The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (54 page)

What can he want of me? He already holds the chitty on my life. All my labours are his. I have no reputation left, not under my real name. I bear only the memory of the heavens, and a tiny speck of certain knowledge about what once was.

It should be enough.

After a while, by way of apology, the cook removes my cooling lunch bowl and replaces it with a delicate porcelain plate bearing a honey-laden moon cake. I suspect him of humour, though the timing is hideously inappropriate.

“
Xie xie
,” I tell him in my Mandarin pidgin. He does not smile, but the lines around his eyes relax.

Still, I will not stoop to the tea.

Huang arrives to the sound of barking dogs. I stand behind a latticed window in my garden wall and look out into the alley. The gangster’s hydrogen-powered Mercedes is a familiar shade of Cherenkov blue. I doubt the aircraft paint his customizers use is hot, though.

There is a small pack of curs trailing his automobile. The driver steps out in a whirr of door motors which is as much noise as that car ever makes. He is a large man for a Chinese, tall and rugged, wearing the ubiquitous leather jacket and track pants of big money thugs from Berlin to Djakarta. His mirror shades have oddly thick frames, betraying a wealth of sensor data and computing power. I wonder if he ever removes them, or if they are implants. Life in this century has become a cheap 1980s science fiction novel.

The driver gives the dogs a long look which quiets them, then opens Huang’s door. The man himself steps out without any ceremony or further security. If there is air cover, or rooftop snipers, they are invisible to me.

Huang is small, with the compact strength of a wrestler. His face is a collapsed mass of wrinkles that makes his age impossible to guess. There are enough environmental poisons which can do that to a man without the help of time’s relentless decay. Today he wears a sharkskin jacket over a pale blue cheongsam. His eyes when he glances up to my lattice are the watery shade of light in rain.

I walk slowly through the courtyard. That is where Huang will meet me, beneath a bayberry tree on a stone bench with legs carved like lions.

He is not there when I take my seat. Giving instructions to the cook, no doubt. The pond occupies my attention while I wait. It is small, not more than two meters across at its longest axis. The rim is walled with rugged rocks that might have just been ejected from the Earth moments before the mason laid them. Nothing is that sharp-edged out in the Belt, not after a quarter billion years of collision, of dust, of rubbing against each other. The water is scummed over with a brilliant shade of green that strikes fear in the heart of anyone who ever has had responsibility for a biotic air recycling plant.

They say water is blue, but water is really nothing at all but light trapped before the eyes. It’s like glass, taking the colour of whatever it is laced with, whatever stands behind it, whatever shade is bent through its substance. Most people out in the Deep Dark have a mystical relationship with water. The very idea of oceans seems a divine improbability to them. As for me, my parents came from Samoa. I was born in Tacoma, and grew up on Puget Sound before finding my way Up. To me, it’s just water.

Still, this little pond choked with the wrong kind of life seems to say so much about everything that is wrong with Earth, with the Deep Dark, with the little damp sparks of colonies on Ceres and Mars and elsewhere. I wondered what would happen to the pond if I poured my blue paint out of its lead-lined bottles into the water.

“Your work holds fair,” says Huang. I did not hear him approach. Glancing down, I see his crepe-soled boat shoes, that could have come straight off some streetcorner vendor’s rack to cover his million dollar feet.

I meet his water-blue eyes. Pale, so pale, reflecting the colour of his golf shirt. “Thank you, sir.”

He looks at me a while. It is precisely the look an amah gives a slab of fish in the market. Finally he speaks again: “There have been inquiries.”

I reply without thinking. “About the radioactives?”

One eyebrow inches up. “Mmm?”

I am quiet now. I have abandoned our shared fiction for a moment, that pretense that I do not know he is poisoning thousands of homes worldwide through his artefact trade. Mistakes such as that can be fatal. That the entire present course of my life is fatal is not sufficient excuse for thoughtless stupidity.

Huang takes my silence as an answer. “Certain persons have come to me seeking a man of your description.”

With a shrug, I tell him, “I was famous once, for a little while.” One of history’s villains, in fact, in my moment of media glory.

“What you paid me to keep you . . . they have made an offer far more generous.”

I’d sold him my life, that strange, cold morning in a reeking teahouse in Sendai the previous year. Paid him in a substantial amount cash, labour and the last bare threads of my reputation in exchange for a quiet, peaceful penance and the release of obligation. Unfortunately, I could imagine why someone else would trouble to buy Huang out.

He was waiting for me to ask. I would not do that. What I would do was give him a reason not to send me away. “My handiwork meets your requirements, yes?” Reminding him of the hot paint, and the trail of liability which could eventually follow that blue glow back to its source.

Even gangsters who’d left any fear of law enforcement far behind could be sued in civil court.

“You might wish me to take this offer,” he says slowly.

“When has the dog ever had its choice of chains?”

A smile flits across Huang’s face before losing itself in the nest of wrinkles. “You have no desires in the matter?”

“Only to remain quietly in this house until our bargain is complete.”

Huang is silent a long, thoughtful moment. Then: “Money completes everything, spaceman.” He nods once before walking away,

It is difficult to threaten a man such as myself with no family, no friends, and no future. That must be a strange lesson for Huang.

I drift back to the latticed window. He is in the alley speaking to the empty air – an otic cell bead. A man like Huang wouldn’t have an implant. The dogs are quiet until he steps back into the blue Mercedes. They begin barking and wailing as the car slides away silent as dustfall.

It is then that I realize that the dog pack is a hologram, an extension of the car itself.

Until humans went into the Deep Dark, we never knew how kindly Earth truly was. A man standing on earthquake-raddled ground in the midst of the most violent hurricane is as safe as babe-in-arms compared to any moment of life in hard vacuum. The smallest five-jiăo pressure seal, procured low bid and installed by a bored maintech with a hangover, could fail and bring with it rapid, painful death.

The risk changes people, in ways most of them never realize. Friendships and hatreds are held equally close. Total strangers will share their last half-litre of air to keep one another alive just a little longer, in case rescue should show. Premeditated murder is almost unknown in the Deep Dark, though manslaughter is sadly common. Any fight can kill, even if just by diverting someone’s attention away from the environmentals at a critical moment.

So people find value in one another that was never been foreseen back on Earth. Only the managers and executives who work in the rock ports and colonies have kept the old, human habits of us-and-them, scheming, assassination of both character and body.

The question on my mind was whether it was an old enemy come for me, or someone from the Ceres Minerals Resources corporate hierarchy. Even setting aside the incalculable damage to our understanding of history, in ensuring the loss of the first verifiable non-human artefact, I’d also been the proximate cause of what many people chose to view as the loss of a billion tai kong yuan. Certain managers who would have preferred to exchange their white collars for bank accounts deeper than generations had taken my actions very badly.

Another Belt miner might have yanked my oxygen valve out of sheer, maddened frustration, but it took an angry salaryman to truly plot my ruin in a spreadsheet while smiling slowly. Here in Huang’s steel embrace I thought I’d managed my own ruin quite nicely. Yet someone was offering good money for me.

Oddly, Huang had made it all but my choice. Or seemed to, at any rate. Which implied he saw this inquiry as a matter of honour. Huang, like all his kind, was quite elastic in his reasoning about money, at least so long as it kept flowing, but implacable when it came to his notions of honour.

Even my honour, it would seem.

All of this was a very thin thread of logic from which to dangle. I could just keep painting shards until any one of several things killed me – radiation sickness, cancer, the old cook. Or I could tell Huang to break the deal he and I had made, and pass me back out of this house alive.

Given how much trouble I’d taken in order to surrender all control, there was something strangely alluring about being offered back the chitty on my life.

That night when the cook brought me the tea, I poured some into the tiny cup with no handles. He gave me a long, slow stare. “You go out?”

“With Mr Huang, yes,” I told him.

The cook grunted, then withdrew to the kitchen.

The tea was so bitter that for a moment I wondered if he’d brewed it with rat poison. Even as this thought faded, the cook came back with a second cup and poured it out for himself. He sat down opposite me, something else he’d never done. Then he drew a small mesh bag on a chain out from inside his grubby white t-shirt.

“See this, ah.” He tugged open the top of the bag. Out tumbled one of my little blue caltrop fragments. I could almost see it spark in his hand.

“You shouldn’t be holding that.”

The cook hefted the mesh bag. “Lead. No sick.”

I reached out and took the caltrop arm. It was just that, a single arm broken off below the body. I fancied it was warm to my touch. It was certainly very, very blue.

“Why?” I asked him.

He looked up at the ceiling and spread one hand in a slow wave, as if to indicate the limitless stars in the Deep Dark far above our heads. “We too small. World too big. This” – he shook his bag – “this time price.”

I tried to unravel the fractured English. “Time price?”

The cook nodded vigorously. “You buy time for everyone, everything.”

I sipped my tea and thought about what he’d told me. I’d
been
out in the Deep Dark. I’d touched the sky that wraps the world round, past the blue and into the black.

“Blue,” he said, interrupting my chain of thought. “We come from sea, we go to sky. Blue to blue, ah?”

Blue to blue. Life had crawled from the ocean’s blue waters to eventually climb past the wide blue sky. With luck, we’d carry forward to the dying blue at the end of time.

“Time,” I said, trying the word in my mouth. “Do you mean the future?”

The cook nodded vigorously. “Future, ah.”

Once I’d finished eating the magnificent duck he’d prepared, I trudged back to my workroom. I’d already bargained away almost all of my time, but I could create time for others, in glowing blue fragments. It didn’t matter who was looking for me. Huang would do as he pleased. My sins were so great they could never be washed away, not even in a radioactive rain.

I could spend what time was left to me bringing people like the old cook a little closer to heaven, one shard after another.

INCOMERS

Paul J. McAuley

Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984 and has gone on to be a frequent contributor to
Interzone
, as well as to markets such as
Asimov’s Science Fiction
,
SCI FICTION
,
Amazing
,
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
,
Skylife
,
The Third Alternative
,
When the Music’s Over
, and elsewhere.

McAuley is at the forefront of several of the most important subgenres in SF today, producing both “radical hard science fiction” and revamped and retooled widescreen space operas that have sometimes been called new space operas as well as dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future. He also writes fantasy and horror. His first novel,
Four Hundred Billion Stars
, won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his novel
Fairyland
won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His other books include the novels
Of the Fall
,
Eternal Light
, and
Pasquale’s Angel
,
Life on Mars
,
The Secret of Life
,
Whole Wide World
,
White Devils
,
Mind’s Eye
,
Players
, and
Cowboy Angels
.
Confluence
, his major trilogy of ambitious scope and scale set ten million years in the future, is comprised of the novels
Child of the River
,
Ancient of Days
, and
Shrine of Stars
. His short fiction has been collected in
The King of the Hill and Other Stories
,
The Invisible Country
, and
Little Machines
, and he is the co-editor, with Kim Newman, of an original anthology,
In Dreams
. His most recent book is a novel,
The Quiet War
; coming up is a new novel,
Gardens of the Sun
.

McAuley made his name as one of the best new space opera writers with novels such as
Four Hundred Billion Stars
and the Confluence trilogy, but in recent years he has created the Quiet War series as well, with stories such as “Second Skin,” “Sea Scene, With Monsters,” “The Assassination of Faustino Malarte,” and others, about the aftermath and the consequences of an interplanetary war that ravages the solar system.

In the quietly moving story that follows, he takes us to Rhea, Saturn’s second largest moon, to examine more of those consequences, the rather unexpected ones.

M
ARK
G
RIFFIN WAS
convinced that there was something suspicious about the herbalist.

“Tell me who he is, Sky. Some kind of pervert murderer, I bet.”

Sky Bolofo was a hacker who had filled the quantum processor of the large, red-framed spex that perched on his nose with all kinds of talents and tricks. Right now, he had a look of focussed concentration, and the left lens of his spex was silvered over as it displayed something to him. He said, “No problem. My face recognition program picked him up straight away, and right now I’m looking at his public page. His name is Ahlgren Rees. He lives right here in the old city, he sells herbs —”

“I can see that,” Mark said. “What else?”

“He also fixes up pets,” Sky said.

“What about his private files?” Mark said. “What about the real dirt?”

“No problem,” Sky said complacently, and started tapping his fingers on the chest of his jumper – he was using the virtual keyboard of his spex, which read the positioning of his fingers from the silver rings he wore on fingers and thumbs.

Jack Miyata, whose idea it had been to visit the produce market, had the sinking feeling that Mark had spied an opportunity for some serious mischief. He said, “The man sells herbs. There’s nothing especially interesting or weird in that.”

“If he isn’t weird,” Mark said, “why is he living with the tweaks? He’s either crazy, or he’s up to no good.”

The man in question sat behind a small table at the edge of the market, selling bundles of fresh herbs and a dozen different types of herb tea whose virtues were advertised by handlettered signs. He was definitely an incomer. Native Xambans who’d been born and raised in Rhea’s weak gravity were tall and skinny, and most of them were Nordic, with pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. The herbalist was a compactly-built man of indeterminate middle-age (in the third decade of the twenty-fourth century, this meant anything between forty and a hundred), not much taller than Sky Bolofo, and had skin the colour of old teak. He was also completely hairless. He didn’t even have eyelashes. As far as Jack was concerned, that was the only unusual thing about him, but Mark had other ideas.

Jack had brought his two friends to the produce market because he thought it was a treasure house of marvels, but Mark and Sky thought it was smelly, horribly crowded, and, quite frankly, revoltingly primitive. When makers could spin anything you wanted from yeast and algae, why would anyone want to eat the meat of real live animals like fish and chickens and dwarfed goats, especially as they would have to kill them first? Kill and gut them and Ghod knew what else. As they wandered between stalls and displays of strange flowers and fruits and vegetables, red and green and golden-brown streamers of dried waterweed, tanks of fish and shrimp, caged birds and rats, and bottle vivariums in which stag beetles lumbered like miniature rhinoceroses through jungles of moss and fern, Mark and Sky made snide comments about the weird people and the weirder things they were selling, pretended to retch at especially gross sights, and generally made it clear that this was very far from their idea of fun.

“Do you really think I want to know anything at all about people who eat things like that?” Mark had said to Jack, pointing to a wire cage containing rats spotted like leopards or striped like tigers.

“I think they keep them as pets,” Jack had said, feeling the tips of his ears heat up in embarrassment because the tall, slender woman who owned the stall was definitely looking at them.

“I had a pet once,” Mark had said, meeting the woman’s gaze. “It was a cute little monkey that could take a shower all by itself. Quite unlike these disease-ridden vermin.”

Which had made Sky crack up, and Jack blush even more.

The three of them, Jack, Mark and Sky, were all the same age, sixteen, went to the same school, and lived in the same apartment complex in the new part of Xamba, the largest city on Rhea, Saturn’s second largest moon. Their parents were engineers, security personnel, and diplomats who had come there to help in the reconstruction and expansion of the Outer Colonies after the Quiet War. Unlike most city states in the Saturn system, Xamba had remained neutral during the Quiet War. Afterwards, the Three Powers Alliance which now governed every city and orbital habitat in the Outer Colonies had settled the bulk of its administration on peaceful, undamaged Rhea, and had built a new city above the old.

Fifteen years later, the city was still growing. Jack’s parents, Mariko and Davis, were thermal engineers who were helping to construct a plant to tap the residual heat of the moon’s core and provide power for a hundred new apartment complexes, factories, and farms. They’d moved to Rhea just two months ago. In that short time, Jack had explored much of the old and new parts of the city, and had also completed a pressure suit training course and taken several long hikes through the untouched wilderness in the southern half of the big crater in which Xamba was located, and from which it took its name. He’d even climbed to the observatory at the top of the crater’s big central peak. Although both Mark and Sky had been living here much longer, like many incomers neither of them had so much as stepped foot on the surface of the moon, or even visited the old part of the city. Jack had been eager to show them the produce market, his favourite part of old Xamba, but now he was feeling miserable because they had been so rude about it. He had been about to give up and suggest they leave when Mark had spotted the herbalist.

“That’s obviously a front,” Mark said. “How’s it going, Sky?”

Sky, sounding distracted and distant, said he was working on it.

“Maybe he’s a spy. Selling herbs is his cover – what he’s actually doing is keeping watch for terrorists and so-called freedom fighters. Or maybe he’s a double agent. Maybe he’s gone over to the side of the tweaks,” Mark said, beginning to get into his little fantasy. “Maybe he’s feeding our side false information to sabotage the reconstruction. There was that blow-out at the spaceport last month. They said it was an accident, but maybe someone sabotaged an airlock and let the vacuum in.”

“Air escapes into a vacuum,” Jack said, “not the other way around.”

“Who cares which direction the vacuum flows?” Mark said carelessly.

“And anyway, they said it was an accident.”

Mark raised his eyebrows. They were thick, and met over the bridge of his nose. He was a stocky boy with pale skin, jet black hair and a perpetual scowl who looked a lot like his policeman father. His mother was in the police too, in charge of security at the spaceport. “Of course they
said
that, but it doesn’t mean it really was an accident. What’s the word, Sky? What is this fellow hiding?”

“There’s a problem,” Sky said. His fingers were fluttering frantically over his chest, and he had a look of such intense concentration that he seemed to be cross-eyed.

“Talk to me,” Mark said.

“He has really heavy security behind his public page. I had to back out in a hurry, before I tripped an alarm. Right now I’m making sure I didn’t leave anything that could lead back to me.”

Mark said, “So what you’re saying is that Ahlgren Rees – if that’s his real name – is hiding something.”

Sky shrugged.

Mark said, his eyes shining with sudden excitement, “I bet you thought I was kidding, but all along I had a feeling there was something wrong with this guy. It’s what the Blob —” that was his nickname for his rotund and none too bright father — “calls gut instinct. My gut told me that Ahlgren Rees is a wrong one, my man Sky has just confirmed it, and now it’s up to all of us to find out why. It’s our
duty
.”

Jack should have told Mark that he wasn’t going to have anything to do with his silly fantasy, but his need for his new friends to like him (which was why he’d brought them to the market in the first place) was stronger than his conscience. Also, it was the school holidays, and his parents were spending most of their time at the site of the new power plant, a hundred kilometers northwest of the city, and were only at home on weekends, so he was pretty much on his own for most of the time. There was no way that the herb seller, Ahlgren Rees was either a spy or a criminal, so what harm could simply following him about actually do?

Jack spent much of the next three days following Ahlgren Rees, sometimes with Mark, sometimes on his own (Sky Bolofo, spooked by the experience of running up against Ahlgren Rees’s electronic watchdogs, had made a weak excuse about having to do some extra tuition for the upcoming new school year). It wasn’t hard; in fact, it was a lot of fun. The herbalist spent much of the day at the stall in the produce market, or tending the little garden where he grew his herbs, or simply sitting outside the door of his apartment, a one-room efficiency on a terrace directly above the market, drinking tea or homemade lemonade and watching people go by, but he also liked to take long walks, and every time Jack followed him, his route was different. Jack saw more of the old city in those three days than he had in the past two months.

The old part of the city was buried inside the eastern rimwall of the huge crater, and some of its chambers had diamond endwalls facing what was generally reckoned to be one of the most classically beautiful views in all of Saturn’s family of moons, across slumped terraces and fans of ice rubble towards the crater’s central peak which rose up at the edge of the close, curved horizon. Inside the old city’s chambers, apartments and shops and cafes and workshops and gardens were piled on top of each other in steep, terraced cliffs, linked by steep paths, chutes, cableways and chairlifts to the long narrow parks of trees and lawns and skinny lakes that were laid out on the chamber floors. There was no shortage of water on Rhea, which was essentially a ball of ice one and a half thousand kilometres in diameter wrapped around a small rocky core. A series of long, narrow lakes looped between several of the chambers, busy with skiffs and canoes paddling between floating islands and rafts and pontoons, and the main pathways were crowded with cycles and pedicabs and swarms of pedestrians.

The old part of Xamba was a busy, bustling place, and Jack had no problem blending into the crowds as he trailed Ahlgren Rees through walkways, parks, markets, malls, and plazas, even though most of its inhabitants were tall, skinny Outers, genetically engineered so that they could comfortably live in microgravity without the medical implants that Jack and every other incomer needed in order to stop their bones turning to chalk lace, their hearts swelling like pumped-up basketballs with excess fluid, and a host of other problems. Jack even plucked up the courage to chat with the woman behind the counter of the cafe where Ahlgren Rees ate his lunch and breakfast, which is where he’d learned that the herbalist was originally from Greater Brazil, where he had worked in the emergency relief services as a paramedic, and had moved to Rhea two years ago. He seemed well-liked. He always stopped to talk to his neighbours when he met them as he went about his errands, had long conversations with people who stopped at his stall. He was a regular at the café, and at several bars in various parts of the city. His only money seemed to come from selling herbs and herb tea and fixing broken pets.