The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (29 page)

W
HERE ARE THEY
?’”

“They? Who’s this ‘they,’ Niles?” I say, wondering if he’s finally flipped. “There’s nobody out here but us chickens. And we’re where we’ve always been. Right behind you and catching up fast.”

“It’s a famous question, Emma. Even though I know your training wasn’t all it could have been, I’m surprised and more than a little shocked that you don’t recognise it.”

At the beginning of this long chase, Niles Sarkka maintained an imperial silence, week after week, month after month. He didn’t answer my calls, and after a while I gave up trying to call him. Then, after turnover, after we switched off our motor and flipped end for end and switched it back on and began to decelerate, applying the brakes as we slid down the steepening slope of the warm yellow star’s gravity well, he called me. He wanted to know why we’d left it so late; I told him that a smart fellow like him should be able to work it out for himself.

But he hasn’t, not yet, although he’s been nagging away at it ever since. As our ship has grown closer to his, as both have grown closer to our final destination, the calls have begun to increase in frequency. And like most people living on their own, Niles has developed eccentric habits. He calls without any regard for time of day, so I have to carry the q-phone everywhere, and it’s a big old heavy thing the size of a briefcase, one of the first models. This call, the second in three days, has fetched me out of my weekly bath, and baths are a big deal on the ship. It’s not just a question of scrubbing off a week’s worth of grime; it’s also an escape from the 1.6 g pull. Sinking into buoyant water and resting sore joints and swollen legs and aching backs. Forgetting for a little while how far we’ve come from all that’s known, and the possibility we might not be able to get back. So, standing dripping wet on an ice-cold floor, grappling with the q-phone and trying to knot a towel around me while the other women slosh and wallow in hot dark water in the big bamboo tub, I’m annoyed and resentful, and having a hard time hiding it.

Saying, “As far as I’m concerned, my training was good enough to catch you.”

Fortunately, Niles Sarkka ignores my sarcasm. He’s in one of his pedagogical moods, behaving as if he’s back in front of the TV camera, delivering a solemn lecturette to his adoring audience.

“ ‘Where are they?’ ” he says. “A famous question famously asked by the physicist Enrico Fermi when he and his colleagues were discussing flying saucers and likelihood of faster-than-light travel. ‘Where are they?’ Fermi exclaimed. Given the age and size of the Galaxy, given that it was likely that life had evolved more than once, the Earth should have been visited many times over. If aliens existed, they should already be here. And since they weren’t, Fermi argued, they did not exist. Many scientists and philosophers challenged his paradox with a variety of ingenious solutions, or tried to explain the absence of aliens with a variety of equally ingenious scenarios. But we are privileged to know the answer. We know that they were there all along. We know that the Jackaroo have been watching us for centuries, and chose to reveal themselves in our hour of greatest need. But their appearance provoked many other questions. Where did they come from? Why were they watching us, and why have they intervened? Why have they survived for so long, when we know that other intelligent species have not? Are they outliers, or something different? Are we like them, or are we like the other so-called Elder Cultures – doomed to a finite span, doomed to die out, or to evolve into something beyond our present comprehension? Or are we doomed by our association with the Jackaroo, who set us free from the cage of Earth, yes, but only to let us move into a slightly larger cage. Where we can be studied or played with until they grow tired of us. And so on, and so on. The Jackaroo provided a kind of answer to Fermi’s question, Emma, but it generated a host of new mysteries. Soon, we will discover the answers to some of them. Doesn’t it excite you? It should. I am excited. Excited, and amazed, and more than a little afraid. If you and your farmer friends have even the slightest hint of imagination, you should feel excited and amazed and afraid too. For we are fast approaching the threshold of a new chapter of human history.”

Like every criminal who knows the game is up, Niles Sarkka is trying to justify actions that can’t be justified. Trying to climb a ladder of words towards that last little chink of light high above the dungeon of his plight. I let him talk, of course. It’s always easier to let the guilty talk. They give so much away it isn’t even funny. Niles Sarkka is responsible for the deaths of three people and stole code that could, yes, this is about our only point of agreement, radically change our understanding of our place in the Universe and our relationship with the Jackaroo. So of course I let him talk, but I’m getting cold, standing there in only a towel, my vertebrae are grinding together, blood is pooling in my tired and swollen legs, and I’m growing more impatient than usual with his discursions and bluster, his condescending lesson on the history of the search for extraterrestrial life. So when at last he says that he doesn’t care what people think of him now, that history will judge him and that’s all that counts, I can’t help myself.

“I’ll tell you who will judge you, Niles. A jury of your peers, in Court One of the Justice Centre in Port of Plenty.”

He hangs up. Affronted and offended no doubt, the pompous fool. Anxiety nips at me, I wonder if this time I’ve gone too far, but it soon passes. I know he will call back. Because he wants to convince me that, despite all the bad things he’s done, he will be vindicated by what he expects to discover. Because he has only one q-phone, and I have its twin. Because he has no one else to talk to, out here in the deep and lonely dark between the stars.

As far as I was concerned, it began with a call from one of our contacts in the Port of Plenty Police Department, telling me that the two code jockeys I was looking for, Everett Hughes and Jason Singleton, had been traced to a motel.

It was a little past eight in the Evening. As usual, I’d been writing up notes on the day’s work with half an eye on the news channel. I found the remote and switched off the TV and said, “Are they in custody?”

“It looks like they’re dead. The room they rented is burned out, and there are two crispy critters inside. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there it is. And info is info, good or bad, right?”

I didn’t bother to reassure him that he would get paid in due course. “Who’s the attending?”

“Zacarias. August Zacarias. He’s good police, closes more than his fair share of cases. A prince of the city, too.”

“Where can I find him?”

“He’s still at the scene. From what I hear, it’s a mess out there.”

The motel was at the outer edge of the city, close to an off-ramp on the orbital freeway and an access road that climbed a slope of thorn scrub to an industrial park. The streetlights along the road were out, the long low sheds of the park squatted in darkness, and the lights were out in the motel office and its string of rooms, too. A transformer on top of a power-line pole fizzed and sparked. I parked behind a clutch of police cruisers and the satellite van of the local TV news team, and badged my way past the patrol officers who were keeping a small crowd on the right side of crime scene tape strung between a couple of saw horses. The TV reporter and her camerawoman tried to zero in on me, but I ducked away. I was excited and apprehensive: this had brought three months of careful investigative work to a sudden and unwelcome crux, and I had no idea how it would play out.

The warm night air stank of charred wood, smoke, and a sharp tang like freshly-cut metal. The headlamps of a pair of fire trucks patchily lit an L-shaped string of rooms that enclosed two sides of the parking lot; their flashers sent flickers of orange light racing over wet tarmac and the roofs of angle-parked cars and pickup trucks. Firefighters in heavy slickers and yellow helmets were rolling up hoses. A chicken was perched on the cab of a pickup and several more strutted and pecked amongst a couple of picnic tables set on a strip of grass by a derelict swimming pool. The room at the end of the short arm of the L was lit by portable floods, light falling strong and stark on blackened walls, smoke curling from the broken door and the smashed, soot-stained window. Jason Singleton’s car, an ancient Volkswagen Faraday, stood in front of this ruin. The windshield was shattered and its hood was scorched clean of paint and its plastic fender was half-melted.

The homicide detective who had caught the call, August Zacarias, was a tall man in his fifties, with matt black skin and wooly hair clipped short and brushed with grey at the temples, dressed in a brown suit with a windowpane check and polished brown Oxford loafers, a white shirt and a buttercup yellow silk tie. A micropore mask hung under his chin and he stripped off soot-stained vinyl gloves as he came towards me, saying that he understood I wanted to take his case away from him. He had a signet ring on the index finger of his right hand: the kind of ring, faced with a chunk of opal, worn by male members of the Fortunate Five Hundred.

“As far as I’m concerned, you’ve walked into my case,” I said.

“You’re English.”

“Yes. Obviously.”

“Were you in the police before you came here?”

“Ten years in the Met.”

“The London police? Scotland Yard?”

“New Scotland Yard.”

“And then you came here, and joined the geek police.”

“I joined the UN police, Detective Zacarias, and currently I’m working with the Technology Control Unit. Now we’ve bonded, perhaps you can tell me what happened here.”

August Zacarias had a friendly smile and possessed the imperturbable calm of someone with absolute confidence in his authority, but from bitter experience I knew exactly what he was thinking: that I was a meddling, boot-faced bureaucrat with a humour bypass and a spreadsheet for a soul who was about to steal a perfectly good double murder from him and cause him all kinds of grief besides. And I couldn’t help wondering how he paid for his tailored suit, handmade loafers, and expensive cologne, whether the gold Rolex on his left wrist was real or a street-market fake, whether he was just a working stiff who wanted nothing more than to put down this case and move on to the next, or whether he had a private agenda. Aside from the usual rivalry between our two branches of law enforcement, the plain fact of the matter is that the PPPD is riddled with corruption. Most of its patrol officers take kickbacks and bribes; many of its detectives and senior officers are in the pockets of politicians, gangsters, or business people.

“Myself, I am from Lagos,” he said. “I was in the army there, and now I am a homicide detective here. And that’s what this is. Homicide. Two men died in that room, Inspector Davies. Someone has to answer for that.”

“Have the bodies been identified?”

“You want to know if they are the two young men you are looking for. I’m afraid I can’t confirm that yet. They are very badly burned.”

“This is Jason Singleton’s car,” I said.

“It is certainly registered to him. And according to several of the residents it was used by a man answering Mr Singleton’s description. Tall and blond, in his twenties, possibly English. His friend was heavyset, with long black hair, tattoos, and an American accent. Also in his twenties. That sounds like your other missing coder, Everett Hughes, yes? Although they signed the register as Mr Gates and Mr Jobs.”

“Geek humour.”

“I wondered if it was supposed to be funny. You posted an APB for both men. May I ask why?”

“I believe they stole Elder Culture technology from their employer.”