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

by Gardner Dozois

  ‘When the year’s up I’m moving on. I have a whole new world to explore. And plenty more besides.’

  ‘Ha. If I had a euro for every time I’d heard that from people who thought they were passing through but couldn’t find a reason to leave,’ Ana Datlovskaya said, ‘I’d be riding around the desert in style, instead of nursing that broken-down donkey of a pickup.’

  Ana was a biologist who’d moved out to the western desert to study hive rats, supporting her research with her savings and the sale of odd little figurines. Like Marilyn, she was originally from London, England, but their sex and nationality were about all they had in common—Marilyn had been born and raised in Streatham, her mother a nurse and her father a driver on the Underground, while Ana’s parents had been Russian exiles, poets who’d escaped Stalin’s postwar purges and had set up residence in Hampstead. Still, the two women quickly became friends. Ana was a prominent member of Joe’s Corner’s extensive cast of eccentrics, but she was also an exemplar of the legion of stout-hearted, sensible, and completely fearless women who before World War Three had explored and done every kind of good work in every corner of the globe. Marilyn had met several of these doughty heroines during her service in the army and had admired them all. The evening she gave Ana a lift into town they had a fine time in the roadhouse, swapping war stories and reminiscing about London and how they’d survived World War Three, and on her next free day Marilyn was more than happy to make a fifty kilometre trip beyond the northern edge of the City of the Dead to visit Ana’s desert camp.

  By then, Joel Jumonville had told Marilyn a fair number of tall tales about the Queen of the Hive Rats. According to him, the old woman had once shot a bandit who’d tried to rob her, and cut up his body and fed it to her hive rats. Also, that the little figurines she sold to support herself, found nowhere else in the City of the Dead, were rumoured to come from the hold of an ancient spaceship she’d uncovered, she kept a tame tigon she’d raised from a kitten, and she’d learned how to enter hive rat gardens without being immediately attacked and killed. Joel was an inveterate gossip and an accomplished fabulist, so Marilyn also took his stories with large pinches of salt, but when she pulled up by Ana’s shack, on a bench terrace cut into a stony ridge that overlooked a broad arroyo, she was amazed to see the old woman pottering about the edge of a hive rat garden. The garden stretched away down the arroyo, crowded with the tall yellow blades of century plants. Columns of hardened mud that Marilyn later learned were ventilation chambers stood here and there, hive rat sentries perched on their hind legs at intervals along the perimeter, and there was a big mound with a hole in its flat top that no doubt led to the heart of the nest.

  Jet went crazy over the scent of the hive rats. By the time Marilyn had calmed him down, Ana was climbing the path to her shack, cheerfully helloing them. ‘How nice to see you, my dear. And your lovely dog. Did you by any chance bring any tea? I ran out two days ago.’

  Sitting on plastic chairs under a canvas awning that cracked and boomed in the hot breeze, they made do with stale instant coffee and flat biscuits, tasting exactly like burnt toast, that Ana had baked using flour ground from cactus tree bark. There wasn’t any trick to walking amongst the hive rats, the old woman told Marilyn. She had worked out the system of pheromonal signals that governed much of their cooperative behaviour, and wore a dab of scent that suppressed secretion of alarm and aggression pheromones by sentries and soldiers, so that the hive rats accepted her as one of their own.

  Ana talked a long streak about hive rat biology, explaining how their nests were organised in different castes like ants or bees, how they made their gardens. This garden was the largest known, Ana said, and it was unique not only because it was a monoculture of century plants, but because there was an elaborate system of irrigation ditches and dykes scratched across the arroyo floor. She showed Marilyn views from camera feeds she’d installed in the kilometres of tunnels and shafts and chambers of the nest beneath the garden: workers gnawing at the car-sized tuber of a century plant; endless processions of workers toiling up from the deep aquifer, their bellies swollen with water; one of the fungal gardens that processed the hive rats’ waste; a chamber in which a hive rat queen, fed and groomed by workers one-tenth her size, extruded blind, squirming pups with machine-like regularity. Unlike other nests, this one housed many queens, Ana said; it had never split into daughter colonies.

  ‘When I know you better, perhaps I’ll tell you why. But enough of my work. Tell me about the world.’

  Marilyn gave Ana the latest local gossip, and ended up promising to do a supply run for the old woman, who said that she would be grateful not to have to bother with dealing with other people: she was far too busy with her research, which was at a very interesting stage. So Marilyn took a dozen little figurines back to Joe’s Corner, smoothly knotted shapes fashioned from some kind of resin that when handled induced a pleasant, dreamy sensation that reminded her of her habit, when she’d been eleven or twelve, of standing at the bathroom sink with her hands up to the wrists in warm water, staring into the fogged mirror, wondering what she would become when she grew up. She sold them to the Nigerian assayer in Joe’s Corner, bought supplies and picked up several packages from an electronics supplier along with the rest of Ana’s mail, and on her next free day took everything out to the old woman’s camp.

  After a couple of supply runs, Ana gave Marilyn a tiny brown bottle containing a couple of millilitres of oily suppressor scent, telling her that she could use it to check out tombs that happened to be in the middle of hive rat gardens. ‘Foolish people try to poison or smoke them out. And they usually get bitten badly because the rats are smarter than most people think. They know how to avoid poison, and their nests are extremely well-ventilated. But if you wear just a dab of suppressor, my dear, you can walk right into those tombs, all of them untouched by looters, and pick up any treasures you might find.’

  Marilyn promised she’d give it a try, but the bottle ended up unopened in the junk-filled glove compartment of her Bronco. For one thing, she wasn’t convinced that it would work, and she knew that you could die from infection with flesh-eating bacteria after a single hive rat bite. For another, she didn’t really need to supplement her income from sale of scraps looted from tombs. Her salary as town constable was about a quarter of what she’d received for guarding the late unlamented Albanian businessman, but she had a rent-free room in the Westward Ho! motel and ate for free in Joel’s roadhouse most nights, and for the first time in her life she was able to put a little money by for a rainy day.

  It occurred to her around this time that she was happy. She had a job she liked, and she liked most of the people in Joe’s Corner and could tolerate the rest, and she liked the desert, too. When she wasn’t visiting Ana Datlovskaya, she spent most of her free time pottering around the tombs of the City of the Dead, exploring the salt-flats and arroyos and low, gullied hills, learning about the patchwork desert ecology, plants and animals native to First Foot and alien species imported from other worlds by previous tenant races. Camping out in the desert at night, she’d lie in her sleeping bag and look up at the rigid pattens of alien constellations, the two swift moons, the luminous milk of the Phoenix nebula sprawled across the eastern horizon. Earth was about two thousand light years beyond the nebula: the wormhole network linked only fifteen stars, but it spanned the Sagittarius arm of the Galaxy. How strange and wonderful that she should be here, so far from Earth. On an alien world twice the size of Earth, where things weighed half as much again, and the day was a shade over twenty hours long. In a desert full of the tombs of a long-vanished alien race . . .

  One day, Marilyn was out at the northern edge of the City of the Dead, sitting on a flat boulder on a low ridge and eating her lunch, when Jet raised up and trotted smartly to the edge of the ridge and began to bark. A few moments later, Marilyn heard the noise of a vehicle off in the distance. She finished what was left of her banana in two quick bites, walked over to where her dog
stood, and looked out across the dry playa towards distant hills hazed by dusty air and shimmering heat. The hummocks of ancient tombs in ragged lines amongst drifts of sand and rocks; silvery clouds of saltbush and tall clumps of cactus trees; the green oases of hive rat gardens. The nearest garden was only a kilometre away; Marilyn could see the cat-sized, pinkly naked sentries perched upright amongst its piecework plantings. Beyond it, a thin line of dust boiled up, dragged by a black Range Rover. As it drew nearer, the hive rat sentries started drumming with their feet, a faint pattering that started Jet barking. Soldiers popped up from the mound in the centre of the garden, two or three times the size of the sentries, armoured with scales and armed with recurved claws and strong jaws that could bite through a man’s wrist, running towards the Range Rover as it drove straight across the garden. It ploughed through them, leaving some dead and dying and the rest chasing its dusty wake all the way to the garden’s boundary, where they tumbled to a halt and stared after it as it headed up a bare apron of rock towards the ridge.

  Marilyn walked over to her Bronco and took her pistol from her day bag and stuck it in the waistband of her shorts and walked back to Jet, who was bristling and barking. The Range Rover had stopped at the bottom of the short steep slope. A blond, burly man stood in the angle of the open door on the far side, staring up at Marilyn as a second man climbed out. He had a deep tan and black hair shaved close to his skull, was dressed in black jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt. Black tattoos on his forearms, black sunglasses that heliographed twin discs of sunlight at Marilyn as he said, ‘How are you doing, Marilyn? It’s been a while.’

  It was one of the men who’d worked for the security firm back in Port of Plenty. Frank something. Frank Parker.

  ‘I’m wondering why you came all the way out here to find me, Frank. I’m also wondering how you found me.’

  Marilyn was pretty sure that this wasn’t anything do with the Albanians, who liked to do their own dirty work, but she was also pretty sure that Frank Parker and his blond bodybuilder friend were some kind of trouble, and a smooth coolness was filling her up inside, something she hadn’t felt for a long time.

  ‘I guess you don’t feel like coming down here, so I’ll come up,’ Frank Parker said, and began to pick his way up the stony slope, ignoring Marilyn’s sharp request to stay where he was, going down on one knee when his black town shoes slipped on the frangible dirt and pushing up and coming on, stopping only when Jet started to bark at him, knuckling sweat from his forehead and saying, ‘Feisty fellow, ain’t he?’

  ‘He’s a pretty good judge of people.’ Marilyn told Jet to sit, said to Frank Parker, ‘I’m waiting to hear what you want. Maybe you can start by telling me what you’re doing out here. It’s a long way from Port of Plenty.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a drink of water,’ Frank Parker said, and took a couple of steps forward. Jet rose up and started barking again and the man held up his hands, palms out, in a gesture of surrender.

  ‘I’m sure you have a bottle or two in that expensive car of yours,’ Marilyn said. She was watching him and trying to watch his friend down by the Range Rover at the same time. Her Glock was a hard flat weight against the small of her back and she stepped hard on the impulse to show it to Frank Parker. If she did, it would take things up to the next level and there’d be no going back.

  ‘I bring greetings from another old friend,’ Frank Parker said. ‘Tom Archibold. He’d like to invite you over for a chat.’

  ‘What’s Tom doing out here?’

  Like Frank Parker, Tom Archibold had been working for the same security firm that had been employing Marilyn when her client had been blown to bloody confetti. She was trying her best to keep the surprise she felt from her face, but Frank Parker must have seen something of it because his smile broadened into a grin. ‘Tom told me to tell you that he has a little job for you.’

  ‘You can thank Tom for me, and tell him that I already have a job.’

  ‘He needs your advice on something is all.’

  ‘If he wants my advice, he’s welcome to visit me when I get back to town tomorrow. My office is right in the middle of our little commercial strip. You can’t miss it. It has a sign with “Town Constable” printed on it hung right above the door.’

  ‘He kind of needs you on site,’ Frank Parker said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘We really would like for you to come right away. It’s about your friend Ana Datlovskaya,’ Frank Parker said, and took a step towards Marilyn.

  Jet barked and lunged forward, and Frank Parker reached behind himself and jerked a pistol from his belt, Marilyn shouting no!, and shot Jet in the chest. Jet dropped flat and slid down the slope, and Frank Parker turned to Marilyn, his eyes widening behind his sunglasses when she put her Glock on him and told him to put his weapon down.

  ‘Do it right now!’ she said, and shot him in the leg when he didn’t.

  He fell on his ass and dropped his pistol. Marilyn stepped forwards and kicked it away, saw movement at the bottom of the slope, the man behind the Range Rover raising a machine pistol, and threw herself flat as a short burst walked along the edge of the ridge, whining off stones, smacking into dirt, kicking up dust. Marilyn raised up and took aim, and the man ducked out of sight as the round spanged off the window post beside him. She got off two more shots, aiming for the tyres, but the damned things must have been puncture-proof. The Range Rover started with a roar and reversed at speed, its open door flapping. Marilyn braced and took aim and put a shot through the tinted windshield, and the Range Rover spun in a handbrake turn and took off into the playa, leaving only dust in the air.

  Frank Parker was holding his thigh with both hands, blood seeping through laced fingers, face pale and tight with pain. ‘You fucking shot me, you bitch.’

  ‘You shot my dog. But don’t think that makes us even.’

  Marilyn picked up his pistol and told him to roll over on his stomach, patted him down and found a gravity knife in an ankle scabbard. She told him to stay absolutely still if he didn’t want to get shot again, and crabbed down the slope to where Jet lay, dusty and limp and dead. She carried him up the slope to her Bronco, set him in the well under the shotgun seat. Frank Parker had sat up again and was clutching his thigh and making threats. She told him to shut up and pulled the q-phone from its holster under the dashboard, but although she tried three times she could raise only a faint conversation between two people who seemed to be shouting at each other in a howling gale in a language she didn’t recognise. She tried the shortwave radio, too, but every channel was full of static; that wasn’t unexpected, as radio reception ran from patchy to non-existent in the City of the Dead, but she’d never before had a problem with the q-phone. A little miracle that fused alien and human technology, it was worth more than the Bronco and shared a bound pair of electrons with the hub station in Joe’s Corner, and should have given her an instant connection even if she was standing on other side of the universe.

  Well, she didn’t know why the damn thing had decided to throw a glitch, but she was a long way from town, and Ana was in trouble. She found her handcuffs in the glove compartment and walked over to Frank Parker and tossed them into his lap and told him to put them on. As he fumbled with them, she asked him why Tom wanted to talk with her, and what it had to do with Ana Datlovskaya.

  Frank Parker told her to go fuck herself, closed his eyes when Marilyn cocked her pistol.

  ‘I can knock off plenty of pieces of you before you die,’ she said. She was angry and out of patience, and anxious too. ‘Or maybe give you to the hive rats down there. I bet they’re still pissed off after you drove straight through their garden.’

  After a moment, Frank Parker said, ‘We’ve taken over Ana Datlovskaya’s claim.’

  ‘Taken it over? What does that mean? Have you bastards killed her?’

  ‘No. No, no. It’s not like that.’

  ‘She’s alive.’

  ‘We think so.’

&nb
sp; ‘She is or she isn’t.’

  ‘We think she’s alive,’ Frank Parker said. ‘She got out into the damn garden and ducked into a hole. We haven’t been able to get near it.’

  ‘Because of the hive rats. Did anyone get eaten?’

  ‘One of us got bitten.’

  ‘Tom wants me to persuade her to come out.’

  The man nodded sullenly. ‘Word is, you’re her good friend. Tom thought you could talk some sense into her.’

  Marilyn thought about this. ‘How did you know where to find me? This is my day off, I driving around the desert, no one in town knows where I am. Yet you drive straight towards me. Were you following me?’

  ‘You have a q-phone. We have a magic gizmo that tracks them.’

  ‘Does this magic gizmo also stop q-phones working?’

  ‘I don’t know. Really, I don’t,’ Frank Parker said. ‘I was told where to find you, and there you were. Look, the old woman is sitting on something valuable. You can have a share of it. All you have to do is talk to her, persuade her to give herself up. Is that so hard?’

  ‘We walk away afterwards, me and Ana.’

  ‘Sure. We’ll even cut you in for a share. Why not? Help me up, we can drive straight there—’

  ‘What is it you want from her? Those figurines?’

  ‘It’s something to do with those rats. Don’t ask me what. I wasn’t privy to the deal Tom made.’

  ‘I bet. Think you can walk over to my pickup?’

  ‘You shot me in the fucking leg. You’re going to have to give me a hand.’

  ‘Wrong answer,’ Marilyn said.

  Frank Parker flinched and started to raise his cuffed hands, but she was quicker, and rapped him smartly above his ear with the grip of her pistol and laid him flat.

  He started to come round when she dumped him in the loadbed of the Bronco, feebly trying to resist as she tied off the nylon cord she’d wrapped around his calves. ‘You’re fucked,’ he said. ‘Well and truly fucked.’