by Spider
She was ancient and thin, her skin like wrinkled black leather. Like Kirra’s, her teeth were gleaming white. She wore only shorts and a knife. Her eyes made me think of Reb, decades older and female. She bade me welcome, gave me tea from a billy. I can’t describe the taste, but it was very good. I told her my real name, started to tell her why I was there, and she cut me off. “You knew my badundjari,” she told me. “My beloved dream spirit. Kirra, the Singer, who makes Walkabout among the stars. You were her friend.”
I nodded, and started to say that I was here to tell her of Kirra’s last days. She cut me off again.
“You are here to ask me if you should kill her killer.”
I dropped my jaw.
The fire crackled, the sparks flew upward. At last I sighed and said, “How can you know that?”
“From the way you sit. From your voice. I do not hear your words so much as the song of your voice. It is a song of blood rage.”
“Yes.” There was nothing else to say.
“You know who killed my badundjari?”
“I think so. I may know for sure in a day or two. If I am right…it was the blackest of betrayals.” I explained as carefully as I could my suspicions.
“You believe he gave her a poison that became a bomb, this Symbiote to destroy. And he gave her this poison in the act of love?”
“I hope to know for sure in a day or two,” I repeated, then blurted, “Oh, but what will I do if it’s true?”
She grimaced at me, and slowly shook her head. “No one can tell you that. Not I. Not Emu, or Goanna Lizard, or Kangaroo, not a Rainbow Serpent nor a Sky-God nor any of the Ancestors who were here in the Dreamtime. Not even Menura, the lyrebird of the gullies, who was Kirra’s totem. You must decide.”
I closed my eyes and sighed again. A didgeridu was playing in the far distance, like a mournful dragon. “Yes. You’re right.”
“But tell me his full name and where he lives,” she said. “When you have done whatever you decide to do…if he still lives…perhaps I will decide I need to do something about him.”
“I’ll tell you the moment I’m sure,” I countered, knowing that I might be dead seconds after the moment I was sure. “If you have not heard from me within a week, then I was right and he has overcome me. In that case, and only then, call Top Step and ask Reb Hawkins who my lover was there. You can get access to a phone?”
She took one from a bag at her side. Of course. She’d probably first heard Kirra’s space Songs on it. I recalled suddenly, with sharp pain, that I had never carried out my final promise to Kirra, to send her last song-fragments home to that very telephone. “You have my number?” she asked.
Yes I did. In my personal memory node in Teena, up in Top Step. I had not yet downloaded it, and didn’t want to access it now for fear of leaving a trail to where I was on Earth. Yarra gave me the number again, and I memorized it rather than write it down. I gave her my personal security code, so that she could get at that last Song of Kirra’s if I failed to live through what I was planning.
I slept beside her campfire that night. Nothing bit me.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?
—Job, xli. 1
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER I was back in my hotel room in San Francisco and my skin was its normal colour again. If anyone was following me, they were too good to be spotted. I was getting close to broke, but treated myself to the finest dinner the hotel could provide. I gave them fresh roasted coffee beans I had bought the day before from an unlikely madman named Gebhardt Kaiserlingck, who ran a wonderful screwball coffee plantation outside of Daintree, and insisted that the kitchen drip-brew them for me. I drank four cups with dessert and wanted more. It was the finest coffee I had ever tasted. A good omen, I felt.
The next morning I had three more cups with breakfast, and adjourned to the ladies’ room. There I changed into male drag, using much the same makeup I had used for drag roles on stage in years past, and left without causing any apparent notice (well, it was San Francisco). I spent some time re-learning how to walk like a male, and knew I was remembering it correctly when a stewardess gave me the eye as I was passing through the lobby. An hour later I identified myself to a taco vendor as a client of the Bay City Detective Agency; he insisted on a thumbprint, did something with it under the counter, squinted at it and then at me, and passed me an envelope containing a report on one Chen, Robert. I read it on the city’s last remaining cable car, holding it close so the passengers on either side could not have read it even with Ben’s trick glasses.
The top sheet mostly recapitulated what little I already knew about Robert from the things he had told me; most of the new information was irrelevant, except that he had in fact been observed to be living at the address I had for him. For the first time since I’d left Top Step I began to seriously wonder if the whole thing wasn’t only a grotesque figment of my overheated imagination, a psychosis manufactured by my mind to distract me from a series of traumas.
But then there was the second page.
“…first-order identity check seemed to establish that subject’s stated identity and background were genuine; all expected records were in fact on file and no inconsistencies or alterations were noted. But since you had expressed doubt concerning subject’s bona fides, further and more stringent inquiries were instituted, as per attached statement. Second-order ID check also proved out. Third-order check however revealed that subject’s given ID is bogus.
“Subject’s true name is Chen Po Chang. He is the bastard son of Chen Hsi-Feng, who is the son of the late Premier of the People’s Republic, Chen Ten Li. His last official place of residence is Shanghai; he disappeared there four years ago in March of 2016, concurrent with his father’s disappearance during the political upheaval which followed the death of Chen Ten Li. He is not presently wanted in any jurisdiction for any crime or malfeasance. Additional information may be accessed from any public database. Please inform us if you wish any of this information communicated to relevant authorities, or if you require any further action from us. See attachments.”
The third sheet was an itemized statement that said I was a pauper. It didn’t know how right it was.
I had the evidence I had sought, right there in my hands. Not proof that Robert had murdered Kirra and Ben—but enough to throw strong suspicion on him. With that as a start, further information might possibly be found by Interpol, maybe even enough to tie him to the nanotechnological bomb. The People’s Republic had more nanotechnologists than any other nation. (Not too surprising. They had more anythings than most other nations.)
And so what?
Suppose I could tie him to the killing, with monofilament strands of evidence. Who had jurisdiction over raw space, outside the cislunar band?
Was it even against the law—any nation’s law or the UN’s—to murder a Stardancer? The subject had never come up before. Nearly all motives for a murder were irrelevant in the case of Stardancers. They had nothing to steal, no territory to conquer, made love only with other Stardancers, and were damn near impossible to find if they didn’t want to be found. The one thing generally agreed was that they were not human beings in the legal sense.
If I blew Robert’s cover skyhigh, spread it across human space via UPI or Reuters, all I’d accomplish might be merely to annoy him and his secret masters, perhaps cause them to alter slightly whatever their plans were. At most Robert himself might suffer a tragic accident, walk out into traffic, say, and then no one would ever know what those plans were.
I composed an in-the-event-of-my-death letter, and used the last of my credit to send it up to Top Step, to my own personal memory node where Interpol itself couldn’t get at it, programmed to start announcing itself to Reb, Dorothy and Phillipe Mgabi if I didn’t personally disable it within twenty-four hours.
Then I called Robert’s home.
“Morgan, is that really you? I can’t see you—where are you?”
I tol
d him I was in a phone booth at the airport and the phone’s eye had been vandalized. He sounded so genuinely glad to hear my voice, to learn that I was really on Earth and in his city, that I was happy he could not see my face. I put great effort into controlling my voice. He offered to buy me dinner, named a restaurant. I demurred, insisting that I wanted to dine in a place I remembered from an old tour, picking the name out of the Yellow Pages as I spoke. I did vaguely remember it; mostly it was a place he had not chosen and could not have staked out already. And it was large enough and public enough to make violence awkward.
On the way I used the last of my cash to buy a Gyro model dart gun from a wirehead in a back alley off Haight Street. He claimed that the rocket-darts were tipped with lethal nerve poison, and used a passing rat the size of a raccoon to prove that at least the first one was. There were four left in the gun. He backed away from me very carefully after we’d made the exchange.
I was stone broke now. Maybe I should let Robert pick up the check for dinner before I killed him. If I was going to. I still did not honestly know whether I could.
Or even for sure that I intended to.
I deliberately got to the restaurant almost half an hour early. As the maître d’hôtel greeted me, I realized for the first time that the gravity had stopped bothering me. Even my lower back no longer ached unless I put stress on it. A little under two weeks to recover from over two months in free fall. Remarkable. I was an earthling again.
But on sudden impulse I decided to simulate gee fatigue for Robert, as though I had just landed within the past few days. He might underestimate me if he thought I was weak and logy, and I needed any edge I could get. As the maître d’ led me to my table I tried to walk as though I were strapped with heavy weights, and sank into my chair with a great sigh.
The body language part was no trouble for me; most dancers are half actor. It was actually an interesting technical challenge: instead of doing what dancers almost always did, making difficult movements look easy, I had to make easy ones look difficult. The tricky part was the intellectual details. When had the most recent shuttle landed, and at which of the three Stardancer spaceports? I could fake small talk about either Queensland or Ecuador, but I knew nothing at all of Uganda. What day of the week was this, and what was the date? Damn, this melodrama stuff was more complicated than it looked. It seemed to me that the most recent shuttle had grounded three days before, in Australia. Excellent. I had a fund of fresh trivia about that part of the world.
An adorable waiter took my order for Irish coffee with no Irish whiskey in it. “I get it,” he said archly as he set it before me, “you want him to think you’re drinking. Good luck, honey.” I winked at him, and he giggled. I sipped coffee with exaggeratedly weary gestures and looked around the restaurant, trying to spot a stakeout. There was a high percentage of tables with two or more males and no females, but perhaps not abnormally high for this town. And there was no reason why a stakeout team could not include female agents. Everyone looked normal and authentic and undangerous. Normal urban dinner crowd, Pacific Rim version. Every one of them could have been in the pay of the People’s Republic for all I knew. Half of them were Asian. The roof seemed to hover over me oppressively, a potentially destructive mass held away by four flimsy walls. A pianist with a shaky left hand was mangling “We Are in Love” in the far corner of the room. Waiters glided to and fro as smoothly as if they were jaunting. The lights had a tendency to strobe if I looked at them. I wanted Fat Humphrey to float up and tell me what I wanted to eat. I wanted Reb to come and tell me what to do.
Thinking of Reb, I straightened my spine, joined my hands in mudra on my lap, and began measuring my breath. It helped.
I spotted Robert before he saw me.
Suddenly I remembered my ex-husband telling me once that I could lie very well with my body, but not with my face. Well, a lot had happened since then.
Robert spoke with the maître d’, who pointed me out, and looked my way. Our eyes met. I concentrated on my breathing. I kept my face impassive, tried to relax every facial muscle completely. I am suffering from high-gee lethargy. He crossed the room to my table, with the graceful loping walk of a jungle cat, as I had imagined he would. No limp: his injured foot was healed. He stopped beside me, took my right hand in both of his, bent over it and kissed it. His lips lingered just an instant. He released it, sat across from me.
His expression was neutral, his eyes open and seemingly guileless. His face was different than I remembered, longer and leaner, the eyes less squinty, the wrinkles slightly more pronounced. His head appeared smaller, the hair lying close to the skull instead of fanning out. This was how he looked under gravity. I decided it made him even more attractive.
“It’s good to see you,” he said.
I said, “I’m glad to see you too. You look different in a gravity field.”
He nodded. “Yes. So do you. I like what you’ve done with your hair.”
There now, just what I needed: a nice sample lie to calibrate my bullshit detector. I knew perfectly well that my hair looked awful. “Thank you for the gallantry,” I said. “It was ungodly hot in Queensland. The hair was always wet, and it kept crawling down my neck, so I had them hack it all off. I think I’m going to end up regretting it.”
“No, really, it suits you well.”
Okay, now see if you can get him to make some true statements for comparison, and we’ll get this polygraph interrogation started. “I just hit dirt a few days ago. I can’t get used to this up and down nonsense. It seems so arbitrary, like making all music be in the same key. And I can’t believe how much my feet hurt!”
He nodded. “My first couple of days dirtside I couldn’t imagine how humans had ever put up with gravity. It was just barely tolerable back when we didn’t know any better—but now, something’s simply got to be done about it. You must be exhausted.”
“Irish coffee helps,” I said. “It’s great for reconciling you to gravity: it’s got up and down built into it. The booze calms you down and then the coffee wakes you up.” Small talk, small talk—
“Small talk,” he said.
I nodded. “What do you say—stick to small talk until we’ve eaten?”
He nodded back. “Sounds sensible.” The waiter arrived, and Robert ordered Irish coffee, “like the lady.” The waiter nodded gravely, turned away—then stopped outside Robert’s field of vision, pointed at him, and gave me an exaggerated thumbs up. Keep this one. When he returned a few moments later with the coffee, he stopped behind Robert again, pointed at the coffee and fanned himself: this glass had whiskey in it, in good measure. I slipped him another wink when Robert wasn’t looking. I hoped Robert was going to tip him well, since I couldn’t. Robert ordered something to eat and I said I’d have the same and he twinkled away, delighted at his role in my little intrigue.
“So you just got into town? Where are you staying?”
I’d anticipated the question, and had decided there was no reason to lie. I told him the correct name of my hotel. It didn’t seem to matter; I need never go back there again. He nodded and said it was a good place, and I agreed.
Whatever it was we had ordered arrived. As we ate we kept jousting with our eyes, making contact and then finding reasons to look away, busying ourselves with the food. I felt like I was drowning in quicksand. No, in slowsand. But there was no hurrying things. I didn’t want him to have any busy little distractions available when I started asking pointed questions.
Which led to: what pointed questions? I had been thinking about this moment for something like two weeks now, and I still did not know how to play it. Should I go right for the jugular, tell him everything I knew and all I had guessed, and demand a response? Or keep what I knew to myself, give him to understand that I wanted to resume our relationship, and see what he said about that? That could lead in short order to a bedroom, and what would I do then?
Or should I indicate ambiguous feelings, which would allow me to prolong our conta
ct without having to go to bed with him? The problem with that one was, it made it easy for him to get rid of me if he didn’t want to be under close scrutiny. No, the smart thing to do was feign passion and try to get as far inside his guard as I could. Feigning passion is natural for a performer. I could always plead gee-fatigue when things got intense.
But as I watched him eat, watched his slender fingers move, I knew I just could not go through with it. Perhaps it was exactly what he had been doing to me, all those passionate days and nights back in Top Step. But I could not do it to him.
The plates were empty. The second round of Irish coffees arrived. Mine was again denatured. The waiter winked at me for a change.
Well, then? Charge right in or dance around it as long as possible? Cowardice and caution both said to stall. Crazy to risk everything on one roll of the dice. Lots of misdirection first, then slip it in under his guard while he’s trying to figure out how to get into your pants.
“Chen Po Chang?” I said suddenly.
“Yes, Morgan?”
And there it was.
“It was on your tongue, wasn’t it?” That’s it, baffle him with misdirection.
“Yes.”
“Which one got it? Ben, or Kirra?”
“Kirra.”
I nodded. “I just wondered. You knew they’d both be meeting the Harvest Crew.” Under the table, I slid my hand into my handbag. Just the one question left, now. “Why?”
He seemed to think about it, as if for the first time. He started to answer twice, and changed his mind each time. Finally he said, “For my species.”
“For your species.” I seemed to be having trouble with my voice. “And what species would that be? Insect, or reptile?”
“Homo sapiens,” he said calmly. “It’s us or them. Us or Homo caelestis. The universe isn’t big enough for both of us.”
