Diamond Sphere

by F P Adriani

  Unfortunately, that “no one” meant Jamie wasn’t around either.

  “Where the hell did he go?” I asked Nell as tore off my mask and we shot down the street.

  “I don’t know! What happened back there—did you find anything?”

  “We’ll talk later—let’s get to the rail.”

  We did. We waited there; the minutes passed.

  The train was scheduled to come in about ten minutes. “Where the fuck is he,” I said now, nervously pacing the platform, feeling very adrenaline juiced-up. I’d probably have trouble sleeping later….

  Just as I thought that, Jamie’s slim form appeared farther down the platform and came closer.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I practically shouted at him.

  Both the corners of his mouth and his eyebrows rose suggestively. “Missed me?”

  “No. We were gonna leave without you.”

  Now his eyebrows sunk and his mouth did that pout thing I’d realized was a common Jamie facial expression.

  “I’m just busting your hump,” I said, sighing. “I’m not a dumbass. Of course I would have waited.”

  Now the pout turned into a grin. He took off Nell’s blue knit hat and gave it back to her. “I asked the people for directions—there’s a bar a ways down. That must have been where people kept coming from. But I gave the two of them a fag each. We smoked for a little. Then I left but had to walk here the long way around, first in the bar’s direction. Made it look convincing. You think I shouldn’t have talked to them so much though? I had the hat pulled down to my brow, but they saw me up close….”

  “Don’t worry about it. There was no choice, at least with my being stuck inside.”

  “So did you fix that window?”

  I looked at him. Then I said a blunt, “No.”

  “But you said you’d fix it!”

  “How exactly? Do I look like I’m sporting glazier equipment? Hopefully, no one will notice it’s broken and if they do, it’ll be days later. And the little mementos I left will explain things.”

  “Mementos? What are you talking about, Pia?” Nell asked.

  “Not the place to discuss this…and here comes the train. Let’s move.”

  *

  “Omigod,” said Nell, “did you really drop used condoms there?” She held her stomach as she laughed, tears coursing down her face.

  We were back in our hotel room, and Nell was in her usual leaning-against-the-headboard spot on her bed.

  “Yep,” I said to her now on a grin.

  “Used by YOU?” Nell asked now.

  “Of course not. There is such a thing as sperm banks, you know. I keep a vacuum-packed supply of tainted rubbers in my case for just these special occasions. That’s a trick I thought up years ago. It’s come in handy a lot.”

  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Jamie, shaking his head. “But, hot damn, do I like it.”

  *

  A little while later, we made plans for the next day. I spoke mostly to Jamie now because I could talk to Nell after he’d left.

  “Giba,” he said to me at one point, “we’ve never talked about payment.”

  “How much is you-know-Hu paying you?”

  “Er…not much. It was a lump-sum deal.”

  I thought a moment, studied his serious face. I had two important places to visit in Cielo, and I didn’t know if most people there spoke anything other than Moonspan. Early that morning right after I’d woken up, I looked for that information on the hotel’s guest computer, but I found nothing about the languages then. It seemed that too often I’d be flying blind in Cielo, especially because tonight’s events wound up not allowing me time to study my visitor’s guide.

  I needed Jamie’s help—that was clear.

  “All right,” I said now. “I’ll pay you whatever your usual rate is. Be on time in the afternoon for the rail to Cielo.”

  “Yes Ma’am.”

  “You should go. We’ve got to rest, especially Nell.” I looked over at her; her head lay back against the top of the wooden headboard, her eyes were closed. And they hadn’t opened when I’d said her name.

  “See what I mean?” I whispered back to Jamie.

  *

  The next morning while we were packing up our belongings, Nell said to me, “I meant to ask you again what you found in the office last night, but I forgot after all the excitement.”

  “Well, look here.” I pulled out that paper from the file-cabinet room and some notes I’d made before I left Diamond. “This is the address for Millie in the doctor’s record, and that’s the address for Stein Refinery, which that John character used to half-own.”

  “Okay, they’re the same.” She glanced up at me. “What does it mean?”

  “What I suspected: Millie was working for him in breaking into our office.”

  “And the doctor—where does that come in?”

  “That scar on her face—you ever see it close up? When I saw a plastic surgeon listed on that building’s plaque, I figured that’s why she came back here. And the thing is: her initial appointment was for her third day on Hera, which was when she made an appointment for Strand to start the actual work on her face yesterday. But then on her fifth day here, she canceled yesterday’s appointment. I wonder what happened.”

  *

  At this point neither Nell nor I had actually spoken with either Derek or Tan since we’d left Diamond. So when Nell and I finished our packing, we went downstairs to the Communications room to call them.

  Normally, only big buildings on Hera had Communications rooms, and communications to-and-from were typically sent through the tiniest of space flumes—microflumes, which were used wherever and whenever they were available so people could talk in real-time over long distances.

  Nearly all flumes flowed in one general direction only, so you needed a flume with a nearby sister flume in the opposite flow direction for fast long-distance communications—or to get back to where you’d come from. A sad fact I’d only recently learned about flume exploration: for some places where one-way-only flumes existed, when those flumes had first been discovered, the humans who’d discovered them had gotten stranded in and then died in those isolated layers….

  At this time and day where Tan and Derek were on Diamond, I figured they’d both probably be at The Citadel; they normally had similar schedules, just in different departments.

  But this was an unscheduled call, so they hadn’t been sitting and waiting for us; we had to leave a message, wait, and have them call us back, which they did twenty minutes later, or at least Derek did.

  His enthusiastic face and voice came on the line, which was great for Nell. Because Tan had an upper-level job, I had been hoping he’d be available now to speak to me no matter what….

  Unfortunately, I’d hoped for nothing: Derek informed me that Tan wasn’t there. He was still too busy.

  “It’s the artifact show,” Derek explained. “An hour ago he went to drive some politicians over to the next county.”

  I nodded at him, then I left the room a moment later, my throat feeling a bit too tight for comfort.

  *

  On the train to Shiloh Center, both Nell and Jamie slept, but I had thinking to do: thinking about what to do next.

  Everything I knew about Millie’s specific whereabouts didn’t add up to much. She’d probably been to the two other places on her itinerary, which were also businesses. But she had to spend her nights somewhere—and I had no leads on that, itinerary or not.

  Not that the two locations weren’t important pieces of information for other reasons, especially considering one was The Neon Institute—the place Amy Castano had been connected with, the place I had become suspicious of. Before I’d left Diamond, I’d researched more about The Institute, and I didn’t like what I found.

  The Stein Refinery was on Millie’s itinerary for her fourth day here, and the next day was when she’d canceled the second Strand appointment. Something must h
ave gone wrong.

  But, without question, The Neon Institute was the most troubling development; when Mike had first shown me Millie’s itinerary and I’d seen that Institute listed there, I instinctually felt an I-really-don’t-want-to-go-to-Hera moment. Would I ultimately regret my not having listened to my instincts then? That remained to be seen.

  I had pulled out Millie’s itinerary once again, and now I realized that my investigation had wound up forming a straight line, with John at the center point, Amy Castano at one end, and the Institute at the opposite end…. No, that probably wasn’t right. More likely, The Institute was at the center, and Amy and John were on the ends….

  So far, The Institute looked questionable, and I probably had to proceed carefully about that, which was tough to do now: being in a strange, I’m-just-not-used-to-this environment did not help me work effectively….

  I sighed, my palms pressing against my seat’s armrests, my stomach lurching a bit, my lungs burning. The rail had reached a bumpy patch, and for some reason that Heran air sickness suddenly took hold of my body again. I needed another Supershot. In my mind, I moved that to the top of my to-do list to right after we got off this fucking train.

  *

  About an hour before our stop, Jamie and Nell woke from their slumbers. Jamie was seated on my left and Nell was seated across from us, facing backwards to the train’s motion.

  Jamie yawned and stretched his arms in front of him, and something hit the left side of my head then. My head spun around, my eyes locked onto him, and I finally saw that a folded breather helmet had slipped out of his jacket’s neck toward my direction.

  “You wear a breather suit?” I asked him, my eyebrows rising.

  “Sure, most times. Especially on the rails. You never know—there could be an accident that busts through a bubble.”

  “But I thought Herans don’t wear the suits, that the daxon doesn’t bother natives so much.”

  One of his big loud laughs rushed from his mouth. “Where’d you get that idea?” That fucking-asshole bartender. “Herans are only humans too.”

  “Someone showed us a daxon wrist gauge—and now I remember I forgot to buy two from the hotel store.”

  Jamie was laughing again, shaking his head this time. “Don’t waste your money! The daxon gauges are an overpriced scam. Hunks of junk that don’t work most times. I told you that you need a guide, Giba.” He was still slowly shaking his head, right at me now.

  I reached into one of my jacket pockets and pulled out the Moonspan book. “I’ve looked at this today…a good deal of the words are English. But the combinations with Spanish are odd. And I think ejecta comes from Earth-Moon’s geography?”

  “Yep, a bunch of the words do,” said Jamie, his head nodding now. “Moonspan’s like a language of hybrid idiomatic expressions—most of them can’t be literally translated and hold the same meaning. Moonspan’s a lot of memorization. You ever been to Earth-Moon?”

  I flushed, then stammered, “I’ve—I’ve been to that moon, yeah.”

  “You speak so brusquely, yet sing-song. You’ve got an Earth accent.”

  I did not want to talk about any of that. My eyes fell down to the guide as my fingers flipped the pages. “You might have to come with me a lot and translate—tomorrow I’m going on a guided tour somewhere. Can’t tell if it’ll be in English. I won’t talk much, but I want to understand when others talk.”

  “Where’s the tour?”

  “The Neon Institute.”

  His eyebrows rose; he pointed a forefinger out the window beside me. “Notice all the neon lighting around here? Lots and lots of neon, whether people want it or not. But the NI isn’t only about neon. They research and finance gas exploration—something like that. I don’t know much about that geo stuff. It’s just everyone knows who they are.”

  He was frowning now, as if he were thinking about something. The way he’d said “who they are” seemed strange to me, so I asked him about that.

  He shook his head, his eyes falling on the train’s other occupants; then he lowered his voice. “It’s just some Herans don’t like the place. It gives us a bad name.”

  “How?”

  Nell leaned forward toward us, her elbows on her knees.

  But Jamie only went back to shaking his head, except this time it was an I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-this fast shake. “I’ve said enough. Anyway, you won’t need me with you—there’s an English tour.”

  “You act like you don’t know the place, but you certainly know details about it all the same.”

  His dark eyes pointedly blinked at me. “I went there once on a school trip—years ago. I’m not certain they have an English tour, but they did then. I don’t know what to tell you, Persista Giba. Give them a call, why don’t you?”

  “I will. When we get to the hotel. What’s a persista giba?”

  “A persistent boss.”

  “Well, there’s no doubt about that,” said Nell. “Persistent Pia. That’s one of her best qualities.” She motioned for me to toss her the guide, so I did.

  “I want to know how to say hard-headed,” Nell said now.

  “Is that a hint?” I raised an eyebrow at her.

  She laughed, shook her head “no.” But I had my doubts.

  “How about: you es una ejecta cabeza, for you’re a hard-headed shithead,” Jamie said, looking directly at Nell.

  “Ha-ha-ha. Very funny, ejecta for brains.”

  “I’d rather have shit for brains than a maria boca.”

  Nell flipped through the guide, apparently looking for a translation of his seeming insult.

  But then Jamie finally said, “You won’t find that literally in there.”

  “I don’t need to.” She looked up at him with thundering brown eyes. “This says maria are the Earth-Moon seas. I think you said I’ve got a big mouth.”

  His forefinger pointed at her. “Very good. You’re learning.”

  “How do you say, ‘You’re a big dick’?” Nell asked, looking down at the guide again.

  I sighed and sat back in my seat. “We’re soooo getting on each other’s nerves today. I wish we’d fucking get to this Shiloh place already. I need one of those Supershots. My stomach’s rolling as fast as this train, only my insides don’t have any brakes.”

  *

  A little later we were finally walking through the train station. I looked around me at all the people—and I did not like the atmosphere. I heard some voices speaking Moonspan, but I had no idea what they were saying.

  Though that wasn’t the main reason I didn’t like the place: right away I noticed that the people here stared at other people a lot. And the three of us were prime objects for the staring. It seemed Shiloh people all wore these red-and-black suit-like outfits. Yet because we three were dressed in no such uniform, we stuck out. I’d have to remedy this before we went traipsing around anywhere….

  I sighed. This whole trip had wound up requiring a lot more money and work than I’d planned. Had it been worth it? So far, I’d turned up shit.

  Either way, I gave myself three days now: even if I didn’t come up with a single thing by then, I’d get the hell out of this shithole.

  *

  “Who the hell is Arnold Kreig?” Nell asked.

  “You are,” I replied.

  We were in our new room in our new hotel. I’d just handed her a piece of paper: a forgery of what had been Mike’s fake-cover itinerary. Earlier I’d made a copy of Nell’s itinerary photo; now I taped it to the Arnold Kreig one, and then I’d have to make another copy of the new whole.

  “You’re coming with me to the refinery,” I said to her. “And I don’t want to flash our real IDs. Too dangerous.”

  “What about me?” said Jamie from beside me. “Can I get an I. S. Superman ID?”

  I rolled my eyes at his grin.

  And Nell said, “I hate to tell you this, Pia-babe, but I don’t look like an Arnold Kreig. It’s the between-the-legs thing.”

  “W
e’ll white-over the title to Arn for Arnette and make a copy downstairs.”

  From the table in front of me, she picked up another piece of paper and began laughing. “Ginger Meek!”

  “That’s my new name,” I said, “Don’t wear it out. No, really—scratch that and do wear it out. From now on when we’re floating in public here, you’re Arn and I’m Gin. We’ve got to get used to that.”

  I looked at Jamie again. Earlier he’d told me he would be staying at a student hostel. But now I said that I’d rather he stay in this hotel.

  He frowned and shuddered a bit. “I won’t stay in a seedy place like this.”

  He was right; this room looked like the definition of seedy. Mold clung to the bathroom ceiling above rusty bathroom fixtures; the small bedroom contained only one dinky dresser, two narrow beds, and a tiny table, which faced the glass door to the balcony, which glass was covered with a gray-green dusty sheen…definitely not an aesthetically appealing space.

  Nevertheless, this hotel had one thing going for it: it was quite close to the two places I had to check out.

  I sighed as I removed my special case from on top of the tiny table. “Well, I’m sure your hostel’s nicer, but Nell and I have no choice but to stay here. We need privacy. And right now, I also need a Supershot.”

  *

  As I ordered one down in the hotel bar, Jamie stood beside me and encouraged me to use Moonspan. And I sort of did.

  “Dos Supershots, cold,” I said to the bartender.

  “Mon, eh?” she asked me.

  “What—money?” I reached into my pocket and pulled out some Heran bills. But then the bartender laughed loudly. I scowled at her.

  “She meant do you want your shot with ice—mon is ice,” said Jamie, laughing too.

  I could feel my face was bright red. “How the fuck am I supposed to know that? No mon,” I said to the bartender, scowling again.

  *