartment that was attached to her place of business. She began showing movies around the clock . . . and people came.

  Within a Kabuva week, Elva had bartered for all the necessities she had left behind—clothes, kitchen goods, books. Culture-shocked and dispossessed, the human refugees welcomed even the slightest glimpse of home.

  Nowadays, the business ran strictly on cash. As always, the theater was jammed, every one of the two hundred seats filled and a lineup of homesick humans, most of them Ruthless’s age, waiting to get in. They were watching an old Bollywood thing—Mangal Pandey, she thought. Many were slack-jawed, entranced. Some mumbled along, reading the English subtitles.

  Ruthless allowed herself one glance at the screen, one intoxicating sight of horses and desert, of the familiar Earth sky. Then she tiptoed into Elva’s office. With a bit of fiddling and one of her sprays, she was able to bust the lock on the safe, liberating a sheaf of movie passes.

  “What are you doing here?” Elva’s voice brought her round. “Where’s Rav?”

  Elva was a wealthy woman by Refuge standards, but years of hardship before Exile had made her frugal. She was wearing the plainest of gray smocks and an aging pair of leather boots. She kept her hair shaved in a buzz cut, red and silver bristles that did not quite hide the scar that ran down the side of her skull. She hoarded food and medicine, Rav said, against the day when they went home.

  Her eyes were emeralds—sharp, green, hostile. They’d played together on a lot of battlefields, but they’d never quite been friends.

  “Rav’s upstairs,” Ruthless said, and when Elva made a move in that direction she said, “Leave him be.”

  “What gives you the right to tell me what I can do in my own house?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Is he in trouble?”

  “He won’t be for much longer.”

  “What’s the game?”

  “You wouldn’t want me to say.”

  Elva glanced at the theater curtain.

  “If you’re calling your security guys to take me out of play . . .”

  “You think I’m stupid enough to strongarm you, Ruthless?”

  “I guess we’ll see,” she said pleasantly, but Elva didn’t move. If she’d called on her dogs, she wasn’t taking it back.

  “Go back to work, Elva. Act normal. Rav’ll be home by dawn.”

  “That’s all? Show up, scare me shitless, rob me blind, and you’re not going to tell me?”

  “You’re not going to ask again,” Ruthless said. “Not here. Don’t ask him either.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’ll be best for everyone if you pretend you don’t know he went out. Tell anyone who asks that he was in all night.”

  “What the fuck have you gotten him into?”

  “You don’t do as I say, Elva, the squid will come for him. If you don’t do as I say, the squid will drown him. You’re family, Elva, but he’s blood. You mention tonight to him or anyone else, you give the police a reason to eavesdrop, you get my brother’s son killed, I will give it out around town that you worked for the Fiends.”

  “I never—”

  “Mobs don’t care about the truth, Elva. You’re a woman, you’re wealthy, and you’re something of a bitch. You’re not liked and you know it. Now go back to work before your kid comes down and sees us arguing.”

  “I’m not arguing.”

  “Look, it’s going to be okay,” she said, and Elva punched her hard in the mouth.

  Ruthless fell back against the desk. She’d forgotten about the hair-trigger temper.

  “Don’t you threaten me, Ruthie. He’s my kid. You think blackmail—”

  “It’s bad, okay? He’s in trouble and it’s bad.” She tasted blood in her mouth and, fleetingly, imagined hitting back. It had been years since they brawled . . . long enough she could almost imagine it would be fun. Instead, she said: “I shouldn’t have said that. He’s your kid. You’ll keep quiet, I know that.”

  There was a light footfall on the stairs. “Auntie?”

  Elva dashed at her eyes with the back of one clenched fist. “Don’t lose. Whatever the game is—”

  “I never lose.” Jaw throbbing, she edged around Elva, slipping back into the hallway.

  “Ruthless?” A hoarse whisper.

  “Just Ruth, Rav,” she sighed. “Okay?”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “One of your mom’s goons thought I was a gatecrasher.”

  “He still alive?” The joke fell flat as his voice quavered.

  “Killing suddenly not so funny, huh kid?”

  “So what now?”

  What indeed? Elva would need time to calm down, and Rav was too worked up to leave behind. And he was in the game now, anyway, wasn’t he? Club rule number one: clean up your own toys.

  She led him to a pedestrian walkway, grateful to see it was getting foggy. “Let’s talk over the ways people get caught.”

  “Okay.”

  “They make phone calls and big bank transactions around the time of the crime.”

  “I called you.”

  “We’ll work up a story for that. They confess to their lover or therapist a decade after the event; then the lover or therapist tells someone, who tells someone else, and the secret eventually finds its way to the cops. They write about it in their diaries. They stop trusting their playmates . . .”

  “Playmates?”

  “Co-conspirators.”

  “I was by myself, Ruthl—Ruth.”

  “Rav.” She caught his gaze. “I can sink for this now, just like you can.”

  He paled.

  “Come on, we’re on a clock.”

  * * * *

  2

  They caught a highspeed to her home district, riding in silence to Beijing Avenue. Between the buildings, they could see the black sheet of the ocean whose Kabuva name, Vinvalomm, meant the Blighted Sea. The water was obscured at its beachward edges by rising banks of mist. The shadowy figures of shellfish collectors, human and squid both, moved like ghosts along its blue-tinged beaches.

  Passing through a brightly-lit market, Rav and Ruthless watched the squid who’d come to buy Earthly delicacies—bean sprouts, beef tripe, silk. Shopping districts like this were mostly open at night, when the squids’ suns couldn’t dry out or fry their delicate skins.

  Amid the loud chatter of the market, Rav murmured in her ear: “Can I ask you something?”

  She glanced at her scanner, nodded. “You can ask.”

  “You weren’t a Fiend. You were fighting the Fiends, right, just like the Kabu were?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How is it you ended up . . .”

  “Killing squid with my bare hands?”

  He nodded.

  “You don’t need to know—”

  “Please?”

  No, she thought, and when
she opened her mouth to speak her whole body resisted—her jaw felt rusted shut. “The squid needed spies—loyal Demos who’d join the Fiends and report on what they were up to. Your father’d been taken prisoner; I figured I could look for him and gather intelligence all at once.”

  “You pretended to be an infiltrator?”

  “That’s right.”