The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  “What about you?” Trip asked, helping him pack up the morning’s sample. “Do you think we should stay longer?”

  Gary headed for the companionway. “Ray pays my salary, which doesn’t make me a disinterested observer. The fact is, I love both of those guys, but Ellis is just as ambitious as Ray is. He’s better at hiding it, that’s all.”

  He disappeared down the stairs. As the day wore on, Trip caught occasional glimpses of Gary in the wet lab across from the salon. Through the laboratory window, Trip saw him sterilize a pair of shears with a blowtorch and slice each filter in two, one half to be frozen for later analysis, the other to be sequenced aboard the yacht itself. Aside from the time spent gathering each day’s water sample, Gary spent most of his time in the lab, dissolving the filters and analyzing the resultant genetic material, which meant that he was the only crew member without a tan.

  Trip took a seat in the salon, where the captured octopus had been installed in a plastic tank. Since his arrival, he had been struck by the demands being made of the scientific team. Sequencing the genes of all the organisms in a random sample of seawater was an incredibly complicated process, akin to assembling a thousand jumbled jigsaw puzzles. Normally, most of the analysis would have taken place on shore, but Ray, hoping to save time, had insisted that it occur on the sloop itself. Several competing efforts to sequence marine ecosystems were currently underway, and Ray had become obsessed with concluding the project before the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth, which was in less than three weeks.

  Such urgency might have seemed strange, but as Trip reviewed his notes, he reflected that nothing less than Ray’s legacy was at stake. Despite the role that he had famously played in decoding the human genome, Ray remained a controversial figure, known more for his ruthlessness as a businessman than his scientific integrity. Now that money was no longer an issue, he had funded this mission in an attempt to refute his detractors, as well as to make his own case for a Nobel Prize. As a result, he had begun to push his scientific team to show greater progress, which, as far as Trip could tell, had only deepened the divisions within the crew.

  Dinner that night was quietly tense. Dawn, the ship’s cook, an attractive woman with a blond ponytail, had prepared a ceviche, slowly simmering the octopus to soften it first. Although the flesh was tender, nobody could do more than pick at it, so the crew focused on the vegetable curry instead, which they washed down with plentiful wine and cold water. “You can judge a yacht by how the wine flows,” Ray said, his eyes red. “On the Calypso, Cousteau had a wine tank made of stainless steel. And how many bottles do we have?”

  “Two hundred in the hold,” Dawn said, “and another fifty or sixty in the fridge.”

  Trip poured himself another glass. Unlike some yachts, which had separate tables for guests and crew, everyone on the research sloop ate together, although this did nothing to lighten the mood. Ray, he noticed, treated everyone as his servant, even Stavros, who had been the yacht’s captain long before the billionaire had acquired it. When Ray asked him condescendingly to tell them the Greek word for octopus, the captain replied, “Octopous, of course. But to Hesiod, it was anosteos, or the boneless one. The boneless one gnaws his foot in his fireless house and wretched home.”

  “I didn’t know we had so many scholars on board,” Ray said. He eyed Trip over the rim of his glass. “I’m aware, by the way, that I’ve neglected to give you the interview I promised. Are you free tonight?”

  Trip, who had nearly given up hope of such an invitation, was surprised at the sudden offer. “Of course. Maybe after dinner?”

  “I need to take care of some business first, but if you want to drop by my cabin at ten, I can give you an hour of my time.” Ray’s bloodshot eyes flashed between Trip and Meg. “Unless you have other plans—”

  Meg rose abruptly, clearing the dishes and carrying them into the galley. Ray, flushed from the wine, did not take his eyes from her face.

  After dinner, the crew dispersed. Kiran headed up to the deck, joined a moment later by Dawn, ostensibly for the first watch, although a whiff of sweet smoke from the crew’s quarters made Trip guess that they had something else in mind. Around the yacht, the octopuses had resumed their nocturnal flickering. When the lights in the salon were turned down, the octopus in the tank started to glow as well.

  Going into his cabin, Trip began to review his list of questions, glancing out the window at the show of lights. As he prepared, he began to feel strangely nervous. Looking at his hands, he noticed that he had been chewing his fingernails, which was something that he had not done in years.

  When the time for the interview arrived, Trip rose from his chair, making sure that he had his notebook and audio recorder, and went into the hallway. The yacht was silent. Stavros sat in the salon, his back turned, laying out a game of solitaire. None of the other crew members was in sight.

  Trip went to the door of Ray’s cabin, which was closed, and knocked lightly. “Ray?”

  There was no answer. Looking down, Trip saw a line of light beneath the door. He knocked a second time, and when there was no response, he tried the knob, which turned easily.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Trip pushed open the door and entered the stateroom. He had been here only once before, on the day that he had boarded the yacht, and had been duly impressed by its luxury.

  Ray was seated at his work station, his back to the door. His head was bowed, as if he were looking intently at something on the desk. Trip came forward cautiously, afraid that he was intruding, and gingerly touched Ray’s shoulder with his fingertips. “Do you still want to talk?”

  In response to the nudge, Ray swiveled around in his chair, although the motion was due solely to momentum. His eyes were open, and his head was tilted at an unnatural angle. A gash had parted the skin of his throat, the blood running down the front of his shirt and pooling on the floor below, where it blended with the burgundy rug. Trip was not a doctor, and had no firsthand experience of murder, but even at first glance, it was clear that Ray was quite dead.

  II

  The captain was the first to respond to his shouts of alarm. Stavros appeared in the stateroom door, his calmness oddly reassuring, and stopped. He looked at Trip, saying nothing, then turned to the body. Going up to the corpse, he placed his fingertips against its throat, almost in a parody of checking for a pulse, and examined the wound, which was clean and deep. After studying the gash for a moment, he shook his head. “It’s bad luck to have a dead man on board.”

  Trip stared at the captain, wondering if he was joking. Instead of saying more, Stavros took the body beneath its arms and laid it on the floor, with Trip doing his best to help. As they moved the body, a fresh stream of blood trickled from its throat, swallowed up at once by the plush fibers of the carpet.

  There was a gasp from the doorway. It was Meg. A second later, Gary appeared, still in his gloves and laboratory gown, his face pale with shock. Kiran and Dawn stood behind him, looking over his shoulder at the scene in the cabin. Their eyes were bloodshot. Last of all, Ellis pushed through the knot of bodies, his gaze fixed on the corpse on the ground.

  “My God,” Ellis said, his voice nearly cracking. “Did anyone see what happened?”

  No one replied. Through the windows, the octopus lights continued to flicker.

  “I’ve been in the salon all night,” Stavros said at last. “I saw nobody enter or leave.”

  “Someone must have been here,” Trip said. “Ray didn’t cut his own throat. If he did, where’s the knife?”

  There was another silence, more suspicious now. Trip was studying the faces of the others, searching for signs of guilt, when his eye was caught by a trail of blood on the floor. It led from the desk to the far wall, where a door had been set into the bulkhead. “Where does this hatch go?”

  “The deck,” Stavros said. He went to the hatch and opened it, touching only the edge of the knob. Beyond the door lay a narrow companionway. He went up, followed by Trip and Kiran, w
ith the others remaining behind.

  Outside, the air was cool and motionless, the ocean glowing with eerie light. In the dive cockpit, a constellation of blood was visible on the deck. A pool of pink water had collected beneath the showerhead, as if someone had paused to wash his or her hands before moving on. Stavros turned to Kiran. “You were supposed to be on watch. You didn’t see anything?”

  Kiran looked embarrassed. “We were at the prow, looking at the lights. And we were, uh—”

  “Yes, I know,” Stavros said, making a gesture of disgust. “A couple of potheads.”

  They returned to the stateroom. In the cabin, someone had covered the body with a sheet, the crimson petals of blood already starting to soak through. Meg was seated on the bed, eyes wet, with Dawn’s arm around her shoulders.

  In the corner, Ellis and Gary were talking in low tones. A second later, Ellis turned to the others, as if he had decided to assume control. “All right. Whoever did this needs to confess now.”

  In the long pause that followed, volleys of glances were exchanged, but no one spoke. Eventually, one by one, they began to offer explanations for their whereabouts. It soon became clear that only Kiran and Dawn, who had been smoking up on the far end of the sloop, could verify their stories. While Trip had gone into his room after dinner, Gary had returned to the lab, and Ellis had been in the observation chamber belowdecks, taking notes on the octopus school. Stavros had been in the salon, facing away from the stateroom, while Meg had retired to her cabin to read.

  Ellis turned to Trip. “You’re the one who found him. What were you doing here?”

  “You heard what happened at dinner,” Trip said. “Ray offered me an interview.”

  “Is that what you thought?” Ellis gave him a tight smile. “I happen to know that Ray was planning to tell you that he was withdrawing permission for the article. He told me so himself.”

  Trip was astonished by the unspoken implication. “Why would he change his mind?”

  Ellis looked at Meg, who was seated on the bed. “Who knows what he was thinking?”

  Trip’s face grew red. “So what are you saying? He wouldn’t give me an interview, so I killed him?”

  There was no response. After another moment, when it became clear that no confessions were forthcoming, they turned, almost with relief, to the business of dealing with the body. Ellis went into his cabin and returned with a medical kit, which he used to tape bags over Ray’s hands. When he was done, Stavros wrapped the corpse in a sheet and secured it neatly with nylon cord. Sealing off the stateroom, they carried the body into the galley, where Meg and Dawn had removed the bottles from the wine refrigerator, and laid it snugly inside.

  As they were closing the galley door, Trip happened to glance at the rack above the sink, and saw that one of the knives was missing.

  Once the body had been stowed, they returned to the salon to debate their next move. The first decision was easy. The Lancet, like many yachts, had a system of security cameras that was rarely used, and which they now agreed to turn on. There was also some discussion of sleeping arrangements. In the end, it was decided that the women would share one of the staterooms, Trip, Ellis, and Gary the other, and that the captain and first mate would each take a cabin for themselves.

  Finally, they raised the issue of the voyage itself. “There’s no way out of it,” Stavros said. “We need to go back. If we make full speed, we can be at Antigua and Barbuda in three days.”

  “We would have been done in a few more weeks,” Gary said bitterly. He looked around at the others. “I know we don’t have much of a choice, but after all this is done, I’m coming back to finish the project.”

  No one spoke. In the tank, the octopus wound and unwound its arms, glowing softly, like an emblem of death from a medieval painting.

  They all spent a restless night. The following morning, Trip was in the salon when he felt a soothing vibration well up through the floor. The engine had started. He was smiling at Meg and Dawn, who seemed equally relieved that they were on their way, when an alarm sounded from the cockpit. A second later, the wailing ceased, and the engine died as well.

  Trip went up to the deck, where he found Stavros crouching over the hatch of the engine room, biting his lower lip. A sharp tang of scorched metal wafted up from the engine. “Overheated,” Stavros said tersely, in response to Trip’s question. “We’re taking care of it.”

  Kiran, who was examining the engine, stuck his head and shoulders out of the darkened rectangle, a smudge of grease on his face. “It’s the alternator and pump. The belt’s torn to shreds. I’ll need to replace it.”

  “How long will that take?” Trip asked, unsettled by the prospect of an engine failure. Although the sloop was perfectly capable of proceeding under sail, the last few days had been windless, and they were weeks away from shore.

  Kiran wiped away the grease. “A couple of hours. We’ll need to hold station here.”

  Word of their situation spread quickly. After learning what had happened, Ellis announced that he would spend the morning trying to capture a few more octopuses. While examining the octopus that had been caught the day before, he had noticed that one of its arms was missing, apparently severed. “We need a perfect specimen,” Ellis said, as if challenging the others to contradict him. “If we’re stuck here anyway, we may as well make the most of it.”

  When no one objected, Ellis and Gary set to work. During the night, the yacht had drifted away from the octopus school, so they took the boat tender. Trip accepted an invitation to come along, glad for an excuse to get away from the yacht, and Meg agreed to join them as well.

  They roared off in the tender, the water rising around them in a needlelike spray. The motor was too loud for conversation, but Trip kept a close watch on Meg, who had dark circles under her eyes.

  When the tender neared the octopus school, which was visible in faint red patches through the water, Ellis cut the engine. “Gary and I will dive together. You two can wait here.”

  Donning their equipment, the two scientists climbed onto the inflatable keel and slid overboard. Trip watched them descend, the sun beating down on the back of his neck, then turned to Meg. “How are you doing?”

  “I’ll be all right,” Meg said. The brim of her hat left her face in shadow, but her voice, he noticed, was steady.

  As they waited for the others to return, Meg began to take measurements of the water’s temperature and salinity, with Trip helping as best he could. As the minutes ticked by, he tried to steer the conversation toward the other members of the crew. “Ray didn’t seem like a guy who was easy to work with.”

  Meg looked back at the yacht, which was holding station seven hundred yards away. “He was used to being right all the time. Ellis couldn’t deal with it. He also thought that he was going to have the chance to conduct his own research, but Ray worked him pretty hard.”

  “Ellis seems to think that the octopus school is his last chance for a major discovery.”

  “Yes, I know.” Meg hesitated, as if there were something else that she wanted to say. “There was a lot that Ellis didn’t understand. Ray drank too much, and sometimes, when we were alone, he would tell me things—”

  Trip sensed that she was on the verge of revealing something important. “What is it?”

  “Ray was withholding some of the team’s discoveries. You know how he insisted that Gary process the samples on board the yacht? It was so he could screen the results for genes with commercial potential. If you can find a microbe that makes it easier to produce ethanol, for example, or a luminous microbe like the one he was hoping to find the other night, it would be worth millions.”

  “But the whole point of this project was to make the data freely available,” Trip said. “Every gene was going to be made public, right?”

  “That’s what Ray claimed. It’s what allowed him to recruit people like Gary. If you ask Gary why he joined the project, he’ll say it was because he believed that genetic research shou
ld be as open as possible. But Ray was always driven by profit. He wasn’t about to change his ways.”

  Trip could feel the elements of a story assembling themselves in his head. “You seem to know a lot about the science.”

  “I spent a year in medical school before I dropped out. I couldn’t stand the dissections.” Meg glanced back at the sloop, which looked like a scale model in the sunlight. “I decided a long time ago that I was going to devote my life to pleasure, not death. For a while, I thought that marrying a rich man was the answer. That’s why I was involved with Ray. Don’t pretend you didn’t know.”

  Trip went for the diplomatic response. “I had some idea of what was going on.”

  “You and everyone else. I don’t mind. I knew he wasn’t going to marry me.” Meg turned back to Trip. “Maybe it’s better this way. If he’d held back results for commercial reasons, it would have come out sooner or later. Now, instead, he gets to be a martyr. In a way, I’m glad he’s dead.”

  Trip tried to cut the tension. “You probably don’t want me writing about this, then.”

  Meg didn’t respond. Something in her unsmiling face, which was still in shadow, sent a prickle of nervousness down his spine. Before either of them could speak again, Gary’s gloved hand emerged from the sea, clutching an octopus, which had wound itself around his upper arm. Ellis surfaced a second later, wetsuit glistening, holding an octopus of his own.

  “Looks like they’ve got their prizes,” Meg said. She glanced at Trip’s hands. “You’ve been biting your nails. Are you nervous?”

  When she looked back up at him, Trip held her gaze. “Not any more than you are.”