The Year’s Best Science Fiction (St Martin's) 26

by Gardner Dozois

  The man was eating his porridge slowly but steadily, his elbows on the counter. In a few minutes he would be finished. He’d get up, walk back to his apartment, find the door open . . .

  Jack pushed the box an inch towards the man and said, “I have it right here.”

  “So I see,” Alhgren Rees said, although he didn’t spare Jack so much as glance. “And I have my breakfast right here too.”

  “It belongs to my little sister,” Jack said, the little lie sliding out easily. He added, “She loves it to bits, but we’re scared that it’s dying.”

  “Take a look, Alhgren,” the woman who owned the café said, as she placed the bulb of juice in front of Jack. “The worst that can happen is that your karma will be improved.”

  “It will need much more than fixing a pet to do that,” Alhgren Rees said, smiling at her.

  The woman smiled back. Jack was reminded of his parents, when they shared a private joke.

  “All right, kid,” Ahlgren Rees said. “Show me what you got.”

  It was a mock turtle, a halflife creature that produced no waste or unpleasant odors, and needed only a couple of hours of trickle charge and a cupful of water a day. It had large, dark, soulful eyes, a yellow beak as soft as a sock puppet’s mouth, and a fifty-word vocabulary. The color and texture of its shell could be altered by infection with simple retroviruses created using the simple RNA writer kit that came with it; this one’s was covered in thick pink fur. It didn’t belong to Jack’s imaginary little sister, of course, but to the youngest daughter of Jack’s neighbors, but it really was sick. Its fur was matted and threadbare; its eyes were filmed with white matter, its soft beak chewed ceaselessly and its breath was foully metallic.

  Ahlgren Rees studied it, then took a diagnostic pen from one of the many pockets of his brocade waistcoat and tipped up the mock turtle and plugged the instrument into the socket behind the creature’s stubby front leg.

  “Tickles,” the turtle complained, working its stubby legs feebly.

  “It’s for your own good,” Ahlgren Rees said. “Be still.”

  He had small, strong hands and neatly trimmed fingernails. There were oval scars on the insides of his thick wrists; he’d had plug-in sockets once upon a time, the kind that interface with smart machinery. He squinted at the holographic readout that blossomed above the shaft of the diagnostic pen, then asked Jack, “Do you know what a prion is?”

  “Proteins have to fold up the right way to work properly. Prions are proteins that fold up wrongly.”

  Ahlgren Rees nodded. “The gene wizard who designed these things used a lot of freeware, and one of the myoelectric proteins he used has a tendency to make prions. That’s what’s wrong with your sister’s pet, I’m afraid. It’s a self-catalysing reaction—do you know what that means?”

  “It spreads like a fire. Prions turn proteins into more prions.”

  Ahlgren Rees nodded again, unplugged the diagnostic pen, and settled the mock turtle in the box. “The myoelectric proteins are what power it. When they fold the wrong way they can no longer hold a charge, and when enough have folded wrongly, it will die.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  Ahlgren Rees shook his head. “The best thing to do is to put it to sleep.”

  He looked genuinely sorry, and Jack felt a wave of guilt pass through him. Right now, Mark was breaking into his apartment, rifling through his possessions . . .

  “If you like, I can do it right now,” Ahlgren Rees said.

  “I’ll have to tell my sister first.”

  Ahlgren Rees shrugged and started to push away from the counter, saying, “Sorry I couldn’t help you, son.”

  “Wait,” Jack said, knowing that Mark must still be in the apartment. Adding, when Ahlgren Rees looked at him, “I mean, I want to ask you, how do you grow your herbs?”

  “I suppose you told him about the herbs too,” Ahlgrem Rees told the woman, who blithely shrugged.

  “I saw you at the produce market,” Jack said boldly. “And then I saw you here.”

  Ahlgren Rees studied him for a moment. Jack felt a moment of anxiety, thinking he’d been found out, but then the man smiled and said, “I had the feeling I’d seen you before. You like the market, uh?”

  “I’m interested in biology,” Jack said, speaking the truth because it was the first thing that came into his head. He was good at it, could solve genetic problems or balance a simple ecosystem without thinking too hard, and got pleasure from solving it. Before coming to Rhea, he’d lived with his parents in on the eastern coast of Australia, and one of the things he missed most, after leaving Earth, was snorkelling above the elaborate architecture of the coral reef and its schools of bright fish in the bay, and the aquarium he’d taken a whole year to get just right, a miniature reef in its own right. He added, “I’d like to know how you grow the herbs you sell.”

  “In dirt, with water and sunlight.”

  “That isn’t what I meant. I was wondering how the low gravity—”

  Ahlgren Rees held up a hand. “I have a date,” he said. “If you stop at my stall, if I am not too busy, perhaps we can talk then.”

  He said goodbye to the owner of the café, who with a smile asked him to have a good thought on her behalf, and then he was walking off down the path. Not towards his apartment, but in the opposite direction, towards the little funicular railway that dropped down to the floor of the chamber.

  Jack wanted but did not dare to ask the owner of the café where he was going. After the woman had refused his offer to pay for his juice (“You can bring me some sour oranges next time you visit the market,” she said), he set off after Ahlgren Rees, and called Mark on his phone, told him about the conversation, and what he was doing. Mark said that he’d catch up, and arrived, breathless and excited, at the lakeside jetty just as Ahlgren Rees was climbing into one of the swan boats.

  “Where is he going?” Mark said.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “But he said that he had a date.”

  “With a woman?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you sure you actually talked to him?”

  “He said that he had a date, and he left. What was I supposed to do—make a citizen’s arrest.”

  “No need to feel guilty. Our mission was successful.”

  “You found something. What did you find?”

  “He’s a spy all right.” Mark patted the pouch of his jumper, waggled his thick black eyebrows. “I’ll show you in a minute. First, we need a boat.”

  There were several high-sided dinghies waiting at the jetty, rising and falling on the long, slow waves that rolled across the lake. Jack and Mark climbed into one, and Mark stuck something in a slot in the fat sensor rod that stuck up at the prow, told the boat that this was a police override, told it to follow the boat which had just left.

  As the boat’s reaction motor pushed it towards the centre of the long, narrow lake, Jack said, “That’s how you got into his apartment, isn’t it? You overrode the lock.”

  He was sitting in the stern, the plastic box with the mock turtle inside it on his knees.

  Mark, standing at the prow, one hand on top of the sensor rod, glanced over his shoulder. “Of course I did.”

  “I suppose you stole the card from one of your parents.”

  “Sky made a copy of my mother’s card,” Mark said.

  “If she finds out—”

  “As long as I don’t get into trouble, she doesn’t care what I do. The Blob doesn’t care either. They’re too busy with their jobs, too busy advancing their careers, too busy making money,” Mark said. He had his back to Jack, but Jack could hear the bitterness in his voice. “Which is fine with me, because once they make enough, we’ll leave this rotten little ball of ice and go back to Earth.”

  There was a short silence. Jack was embarrassed, feeling that he had had an unwanted glimpse through a crack in his his friend’s armor of careless toughness into his soul, had seen the angry resentment and lonelin
ess there. At last, he said, “If we prove that Ahlgren Rees really is a spy, your parents will be proud of you.”

  Mark turned around. “Oh, he’s a spy, all right. Guess what I found in his apartment.”

  It was the kind of question you were bound to fail to answer correctly, so Jack just shrugged.

  Mark smiled a devilish smile, reached into the pouch of his jumper, and drew out a small, silver gun.

  Jack was shocked and excited at the same moment. He said, “Is it real?”

  “Oh yes. And it’s charged too,” Mark said, pointing to a tiny green light that twinkled above the crosshatched grip.

  He explained that it was a railgun that used a magnetic field to fire metal splinters tipped with explosive or toxin, or which sprouted hooks and knives after they hit their target, burrowing deep into flesh. He played campaigns based on the Quiet War on a wargaming network, knew all about the different ways the rebellious colonies had been pacified, and all about the guns and the various kinds of weapons used by both sides. Discovering the gun had not only confirmed his suspicions about Ahlgren Rees, but had made him bold and reckless too. He talked excitedly about catching the spy in the act of sabotage, about arresting him and whoever he was going to meet and making them talk.

  Although Jack was excited too, it was plain that his friend was getting carried away. “This doesn’t change ours plan,” he said. “We follow the man and see what he gets up to, and then we decide what to do.”

  Mark shrugged and said blithely, “We’ll see what we’ll see.”

  “I mean that we don’t do anything dumb,” Jack said. “If he really is a spy, he’s dangerous.”

  “If you’re scared, you can get off at any time.”

  “Of course I’m not scared,” Jack said, even though he felt a freezing caution. “All I’m saying is that we have to be careful.”

  The boat carrying Ahlgren Rees stopped three times, dropping people and picking up others, before it headed down a canal that ran through a long transparent tunnel between two chambers, Mark and Jack following two hundred meters behind it. The tunnel was laid along the edge of a steep cliff. It was the middle of Rhea’s night out there. Saturn hung full and huge overhead in the black sky like Ghod’s Christmas ornament, the razor-thin line of his rings cutting across his banded face, his smog-yellow light laid across terraced icefields below. Jack leaned back, lost in the intricate beauty of the gas giant’s yellow and dirty white and salmon pink bands, their frills and frozen waves, forgetting for the ten minutes it took to traverse the tunnel all about the gun in Mark’s pouch and following Ahlgren Rees.

  At the end of the tunnel, the canal entered a lake with a rocky shoreline pinched between two steep slopes of flowering meadows and stands of trees and bamboos. There were no houses in this chamber, no workshops of markets, no gardens or farms. It was the city’s cemetery. Like all Outer colony cities, Xama recycled its dead. Bodies were buried in its cemetery chamber and trees planted over them, so that their freight of carbon and nitrogen and phosphorous and other useful elements could reenter the loop of the city’s ecosystem. It was a quiet, beautiful place, lit by the even golden light of a late summer afternoon. On one steep slope was the black pyramid, hewn from the crystalline iron of an asteroid, that marked the resting place of the people who had died in accidents during the construction of the old city; on the other was a slim white column topped by an eternal blue flame, the monument to the citizens of Xamba who had died in the Quiet War. For although the city had remained neutral during the war, more than a thousand of its citizens had died, almost all of them had been either passengers or crew on ships crippled when their nervous systems had been fried by neutron lasers, micro wave bursters, or EMP mines during the first hours of the invasion of the Saturn system. Otherwise, the woods and meadows seemed untouched by human hands, a tame wilderness where birds and cat-sized deer and teddy-bear-sized pandas roamed freely.

  Ahlgren Rees and two women got off when the boat docked at a jetty of black wood with an red-painted Chinese arch at one end. The two women went off along the lakeshore; Ahlgren Rees started up a steep, bone-white path that wound past a grove of shaggy cypress trees.

  Mark sprang out of the boat as soon as it nudged alongside the jetty and bounded through the Chinese gate and set off up the white path. Jack had to hurry to catch up with him. They slogged around the cypress grove, climbed alongside a tiny stream that ran over white rocks speckled with chunky black shards of shock quartz, and followed Alhgren Rees as he cut through a belt of pines. There was a lumpy heath of coarse tussock grass and purple heather and clumps of flowering gorse, rising in steep terraces to the place where the top of the slope met the edge of the chamber’s curved blue roof. The flame-topped white column of the monument to Xamba’s war dead stood halfway between the pines and the painted sky, and Ahlgren Rees stood in front of the column, his bald head bowed.

  He stood there for more than fifteen minutes, still and obdurate as a statue. Crouched behind a pine tree, shoulder to shoulder with Mark, Jack was convinced that the herbalist really was waiting to meet another spy, that he and Mark really had stumbled over a conspiracy, that once they had learned enough they could turn their information over to the authorities. In excited whispers, he and Mark discussed what they’d do when Ahlgren Rees’s co-conspirator appeared, agreeing that they might have to split up and follow the men separately. But no one came. Big silver and gold butterflies tumbled over each other above a clump of gorse; one by one, rabbits hippity-hopped out of their burrows and began to nibble at the grass. At last, Ahlgren Rees turned from the monument and moved on up the slope, silhouetted against the solid blue sky for a moment when he reached the top, then dropping out of sight.

  The rabbits scattered as Jack and Mark followed, making a bounding run up the rough slope, jinking from gorse clump to gorse clump. Mark quickly outpaced Jack, who still hadn’t quite mastered running in low gravity, waiting impatiently for him to catch up near the top of the slope, crouched amongst rocks spattered with orange lichens. There was a narrow stairway down to the floor of a long, narrow rock-sided gully. Ahlgren Rees was walking at his usual unhurried pace down the gully towards a steel door set in a wide frame painted with yellow and black warning chevrons—an airlock door.

  “He’s going outside!” Mark said, and bounded down the stairs, the pistol flashing as he drew it, shouting a warning, telling the man to stop or he’d shoot.

  By the time Jack reached them, Mark and Ahlgren Rees were standing a few yards apart, facing each other. Mark was pointing the pistol at Ahlgren Rees’s chest, but the stocky, bald-headed man was ignoring him, looking instead at Jack and saying mildly, “Tell your friend he has made a mistake.”

  “Kneel down,” Mark said. He held the pistol in his right hand, was bracing his right wrist with his left hand. “Kneel down and put your hands on your head.”

  Ahlgren Rees shook his head slightly. “I believe that is mine. How did you get it?”

  “Just kneel down.”

  “You broke into my apartment while your friend—” he looked at Jack again, who felt a blush heat his face “—kept me busy. What is this about? What silly game are you playing?”

  “It’s no game,” Mark said. “We know you’re a spy.”

  Ahlgren Rees laughed.

  “Shut up!” Mark screamed it so loudly it echoed off the rough rock walls of the gully and the blue concrete sky that curved overhead.

  Jack, clutching the plastic box to his chest, frightened that his friend would shoot Ahlgren Rees there and then, said, “You said you were meeting someone here.”

  “Is that what this is about?” Ahlgren Rees said. “Yes, I visit someone. I visit her every Monday. Everyone knows that. Give me the pistol, son, before you get into trouble.”

  “You’re a spy,” Mark said stubbornly. “Kneel down—”

  There was a blur of movement, a rush of air. Mark was knocked into Jack, and they both fell down. Ahlgren Rees was standing a yard away, the pis
tol in his hand. He was sweating and trembling lightly all over, like a horse that has just run a race. He stared at the two boys, and Jack felt a spike of fear, thinking that he’d shoot him, shoot Mark, dump their bodies in some deep crevasse outside. But then the man tucked the pistol in the waistband of his green canvas trousers and said, “My nervous system was rewired when I was in the navy. A long time ago, but it still works. Go home, little boys. Go back to your brave new city. Never let me see you again, and I won’t tell anyone about this. Go!”

  They picked themselves up, and ran.

  On the boat-ride back, Mark blew off his nerves and shame by making all kinds of plans and boastful threats. He was scared and angry. He promised vengeance. He promised to find out the truth. He promised to bring the man to justice. He said that if Jack said so much as one word about this, he’d get into so much trouble he’d never find his way out again.

  Jack kept quiet. He already knew that he was in a lot of trouble. Even if Ahldred Rees was a spy, there was nothing they could do about it because they were outside the law too. They’d broken into his apartment, stolen his gun and threatened him with it. Suppose Mariko and Davis found out. Suppose the police found out. It was a Mexican stand-off.

  Jack spent the next week in a misery of fear and guilty anticipation. When his parents came home, he avoided them as much as he could, and refused their offer of a trip to the canyonlands to the north. If it had been possible, he would have caught the next ship back to Earth, leaving the whole horrible wretched incident behind him. As it was, he spent most of his time in his room, studying or half-heartedly fiddling with the virtual ecosystem he was constructing, or mooching around the apartment block’s mall.

  That was where he met Sky Bolofo, and heard about Mark’s plan. Sky wanted to know what had made Mark so terminally pissed, and eventually got Jack to confess everything.

  “Wow. You’re lucky the guy didn’t report you,” Sky said, when Jack was finished.