Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 Read Free Page B

vase, and, above the table, a large portrait of a stately-looking horse in a heavy gilded frame. Beneath the table were stowed—temporarily, Michelle assumed—a dozen or so trophies, which to judge from the little golden figures balanced atop them were awarded either for gymnastics or martial arts. The opulent setting seemed a little at odds with the young, informally dressed couple: she wore a flowery tropical shirt tucked into khakis, and Terzian was dressed in a tank top and shorts. There was a sense that the photographer had caught them almost in motion, as if they’d paused for the picture en route from one place to another.
    Nice shoulders, Michelle thought. Big hands, well-shaped muscular legs. She hadn’t ever thought of Terzian as young, or large, or strong, but he had a genuine, powerful physical presence that came across even in the old, casual photographs. He looked more like a football player than a famous thinker.
    Michelle called up her character-recognition software and fed in all the pictures, then checked the software’s work, something she was reasonably certain her employer would never have done if he’d been doing this job himself. Most people using this kind of canned software didn’t realize how the program could be fooled, particularly when used with old media, scanned film prints heavy with grain and primitive digital images scanned by machines that simply weren’t very intelligent. In the end, Michelle and the software between them managed an excellent job of mapping Terzian’s body and calibrating its precise ratios: the distance between the eyes, the length of nose and curve of lip, the distinct shape of the ears, the length of limb and trunk. Other men might share some of these biometric ratios, but none would share them all.
    The mermaid downloaded the data into her specialized research spiders, and sent them forth into the electronic world.
    A staggering amount of the trivial past existed there, and nowhere else. People had uploaded pictures, diaries, commentary, and video; they’d digitized old home movies, complete with the garish, deteriorating colors of the old film stock; they’d scanned in family trees, postcards, wedding lists, drawings, political screeds, and images of handwritten letters. Long, dull hours of security video. Whatever had meant something to someone, at some time, had been turned into electrons and made available to the universe at large.
    A surprising amount of this stuff had survived the Lightspeed War—none of it had seemed worth targeting, or, if trashed, had been reloaded from backups.
    What all this meant was that Terzian was somewhere in there. Wherever Terzian had gone in his weeks of absence—Paris, Dalmatia, or Thule—there would have been someone with a camera. In stills of children eating ice cream in front of Notre Dame, or moving through the video of buskers playing saxophone on the Pont des Artistes, there would be a figure in the background, and that figure would be Terzian. Terzian might be found lying on a beach in Corfu, reflected in a bar mirror in Gdynia, or negotiating with a prostitute in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district—Michelle had found targets in exactly those places during the course of her other searches.
    Michelle sent her software forth to find Terzian, then lifted her arms above her head and stretched—stretched fiercely, thrusting out her bare feet and curling the toes, the muscles trembling with tension, her mouth yawned in a silent shriek.
    Then she leaned over her deck again, and called up the message from Darton, the message she’d saved till last.
    “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why won’t you talk to me? I love you!”
    His brown eyes were a little wild.
    “Don’t you understand?” he cried. “I’m not dead! I’m not really dead! ”

    Michelle hovered three or four meters below the surface of Zigzag Lake, gazing upward at the inverted bowl of the heavens, the brilliant blue of the Pacific sky surrounded