Alien Crimes

489 Pages·2012·2.02 MB·English

by  Resnick Mike

Mike Resnick (ed) – Alien Crimes
ALIEN CRIMES
Edited by
Mike Resnick

SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB

Compilation and Introduction copyright © 2007 by Mike Resnick
“Nothing Personal” copyright © 2007 by Pat Cadigan “A Locked-
Planet Mystery” copyright © 2007 by Mike Resnick “Hoxbomb”
copyright © 2007 by Harry Turtledove “The End of the World”
copyright © 2007 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“Dark Heaven” copyright © 2007 by Gregory Benford “Womb of
Every World” copyright © 2007 by Walter Jon Williams
All rights reserved.

First Science Fiction Book Club printing April 2007
Published by Science Fiction Book Club, 401 Franklin Avenue,
Garden City, New York 11530. Visit the SF Book Club online at
www.sfbc.com
Book design by Christos Peterson
ISBN: 978-1-58288-223-9
Printed in the United States of America an ebookman scan
Contents
Mike Resnick (ed) – Alien Crimes
Contents
INTRODUCTION
NOTHING PERSONAL by Pat Cadigan
A LOCKED-PLANET MYSTERY by Mike Resnick
HOXBOMB by Harry Turtledove
THE END OF THE WORLD by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
DARK HEAVEN by Gregory Benford
WOMB OF EVERY WORLD by Walter Jon Williams
End of Mike Resnick (ed) - Alien Crimes
INTRODUCTION
TWO YEARS ago I edited Down These Dark Spaceways, an
anthology of six hard-boiled science fiction detective novellas,
for the Science Fiction Book Club. It was pretty well received:
Robert J. Sawyer’s novella was nominated for a Hugo and a
Nebula, Catherine Asaro’s was nominated for a couple of
awards, others appeared in various Best-of-the-Year
anthologies.
So last year I approached the book club and suggested we do
another. They agreed, with the stipulation that this book of alien
crimes not contain any hard-boiled mysteries, that we show that
the infinitely adaptable field of science fiction is able to
encompass all kinds of mysteries. After all, Alfred Bester’s The
Demolished Man and Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, the two
archetypal science fictional mysteries, weren’t hard-boiled
novels.
Hence, Alien Crimes. Once again I chose some of the very
best writers in the field and put the challenge to them: give me
a science fiction mystery, make it novella length, play fair with
the reader, and this time let’s have no genuflecting to the
Hammett/Chandler school of writing. In due time they delivered
their stories, and I think you’ll find the broad range of
approaches and subject matter as interesting as the mysteries
themselves. Hugo winner and best seller Harry Turtledove
examines the odor of crime in Hoxbomb; I bring back my Down
These Dark Spaceways detective Jake Masters, but this time
he’s working for the police and trying to solve A Locked-Planet
Mystery; Hugo winner and Edgar nominee Kristine Kathryn
Rusch demonstrates that things are not always what they seem
in End of the World; Hugo nominee and Clarke winner Pat
Cadigan gives us an interesting lady investigator with a unique
problem to solve in Nothing Personal; Nebula winner Gregory
Benford seems to be telling a contemporary mystery in Dark
Heaven, and then proves that appearances can be deceiving;
and finally, in Womb of Every World, Nebula winner Walter Jon
Williams brings you a story that... well, whatever you think it is,
it’s almost certainly not.
I think, like its predecessor, this book proves that science
fiction can always bring something fresh and new to other forms
of fiction—especially the mystery story.
—Mike Resnick
NOTHING PERSONAL by Pat Cadigan
Detective Ruby Tsung could not say when the Dread had first
come over her. It had been a gradual development, taking place
over a period of weeks, possibly months, with all the subtlety of
any of the more mundane life processes—weight gain, graying
hair, aging itself. Time marched on and one day you woke up to
find you were a somewhat dumpy, graying, middle-aged
homicide detective with twenty-five years on the job and a hefty
lump of bad feeling in the pit of your stomach: the Dread.
It was a familiar-enough feeling, the Dread. Ruby had known
it well in the past. Waiting for the verdict in an officer-involved
shooting; looking up from her backlog of paperwork to find a
stone-faced Internal Affairs Division officer standing over her;
the doctor clearing his throat and telling her to sit down before
giving her the results of the mammogram; answering an
unknown trouble call and discovering it was a cop’s address.
Then there were the ever-popular rumors, rumors, rumors: of
budget cuts, of forced retirement for everyone with more than
fifteen years in, of mandatory transfers, demotions, promotions,
stings, grand jury subpoenas, not to mention famine, war;
pestilence, disease, and death—business as usual.
After a while she had become inured to a lot of it. You had to
or you’d make yourself sick, give yourself an ulcer, or go crazy.
As she had grown more experienced, she had learned what to
worry about and what she could consign to denial even just
temporarily. Otherwise, she would have spent all day with the
Dread eating away at her insides and all night with it sitting on
her chest crushing the breath out of her.
The last ten years of her twenty-five had been in Homicide
and in that time, she had had little reason to feel Dread. There
was no point. This was Homicide—something bad was going to
happen so there was no reason to dread it. Someone was going
to turn up dead today, tomorrow it would be someone else, the
next day still someone else, and so forth. Nothing personal, just
homicide.
Nothing personal. She had been coping with the job on this
basis for a long time now and it worked just fine. Whatever each
murder might have been about, she could be absolutely certain
that it wasn’t about her. Whatever had gone so seriously wrong
as to result in loss of life, it was not meant to serve as an omen,
a warning, or any other kind of signifier in her life. Just the facts,
ma’am or sir. Then punch out and go home.
Nothing personal. She was perfectly clear on that. It didn’t
help. She still felt as if she had swallowed something roughly
the size and density of a hockey puck.
There was no specific reason that she could think of. She
wasn’t under investigation—not as far as she knew, anyway,
and she made a point of not dreading what she didn’t know. She
hadn’t done anything (lately) that would have called for any
serious disciplinary action; there were no questionable medical
tests to worry about, no threats of any kind. Her son, Jake, and
his wife, Lita, were nested comfortably in the suburbs outside
Boston, making an indecent amount of money in computer
software and raising her grandkids in a big old Victorian house
that looked like something out of a storybook. The kids e-mailed
her regularly, mostly jokes and scans of their crayon drawings.
Whether they were all really as happy as they appeared to be
was another matter but she was fairly certain they weren’t
suffering. But even if she had been inclined to worry unduly
about them, it wouldn’t have felt like the Dread.
Almost as puzzling to her as when the Dread had first taken
up residence was how she had managed not to notice it coming
on. Eventually she understood that she hadn’t—she had simply
pushed it to the back of her mind and then, being continuously
busy, had kept on pushing it all the way into the 'Worry About
Later file, where it had finally grown too intense to ignore.
Which brought her back to the initial question: when the hell
had it started? Had it been there when her partner, Rita Castillo,
had retired? She didn’t remember feeling anything as
unpleasant as the Dread when Rita had made the
announcement or later on, at her leaving party. Held in a cop
bar, the festivities had gone on till two in the morning and the
only unusual thing about it for Ruby had been that she had gone
home relatively sober. Not by design and not for any specific
reason. Not even on purpose—she had had a couple of drinks
that had given her a nice mellow buzz, after which she had
switched to diet cola. Some kind of new stuff—someone had
given her a taste and she’d liked it. Who? Right, Tommy
DiCenzo; Tommy had fifteen years of sobriety, which was some
kind of precinct record.
But the Dread hadn’t started that night; it had already been
with her then. Not the current full-blown knot of Dread, but in
retrospect she knew that she had felt something and simply
refused to think about the bit of disquiet that had sunk its
barbed hook into a soft place.
But she hadn’t been so much in denial that she had gotten
drunk. You left yourself open to all sorts of unpleasantness
when you tied one on at a cop’s retirement party: bad thoughts,
bad memories, bad dreams, and real bad mornings-after. Of
course, knowing that hadn’t always stopped her in the past. It
was too easy to let yourself be caught up in the moment, in all
the moments, and suddenly you were completely shitfaced and
wondering how that could have happened. Whereas she
couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard of anyone staying
sober by accident.
Could have been the nine-year-old that had brought the
Dread on. That had been pretty bad even for an old hand like
herself. Rita had been on vacation and she had been working
alone when the boy’s body had turned up in the Dumpster on
the South Side—or South Town, which was what everyone
seemed to be calling it now. The sudden name-change baffled
her; she had joked to Louie Levant at the desk across from hers
about not getting the memo on renaming the ’hoods. Louie had
looked back at her with a mixture of mild surprise and
amusement on his pale features. “South Town was what we
always called it when I was growing up there,” he informed her,
a bit loftily. “Guess the rest of you finally caught on.” Louie was
about twenty years younger than she was, Ruby reminded
herself, which meant that she had two decades more history to
forget; she let the matter drop.
Either way, South Side or South Town, the area wasn’t a
crime hotspot. It wasn’t as upscale as the park-like West Side or
as stolidly middle/working class as the Northland Grid but it
wasn’t East Midtown, either. Murder in South Town was news;
the fact that it was a nine-year-old boy was worse news and
worst of all, it had been a sex crime.
Somehow she had known that it would be a sex crime even
before she had seen the body, lying small, naked, and broken
amid the trash in the bottom of the Dumpster. Just what she
hadn’t wanted to catch—kiddie sex murder. Kiddie sex murder
had something for everyone: nightmares for parents, hysterical
ammunition for religious fanatics, and lurid headlines for all.
And a very special kind of hell for the family of the victim, who
would be forever overshadowed by the circumstances of his
death.
During his short life, the boy had been an average student
with a talent for things mechanical—he had liked to build
engines for model trains and cars. He had told his parents he
thought he’d like to be a pilot when he grew up. Had he died in
some kind of accident, a car wreck, a fall, or something equally
unremarkable, he would have been remembered as the little
boy who never got a chance to fly—tragic, what a shame, light a
candle. Instead, he would now and forever be defined by the
sensational nature of his death. The public memory would link
him not with little-kid stuff like model trains and cars but with
the pervert who had killed him.
She hadn’t known anything about him, none of those specific
details about models and flying when she had first stood gazing
down at him; at that point, she hadn’t even known his name.
But she had known the rest of it as she had climbed into the
Dumpster, trying not to gag from the stench of garbage and
worse and hoping that the plastic overalls and booties she had
on didn’t tear.
That had been a bad day. Bad enough that it could have
been the day the Dread had taken up residence in her gut.