Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

A flicker of a smile curved Quinn Gross’s lips. “Tell me about this thing.”

Her gesture took in the wide bay and estuary beyond the walkway, the water still roiled brown and flecked with debris.

“The mesh?” Carmen walked to the safety wall and looked over. The body had been covered. People in blue jumpsuits stood around in varying attitudes of boredom and irritation. One—in a gray suit—looked up at Carmen and Quinn and frowned.

Quinn waved. Carmen thought that was probably the M.E., because whoever it was looked back down, head shaking.

“Do you need to go down there?”

“In a minute.” Quinn pulled out a tiny recorder with the air of one licking their pencil. “Tell me about the mesh. It’s an artificial wetland?”

“It’s more of an engineered wetland,” Carmen said. “Artificial suggests that it’s all man-made, and plenty of those plants you see down there and the animals doinking around volunteered for the job. We just provided them with a habitat. It’s called soft edge tech; it’s a way of making the transition zone between sea and land more durable and absorbent.”

“So it soaks up storm surge.”

“And everyday erosion, yes. So this walkway and those houses right there stay here, and don’t wash into the rising sea.”

“Is it possible that the victim would have washed up that far onto the shore? Or do you think she would have had to come from the top?”

“It’s a she?” Carmen asked. The swollen condition of the body had not made gender evident.

“Superficially,” Quinn said. “It’s hard to ask their pronouns. We’ll find out from the family.”

Carmen shied away from answering, from helping this detective send somebody to jail. But she was also a scientist, and the urge to explain her work was irresistible.

“Where she’s caught, those are dunes. A broad-cell polymer webwork filled up with sand and planted with dune grass and beach plums and so forth. Lower down, that’s the wetland. So yes, she could have washed up that far—see where the sea stopped rising? There’s the mark on those trees. And if she had been thrown off the wall here, she probably would have washed away. So the body came from somewhere else and the storm surge deposited it where it is.”

Quinn’s gesture took in the green polymer lattices festooned with sea wrack along the water’s edge. “What’s all that stuff for?”

“The rising sea can’t be stopped, but its force can be shifted.”

“You’re using judo on the ocean.”

“I suppose we are.”

Down below, the medical examiner looked up again and waved to Quinn impatiently. “I’d better go down,” Quinn said. “They want to bring the body up. One city employee to another, I can reach you through the Department of Public Works?”

She was gone before Carmen could answer.

Or ask what it was about the body that had made the medical examiner call for a detective, but Carmen didn’t realize that until later, when the ceiling over her bed was staring her down.

After four days, Carmen made herself stop searching for news coverage on the murder. Becoming obsessed with a slow-breaking story wouldn’t help an overworked, underpaid public servant get her job done.

Her work was tracking the progress of the mesh as it built itself—reclaimed scrap of microplastic by reclaimed scrap of microplastic—along the edge of the bay. Supporting it. Protecting people. Building habitat for animals. Regreening sequestered carbon, and that too helped the warming world weather its changes.

On the seventh day, Carmen looked up from her spreadsheets to find Quinn lounging against the doorframe, watching her.

“How’d you get in here?” Carmen blurted, aware as the words left her mouth how weird—how guilty—they made her sound.

“I’m a city employee too.” Quinn’s intent gaze never wavered, a frank inspection that left Carmen feeling awkward and self-conscious. “I came to ask your help with some forensics stuff, actually.”

“Aren’t I a suspect?”

Quinn’s head tilted. “Should you be?”

“… No? I just thought… Isn’t the person who finds the body always a suspect?”

“You’ve been watching too many CSI shows.” Quinn walked into the office, moving as easily as she spoke. She shut the door behind her, glancing at Carmen for permission. “Not when the body is a floater washed up at the soft edge, and the person who found it is an engineer performing her assigned duties. Unless you knew her, of course.”

“Has her name been released and I missed it?” Carmen called up a search bar. Her mouth twisted. She made herself close it again. I must not develop unproductive obsessions. I must not develop unproductive obsessions. I must not develop —

“Not yet,” Quinn said, following Carmen’s gesture to a chair. She sat and crossed her legs.

“Is it still not suspicious if the engineer in question is an expert on tide patterns?”

“Do you want to be a suspect?”

Carmen put the heel of her hand to her forehead and laughed ruefully. “No?”

“Then stop making the case for it.” Quinn uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, making the coat of her beautifully cut dove-colored suit flare.

Carmen lifted her chin and decided to get it out in the open. “This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been accused of a violent crime.”

“I know,” Quinn said. “I looked you up. You were cleared.”

“Cops don’t usually care about things like that.”

Quinn smiled. “You spent six months in jail awaiting trial. I understand why you automatically hated me, now.”

Carmen decided not to dignify that with an answer and shut her half-open mouth very quietly. “Nobody should go to jail,” she said, instead.

“You and I will have to differ on that one,” Quinn said. “I’m sorry to say, this is probably a sexual homicide.”

“Sexual—” Those were not words Carmen would usually put together.

“Serial killer,” Quinn said tiredly. “Or about to become one. We need at least three bodies before we can call the FBI.”

Carmen bit her lip. She was, she knew, flailing.

“What do you know about”—Quinn looked down at her handheld—“identifying the provenance of microplastics and seawater?”

“I literally wrote the book on it.” Carmen swiveled her chair away from her computer and leaned her elbows on the blotter. Relief welled through her. This was something she knew how to deal with. Not like… sexual homicide. Not like the possibility of sending somebody else to jail.

Quinn said, “Is there anything you can do to help us catch the killer? Can you tell me based on, maybe, tide charts and trace evidence on the body where she might have gone into the water?”

“I can probably rule a lot of places out. The mesh filters microplastics and reprocesses them to manufacture more soft edge, so if there’s a lot of microplastics in her clothes, she didn’t drown near our tech perimeter.”

“I have samples extracted from the victim’s lungs,” Quinn said. “Would you look at them for me?”

“You have to understand,” Carmen said carefully, “that I am utterly opposed to prisons on an ethical and logical level. I think they’re a terrible idea that harms society and creates more crime.”

“Sure,” Quinn said, disarmingly. “You’re probably right. But that terrible solution is the best solution I know of to keeping violent habitual offenders from re-offending, and I have a degree in criminal justice. So. Will you help?”

“I shouldn’t.”

“But?”

“The science might be interesting,” Carmen said.

From Quinn’s wry expression, Carmen understood that Quinn, too, felt the inescapable urge to know and reveal the truth. The detective was also a kind of scientist, testing hypotheses and collecting data. The urge to find out was the strongest motivator of all.