Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  But the girl said, “Up there,” and there it was, the old truck with the homemade camper bed and the blue plastic awning rigged out behind, just like before. He stopped the car and got out and went around to open the passenger door.

  The air was thick with wood smoke and the exhausts of worn-out engines, and the pervasive reek of human waste. The ground underfoot was soggy with mud and spilled motor oil and God knew what else. Davis looked around at the squalid scene, remembering what this area used to look like, only a few years ago. Now, it looked like the sort of thing they used to show on the news, in countries you’d never heard of. The refugee camps in Kosovo, during his long-ago army days, hadn’t been this bad.

  Beyond, up on the mountainsides, sunlight glinted on the windows of expensive houses. A lot of locals had thought it was wonderful, back when the rich people first started buying up land and building homes up in the mountain country, getting away from the heat and the flooding. They hadn’t been as happy about the second invasion, a year or so later, by people bringing nothing but their desperation….

  Davis shook his head and opened the door. Even the depressing scene couldn’t really get him down, right now. It had been an amazing experience, almost religious, driving along with that voice filling the dusty interior of the old cruiser; he felt light and loose, as if coming off a marijuana high. He found himself smiling —

  A voice behind him said, “What the hell?” and then, “Eva May!”

  He turned and saw the man standing there beside the truck, still wearing the red cap and the angry face. “Hello,” he said, trying to look friendly or at least inoffensive. “Just giving your daughter a lift from town. Don’t worry, she’s not in any trouble —”

  “Hell she’s not,” the man said, looking past Davis. “Eva May, git your ass out of that thing! What you doing riding around with this God-damn woods nigger?”

  The girl swung her feet out of the car. Davis started to give her a hand but decided that might be a bad move right now. She got out and stepped past Davis. “It’s all right, Daddy,” she said. “He didn’t do nothing bad. Look, he bought me some new shoes!”

  “No shit.” The man looked down at her feet, at the new shoes standing out white and clean against the muddy ground. “New shoes, huh? Git ’em off.”

  She stopped. “But Daddy —”

  His hand came up fast; it made an audible crack against the side of her face. As she stumbled backward against the side of the truck he said, “God damn it, I said take them shoes off.”

  He spun about to face Davis. “You don’t like that, Indian? Maybe you wanta do something about it?”

  Davis did, in fact, want very much to beat this worthless yoneg within half an inch of his life. But he forced himself to stand still and keep his hands down at his sides. Start a punch-out in here, and almost certainly he’d wind up taking on half the men in the camp. Or using the gun on his belt, which would bring down a whole new kind of disaster.

  Even then he might have gone for it, but he knew that anything he did to the man would later be taken out on Eva May. It was a pattern all too familiar to any cop.

  She had one shoe off now and was jerking at the other, standing on one foot, leaning against the trailer, sobbing. She got it off and the man jerked it out of her hand. “Here.” He half-turned and threw the shoe, hard, off somewhere beyond the old school bus that was parked across the lane. He bent down and picked up the other shoe and hurled it in the opposite direction.

  “Ain’t no damn Indian buying nothing for my kid,” he said. “Or going anywhere near her. You understand that, Chief?”

  From inside the camper came the sound of a baby crying. A woman’s voice said, “Vernon? What’s going on, Vernon?”

  “Now,” the man said, “you git out of here, woods nigger.”

  The blood was singing in Davis’s ears and there was a taste in his mouth like old pennies. Still he managed to check himself, and to keep his voice steady as he said, “Sir, whatever you think of me, your daughter has a great gift. She should have the opportunity —”

  “Listen close, Indian.” The man’s voice was low, now, and very intense. “You shut your mouth and you git back in that car and you drive outta here, right damn now, or else I’m gon’ find out if you got the guts to use that gun. Plenty white men around here, be glad to help stomp your dirty red ass.”

  Davis glanced at Eva May, who was still leaning against the truck, weeping and holding the side of her face. Her bare white feet were already spotted with mud.

  And then, because there was nothing else to do, he got back in the car and drove away. He didn’t look back. There was nothing there he wanted to see; nothing he wouldn’t already be seeing for a long time to come.

  “Blackbear,” Captain Ridge said, next morning. “I don’t believe this.”

  He was seated at his desk in his office, looking up at Davis. His big dark face was not that of a happy man.

  “I got a call just now,” he said, “from the sheriff’s office over in Waynesville. Seems a reservation officer, man about your size and wearing sergeant’s stripes, picked up a teenage girl on the street. Made her get into a patrol car, tried to get her to have sex, even bought her presents to entice her. When she refused he took her back to the refugee camp and made threats against her family.”

  Davis said, “Captain —”

  “No,” Captain Ridge said, and slapped a hand down on his desk top. “No, Blackbear, I don’t want to hear it. See, you’re about to tell me it’s a lot of bullshit, and I know it’s a lot of bullshit, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. You listen to me, Blackbear. Whoever those people are, you stay away from them. You stay out of Waynesville, till I tell you different. On duty or off, I don’t care.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Because if you show up there again, you’re going to be arrested — the sheriff just warned me — and there won’t be a thing I can do about it. And you know what kind of chance you’ll have in court over there. They like us even less than they do the squatters.”

  Davis said, “All right. I wasn’t planning on it anyway.”

  But of course he went back. Later, he thought that the only surprising thing was that he waited as long as he did.

  He went on Sunday morning. It was an off-duty day and he drove his own car; that, plus the nondescript civilian clothes he wore, ought to cut down the chances of his being recognized. He stopped at an all-hours one-stop in Maggie Valley and bought a pair of cheap sunglasses and a butt-ugly blue mesh-back cap with an emblem of a jumping fish on the front. Pulling the cap down low, checking himself out in the old Dodge’s mirror, he decided he looked like a damn fool, but as camouflage it ought to help.

  But when he got to the refugee camp he found it had all been for nothing. The truck was gone and so was Eva May’s family; an elderly couple in a Buick were already setting up camp in the spot. No, they said, they didn’t know anything; the place had been empty when they got here, just a little while ago.

  Davis made a few cautious inquiries, without finding out much more. The woman in the school bus across the lane said she’d heard them leaving a little before daylight. She had no idea where they’d gone and doubted if anyone else did.

  “People come and go,” she said. “There’s no keeping track. And they weren’t what you’d call friendly neighbors.”

  Well, Davis thought as he drove back to the reservation, so much for that. He felt sad and empty inside, and disgusted with himself for feeling that way. Good thing the bars and liquor stores weren’t open on Sunday; he could easily go on a serious drunk right now.

  He was coming over the mountains east of Cherokee when he saw the smoke.

  It was the worst fire of the decade. And could have been much worse; if the wind had shifted just right, it might have taken out the whole reservation. As it was, it was three days before the fire front crossed the reservation border and became somebody else’s problem.

  For Davis Blackbear it was a very long
three days. Afterward, he estimated that he might have gotten three or four hours of sleep the whole time. None of the tribal police got any real time off, the whole time; it was one job after another, evacuating people from the fire’s path, setting up roadblocks, keeping traffic unsnarled, and, in the rare times there was nothing else to do, joining the brutally overworked firefighting crews. By now almost every able-bodied man in the tribe was helping fight the blaze; or else already out of action, being treated for burns or smoke inhalation or heat stroke.

  At last the fire ate its way over the reservation boundary and into the national parkland beyond; and a few hours later, as Wednesday’s sun slid down over the mountains, Davis Blackbear returned to his trailer and fell across the bed, without bothering to remove his sweaty uniform or even to kick off his ruined shoes. And lay like a dead man through the rest of the day and all through the night, until the next morning’s light came in the trailer’s windows; and then he got up and undressed and went back to bed and slept some more.

  A little before noon he woke again, and knew before he opened his eyes what he was going to do.

  Captain Ridge had told him to take the day off and rest up; but Ridge wasn’t around when Davis came by the station, and nobody paid any attention when Davis left his car and drove off in one of the jeeps. Or stopped him when he drove past the roadblocks that were still in place around the fire zone; everybody was too exhausted to ask unnecessary questions.

  It was a little disorienting, driving across the still-smoking land; the destruction had been so complete that nothing was recognizable. He almost missed a couple of turns before he found the place he was looking for.

  A big green pickup truck was parked beside the road, bearing the insignia of the U.S. Forest Service. A big stocky white man in a green uniform stood beside it, watching as Davis drove up and parked the jeep and got out. “Afternoon,” he said.

  He stuck out a hand as Davis walked across the road. “Bob Lindblad,” he said as Davis shook his hand. “Fire inspector. They sent me down to have a look, seeing as it’s on federal land now.”

  He looked around and shook his head. “Hell of a thing,” he said, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

  It certainly was a strange-looking scene. On the northeast side of the road, there was nothing but ruin, an ash-covered desolation studded with charred tree stumps, stretching up the hillside and over the ridge and out of sight. The other side of the road, however, appeared untouched; except for a thin coating of powdery ash on the bushes and the kudzu vines, it looked exactly as it had when Davis had come this way a couple of weeks ago.

  The Forest Service man said, “Anybody live around here?”

  “Not close, no. Used to be a family named Birdshooter, lived up that way, but they moved out a long time ago.”

  Lindblad nodded. “I saw some house foundations.”

  Davis said, “This was where it started?”

  “Where it was started,” Lindblad said. “Yes.”

  “Somebody set it?”

  “No question about it.” Lindblad waved a big hand. “Signs all over the place. They set it at half a dozen points along this road. The wind was at their backs, out of the southwest — that’s why the other side of the road didn’t take — so they weren’t in any danger. Bastards,” he added.

  Davis said, “Find anything to show who did it?”

  Lindblad shook his head. “Been too much traffic up and down this road, last few days, to make any sense of the tracks. I’m still looking, though.”

  “All right if I look around too?” Davis asked.

  “Sure. Just holler,” Lindblad said, “if you find anything. I’ll be somewhere close by.”

  He walked off up the hill, his shoes kicking up little white puffs of ash. Davis watched him a minute and then started to walk along the road, looking at the chewed-up surface. The Forest Service guy was right, he thought, no way in hell could anybody sort out all these tracks and ruts. Over on the unburned downhill side, somebody had almost gone into the ditch —

  Davis almost missed it. A single step left or right, or the sun at a different angle, and he’d never have seen the tiny shininess at the bottom of the brush-choked ditch. He bent down and groped, pushing aside a clod of roadway dirt, and felt something tangle around his fingers. He tugged gently and it came free. He straightened up and held up his hand in front of his face.

  The sun glinted off the little silver dog as it swung from side to side at the end of the broken chain.

  Up on the hillside, Lindblad called, “Find anything?”

  Davis turned and looked. Lindblad was poking around near the ruins of the old house, nearly hidden by a couple of black tree stubs. His back was to the road.

  “No,” Davis yelled back, walking across the road. “Not a thing.”

  He drew back his arm and hurled the pendant high out over the black-and-gray waste. It flashed for an instant against the sky before vanishing, falling somewhere on the burned earth.

  * * *

  Computer Virus

  NANCY KRESS

  Nancy Kress began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-seventies, and has since become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, among others. Her books include the novels The Prince Of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brain Rose, Oaths & Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, the novel version of her Hugo- and Nebula-winning story, Beggars in Spain, and a sequel, Beggars and Choosers. Her short work has been collected in Trinity And Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, and Beaker’s Dozen. Her most recent books are the novelsProbability Moon and Probability Sun. Upcoming is a new novel, The Fabric of Space. She has also won Nebula Awards for her stories “Out Of All Them Bright Stars” and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison.” She has had stories in our Second, Third, Sixth through Fifteenth, and Eighteenth Annual Collections. Born in Buffalo, New York, Nancy Kress now lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband, SF writer Charles Sheffield.

  Here’s a taut and suspenseful story that pits one lone woman in a battle of wits against an intruder who has broken into her home and taken her and her children hostage — a very unusual kind of intruder, and one who seems impossible to defeat…but one who she must somehow attempt to out-think and out-maneuver, against all the odds, if she wants her family to survive…

  “It’s out!” someone said, a tech probably, although later McTaggart could never remember who spoke first. “It’s out!”

  “It can’t be!” someone else cried, and then the whole room was roiling, running, frantic with activity that never left the workstations. Running in place.

  It’s not supposed to be this way,” Elya blurted. Instantly she regretted it. The hard, flat eyes of her sister-in-law Cassie met hers, and Elya flinched away from that look.

  “And how is it supposed to be, Elya?” Cassie said. “Tell me.”

  “I’m sorry. I only meant that…that no matter how much you loved Vlad, mourning gets…lighter. Not lighter, but less…withdrawn. Cass, you can’t just wall up yourself and the kids in this place! For one thing, it’s not good for them. You’ll make them terrified to face real life.”

  “I hope so,” Cassie said, “for their sake. Now let me show you the rest of the castle.”

  Cassie was being ironic, Elya thought miserably, but “castle” was still the right word. Fortress, keep, bastion…Elya hated it. Vlad would have hated it. And now she’d provoked Cassie to exaggerate every protective, self-sufficient, isolating feature of the multi-million-dollar pile that had cost Cass every penny she had, including the future income from the lucrative patents that had gotten Vlad murdered.

  “This is the kitchen,” Cassie said. “House, do we have any milk?”

  “Yes,” said the impersonal voice of the house system. At least Cassie hadn’t named it, or given it one of those annoying visual avatars. The room-screen remained blank. “There is one carton of soymilk and
one of cow milk on the third shelf.”

  “It reads the active tags on the cartons,” Cassie said. “House, how many of Donnie’s allergy pills are left in the master-bath medicine cabinet?”

  “Sixty pills remain,” House said, “and three more refills on the prescription.”

  “Donnie’s allergic to ragweed, and it’s mid-August,” Cassie said.

  “Well, he isn’t going to smell any ragweed inside this mausoleum,” Elya retorted, and immediately winced at her choice of words. But Cassie didn’t react. She walked on through the house, unstoppable, narrating in that hard, flat voice she had developed since Vlad’s death.

  “All the appliances communicate with House through narrow-band wireless radio frequencies. House reaches the Internet the same way. All electricity comes from a generator in the basement, with massive geothermal feeds and storage capacitors. In fact, there are two generators, one for backup. I’m not willing to use battery back-up, for the obvious reason.”

  It wasn’t obvious to Elya. She must have looked bewildered because Cassie added, “Batteries can only back-up for a limited time. Redundant generators are more reliable.”

  “Oh.”

  “The only actual cables coming into the house are the VNM fiber-optic cables I need for computing power. If they cut those, we’ll still be fully functional.”

  If who cuts those? Elya thought, but she already knew the answer. Except that it didn’t make sense. Vlad had been killed by econuts because his work was — had been — so controversial. Cassie and the kids weren’t likely to be a target now that Vlad was dead. Elya didn’t say this. She trailed behind Cassie through the living room, bedrooms, hallways. Every one had a room-screen for House, even the hallways, and multiple sensors in the ceilings to detect and identify intruders. Elya had had to pocket an emitter at the front door, presumably so House wouldn’t…do what? What did it do if there was an intruder? She was afraid to ask.