The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  "He is one. A bulk-buy, government-sponsored, Son of Sam."

  The movie projection shivered.

  A tall, broad-shouldered figure wearing scanty combat gear materialized in front of the black and white picture. It was Sara Komensky, Draco's virtual babe.

  The aliens stared in horrified amazement. The bot wrapped her arms over her bazookas of breasts, bizarrely like a real live young woman mortified by the excess.

  "Hey," she said. "Er, Draco doesn't know I'm here."

  The aliens nodded. "Right," croaked Orlando. "Of course."

  The warrior girl appeared to look around, her little mouth an Oh! of surprise. Draco's quarters were in First Class, and probably a bit smarter.

  "We've had burglars," Grace explained. "Usually it's better than this."

  "It's cool," said the bot. She shrugged. "I've seen worse bunkers. I've been with Drac a while you know. We… we've been in some tough spots. Jungles, bombed out cities, volcanos, icefields of Uzbekistan, polluted oil platforms, all kindsa shit."

  "Sure you have."

  Sara strode up and down, which didn't take her long, and turned to them again, her strong hands clasped on her bandoliers, the muscles in her forearms tight. "You got to help me. You see… Drac… He's not good at the joined-up thinking. It's the combat drugs, they wrecked his brain. He doesn't get that this is our last chance. He took the Lottery option because it was imprinted on him. He'll take a risk on some lousy half-viable coordinates and kill himself; that's what's meant to happen. The government don't terminate toy-soldiers direct; it wouldn't look good. They just make shit-ass sure people like Drac don't survive long in the real."

  "That's rough," said Orlando. "I'm sure he's a truly good person, deep down. But what can we do? We haven't any viable numbers. Y-you can check."

  "He's not a good person," said the bot. "But if he goes, I go too."

  "Huh?"

  Sara's little pearly teeth caught her sweet, pouting underlip, "Listen, assholes, you come from the same place I come from. Are you made of information, or what? Don't you have anyone switching you on or off? Me, I live in the chinks, same as you. Are you so fucking free?" Her huge blue eyes snapped with frustration. "Okay, okay, I get that you can't trust me. But you two know something about the Fulcrum."

  "We don't know anything," protested Grace, hurriedly.

  The big babyblues narrowed as far as the graphic algorithm would allow. "Yeah, but you do. I'm with the Panhandle sys-op. We're like that." The bot released her bandoliers, and hooked her two index fingers. "I can't get inside your heads but I know you've been where the sys-op can't go. All it would take would be one drop of that silver jizm. One nugget of the good stuff, he'd be set for life, and you'd never have to be looking over your shoulders. I haven't told him, I swear. This is between you and me. Now I gotta get back. Think about it, is all I ask. We'll talk again."

  She vanished.

  Orlando and Grace shot out of the net, scrabbled in their belongings for the spy-gone (a gadget that had often been useful on extreme tourism trips) and bounced around the room wildly, searching cornices, crevices, the toilet, anywhere. They found nothing. It was uncanny, how could Draco be using his bot like that, wireless, from another deck, without a receiver in here? Unnoticed, the movie had continued to play. "The projector!" howled Orlando. They flew to disable the entertainment center, dumped it outside in the corridor; switched off the lights and the doorlock for good measure. Switching off the air and gravity would not, they decided, improve the situation: even if they knew how. Finally they collapsed on the floor. Grace dragged their grave-goods whisky flask out of the litter.

  "What can we do?"

  "We are fucked," gabbled Orlando, grabbing the precious reserve of Highland Park from her and knocking it back. "We are fucked to all shit! We have the stolen suitcase full of cocaine, the one that belongs to the Mob."

  "No it doesn't! It belongs to us!"

  "N-no it doesn't! Suitcases full of cocaine, dollar bills, anti-information, they always belong to the Mob. And they're onto us. There's nothing we can do except dump the goods in a shallow grave and run for our fucking lives."

  "But we can't run. We can't get off here until the Slingshot."

  "We c-could try and gone-in-sixty one of the Deep Spacers' asteroid hoppers?"

  "Except we don't know how, and if we did, they aren't equipped to get back to Earth. We'd just die more slowly."

  The Panhandle was not supplied with lifeboats. Most of the prospectors and all of the support staff were totally dependent on the Slingshot, which was not due for three months. There had to be a lifepod for the Supercargo, keyed to his identity… but forget it. That would be a single ticket. Grace saw a faint hope. "Maybe… Maybe Draco doesn't know? Maybe the bot was telling the truth?"

  "Get a grip. That was an interactive videogram, Gracie. That was Draco we were talking to, for fuck's sake! What did you think?"

  "Are you sure? I hear you, but I don't know, it just didn't—"

  Someone knocked on the door. They went dead still, forgot to breathe, and stared at each other. Grace got up, quietly, and keyed the lights.

  "Come in," said Orlando.

  The door opened, and Lakey the fat lady appeared, in her power chair.

  "Your lock's broken," she told them. "You should complain to Eddie."

  "It isn't broken," said Grace. "We switched it off."

  Lakey looked around, the Veronica Lake fall of gold hair swinging. She didn't seem as surprised to see the state the place was in as Sara the bot had been.

  "Can we help you?" inquired Grace.

  "I'm here because we want to talk to you."

  "Everybody wants to talk to us," said Orlando. "Is your chair in this?"

  "My chair has the brains of a hamster. I mean, some of us." The chair hissed. Lakey leaned from it to peer at drifted socks. "You two disappeared this morning. You left the sys-op screen. We think Eddie took you through the Wall, and now you know something that will cost you your sweet little tourist skins, unless you get some help."

  "What is the Fulcrum?" asked Grace.

  Lakey's body was a wreck, but she still had the remains of tough, old-fashioned natural beauty in her dropsical face and in the way she smiled.

  "You just spilled all the noughts and ones, little lady."

  "I truly don't know what you mean."

  "Give me a place to stand," said Lakey, "and I will move the world."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "To me the Fulcrum means nothing. To you, it means life or death. You guys had a nerve, coming out to the Pan. Do you even care what non-local has done to our culture, to our heroes? This is our fucking patch, the only one we have left. There's a maintenance bay, one junction centerwards of the observation deck, where the food machines go to get pulled apart when they die. You better be there, at oh-four-hundred hours standard, or else. Do you know what burial at sea means?"

  Burial at sea meant when Deep Spacers chuck some miscreant out of an airlock, naked into hard vacuum.

  "Okay," said Grace. "We'll talk. But we want our bicycles back."

  Lakey grinned in appreciation. "I'll see what I can do."

  Six hours later, the Panhandle was deep in its night cycle. Dim nodes of minimum light glowed along the dark corridors, each node surrounded by a halo of micro-debris. The air exchangers sighed, the aliens bounced toward the rendezvous with barely a sound. As they hit the last junction, Orlando touched Grace's arm. She nodded. They had both heard the crisp tread of velcro soles. Some adept of the spaceways was sneaking up behind them, and it definitely wasn't Lakey. Without a word they jumped up, utilizing their low-gravity gymnastics practice, kicked off from the wall, flew, and kicked again.

  Not daring to grab at anything, they tumbled into the bay, narrowly avoided colli-son with the hefty carcass of a meat synthesizer, and hit the industrial carpet behind it. The crisp footsteps came on, like booted feet walking lightly on fresh snow. They tried not to breathe. The main
tenance bay was pitch dark, but it did not feel safe. They were surrounded by the shadow operators, disregarded life support, as if by a dumb and blind and suffering malevolence. Then something shrieked. Something fell, and a human voice started up, a series of short, horrible, choking groans —

  "That's Lakey!" gasped Grace, mouth against Orlando's ear.

  Silence followed. They crept forward until they could see, in the dim light from the junction, the fat lady's power chair upended and crippled. Lakey was lying beside it, her golden hair adrift, her great body as if crushed at last by the knocked-down gravity that had ruined her bones and swamped her lymphatic system.

  "Lakey?" whispered Grace helplessly. "Hey, er, are you okay?"

  Something whimpered. Jack Solo's bot was crouching beside the body, like a painted shadow on the darkness, wearing her usual grubby nightdress, "jack didn't do it," whined Anni-mah. She rubbed her bare arms and cringed from a blow that existed only in the virtual world. "It wasn't Jack! He wasn't here! Oh, hit me harder, yes—"

  The legendary pilot's wrist knife was on the floor, covered in blood. Orlando and Grace went over to the strange tableau. Lakey'd been stabbed, many times. Blood pooled around her, in swollen globules that stood on the carpet like grotesque black bubbles. Their eyes met. The madman must be very near, and in a highly dissociated state. He was certainly still armed. Jack Solo didn't carry just the one knife.

  "Anni?" whispered Grace, trying to make it gentle. "Where's poor Jack?"

  "Jack is right here," said a voice they didn't know.

  They spun around. White lights came up. Out from among the defunct service machines loomed the gangling man, with the visor and the crooked bones of many fractures, whom they had called Blind Pew. The popeyed fellow they had nicknamed Joe Cairo was beside him, supporting his arm. Other figures joined them: one-armed Dirty Harry, a swollen-headed woman they'd called Jean Harlow for her rags of platinum-blonde hair, and two support staff in their drab coveralls. Right now they were supporting Jack Solo. The pilot stared vaguely at the aliens, as if hardly aware of his surroundings, and muttered, "Jack didn't do it."

  "Did he kill Lakey?" asked Grace. "We heard a struggle."

  "Lakey?"

  "The lady in the chair."

  The tall man nodded, indifferent. "It looks like it."

  "We were supposed to meet her here. She said she could get out bikes back."

  "Ah, the bicycles. Come along. Leave that." He jerked his chin at the corpse, "The robotics will clear it away. Her name was Lana. She was my wife," he added, casually, as he led the way toward the observation deck, leaning on Joe Cairo's arm. "For many years, when I was a pilot. But we had grown apart."

  The halfdome was still filled by the vast, silent majesty of the nebula, studded with its glorious young stars. The other prospectors and the two support staff grouped themselves around the tall man. Jack Solo was still muttering to himself.

  Anni-mah hovered in the background, like a troubled ghost.

  The tall man turned his back on the astronomy and propped his gangling form against the rail, his visored face seeking the aliens. "My name… is immaterial. They call me L'Hibou, which means the owl. I was Franco-Canadian, long ago. These good folk have made me their spokesperson. We have to talk to you, about the information you have concerning the Fulcrum and what you plan to do with it."

  "Lake —Lana used that term. We don't know what it means," said Grace.

  "A fulcrum, my young friends, is the fixed point on which a lever moves. The un-moving mover one might say. But reculons-nous, pour mieux sauter. Eight hundred years ago, explorers set out across uncharted seas, and the mighty civilization that still commands the human world was born. Four hundred years ago, man achieved space flight. What happened?"

  Orlando and Grace wondered what to say.

  L'Hibou provided his own answer. "Nothing," he said, with infinite disgust. "Flags and footprints in the dead dust! Eventually, yes, a few fools managed to scrape a living in the deep. But the gravity well defeated us. We could not become a new world. There was nothing to prime the pump, no spices, no gold: no new markets, never enough materials worth the freight."

  The Spacers muttered, in bitter assent.

  "Buonarotti science has changed everything," continued L'Hibou. "It makes our whole endeavor look like Leonardo da Vinci's futile attempts to fly. Touching, useless precosity. Pitifully wrongheaded! But what will non-local transit, of itself, give to the human race? Prison planets, my young friends. Sinks for Earth's surplus population, despatched out there with a pick and shovel and a bag of seed apiece. That's what the International Government intends. And so be it, that's none of our concern. But something happened, out here on the Kuiper Belt station fifteen years ago. In one of the first Buonarotti experiments, a dimensional gate was opened, and something came back that was not of this universe. There were deaths, human and AI. Records were erased. No witnesses survived, no similar experiment has ever been attempted, non-local exploration has been restricted to the commonplace. But we have pieced together the story. They were very afraid. They ejected the thing from the Hub, wrapped in the force field that still contains it. The Knob was built around that field and connected to the Pan, so that the jailer would have some relief and some means of escape. And there it stays, weeping its precious tears."

  "Thanks," said Orlando. "We've read the guidebook."

  "It is the scorpion," hissed the popeyed little man. "The scorpion that stings because that is its nature, the scorpion that will fell the mighty hunter."

  The tall man smiled wryly. "My friend Slender Johnny is as crazy as Jack. He's convinced that the silver tears will ruin the world below, the way Mexican gold felled the might of Spain. It seems to be a slow acting poison."

  "Hahaha. When the gods mean to destroy us, they give us what we desire."

  "Be quiet, Johnny." The little man subsided. "The real significance of the tears is that they came through. What happens in a Buonarotti transit, my tourist friends? Come, you've read the guidebook."

  "Nothing moves," said Grace. "The traveler's body and the gravegoods —I mean the survival outfit—disappear, because of local point phase conservation. At the, er, target location, base elements plentiful everywhere accrete to the information and an identical body and, er, outfit, will appear. Coming back it happens the same in reverse. The survey data is never enough, it can only show the trip is feasible, not whether all the trace elements are there. But when the test-pilot comes back—"

  The Deep Spacers drew a concerted breath of fury.

  "She meant dumb puppet," said Orlando hurriedly. "Monkey, whatever—"

  "Quite so," agreed the tall man, coldly. "But the point is made. Nothing material travels, but the silver tears are material. They are the proof, the validation, the gateway to the empire that should have been ours, and that is why the government will never, never investigate. Ships, my young friends. If we had a sample of those tears, we would be on our way to building ships that could weave through — "

  "I'm sure you're right," said Grace. "But, what do you want from us?"

  "We know you have the key to the Fulcrum's prison cell."

  The aliens looked at each other, dry-mouthed.

  "Say you were right," said Grace, "what use is the combination of the safe, when you have no chance of making a getaway?"

  "Agreed. But a madman might be persuaded. A dangerous lunatic."

  The aliens looked at Jack Solo, still hanging there in the arms of the support staff. The Kuiper Belt patches on the two men's coveralls glowed a little in the dim light. Jack was in never-never land, whispering to the bot, who crouched at his feet in her soiled pink nightie. L'Hibou held up a hand.

  "Oh, no. Jack is ours. We look after our own."

  "Draco Fujima has lettres de cachet," whispered Slender Johnny, and shivered.

  "Lettres de cachet?" repeated Grace. "What's that?"

  "The term is mine," said L'Hibou. "Suffice to say the bastard has contacts, and ea
ch of us here has offended him in some way. He's threatening to have us sent down the gravity well."

  "We know he'll do it," said Dirty Harry grimly. "Unless we can buy him off."

  "Only it has to be the big prize," put in Jean, tossing her head. "Nothing less."

  Death by violence had no horror for the Deep Spacers. To be forcibly returned to Earth, not rich but in helpless poverty, to die in lingering humiliation in some public hospital, that was something like the ultimate damnation.

  "We'd want our bikes back," said Grace. "And some useful numbers."

  "Deal with the playpen soldier for us, and we will look after you."

  The aliens retired to their cabin, very shaken, and put their heads together, figuratively and also literally, for greater security. They had to do this deal, but they'd rather have dealt with Jack Solo, who seemed to them like only a minor bad guy… in spite of the knife work. A softbot sextoy (and this was why the bots had been only a passing phase on Earth) inevitably reflects the owner's secret identity. You could sympathize with crazy Jack, dragging his whiney Anni-mah around like a flag of failure and defeat. Draco's image of himself as a hefty sugarbabe just turned their stomachs. But it wasn't Anni-mah who could deal with sys-op.

  "We have no choice," said Grace, at last. "We know what we have to do. You have to risk your life, playing footsie with the toy soldier."

  Orlando nodded. "And you have to fuck Eddie's brains out."

  Days passed. "Lakey" was just gone. There would be no investigation: The rule is, there are no rules. An obscure Spacer with a poor stake, whose chances had seemed remote, made a successful trip. Another prospector sold some good numbers to the developers, several long term "travelers" were posted officially missing. The remote control conversion work that was adapting the Kuiper Belt station for mass rapid transit—turning the place into a latter-day Ellis Island —continued apace. The plans included moving the goose that laid the golden eggs to an even more secure and isolated location, but no one in Deep Space knew about that, not even Eddie. The Slingshot was on course and growing closer, but still weeks away from dock.