Writers of the Future Volume 28: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

by L. Ron Hubbard

  The plastic at the edges of the Patch was supposed to be small, free-floating particles, broken down from years of drifting in the Pacific. She had felt the increased drag on the boat as she entered the slurry of debris earlier that night. The bigger stuff, where she hoped to hide, was in the center, sometimes piled high like icebergs; at least that’s what she’d been told. She imagined navigating amongst great mounds of plastic, perhaps lodging her boat beneath an overhang that would screen her from the air.

  A crash at the prow caused the boat to lurch to port. The motor screamed as its blades lifted from the water. She whipped the wheel, overcompensating, but managed to straighten the boat as it rocked once before leveling back. A wave of cold water and plastic particles washed over her feet, chilling them. She’d taken on water that time.

  The thought of capsizing, of falling into the ocean at night, in black water filled with garbage, made her shrivel inside. Three days ago, hiding in a boat in the middle of the Pacific Patch seemed like a good plan. She was too tired, now, to tell whether the idea even made sense. Half the noise in her head was the buzz of sleep deprivation.

  Within half an hour the overcast sky lightened enough for her to see the ocean’s surface. As much as she had prepared for it, she was still shocked: the boat scudded across an endless mass of floating refuse. She had imagined bottles and objects of all kinds, and yet here there was nothing so complete. It was a thick stew of particles, washed-out, pale pieces of plastic, none bright, all faded together into a dull gray-white. The huge swells of the ocean rose and fell, but instead of waves of water they looked to her more like the undulations of an earthquake.

  Her implant buzzed, shattering her thoughts. Who could reach her out here? With great reluctance, she punched the responder on her neck and heard: “Surface boat, you look like a WR300. Can you hear me?”

  In English, and he knew the model of her boat. “Who is this?”

  “You are about to be intercepted. Can you hear me? You are about to be intercepted.”

  “Who are you? I don’t see any pursuit on my navs.”

  “The junk is blocking your navs. I can see their blip.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Head for the cliffs. It’s your only chance.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?”

  “Look west of you.”

  She looked through the salt-stained windshield. It was light enough to see that what she had taken for a cloudbank on the horizon was actually a pale cliff, not that far away. Who ever thought garbage could pile so high?

  “Okay, I see the cliff. But you’ve blown my cover.”

  “They probably aren’t monitoring phone frequencies. They don’t have to. You’ve got a Wave Jack on your boat.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve got it on my screen.” The implant was silent for a moment. “I used to install them.”

  Her heart raced. The boat had radar warp, but if there was a bug on board . . .

  “Change your course. Head for the cliffs. Run your boat directly under the highest point. You hear? The highest point.”

  Frantically, she scanned the horizon. “I still don’t see any interception.”

  “They’re closing fast.” He sounded exasperated.

  “How do I know you’re not setting me up?”

  “On your present course, you’ll find out in about three minutes.”

  The line went dead. She keyed the reset, but nothing.

  Damn. She wasn’t changing course for some anonymous Good Samaritan. She had seen that game too many times. Still, why would he have told her about the bug? With an anxious glance at the debris through which she plowed, some of it now sizable, she set the boat on autopilot and dashed below, frantically opening cabinets and pulling out drawers. Her initial search had been thorough, but if the bug had been planted afterward, the dealer could have made a tidy sum selling the information to the Old Buddha tong.

  The boat crashed, and the impact threw her to the floor. She felt the prow lift for a breathless moment, the engine scream and then the impact as the boat fell back into the water. On the floor of the cabin, on all fours, she thought she was going to be sick.

  She scrambled back to the wheel. Lumps and piles of multicolored junk stretched in front of the boat. She also saw on her navs a green dot on an intercept course.

  In cold despair, she turned the boat toward the cliffs. Okay, okay, she thought to her anonymous caller. You were right.

  Why did she always have trouble trusting the good guys? If she had turned earlier, she might have made it. If that were a tong boat in pursuit, then they were equipped with shallow water torpedoes, and doubtless she was already in range. Even if she rammed the boat under the wall of garbage, they could locate her with the bug.

  And what could her mysterious voice do about it? Where was his boat? She looked back at the navs screen. Fat chance of help.

  The impacts on the hull were constant now. The boat was taking a beating. A long trash reef floated directly ahead, like a giant caterpillar held together with fish netting. She’d have to go around.

  A clap in the distance, and water spouted ahead. Artillery shells. They were trying to head her off.

  She lost precious seconds skirting the caterpillar. Then the far end of the mass took a direct hit. Water and Styrofoam rained down on her boat.

  “Aim north a few degrees. You’ll see a cave.”

  She had left the line open. “They’ll torpedo me broadside!”

  “Not in that junk, they won’t.”

  Weaving left and right she dodged the biggest pieces which lay strewn across the water like boulders on a valley floor. Another crack and an impact crater blossomed in the cliff ahead of her. She looked up. So they want me alive, she thought.

  The boat lurched, and she barely kept her grip on the wheel. The solid wall loomed perilously close. Drawing herself up, she prepared to collide head-on when she spotted the cavern, more like a dark crevice that rose from the water in the side of the speckled cliff.

  Without time to think, she corrected her course and held her breath that they would not shell the boat in the last moments it was exposed. Perhaps they thought she was trapped.

  The cavern engulfed her. Half blind in the abrupt shadow, she peered ahead for passage through the mottled walls. Seeing none, she killed the motor and skidded across the calm surface. It was a dead end. The boat was going too fast. In her last moments, she searched for a sign of her mysterious friend among the crags and ledges of the chamber, but he wasn’t there. She would be taken, after all, if the collision didn’t kill her first.

  She thought to reverse the motor, but there was no time. Gripping the wheel, she grimaced, and the boat smacked into the far wall. The sound was like a million plastic cups breaking at once. The steering wheel shattered in her hands and she flew forward against the shaft. Her head hit the instrument panel.

  Silence replaced the roar of the motor. For a moment, she thought the shaft of the wheel had penetrated her chest, but it had gone between her right side and her arm. Her jacket was torn, and her side was hurt; how much, she couldn’t tell.

  Pushing herself back from the shaft, she blinked away the spots and saw on a sloping ledge near the boat a figure in what looked like a gray diving suit. He gestured with both hands, urgently. Unable to think clearly, she grabbed her backpack and windbreaker and stumbled to the side of the boat. She put her hand on the gunwale and tried to jump, though it seemed that she merely flung herself overboard, aiming for what looked like a solid surface.

  Her feet went through the plastic. For a moment she felt as if she had jumped onto a cloud. Crying out, she threw her arms wide, grasping for anything, and felt the frigid water on her feet and legs. It was her arms that kept her from slipping down all the way into the sea.

  A rope fell across her. Grateful for an
ything solid, she grabbed it, half climbed and was half pulled toward the ledge on which the figure stood.

  The strange man reached down for her. He wore a skin of mottled gray plastic, a kind of camouflage that rendered him almost invisible except for his brown beard and goggles. A flat black case hung about his neck. Definitely weird, but what choice did she have? She gave him her hand, and he pulled her the rest of the way onto the ledge. The sensation was like being pulled up through a bakery crust.

  “You’re hurt,” he said in English.

  She looked down and saw the rent in her jacket under her right arm where she was bleeding and hoped she hadn’t broken a rib. “I’m okay.”

  “Keep your arm pressed against it. We’ve got to move.”

  She looked back. “My windbreaker.” The blue jacket lay sprawled on the plastic, half of it fallen in the hole where she had leaped from the boat.

  “They’ll think you drowned,” the man said, rapidly smoothing with his gloved hands the gouges in the plastic she had made getting onto the ledge.

  The roar of a motor sounded outside the opening.

  “Quick. Keep hold of the rope in case you fall.” He turned and sprinted with a kind of hopping motion up a path through a narrow crevice. His shoes were big platter-like things, resembling pictures she had seen of snowshoes.

  Liyang followed, gripping the rope with one hand and the backpack with the other. The ground wobbled, the result of her sea legs, and she threw her arms about, but she did not fall.

  He shouted down, “Try not to catch yourself with your hands or touch the walls.”

  Behind them, through the tunnel, she heard the rumble of a powerful motor and voices shouting in Chinese, but she could not make out what they were saying.

  She managed one foot in front of the next through mushy debris that often broke at her touch. The passageway meandered. They circumvented a smooth gray boulder, jumped a fissure and crawled beneath the drape of a fishing net. At last, a light appeared above them.

  The man held up one hand and they stopped just as an explosion rocked them from underneath. Air and debris shot up the tunnel. Liyang steadied herself against the wall, despite the warning, and hoped the tunnel would not collapse.

  “Too bad,” her companion said. “We could have used that boat.”

  “Why would they blow it up?” In her long, desperate race to the Patch, she had bonded with the small cabin cruiser and now felt an odd sense of bereavement.

  “They know there are people out here. They don’t want to leave us anything.”

  “It could have been towed, or . . .”

  He shook his head and motioned her forward.

  They emerged onto a bizarre snowscape made up of a jillion faded colors. Solid outcroppings thrust into the sky like miniature mountains while cracks and holes perforated the surfaces below. A few ragged sea birds perched atop some of the mounds. She had seen pictures of arctic wastes. That was what the scene before her resembled except for the colors, and, of course, it wasn’t cold.

  Sweating from the climb and weak in the knees, she sat heavily, catching her breath. The ground was more solid than she expected.

  The man squatted in front of her. “Adam,” he said, proffering a gloved hand and grinning as if the whole incident had been contrived for her amusement.

  “Liyang,” she answered, gasping for breath and taking the hand. “I had no idea.”

  “No one does. Welcome to the Poly Islands.”

  “Poly Islands?”

  He spread his arms as if encompassing the whole of the island. “Polyethylene, polyvinyl, polypropylene, polystyrene, polycarbonate—need I go on?”

  “It’s amazing. What holds it together?”

  “Actually, it’s not held together very well, but in answer to your question, it’s bound by government bungling.”

  Liyang gave him a blank look.

  “Do you remember the short-lived nation of California, the one that was going to address all the ecological problems of the planet? Among their more modest projects was cleaning up the Pacific Ocean. They dropped hundreds of small buoys into the Patch, each one transmitting a type of velox wave that was supposed to cause the polycarbonates to release their lighter gasses and sink. What happened, instead, was that in this environment the molecules became excited and polymerized further, binding them closer to one another. By the time they realized their mistake, they had been conquered by the Alaskan Coalition, which wasn’t about to waste a cent on the environment. And so the little buoys were left in the ocean, beeping away. The nation of California may be no longer, but these islands live on, monuments to their good faith and incompetency.”

  “You sound like a professor.”

  He inclined his head and waved an arm in a mock bow. “Guilty as charged. And this is my new nav-com by which I located your boat,” he said, tapping the flat case that hung by a strap from his shoulders. “It’s been rigged to run on static electricity which, I might add, we have here in abundance.”

  “But you look like a lunatic.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. It was a natural laugh that, for all his posturing, seemed genuine and uncomplicated. She tried to make out his face, beyond the beard and goggles, and wondered if he could be trusted.

  “You’re a bit banged up, but your side doesn’t seem to be bleeding anymore.”

  “No. It’s not bad.”

  “That’s a pretty good bruise on your forehead.”

  She felt her right temple. “I’ve had worse.” And then she felt the hard spot on her neck. “My implant seems to be okay.”

  “Not on the plastic. It’s useless here.”

  She sighed. “Other than that, I’m okay.”

  “Very well. I’m on my way somewhere. You’ll have to come with me.”

  “Have to?”

  “Ah, do not leap to conclusions, my dear. I assure you, it is for your own good. You cannot survive in the wild Polys by yourself.”

  “Where are you going? A research station?”

  “You could call it that,” he said with a subdued grin. “But I’m late, now, so we’ll have to hurry. Just step where I step. Sorry, I don’t have an extra pair of snows. And don’t touch the plastics unless you have to. You don’t have a P-suit on, so you can cut yourself. For instance, don’t sit down like that. Those trousers won’t last the day.”

  She got to her feet. He extended his hand in an offer to carry her backpack, and she reflexively clutched it to herself.

  “Sorry,” she said, embarrassed by her obvious gesture. “It’s all I have left.”

  He eyed the pack. “Your survival, now, will depend on others. You’ll have to give them something.”

  Her grip tightened on the strap.

  He spread his hands. “I’m just telling you so you won’t be caught by surprise. It would have been better if we had saved your boat. Still, Crab will expect presents.”

  “Crab?”

  “Come on.”

  Following in Adam’s footsteps, she quickly adjusted to walking on the jumbled surface. Only once did her foot punch through, cutting the fabric of her trousers, but not her leg. They soon came to a compacted trail where the “ground” was smoother, if not flat. Adam took off the snowshoes and strapped them on his back. The surface here had the feel of something hollow. It was, she imagined, like walking on ice.

  As the traveling eased, she considered the loss of her boat. It was a blow, yet she had successfully evaded capture. Better still, they thought she had drowned, and there would be no further pursuit. And she still had the chips. Having come ashore on what seemed like another planet, if she could just survive long enough to get those chips to a black market, her plan still seemed feasible.

  The path wound through debris, skirting the highest outcroppings. Her guide seemed to be heading toward a smokestack-looking spir
e, plastic she assumed, that leaned at about forty-five degrees. Sure enough, a makeshift stairway, cut into the plastic, opened at its base.

  “We call these ‘hatch caves.’” He started down the irregular, hard-packed steps. “Again, don’t touch the walls unless you have to. There are sharp particles embedded in the plastic.”

  Sunlight sparkled through the plastic fragments and gave her the feeling of descending into a glacier. Yet the passageway soon narrowed, giving her a rush of claustrophobia. She hurried down the last few steps. At the bottom, the stairs opened into a big oval chamber with a flat wooden floor, and she gratefully stepped onto its smooth surface. They had, apparently, descended onto the deck of a boat.

  Walls of debris hid the edges of the deck, even the ship’s railing. They crossed the wooden floor to a doorway, a metal oval beyond which a second pair of stairs led down into the ship’s interior. Adam wiped his feet on a large mat just inside the door, and Liyang did likewise. As they descended, she heard a voice below in English.

  At the bottom of the stairs another oval doorway opened into a long room lighted by electricity. Men and women sat on tatami mats in rows on each side of a center aisle facing one another. She stepped inside, and the odor of unwashed bodies struck her with physical force. Everyone was naked, or near naked, wearing what appeared to be only underwear. Their clothes, suits like Adam wore, were folded next to them. They sat in the “perfect” posture, some in a full lotus.

  In front of each person, or to one side, sat a plate with knife and fork and an empty wine glass. Some of the plates were still half full. They had just dined on fish—raw fish.

  The scene confused her. While it had the look of an ashram meeting, the wine, even the raw fish, were not traditional Hindi.

  “Om, Crab,” said Adam, placing the palms of his hands together and bowing to a wizened old man sitting at the far end of the room. His skin was a rich brown, but at first, Liyang couldn’t tell his ethnicity, perhaps Southeast Asian, perhaps Indian. His loincloth and turban definitely said Indian.