The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Here he spins an epic tale of love, loss, conspiracy, murder, and redemption that shuttles us back and forth through time to unravel a mystery that crucially shaped the fate of humanity itself. . .

  KICKING HER LEGS out over the ocean, the lonely mermaid gazed at the horizon from her perch in the overhanging banyan tree.

  The air was absolutely still and filled with the scent of night flowers. Large fruit bats flew purposefully over the sea, heading for their daytime rest. Somewhere a white cockatoo gave a penetrating squawk. A starling made a brief flutter out to sea, then came back again. The rising sun threw up red-gold sparkles from the wavetops and brought a brilliance to the tropical growth that crowned the many islands spread out on the horizon.

  The mermaid decided it was time for breakfast. She slipped from her hanging canvas chair and walked out along one of the banyan’s great limbs. The branch swayed lightly under her weight, and her bare feet found sure traction on the rough bark. She looked down to see the deep blue of the channel, distinct from the turquoise of the shallows atop the reefs.

  She raised her arms, poised briefly on the limb, the ruddy light of the sun glowing bronze on her bare skin, and then pushed off and dove headfirst into the Philippine Sea. She landed with a cool impact and a rush of bubbles.

  Her wings unfolded, and she flew away.

  After her hunt, the mermaid – her name was Michelle – cached her fishing gear in a pile of dead coral above the reef, and then ghosted easily over the sea grass with the rippled sunlight casting patterns on her wings. When she could look up to see the colossal, twisted tangle that was the roots of her banyan tree, she lifted her head from the water and gulped her first breath of air.

  The Rock Islands were made of soft limestone coral, and tide and chemical action had eaten away the limestone at sea level, undercutting the stone above. Some of the smaller islands looked like mushrooms, pointed green pinnacles balanced atop thin stems. Michelle’s island was larger and irregularly shaped, but it still had steep limestone walls undercut six meters by the tide, with no obvious way for a person to clamber from the sea to the land. Her banyan perched on the saucer-edge of the island, itself undercut by the sea.

  Michelle had arranged a rope elevator from her nest in the tree, just a loop on the end of a long nylon line. She tucked her wings away – they were harder to retract than to deploy, and the gills on the undersides were delicate – and then slipped her feet through the loop. At her verbal command, a hoist mechanism lifted her in silence from the sea to her resting place in the bright green-dappled forest canopy.

  She had been an ape once, a siamang, and she felt perfectly at home in the treetops.

  During her excursion, she had speared a yellowlip emperor, and this she carried with her in a mesh bag. She filleted the emperor with a blade she kept in her nest, and tossed the rest into the sea, where it became a subject of interest to a school of bait fish. She ate a slice of one fillet raw, enjoying the brilliant flavor, sea and trembling pale flesh together, then cooked the fillets on her small stove, eating one with some rice she’d cooked the previous evening and saving the other for later.

  By the time Michelle finished breakfast, the island was alive. Geckoes scurried over the banyan’s bark, and coconut crabs sidled beneath the leaves like touts offering illicit downloads to passing tourists. Out in the deep water, a flock of circling, diving black noddies marked where a school of skipjack tuna was feeding on swarms of bait fish.

  It was time for Michelle to begin her day as well. With sure, steady feet, she moved along a rope walkway to the ironwood tree that held her satellite uplink in its crown, straddled a limb, took her deck from the mesh bag she’d roped to the tree, and downloaded her messages.

  There were several journalists requesting interviews – the legend of the lonely mermaid was spreading. This pleased her more often than not, but she didn’t answer any of the queries. There was a message from Darton, which she decided to savor for a while before opening. And then she saw a note from Dr. Davout, and opened it at once.

  Davout was, roughly, twelve times her age. He’d actually been carried for nine months in his mother’s womb, not created from scratch in a nanobed like almost everyone else she knew. He had a sib who was a famous astronaut, a McEldowny Prize for his Lavoisier and His Age, and a red-haired wife who was nearly as well-known as he was. A couple of years ago, Michelle had attended a series of his lectures at the College of Mystery, and been interested despite her specialty being, strictly speaking, biology.

  He had shaved off the little goatee he’d worn when she’d last seen him, which Michelle considered a good thing. “I have a research project for you, if you’re free,” the recording said. “It shouldn’t take too much effort.”

  Michelle contacted him at once. He was a rich old bastard with a thousand years of tenure and no notion of what it was to be young in these times, and he’d pay her whatever outrageous fee she asked.

  Her material needs at the moment were few, but she wouldn’t stay on this island forever.

  Davout answered right away. Behind him, working at her own console, Michelle could see his red-haired wife Katrin.

  “Michelle!” Davout said, loudly enough for Katrin to know who’d called without turning around. “Good!” He hesitated, and then his fingers formed the mudra for . “I understand you’ve suffered a loss,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, her answer delayed by a second’s satellite lag.

  “And the young man – ?”

  “Doesn’t remember.”

  Which was not exactly a lie, the point being what was remembered.

  Davout’s fingers were still fixed in . “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Her own fingers formed an equivocal answer. “I’m getting better.” Which was probably true.

  “I see you’re not an ape any more.”

  “I decided to go the mermaid route. New perspectives, all that.” And welcome isolation.

  “Is there any way we can make things easier for you?”

  She put on a hopeful expression. “You said something about a job?”

  “Yes.” He seemed relieved not to have to probe further – he’d had a realdeath in his own family, Michelle remembered, a chance-in-a-billion thing, and perhaps he didn’t want to relive any part of that.

  “I’m working on a biography of Terzian,” Davout said.

  “. . . And his Age?” Michelle finished.

  “And his Legacy.” Davout smiled. “There’s a three-week period in his life where he – well, he drops right off the map. I’d like to find out where he went – and who he was with, if anyone.”

  Michelle was impressed. Even in comparatively unsophisticated times such as that inhabited by Jonathan Terzian, it was difficult for people to disappear.

  “It’s a critical time for him,” Davout went on. “He’d lost his job at Tulane, his wife had just died – realdeath, remember – and if he decided he simply wanted to get lost, he would have all my sympathies.” He raised a hand as if to tug at the chin-whiskers that were no longer there, made a vague pawing gesture, then dropped the hand. “But my problem is that when he resurfaces, everything’s changed for him. In June, he delivered an undistinguished paper at the Athenai conference in Paris, then vanished. When he surfaced in Venice in mid-July, he didn’t deliver the paper he was scheduled to read, instead he delivered the first version of his Cornucopia Theory.”

  Michelle’s fingers formed the mudra . “How have you tried to locate him?”

  “Credit card records – they end on June 17, when he buys a lot of euros at American Express in Paris. After that, he must have paid for everything with cash.”

  “He really did try to get lost, didn’t he?” Michelle pulled up one bare leg and rested her chin on it. “Did you try passport records?”

  “But if he stayed in the European Community he wouldn’t have had to present a passport when crossing a border.”

  “
Cash machines?”

  “Not till after he arrived in Venice, just a couple of days prior to the conference.”

  The mermaid thought about it for a moment, then smiled. “I guess you need me, all right.”

  Davout flashed solemnly. “How much would it cost me?”

  Michelle pretended to consider the question for a moment, then named an outrageous sum.

  Davout frowned. “Sounds all right,” he said.

  Inwardly, Michelle rejoiced. Outwardly, she leaned toward the camera lens and looked businesslike. “I’ll get busy, then.”

  Davout looked grateful. “You’ll be able to get on it right away?”

  “Certainly. What I need you to do is send me pictures of Terzian, from as many different angles as possible, especially from around that period of time.”

  “I have them ready.”

  “Send away.”

  An eyeblink later, the pictures were in Michelle’s deck. she flashed. “I’ll let you know as soon as I find anything.”

  At university, Michelle had discovered that she was very good at research, and it had become a profitable sideline for her. People – usually people connected with academe in one way or another – hired her to do the duller bits of their own jobs, finding documents or references, or, in this case, three missing weeks out of a person’s life. It was almost always work they could do themselves, but Michelle was simply better at research than most people, and she was considered worth the extra expense. Michelle herself usually enjoyed the work – it gave her interesting sidelights on fields about which she knew little, and provided a welcome break from routine.

  Plus, this particular job required not so much a researcher as an artist, and Michelle was very good at this particular art.

  Michelle looked through the pictures, most scanned from old photographs. Davout had selected well: Terzian’s face or profile was clear in every picture. Most of the pictures showed him young, in his twenties, and the ones that showed him older were of high quality, or showed parts of the body that would be crucial to the biometric scan, like his hands or his ears.

  The mermaid paused for a moment to look at one of the old photos: Terzian smiling with his arm around a tall, long-legged woman with a wide mouth and dark, bobbed hair, presumably the wife who had died. Behind them was a Louis Quinze table with a blaze of gladiolas in a cloisonné vase, and, above the table, a large portrait of a stately-looking horse in a heavy gilded frame. Beneath the table were stowed – temporarily, Michelle assumed – a dozen or so trophies, which to judge from the little golden figures balanced atop them were awarded either for gymnastics or martial arts. The opulent setting seemed a little at odds with the young, informally dressed couple: she wore a flowery tropical shirt tucked into khakis, and Terzian was dressed in a tank top and shorts. There was a sense that the photographer had caught them almost in motion, as if they’d paused for the picture en route from one place to another.

  Nice shoulders, Michelle thought. Big hands, well-shaped muscular legs. She hadn’t ever thought of Terzian as young, or large, or strong, but he had a genuine, powerful physical presence that came across even in the old, casual photographs. He looked more like a football player than a famous thinker.

  Michelle called up her character-recognition software and fed in all the pictures, then checked the software’s work, something she was reasonably certain her employer would never have done if he’d been doing this job himself. Most people using this kind of canned software didn’t realize how the program could be fooled, particularly when used with old media, scanned film prints heavy with grain and primitive digital images scanned by machines that simply weren’t very intelligent. In the end, Michelle and the software between them managed an excellent job of mapping Terzian’s body and calibrating its precise ratios: the distance between the eyes, the length of nose and curve of lip, the distinct shape of the ears, the length of limb and trunk. Other men might share some of these biometric ratios, but none would share them all.

  The mermaid downloaded the data into her specialized research spiders, and sent them forth into the electronic world.

  A staggering amount of the trivial past existed there, and nowhere else. People had uploaded pictures, diaries, commentary, and video; they’d digitized old home movies, complete with the garish, deteriorating colors of the old film stock; they’d scanned in family trees, postcards, wedding lists, drawings, political screeds, and images of handwritten letters. Long, dull hours of security video. Whatever had meant something to someone, at some time, had been turned into electrons and made available to the universe at large.

  A surprising amount of this stuff had survived the Lightspeed War – none of it had seemed worth targeting, or, if trashed, had been reloaded from backups.

  What all this meant was that Terzian was somewhere in there. Wherever Terzian had gone in his weeks of absence – Paris, Dalmatia, or Thule – there would have been someone with a camera. In stills of children eating ice cream in front of Notre Dame, or moving through the video of buskers playing saxophone on the Pont des Artistes, there would be a figure in the background, and that figure would be Terzian. Terzian might be found lying on a beach in Corfu, reflected in a bar mirror in Gdynia, or negotiating with a prostitute in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district – Michelle had found targets in exactly those places during the course of her other searches.

  Michelle sent her software forth to find Terzian, then lifted her arms above her head and stretched – stretched fiercely, thrusting out her bare feet and curling the toes, the muscles trembling with tension, her mouth yawned in a silent shriek.

  Then she leaned over her deck again, and called up the message from Darton, the message she’d saved till last.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why won’t you talk to me? I love you!”

  His brown eyes were a little wild.

  “Don’t you understand?” he cried. “I’m not dead! I’m not really dead!”

  Michelle hovered three or four meters below the surface of Zigzag Lake, gazing upward at the inverted bowl of the heavens, the brilliant blue of the Pacific sky surrounded by the dark, shadowy towers of mangrove. Something caught her eye, something black and falling, like a bullet: and then there was a splash and a boil of bubbles, and the daggerlike bill of a collared kingfisher speared a blue-eyed apogonid that had been hovering over a bright red coral head. The kingfisher flashed its pale underside as it stroked to the surface, its wings doing efficient double duty as fins, and then there was a flurry of wings and feet and bubbles and the kingfisher was airborne again.

  Michelle floated up and over the barrel-shaped coral head, then over a pair of giant clams, each over a meter long. The clams drew shut as Michelle slid across them, withdrawing the huge siphons as thick as her wrist. The fleshy lips that overhung the scalloped edges of the shells were a riot of colors: purples, blues, greens, and reds interwoven in an eye-boggling pattern.

  Carefully drawing in her gills so their surfaces wouldn’t be inflamed by coral stings, she kicked up her feet and dove beneath the mangrove roots into the narrow tunnel that connected Zigzag Lake with the sea.

  Of the three hundred or so Rock Islands, seventy or thereabouts had marine lakes. The islands were made of coral limestone and porous to one degree or another: some lakes were connected to the ocean through tunnels and caves, and others through seepage. Many of the lakes contained forms of life unique in all the world, evolved distinctly from their remote ancestors: even now, after all this time, new species were being described.

  During the months Michelle had spent in the islands, she thought she’d discovered two undescribed species: a variation on the Entacmaea medusivora white anemone that was patterned strangely with scarlet and a cobalt-blue; and a nudibranch, deep violet with yellow polka dots, that had undulated past her one night on the reef, flapping like a tea towel in a strong wind as a seven-knot tidal current tore it along. The nudi and samples of the anemone had been sent to the appropriate au
thorities, and perhaps in time Michelle would be immortalized by having a Latinate version of her name appended to the scientific description of the two marine animals.

  The tunnel was about fifteen meters long, and had a few narrow twists where Michelle had to pull her wings in close to her sides and maneuver by the merest fluttering of their edges. The tunnel turned up, and brightened with the sun; the mermaid extended her wings and flew over brilliant pink soft corals toward the light.

  Two hours’ work, she thought, plus a hazardous environment. Twenty-two hundred calories, easy.

  The sea was brilliantly lit, unlike the gloomy marine lake surrounded by tall cliffs, mangroves, and shadow, and for a moment Michelle’s sun-dazzled eyes failed to see the boat bobbing on the tide. She stopped short, her wings cupping to brake her motion, and then she recognized the boat’s distinctive paint job, a bright red meant to imitate the natural oil of the cheritem fruit.

  Michelle prudently rose to the surface a safe distance away – Torbiong might be fishing, and sometimes he did it with a spear. The old man saw her, and stood to give a wave before Michelle could unblock her trachea and draw air into her lungs to give a hail.

  “I brought you supplies,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Michelle said as she wiped a rain of sea water from her face.

  Torbiong was over two hundred years old, and Paramount Chief of Koror, the capital forty minutes away by boat. He was small and wiry and black-haired, and had a broad-nosed, strong-chinned, unlined face. He had traveled over the world and off it while young, but returned to Belau as he aged. His duties as chief were mostly ceremonial, but counted for tax purposes; he had money from hotels and restaurants that his ancestors had built and that others managed for him, and he spent most of his time visiting his neighbors, gossiping, and fishing. He had befriended Darton and Michelle when they’d first come to Belau, and helped them in securing the permissions for their researches on the Rock Islands. A few months back, after Darton died, Torbiong had agreed to bring supplies to Michelle in exchange for the occasional fish.