The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Read online

  “There are seventeen thousand people on Finisterra,” said Dinh. “Men, women, children, old people. There’s a town—they call it the Lost City, la ciudad perdida. Some of the families on Finisterra can trace their roots back six generations.” She gave a little laugh, with no humor in it. “They should call it la ciudad muerta. They’re the walking dead, all seventeen thousand of them. Even though no one alive on Finisterra today will live to see it die. Already the crops are starting to fail. Already more old men and old women die every summer, as the summers get hotter and drier. The children of the children who are born today will have to move up into the hills as it gets too hot to grow crops on the lower slopes; but the soil isn’t as rich up there, so many of those crops will fail, too. And their children’s children … won’t live to be old enough to have children of their own.”

  “Surely someone will rescue them before then,” Bianca said.

  “Who?” Dinh asked. “The Consilium? Where would they put them? The vacuum balloon stations and the elevator gondolas are already overcrowded. As far as the rest of Sky is concerned, the Finisterrans are ‘malcontents’ and ‘criminal elements. ’ Who’s going to take them in?”

  “Then Valadez is doing them a favor,” Bianca said.

  Dinh started. “Emmanuel Valadez is running your operation?”

  “It’s not my operation,” Bianca said, trying to keep her voice level. “And I didn’t ask his first name.”

  Dinh fell into the window seat. “Of course it would be,” she said. “Who else would they …” She trailed off, looking out the west window, toward the killing ground.

  Then, suddenly, she turned back to Bianca.

  “What do you mean, ‘doing them a favor’?” she said.

  “Finisterra,” Bianca said. “He’s poaching Finisterra.”

  Dinh stared at her. “My God, Bianca! What about the people?”

  “What about them?” asked Bianca. “They’d be better off somewhere else—you said that yourself.”

  “And what makes you think Valadez will evacuate them?”

  “He’s a thief, not a mass murderer.”

  Dinh gave her a withering look. “He is a murderer, Bianca. His father was a warden, his mother was the wife of the alcalde of Ciudad Perdida. He killed his own stepfather, two uncles, and three brothers. They were going to execute him—throw him over the edge—but a warden airboat picked him up. He spent two years with them, then killed his sergeant and three other wardens, stole their ship and sold it for a ticket off-world. He’s probably the most wanted man on Sky.”

  She shook her head and, unexpectedly, gave Bianca a small smile.

  “You didn’t know any of that when you took the job, did you?”

  Her voice was full of pity. It showed on her face as well, and suddenly Bianca couldn’t stand to look at it. She got up and went to the east window. The rain was lighter now, the lightning less frequent.

  She thought back to her simulations, her plans for lifting Finisterra up into the waiting embrace of the skyhook: the gasbags swelling, the zaratán lifting, first slowly and then with increasing speed, toward the upper reaches of Sky’s atmosphere. But now her inner vision was not the ghost-shape of a projection but a living image—trees cracking in the cold, water freezing, blood boiling from the ground in a million, million tiny hemorrhages.

  She saw her mother’s house in Punta Aguila—her sister-in-law’s house, now: saw its windows rimed with frost, the trees in the courtyard gone brown and sere. She saw the Mercado de los Maculados beneath a blackening sky, the awnings whipped away by a thin wind, ice-cold, bone-dry.

  He killed that Finisterran balloonist, she thought. He was ready to kill Dinh. He’s capable of murder.

  Then she shook her head.

  Killing one person, or two, to cover up a crime, was murder, she thought. Killing seventeen thousand people by deliberate asphyxiation—men, women, and children—wasn’t murder, it was genocide.

  She took her cup of coffee from the table, took a sip and put it down again.

  “Thank you for the coffee,” she said. She turned to go.

  “How can you just let him do this?” Dinh demanded. “How can you help him do this?”

  Bianca turned on her. Dinh was on her feet; her fists were clenched, and she was shaking. Bianca stared her down, her face as cold and blank as she could make it. She waited until Dinh turned away, throwing herself into a chair, staring out the window.

  “I saved your life,” Bianca told her. “That was more than I needed to do. Even if I did believe that Valadez meant to kill every person on Finisterra, which I don’t, that wouldn’t make it my problem.”

  Dinh turned farther away.

  “Listen to me,” Bianca said, “because I’m only going to explain this once.”

  She waited until Dinh, involuntarily, turned back to face her.

  “This job is my one chance,” Bianca said. “This job is what I’m here to do. I’m not here to save the world. Saving the world is a luxury for spoiled extrañado children like you and Fry. It’s a luxury I don’t have.”

  She went to the door, and knocked on the window to signal the firija guard.

  “I’ll get you out of here if I can,” she added, over her shoulder. “But that’s all I can do. I’m sorry.”

  Dinh hadn’t moved.

  As the firija opened the door, Bianca heard Dinh stir.

  “Erasmus Fry?” she asked. “The naturalist?”

  “That’s right.” Bianca glanced back, and saw Dinh looking out the window again.

  “I’d like to see him,” Dinh said.

  “I’ll let him know,” said Bianca.

  The guard closed the door behind her.

  7. THE FACE IN THE MIRROR

  Lightning still played along Encantada’s dorsal ridge, but here on the eastern edge the storm had passed. A clean, electric smell was in the air, relief from the stink of the killing ground. Bianca returned to her own bungalow through rain that had died to a drizzle.

  She called Fry.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Miss Dinh,” Bianca said. “She wants to see you.”

  There was silence on the other end. Then, “You told her I was here?”

  “Sorry,” Bianca said insincerely. “It just slipped out.”

  More silence.

  “You knew her better than you told Valadez, didn’t you,” she said.

  She heard Fry sigh. “Yes.”

  “She seemed upset,” Bianca said. “You should go see her.”

  Fry sighed again, but said nothing.

  “I’ve got work to do,” Bianca said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  She ended the call.

  She was supposed to make a presentation tomorrow, to Valadez and some of the poachers’ crew bosses, talking about what they would be doing to Finisterra. It was mostly done; the outline was straightforward, and the visuals could be autogenerated from the design files. She opened the projection file and poked at it for a little while, but found it hard to concentrate.

  Suddenly to Bianca her clothes smelled of death, of Dinh’s dead companion and the slaughtered zaratán and the death she’d spared Dinh from and the eventual deaths of all the marooned Finisterrans. She stripped them off and threw them in the recycler; bathed, washed her hair, changed into a nightgown.

  They should call it la ciudad muerta.

  Even though no one who’s alive on Finisterra today will live to see it die.

  She turned off the light, Dinh’s words echoing in her head, and tried to sleep. But she couldn’t; she couldn’t stop thinking. Thinking about what it felt like to be forced to live on, when all you had to look forward to was death.

  She knew that feeling very well.

  What Bianca had on Pablo’s wife Mélia, the instrument-maker’s daughter, was ten years of age and a surreptitious technical education. What Mélia had on Bianca was a keen sense of territory and the experience of growing up in a house full of sisters. Bianca continu
ed to live in the house after Mélia moved in, even though it was Mélia’s house now, and continued, without credit, to help her brother with the work that came in. But she retreated over the years, step by step, until the line was drawn at the door of the fourth-floor room that had been hers ever since she was a girl; and she buried herself in her blueprints and her calculations, and tried to pretend she didn’t know what was happening.

  And then there was the day she met her other sister-in-law. Her moro sister-in-law. In the Mercado de los Maculados, where the aliens and the extrañados came to sell their trinkets and their medicines. A dispensation from the ayuntamiento had recently opened it to Christians.

  Zahra al-Halim, a successful architect, took Bianca to her home, where Bianca ate caramels and drank blackberry tea and saw her older brother for the first time in more than twenty years, and tried very hard to call him Walíd and not Jesús. Here was a world that could be hers, too, she sensed, if she wanted it. But like Jesús-Walíd, she would have to give up her old world to have it. Even if she remained a Christian she would never see the inside of a church again. And she would still never be accepted by the engineers’ guild.

  She went back to the Nazario house that evening, ignoring the barbed questions from Mélia about how she had spent her day; she went back to her room, with its blueprints and its models, and the furnishings she’d had all her life. She tried for a little while to work, but was unable to muster the concentration she needed to interface with the system.

  Instead she found herself looking into the mirror.

  And looking into the mirror Bianca focused not on the fragile trapped shapes of the flying machines tacked to the wall behind her, spread out and pinned down like so many chloroformed butterflies, but on her own tired face, the stray wisps of dry, brittle hair, the lines that years of captivity had made across her forehead and around her eyes. And, meeting those eyes, it seemed to Bianca that she was looking not into the mirror but down through the years of her future, a long, straight, narrow corridor without doors or branches, and that the eyes she was meeting at the end of it were the eyes of Death, her own, su propria muerte, personal, personified.

  Bianca got out of bed, turned on the lights. She picked up her pocket system. She wondered if she should call the wardens.

  Instead she unerased, yet again, the sketch she’d made earlier of the simple alcohol-powered dirigible. She used the Nazario family automation to fill it out with diagrams and renderings, lists of materials, building instructions, maintenance and preflight checklists.

  It wasn’t much, but it was better than Dinh’s balloon.

  Now she needed a way for Dinh to get it to the Finisterrans.

  For that—thinking as she did so that there was some justice in it—she turned back to the system Valadez had given her. This was the sort of work the extrañado automation was made for, no constraints other than those imposed by function, every trick of exotic technology available to be used. It was a matter of minutes for Bianca to sketch out her design; an hour or so to refine it, to trim away the unnecessary pieces until what remained was small enough to fit in the valise she’d left with Dinh. The only difficult part was getting the design automation to talk to the bungalow’s fabricator, which was meant for clothes and furniture and domestic utensils. Eventually she had to use her pocket system to go out on Sky’s local net—hoping as she did so that Valadez didn’t have anyone monitoring her—and spend her own funds to contract the conversion out to a consulting service, somewhere out on one of the elevator gondolas.

  Eventually she got it done, though. The fabricator spit out a neat package, which Bianca stuffed under the bed. Tomorrow she could get the valise back and smuggle the package to Dinh, along with the dirigible designs.

  But first she had a presentation to make to Valadez. She wondered what motivated him. Nothing so simple as money—she was sure of that, even if she had trouble believing he was the monster Dinh had painted him to be. Was it revenge he was after? Revenge on his family, revenge on his homeland?

  That struck Bianca a little too close to home.

  She sighed and turned out the lights.

  8. THE PROFESSIONALS

  By morning the storm had passed and the sky was blue again, but the inside of Valadez’s bungalow was dark, to display the presenters’ projections to better advantage. Chairs for Valadez and the human crew bosses were arranged in a rough semicircle; with them were the aliens whose anatomy permitted them to sit down. Ismaíl and the other firija stood in the back, their curled arms and the spindly legs of their machines making their silhouettes look, to Bianca, incongruously like those of potted plants.

  Then the fronds stirred, suddenly menacing. Bianca shivered. Who was really in charge?

  No time to worry about that now. She straightened up and took out her pocket system.

  “In a moment,” she began, pitching her voice to carry to the back of the room, “Mr. Fry will be going over the zaratán’s metabolic processes and our plans to stimulate the internal production of hydrogen. What I’m going to be talking about is the engineering work required to make that extra hydrogen do what we need it to do.”

  Bianca’s pocket system projected the shape of a hundred-kilometer zaratán, not Finisterra or any other particular individual but rather an archetype, a sort of Platonic ideal. Points of pink light brightened all across the projected zaratán’s back, each indicating the position of a sphincter that would have to be cut out and replaced with a mechanical valve.

  “Our primary concern during the preparation phase has to be these external vents. However, we also need to consider the internal trim and ballast valves … .”

  As she went on, outlining the implants and grafts, surgeries and mutilations needed to turn a living zaratán into an animatronic corpse, a part of her was amazed at her own presumption, amazed at the strong, confident, professional tone she was taking.

  It was almost as if she were a real engineer.

  The presentation came to a close. Bianca drew in a deep breath, trying to maintain her veneer of professionalism. This part wasn’t in her outline.

  “And then, finally, there is the matter of evacuation,” she said.

  In the back of the room, Ismaíl stirred. “Evacuation?” he asked—the first word anyone had uttered through the whole presentation.

  Bianca cleared her throat. Red stars appeared along the imaginary zaratán’s southeastern edge, approximating the locations of Ciudad Perdida and the smaller Finisterran villages.

  “Finisterra has a population of between fifteen and twenty thousand, most of them concentrated in these settlements here,” she began. “Using a ship the size of the Lupita Jeréz, it should take roughly—”

  “Not your problem, Miss Nazario.” Valadez waved a hand. “In any case, there won’t be any evacuations.”

  Bianca looked at him, appalled; and it must have shown on her face because Valadez laughed.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Miss Nazario. We’ll set up field domes over Ciudad Perdida and the central pueblos, to tide them over till we get them where they’re going. If they keep their heads they should be fine.” He laughed again. “Fucking hell,” he said, shaking his head. “What did you think this was about? You didn’t think we were going to kill twenty thousand people, did you?”

  Bianca didn’t answer. She shut the projection off and sat down, putting her pocket system away. Her heart was racing.

  “Right,” said Valadez. “Nice presentation, Miss Nazario. Mr. Fry?”

  Fry stood up. “Okay,” he said. “Let me—” He patted his pockets. “I, ah, I think I must have left my system in my bungalow.”

  Valadez sighed.

  “We’ll wait,” he said.

  The dark room was silent. Bianca tried to take slow, deep breaths. Mother of God, she thought, thank you for not letting me do anything stupid.

  In the next moment she doubted herself. Dinh had been so sure. How could Bianca know whether Valadez was telling the truth?
<
br />   There was no way to know, she decided. She’d just have to wait and see.

  Fry came back in, breathless.

  “Ah, it wasn’t—”

  The voice that interrupted him was loud enough that at first it was hardly recognizable as a voice; it was only a wall of sound, seeming to come from the air itself, bazaar-Arabic words echoing and reechoing endlessly across the camp.

  “THIS IS AN ILLEGAL ENCAMPMENT,” it said. “ALL PERSONNEL IN THE ENCAMPMENT WILL ASSEMBLE ON OPEN GROUND AND SURRENDER TO THE PARK WARDENS IN AN ORDERLY FASHION. ANY PERSONS CARRYING WEAPONS WILL BE PRESUMED TO BE RESISTING ARREST AND WILL BE DEALT WITH ACCORDINGLY. ANY VEHICLE ATTEMPTING TO LEAVE THE ENCAMPMENT WILL BE DESTROYED. YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES TO COMPLY.”

  The announcement repeated itself: first in the fluting language of the firija, then in Miami Spanish, then as a series of projected alien glyphs, logograms, and semagrams. Then the Arabic started again.

  “Fuck your mother,” said Valadez grimly.

  All around Bianca, poachers were gathering weapons. In the back of the room, the firija were having what looked like an argument, arms waving, voices raised in a hooting, atonal cacophony.

  “What do we do?” Fry shouted, over the wardens’ announcement.

  “Get out of here,” said Valadez.

  “Make fight!” said Ismaíl, turning several eyes from the firija discussion.

  “Isn’t that resisting arrest?” asked Bianca.

  Valadez laughed harshly. “Not shooting back isn’t going to save you,” he said. “The wardens aren’t the Phenomenological Service. They’re not civilized Caliphate cops. Killed while resisting arrest is what they’re all about. Believe me—I used to be one.”

  Taking a surprisingly small gun from inside his jacket, he kicked open the door and was gone.

  Around the Lupita Jeréz was a milling knot of people, human and otherwise, some hurrying to finish the loading, others simply fighting to get aboard.