The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  Let us be pure. Let us accept the cold.

  Let us foreswear the search for love.

  Let us ride in the bare places where the ground is clinker

  And the towers are steel . . .”

  And so on. He was rather pleased with it. (But then it was late at night and he had taken a fair quantity of wine). Feeling he had somehow redeemed himself, he undressed, went to bed and was soon asleep.

  The phone rang at seven o’clock in the morning. It was Huw’s boss, Roger, to tell him a new case had surfaced in a Special Category estate to the south of town. Everyone else in the Section was tied up with other cases. Could he go straight there and make a start on the investigation?

  At half past eight, slightly the worse for last night’s wine, Huw was waiting in his car to go through the estate checkpoint. There were two vehicles ahead of him. In front of the checkpoint was a large sign:

  DEPARTMENT FOR SPECIAL

  CATEGORY ADMINISTRATION

  – WORCESTER DISTRICT –

  WELCOME TO

  PERRY MEADOWS

  THIS IS A SPECIAL CATEGORY ESTATE WITHIN THE

  MEANING OF THE WELFARE ADMINISTRATION ACT

  YOU MAY BE REQUIRED TO PRODUCE IDENTIFICATION

  DeSCA

  LET’S TACKLE THIS TOGETHER

  The other cars passed through and Huw handed up his ID to the DeSCA Constabulary officer. This was the border between the wider world and the world of the welfare claimants, the “dreggies” as they were known.

  The officer swiped Huw’s card in front of a reader.

  “Immigration Service, eh?” he observed with a knowing grin. “Nothing to do with these rumours about appearances and disappearances by any chance?”

  Huw reluctantly returned the smile. He disliked this sort of game. “Sorry, mate. No comment.”

  “Of course,” said the officer, “quite correct. Welcome to Perry Meadows.”

  Huw had visited a fair few such places. Not that his agency had anything to do with the administration of Special Category estates, but the kinds of cases that he dealt with often cropped up in them (as well as in prisons, mental hospitals and private boarding schools).

  Some estates were old concrete jungles, former “council estates” from the 1960s and ’70s of the last century. But Perry Meadows was an estate of the new kind. It had trees and shrubs and artificial hills to screen off homes from the sight and sound of traffic. It had well-equipped playgrounds and shining community centres. It had attractive houses in at least ten quite different designs, with playful features like round windows and the occasional clock-tower or weather-vane, all brightly painted in cheerful nursery colours.

  “These are not ‘sink estates,’ ” the Secretary of State for Special Category Administration had recently declared, “and they are not ‘dreg’ estates. They are decent dwelling places for human beings: fellow-citizens in our society who find themselves for whatever reason, outside of the economy and who require the special, focused, concentrated help that my department can offer, to find their way back inside it . . .”

  But for all the clock-towers and weather-vanes, Perry Meadows seemed to Huw to be a kind of modern zoo, providing its inhabitants with living conditions that resembled the natural habitat of their species, yet denying them somehow the opportunity to really be themselves.

  He was slightly discomforted by these thoughts, but his attention was elsewhere. He was keeping a look-out for certain telltale signs.

  And sure enough, there they were. On one wall a slogan sprayed in day-glo pink. ENDLESS WORLDS, it read. On another, in silver, the symbol of a many-branched tree.

  Yes, and here again, look, on a high brick wall at one end of a low-rise block of flats: an enormous tangled tree-form in luminous yellow with a single word splattered over it in red: Igga!

  Inside the entrance of the DeSCA office there was a kind of carpeted airlock arrangement where Huw was required to show his card to a reader again and wait for clearance. A recorded message played while his details were being checked.

  “Welcome to Perry Meadows Administration,” said a sonorous male voice. “May we remind you that DeSCA and its partner agencies are committed to combating racism, sexism, homophobia and discrimination in all its forms, and our staff will challenge offensive or discriminatory language.”

  The inner door slid open and he was admitted to the Visitor Reception Area. (There was a separate reception area for Estate Residents.)

  “Good morning, Mr Davis,” said the receptionist, “Ms Rogers is on her way down to meet you. Can I get you a cup of coffee or anything?”

  Ms Rogers was the Executive Director of the Perry Meadows estate. She was brisk and expensively dressed, with elegant short grey hair. Huw had met her kind before. They were mini-prime ministers of their own little kingdoms, with their own little governments of agency managers (police, social services, health, education, benefits, housing . . .). But in exchange for their empires they had made a kind of Faustian bargain. They had to keep the lid on things. If an estate child was battered to death by a parent, or there was a riot of some sort, or if too much drugs and crime seeped out from the estate into the normal world outside, then Ms Rogers’ head would be on the block. Unless she could find someone else to blame, she would be the sacrificial victim when the world bayed, “Something must be done!”

  So today she was anxious. She would not normally have had much time for this young immigration officer, junior to herself both in age and in status, but now she badly needed his help. Huw savoured the situation.

  “Mr Davis, I’m Janet Rogers. So good of you to have come here so quickly,” she enthused as she ushered him into a spacious office fitted with pale, polished furniture. “As you’ll have gathered this chap was picked up last night who sounds like one of your sort of cases. And a young girl disappeared a couple of days ago in a way that now looks as though it might be connected.”

  “Ms Rogers . . .”

  “Oh, call me Janet, please . . .”

  “Janet, I’d be pleased to talk later but my first priority has got to be to interview this man you’ve got in detention. These people have a way of disappearing.”

  “Yes, of course, I’ll take you down to the police wing myself. Ah, here’s your coffee. Did you want to drink it first? It would perhaps be an opportunity very briefly to . . .”

  She was torn between her desire that Huw should deal with the matter quickly and her desire to hear his assessment of the situation.

  “I’ll take it with me if you don’t mind.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  She led him along a corridor and into a lift.

  “We’ve never had any sign of this sort of thing before,” she said. “It’s completely out of the blue.”

  “Actually,” said Huw (they were emerging from the lift and heading along another corridor), “for future reference, the signs were there to be seen. The graffiti. Have you not noticed that big yellow tree? ‘Igga?’ You can see it from the car park of this building.”

  “The tree? Yes. I suppose I felt that a lot of young people have cottoned onto that tree thing. A sort of cult. Not necessarily an indication of actual . . . um . . .”

  “Actually, the appearance of tree graffiti is thought to be a pretty reliable predictor of appearances or disappearances,” Huw said.

  “As you’ll have no doubt read in the recent Home Office circular,” he added innocently.

  Janet Rogers pursed her lips slightly and said nothing. They had entered another airlock-like security door that led to the DeSCA Constabulary wing and were waiting for a policeman to come and let them through.

  “Igga,” said Ms Rogers. “Remind me, what is it supposed to be?”

  “It’s a representation of the multiverse. It’s thought the word comes from Yggdrasil, the tree which contained the various worlds in Norse mythology. One theory is that there is a universe out there where the old Norse polytheistic religion never got supplanted by Christianity and con
tinued into modern times, rather like Hinduism . . .”

  But here the custody sergeant opened the door.

  The prisoner had been picked up as the result of a drunken brawl. He was a thickset man with close-shaven red hair, about 30 years old. He possessed an ID card of sorts, with a photograph of himself and giving his name as Wayne Furnish. But, though the card purported to have been issued in the last six months it was quite different in design from the cards used either by special-category citizens or by the population at large. The address it gave was local but non-existent, as was The Central Population Register, which (according to the card) was the issuing agency. And Wayne’s fingerprints did not correspond to any in the national databank.

  Yet he spoke English not only fluently but also with the characteristic slightly rustic version of a Brummie accent that was spoken in the Worcester dreg estates. This was no foreigner.

  “Ah!” he said, as Wayne was introduced to him. “The Ickies, eh? I thought you boys would be showing up soon.”

  Ickies! Huw could have clapped his hands with professional pleasure. This was classic stuff: a local accent but a word or a phrase that locals never used.

  He settled down into the chair opposite Wayne Furnish. The officer who had shown him in waited by the door.

  “Ickies? You’ll have to explain that to me, Wayne.”

  “Ickies! Incomer Control. That’s what you are, yeah?”

  “Incomer Control? No, the Immigration Service we call it.”

  “Ah. Well, I don’t come from round here.”

  “You don’t come from Worcester?”

  Wayne narrowed his eyes and regarded Huw for a moment.

  “Not from this Worcester. You know I don’t, mate, or you wouldn’t be here would you?”

  “So how did you get here?”

  “Shifter pills, of course. Seeds, as we call them.”

  “These, yes?”

  Huw held out a small plastic bag which the police had confiscated from Wayne when they arrested him. It contained two dull-red capsules.

  “Yup. I ain’t bothered, mate. I swallowed one when the old bill knocked on the door. I’ve got a seed in my blood.”

  “Do you mind telling me a bit more about where you come from?”

  The shifter shrugged. “The place I come from is shit. This place is just as bad. But it don’t matter. Know what I mean? A couple of hours and I won’t be here any more, mate. This’ll be an empty room and I’ll be somewhere where you won’t never find me.”

  Huw nodded. He took out the standard checklist and started to go through it. What was the Prime Minister’s name where Wayne came from? Was there a Perry Meadows there? (No, but there was an estate on the same site called Daisyfields.) What was currently in the news there? Who were the top football teams? . . . and so on. The idea was to accumulate a sort of map of the different worlds, the gradients of difference, the routes along which the shifters moved.

  “None of this matters to me,” Wayne said, after a few minutes. “Know what I mean? I’m a warrior of Dunner, I am. That’s why I got this hammer on my arm. No one can shut me up in dreg estates no more. I’m a warrior of Dunner and my home is the Big Tree.”

  He grunted. “And if you want me to answer any more questions, mate, I need a cup of tea and packet of cigs.”

  Janet Rogers seemed to have been hovering over her phone for the three hours that Huw spent with the shifter. As soon as he emerged she was there to meet him and take him back to her office, where members of her management team were also waiting (C.I. Thomas, “my police chief,” Dave Ricketts, “my senior registration manager,” Val Hollowby, “my head of welfare” . . .).

  “How did you get on?” they all wanted to know, as they plied Huw eagerly with coffee and sandwiches. “Has he been here long? Do you think this is an isolated case?”

  “He’s been here a month or so,” Huw said. “Living in hiding, trading on the glamour of coming from another world. There are others, I would guess, though Wayne wouldn’t say so. The ones who follow Dunner like to shift in groups, we’ve noticed as a rule.”

  “But if it’s a drug which they each take separately, how could they all end up in the same place?” asked Mr Ricketts.

  Huw smiled, concealing his irritation. He could tell that these people had been stewing here all morning, rationalizing, minimizing, trying to persuade themselves that there wasn’t a reason to panic. There was a fug of fear in the room. And what was it they were afraid of? The universe itself had sprung a leak in their backyard – the universe! – but that wasn’t what bothered them. No, what they were worried about was being told off for not noticing it quickly enough.

  “People often ask how they cross over together,” he said to Mr. Ricketts. “The other question people ask is how can a drug bring over the clothes they wear and the things they have in their pockets? Well the truth is we still have absolutely no idea how the ‘seeds’ work. But the scientists reckon that we’re all still asking the wrong questions. Trying to understand the seeds by comparing them to other drugs is like trying to understand a magnet by weighing it or testing its hardness. There is some force involved which is fundamentally different from the ones we know about and feel we understand.”

  “You say he’s a follower of Dunner?” asked C.I. Thomas, “Dunner is a pagan god, yes?”

  “That’s right,” said Huw, “the thunder god: Donner, Dunar, Thor . . .” He repeated a piece of doggerel that another shifter had once taught him:

  “Wotty wiv ’is one eye,

  Dunner wiv ’is cock,

  Frija wiv ’er big tits,

  And two-faced Lok.”

  The assembled managers laughed uncomfortably.

  “Does that mean he comes from a society which is still pagan?” asked Janet Rogers.

  “No, he doesn’t. He comes from a society very much like this, with a few minor differences (what we call the DeSCA is known as the DoSCA there, for example). The pagan cult must originate in a world that diverged much longer ago. But it seems to have spread very rapidly across many worlds with the shifters, just as the shifter pills themselves – the seeds – have done.”

  He finished his sandwiches.

  “Now I need to look into this disappearance. This young girl . . .”

  Val Hollowby, the gaunt-looking Head of Welfare, told him the story.

  “Yes, this was a girl called Tamsin Pendant, 15 years old. She’s got a lot of problems. Physical abuse. Sexual abuse. Been in the care system for four years. Lots of problems there. Placements breaking down. Absconding. Drugs. For the last two months she’s been living in our Residential Assessment Unit. She’s been talking a lot recently, so I now gather, about shifters, and seeds and Dunner and all that. I suppose we should have taken more notice.”

  Suddenly she leaned forward, looking into Huw’s face with cavernous, urgent eyes: “But you know, Mr Davis, they all do. It’s easy enough with hindsight to say we could have seen the signs!”

  Huw nodded, non-committally. “Who was the last person to see her?”

  “Her social worker, Jazamine Bright. Two days ago. Took her out to talk to her about some of her recent problems. Tamsin felt got at. When Jaz dropped her off at the unit she announced that she was going to disappear and Jaz would never see her again. It seems she never actually went inside after Jaz drove off. We assumed she’d just absconded, something she’s done many times before. But of course when Janet told me about this shifter chap showing up I realized there might be a connection. Too late, of course, as will doubtless be said at the enquiry.”

  Ms Hollowby gave a bitter little snort. “Though even if we had made the connection, I can’t see there’s much we could have done.”

  Huw made no comment on this. “Well, my next job is to interview Jazamine Bright,” he said.

  “She’s standing by,” cried Janet Rogers. “We’ve booked an interview room for you. Would you like any more coffee? Or perhaps a cup of tea?”

  “Hello!” Jazamine e
xclaimed as Huw stood up to greet her. “I know you. The frontiersman! But you said you were an immigration officer, putting weeping refugees back on planes!”

  She was the young woman from Susan’s party. The one who had unsettled him by asking him why he did his job.

  “Well, I am an immigration officer. It’s just that I’ve moved on from dealing with the national boundary, to . . .”

  “. . . to guarding the universe itself,” she interrupted. “Wow!”

  She had seen right through him. Huw found himself reddening not just with embarrassment but with real shame. He remembered the poem he’d written last night.

  “I’ll tear it up and burn it as soon as I get home,” he vowed to himself.

  But out loud he stubbornly defended his ground. “It’s important,” he said. “Imagine if everyone could escape at will from the consequences of their actions. Imagine what it would do to the idea of responsibility and accountability and right and wrong!”

  No one seemed to get it, the real enormity of it. No one! Not even the other members of his own Section.

  “Tamsin Pendant wasn’t escaping from the consequences of her actions,” protested Jazamine Bright. “She was trying to escape from a world in which she was of no consequence at all. In fact it must be hard for Tamsin to believe that she ought to be here at all. For a start she was conceived in a rape. Her father went to prison as a result.”

  “God!” breathed Huw. “Imagine that. Your very existence the result of a terrible transgression.”

  “ ‘Transgression,’ ” observed Jazamine. “That’s an interesting choice of word.” She smiled. “But you’re right,” she went on, “there is something terribly contradictory about it: existing only because of a crime against your mother. And, now I think about it that way, Tamsin’s whole life is full of contradictions. She craves for love but she always rejects affection and support; she’s a tenacious fighter but she always anticipates defeat; she’s clever but she’s barely literate . . .”

  Jazamine considered for a moment.

  “Yes,” she added, “and Tamsin’s very pretty but she loathes her own body so much that she attacks it with knives and razor blades.”