Year's Best Scifi 3 Part 29

Women in shorn hair and green-striped coveralls grinned at him. Smiles were all they had to offer-their only way to look attractive.

Disheveled and out of shape, breathing hard from the run up slope, Toni did not fancy himself overly handsome. But these women had gone months, maybe years, without a man. The mere fact that he was walking free put him way ahead of the guys they were used to seeing. Swiftly, he searched out a matronly female trustee in loading and packaging, offering his life-support pack for cargo-cla.s.s pa.s.sage to Elysium. Toni had a bulging credit file, but dared not touch it-not so long as he planned to stay dead.

She readily agreed. What he wanted was only mildly illegal-and the support pack was crammed with drugs and paraphernalia. Stuff that could keep you entertained for weeks in lockup. Giggling mint-striped prisoners loaded him into a cus.h.i.+oned bio-container. The trustee, easily twice Toni's age, with a long sentence behind her, leaned in and kissed him, pressing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against him beneath the coveralls.

Whispering "Sweet dreams," she closed the lid. The box sealed.

Curled in the dark, Toni reviewed the news channels. ("The armed merchant cruiser M. Licinius Cra.s.sus regrets the accidental launching of an Osiris...o...b..t-to-surface missile. Luckily, the missile impacted in a spa.r.s.ely populated area, causing no significant structural damage except to a public toilet.") But the top story remained the hunting death of Transgalactic tyc.o.o.n Alexander Gracchus. ("A member of his party is still listed as missing.") Much bigger news than some blown-up outhouse.

Presently, he felt himself being loaded aboard a ballistic cargo carrier, Toni could still smell the warm odor of the woman who had tucked him in, reminding him how s.h.i.+tty some people's "real" lives were. What had she done to deserve a lonely, single-s.e.x realtime existence, locked away when she was not working. Not much, he bet. Whoever murdered Alexander Gracchus was bound to be doing way better.

And murder it was. Whatever slim chance had existed that this was all some ghastly hunting mishap had been punctured by Pandora turning up alive in Verona.

Alive and on the run. Having known, or seen, too much. Clearly, she was supposedto have died along with Gracchus and his Chimp bodyguards. But she must have seen it coming, and set up her escape ahead of time-using PROTEUS to get Toni's attention. d.a.m.n it, why had she picked him? Didn't she know he was an addict?

Answer was, she did know. It must be one of the reasons why she'd picked him.

It made him easy to manipulate. Desperate people have few scruples about other folks' weaknesses. She had tapped into his private 3V fantasy even before coming down the Beanstalk-catching his attention at Carnival, making sure he'd come after her.

And whoever killed Gracchus had traced her contact through PROTEUS. No surprise there. Gracchus had been murdered through PROTEUS-using the Wyvyrn's control collar. Huge winged megafauna made nifty murder weapons.

Pandora and her would-be killers had been conducting a silent duel in cybers.p.a.ce, while Gracchus stalked his Wyvyrn, and the n.o.ble Dog panted after Silvia Visconti.

Which was why Toni had to stay off the net-playing dead. Not using PROTEUS until he absolutely had to. Surprise was his best weapon. Whoever did all this was not infallible. They'd missed Pandora. And they'd missed him. If only by an angstrom.

His thoughts were still spinning in these circles when the ballistic transport's engines roared to life. G-forces slammed him into the cubicle cus.h.i.+oning. Like many stretches of realtime, the flight fast became a hideous bore. Interminable minutes of banging off padded walls. In-flight entertainment consisted of Toni tossing his cookies in free fall.

He emerged battered and dirty on a cargo pad overlooked by the Elysium rim wall. A far belter place for his purposes than the usual entry ports atop the rim-less used, and watched over solely by security cams and a trusting crew of maintenance Chimps. Best of all, the cargo pad possessed a clean, vacant public toilet. Adept at bathing from a sink, while doing his laundry in the hand drier, Toni used the time to check on the search, tapping into Ali, Doc, and Harpo's control channel. The search pattern had tightened. Large sections of the crater floor had been gone over, or ruled out. The remaining area continued to shrink.

It took time to crack the code on the Wyvyrn's control collar without alerting PROTEUS. But the code ended up being a simple binary transposition-any more encryption would have drawn unwanted attention to Dragon Hunt. The Wyvyrn also turned out to be in the prime search area.

Great. The more the merrier. Luckily the monster lay immobilized, paralyzed by its collar, pinned down now that it was no longer needed. Toni meant to do something about that-but not right now.

First, he had to find Pandora. Not a pleasing prospect. It meant going in person into Elysium-since he couldn't use his cyborg body without alerting PROTEUS.

But he had no choice. Someone who had murdered the richest man in this part of the spiral arm would gladly invest a couple of mega-credits in making Toni go away.Pandora was his only protection. Come up with her alive, and he had half a chance.

Without her, he would just be some homeless 3V addict with a weird story and an outrageous price on his head. An acutely terminal condition.

And he had to do it alone. The planetary authorities might be tough on drug addicts and tax cheats, but they were hardly up to interstellar conspiracies.

Pair-a-Dice Security couldn't care less what happened on planet. And the Freeport Police were completely corrupt. Their idea of lending a hand would be to hold Toni for the highest bidder.

But the absolute worst of it was having to do it in realtime. In Verona, this would be no problem. Antonio the n.o.ble Dog never failed at anything. But he was not Antonio. And this was not 3V. This was the real world-where everything could (and did) go wrong. Here, he could fail. Or die. G.o.d, how he hated real time! In Verona, none of this would even be happening.

Being the only human at the cargo pad, he had the run of the place. To take him into the crater, Toni selected a sky cycle, a hydrogen-filled parasail with a solar-a.s.sisted pedal propeller. He could not chance using his own credit, but he easily convinced the simple-minded rent-a-stand to charge the flight to a regular client's account.

Toni peddled the sky cycle straight off the cargo pad into an updraft along the windward side of the rimwall. Here hot surface air and prevailing winds blowing out of Nightside formed a great standing wave, rolling over Elysium rim. This was the easiest entrance to Elysium, and the air above the rim swarmed with fliers, orthopters, and sailplanes. He felt comfortably lost in the crowd. Beneath him, a green canopy of kilometer-tall trees filled the bottom of the crater, climbing up almost to the rim.

From his perch among the tourists and pleasure seekers, Toni kept tabs on the search below-happily letting Ali, Doc, and Harpo do the leg work. He beat back and forth to windward, listening in on their calls. Hours on the exercise bike had kept his calves in shape, and soaring allowed him to save his strength for one frantic burst once they found Pandora.

Harpo hit the trail first. Chemosensors and a heat trace picked up Pandora's track, and Harpo's cyborg body went cras.h.i.+ng after her, calling on Doc and Al to bring the hover car. Swooping down, Toni plunged through a break in the canopy.

Getting ahead of Harpo, he dodged in among the tall trunks, keeping between the upper canopy and the tangle of ground cover, hopefully showing himself to Pandora.

Harpo signaled that he had an infrared contact, bearing ZERO-THREE-ZERO, just shy of a large clearing caused by the fall of a forest giant. Toni headed for the contact, spiraling down through slanting lanes of Prospero light filled with gaily colored day moths.

Pandora had picked a perfect spot for her pick-up. The fallen Goliath had taken out a dozen lesser trees, tearing a huge rent in the canopy. Clear sky showed throughthe ragged hole, and much of the tangle beneath had been flattened by falling timbers. Toni set down atop a mossy pile of toppled logs. Insects whirred up to greet him.

Pandora appeared, breaking cover to Toni's left, still wearing her synthetic leopard-skin. Her thigh-length boots were covered in mud, and her lacquered hair had drooping spikes-otherwise she seemed in decent shape. Scrambling atop the log pile, she leaped from timber to timber toward him.

Toni lifted an eyebrow as she hopped aboard the sky cycle behind him, landing on the back half of the banana seat. "Lady Silvia Lucetta Visconti?"

"Sorry about that, I was incredibly desperate." She sounded as if she meant it, particularly the last part. Her arms looped around his waist, pressing her hips against his back. "Let's go!"

"You almost got me killed," he pointed out.

"Might still happen," she a.s.sured him.

As if bent on proving her right, Harpo came cras.h.i.+ng out of the undergrowth.

Cyborg faces cannot register shock, but Harpo did come to a dead stop, sensors pointed forward. Not waiting for Harpo to recover, Toni kicked the emergency release on the sky cycle's hydrogen bottle.

The cycle's gas bag ballooned above them, lifting the sky cycle off the log pile.

Toni backpedaled furiously, keeping them aimed at the hole in the canopy. Harpo dwindled until he looked like a plasti-metal toy abandoned in the cleari'ng.

Pandora pulled them tighter together. Spiked hair tickled his neck. "Smas.h.i.+ng.

Absolutely smas.h.i.+ng," she purred into his ear-her voice had a rich timbre to it, worthy of a Visconti heiress. Or a beautiful, wealthy young widow, with holdings in a dozen star systems. Obviously on top of the universe, she started giving orders, "Head for the Beanstalk. There's a gravity-drive yacht waiting on Pair-a-Dice. A Fornax Skylark-fast enough to get us comfortably lost." *

Toni nodded, happy to have somewhere to run to. But at the moment, he had his hands full with the here-and-now, keeping the overloaded sky-cycle on an even keel while balancing his 3V deck on his lap. No easy task with Pandora holding tight to him, hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s pressed against his spine, her hands clasped just above his groin. He eyed her over his shoulder. "Doing okay?"

"Sure, great. Can't you tell?" She plainly aimed to make the most of the moment.

Pa.s.sing through the canopy, Toni kept on going, meaning to get all the height he could out of the gas bag. For a laboring sky cycle trying to make a quick getaway, alt.i.tude is everything.

Trouble appeared almost at once. A silver gleam below them whipped into a quick climbing turn. The Dragon Hunt hover car. Doc and Ali must have picked up Harpo and were now coming for him.

He shouted to Pandora, "Hold tight." Releasing the gas bag and the spent hydrogen bottle, Toni put the sky cycle into a screaming dive. He had no chance ofoutrunning a jet-powered hover car, but the dive would give him airspeed to work with-and the chance to make something happen.

Doc put in a call to him, "Toni, what in h.e.l.l do you think you're doing?"

Having no good answer, Toni hung grimly into the dive. Treetops rushed up to greet him. The hover car did another fast turn and bored after him. "Give it up, Toni, we've got the speed to run you down." That was Harpo.

They had, the speed, but not the agility. Spotting a hole in the forest canopy, Toni side-slipped and angled in, dodging between kilometer-tall trunks. The hover car could not follow without risking hitting its rotors on the foliage or whacking into a tree. They had to throttle down just to draw even with him.

"Come on, Toni, we can make a deal." That was Doc again, ever the reasonable one.

"I doubt it." No deals. Toni had them right where he wanted them. He backpedaled, forcing them to come to a complete halt, hovering just above the canopy. Branches rattled in the prop wash.

"n.o.body cares about you," Harpo a.s.sured him.

Toni smirked. "Tell me something I don't know."

"Give up the woman and we'll see you get away." Ali tried to sound like they had his interests at heart.

Toni was not even tempted. Without Pandora, he was just a loose end, waiting to be done away with. "They're going to kill her," he reminded them. "Just like they killed Gracchus."

"That's not our business," Harpo protested.

"Too bad, it should be." Toni hit the control key on his deck, sending out a coded signal.

The Wyvyrn roared out of its hiding place, saber-like mandibles flas.h.i.+ng, wing segments beating, spine-tipped tail las.h.i.+ng. Given what had happened, the great segmented beast didn't need much encouragement from its control collar to fly into a blind frenzy. Toni merely gave its anger direction.

Doc managed to get off an anguished MAYDAY before the monster hit. Imagine a huge hundred-meter centipede, with wings instead of feet, slamming into the light plastic-aluminum hover car. The s.h.i.+p's lifting body hull crumpled, and the hover car flipped over, spinning out of control. It went whirling into the canopy, with the Wyvyrn still clinging to the hull, stabbing at it again and again with its giant stinging tail.

"That will teach you to trifle with the n.o.ble Dog!" Toni couldn't hang around to enjoy the virtual deaths of Doc, Ali, and Harpo's cyborg bodies. Putting business ahead of pleasure, he pedaled off between the trees. Soon he was lost among the tourists swarming atop the standing wave at Elysium's windward rim.

Pandora sat comfortably safe in her. yacht, a drink in her hand, her back to theSkylark's main view port, looking like she had swallowed the canary. A mobile auto-bar stood moored beside her couch, serving up a frothy blue liquor that misted like liquid oxygen.

Behind her, projected in the view port, lay Pair-a-Dice yacht harbor, backed by starlit void. Pair-a-Dice had grown in haphazard fas.h.i.+on from the original geosync station and Beanstalk terminus. Pleasure domes and gaming palaces came right up to the harbor edge, sticking out at odd angles amid the repair slips and taxi stands. The whole gleaming jumble ended abruptly in empty s.p.a.ce. The "harbor" was merely a parking area around the geosync point. A couple of orbital yachts were clearly visible, and taxis going s.h.i.+p to sh.o.r.e showed up as tiny moving sparks. But most of the parked s.p.a.cecraft were mere points of light, lost among the stars.

She told Toni, "Gracchus was d.a.m.ned good to me. We married for his money, but that didn't make me hate him.

Trouble was, too many folks stood to make trillions by his death. Like his b.i.t.c.h of a First Wife, and her little f.u.c.k mate Selene. You remember her? Came to the Wyvyrn hunt in a faerie gown?"

Toni nodded idly. Pandora had been doing all the talking, happy to be rich and alive.

"I mean, the guy was worth giga-credits. In Aesir system, he owned his own G.o.dd.a.m.n moon! My measly 2 percent was worth killing for a billion times over."

Intersystem law made a small but immutable provision for secondary spouses.

She grinned at him. "Without a doubt, you saved my b.u.t.t. And I'm gonna be grateful. Outrageously grateful. I'm fabulously rich, which is all I ever wanted to be.

And I've seen way too many a.s.sholes stepping on people's faces to get somewhere, forgetting who gave them their start. Well, that ain't me." Pandora laughed provocatively, "Prepare to be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams!"

Toni stared at her. What he saw was Silvia Lucetta Visconti with her halo of golden hair, lounging on a day bed on the p.o.o.p royal of her great lateen-rigged trading galley. A handsomely hung serving lad in blue and white Visconti livery stood ready to refill her wine goblet.

Behind her lay the sparkling waters of the Venice lagoon, backed by the tall Campanile and the sun-drenched colonnades of the Piazza San Marco, where the Grand Ca.n.a.l came sweeping out of the city, headed toward the sea. Toni could see the twin Columns of Execution marking the sea gate to Venice, and the Greek bell-and-onion domes of San Marco Basilica poking above the Doge's new Gothic palace. At the moment, Venice was besieged by high water. Wavelets lapped past the twin columns into the Piazzetta, flooding the "finest drawing room in Europe."

Silvia had had the effrontery to suggest that he sail away with her to the East-where she claimed to have inherited rich estates among the Isles. What presumption, even for a Visconti! He was Antonio Cansignorio della Scala, nephew to the prince, not some rich b.i.t.c.h's plaything. If the right people were poisoned, he would be heir to Verona!And yet-Italy had gotten stale of late, with this obnoxious French Pope and no wars of note. Or at least none worth fighting in. Even Proteus had failed him, plunging Antonio into no end of trouble. And the East was said to be a real eye-opener-if you believed the Polos.

Besides, the n.o.ble Dog had begun to feel he had somehow outgrown Verona...

Chapter 18 - Great Western by Kim Newman.

Kim Newman has emerged as one of the significant fantasy and horror writers in England in the last decade. His most recent book is a collection of linked stories, Back in the USSA, in collaboration with Eugene Byrne, and set in an alternate-universe twentieth century in which the Communist revolution happened in the USA, not Russia. His SF is usually some sort of hybrid (almost all of his fiction is some sort of hybrid of genres). As does Howard Waldrop or James P. Blaylock, Newman joyfully yokes pop culture images and historical figures and events in often unlikely but provocative juxtapositions. This piece is no exception, an alternate-present west-of-England western about the arrival of the railroads (in this case the Great Western Railway) and the social disruption of progress. It appeared in New Worlds, and a moment's comparison to the Gibson, above, and the Moorc.o.c.k, below, will give some indication of the range of that impressive anthology. There is a tone and style in Newman's story perhaps reminiscent of the Pavane stories of Keith Roberts. It is also a retelling of a great Western genre novel and film.

Cleared paths were no good for Allie. She wasn't sup-posed to be after rabbits on Squire Maskell's land. Most of Alder Hill was wildwood, trees webbed together by a growth of bramble nastier than barbwire. Thorns jabbed into skin and stayed, like bee-stingers.

Just after dawn, the air had a chilly bite but the sunlight was pure and strong.

Later, it would get warm; now, her hands and knees were frozen from dew-damp gra.s.s and iron-hard ground.

The Reeve was making a show of being tough on poaching, handing down short, sharp sentences. She'd already got a stripe across her palm for setting snares.

Everyone west of Bristol knew Reeve Draper was Maskell's creature. Serfdom might have been abolished, but the old squires clung to their pre-War position, through habit as much as tenacity.

Since taking her lash, administered under the village oak by Constable Erskine with a razor-strop, she'd grown craftier. Wiry enough to tunnel through bramble, she made and travelled her own secret, th.o.r.n.y paths. She'd take Maskell's rabbits, even if the Reeve's Constable striped her like a tiger.

She set a few snares in obvious spots, where Stan Budge would find and destroythem. Maskell's gamekeeper wouldn't be happy if he thought no one was even trying to poach. The trick was to set snares invisibly, in places Budge was too grown-up, too far off the ground, to look.

Even so, none of her nooses had caught anything.

All spring, she'd been hearing gunfire from Alder Hill, resonating across the moors like thunder. Maskell had the Gilpin brothers out with Browning rifles. They were supposed to be ratting, but the object of the exercise was to end poaching by killing off all the game.

There were rabbit and pigeon carca.s.ses about, some crackly bone bundles in packets of dry skin, some recent enough to seem shocked to death. It was a sinful waste, what with hungry people queueing up for parish hand-outs. Quite a few trees had yellow-orange badges, where Terry or Teddy Gilpin had shot wide of the mark.

Squire Maskell would not be heartbroken if one of those wild shots finished up in her.

Susan told her over and over to be mindful of men with guns. She had a quite reasonable horror of firearms. Too many people on Sedgmoor died with their gumboots on and a bullet in them. Allie's Dad and Susan's husband, for two. Susan wouldn't have a gun in the house.

For poaching, Allie didn't like guns anyway. Too loud. She had a catapult made from a garden fork, double-strength rubber stretched between steel tines. She could put a nail through a half-inch of plywood from twenty-five feet.

She wriggled out of her tunnel, pus.h.i.+ng aside a circle of bramble she'd fixed to hinge like a lid, and emerged in a clearing of loose earth and shale. During the Civil War, a bomb had fallen here and fizzled. Eventually, the woods would close over the scar.

When she stood up, she could see across the moors, as far as Achelzoy. At night, the infernal lights of Bridgwater pinked the horizon, clawing a ragged red edge in the curtain of dark. Now, she could make out the road winding through the wetlands. The sun, still low, glinted and glimmered in sodden fields, mirror-fragments strewn in a carpet of gra.s.s. There were dangerous marshes out there. Cows were sucked under if they set a hoof wrong.

Something moved near the edge of the clearing.

Allie had her catapult primed, her eye fixed on the rabbit. Crouching, still as a statue, she concentrated. Jack Coney nibbled on nothing, unconcerned. She pinched the nailhead, imagining a point between the ears where she would strike.

A noise sounded out on the moor road. The rabbit vanished, startled by the unfamiliar rasp of an engine.

'"S'blood," she swore.

She stood up, easing off on her catapult. She looked out towards Achelzoy. A fast-moving shape was coming across the moor.The rabbit was lost. Maskell's men would soon be about, making the woods dangerous. She chanced a maintained path and ran swiftly downhill. At the edge of Maskell's property, she came to a stile and vaulted it-wrenching her shoulder, but no matter-landing like a cat on safe territory. Without a look back at the "TRESPa.s.sERS WILL BE VENTILATED" sign, she traipsed between two rows of trees, toward the road.

The path came out half a mile beyond the village, at a sharp kink in the moor road.