The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (55 page)

“Which must mean that he has some other source of income,” Mark said.

“Maybe he has some kind of private income.”

“He has secrets, is what he has. Ahlgren Rees. We don’t even know if that’s his real name.”

The two boys were leaning at the cafe counter in the produce market, sipping fruit juice from bulbs. Ahlgren Rees was sitting at his stall twenty metres down the aisle, reading a book (books printed on paper were a famous tradition in old Xamba), completely oblivious to the fact that the two boys were watching him and talking about him, licking his thumb every time he had to turn a page.

Jack said, “He’s a herbalist. He works at his stall. He works in his garden. He goes for long walks. Sometimes he visits people and fixes up their pets. If he has any secrets, I’m missing something.”

He was hoping that this would be the end of it, but Mark had a determined look, a jut of his heavy jaw like a bulldog gripping a bone it isn’t willing to let go.

“What we need to do,” Mark said, “is get into his apartment. I bet he has all kinds of things hidden there.”

Jack tried to talk him out of it, but Mark was determined. Jack was pretty sure that he didn’t really believe that Ahlgren Rees was a spy, but it had become a matter of pride to find out who he really was and why he had come to Xamba to live amongst the Outers. And Jack had to admit that the past three days of following the man had sharpened his curiosity too, and eventually they managed to hash out a plan that more or less satisfied both of them.

The next day was Monday, and the produce market would be closed. Mark told Jack that he would have to intercept Ahlgren Rees at the café where he ate breakfast every day, and keep him occupied. Meanwhile, Mark would break into his apartment.

Jack said, “How are you going to do that?”

“Police tradecraft,” Mark said. “Don’t worry about it. Just make sure you keep him busy.”

Although Jack believed that he had a good idea about how to do just that, he slept badly that night, going over every part of a plan which seemed increasingly silly and fimsy, and he was very tired and nervous when, early the next morning, he and Mark rode the train into the city. Mark wanted to know what was in the box Jack was clutching to his chest, and Jack told him with a confidence he didn’t feel that it was a foolproof way of keeping the man busy.

“I’ll tell you what it is if you’ll tell me how you’re going to break into his apartment.”

“I’m not going to break in, I’m going to walk in,” Mark said. “And I could tell you how I’m going to do it, but I’d have to kill you afterwards. Are you sure you can keep him talking for half an hour?”

Jack tapped the top of the plastic box, feeling what was inside stir, a slow, heavy movement that subsided after a moment. He said, “Absolutely sure.”

Actually, he wasn’t sure at all. This was a lot more dangerous than simply following someone through the city’s crowded paths. Following someone wasn’t against the law. Breaking into their private apartment plainly and simply was. Jack had the same sick, doomy feeling that had possessed him in the days before he and his parents had boarded the liner that had taken them from Earth to Saturn. He felt that he was about to do something that would change his life forever, and would change it for the worse if he failed at it. It was a very grown-up feeling, and he didn’t like it at all. There was a sharp edge of excitement, to be sure, but the muscles of his legs felt watery and his stomach was doing somersaults when, after spending half an hour with Mark watching Ahlgren Rees’s apartment from the cover of a little arbour made by the drooping branches of a weeping willow, he followed the herbalist to the cafe.

It was more or less on the same level as the apartment, a bamboo counter beneath the shade of a huge fig tree, with a bench long enough for a dozen customers and a hissing steel coffee machine that the owner, a white-haired wisp of a woman, had built herself, from a design centuries old. The food was prepared from what was in season in the garden behind the fig tree, and whatever came in trade – the citizens of old Xamba had a complicated economy based on barter of goods and services.

Jack took a seat next to Ahlgren Rees, the closest he had got to the man so far. He asked the owner for the juice of the day, set the plastic box on the counter, and turned to the herbalist and said as casually as he could that he heard that he treated sick pets.

“Who told you that?”

Ahlgren Rees, hunched over a bowl of porridge flecked with nuts and seeds, didn’t look up when he spoke. He had a husky voice and a thick accent: the voice of a villain from some cheap virtuality.

“She did,” Jack said, nodding to the owner of the café, who was filling a blender with orange segments and a handful of strawberries.

“I did,” the woman said cheerfully, and switched on the blender.

“Stop by my place when you’ve had your breakfast,” Ahlgren Rees told Jack. “It’s just around the corner, past a clump of black bamboo. The one with the red door.”

The man was eating his porridge slowly but steadily, his elbows on the counter. In a few minutes he would be finished. He’d get up, walk back to his apartment, find the door open . . .

Jack pushed the box an inch towards the man and said, “I have it right here.”

“So I see,” Ahlgren Rees said, although he didn’t spare Jack so much as a glance. “And I have my breakfast right here too.”

“It belongs to my little sister,” Jack said, the little lie sliding out easily. He added, “She loves it to bits, but we’re scared that it’s dying.”

“Take a look, Ahlgren,” the woman who owned the cafe said, as she placed the bulb of juice in front of Jack. “The worst that can happen is that your karma will be improved.”

“It will need much more than fixing a pet to do that,” Ahlgren Rees said, smiling at her.

The woman smiled back. Jack was reminded of his parents, when they shared a private joke.

“All right, kid,” Ahlgren Rees said. “Show me what you got.”

It was a mock turtle, a halflife creature that produced no waste or unpleasant odours, and needed only a couple of hours of trickle charge and a cupful of water a day. It had large, dark, soulful eyes, a yellow beak as soft as a sock puppet’s mouth, and a fifty-word vocabulary. The colour and texture of its shell could be altered by infection with simple retroviruses created using the simple RNA writer kit that came with it; this one’s was covered in thick pink fur. It didn’t belong to Jack’s imaginary little sister, of course, but to the youngest daughter of Jack’s neighbours, but it really was sick. Its fur was matted and threadbare; its eyes were filmed with white matter, its soft beak chewed ceaselessly and its breath was foully metallic.

Ahlgren Rees studied it, then took a diagnostic pen from one of the many pockets of his brocade waistcoat and tipped up the mock turtle and plugged the instrument into the socket behind the creature’s stubby front leg.

“Tickles,” the turtle complained, working its stubby legs feebly.

“It’s for your own good,” Ahlgren Rees said. “Be still.”

He had small, strong hands and neatly trimmed fingernails. There were oval scars on the insides of his thick wrists; he’d had plug-in sockets once upon a time, the kind that interface with smart machinery. He squinted at the holographic readout that blossomed above the shaft of the diagnostic pen, then asked Jack, “Do you know what a prion is?”

“Proteins have to fold up the right way to work properly. Prions are proteins that fold up wrongly.”

Ahlgren Rees nodded. “The gene wizard who designed these things used a lot of freeware, and one of the myoelectric proteins he used has a tendency to make prions. That’s what’s wrong with your sister’s pet, I’m afraid. It’s a self-catalysing reaction – do you know what that means?”

“It spreads like a fire. Prions turn proteins into more prions.”

Ahlgren Rees nodded again, unplugged the diagnostic pen, and settled the mock turtle in the box. “The myoelectric proteins are what power it. When they fold the wrong way they can no longer hold a charge, and when enough have folded wrongly, it will die.”

“Can you fix it?”

Ahlgren Rees shook his head. “The best thing to do is to put it to sleep.”

He looked genuinely sorry, and Jack felt a wave of guilt pass through him. Right now, Mark was breaking into his apartment, rifling through his possessions . . .

“If you like, I can do it right now,” Ahlgren Rees said.

“I’ll have to tell my sister first.”

Ahlgren Rees shrugged and started to push away from the counter, saying, “Sorry I couldn’t help you, son.”

“Wait,” Jack said, knowing that Mark must still be in the apartment. Adding, when Ahlgren Rees looked at him, “I mean, I want to ask you, how do you grow your herbs?”

“I suppose you told him about the herbs too,” Ahlgren Rees told the woman, who blithely shrugged.

“I saw you at the produce market,” Jack said boldly. “And then I saw you here.”

Ahlgren Rees studied him for a moment. Jack felt a moment of anxiety, thinking he’d been found out, but then the man smiled and said, “I had the feeling I’d seen you before. You like the market, uh?”

“I’m interested in biology,” Jack said, speaking the truth because it was the first thing that came into his head. He was good at it, could solve genetic problems or balance a simple ecosystem without thinking too hard, and got pleasure from solving it. Before coming to Rhea, he’d lived with his parents in on the eastern coast of Australia, and one of the things he missed most, after leaving Earth, was snorkelling above the elaborate architecture of the coral reef and its schools of bright fish in the bay, and the aquarium he’d taken a whole year to get just right, a miniature reef in its own right. He added, “I’d like to know how you grow the herbs you sell.”

“In dirt, with water and sunlight.”

“That isn’t what I meant. I was wondering how the low gravity —”

Ahlgren Rees held up a hand. “I have a date,” he said. “If you stop at my stall, if I am not too busy, perhaps we can talk then.”

He said goodbye to the owner of the cafe, who with a smile asked him to have a good thought on her behalf, and then he was walking off down the path. Not towards his apartment, but in the opposite direction, towards the little funicular railway that dropped down to the floor of the chamber.

Jack wanted but did not dare to ask the owner of the cafe where he was going. After the woman had refused his offer to pay for his juice (“You can bring me some sour oranges next time you visit the market,” she said), he set off after Ahlgren Rees, and called Mark on his phone, told him about the conversation, and what he was doing. Mark said that he’d catch up, and arrived, breathless and excited, at the lakeside jetty just as Ahlgren Rees was climbing into one of the swan boats.

“Where is he going?” Mark said.

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “But he said that he had a date.”

“With a woman?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you sure you actually talked to him?”

“He said that he had a date, and he left. What was I supposed to do – make a citizen’s arrest.”

“No need to feel guilty. Our mission was successful.”

“You found something. What did you find?”

“He’s a spy all right.” Mark patted the pouch of his jumper, waggled his thick black eyebrows. “I’ll show you in a minute. First, we need a boat.”

There were several high-sided dinghies waiting at the jetty, rising and falling on the long, slow waves that rolled across the lake. Jack and Mark climbed into one, and Mark stuck something in a slot in the fat sensor rod that stuck up at the prow, told the boat that this was a police override, told it to follow the boat which had just left.

As the boat’s reaction motor pushed it towards the centre of the long, narrow lake, Jack said, “That’s how you got into his apartment, isn’t it? You overrode the lock.”

He was sitting in the stern, the plastic box with the mock turtle inside it on his knees.

Mark, standing at the prow, one hand on top of the sensor rod, glanced over his shoulder. “Of course I did.”

“I suppose you stole the card from one of your parents.”

“Sky made a copy of my mother’s card,” Mark said.

“If she finds out —”

“As long as I don’t get into trouble, she doesn’t care what I do. The Blob doesn’t care either. They’re too busy with their jobs, too busy
advancing their careers
, too busy
making money
,” Mark said. He had his back to Jack, but Jack could hear the bitterness in his voice. “Which is fine with me, because once they make enough, we’ll leave this rotten little ball of ice and go back to Earth.”

There was a short silence. Jack was embarrassed, feeling that he had had an unwanted glimpse through a crack in his his friend’s armour of careless toughness into his soul, had seen the angry resentment and loneliness there. At last, he said, “If we prove that Ahlgren Rees really is a spy, your parents will be proud of you.”

Mark turned around. “Oh, he’s a spy, all right. Guess what I found in his apartment.”

It was the kind of question you were bound to fail to answer correctly, so Jack just shrugged.

Mark smiled a devilish smile, reached into the pouch of his jumper, and drew out a small, silver gun.

Jack was shocked and excited at the same moment. He said, “Is it real?”

“Oh yes. And it’s charged too,” Mark said, pointing to a tiny green light that twinkled above the crosshatched grip.

He explained that it was a railgun that used a magnetic field to fire metal splinters tipped with explosive or toxin, or which sprouted hooks and knives after they hit their target, burrowing deep into flesh. He played campaigns based on the Quiet War on a wargaming network, knew all about the different ways the rebellious colonies had been pacified, and all about the guns and the various kinds of weapons used by both sides. Discovering the gun had not only confirmed his suspicions about Ahlgren Rees, but had made him bold and reckless too. He talked excitedly about catching the spy in the act of sabotage, about arresting him and whoever he was going to meet and making them talk.

Although Jack was excited too, it was plain that his friend was getting carried away. “This doesn’t change our plan,” he said. “We follow the man and see what he gets up to, and then we decide what to do.”