Sheep’s Clothing by Dale Bailey (F&SF, October-November 1995) opens with Stern, the narrator, thinking about different types of assassin before he himself is recruited by a wheelchair-bound man called Thrale to kill a Senator Philip Hanson.
We later learn that the reason for the proposed killing is that Hanson intends to vote for legislation enabling a biowar facility, an action that links to Stern’s own past as he was a spider drone operator in the Brazilian conflict and was exposed to a cocktail of tailored viruses and pathogens, but never fell ill. His family, however, were not so lucky:
After the war, Anna and I remained in her native Brazil. We did not return to the States until several years later, when black pustulant sores began to erupt in our five-year-old daughter’s flesh.
I can never forget the stench of the hospital room where she died—a noxious odor compounded of the sterile smell of the hospital corridors and a fulsome reek of decay, like rotting peaches, inside the room itself. At the last, my eyes watered with that smell; Anna could barely bring herself to enter the room. My daughter died alone, walled away from us by the surgical masks we wore over our noses and mouths. p. 115
In the next part of the story we see (the now widowed) Stern learn how to operate a marionette-like bodysuit that will enable him to control Hanson’s daughter after she has been injected with nanotechnology. The nanotech will give Stern twenty minutes of control and will than decompose, leaving no trace of external involvement—so the daughter will take the blame for the murder which, apart from the obvious benefits to Thrale, Stern & co., will also prevent her, a politician in her own right, from continuing with her father’s legislative agenda. To be honest, the suit/nanotech gimmick is probably the weakest part of the story, but little time is spent on the tech stuff and the bulk of the piece is mostly a series of scenes where we get a character study of Stern, or learn more about Thrale and his two employees: Pangborn is a female assistant, and Truman is the scientist who developed the system that Stern will be using to control the daughter.
At one point Stern is given a video disc from Pangborn that shows Hanson’s daughter and her female lover in a hotel room, and he later has a disturbing dream:
I was riding the spider, chasing the beacon of an intelligence comsat through the labyrinthine jungle. Luminescent tactical data flickered at the periphery of my vision. Antediluvian vegetation blurred by on either side. Small terrified creatures flashed through the tangled scrub. The forest reverberated with the raucous complaints of brightly plumed birds, the thrash of contused undergrowth.
How I loved the hunt.
I had always loved it.
Razored mandibles snapped the humid air as I drove the spider through the shadowy depths, emerging at last through a wall of steaming vegetation into a hotel room, dropped whole into the tangled Mato Grosso.
I stopped the spider short. Servos whirred. High resolution cameras scanned the area.
The sun penetrated the clearing in luminous shards. The jungle symphony swelled into the stillness. Two women writhed on the bed, oblivious to everything but one another.
“It’s time,” said the voice of Napoleon Thrale.
I urged the spider forward. Whiskered steel legs clawed the moist earth, the bed-sheets. Just as the mandibles closed about their fragile bodies, one of the women turned to look at me, her features contorted in the involuntary rictus of orgasm.
She wore my daughter’s face.
I screamed myself awake, sitting upright in the soured sheets, my penis like a stiffened rod against my belly. p. 126
After this Stern (a) talks to Truman about scientists like Oppenheimer and the guilt they bear for the inventions they create and (b) sleeps with Pangborn, learning that her fiancé died in Brazil.
Eventually (spoiler), the day of the assassination arrives and Stern, Pangborn and Truman set off to complete the mission. The daughter, Amanda, is shot with a long range hypodermic dart while out on a regular run and the nanotechnology enters her body. Stern takes control of Amanda and takes her back to the house, quickly finding Hanson in his office. Then, when the nanotech starts to break down, Amanda manages to reassert enough control to say “Dad?” just before Stern breaks a mug on the desk and kills Hanson by repeatedly slashing his throat.
There is a final postscript which sees Stern in the Caymans, where he still dreaming of his wife and daughter. Stern says that he has written a letter to Amanda’s attorneys explaining what happened and why she is not guilty of the murder (“the daughters have suffered enough” he adds to himself). After he sends the letter Stern says he will swim off towards the horizon to join his wife and daughter.
If you are looking for the assassination adventure suggested by the beginning of the piece you are probably going to be disappointed—however, if you are looking for a complex and involving psychodrama, then this will be well worth your time.
***+ (Good To Very Good). 11,100 words.