The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  "He is right now. He's associated, that means under the protection, of the biggest line in the county. He's fine," I said.

  "Whose line is that?"

  "Mine."

  I glanced back to the shack. Oly and Foremost sat close together on the bench. Foremost watched intently while Oly drew in the dirt with a stick. Occasionally they stopped and sipped more fish.

  "What do you want me to do?" she asked.

  "I want you to be careful. I want you up here, but I want you up here alone. We don't want the wrong people to follow you. Assume someone has a trace on you. Get rid of it. Then come up here, alone. Bring whatever communications equipment you want. I'll keep Foremost safe until you arrive."

  "And then?"

  "And then the three of us will get together and figure out what to do."

  "What about the tracks? what if someone from the ship is coming after Foremost?" she asked. "If there's any trouble, we'll deal with it in our own way."

  More silence, until it dragged on like one of those bargaining tricks they taught me in hostage negotiation school. The idea there was to let the silence drag on, let the person who is most anxious talk first.

  But this was not some damn role-play game. "I don't like it, Tony. But I don't have much choice. We'll do it your way."

  "Good," I said, and let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. "Put me back to Phyllis. I'll give her directions on how to get you here and where to meet me.

  "All right. Give me a minute to tell her what I need and then I'll put her on."

  The phone clicked once, I heard dead air, then the phone clicked again and Phyllis came on the line. "So how do I get her to you?" Phyllis asked.

  I briefly gave directions. Phyllis repeated them back to me to make sure she had them down correctly.

  "Tony, she'll never say this, so I'll say it for her," Phyllis said. "Thank you. Thank you for everything."

  "She never would say it, would she?"

  "Tony, she might not say it, but she doesn't want you to quit," Phyllis continued.

  "How do you know that?"

  "Those resignation papers of yours? They never made it to me. They're still in their envelope, on her desk. Unopened. Why do you think that is?"

  I looked at the lake, at the wind-ruffled water and the grass that swayed and tossed on the naked hills. Oly and Foremost relaxed back on the bench now and spoke slowly to each other.

  "I don't know, Phyllis. I just don't know."

  "Think about it, Tony."

  I thought about a lot of things as Foremost and I drove back into town. I stuffed the tokens in their oilcloth under the seat and drove back by a different route than the one I used to get to Oly's place. Training: never use the same route back from a location that you used to get there. Old habits from the Service died hard, and I decided sometimes it was good to keep in practice. Particularly with strange tracks and strange people walking around town.

  We stopped at the house. I found a note taped on the back door that said Rose and Steve were at the church, and I was supposed to go directly to the cemetery. Bob was already out there to get things ready.

  I changed clothes and carefully adjusted my holster so my handgun did not bulge under the suitcoat. Foremost scraped the mud off his feet and put on a clean robe. We met in the kitchen.

  "How do I look?" Foremost asked.

  He looked like a giant wolverine with funny looking hands. He looked like the kind of person who could spend an hour discussing the nuances of fish-based moonshine with a stranger from the hills. He looked like the kind of person who brought strangers into my town and problems into my life.

  He looked like someone under my protection.

  "You look fine," I said. "Come on. Get in the car."

  We drove down the side streets, strangely abandoned by the children who had been scrubbed, poured into suits and dresses, and then marched to church for the funeral. We crossed Main and drove past cars and trucks parked on the grassy strips next to the church.

  The church was Methodist, with a three-story-tall steeple that was the highest point in town. A giant cross, half the gold paint flaked off, topped the structure proudly. White paint on clapboard, six-foot-tall stained-glass windows, and a set of walk-up concrete steps to the main entrance finished off the picture.

  "You have many different religions here?"

  "Not so many as some towns, but a few. Methodists go here. Catholics go to Blue Cloud Abbey outside of town. Lakota might go to the shaman and a sweat lodge," I said. "Your line goes to this church?" he asked, and nodded toward the church.

  "Some do," I said. "Some go to the other places. We're all mixed up."

  We left town gravel behind and drove on county gravel. It sounded like the same thing, gravel was gravel, but even in Summit there was a difference between the town and the country. It was a small thing, hardly noticeable to outsiders, but town gravel roads were graded and smoothed while the country roads were ridged like corduroy. A little thing, but I had seen fights break out at Sam's Pool Hall over less.

  We bounced on county gravel while the clouds thickened up and got darker. A fleck of snow, huge and fat, struck the windshield. It stuck there, pinned like some exotic butterfly on display, then melted into a wet spot and a tiny droplet that streamed down the glass.

  I turned left at a crossroads and went down the cemetery road. The surface was mixed gravel and dirt now, humped up in long ridges down both sides of the road. Once a year a grader might force its way down here, to level out the ridges and throw down new gravel. Maybe. If the county budget was in good shape that year. And it looked as if the budget had been in trouble for a long time.

  I drove down the tire marks of other vehicles and used the bottom of the car as my own grader when I needed. Sometimes this put me on the right hand side of the road, sometimes on the left. Foremost hung on tight and looked straight ahead.

  Marshes and sloughs, tiny wetlands filled with reeds and tall grass and old decayed fence posts with the rusted barbed wire still attached filled the fields on both sides of us whenever the road crossed a low spot. jays and sparrows and blackbirds perched on anything dry and watched us as we passed. I watched Foremost as his head jerked like the birds, and wondered what the hell was going on inside that brain.

  We turned once again and we were at the cemetery.

  Raw headstones, shaped but not yet engraved or polished, lay together in a gray tumbled pile in the ditch next to the crossroads. Tall grass, mixed brown from last fall and fresh baby green new growth from this spring, sprouted through and around the stones like whiskers on a dead man's face.

  The grass in the cemetery itself was clipped short and raked with military precision. Placed neatly in the field of green were the finished cousins of the headstones in the ditch. These, though, marched in strict rows, ordered by family and line, across the cemetery. Men and women, the important in life and those that passed through unnoticed, were all equal here. The only concession to sentiment was the small headstones of the children, tucked in close to their mothers. Bouquets of flowers, some real and withered, some plastic and worn, filled the cupholders of the children's headstones.

  I saw Bob's car, the backhoe used to dig the grave, and a green canvas tent. The tent stood next to a pile of fresh black and brown dirt flecked with white glacial stone. Folding chairs were set up in two small rows under the tent and faced the grave.

  I looked for Bob but didn't see him. What I did see were so many ambush sites where a shooter could lay up and hide that I almost turned around and took Foremost back into town right then and there.

  Trees pushed up next to the cemetery on one side and provided excellent cover. Across the road, the flax field was plowed and planted and empty, with a tremendous field of fire. Sloughs covered both of the other sides, so that we were in a kind of island, surrounded by trouble. Most times I thought of the cemetery as beautiful, peaceful even.

  But not when there were strange tracks around my town. And where
the hell was Bob?

  I drove slowly down the rutted dirt track, dotted here and there with a flash of white that was last year's crushed paving stone, toward the grave. I pulled the car into line next to Bob's, passenger side facing his car. Then I loosened my gun in the holster, and opened the car door. "Do you want me in or out?" Foremost asked. "What kind of weapon would a killer from your ship have?"

  "Pumped laser."

  "Could it cut through the car?"

  "Yes. Easily."

  "What kind of surveillance and identification equipment would they use?" I asked.

  "There are many," Foremost said. "They might use a body-heat scanner or a low-light analyzer. Or any of a dozen other devices."

  I thought for a moment. With the tint dialed to full on the car windows, Foremost was invisible inside. Invisible, that is, to the bare-eyed locals around Summit. I was pretty sure my little window-tint trick wouldn't keep him invisible to an assassin with military-level surveillance and identification gear. Foremost wasn't built to be able to slip down to the floorboards and hide, so he sat up straight and provided a perfect silhouette to any sniper who could see him.

  "Might as well get out then. Better to be a moving target than one that sits and waits," I said. We shut the doors behind us softly, but it still seemed loud. "Bob?" I called. "Down here," came his voice. We walked closer to the grave. "Where?"

  "Down here," he repeated.

  We walked to the lip of the grave and looked down. The grave was about eight feet deep, with the concrete lining sunk into the bottom six feet of that so two feet of dirt remained on top to grow grass. Rob stood in the center of the open concrete box and looked up at us. "What the hell are you doing down there?" I asked.

  He looked embarrassed. He slapped his hands together to knock off dirt and smiled.

  "I wondered what it was like to be buried. I thought I'd just come down, feel it for a couple minutes, and come back out."

  "And?"

  "And I can't get out of the damned grave now. The concrete is too slick and the ground is too muddy. Give me a hand."

  I looked at our clean clothes and the mud. Bob was dressed in casual clothing, streaked with brown and black dirt.

  "Where're your funeral clothes?"

  "In the car. I figured I'd change after I did this and no one would ever know."

  "Sweet Jesus," I said disgustedly. "I didn't bring any spare clothes. And I don't want to think about what Aunt Gladys will say if I'm all covered with mud during the burial. Hold on a minute while I think of something."

  I went back to the car. I figured there must be something in the trunk, snow chains left over from winter or an old piece of rope or hose, that I could let down to him to get him out and still stay clean myself. I reached in my pocket and fumbled with my keys. They dropped to the ground and I swore mildly and bent over to pick them up.

  The rear bumper blinked at me.

  I hit the ground and rolled. Foremost shouted and flung up his arms. He staggered and stumbled backward, his arms flung wide. A cloud of steam engulfed him.

  The light flashed again, and this time I saw the laser flare and burn part of Foremost's robe. Jets of steam spurted from his clothes around his neck and armpits and waist and he hit the ground and lay motionless, half in the grave, half out.

  I was up and moving, gun in my hand. I put the car between myself and the grove of trees where I saw the laser flash. :"Bob, you okay?"

  "What the hell is going on up there?" he shouted back.

  "Just shut up and do what I tell you," I said. "Can you drag Foremost down in there with you?"

  I heard Bob grunt, the sound of something heavy scraping on the grass and dirt, and another deeper grunt from Bob. "Got him."

  "He alive?"

  "He's breathing," Bob said. "Not real regular, but he's breathing."

  "Just keep him that way," I said.

  What would I do if I was the shooter? Foremost was down, hit twice, but there was no guarantee he was dead. The steam was the giveaway. A laser cuts cleanly through fabric and messily through flesh. It never sends out jets of steam. Which meant Foremost had some kind of protective layer underneath his robe to dissipate the laser heat. Was it tough enough to handle two shots?

  The shooter had to be certain.

  I glanced quickly underneath the car and saw a figure with a pair of feet coming toward the car at a trot. I took three deep breaths and came over the top of the hood, gun outstretched.

  I fired three times, direct hits to the body. The creature, short and squat and all in gray so I could not tell what was clothing and what was skin, jerked at the impacts but kept on coming. It stared at me with a fixed caricature of a wild grin on its face, writhing tentacles where I had teeth, a thin slash of bone where I had lips. Then it shuffled its feet for balance and aimed the laser at me. The grin widened and I knew I was dead. The head exploded.

  The body stood for a moment, fixed, as if it meant to keep on conng, as if the loss of its head was nothing more than a minor inconvenience. I worried for the saine moment that with this alien that might be true, that the head was nothing more than a place to put the eyes, that the brain might be in the torso.

  Then the body crumpled and collapsed.

  I ran to the shooter, my gun out and level, ready to fire if I saw a flicker of movement. When I got closer I kicked the laser away, far out of reach, and felt the body. It was cool to the touch, and lumpy, like a plastic bag full of rocks.

  "It is called a Synth."

  I looked over my shoulder and saw Bob and Foremost, their clothes smeared with dirt. Bob stared at the alien, shook his head slowly, and went over to look at the laser.

  "Do not try to use it," Foremost warned. "The odds are good it is a personal weapon, keyed to the Synth."

  "Booby-trapped?" Bob asked.

  "I don't know the word," Foremost said.

  "Rigged to explode if someone other than the owner tries to use it," Bob explained. "Probably," Foremost agreed.

  I stared at the country around me. The grass moved in waves to the winds, and the trees in the little forest rubbed and swayed in rhythm.

  "Do they travel in pairs?" I asked.

  "No, strictly alone. They are living killing machines. Put them in an area, give them instructions, and let them do their work. If you put two in an area they would most likely kill each other," Foremost said.

  "Hard to keep a species going that way," I said.

  "They manage somehow," Foremost said dryly.

  I stood and looked down at the Synth. Up close, the gray was partly clothing and partly skin, so close in color to each other that they blended to form a whole that was difficult to focus on. The alien looked like a silly-putty man, and I wondered if the rain would dissolve the skin and clothes and wash them into the grass.

  I saw three smudge marks on the alien's chest where my bullets struck some kind of protective vest. I looked at the marks and, for just a moment, I was pleased with myself. The bullet pattern was tight, the black smears close together, and I knew my old firearms instructor at the Service would be pleased. The Synth itself looked enough like one of the practice dummies at the Academy that I half expected it to snap back upright when this little exercise was over. But the rain puddled on the clothes and formed droplets on the skin and the Synth stayed dead.

  "Indian, you can come out now," I said, my voice pitched to carry against the weather.

  Indian, his fatigue jacket smeared with a few new grass stains that would soon dry and mix with all the others, drew himself up from the edge of the trees. He wore a broad-brimmed hat with snap-down ear flaps, just as dirty and stained as the rest of his clothing. He carried a scoped rifle, as clean and well-tended as an opposite could be. He pointed down the road, then disappeared back in the trees.

  "Funeral procession is coming down the road," Bob said. I looked up and saw a black hearse, with a procession of other cars behind it. I kicked the Synth. "How the hell do I explain this?" I growled.
/>   "Don't need to," Bob said. "This is Summit. That's all you need to know, and all you need to say."

  Carole showed up about an hour after dusk, when the street lights on Main Street were just starting to get into some real work. Foremost and Oly and I sat on the steps outside the pool hall and passed a glass jar of fish back and forth. Bullhead, if I remember right. Bob and Steve and Rose were inside, acting as hosts for Sam's wake. I could tell, from the rising level of voices and music and laughter inside, that the party was just starting to take off.

  Driving down the street, Carole saw us, and turned to parallel park in front of the pool hall. She stopped the car and the driver's side window rolled down. Even through the sharp cut shadows from the street lights I could see the relief on her face.

  "All I thought about on the way down here was that you might be dead. Every time I closed my eyes on the plane I saw you in a coffin," she said, her voice soft and tired. She turned her head a little to the side. "I'm glad you're all right, too, Ambassador."

  I'm glad you're all right, too, Ambassador?

  I struggled with the thought that Carole spent the trip worried about me. Something of my confusion must have shown on my face. She smiled. "You don't work for me anymore, do you? Then I can worry about you now."

  "And before?" I asked. "You were an agent. You had a job to do, and I had a job to do."

  "I wasn't a person before, and now I am?"

  "You were a person before," she said carefully, "and an agent."

  "And now?"

  She smiled again. Her face relaxed in a way I never remembered from Washington. I realized I liked that smile very much, and wondered where she'd kept it all those years. I suddenly wanted to make her smile again.

  She started to get out of her car and I shook my head.

  She stopped for a moment, her face frozen, and the old mask snapped back into place. For a moment I saw pain and hurt and loneliness. Then it was gone, and it was the Washington face back again. "Of course," she said carefully. "I understand."

  "No, you don't," I said. "Park the car around the corner. We're keeping Main Street clear. Then come back here. We need to talk."