In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Oh dear,” Dr. Rao said. “When I called the police, I didn’t expect–”

  “I know,” Ferron said. “But do you understand the caution, saab?”

  “I do,” he said. A yellow peripheral node in Ferron’s visual field went green.

  She said, “Do you confirm this is his cat?”

  “I’d know her anywhere,” Dr. Rao said. “The markings are very distinctive. Dexter brought her in quite often. She’s been wiped? How awful.”

  “We’re investigating,” Ferron said, relieved to be back in control of the conversation. “I’m afraid I’ll need details of what Coffin was working on, his contacts, any romantic entanglements, any professional rivalries or enemies–”

  “Of course,” Dr. Rao said. He pulled his interface back around and began typing. “I’ll generate you a list. As for what he was working on–I’m afraid there are a lot of trade secrets involved, but we’re a biomedical engineering firm, as I’m sure you’re aware. Dexter’s particular project has been applications in four-dimensional engineering.”

  “I’m afraid,” Ferron said, “that means nothing to me.”

  “Of course.” He pressed a key. The cat peered over his shoulder, apparently fascinated by the blinking lights on the monitor.

  The hyperlink blinked live in Ferron’s feed. She accessed it and received a brief education in the theoretical physics of reaching around three-dimensional shapes in space-time. A cold sweat slicked her palms. She told herself it was just the second hypomania re-up.

  “Closed-heart surgery,” she said. During the medical tourism boom, Bengaluru’s economy had thrived. They’d found other ways to make ends meet now that people no longer traveled so profligately, but the state remained one of India’s centers of medical technology. Ferron wondered about the applications for remote surgery, and what the economic impact of this technology could be.

  “Sure. Or extracting an appendix without leaving a scar. Inserting stem cells into bone marrow with no surgical trauma, freeing the body to heal disease instead of infection and wounds. It’s revolutionary. If we can get it working.”

  “Saab…” She stroked Chairman Miaow’s sleek azure head. “Could it be used as a weapon?”

  “Anything can be used as a weapon,” he said. A little too fast? But his skin conductivity and heart rate revealed no deception, no withholding. “Look, Sub-Inspector. Would you like some coffee?”

  “I’d love some,” she admitted.

  He tapped a few more keys and stepped down from the treadmill. She’d have thought the typing curiously inefficient, but he certainly seemed to get things done fast.

  “Religious reasons, saab?” she asked.

  “Hmm?” He glanced at the monitor. “No. I’m just an eccentric. I prefer one information stream at a time. And I like to come here and do my work, and keep my home at home.”

  “Oh.” Ferron laughed, following him across the office to a set of antique lacquered chairs. Chairman Miaow minced after them, stopping to sniff the unfamiliar rug and roll in a particularly lush patch. Feeling like she was making a huge confession, Ferron said, “I turn off my feeds sometimes too. Skin out. It helps me concentrate.”

  He winked.

  She said, “So tell me about Dexter and his cat.”

  “Well…” He glanced guiltily at Chairman Miaow. “She was very advanced. He obviously spent a great deal of time working with her. Complete sentences, conversation on about the level of an imaginative five-year old. That’s one of our designs, by the way.”

  “Parrot cats?”

  “The hyacinth variety. We’re working on an Eclectus variant for next year’s market. Crimson and plum colors. You know they have a much longer lifespan than the root stock? Parrot-cats should be able to live for thirty to fifty years, though of course the design hasn’t been around long enough for experimental proof.”

  “I did not. About Dr. Coffin–” she paused, and scanned the lists of enemies and contacts that Dr. Rao had provided, cross-referencing it with files and the reports of three interviews that had come in from Indrapramit in the last five minutes. Another contact request from her mother blinked away officiously. She dismissed it. “I understand he wasn’t born here?”

  “He traveled,” Dr. Rao said in hushed tones. “From America.”

  “Huh,” Ferron said. “He relocated for a job? Medieval. How did BioShell justify the expense–and the carbon burden?”

  “A unique skill set. We bring in people from many places, actually. He was well-liked here: his work was outstanding, and he was charming enough–and talented enough–that his colleagues forgave him some of the… vagaries in his rightminding.”

  “Vagaries…?”

  “He was a depressive, madam,” Dr. Rao said. “Prone to fairly serious fits of existential despair. Medication and surgery controlled it adequately that he was functional, but not completely enough that he was always… comfortable.”

  “When you say existential despair…?” Ferron was a past master of the open-ended hesitation.

  Dr. Rao seemed cheerfully willing to fill them in for her. “He questioned the worth and value of pretty much every human endeavor. Of existence itself.”

  “So he was a bit nihilistic?”

  “Nihilism denies value. Dexter was willing to believe that compassion had value–not intrinsic value, you understand. But assigned value. He believed that the best thing a human being could aspire to was to limit suffering.”

  “That explains his handle.”

  Dr. Rao chuckled. “It does, doesn’t it? Anyway, he was brilliant.”

  “I assume that means that BioShell will suffer in his absence.”

  “The fourth-dimension project is going to fall apart without him,” Dr. Rao said candidly. “It’s going to take a global search to replace him. And we’ll have to do it quickly; release of the technology was on the anvil.”

  Ferron thought about the inside-out person in the midst of his rug, his flat set for an intimate dinner for two. “Dr. Rao…”

  “Yes, Sub-Inspector?”

  “In your estimation, would Dr. Coffin commit suicide?”

  He steepled his fingers and sighed. “It’s… possible. But he was very devoted to his work, and his psych evaluations did not indicate it as an immediate danger. I’d hate to think so.”

  “Because you’d feel like you should have done more? You can’t save somebody from themselves, Dr. Rao.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “a word in the dark is all it takes.”

  “Dr. Coffin worked from home. Was any of his lab equipment there? Is it possible that he died in an accident?”

  Dr. Rao’s eyebrows rose. “Now I’m curious about the nature of his demise, I’m afraid. He should not have had any proprietary equipment at home: we maintain a lab for him here, and his work at home should have been limited to theory and analysis. But of course he’d have an array of interfaces.”

  The coffee arrived, brought in by a young man with a ready smile who set the tray on the table and vanished again without a word. No doubt pleased to be Employed.

  As Dr. Rao poured from a solid old stoneware carafe, he transitioned to small talk. “Some exciting news about the Andromeda Galaxy, isn’t it? They’ve named the star Al-Rahman.”

  “I thought stars were named by coordinates and catalogue number these days.”

  “They are,” Rao said. “But it’s fitting for this one to have a little romance. People being what they are, someone would have named it if the science community didn’t. And Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sufi was the first astronomer to describe the Andromeda Galaxy, around 960 A.D. He called it the ‘little cloud.’ It’s also called Messier 31–”

  “Do you think it’s a nova precursor, saab?”

  He handed her the coffee–something that smelled pricy and rich, probably from the hills–and offered cream and sugar. She added a lump of the latter to her cup with the tongs, stirred in cream, and selected a lemon biscuit from the little plate he nudged toward her.r />
  “That’s what they said on the news,” he said.

  “Meaning you don’t believe it?”

  “You’re sharp,” he said admiringly.

  “I’m a homicide investigator,” she said.

  He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small injection kit. The hypo hissed alarmingly as he pressed it to his skin. He winced.

  “Insulin?” she asked, restraining herself from an incredibly rude question about why he hadn’t had stem cells, if he was diabetic.

  He shook his head. “Scotophobin. Also part of my rightminding. I have short-term memory issues.” He picked up a chocolate biscuit and bit into it decisively.

  She’d taken the stuff herself, in school and when cramming for her police exams. She also refused to be derailed. “So you don’t think this star–”

  “Al-Rahman.”

  “–Al-Rahman. You don’t think it’s going nova?”

  “Oh, it might be,” he said. “But what would you say if I told you that its pattern is a repeating series of prime numbers?”

  The sharp tartness of lemon shortbread turned to so much grit in her mouth. “I beg your pardon.”

  “Someone is signaling us,” Dr. Rao said. “Or I should say, was signaling us. A long, long time ago. Somebody with the technology necessary to tune the output of their star.”

  “Explain,” she said, setting the remainder of the biscuit on her saucer.

  “Al-Rahman is more than two and a half million light years away. That means that the light we’re seeing from it was modulated when the first identifiable humans were budding off the hominid family tree. Even if we could send a signal back… The odds are very good that they’re all gone now. It was just a message in a bottle. We were here.”

  “The news said twenty thousand light years.”

  “The news.” He scoffed. “Do they ever get police work right?”

  “Never,” Ferron said fervently.

  “Science either.” He glanced up as the lights dimmed. “Another brownout.”

  An unformed idea tickled the back of Ferron’s mind. “Do you have a sunfarm?”

  “BioShell is entirely self-sufficient,” he confirmed. “It’s got to be a bug, but we haven’t located it yet. Anyway, it will be back up in a minute. All our important equipment has dedicated power supplies.”

  He finished his biscuit and stirred the coffee thoughtfully while he chewed. “The odds are that the universe is–or has been–full of intelligent species. And that we will never meet any of them. Because the distances and time scales are so vast. In the two hundred years we’ve been capable of sending signals into space–well. Compare that in scale to Al-Rahman.”

  “That’s awful,” Ferron said. “It makes me appreciate Dr. Coffin’s perspective.”

  “It’s terrible,” Dr. Rao agreed. “Terrible and wonderful. In some ways I wonder if that’s as close as we’ll ever get to comprehending the face of God.”

  They sipped their coffee in contemplation, facing one another across the tray and the low lacquered table.

  “Milk?” said Chairman Miaow. Carefully, Ferron poured some cream into a saucer and gave it to her.

  Dr. Rao said, “You know, the Andromeda Galaxy and our own Milky Way are expected to collide eventually.”

  “Eventually?”

  He smiled. It did good things for the creases around his eyes. “Four and a half billion years or so.”

  Ferron thought about Uttara Bhadrapada, and the Heavenly Ganges, and Aryaman’s house–in a metaphysical sort of sense–as he came to walk that path across the sky. From so far away it took two and a half million years just to see that far.

  “I won’t wait up, then.” She finished the last swallow of coffee and looked around for the cat. “I don’t suppose I could see Dr. Coffin’s lab before I go?”

  “Oh,” said Dr. Rao. “I think we can do that, and better.”

  The lab space Coffin had shared with three other researchers belied BioShell’s corporate wealth. It was a maze of tables and unidentifiable equipment in dizzying array. Ferron identified a gene sequencer, four or five microscopes, and a centrifuge, but most of the rest baffled her limited knowledge of bioengineering. She was struck by the fact that just about every object in the room was dressed in BioShell’s livery colors of emerald and gold, however.

  She glimpsed a conservatory through a connecting door, lush with what must be prototype plants; at the far end of the room, rows of condensers hummed beside a revolving door rimed with frost. A black-skinned woman in a lab coat with her hair clipped into short, tight curls had her eyes to a lens and her hands in waldo sleeves. Microsurgery?

  Dr. Rao held out a hand as Ferron paused beside him. “Will we disturb her?”

  “Dr. Nnebuogor will have skinned out just about everything except the fire alarm,” Dr. Rao said. “The only way to distract her would be to go over and give her a shove. Which–” he raised a warning finger “–I would recommend against, as she’s probably engaged in work on those next-generation parrot-cats I told you about now.”

  “Nnebuogor? She’s Nigerian?”

  Dr. Rao nodded. “Educated in Cairo and Bengaluru. Her coming to work for BioShell was a real coup for us.”

  “You do employ a lot of farang,” Ferron said. “And not by telepresence.” She waited for Rao to bridle, but she must have gotten the tone right, because he shrugged.

  “Our researchers need access to our lab.”

  “Miaow,” said Chairman Miaow.

  “Can she?” Ferron asked.

  “We’re cat-friendly,” Rao said, with a flicker of a smile, so Ferron set the carrier down and opened its door. Rao’s heart rate was up a little, and she caught herself watching sideways while he straightened his trousers and picked lint from his sleeve.

  Chairman Miaow emerged slowly, rubbing her length against the side of the carrier. She gazed up at the equipment and furniture with unblinking eyes and soon she gathered herself to leap onto a workbench, and Dr. Rao put a hand out firmly.

  “No climbing or jumping,” he said. “Dangerous. It will hurt you.”

  “Hurt?” The cat drew out the Rs in a manner so adorable it had to be engineered for. “No jump?”

  “No.” Rao turned to Ferron. “We’ve hardwired in response to the No command. I think you’ll find our parrot-cats superior to unengineered felines in this regard. Of course… they’re still cats.”

  “Of course,” Ferron said. She watched as Chairman Miaow explored her new environment, rubbing her face on this and that. “Do you have any pets?”

  “We often take home the successful prototypes,” he said. “It would be a pity to destroy them. I have a parrot-cat–a red-and-gray–and a golden lemur. Engineered, of course. The baseline ones are protected.”

  As they watched, the hyacinth cat picked her way around, sniffing every surface. She paused before one workstation in particular before cheek-marking it, and said in comically exaggerated surprise: “Mine! My smell.”

  There was a synthetic-fleece-lined basket tucked beneath the table. The cat leaned towards it, stretching her head and neck, and sniffed deeply and repeatedly.

  “Have you been here before?” Ferron asked.

  Chairman Miaow looked at Ferron wide-eyed with amazement at Ferron’s patent ignorance, and declared “New!”

  She jumped into the basket and snuggled in, sinking her claws deeply and repeatedly into the fleece.

  Ferron made herself stop chewing her thumbnail. She stuck her hand into her uniform pocket. “Are all your hyacinths clones?”

  “They’re all closely related,” Dr. Rao said. “But no, not clones. And even if she were a clone, there would be differences in the expression of her tuxedo pattern.”

  At that moment, Dr. Nnebuogor sighed and backed away from her machine, withdrawing her hands from the sleeves and shaking out the fingers like a musician after practicing. She jumped when she turned and saw them. “Oh! Sorry. I was skinned. Namaskar.”

  “Miaow
?” said the cat in her appropriated basket.

  “Hello, Niranjana. Where’s Dexter?” said Dr. Nnebuogor. Ferron felt the scientist reading her meta-tags. Dr. Nnebuogor raised her eyes to Rao. “And–pardon, officer–what’s with the copper?”

  “Actually,” Ferron said, “I have some bad news for you. It appears that Dexter Coffin was murdered last night.”

  “Murdered…” Dr. Nnebuogor put her hand out against the table edge. “Murdered?“

  “Yes,” Ferron said. “I’m Police Sub-Inspector Ferron–” which Dr. Nnebuogor would know already. “–and I’m afraid I need to ask you some questions. Also, I’ll be contacting the other researchers who share your facilities via telepresence. Is there a private area I can use for that?”

  Dr. Nnebuogor looked stricken. The hand that was not leaned against the table went up to her mouth. Ferron’s feed showed the acceleration of her heart, the increase in skin conductivity as her body slicked with cold sweat. Guilt or grief? It was too soon to tell.

  “You can use my office,” Dr. Rao said. “Kindly, with my gratitude.”

  The interviews took the best part of the day and evening, when all was said and done, and garnered Ferron very little new information–yes, people would probably kill for what Coffin was–had been–working on. No, none of his colleagues had any reason to. No, he had no love life of which they were aware.

  Ferron supposed she technically could spend all night lugging the cat carrier around, but her own flat wasn’t too far from the University district. It was in a kinship block teeming with her uncles and cousins, her grandparents, great-grandparents, her sisters and their husbands (and in one case, wife). The fiscal support of shared housing was the only reason she’d been able to carry her mother as long as she had.

  She checked out a pedestrial because she couldn’t face the bus and she felt like she’d done more than her quota of steps before dinnertime–and here it was, well after. The cat carrier balanced on the grab bar, she zipped it unerringly through the traffic, enjoying the feel of the wind in her hair and the outraged honks cascading along the double avenues.