by Sharon Shinn
Benito was not present, but a tall, redheaded woman said she had been told to help him in any way she could. Her Standard Terran was serviceable, but not nearly as good as Benito’s. When he requested information on violent crimes committed in Madrid over the past ten years, she boxed up a collection of visicubes and wished him luck.
He loaded the box in his car and drove back to his hotel. There he found Lise sitting outside, enjoying the milder air of evening. She sauntered up to the car when he pulled over to the curb.
“And where,” she wanted to know, “did you acquire this hot number? I didn’t think they rented out wheels like these.”
“I don’t think they do. It was a loan from the archpriestess of the Triumphante temple.”
“Senya Jovieve? Why so generous?”
“Paying off her guilt.”
“Handsomely, I’d say. Take a girl for a ride?”
“Sure. Get in.”
She slid in beside him more gracefully than Jovieve. Those Moonchild muscles again; he admired Lise’s litheness greatly. “Climate control,” she said happily, fooling with the gauges. “We are going in style.”
He signaled and pulled back into the traffic. “Where to?”
She leaned her head back against the upholstered seat; she was luxuriating. “Cruising,” she suggested. “Pick up a bottle of wine and some snacks and drive all night.”
“There a radio in here?”
She sat up again and played with the controls once more. The stereo system, as might have been expected, was first-class. Lise twisted the dials until she found music she liked, with a syncopated back beat and unrecognizable lyrics.
“That okay?”
“Sure,” he said.
He drove across town, pulling over once at a small market on the side of the road. Lise ran inside while he waited in the car, the motor idling and the music playing its hot reggae beat. She came back with two large bags.
“What did you get?” he demanded, driving again.
She giggled. “Bread and fish sticks and some weird vegetable dish and chocolates and wine and paper cups and stuff like that. I didn’t know what you’d like.”
“I’ll eat anything.”
It was nearly dark as they made it to the edge of town, and Drake was able to increase his speed as the lights of the city dropped away. Before him, the road stretched level and endless, a dark ribbon of pavement against the level and endless sand. As the night came fully on, even the sense of horizon gave way. They traveled in a circular shell of their own light, pushing through the darkness and finding identical darkness ahead. They were moving rapidly, fleeing down the unmarked highway; they were completely motionless, adrift in a dry ocean of sand. Either sensation could be true. There was nothing here by which to judge speed or distance or motion.
“How fast we going?” Lise asked once.
“Hundred and twenty.”
“How fast does it go?”
“Speedometer says one-eighty.”
“Well?”
“I don’t know when the road runs out.”
“How about fuel?”
He laughed. “Solar,” he said. “So it could go any time.”
Her returning laughter was incredulous. “You mean there’s no gauge?”
“There’s a gauge. I was teasing.”
He drove and drove, and the landscape never changed by so much as a dune. Lise reached into one of her bags and pulled out toasted pieces of bread, munching contentedly. He shook his head when she offered him a taste. The music continued its sinuous, foreign beat and Drake tried to understand the words. Not that he needed to; it didn’t matter. They would be songs of love and heartbreak and betrayal and faithlessness. That was what men and women sang of the universe over.
“Aren’t you hungry?” Lise finally demanded.
He slowed. “A little. You want me to stop?”
“I want to eat, and I can’t if you’re driving.”
“Why not?”
“Because I want you to eat with me.”
So he slowed even more and pulled off the road, swinging the car around in the direction from which they’d come. They climbed stiffly from the front seat, feeling their feet sink into the loose sand.
“Must have been a hell of a job,” Drake observed, bending to examine the surface of the highway. “How come the sand doesn’t drift over the road and make it impassable?”
“Does, in the summer. There are violent winds. In the winter the winds are just strong enough to shift the dunes a little. That’s what Raeburn says, anyway. Seems to be true.”
“So this is winter?”
“Couldn’t you tell?”
He searched the back of the car and found a large blanket folded in the back seat. They spread this out over the sand and arranged their food on top of it. Then Drake turned off the car lights.
Instantly, the stars overhead sprang forward like an audience rising for an ovation. Drake stood for a moment, gazing upward at the lavish display, forgetting for a split second where he was and whom he was with. Watching the stars from the hull of a spaceship, he never had a sense of motion; but here, on the hot, unprotected edge of the world, the slow turning of the earth beneath the constellations gave him a brief sensation of vertigo.
Lise tugged at the leg of his trousers. “Sit down,” she said impatiently. He dropped beside her on the blanket. “What’s so fascinating?” she asked.
“The midnight prairie miles of space,” he said.
She gave a quick, cursory glance upward. “Dinner first, then astronomy,” she said.
The wine was good, and the odd variety of food surprisingly pleasing. They could not possibly eat everything Lise had bought, but they made a good try. Drake was careful about how much wine he drank. He was driving, and it was not his car.
They talked easily through the makeshift meal, describing their past missions and the commanders they had and hadn’t liked. Drake was Lise’s senior by at least twelve years, so he had more stories he could have told, but instead he allowed her to do most of the talking.
“You don’t like it here, do you?” he said, lying down on his back to watch the pageant overhead. She sat beside him, her knees drawn up and her hands clasped around her ankles.
“I try not to complain,” she answered quickly.
“Oh, you don’t complain. You seem to make the best of it. But this doesn’t seem like your milieu.”
She shrugged. “There’s not much to do and no one to do it with. Raeburn isn’t exactly a warm guy and Leo—”
“Leo’s okay,” Drake said.
“Sure, he’s okay. We’re friends. We realized early on that if we didn’t get along, we’d have nothing, so we get along. On a big mission, you know, hundreds of children, we probably wouldn’t be friends. That’s why I was so delighted when you showed up. A little diversion.”
He smiled. “That’s not always how I see myself. A diversion.”
“No, you see yourself as a serious kind of guy. Only I keep thinking you didn’t used to be so glum. And every once in a while you sort of break out, but you do it so quietly that it doesn’t even seem like you’re breaking out.”
“Like how?”
“Like driving one-twenty in a church lady’s car down a road you’ve never even seen in the daylight, just because you feel like it.”
He was silent a moment, still watching the stars. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t even think about it.”
She dropped down to one elbow, facing him in the dark. “When’s the last time you were really happy, Cowen?” she asked quietly. “How long ago was it?”
“When my family was still alive,” he said. “Eight years ago.”
She waited, but he did not amplify, and she did not ask for details. “You ever planning to be happy again?”
He moved his head on the blanket, a gesture that meant neithe
r yes nor no. “I didn’t know I was so morose.”
“You’re not, not at all. In fact, you’re a real nice guy to be around. It’s like you decided a long time ago that what you do and feel isn’t too important, so you’ll concentrate on everyone else instead.”
“Profile of a Sayo,” he said. “We keep our thoughts hidden.”
“Keep your souls hidden,” she said.
The stars seemed so close that he wanted to reach out a hand and scoop them up like so many loose gems. Instead, he spread his palm over the desert and dug his fingers into the fine sand.
“Lise,” he said, “do you believe in god? In any god?”
She rolled onto her back and pillowed her head on her arms. “Sure,” she said. “Sort of.”
“What does that mean?”
“Means I was raised in a church—”
“Which church?”
“Christian faith, back on New Terra. Raised there and have never quite shaken my early training, despite all my star travel and all my exposure to strange beings and strange things.”
“But you believe?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think about it much. I don’t not believe. You know, maybe there’s something out there, maybe there isn’t. It’s spooky when I think about it too long. But it’s even spookier to think we’re here all alone, ramming around any old way with no one watching over us.”
“I can’t make up my mind,” he said. “I was brought up believing, but I see so much—waste. So much pain and violence and hatred. I can’t believe that a loving god would allow any of these things. So I think maybe there isn’t a god after all.”
She shrugged again. “Leo says there’s no reason to think that god—”
“If there is a god,” he said in unison with her.
She continued, “That this god is particularly benevolent. Who said the Almighty had to be a good guy? Maybe he has good days and bad days like anyone else—days when he feels like interceding for the helpless, and days when he says, ‘Let ’em find their own damn bread.’ Maybe he really is stern and jealous and cruel, like he was in some of the Old Terran faiths. Maybe he’s just indifferent. No one said he had to love us.”
“She,” Drake murmured. “We’re on Semay now.”
“Well, I have to admit, I kind of like this Ava,” Lise said. “She seems kind of sweet, and even her fanatics don’t irritate me like the fanatics of other religions.”
“I don’t even have to ask,” he said. “You’d be a Triumphante.”
“And you’d be a Fidele,” she said.
He pushed himself to a sitting position. He could not even guess what time it was. “I don’t think I’d join,” he said.
She came to her feet in one easy motion and held her hand out to help him up. He allowed her to haul him upright just because he knew she was strong enough to do it. They repacked their bags, Lise looking around carefully to make sure none of their trash had strayed from their campsite.
“Obliterated within twenty-four hours,” she said, throwing the blanket into the back of the car and climbing in next to him. “There will be no trace of us left here at all.”
Drake turned on the lights, which seemed both too harsh and completely inadequate, and eased the car up the slight incline back onto the road. He was in no particular hurry to get back to Madrid, so this time he kept the pace at under a hundred. “Sort of a metaphor for life, then,” he commented. “A picnic in the sand.”
She laughed. “I lied. You are morose.”
“Just philosophical.”
She glanced over her shoulder and then before them at the unvarying terrain. “You sure we’re going the right way?” she asked.
“Still being philosophical,” he said, “does it really matter?”
She laughed again and settled back into the seat. They did not speak again until they could see the lights of Madrid, faint and alien, glowing over the horizon. Then some spell was broken and they began to talk again of small events and mundane matters and a few of the experiences they had not recounted over dinner.
Chapter Six
Although he had originally planned to visit the families of the other murder victims, Drake found enough material in the hombuenos’ files to make him think that step was unnecessary. The family members had been interviewed and filmed shortly after the priestesses were killed, and the interviews were recorded on the visicubes. The details and the emotions were both plain enough for the Moonchild. He decided he would let the visits slide.
The day following his midnight picnic with Lise, Drake spent hours reviewing Madrid’s crime files from nine and ten years before. He had no idea what he was looking for; he was just hoping a pattern would emerge or a detail catch his eye that could somehow be connected to the convent murders. Perhaps Felipe Sanburro had been arrested years before on assault charges. Perhaps Lynn’s boyfriend, David, had dealt drugs from a western barrio house. Perhaps Drake would learn nothing.
Crime on Semay, at least in Madrid, did not appear to be rampant or especially creative, judging by the files. There were a handful of murders, only one or two rapes, a few robberies. Until now, no serial killings. Until now, very few unsolved crimes, or crimes for which there seemed to be no motivation.
Drake browsed through all the files but paid most attention to the murders, carefully reading the names of the victims, the witnesses, the killers and the survivors. He marked the location of each murder on his city map, using a different color of ink to distinguish these from the killings of the priestesses. As he had expected, many of them fell within the same triangular boundaries as the murders of the holy women, because those were the sections of town most disposed toward violence. But there had been a stabbing in a fancy hotel and a poisoning in the best part of town, and Drake knew enough about human nature not to be surprised when violence could be found anywhere in Madrid.
Finishing up the files from nine years ago without making any major discoveries, he opened the files from eight years back and began reading. Three weeks into the year was a case that caught his attention: a man arrested for beating his wife so severely she eventually died. The incident had been reported to the hombuenos by a woman named Albabianca, which sounded suspiciously like a Triumphante name. Drake read the report with care.
The arresting officers had arrived minutes after the beating had been administered. Both of them noted the quantity of blood splashed throughout the small apartment, and the fact that the amica was covered with it because she had cradled the injured woman in her arms. By the time the officers had made their appearance, the husband had repented, and he knelt on the floor before the priestess and his prostrate wife, sobbing like a child. This act of penitence had not softened the officers’ hearts and apparently had not moved Albabianca to forgiveness either. Her statement had been given swiftly and concisely, if the police file reported her accurately. Although the trial transcript was not included with the hombueno records, some helpful clerk had written in the husband’s eventual fate. He had been convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labor on Fortunata, the nearest prison.
Drake looked up. Fortunata. Not far from Semay, as intergalactic travel went. And a man imprisoned eight years earlier might have been paroled by now. It was easy enough to check out.
A man who had spent eight years of his life in prison might very well feel like he had a reason to kill the woman who had sent him there, or women like her. It was a little flimsy, but it was a start.
Drake’s eyes, which had automatically gone to the map, now flicked back to the skyline visible to him through the high window. Dark out, and he had not even noticed the passing of the hours. Why hadn’t the other Moonchildren dropped by to invite him to dinner? he wondered, and then he remembered. There was some state function to which Raeburn had been invited. Leo and Lise had attended at his heels to give him more consequence. Lise had talked about it dryly last night
as they drove up to the hotel; she had not been looking forward to it.
But just because he would eat in solitude was no reason for him to starve. Drake walked down to the hotel restaurant and ordered a simple meal, watching the other people at the tables around him. Why were they on Semay? Who were they visiting, what was their business? Were they merchants, drug traffickers, somebody’s long-lost relatives, serial killers or homesteaders? All the open faces seemed to him secretive and remote, all the light laughter merely a disguise for dark thoughts. Some days he could look at any man and imagine him capable of the most sinister deeds. That was because he generally felt that no one could be completely understood and, therefore, completely trusted.
He shook his head to clear it, wondering at the sudden well of misanthropy and disillusion. A tolerably cool breeze blew in through the open windows; he would take his borrowed car for a solitary drive and see if the motion swept the shadows from his mind. He rose from the table, scrawling his signature and room number on the check, and left by the door that led to the garage.
Tonight, though, he would stay in the city. He turned off the air conditioning and lowered the windows. Even with the sun down, the air retained a heaviness, a sultriness, that reminded him how hot the day had been. As he drove, a small wind brushed his cheek with a riffled edge, like a sheaf of papers fanned before his face. He liked the feel of it, stiff and tangible.
He went west at a fairly rapid pace until he turned into the barrios, and then he slowed dramatically. He had been here during the day, but he wanted to experience the slums at night, when the murders had taken place. Who was abroad at this time, and why?
It was almost as dark here in this part of the city as it had been on the desert highway. Few houses showed a light; most of those that did were muffled against the dark, curtains drawn as tightly as possible against the eyes and the dangers of the night outside. Here and there, his headlights caught the flash of motion, a shoe or an elbow, as someone turned from his car and dove for cover. He caught strains of music, faintly, from stereos played behind locked doors or on purloined radios set up behind the back of an abandoned house.
