00-Falling Free

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  The next day was that of Kinsey's appointment. It passed slowly, except that Helmut Gonzales discovered she was back in town, and attempted to pester her once more into finishing his work. Her absence had raised false hopes as to its progress. But she was feeling a bit mellower toward the costume romance, so she did not disillusion him.

  With Gonzales fobbed off again, she batted aimlessly around her tiny apartment poking at half-forgotten craft projects and abortive hobbies until, promptly at four, the door buzzed.

  It was Kinsey, oily as ever, but with a suppressed excitement about him that led Anias to think the dream might be for his own consumption after all. He sat on her couch with much juggling of his big carrying case.

  "I brought my own dream player," he remarked unnecessarily, hauling it out of his bag. "You understand, of course, I naturally wish to, um, examine the product before payment."

  "Naturally." Anias produced the master cartridge, and watched critically as he slipped it into his player and attached the single reader lead to the small metal disc behind his left ear. He switched on the player and closed his eyes.

  After a few minutes he switched it off again, rather hastily it seemed to her. He sat up and regarded her with something like a reptilian version of respect.

  "That is certainly quite . . . remarkable," he said at last. Anias preened mentally, but kept her face straight.

  "Go ahead and do the whole thing," she invited generously.

  "Oh, no, that's quite satisfactory," Kinsey assured her. "I really must be leaving. My time is limited. I need only collect the scenario and arrange for your payment."

  Anias became alert. "You can use my vone to transfer funds," she offered.

  "Oh. I brought a bonded check. Is that all right?" he asked anxiously. "A bit old-fashioned, but perfectly sound, I assure you. You have only to present it in person at the bank, and endorse it with your voiceprint. There's been such a rash of fraud lately with electronic transfers, I thought it would be safer." He produced the rectangle of paper and magnetic tape.

  "You're really big on paper, aren't you," Anias remarked, taking the check and examining it more closely than she usually did such things. It seemed perfectly all right to her. It was drawn on the State bank, prepaid and presumably unstoppable. That consideration had crossed her mind, as tomorrow was a bank holiday and she would be unable to present it until the day after. She returned Kinsey his sheaf of papers, somewhat crumpled. He examined them with all the attention she had given his check.

  "Oh, yes, very satisfactory." He rose to go, but stopped at the door, looking at her almost slyly. "I say—could I ask a small favor of you?—for a fee, of course."

  Anias shrugged. "You can always ask. Shoot."

  "Tomorrow is my aunt's birthday. She is rather a fan of yours. I wonder if it would be possible to compose a very short piece for her—a sort of dream birthday card, as it were. She is very fond of the poem, 'Doreen's Gift.' If you could put it in a setting, or something, I'm sure she would be thrilled."

  Anias's mind boggled at the thought of Kinsey with an aunt. He seemed more like something hatched out of an egg, and a leathery egg at that. 'Doreen's Gift' was a saccharine poem of great current popularity. Translated into versions for all the media, it had been saturating the commercial culture since well before Christmas. Anias regarded it as a cultural pimple, brought on by too much sugar and grease in the mental diet.

  Kinsey evidently read the dubious look on her face, for he urged more strongly, "I will make it worth your time, really."

  "Well," said Anias, not wishing to appear churlish with the check that would free her for a year still in her hand, "it wouldn't be that hard. But I think I left my synthesizer at a friend's home. I don't think I can get it back by tomorrow."

  "Oh. Well, perhaps it will turn up. If it does—suppose I stop by tomorrow afternoon. I shall be seeing her in the evening. If you can do it, fine—if not, perhaps I can find something else."

  Once again he shook her hand formally. He smiled, "Good-bye, Miss Ruey," and glided away.

  Anias pulled the door shut and returned to the room she usually regarded as her nest, but which today seemed more like a cage. She considered a walk to the beach by way of entertainment—she couldn't go out and spend money wildly until day after tomorrow anyway—but compromised by directing her excess energy to some long-overdue picking up. In the process she came upon her lost synthesizer, kicked under the couch.

  "Yea, hooray, hallelujah!" she chirped in joy, clutching it to her breast. "I thought I'd left you in the howling wilderness. Good, good, good." She happily set it back in its accustomed spot on her worktable.

  "Now I can do something really fun." She wondered which to tackle first, Gonzales's romance, Kinsey's 'birthday card', or some new ideas for a juvenile adventure that had been wandering homelessly in the back of her mind for the last few weeks. As she hesitated over this banquet of choices, a little uneasiness crept over her.

  "Now how the devil did you get under the couch?" she soliloquized. "If I'd lost you unpacking, it'd have to have been in the bedroom." Anias did not trust her own memory for small details. She had occasionally been known to forget whether she'd taken her morning vitamin before she even had the cap back on the bottle, or have to check her toothbrush for wetness to know if she'd brushed her teeth. At the same time, she could carry reams of complex dialogue between her dream characters in her head for days when she was doing her prerecording organization, so she did not think it was a case of incipient mental retardation, but merely the effect of concentrating on essentials. Her synthesizer was not normally in the toothbrush-and-vitamin category of her consciousness.

  For a time yesterday she had been having paranoid fancies that it was stolen, before reason insisted it must have been left behind. But synthesizers were not interchangeable without custom adjustments, and she could not imagine what anyone else would take it for, except ransom, a rather exotic notion. She reached again for the leads, then was stopped again by a new thought.

  "What a stupid idea. You're letting Chalmys's attitude get to you, my dear," she murmured. He had always been bothered by the wires in her head, having archaic visions of short circuits, though his unease usually took the form of jokes about walking around in thunderstorms. In fact, the viral connections of the synthesizer were incapable of building up enough charge to hurt her; they would cook themselves first. Just the same, she did own a diagnostic test kit, put away somewhere. She'd never had trouble with her set, and had never had occasion to use it. Really it was a redundant item, for the machine would have to go back to the manufacturer for any repairs anyway. Mostly it represented an object lesson in sales resistance. But for the sake of peace among her argumentative selves, she got up and went to look for it.

  Her test kit proved almost as hard to find as her synthesizer had been, but after some search she finally unearthed it at the back of a drawer beneath a collection of stray oddments and half pairs of this and that. She was ruffled by her quest, which she had almost given up, but now that she had found the kit she dutifully set it beside her dream machine and prepared to plug it in. She pulled out the leads, placed them in their assigned slots, and switched it on.

  Instantly there was a loud crack, a brilliant flash of bluish light, and a horrible smell as little orange flames danced over the slagged plastic for a moment. Anias was knocked over backward, her hand tingling from the nimbus of the shock, She scrambled shaking to her feet, gulping for breath, heart pounding.

  "My God," she breathed, as astonished as if she had been shot by a lover. She had been telling herself for ten minutes that her fears were silly, and this was not the confirmation she had been expecting. She stared at the little heap of smoking ruins on the table. "My synthesizer," she wailed aloud. She sat down abruptly and stretched her hand toward the mess, then drew it back, adrenaline-induced tears starting to her eyes.

  Presently she gained better control over herself. Whistling tunelessly, she first got up and lock
ed her door, then made a vone call to the police. That completed, she made another. To her surprise it was answered after only a few moments.

  "This must be my day," she greeted Chalmys's image in the screen.

  "I happened to be passing by the study," he excused his aberration. "Are you all right?" he added, as he took in the expression on her face.

  "My synthesizer just blew up. It scared the pee out of me," she said. "Chalmys, it can't have done that!"

  "You weren't wearing it?" he asked anxiously.

  "No, I was testing it. Take a look." She swiveled the vone screen for a view of the chaos. "If I had been, my head would look like that." Anias's imagination, true to form, was distracting her. In it she seemed to feel now every spider-web connection of her dreamer implant, minute root hairs running through her brain tissue, all afire. Like slow-motion film she saw how she might have died as cells boiled, scorched, and burst as electric shock seared along the threads.

  "Anias, why?" asked Chalmys. He was shaken, his face, like Anias's, showing those peculiar lines of tension usually described as 'looking rather pale.'

  "The first thought that comes to my mind," she said grimly, "is that dead people can't voiceprint check endorsements." She held up the check for him to see. "My greasy patron just dropped this by. I have to wait till day after tomorrow to cash it." A dozen discarded disquietudes about the odd little man boiled up inside her. "My synthesizer turned up just after he left."

  She detailed the fiasco with her luggage yesterday, topped by the disappearance of her beloved dream machine.

  "Do you think he stole your synthesizer and wired it to kill you just to get his money back?" asked Chalmys.

  "I don't know. It doesn't make sense. I'd have done his dream for ever so much less. He didn't even try to bargain. It seems so unnecessary." Her mind leapfrogged among the events of the afternoon, and she suppressed a last frightened sniffle. "Then there was that story about his aunt."

  "His aunt?" asked Chalmys, a bit confused.

  "I bet he doesn't have an aunt. I bet he doesn't even have a mother," Anias added savagely.

  Chalmys abstractedly rubbed a thick finger across his lower lip. "Have you called the police?"

  "First thing, after I locked the door."

  "Do you think he'll try again?"

  "Maybe." Actually, her imagination had been generating novel murder methods at an appalling rate for the last several minutes. She tore herself away from mentally dying a thousand deaths. "I'm a bit nervous about staying here by myself."

  "I can understand that. But surely you don't need to go all twitchy yet. For all he knows he's succeeded, or is about to. No reason for him to do anything else till he finds out he's been discovered, hopefully when the police arrest him. But look, after you're done with the police, why don't you pack your things and come up here on the next shuttle? This place is half-fortress anyway. I could even have Charles meet you at the shuttleport."

  "I thought you'd never ask," she joked. "Yes. I would like that very much. Uh . . ."

  "Uh. Do you have enough money?"

  "How do you read my mind like that? No."

  "Give me your code and I'll transfer some into your account."

  Anias smiled gratefully.

  "In the meantime I will do what I can through my contacts to encourage the police to exert themselves in your cause. Give me another call when you're ready to leave. I'll wait for it."

  "Right."

  * * *

  The police arrived promptly after Anias's call, although the wait seemed long to her. There was a detective officer and an explosives technician, and they seemed to fill her little apartment with that extra measure of reality, like a blast of outdoor air come through the window of a stuffy room, that their authority lends policemen, doctors, and the famous. They attended to her complaint with serious and professional courtesy. Lt. Mendez, the detective officer, a middle-aged man with the competence of practiced routine, asked her a series of questions that reminded her very much of the ones Chalmys had asked a week ago. They opened up uncomfortable vistas of her own carelessness.

  The technician encoffined the corpse of her dream synthesizer in a plastic case and carried it off for autopsy. Her check, alas, was also carried off as evidence, since it was the one material lead in the affair. Anias now realized fully how very careful her patron had been to leave no recoverable physical or electronic traces of himself. But the detective seemed fairly optimistic.

  She arranged for the police to reach her at Chalmys's if necessary, and made her shuttle connection without event. The flight to Toronto gave her time to meditate upon her narrow escape. The more she thought about it, the more her conviction grew that money alone was not sufficient motivation for her murder. She had the unhappy suspicion that she had been used, willingly if unconsciously, as a tool in a very much nastier scheme. By the time she reached Chalmys's, her own most intimate knowledge of her recent work, reviewed with sickening clarity, had suggested to her another possible reason for the crime.

  "I'm sure it was for the dream," she said to Chalmys. "I believe it is to be used as a weapon."

  They were seated, in the small hours of the morning, in Chalmys's well-appointed library. Anias was dead tired, but far too nerved up to sleep, or even sit still. Chalmys was thoughtfully plying her with soothing words and a tray of elegant snacks in an effort to calm her enough for bed.

  "I sensed it, you even sensed it. But I was so wound up in admiring my own abilities—I wanted to do that dream. I've got to get that cartridge back, the sooner the better."

  "Slow down, slow down. Now begin at the beginning. Just how do you think it can be used as a weapon? I can imagine, I suppose, it being played over and over to someone by force, but I don't quite see what effect it would be expected to have."

  "Not by force. In their sleep. In their sleep. Like hypnotic suggestion, only much stronger. The thing was tailor-made, designed, to fit the cracks of a particular personality. I think—I think —that if it were played even a few nights, say four or five, to that person, they could really be induced to commit suicide. Only it would really be the perfect murder, because the suicide would be genuine. The murderer would never have to go near the victim. Destroy the cartridge, and it could never, ever, be proved."

  "That is a very interesting idea. What did the police think of it?"

  Anias frowned. "They didn't seem as interested as I thought they should be. The detective kept emphasizing the physical facts."

  "Well, they have to present their case in court, you know. The idea is a bit ethereal. I've always thought feelie-dreams were a sort of super video. A better illusion, but still, just pretend."

  "They can be. Most of the story sorts are. But then there are the reveries, and the pure abstractions. They convey their power in a more direct way. You don't have to bury the psychic symbolism in the characters or the plot, it's all right out front." Anias paced in front of him, troubled. "But you see, as a composer, if I have a fear, or some other terrible thing in my mind, I can in a sense bundle it into the dream and export it. It's very therapeutic—for me. I get power over the problem in the process of handling it. But it doesn't always work that way for the fellow on the import end, the dreamer. It arrives, bang, in his mind, and he has to find his own way to handle it—or not, as the case may be."

  "All right, let's grant your theory as a working hypothesis. By the way, I notice you refer to 'the murderer' in the abstract, not 'Kinsey.' Why?"

  Anias shook her head. "I'm not sure. Kinsey was as slimy a worm as I've ever met, and I didn't really see that much of him, but he just didn't strike me as a man with the depth of insight to come up with that scenario. Call him Mr. Big."

  "Mr. Big?" Chalmys repeated wryly. He gave her a look of amused reproach.

  "I can't help it, it's the way I think. But Chalmys, that thing was good. I mean, powerful. It had a power of its own. It got some of the best work out of me I've ever done. Kinsey might have thought up the atta
ck on me, but not that dreamscape. I still see him as a go-between."

  "All right. We'll put that down in the 'facts' column."

  "Do we have any facts? It all feels like shooting in the dark to me."

  "Oh, you know quite a bit more than you realize. If your theory is right, you know so much that someone has gone to a great deal of trouble and risk to try to kill you for it. If, ah, Mr. Big thinks so highly of you, who are we to contradict him? Let's begin with the dream itself. What does it tell you about the intended victim? Man or woman?"

  "Woman," replied Anias positively. "You don't know about body images in feelie-dreams, but if they'd wanted a really good one for a man, they'd have to get a man to make it."

  "Old or young?"

  "Not very old, certainly not a child—middle-aged."

  "Married?"

  "I'm not sure about that. Not a virgin, anyway."

  "Children?"

  "Almost certainly. It would give some of the most horrible images in the dream loads more power."

  "Strong or weak personality?"

  "Weak, brittle—but stubborn." Anias began to get into the spirit. "That's a deduction. If she were weak and pliable, the murderer could get what he wants without killing her."

  "Mm. Maybe. So the victim is a middle-aged woman, married, with one or more children, and a history of mental illness. We also know she has a dreamer implant, therefore she is well-to-do. I have a gut feeling money plays a part in this. The murderer at least assumes money is a powerful motivation, hence the price he offered you for the dream, also the trouble he's gone to not to pay it. We also know the murderer's on intimate enough terms with the victim to have access to her in her sleep—though there is a possibility he may merely have suborned such a person. Also, by your hypothesis, we know his fatal flaw." Chalmys was getting carried away with the role of amateur detective and forgetting his original purpose of soothing Anias to sleep.