Year’s Best SF 18

by David G. Hartwell

  I arrived at the church with five minutes to spare. The door was unlocked, so I went inside to wait, figuring I’d be less conspicuous than if I stood around awkwardly in the corridor. People went into churches to pray, right? No one could tell from looking that I was a rationalist (and anyway, I’m sixteen—lots of teenagers experiment with religiosity). They weren’t holding a service inside, fortunately, and there were other people here and there. I hoped it wouldn’t be too conspicuous if I sat in the back instead of kneeling next to a statue. There was a woman sitting in one of the better-lit spots reading a book, though. I guessed it was probably fine.

  At 10:25, I started to stand up, but a man dressed in damp white clothes and heavy black work shoes was dropping into a half-kneel and crossing himself, and then sliding in next to me. He was thick-built, with dark hair and large hands that were covered in little knife scars. Chef’s hands.

  “You’re Beck Garrison, aren’t you?” he whispered. “Someone in the kitchen said you’re Paul Garrison’s daughter.”

  “Yes,” I said, wondering if this would make him clam up. My father makes people nervous.

  Instead, he turned his head to give me a long, appraising look. “Lynn’s bond was sold to someone named Janus,” he said.

  “Is that a first name or a last one?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is, we heard the name ‘Janus’ when she disappeared.”

  “Did she come to ask Mr. Gibbon for a loan to go to the doctor, or anything?”

  “Oh, yeah. She came in, and they went into his office. And then they left together, and she hasn’t been back—not to the kitchen, not to her old spot in the locker rooms.” The locker rooms were the dorms where people rented a space just big enough to sleep in; that’s where I’d met Debbie. “You know her sister’s been looking, right?”

  “Yeah, she said she’d—” I bit back the information about the sandals, suddenly a little embarrassed by it. “We’re bartering. What she wanted from me was to find out whether her sister is okay. Do you know anything else about Janus?”

  The man—I still didn’t know his name, I realized—bit his lip and looked down. “There have been a few other disappearances in the last month. Janus’s name comes up every time.”

  Well, the others weren’t my problem. Just Lynn.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “I’d rather you didn’t know it. Mr. Gibbon holds my bond, too.”

  * * *

  JANUS. I HAD no idea who Janus was, but in a town of 22,000, how hard could he be to track down? If I asked enough people, he’d turn up. All the next morning, when I went out on rounds (on my list that day: a coffee grinder, potting soil, and a pair of brown shoelaces for men’s dress shoes, or failing that a single unbroken lace would be acceptable) I asked people if they knew anyone named Janus. I found the coffee grinder, the shoelaces (a pair, still in their package), and got a good lead on the potting soil, but no one knew Janus.

  Due to the potting soil, I arrived at afternoon school a minute or two late. My Humanities tutor was Mrs. Rodriguez; she taught us Literature, History, and Econ. She had a nice apartment, so we all met there. A permanent sign on her door said Experienced Humanities and Social Sciences Tutor, all ages, now accepting students. There were six of us in the high school class. Thor scooted over on the couch to let me sit down.

  “Saw you on Stead Life,” I said, and he blushed.

  Mrs. Rodriguez was teaching Econ today. She talked about Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the noble experiment of the seastead founding fathers. “Thor, you’ve lived somewhere with taxes. Why don’t you talk about that?” she said.

  He blushed and stammered a little, because she’d put him on the spot, and pushed a loose hair back out of his face. “I didn’t have to pay them, my parents did,” he said.

  “Did you pay taxes when you went shopping?” she asked.

  “Oh—yeah! Sales taxes.” He grinned. “Back on shore—well, in the U.S. anyway, I don’t know about other places—we had to pay money to the government every time we bought something. They also took money out of my parents’ pay and at the end of the year they had to fill out this huge form that said whether they’d taken out enough. If the government decided that they hadn’t taken enough they’d make my parents send in even more and if they didn’t, they could go to jail. Or they’d take our house.” He frowned at the memory. “Anyway, that’s part of why we moved here.”

  “I’ve paid sales taxes,” said Shara, one of the other girls in the class. “We go to shore every year and do some shopping, and yeah, you think you’re going to have to pay one thing and WHAM, it’s like … way more.”

  Thor was the newest to the seastead; his family had just moved last year, and bought their stake right away. They’d actually paid for it in gold, which is one of the options, but seriously, actual gold. It’s rare you see that.

  “We won’t be going back,” Thor said. “At least, my dad won’t. Because right before we left, the government came with a HUGE bill and said, ‘Well actually there was some sort of mistake and you owe a lot more than we thought,’ and my father told them to shove it up their—um, he told them where to shove it. And we came here.”

  “Aw, there’s more to shore than the U.S. of A.,” Andy said. “We never go to San Fran, but we visit the Caymans every year, and the shopping’s almost as good.”

  Thor shrugged. “We’ll see if they change their mind. Right now my parents say we’ll never leave ever.”

  We talked Econ until the coffee break midway, when Mrs. Rodriguez made us a pot of coffee and everyone pulled out literature homework. “Hey,” I said as I added sugar to my coffee. “Does anyone know a guy named Janus?”

  “Is that a first name or a last name?” Thor asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Mrs. Rodriguez looked over from her kitchenette, where she was getting a carton of creamer out of the fridge. “Why are you looking for him?”

  “I’m trying to find a woman named Lynn. He’s her bond-holder.”

  “He probably isn’t, actually,” Mrs. Rodriguez said. “He’s sort of a bond wholesaler. Buys bonds from people who don’t need or want a particular bond-worker anymore, and resells to whoever. He doesn’t usually keep people very long.”

  “Why are you such an expert?” Sarah asked.

  Mrs. Rodriguez shrugged. “He eats at my dining hall. We’ve shared a table once or twice.”

  What did I tell you? In a town of 22,000, sooner or later you’ll run into someone who knows the person you’re looking for.

  I didn’t ask Mrs. Rodriguez where she ate, because I already knew. She’d mentioned twice that she ate at Primrose, which was on the top deck and had one of the nicest views in all of Min. She had a husband who worked as a bioengineer on Sal, and she believed it was worth paying for scenery with her food.

  * * *

  IF I WAS going to infiltrate Primrose, I needed to try to guess whether Janus usually ate dinner early or late. Or if he ate dinner in his office most of the time anyway, like my dad, and I’d have a better bet finding him at lunchtime. I finally decided to hope he was a late eater, because that way I could grab dinner at my own dining hall before my father was likely to turn up, and then scoot up to Primrose. He had let me get a job, but he didn’t entirely approve of it, and I had a vague feeling he would not approve at all of this particular task. Usually I just pestered people at home about cologne and coffee beans. This time, I was bothering important businessmen at work.

  I wondered if my father knew Janus.

  They don’t check IDs at the door of Gibbon’s because the staff pretty much knows everyone who eats there regularly. There was a maître d’ at the door of Primrose, though, and I wouldn’t be able to just slip in. She certainly wasn’t going to let me in to stalk Janus, either, so honesty was out. Instead, I smiled broadly and introduced myself and said that although my father really liked Gibbon’s, I was getting tired of eating in a cave and wanted to try to talk him i
nto upgrading. “I think it’ll work better if I sample your food, though,” I said. “If I can tell him what a meal’s like. But even if you could just let me in to soak up the atmosphere…?”

  She gave me an anticipatory smile. “You’re Paul Garrison’s daughter, aren’t you? We’ll let you in for a complimentary dinner.” She waved me inside.

  Primrose is a lot fancier than Gibbon’s. It’s not just the windows (and they have an entire wall of windows). There are white tablecloths on all the tables, and they have wine to drink instead of just beer, and people really were eating lobster. There were more women here than in Gibbon’s—probably nearly a third of the people eating at Primrose were female. There are a lot more men than women on the seastead. There are times when it really sucks not having a mom. The lack of women makes it that much harder.

  I couldn’t go off into a corner and read since I needed to try to figure out who Janus was, so I pulled out a chair next to a table and beamed at the dozen or so strangers. “Is this seat taken?” Assured that it wasn’t, I repeated my line about how I wanted to try to talk my father into upgrading and asked everyone what their favorite dish was at Primrose. It was easy to segue from that into introductions, but no one there was Janus. Well, it had been a long shot.

  The woman sitting next to me was older than me, and friendly. “I’ve heard all the really interesting people on the stead eat at Primrose,” I whispered. “Is it true the stars from Stead Life eat here?” My table neighbor craned her neck and said she didn’t see them, but yes, Primrose was where the Stead Life hosts ate their meals.

  “So who here have I heard of?”

  She pointed out a dozen or so people, including an elected official (we have a few of those, on Min), one of the chief surgeons from the hospital, and an old guy who was one of the handful of remaining founders (he came over to help start the seastead when he was nineteen, which is why he’s still around, forty-nine years later).

  “My teacher eats here, too,” I said. “Mrs. Rodriguez. Do you know her?” I listed a few other people who I thought might plausibly eat in Primrose (some did, some didn’t) and then tried for Janus.

  “You mean Rick Janus?” Oh: a last name. Good to know. “Yeah, see him over there?”

  “In the green?” I said, looking where she was pointing.

  “Yeah, he’s just sitting down.”

  I suppressed a gleeful grin (or at least, I thought I did), threw out another name or two for camouflage, and finished my dinner. Target acquired.

  I decided not to approach him at dinner because it would be too easy for him to have me thrown out, so I waited until he was done, then followed him out. “Mr. Janus?” I said as soon as we were out in the hall.

  He turned around, looking surprised. “Yes? Do I know you from somewhere?”

  “I don’t think so. My name is Rebecca Garrison, I work as a Finder for Jamie at Miscellenry.”

  “Oh…?” He wasn’t walking away, yet.

  “I’m looking for a woman named Lynn Miller. You bought her bond, probably about two weeks ago?”

  His eyes narrowed and he leaned back against the wall, folding his arms. “What about her?”

  “I’ve been asked to find her and check on whether she’s okay.”

  “I sold her bond.”

  “Can you please tell me who you sold it to? Because I’ve been asked to get a note from her, just confirming that she’s okay.”

  “I’m not going to tell you her new bond-holder,” he said. “I don’t discuss my deals; it’s bad business.” He stared at me and waited.

  “She was sick—”

  “She’s been treated.”

  “That’s good,” I said, feeling desperate. “I just need a note—”

  “Can’t give you one.” He waited a moment longer, then raised his eyebrows, said, “Nice to meet you, Rebecca,” and walked away.

  * * *

  IT TOOK ME A long time to walk home from Primrose, partly because it was on the other side of Min, but also because I had to go out of my way to avoid Embassy Row. The U.S. maintains an office they call the U.S. Citizen Services Bureau, because if they had an embassy that would be saying they thought Minerva counted as a country. My father is offended by the fact that they don’t recognize our sovereignty so he doesn’t let me go anywhere near the CSB. (We do have a couple of actual embassies, but one of them is from Rosa, which is kind of silly because they are right there and it’s not as if we have to show a passport to cross the bridge that connects Rosa to Min.)

  The main room light was off when I came in, but my father’s office door was open and light spilled out from there. “Beck?”

  I put down my bag on the table by the couch and went over to his office door, hesitating in the doorway. I wasn’t allowed in unless he explicitly invited me. “Yes?”

  “I’ve been hearing rumors,” he said. “You were pestering Mr. Gibbon, back in the kitchens.”

  I wondered what he knew, and who’d told him. “Only for a minute,” I said. “I left right away.”

  “You were rude,” he said. “He put up with it because you’re my child, and he doesn’t want to lose me as a customer. I told him not to worry, next time.” He looked up from his desk, his eyes cold. I gazed over his shoulder, at the window behind him, even though I couldn’t see anything this time of night but my own reflection.

  “Yessir,” I said.

  “If your job becomes a problem,” he said, “you’ll have to quit.”

  “Yessir,” I said again.

  “Good.” He looked down. “I’m glad you understand.”

  I took that as a dismissal and went to my own room. Stead Life was on, and I watched it with the volume turned down low while I did my homework for Mrs. Rodriguez. After a while, I shoved the TV show aside and set my picture of my mother on my lap.

  I barely remembered her. She died in a car wreck; my father told me when I turned eleven she’d been drinking when it happened. In my picture, she was laughing, holding me in her lap as we both sat on a big porch swing.

  I wondered what she’d think of Min. If she’d have schooled me herself when I was little, like most of my friends’ mothers. If she’d insist on eating at Primrose, even if it cost extra.

  When would my trip to Primrose get back to my father? Maybe I could convince him that I really had just been trying to sample the food, and my conversation with Janus was total coincidence. I’d bumped into him while leaving and said, “Excuse me,” and you know how rumors are.…

  I really didn’t want to quit my job. Having a job, a real job that brought in real money and not Min scrip, felt more important every time I got paid.

  The most frustrating thing was that I still hadn’t found Lynn.

  * * *

  WHEN I WOKE up to pee at 4 A.M., I thought of a way out of my dead end.

  * * *

  “I’M FEELING SICK,” I told my father when I saw him at breakfast. “It hurts to pee. Kind of a lot.”

  “Who’ve you been sleeping with?” he said, unsmiling.

  “Dad. Don’t be ridiculous. I think I have a UTI, not some sort of weird STD.”

  “It’ll be antibiotics either way, I suppose,” he said. “You know where the clinic is. I don’t need to take you in, do I?”

  “No, I can go by myself,” I said. “Do you want me to call Mrs. Leonard, too?” She was the morning teacher, the one who did math and science. “She may want to talk to you.”

  “I’ll call your teacher. Go on to the doc.”

  I walked to the health center. There’s only one, and it’s over on Rosa. I had to go around stupid Embassy Row again, and I checked in with the stead ID that didn’t so much say that I was Beck Garrison as that I was Paul Garrison’s daughter, because the money for my treatment would come out of his account. I got checked in, was told that my temperature was normal although my pulse was a little fast, and then the nurse said the doctor would come see me shortly.

  “Don’t make her hurry,” I said, and gave the
nurse my best most pathetic look. “I’m missing a calculus test. If I miss the whole thing she’ll let me make it up. If I only miss half, she’ll make me try to do it with half the time.”

  The nurse sighed sympathetically and closed the door.

  The tablet she left behind was locked, of course, but I’d watched her type in her password to look up my record and I got it right on the second try. I hit the button to search records and typed in LYNN MILLER.

  Her record opened. Footsteps were coming and I almost hit the LOCK key but they went on by. It had never been less than ten minutes between the nurse leaving and the doctor arriving, so hopefully today would not be a nasty surprise. I didn’t care about Lynn’s diagnosis; I just wanted to know who’d paid for it.

  Butterfield. Davis Butterfield. That was John’s father, John in my math class that I was missing. I actually knew this person. This next part might actually be easy.

  The bill was really high. What the hell had been wrong with her? I pulled up the details and saw that five people were treated, not just one, all with the same condition. On the same day, even. That was weird. Every single one had kidney failure requiring regenerative therapy.

  There was a brusque knock and the door swung open before I could lock the screen and put the tablet down. I did manage to clear the screen so no one would know what I’d been looking at, but I jumped at least a foot and I’m sure I looked extremely guilty, standing there with the tablet in my hand.

  “You’re not supposed to touch that,” the doctor said irritably.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to see how it felt in my hand. I’m hoping for a new gadget for my birthday.”

  She picked it up and gave me a suspicious glare, then started asking me about my symptoms. “Have you been slumming?” she asked.

  “What? It’s not an STD, I told my father—”

  She waved her hand impatiently. “I’m not accusing you of sleeping around,” she said. “I’m wondering where you’ve been eating.”

  “I ate at Primrose last night. Usually I eat at Gibbon’s.”

  “What else have you eaten or drunk in the last week?”