The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (71 page)

She took a sip of her beer, relishing the cool, slightly bitter taste, the dewy chill of the glass against her lips. Life, she thought, is made up of moments. We simply fail to notice most of them. “I have asked myself that question for a long time.” She studied the tiny, silver bubbles rising through the amber liquid. “I’m a lot older than you, Shawn. I’m a product of world that is now dead.”

“Africa,” he murmured.

“Africa is a continent.” She lifted her glass in his direction. “Lesotho. Once upon a time, long before you were born, my people raised and reintroduced lions to the dying plains. We had killed them all and now, many generations later, we brought them back. Only we didn’t know the plains were dying, but they were. We, the Lesotho people, succeeded. For a while.” She lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “But the plains died, then the lions died, and ultimately . . .” She drank more beer. “Lesotho died. Here . . . I found a trace of that dead world.”

“The lions?” Shawn leaned forward and touched her hand lightly.

“Them, too.” She tilted her head to study him, aware that she was getting drunk. “But it is not the world I knew. We did not care enough about that world to bring it back. Why not, Shawn?”

“No tourist value,” he said softly.

“This world the engineers are creating is so old that it is new.” She tried to smile, but it felt crooked. “The merely old has no value. Still . . . there are lions.” She took another swallow of her beer. “And this is a refuge. From memory, if nothing else.”

The entry chimed. “Hey, Tahira, you’re back.” Jen breezed through, bringing in the scent of dust and afternoon heat. “Hi, have we met?” He offered a hand to Shawn as he rose from the cushion. “I’m Jen, a grad student. I study bugs.”

“Hi, Jen. I was just leaving.” Shawn got to his feet, hesitated, then leaned down. “To memories.” He touched his glass to hers.

She hesitated for a moment, met his eyes. Found . . . compassion there.

Jen looked from one to the other, puzzled, as they emptied their glasses. Shawn took them to the kitchen wall, lifted a hand to her, then left, the door whispering shut behind him.

“What was that all about?” He set his field pack against the wall.

“He was deciding whether or not to arrest me.” Tahira watched Jen fill a glass of water. “I’d like some water, too, please.”

“What’s with the arrest thing?” He turned, smiling, a full glass in each hand. “And what happened to your arm? Did you have an accident with the skimmer?”

“Yes. I did.” She took the glass. “Sit down, Jen.”

He sat, the first tickle of alarm tightening the skin of his eyes before he quickly banished it with a smooth, careful smile.

“I have done a number of things in my long life.” Tahira sipped her water. “One was computer security. I was very good. The systems these days are more advanced, but not excessively so.”

“How interesting.”

He was doing the facial expression well, but his body betrayed him, tension lifting his shoulders, straightening the curve of his spine. “Yes,” she said. “So I was able to trace your alterations to the security platform.” She raised her hand to silence him as he opened his mouth. “And I was also able to document the source of the Security breach and ID you. It’s documented, Jen. Archived in hard media to be released to the authorities either on my say-so, or upon my death.”

“I . . . I didn’t know . . . anyone was going to get killed.” His face had gone white and in an instant, the planes and angles of maturity had softened to the rounded face of a child. “It . . . I was horrified. I didn’t know . . . but they’d . . . I didn’t dare say . . . I couldn’t tell . . .”

Was I ever a child like this? she wondered. She tried to remember. Didn’t think so. Her older daughter had never been a child either. Not really. What about her younger daughter? Had they allowed her to be a child before she became a soldier? She hoped so. With all her heart. That was what I bought for you, she thought. Sighed. “You already knew that girl was dead when I first told you we’d had an intruder. Relax, Jen.” She lifted her hand to silence him. “You are a pawn in this game. You will do one thing for me and then you are free to keep studying your bugs. . . . Although I suggest that you look into a transfer to another research program as quickly as you can engineer it.” She studied his bowed head and hunched shoulders. “If something does happen to me, you will certainly be a suspect, so it might be unsafe for you to remain here.”

“What do you want me to do?” he mumbled.

“You will run the DNA analysis on the bones that we found. I will give you a sample of lion DNA and you will make sure that you find that DNA associated with the dead girl. It may be there already. If it is not you will find it.”

“That’s all?” He raised his head, the fearful hope in his eyes painful to look at.

“That’s all.” You would not have survived in my world, she thought.

“I . . . I already put in a grant proposal.” He looked away, swallowed. “I’d be doing it at the Antarctic preserve, looking at the symbiotic bacteria that still exist near the pole.”

Ah, guilt. It would get him out of her sight quickly, at least. “Good.” She nodded. “Here.” She fumbled the collection bag from her coveralls. Handed it to him. The bit of flesh had turned brown and ugly. “This is your DNA.”

He took it and fled. She suspected she wouldn’t see him before he left – not if he could avoid it. Which suited her just fine.

The beer had given her energy, or maybe it had been the compassion in Shawn’s eyes. She had not expected . . . understanding. But now, exhaustion was creeping through her. She opened her holo field and set it to secure, in case Jen was brave enough to return. She opened the camera control and set it to face view only. Her boss would not see her bandages.

Carlo answered quickly, seated in his teak and real-leather deskrecliner. “Did you get my messages?” He looked angry, his jet hair, usually immaculate, slightly mussed as if he had run his hand through it. “What is all this in the media? Tourists claiming that you were a witness to that intruder’s death?”

“I have already informed the authorities that it was a mistake.” She gave him a smooth smile. “The small brush-fire of blogging will fade quickly.”

“This is the last thing we need, Tahira.” He scowled at her. “Such carelessness is unlike you. You know better than to do anything that will incite negative public attention. What were you thinking?”

“I needed to make myself bait,” she said simply. “That was the surest and fastest method.”

He was far more mature than Jen and his face betrayed nothing, not even the tic of an eyelid gave him away. Almost, she could believe . . . “Our security is very very cutting edge. I sent you the inserted visuals that replaced the images of the girl’s dying. Perhaps Jen was in a hurry.” She shrugged. “But he had neither the access nor the expertise to allow an intruder to come and go through the Security shield without triggering any alarm or record. The intruder had a password.”

“How could someone have that?”

Almost she had believed that she had made a mistake, but his tone betrayed him. He was asking a rhetorical question. “Only two people have a password, Carlo. You and I. There is no real anonymity in the net. Not for a long time now.” She smiled at him, pleasantly. “I do not believe you are one of the major players here. If I did . . .” She bared her teeth at him. “I would not be talking to you. I think you merely . . . got a percentage. Rental. And perhaps a copy of the video? Does that excite you? A real and violent death, with real fear, and real blood?”

He flinched then, and her stomach twisted.

“That was how they came to ask you, wasn’t it? You are a customer.” She kept the disgust out of her voice, because it was not yet time to end this conversation. “I have archived a file of all my suspicions and all the evidence I have uncovered to support them. It is not sufficient to convict you. But it is sufficient to let those with greater investigative skills than I have find out the truth. Then they will convict you. On the day of my death, the archive goes to the appropriate World Council committee members.”

“Blackmail?” His lip curled. “Is that so much better than what I did?”

“It’s not blackmail.” She shrugged. “It is simply an insurance policy. To make sure that this does not happen again here.”

He didn’t believe her.

“I am finishing up the DNA scan of the dead girl. I have already euthanized the lioness that attacked her. You may release that information to the media and the public. You may make whatever statement about blogger inaccuracies you choose and that will, as I said, fade away. If anything – her lip curled, “it will increase traffic to the Preserve. As you know, violent death is a potent pheromone.”

His reaction was more visible this time.

She ended the link. Rudely.

She was entitled to be rude.

“He is too well protected.” She was speaking to Shawn’s absence, heard her own defensive tone. “He is insulated by too much money and too many connections. He would emerge from the ashes of an investigation and nothing would change.” She closed down her field, got to her feet, feeling age in her flesh. How much longer did she have? “Perhaps I am too much a product of my old world. To me, justice is direct – an eye for an eye. The justice of the old gods. Of the lions.”

She had bought the old lioness a second chance. It might not buy her much time at all, or she might get another season before she was ousted by one of the younger, striped, new females that made the gene engineers so happy. She had a tour scheduled tomorrow. The note on the green calendar field on the wall was flashing its reminder. She stretched her shoulder, testing the limits of the pain. If she slept well, she could do it, perhaps with less energy. There would be questions. She would have to decide on the answers before then, would this time do Shawn the courtesy of telling him what her answers would be.

And soon it would be nothing more than an ephemera floating in webspace, evoked from time to time like a fading ghost, through some odd search connection that summoned up a stale blog entry. The world was full of ghosts.

Instead of going to her bed, she slipped outside and found her skimmer parked in its usual place. Someone had cleaned the blood from it. She found her spare glasses in the tool compartment, slipped them on and lifted into the darkness. The lions would be hunting and she might catch the pride on their way down to the river. The pain in her shoulder faded as she toed the skimmer up to speed and slid through the bright bubble of a yesterday that had never really happened.