The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  Here she delivers an ingenious and suspenseful adventure that demonstrates that being the messenger can be dangerous, no matter what the message.

  “Common wisdom has it,” said LaDene from where she was stretched out on the queen-sized bed, “that anyone with a tattoo on their face goes crazy within five years.”

  Cody paused in his examination of his jawline in the mirror over the desk to give her a look. “You see any tattoos on this example of manly beauty?”

  “Can’t see the moon from here, either. Or the TV remote,” she added. She sat up and looked around. Cody found it on the desk and tossed it to her. “Thanks. You know, carnies would call you a marked man.”

  “Carnies?” He gave a short laugh. “Don’t tell me you threw over the bright lights of the midway to keep a low profile in budget accommodations.”

  “Higher-end budget accommodations.” She put on the TV and began channel surfing. “For the discerning yet financially-savvy business traveller. Don’t you ever read the brochures?”

  He made a polite noise that was could have been yes or no and was neither. The hotspot that had come up over two hours ago was still there, midway between his chin and the point of his jaw, and as far as he could tell, it hadn’t faded even a little. The medic had assured him there was nothing to worry about unless it started to spread and it hadn’t. It wouldn’t have bothered him except he hadn’t had a hotspot in years. Rookies got hotspots.

  The sudden recurrence could have been down to any number of things, the medic had said, the most likely being the attack of hay fever he had suffered on arrival. But he’d never had hay fever in his life, he’d told the medic. He’d never been to Kansas City in late August, she’d replied, chuckling.

  Technically, he still hadn’t. The airport was thirty miles north of the city and the car they’d sent had taken him to an industrial park about as far to the west on the Kansas side of the state line, which apparently ran right through the middle of town. The most he’d seen of Kansas City proper was a distant cluster of skyscrapers, briefly glimpsed through the tinted window as the driver negotiated a complicated interchange of highway ramps. After that it was generic highway scenery all the way to a generic suburban industrial park, full of angular, antiseptic office buildings surrounded by patches of green landscaped and manicured in extremis, some with a koi pond or a fountain. The access road meandered through it so much that Cody thought there had to be an extra mile of travel. Albeit a very pretty mile; perhaps it was so people coming and going could see at least in passing the flowers they didn’t have time to stop and smell. Cody could have done without it. By the time they’d reached their destination, he had actually begun to feel carsick.

  “Yo!” A pillow hit him in the head, making him jump. “And I thought I was vain,” LaDene laughed. “Are you really that fascinating?”

  “I was woolgathering,” he said as he threw the pillow back at her. “Thinking, in case you don’t know what that means.”

  “I know what it means,” she said. “I also know you’ve got a hotspot. Unclench, honey, I’ve got one, too.” She lifted her shirt and pointed at her navel.

  “Oh, very funny.”

  “Oh, very for-real.” She was up off the bed and had his face in her hands before he could say anything. “Ah, got it, right there.” She patted his cheek and pulled up her shirt again, exposing her midriff. “Mine’s hotter. Feel.”

  Her belly button was only inches away from his nose. Cody drew back and started to protest as she grabbed his hand and pressed it against her skin. His discomfort turned to surprise. “I sit corrected,” he said, extricating himself from her grip. “Yours is hotter.”

  “Told you,” she said, plumping down on the bed to stretch out again. “It’s probably the ragweed and who knows what else in the air. Man, I hate KC this time of year.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “I’m from here.” She laughed at his surprised expression. “You couldn’t tell?”

  “How could I? We just met.”

  “I knew you weren’t from around here, soon as I saw you. No antihistamines.”

  He chuckled a bit ruefully. “I thought I was dying of a head cold I caught on the plane.”

  She started to channel surf again, then changed her mind and shut the TV off. “If you get cold symptoms a lot when you fly, it’s probably an allergy.”

  “Oh?” He gave a short skeptical laugh. “Is there a lot of ragweed on airplanes?”

  She shrugged. “Lots of other stuff—mold, dust, newsprint. Somebody’s cheap cologne. Even expensive cologne.”

  “Newsprint?”

  “Believe it or leave it. You know how if something exists, there’s porn of it? Well, there’s also someone allergic to it.”

  “Newsprint,” Cody said again, still skeptical.

  “If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.” LaDene raised one hand solemnly, then let it fall. “Okay, that was fun. Now whaddaya wanna do?”

  Cody leaned over and scooped the remote control up so he could turn the TV back on, mainly to forestall the possibility of her wanting to compare hotspots again. The screen lit up to show a dark-haired, olive-skinned woman speaking directly to the camera with an earnest sincerity that made his own brow furrow in sympathy.

  “… found flayed and burned in a midtown Kansas City, Missouri, parking garage have now positively been identified as August Fiore, AKA Little Augie Flowers, fifty-one, and Coral Oh, twenty-nine, of Liberty, Missouri. Fiore went missing two weeks ago from an FBI safe house where he was being held pending the start of the trial of Carmine Nesparini on racketeering charges. The FBI has steadfastly refused to comment on allegations that Fiore was Nesparini’s personal ‘master key’ but sources close to the investigation say that Fiore’s cooperation would have given authorities an unprecedented level of access to mob records.

  “Fiore’s attorneys refused to comment, except to say that they were unaware of any escape plans and had no knowledge of Fiore’s whereabouts. Whether Fiore left the safe house voluntarily may never be known. FBI technicians are still working on the sabotaged surveillance system but experts believe there is little chance they can salvage enough data to be useful.

  “Coral Oh’s connection to Fiore still has not been established. Oh worked for the Kansas City Convention Bureau for fifteen years as an event coordinator, for the last three in a supervisory position. Coworkers described her as intelligent and well-liked. She was last seen ten days ago in her office by two of her subordinates, who had been working late with her.”

  The woman was suddenly replaced by a video of a very young man who looked as if he hadn’t slept for at least that long. The slightly wobbly graphic at the bottom of the screen said he was Akule Velasquez. “She told us to go home, she’d finish up,” he said in a husky voice to someone just off-camera to the left. “We’d’ve stayed but she was all—” he made small shooing gestures with both hands. “‘No, get outa here, I’ll finish, bring me some fancy coffee tomorrow.’ She was like that. I tried to stay anyway but she kept telling me no. I wish I hadn’t listened.”

  The woman in the studio reappeared, looking more earnest and sincere than ever. “The mayor’s office issued a statement saying that this unfortunate and tragic incident should not overshadow the fact that criminal activity in the area has been steadily declining for the past twelve months thanks to new policing initiatives—”

  LaDene snatched the remote out of his hand and turned off the TV. “Well, that wasn’t fun. Now what do you wanna do?”

  “Hey, I was watching that.” Cody reached for the remote but she threw it across the room where it bounced off the wall and fell neatly into a small wastebasket.

  “She shoots, she scores! A three-pointer, the crowd goes wild!” LaDene made crowd noises as he stalked over to retrieve the control. The impact had knocked the batteries out and it took him two tries to put them back in properly. “Oh, come on. What do you wanna scare the shit out of yourself for?”

  B
ut the news had moved on; now a man was standing near the edge of an empty swimming pool, blinking in bright sunlight as he talked about levels of chlorine. “Oh, well.” Cody dropped the remote on the bed and sat down on the chair by the desk again. “I wasn’t trying to scare myself.”

  “Who were you trying to scare—me?”

  “No. I just want to pay attention.”

  “Set a news alert on your phone.” She was channel surfing again. “It’s probably all bullshit anyway. ‘Little Augie Flowers,’ for God’s sake. Who goes around calling themselves ‘Little Augie Flowers’? For a minute there, I thought they were talking about some old Grand Theft Auto module. ‘Gay Tony Meets Little Augie Flowers, bullets will fly, heads will roll!’ Oh, hey, I love this!” she added, sitting up suddenly.

  Cody barely had to look at the screen to know what it was. “I’ve seen it.” He rested an elbow on the desk and cupped his face in his hand. The hotspot was still there. “Several times.”

  “So have I but I like to watch it whenever it’s on. That guy’s so cool.”

  “He is?” If he didn’t leave the goddam hotspot alone, he told himself, it was never going to fade. He shifted so he was leaning the upper part of his cheek against his hand; as if it had a will of its own, his thumb slid down to feel his jawline. Annoyed with himself, he straightened up, grabbed the TV listings off the desk, and paged through them without seeing anything.

  “Okay, he’s all wrong and he probably knew it,” LaDene was saying. She punched the pillows behind her into a more supportive position for her lower back and casually folded her legs into a half-lotus, making Cody wince. “But so what? The whole movie’s wrong.”

  “Well, it’s a pretty old movie,” he said, shrugging.

  “Not that old. Not ancient.”

  “No, but BCI didn’t even exist when this came out and people were still using floppy disks. This big.” He held his hands three feet apart. She gave him a Look and he moved them so they were only a foot apart. “Okay, this big. TVs were dumb terminals and a cloud was a fluffy white thing in the sky. So the idea of people giving up memories to store data in their brains—”

  LaDene waved one hand dismissively. “I was referring to the cell phones.”

  He frowned. “What cell phones?”

  “Exactly!” She laughed. “How the hell did they miss cell phones?”

  As if on cue, there was a sound like a ray gun in a sci-fi movie and the ring on her right hand lit up with tiny flashing lights. She cocked her head, listening, then bounced off the bed. “My ride’s here. See you around—” Her grin was sheepish.

  “Cody,” he said.

  “Right.” She paused, one eyebrow raised, the other down low, something Cody had never been able to manage no matter how hard he’d tried. “That’s really your name.”

  “LaDene’s really yours?” he said evenly.

  “I grew up in Tonganoxie, Kansas. Of course it’s really my name.”

  The two statements seemed unrelated to him but he nodded anyway. She pulled her suitcase out of the closet, extended the handle, and then paused again, one hand on the doorknob. “Where are you from?”

  “I used to know but I rented that out for a database backup.”

  He heard her laughing all the way down the hall.

  * * *

  He ate alone in the dining room. The waitress gave him a table by a window that made the most of the hotel’s location atop a rocky promontory, so he could enjoy his chicken Caesar salad with a scenic view of three other hotels and the six-lane highway running between them.

  While it may not have been classic postcard material, he had to admit the view was actually rather nice. Kansas wasn’t as flat as most people seemed to think, at least not in this locale. Here the landscape was gently rolling, punctuated by flat stretches usually occupied by malls or apartment complexes. In the distance, he could see the top of a mall that had to be the size of an airplane hangar and, not far from that, a crane surrounded by a framework suggesting future apartments or condos.

  But it was the highway that drew his eye more than anything. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen so many private cars. Well, the travel agent had told him this was one of the last bastions of the autonomous commuter. Cody couldn’t imagine what it was like to spend an hour or more of every weekday driving. He’d had a license himself once, but only briefly. After it had expired, he hadn’t bothered renewing it and didn’t miss it.

  Perhaps if he were driving now, he’d be too busy to keep worrying at that stupid hotspot. Annoyed with himself, he pulled the complimentary library up on the table-top and checked out the local newspaper.

  The waitress tried to talk him into dessert every time she refilled his iced tea. After his third glass, he swiped his keycard through the table-top reader, left an overly generous cash tip, and went back up to the room. It seemed a lot emptier now that LaDene was gone. Even the pillows she had piled against the headboard looked forlorn. He hadn’t been thrilled to find her there when he’d checked in. She had apologised profusely—some kind of travel-plan fiasco. Having been through a few of those himself, he was sympathetic. As it turned out, she’d been good company—better than he’d realised. His newly-recovered privacy felt lonely.

  He stretched out in the place where she had been and put the TV on again. It was only one night, and as LaDene had pointed out, this was a higher-end budget hotel. The complimentary coffee service was a drip pot with pouches of a gourmet blend rather than merely a kettle and two envelopes of instant. The minibar was well stocked with a wide variety of refreshments and if all of it cost ten times what it would in a grocery store, at least the cans of mixed nuts were a bit larger than average.

  And then there was the television. Twenty channels including sports and movies, not counting the on-demand you had to pay extra for. Most places didn’t offer half that. Maybe it was their way of compensating people like him, who were stuck there without a car.

  Although that wasn’t quite true. A chat with the desk clerk had revealed that they were less than a mile away from what she referred to as a shopping village, which he quickly figured out was a clever euphemism for strip mall. It wasn’t much, she’d said in a politely cautioning tone meant to discourage any ideas of a foray on foot—a discount electronics outlet, a hardware store, an indoor playground, and three fast-food joints. Cody decided he could live without seeing it.

  “Good choice,” the clerk had said approvingly. “Because you’d be taking your life in your hands—no sidewalks.”

  “No sidewalks where?” he’d asked, puzzled.

  “Between here and the shopping village.”

  “Then where do people walk?”

  “They don’t. People have to drive to get out here. They park, do whatever they came to do, then drive home again. I mean, you don’t walk on the interstate, either.”

  Cody had been tempted to ask if she ever went for walks herself and if so, where, but decided against it. She was twenty-two at most, about to go from merely young and pretty to eye-catching as the last of her adolescent puppy-fat disappeared. She might have thought he was hitting on her and if he were honest, he might have had a hard time denying it.

  He found a 24-hour news channel, turned the volume down to a murmur, and then used the remote to shut off the lights.

  * * *

  The next thing he knew, someone was sitting on his chest.

  He could see nothing in the dark except a darker shadow looming over him, blocking out the flickering light from the television. He tried to yell but his mouth refused to open and he only made a sort of high-pitched grunt. Something pressed hard against his windpipe as whoever had him pinned bent over to speak close to his ear.

  “You want to lie very still and not make a sound,” said a male voice, just above a whisper. “Then do exactly what I tell you. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m not here to hurt you. But I will if I have to.”

  His heart was beating hard and fast, as if it were trying to
pound its way out of his chest. The pressure on his windpipe eased but didn’t go away entirely. He swallowed, wincing.

  As the man straightened up, Cody made out long greying hair, possibly tied back, and thick-framed glasses. “First, don’t try to open your mouth. You’re short-circuited and you’ll only give yourself a headache. Once I know you’re gonna behave yourself, I’ll consider letting you chew gum.”

  He tried to make a conciliatory noise; the pressure on his windpipe increased again.

  “I said, don’t make a sound.”

  Cody sucked air through his nose, feeling himself jerk helplessly as his body fought to cough even though his mouth wouldn’t open. His throat clenched, knotted, and tried to turn itself inside out. Then all at once, his mouth did open, just long enough for him to let out a few explosive coughs before his jaw snapped shut again.

  “Better?”

  Cody nodded, breathing in hungrily through his nose.

  “You understand now to do exactly what I say?”

  He nodded again.

  “After I let you up, you’re gonna change your clothes. Then you’ll be taken out of here in a wheelchair. You’re gonna sit quiet and stare at your lap. You’re not gonna look up. If anyone speaks to you, you’ll act like you didn’t hear anything. There’s a van waiting out front. You’ll be put into it, chair and all, and we’ll drive away.