Analog SFF, December 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I sighed and was about to launch into my usual response to that common misunderstanding, when I realized just how long it had been since someone had provoked that response from me—our conversation really had taken me back in time. So I simply said, “No. Not quite all."

  She nodded acknowledgement, then shrugged. “So, anyhow, they let us all return to the university. But none of us liked being reminded of what had happened. We avoided each other, fell completely out of touch.” She glanced downward. “Lately, though, I've done some checking. And, well, now I think that probably everyone went through the same things I did.” Her gaze returned to my face, intense now. “You forced yourself to focus on your studies, right? And after a few years finally you graduated and went looking for work in your field. Or in anything close to your field. Or, finally, in anything at all. But somehow there was always a problem with the paperwork, wasn't there? Or you were overqualified, or the funding had just fallen through ... Before long, you couldn't afford to keep living in the city.” She paused to peer into her spoon, as if it held a scoop of the past. Then she looked back up at me. “So—do you think they already had that all planned for us, right from the start?"

  Her words were making my stomach tighten in a very unpleasant way. “Just stop."

  She looked puzzled. And maybe a little hurt.

  "There's no point asking questions like that,” I said. “This is their world—we forced them to remind us of that, once. We're not supposed to forget again, not ever. Thinking about what happened, bringing everything all back up again, asking questions like yours—that's no good. It only ... look, really, there's just no point."

  She peered at me for a moment, then disappointment overran her expression. She bowed her head to stare again at her spoon.

  It struck me that this job was probably going to be full of cheery moments like this.

  I pushed back from the table. “Tamiko, I'm sorry. Really, it's been great seeing you again. I'm just not very good at—I'll call you, okay?"

  She looked up at me, but her thoughts were somewhere else. I took advantage of her distraction and left before she started asking more questions.

  Emerging from the restaurant was like stepping directly in front of a blazing searchlight. I grabbed for my sunglasses; by the time I had them on I already felt sweat sliding down my back.

  The kids had taken their ball someplace else. Now a few dozen swing-shift workers crisscrossed the plaza; the woman behind the ice-water cart was being kept busy.

  I'd gotten a third of the way across the plaza when from behind I heard, “Jenna, wait!” I stopped and with a sigh I turned.

  Tamiko waved an arm above her head as she jogged toward me. She was, I realized afterward, by far the most animated thing on the plaza. So it was no coincidence that when the shooting started, it all centered on her.

  Seeing that I'd stopped, she slowed to a walk. In the same instant, from the corner of my eye I saw a powerful, elongated form hurl itself from behind a bush to fly toward Tamiko in a low, brown-striped arc.

  The first shot came from off to my left. Then two more from the other side, simultaneous with the sizzle of a maser from somebody behind Tamiko.

  The croc slammed into the plaza's bricks and skidded to rest a meter from Tamiko's side. She'd frozen at the sound of gunfire all around her; now she jumped backward with a scream. One side of her green coveralls was spattered with black blood.

  In the ensuing brief moment of stillness, as my heart slammed against my shuddering ribs and my vision's dark rim slowly cleared, I noticed that Tamiko—who stood mesmerized before the pile of scales, muscle, and teeth splayed within the dark stain that was slowly spreading across the yellow bricks—wore no gun.

  I rushed to her side, nearly colliding with a tall young man with shoulder-length red hair who was returning his weapon to its holster. Tamiko still stared down at the croc; when I spoke her name her wide-eyed gaze snapped to my face. More blood streaked her cheek.

  "Come on,” I said. “I'll give you a ride home."

  * * * *

  Over the next few days I met with two others who answered my message. The first, once a promising scholar of twenty-first-century West African literature, now ran a small-engine repair service. We met at his shop. I couldn't get him to talk about anything other than motors and lubrication.

  My other interviewee was Rafe Lindquist. Zoology student turned kiln operator. We'd once known each other slightly, through a mutual acquaintance and a few rather dismal parties. He'd put on several kilos since then, but he kept his still-black goatee precisely trimmed, and he dressed as fastidiously as I recalled—his unwrinkled, pale blue shirt carefully tucked into the waistband of his neatly pressed, darker blue shorts. When he pulled his chair out from the small café table, though, I'd noticed a streak of soot across one shoulder blade.

  Rafe had an intriguing reaction when I mentioned the “rumor” about the Warrant. At first he simply looked blank. But after a couple of seconds, as I was about to take the conversation somewhere else, he cocked his head and said, “Maybe that's what he was talking about..."

  I waited, but he just sat there looking thoughtful. So finally I asked, “Who?"

  He studied me, tapping his finger on the tabletop. “Somebody who'd had a little too much to smoke one night, by a campfire.” Then he glanced around the busy café. “I'd like to compare notes with you. But not here. Can you meet me at my hab tonight—say, between seven and eight?"

  And then he changed the topic.

  After we parted, I shared a frustrating afternoon with my desk as together we failed to hunt up a single clue as to Rafe's mysterious informant.

  The sun was setting when I pushed my bike up onto its kickstand. Long shadows stretched down the alley; a warm breeze blew a scrap of paper along the road's reddened edge. From a line of nearby bins wafted the thin, sweet smell of garbage.

  I climbed the rickety steel stairs to Rafe's upper-floor apartment. He didn't answer when I buzzed, or when I knocked. My watch showed seven-forty. I tried the door—locked.

  For half an hour I leaned back against his door, keeping an eye on the alley in both directions. Apart from the muffled music coming from the hab next door, I seemed to have the darkening evening to myself.

  I gave the buzzer another chance; I could hear it echoing hollowly inside the hab. Somehow it didn't sound right to me. Maybe I'd caught some of Rafe's paranoia from the café.

  I glanced up and down the street, searching one last time for any obvious cameras. Then I unfastened a pocket and extracted something that looked a lot like a standard key card. Hiding my actions with my body, I held the card over the door's lock. A few seconds passed while an arcane electronic mating ritual was consummated; then the door emitted a soft, satisfied click and the lock retracted its bolt.

  I stepped into the dark apartment, used an elbow to push the door closed behind me as the lights came up. There was a funny scent in the air, too faint for me to name.

  I found myself in a living room spartan in its furnishings, though not currently at its most presentable. A steel endtable lay on its side; one of the couch's burgundy-upholstered cushions had slid to the floor. Beside it laid a scatter of data crystals that I guessed had been swept from the nearby wall-hung desk, along with a couple of image-frames and a brown-striped, fuzzy toy croc.

  I stepped carefully through the debris, glancing into the adjoining kitchen as I passed its doorway. Nothing obviously amiss in there. When I arrived at the closed door to what in most habs would be the bedroom, I paused. Reaching into a pocket of my shorts—the same one holding the scanner and its crystal—I pulled out a small canister and sprayed a pair of gloves over my hands.

  No sounds emerged through the thick plastic door. I pressed my gloved hand lightly against it; the door swung partway open to reveal the corner of a bed, along with a fuller perfume of the odor I'd been smelling—cinnamon, mixed with rotten peaches.

  I'd encountered that smell once before, four yea
rs earlier. At the memory my heart began hammering; my hand trembled as I pushed the door fully open.

  Rafe Lindquist lay on the bed, curled on his side, staring at me wide-eyed. One arm extended across the bed, the hand reaching in my direction. His other hand was pressed to the front of his neck like someone choking—which he had been, when he'd died.

  His dark blue shorts were rumpled. His shirt was half untucked.

  I spun away and squeezed my eyes shut, taking gasping breaths through my mouth to avoid the now cloying odor. Then I forced myself to turn back and step closer. Gagging at the touch, I checked his neck—pulseless, but still warm.

  If I'd arrived just a little earlier, might I have run into his killer exiting the hab? A little earlier yet, might I have prevented this?

  Still shaking, I cursed the intruder whose clumsiness had left those questions lying here in wait for me.

  I made myself give the bedroom a once-over. Other than the bed, though, it didn't hold anything interesting. The contents of Rafe's pockets had been strewn beside him: a few cards, a pocket multitool, some cash-crystals—nothing interesting there, either.

  I returned to the living room, pulling the bedroom door closed behind me. I stood still a moment and waited for my heart to slow, my neck muscles to loosen.

  I reached down to the floor and flipped over one of the fallen image-frames. It was cycling through eight images of smiling faces of various ages, shapes, and sizes. Family members? Friends? I pulled out my scanner and recorded them all.

  The other frame held only a single shot. Rafe—without the extra kilos—and a tall, craggy-faced man whose graying temples contrasted with his ebony skin. Both of them wore serious boots and roughed-up field clothes as they squatted before a desolate landscape of sepia dirt and scruffy bushes. Between them sat three half-buried bluish spheres—the eggs, presumably, of some desert monstrosity. The two men were grinning like kids who'd just stumbled upon an unexpected freezer-load of ice cream. Across the image someone had hand written “To my best student."

  I considered that inscription as I ran my scanner over the frame and over the crystals lying beside it. I didn't recognize the older man. I stood and surveyed the room until I spotted a familiar small gray ceramic box sitting on a high shelf by the front door. I took down the box and lifted its lid—embossed with the university's crest—to reveal the data crystal inside. I closed the box but didn't return it to the shelf.

  I took one more slow look around the room. Then I picked up the second image-frame and stuck both it and the ceramic box inside the waistband of my shorts, where they'd be hidden beneath my loose shirt. After a final glance toward the bedroom, I pulled open the front door and exited, pausing for a second to wipe the buzzer contact and doorhandle with my sleeve.

  The alley was as deserted as before, but I glanced over my shoulder more than once as I mounted my bike and rode away. After several blocks I pulled to the curb, where I peeled off my gloves and stuffed them into a trash bin.

  I kept gnawing at it as I rode home, but I couldn't make any sense of Rafe's death. The smell in his hab meant that somebody had wanted information from him—though that hadn't worked out as intended. I had to assume that it was my meeting with Rafe that had triggered this assault, but I could think of only one person who could have known what I'd been seeking—and that person had already hired me to collect his answers. Even if he didn't completely trust me, it seemed awfully premature for Garcia Ortega to be bypassing my investigation.

  Still, there's nothing like a surprise to shake information out of a client. So when I got back to my office, I took a minute to get into character before making an accusation I didn't actually believe.

  Garcia Ortega answered my call wearing a plush, coffee-colored robe; half a glass of red wine sat on the small wooden table beside his armchair, condensation dripping down its stem. Given the hour, I expected annoyance, maybe sarcasm. But with a business-polite expression he said simply, “Yes?"

  The contrast between his appearance and poor Rafe's made it easy to give myself over to my earlier anger. I told him, “If you want to take over this inquiry, just say so. Because I don't need this sort of crap."

  He frowned. “I don't—"

  "Thilosone butyrate. Whoever you sent to interrogate my lead was too dumb to air out the hab afterward. Or too panicked, once things went dry."

  The frown had deepened. He paused a second. Then he said, “I thought we had an agreement."

  "We—what?"

  "I'm not the one who's supposed to need to ask questions here."

  I studied his expression, his posture. Hovering there above my desk, he seemed as relaxed and patient as when he'd sat on the other side of it a few days earlier. He might be feigning his ignorance, but I couldn't find any evidence of that.

  I gave it one last try. “Rafe Lindquist."

  He shook his head. Not even a flicker of recognition.

  I eased back in my chair. “My lead. A former, ah, colleague; you'll have a file. When I mentioned the Warrant, he thought maybe he'd once heard something—I was supposed to meet him tonight at his apartment to talk about that. Somebody else got there first."

  "With thilosone butyrate."

  I nodded.

  His frown had returned. “So—who? And what did they learn?"

  Thilosone isn't easy to acquire. But unlike other “truth serums,” thilosone actually works.

  "Not to worry.” Even after four years, I could still picture the side effects warning. I recited it for him now. "In the rare anaphylactoid reaction to thilosone butyrate, symptoms manifest within seconds of administration; respiratory arrest typically follows in no more than two to three minutes."

  "Lindquist is dead?"

  "Very."

  He leaned toward the camera, suddenly all brisk efficiency. “Were you seen?"

  His intensity surprised me. “No. I don't think so."

  He was looking off to the side, his fingers flicking through a series of quick gestures. “Lindquist ... the alley between Glendale and San Alvarado? Number eighteen?"

  "Um, yes. Second floor."

  He nodded. Several more flicks and then his hands dropped back to his chair. His gaze returned to me. “All right. I've sent some people. Your name won't come up.” His eyes narrowed as he appraised me for a few seconds. “I don't suppose that you might keep a supply of thilosone butyrate?"

  My still-simmering anger flared. I drew a breath, but then forced myself to just let it out slowly through my nostrils. “If I were the one who killed Rafe Lindquist, then that's what I'd have told you. And no, I don't use thilosone. That's not how I work."

  He held his stare for a moment; then his features relaxed. Either he believed me, or else he'd decided to pursue this some other time.

  I added, “If your ‘people’ find any clues as to who did kill Rafe..."

  He gave me a little nod. “Guesses?"

  I shook my head. “Nobody but Rafe knew I was coming. Nobody but you knew why."

  He laced his fingers together, tapped his thumbs against each other. “Odd, isn't it?” His attention drifted away for a moment, then he asked, “You didn't find anything in his apartment?"

  "No.” The pair of objects still hidden inside my waistband pressed uncomfortably against my skin. Should they lead to anything, I'd tell Garcia Ortega then. Though I didn't think he'd had anything to do with Rafe's death, for now I wasn't about to put anyone else at risk.

  He sighed. “Let's keep in closer touch, yes?” He turned and reached for his wineglass, lifted it from the table.

  I was about to say good-bye when he leaned toward me and said, “Ms. Dalmas, please—” He glanced toward where I should have been wearing a holster, then met my eyes. “—be careful."

  "Always,” I said.

  * * * *

  Thick, dark blue curtains hung beside my bedroom window. Not for privacy—the window was no more transparent than the one in my office. I'd neglected to pull those curtains shut when I'd craw
led into bed; now I woke to a glare that pierced my eyelids like tornado-driven sand. And also to a stiff neck.

  I disentangled myself from the sheets and sat up, trying to stretch the kinks from my neck. Eyes still closed, I watched a dream image retreat: sun-bleached sand spreading down to a sparkling green ocean, foaming waves lapping against dozens of long, still forms—bodies?

  The memory of the previous evening returned. My eyes snapped open, and for a moment I just sat staring at a loose thread dangling from one curtain's tight weave. Then I lifted my pillow to regard the image-frame and the gray box I'd stashed beneath it the night before.

  I got myself up and dressed. The two items I'd taken from Rafe's apartment in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other, I used my elbow to open the door into my office.

  At my desk, I ran a finger over the university crest atop the box, its cold ceramic scroll and shield so familiar. Then I opened the box and lifted out its data crystal—Rafe's dissertation.

  His advisor's name was on the third page. Matthew Johnson. I gave it a minute, but the name triggered nothing for me. My desk, though, had Johnson's complete bio assembled in a few seconds.

  Emeritus professor of zoology. Long publication list—he seemed to have studied every animal native to our corner of the planet. Never married, no registered offspring. For years he'd lived alone in his own outback research station. No political history. No arrests.

  There were plenty of pictures. In one he stood in the desert beside a folding table bearing three blue eggs; I searched, unsuccessfully, for Rafe's face among the ragged crowd in the background.

  It was one hell of a lead. “Somebody by a campfire,” Rafe had said. That could be anybody—another student on a field trip years ago, maybe, or a lover on a weekend getaway last month.

  But you can only follow the leads you've got. I set up two spider-searches, one centered on Professor Matthew Johnson and the other on the uprising, and told the desk to keep enlarging those two webs until they intersected or until each reached four degrees of separation—go any wider and your searches will have linked pretty much every person and event in colonial history.