Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 12

"Far too many Qwik-grow trees have been planted, and now they are spreading like weeds, completely out of control," he declared. "It was one thing to reforest the Amazon basin, the American plains, the Indonesian archipelago and Europe while we were still burning fossil fuels, but now that our energy sources are all solar and thermonuclear, these vast and ever-expanding woodlands have created a severe atmospheric carbon dioxide deficit that has seriously diminished the greenhouse effect. This can only be remedied by a return to the ma.s.s burning of coal or the setting of immense forest fires-preferably both."

This resulted not only in cries of outrage from the climatech engineer contingent, but the throwing of plastic coffee bulbs, styli, fruit, and other debris in his direction. Injury was prevented by the zero- g conditions, which rendered this fusillade ineffective, but the frustration only added to the ire of the climatech engineers, and it was a good 20 minutes before enough order could be restored for Hans Goodkin of Climatech Solutions to deliver a scathing reb.u.t.tal.

"Burn coal! Why not bring back the internal combustion engine, and to h.e.l.l with the ozone layer! Or better yet, the steam locomotive, and never mind the acid rain! Burn the forests? Why settle for half-measures? Let's just nuke the trees! And while we're at it, why not drop thermonuclear charges into the craters of active volcanoes? The resulting ma.s.s eruptions would pump plenty of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere and the red-hot lava flows would really heat things back up! Let's bring back Vesuvius and Mount St. Helens and Krakatoa!"

When the booing and hissing subsided, he continued in an even more sarcastic vein: "Dissolving the coral reefs we've rebuilt would release plenty of carbon dioxide too! And we could melt the ice-caps from orbit! And replace the mylar mirroring with black as.h.!.+ After all, if we listen to you people, we'll have plenty of soot to spare!" Unwilling to wait for the uproar to die down, Goodkin just turned up the gain on his microphone to override it.

"Let Central Australia and the Sahara savannah once more become howling deserts-no problem, their millions of inhabitants can join the rest of the planet's new boat-people when the sea levels rise again and the world's reclaimed coastlands and islands return from whence they came!"

Improvised missiles began to fly again-this time from the climatologists-or rather drift ineffectually in the general direction of Goodkin in the weightless conference chamber. "You're turning the Earth into a deep freeze to line your own pockets!" someone shouted.

"You climatological Luddite snake-oil salesmen want us to turn it back into a greenhouse oven so you can make your fortunes selling air-conditioners in Antarctica and ice-boxes to Eskimos!" Goodkin shouted back.

At which point, the Concerned Climatologists attempted to storm the podium, swimming clumsily towards it through the air like a school of slow-motion sharks, and hotel security released the pax gas.

"What do a climatech engineer, a climatologist, a planet and a nymphomaniac have in common?" a reporter asked, several drinks later, in the bar.

"I'm afraid you're about to tell us," groaned another.

"They're much easier to heat up than cool down."

The Devotee

STEPHEN DEDMAN

Stephen Dedman is the author of the novels The Art of Arrow Cutting (1997), Foreign Bodies (1999), and Shadows Bite (forthcoming in 2001) and the short story collection The Lady of Situations (1999). He was one of the new generation of Australian SF writers breaking out on the international scene at the end of the 1990s. He lives in Perth, West Australia, and is an a.s.sociate editor of Eidolon, where this story appeared. You can find his colorful autobiography at www.eidolon.net. It concludes with "I have a wife, a wife-inlaw, a lot of friends (including all of my ex-lovers), a mortgage, a thousand books or thereabouts, a concertina file bulging with rejection slips, a slightly out-of-date computer, an agent, and now a web page." You get the picture. He writes SF, fantasy, horror, erotica, and is published in small press and professional magazines on three continents.

"The Devotee" is a striking hard-boiled detective story told as sociological SF, with perhaps a whiff of cyberpunk. It moves from Australia to the Caribbean with substantial political and socioeconomic underpinning. It is a fully mature piece of fiction and certainly earns a place in this book as one of the best stories of the year.

The white wall around the house was three to four meters high and free of graffiti, like all the others on the block. The wrought metal gate was black and looked as though it should've been inscribed with something from Dante. I could only see one camera, but I didn't feel like wasting time looking for the others. I stepped out of the car and showed it my wallet. "I'm Nicholas Horne. Two o'clock appointment with Mr. Hill." I even removed my hat and shades, despite the sun; Perth in February is an inferno, and the ozone hole hasn't shrunk measurably since the turn of the century. I was glad when a voice finally issued forth from a speaker inside the gate. "You're expected. Bring the car in."

"Sure." The yard was landscaped, flat as a pool table, but the house was smaller than I expected, only one storey. I parked near the front door, which opened as I walked up the ramp towards it. The man who greeted me wasn't well dressed enough to be a butler, or even a gardener. "Mr. Hill?"

"Come in." He glanced at my summer suit; maybe he was looking for a shoulder holster. Or maybe I didn't look like his idea of a private investigator, but it was too d.a.m.n hot for a trenchcoat. If the house hadn't been in Dalkeith, I wouldn't even have bothered with the necktie. "You were with Missing Persons?" he asked.

"No, Vice. Mostly undercover." I'm a little over average height, a little under average weight. Hair brown with a little grey, not long, not short. Eyes about the same shade of brown. No distinguis.h.i.+ng features to speak of. When I need to, I can be as invisible as a contact lens in a swimming pool. An elephant could forget he'd seen me. It comes in useful sometimes. Hill outweighed me by about twenty kilos, a good percentage of it hanging over the waistband of his shorts. He hadn't shaved, but he'd combed his hair across in an attempt to hide the fact that he was going bald, which was odd; genetic engineering had produced several good baldness cures over the past few years, at prices a Dalkeith resident should have been able to afford easily. Either he didn't trust new drugs, or he was opposed to genetic engineering, or he didn't like spending money on his appearance. He smelled of stale beer and tobacco smoke and flop sweat. "You quit?" he asked.

"Voluntary redundancy," I told him. Well, mostly voluntary. "Budget cuts, four years ago."

"McMinn at Missing Persons recommended you. Says you've done nearly a hundred of these cases.

Hope you're more help than he was." I said nothing. Missing Persons had suffered staff cuts too, and young women who stayed out all Friday night without phoning home weren't exactly an oddity, even if their parents did live a few blocks from Millionaire's Row. "We're still waiting for a ransom demand, but there's been nothing." Hill continued, as he led the way into a loungeroom. He switched the TV off, then walked to the bar and poured himself another beer without offering me one. Maybe he thought I was on duty. I looked around the room, wondering why it looked so much the set of an old-fas.h.i.+oned TV sitcom. A framed photo on the mantelpiece, showing a young girl in a motorized wheelchair, answered that question; everything around me had been arranged for wheelchair access. Sets look like that becausea camera dolly's about as wide and unmaneuverable as a chair. "That's her," said Hill. "Tina. My daughter."

I looked at the photo less carefully. Judging by her complexion and puppyfat, she was in her early teens, but I had no way of knowing how old the photo was. Round face, large eyes, plump lower lip, hair light brown or dark blonde. "How long has she been missing?"

"Left here yesterday morning, and didn't come home. We phoned her but n.o.body answered.

Missing Persons said there wasn't much they could do until she'd been gone forty-eight hours, except tell the patrols to look out for her."

"Where did she go, and how did she get there?"

"Said she was going to train before cla.s.ses, before it got too hot. She wants to compete in the Special Olympics." I looked at the mantelpiece again, saw no trophies or medals. "Archery, I think," he continued. "She's not that good, but she enjoys it."

"You think?"

He shrugged. "Last I heard. She keeps trying new things. This is the only one she seems to've stuck with."

"Where?"

"Sports center out at the uni. I called them, persuaded somebody to stick their head out and see if the car was parked in any of the disabled bays. It's a white Range Rover Vogue with a wheelchair hoist, not easy to miss. No sign of it."

"University of WA?" He nodded. "Have you reported it stolen?"

"Thought of that late last night. It has a satloc-one of those tracking devices? No trace of it anywhere. The cops said it was probably parked underground or something."

"They're probably right."

"Yeah? What if it's been burnt out, or driven off a jetty? b.a.s.t.a.r.ds even said since Tina was eighteen now we weren't allowed to know where she was."

I said nothing, but I doubted that even the most undiplomatic cop would have said exactly that, unless Tina had asked them not to inform her parents. "How long have you lived here?" I asked.

"Why? What's that got to do with anything?"

I looked around the room again. "Let me put it another way. Does Tina think of this place as home?"

He glared at me for another few seconds, but relaxed slightly. "I guess so. She and her mother came down here six or seven years ago, just after she lost her leg. She was only twelve."

"In 2003?"

He blinked a couple of times, then nodded. "Yeah. I stayed on the station for a year or two, working, until the court case was settled."

"Did she like it down here?"

"Yeah, I guess. Aren't many wheelchair ramps up that way."

"Who were her friends?"

He shrugged. "She had school friends, but they never came here, and I couldn't tell you their last names. Besides, she's lost touch with most of them since she started Uni. Now she's on holidays, and sort of at a loose end. She has other friends on the internet, but I know nothing about them."

"Do you really think she's been kidnapped?"

"You think she's run away?" He sounded sour, but not quite angry. "In a wheelchair?"

It was more optimistic than most of the other scenarios I could imagine. "Can I talk to her mother?"

Mrs. Hill didn't tell me much more than her husband, though she was a shade more polite about it.

She took me into the kitchen and made us tea while she spoke softly. Mr. Hill had already turned the car-sized TV back on, and was watching the cricket. His wife was just as reluctant to believe that Tina could have left home voluntarily. "Did she have any boyfriends?" I asked.

She started, and almost laughed. "She only had one leg," she reminded me.

"I know that. Your husband said she had friends on the net. Do you know anything about them?"

"You think she might have found a boyfriend that way?" she said, her eyebrows rising slightly, asthough she'd thought of this for the first time. "I suppose it's possible, but I don't know..."

"What about at the sports centre? Other friends in wheel-chairs, or with other disabilities?"

"I don't know any-You could ask at the center..."

"I will. Can I see her room, please?" Mrs. Hill blinked, then led the way. Her bedroom had the same staginess as the rest of the house, but it looked wrong for other reasons, too. Apart from a fairly new Canon desk panel net system, the books and CDs on the shelves-low shelves, naturally-and the clothes hanging in a curtained alcove, the room looked frozen in time, as though nothing had been moved in years. For a moment, I wondered whether Tina Hill had died back in 2003. I looked at the desk, then flicked the computer on. "What's the most recent photo you have of Tina?"

"We don't take many photos," said Mrs. Hill apologetically, and looked at the shelves. "Her high school yearbook is in here somewhere-ah." As she began leafing through the pages a window appeared on the Canon's screen, asking for a pa.s.sword. d.a.m.n. "Do you know her pa.s.sword?"

"What? No, I'm afraid not." She handed me the yearbook. The photo was professionally taken, and a little too prim to be glamorous, but it showed her as a very attractive young woman, even in her drab green Methodist Ladies College uniform. There was a glint in her eyes that might have been impishness, or sadness, depending on the angle of the light. Her smile was staged, like all the others on the page, as though it were just another part of the school uniform. I glanced at the screen again, and resisted the urge to swear. Things must've been much easier for detectives when people had diaries and address books. I searched the shelves for a few minutes and came up with little more than the fact that she was studying French, Spanish, medieval English, and the late 19th/early 20th Century British novels that academics still call "modern lit." She liked Central American magic realists, historical fantasies and murder mysteries, and vampire stories. Eclectic musical tastes, mostly cla.s.sical, some recent, but very little that would make you want to get up and dance. I sent her mother out of the room, asking her to scan the photo and print me some copies, then looked in the places a girl might not expect her parents to look. Again, nothing: no contraceptives, no drugs, no cash, not even a vibrator. Maybe her life really was as unexciting as her parents believed-either that, or she'd taken everything she valued with her, which implied that she'd deliberately left without telling anyone and wasn't planning on coming back soon. The third alternative was that I'm not very good at thinking like a teenage girl.

I took the copied photos from the mother and left, a vaguely unpleasant taste in my mouth. Finding missing people is the staple of my diet; most of them are just hiding from their creditors and, while I don't like some of my clients, I don't lose any sleep over what I do. Sometimes it's even fun. And when I have doubts, when husbands want me to find wives who I suspect had d.a.m.n good reasons for running away, then I don't take the job. I stared at the photo, wondering whether Tina would want to be found, then I headed for the university.

It was two weeks before semester began, and a Sat.u.r.day to boot, and the campus was so deserted that I actually had a choice of parking s.p.a.ces, so empty that I noticed how attractive the grounds and the trees and the buildings were, rather than being distracted by the students. The beefy young blond sitting behind the counter at the health club didn't look up from his magazine as he asked, "Help you?"; but at least his tone was polite.

"Who do I talk to about archery practice?"

He looked up at that, and blinked. His eyes were a startling blue. The magazine turned out to be Scientific American, with a cover story about wire addiction. "Archery? Try one of the clubs."

"You don't have a range here?"

"No."

"Not even for the disabled?"

He shook his head, then an idea hit him. "No, but hold on a second. I'll call the School of Human Movement; they may know something." He did that while I waited, then turned to me. "What's this about?" he asked, still polite.

I showed him the photo of Tina. "Do you know her?" He squinted. "She would've been in a wheelchair.""Oh. I've seen her in here sometimes, but not this week, I don't think." He gestured with the receiver. "I've got Dr. Sobieski on the phone; do you want to speak to him?"

"Yeah, sure." Sobieski, at least, admitted to knowing Tina's name, though he also swore he hadn't seen her that week. Something in his tome made me ask when he had last seen her. He really couldn't say. Since semester ended? Yes. This year? Yes. This month? Maybe. How often did he usually see her?

"May I ask what your interest is?"

"I can't discuss it over the phone. Where's your office?"

"Under Reid Library. Do you know where that is?"

"Certainly. I'll be there in a minute." I thanked the kid, who returned his attention to his magazine. It was only a short walk from the health club to the library, most of it in the shade of some wonderful old trees. The tutorial rooms, of course, are cramped and ugly and uncomfortable, but you can't have everything.

Sobieski's office was cramped too, or maybe it was Sobieski who gave me that impression; he was shorter than I am but ma.s.sively built, his arms almost as large around as my legs, his thumbs as thick and short as my big toes. His head looked as though it'd been modified to provide a minimum of handholds: hair cropped short, nose flattened, ears that seemed to've been pinned back, no neck worth mentioning.

His desk was bare but for a computer, a phone, and his feet. He looked me up and down, and I resisted the urge to puff out my chest. "You're looking for Tina Hill?"

"Yes."

"Siddown. Why?"

"She hasn't come home, and her parents are worried. Do you have any idea where she might be?"

"Can I see some ID?" I handed him my wallet, showed him my license. He glanced at it, shrugged.

"As I said, I haven't seen her in a couple of weeks."

"She told her parents yesterday morning that she was coming here. As far as I can tell, she didn't turn up. Her parents think she was training in archery. Was she?"

"I think so. Probably."

"You don't want to qualify that at all?" I asked drily.

He flushed slightly. "You'd have to ask her trainer. He's an archery enthusiast, and you know what enthusiasts are like."

I nodded. "Is he here?"

"Not today."

"Where could I find him?"

The flush deepened. "I don't know. I phoned him while you were walking over here. He's not at home, and he's not answering his mobile."

I didn't like the sound of that. "When did you last see him?" I asked, as casually as I could manage.

"Wednesday."

"His name?"

He hesitated, then sighed. "Jason Davy. Look, it's not what you think. He's doing his Master's degree on sports and exercise for what we used to call the maimed and limbless. I know, it's a waste of time, but he's fanatical about it."

"Why is it a waste of time?"

"Genetics, microsurgery, and prosthetics. We've all but wiped out the genetic disorders and teratogenic drugs that cause that sort of deformity, and in almost every case where someone loses a limb, it can be re-attached. Failing that, ninety percent of amputations are lower limb only, and the new lower limb prosthetics are nearly as good as the real thing-except for hands, of course. Tina lost her leg because nearly all of it was crushed, not just severed, and the accident was up in the country a h.e.l.l of a long way from a hospital. She's d.a.m.n lucky she didn't bleed to death before help arrived. But there'll never be enough cases like hers to justify the sort of study he's putting into this, especially not when they've already started cloning parts for transplants. Ten years from now, twenty at the most, Jason's work will be obsolete. Oh, sure, there are plenty of countries where kids are still getting their feet blown off by mines, and where they can't afford transplants or prosthetics, but they have other priorities than theSpecial Olympics."

"I know they've managed to clone some individual organs," I said, "but legs and arms?"

He shrugged, and what little neck he had vanished completely for a second. "I don't know a h.e.l.l of a lot about cloning, but I know it's easy to tinker with the genes so that you end up with a brainless body that's no use for anything else. It needn't be a clone of the individual; as long as the tissue type is close enough, they can use rejection-suppressant drugs without any serious side effects."

"Do you think that'll ever be legal?"

He snorted. "Sure. A lot of politicians need new livers and hearts, and so do the CEOs who contribute to their campaign funds. And as long as there are wars and soldiers, there'll be a need for replacement limbs-the best ones that government can afford. And even if it's not legal, who will that stop? h.e.l.l, it's probably being tried already, somewhere. Look what happened with breast implants, or headwires. Sure, some countries banned the sale and the surgery, but they wouldn't shut down the companies that were making the stuff, and they don't prosecute anybody who goes overseas to have the op. Governments in some other countries are happy to turn a blind eye to it if it brings in foreign currency.