Strings

by Dave Duncan

  The color all drained out again, leaving the swollen nose like a petunia on a snowbank. His lips mouthed something that might been “Bitch.”

  “Tell me: are you well…proportioned? You’re one of the tallest men I’ve ever met, and a girl can’t help wondering—”

  Ping!

  “And finally, friends, to wrap up tonight’s astonishing revelations, we have here the famous Hubbard Cedric. Good evening, Cedric.”

  He had to swallow twice before he could return her greeting.

  “Cedric, of course, is with the Institute. Only yesterday his grandmother snatched him off the company basketball team and appointed him deputy director for Media Relations, which was quite a surprise to all of us…and to you, too, I think, Cedric?”

  He nodded.

  She waited.

  “Yes.” Anger and hatred burned in his eyes. She felt a sudden lurch of desire—those damned pills always did that to her. But she did enjoy her men young. She loved to lead them on…and on…watching their lust rise until it was an agony, until they were driven beyond endurance, either lashing out in frenzy or suddenly humiliating themselves by ending before they had begun—that was glorious. And to start with one who already felt such savage anger…

  Business before pleasure. Concentrate!

  “And tonight Cedric has been sent along to give us the official word from his gran—from the Institute. Haven’t you, Cedy?”

  “That’s correct, Dr. Eccles.”

  She shivered at the intensity of his contempt. It was arousing her. She would be doing the blushing next. “Do call me Pandora, please. All right, then, why has the Institute been keeping this story secret? Why has it not admitted the truth before now?”

  “What truth, Dr. Eccles?”

  “Evidence of sentient life forms!”

  Then she saw the triumph flower in those big gray eyes, and all the world seemed to explode in alarm bells.

  “There is no evidence of sentient life forms.”

  “No evidence?” She must play for time—but she must also speak without any sign or doubt, or hesitation. “Are you suggesting that the records we showed tonight are faked?” Not that! Oh please, not that! The people are missing, their families are mourning—it can’t be a hoax. Please, God, let it not be a hoax.

  “No. The coin was stolen, but it was genuine. Everything you showed was genuine.”

  Relief! And before she could speak, he plunged ahead. He had been well briefed.

  “But you only saw a tiny portion of the data. We have evidence from more than twenty cameras, not just one, and from other sources also. For example—”

  “But the window was open on April fifth?” She must get the ball away from him. If she could pull the kid off his rote briefing, then he would flounder.

  “Yes.” He paused a fraction of an instant, and she pounced.

  “So the Institute has had three whole days to start producing fake records. How can we possibly trust anything you show us?”

  No—they had thought of that. “I’m not offering to show you any records.”

  More relief! Could it be that the whole rebuttal nonsense had been the long whelp’s own idea? She raised her brows in Obvious Skepticism. “So we are expected to take your word for it?”

  “For now you’ll have to.”

  She was running the predicted track, damn it! But she had no choice of move. “And why should we?”

  “Because this is under investigation as a criminal matter.”

  “Criminal?” That one threw her on the ropes, and in fact she had fallen back in her chair. “You are planning to arrest these stone-age inhabitants of—”

  “It was murder!” His eyes glinted with genuine, youthful outrage. “A horrible, premeditated murder. That’s why I can’t show you the holos. The records have been seized—attached, I mean—by the authorities, as evidence.” Then he smirked at her and waited expectantly.

  “What authorities? You’re not suggesting that the cave men on Nile have police?” No, levity was the wrong tack. She was blundering. Criminal crap! “Never mind that for now. You’ve got two dead men and a missing woman to explain, boy. Whodunit? Was there a fourth person in that skiv?”

  He shook his head and settled in to tell the story, a faint smile of triumph on his big mouth. “Have you ever heard of—” He took a deep breath. “—cuthionamine lysergeate?”

  “No, but I’m sure I’m about to.”

  “It’s a poison. It’s powder, but the fumes are deadly. It drives people mad.”

  “Fungus derivative, Pandora,” said her earpatch.

  “What sort of mad?” she asked. She was so weary. Even one conversation was almost too hard to handle, without having to work out why Maurice was blathering about fungus derivatives.

  Cedric adjusted himself in the chair, moving stiffly. What other injuries were hidden under that fancy tailoring? Bruises, welts? Pale skin with red weals—no, she must keep her mind on business.

  Obviously he thought he had her now. “In women it causes extreme confusion and certain libidinous tendencies.”

  “Oh, gimme a break! Who’s been teaching you the big words? It makes them horny, you mean?”

  His Adam’s apple jumped. “I guess so. It has that effect on men, too, and it also makes men violent. Women usually less so, and after a few hours it rots the higher centers of the brain, and it causes a mental degeneration and regression, and in a day or so it will kill—depending on the concentration, you know.”

  “So the Gill woman killed the men?”

  “It’s obvious she must have killed at least one of them.”

  “And where did she get the stone ax?”

  “van Schoening made it.”

  “Oh, really!” Pandora tried a laugh, and it sounded screechy even to her. She needed time to think—days. “Well, tell us the official story, then. You’ve seen these forbidden records?”

  Again he registered satisfaction—the interview was following the script he had been given. “No. All I can tell you is what I’ve been told. There will be a trial, and the jury will get the evidence. But this seems to be what happened. The skiv went—was transmensed—to Nile on April first, with the ecologist Dr. Gill, and Dr. van Schoening from Moscow, who was an expert on funguses, and a ranger, Dr. Chollak John, as operator. You know all that. Well, everything went fine for two days. They drove around, taking pictures and collecting samples. They found nothing unusual. They did not go outside, because of the heat and because the air is not breathable.”

  “We know all that.”

  “You don’t know the rest of it. It was on the fourth. That was when the poison hit. It was very sudden. Dr. Chollak and Dr. van Schoening started to fight. Chollak won, because he was younger and bigger.”

  Through the deadening fog of fatigue and confusion and anger, that image registered with Pandora. “He won the woman? He raped her?”

  Cedric pulled a grimace as well as he could around his swollen nose. “It wasn’t rape. We wanted to spare the families this—but Dr. Gill was affected as much as the men were. Partly she provoked the fight. I have to mention that, because of what happened later. After the fight, Dr. van Schoening went into the lab room at the back of the skiv. He took out some rock samples and made a hand ax.”

  This time Pandora let the laugh come, to show scorn. Then it became ridicule. She howled. She felt tears come, it was all so silly. After all her work and all the evidence, to have this bimbo come along and spin cobwebs on her shiny triumph…Maurice shouted something in her earpatch, and she did not listen. And then she saw the amazed expression on the kid’s face and coughed herself into silence.

  “I told you that the poison causes mental regression,” he said sternly. “It can have that effect, depending on which parts of the brain it affects. He regressed. There were lots of better weapons around—he even used a hammer at one point—but he smashed at a rock until he got an edge on it. Then he went into the room where the other two were, and he battered Chol
lak to death.”

  Obviously Cedric himself believed that crud, and he was young enough and innocent enough to be very convincing to the viewers.

  “That’s when you get your rape scene!” he said.

  “Pan,” Maurice told her. “Cuthionamine lysergeate is extracted from fungus. The external atmosphere was overpressured.”

  Cedric was waiting for comment. Pandora was floundering between his story and Maurice’s nonsensical babblings in her ear. When she did not speak, Cedric continued.

  “And then the second murder. Yes, it had to be the woman. She got revenge.”

  “And then went out to find a cop?”

  He shook his head, his calm rebuking her stupid levity. “Then she began hunting—she seemed to realize that something was wrong. The poison is so random that it’s possible she could still think after a fashion, even if she could not control her emotions. You understand?”

  “Hunting? What had she seen worth hunting?”

  He blinked. “Sorry—I didn’t mean that sort of hunting. She began ransacking the skiv. Because this was the third day, remember? The poison hadn’t shown up earlier. There had to be some sort of booby trap, or time bomb, to release it then.”

  “And what did she find?”

  Cedric showed wariness again, as if he had been warned of bad footing ahead. “We don’t know. She was holding it tight against herself, and none of the pictures showed exactly what it was. But she tried to throw it outside. She opened the—”

  “Well!” Pandora spoke loudly. The time had come to win back control of the interview. “You think she found some sort of time lock that had spread poison? It must have been small, this contraption, or they would have seen it sooner. You haven’t explained why she didn’t just toss it in the disposal chute, or seal it up in a sample locker.”

  “Her brain was half jelly by then. She put on her EVA suit, but she forgot the helmet. She must have used an override code to open the airlock, because normally it wouldn’t let her out without approving the readings on her suit monitor. She would have died at once, and the outer door was self-locking…”

  Pandora began to speak, but he shouted the end of the sentence.

  “…and the inside door she propped open with her helmet!”

  That was the sort of pathetic detail that Pandora did not need.

  “Wrap it up!” was the order from her earpatch.

  But she could not wrap it up and let all this hokum spoil her lovely special. She had pulled out the rug, and she was not going to let them lay it again so easily.

  “Well, so that’s the Institute’s version, is it? But you’re only reporting what they’ve told you, and you have no evidence!”

  He flushed and just shook his head.

  “Conveniently, the evidence is all sealed away by the law. Whose law applies there, on Nile?” Again she saw wariness.

  “Cainsville law. And that comes under a special agreement between the U.N. and the government of Canada.” He tried to say “extraterritorial” and stumbled over it.

  She saw an opening and flogged her tattered brain through it. “What government of Canada? Well, never mind. Isn’t it convenient, though? The Institute has its own security people looking into this supposed murder. The evidence is all locked away for months, by which time the string to Nile will have been lost. So no one will ever know the truth! Very handy! How many other secrets has the Institute buried over the years?”

  Hubbard Cedric had opened his mouth to say something. He started to stammer, and his face went chalky pale. That was puzzling. If she had not been so battered and flattened, she might have tried to follow that up.

  “And I don’t suppose there will be any more expeditions going to Nile in the meantime, just in case they might run into some stone-age beings?”

  Maurice was jabbering at her. “Pandora, if it was a voice-operated airlock…”

  Cedric was gabbling: “There will be evidence! Tomorrow!” A joyful gleam came into his eyes. “The window’ll be open again tomorrow, and we’re going to go and recover Dr. Gill’s body. It should be lying right where the skiv was parked. There’s a responder on her suit, so we can locate her. And whatever it was she found should be right there, too!”

  “When you say ‘we’…”

  The years fell away; the grin would have graced a twelve-year-old. “I’ve been promised I can go along! No overnighting, just a quick trip. I wasn’t in Cainsville before this happened, see, so I’ll be an independent witness when they find the body.”

  “You? Independent? You think that you’re independent?”

  “You are calling me a liar, Dr. Eccles?”

  “I’m saying that you’re not my idea of an independent witness.”

  He shrugged, exultant. “Well, I am. I happen to be honest! There are some of us honest men around, you know. And I’m going along with Dr. Devlin, and tomorrow evening we’re going to hold a press conference. Tune in and see what we found!”

  They were stealing her triumph. She wanted to scream. Maurice was babbling in her ear, and the king-sized cherub was openly smirking at her. They’d had days to plan some sort of trickery to hide the truth. Of course there were sentient aliens out there! Hastings Willoughby had ordered a cover-up. Hubbard Agnes had buried much worse truths than that in her time.

  “You and Devlin? Just the two of you?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe a ranger, or another witness.”

  “I’ll tell you what witness!” Pandora shouted, suddenly inspired. “A truly independent witness. Me! I’ll come along and keep your friends honest. Show me! I dare you!”

  The big kid started to laugh—and stopped, his mouth hanging open. Then his head twisted around and he glared at the blank space he had watched earlier. The nape of his neck was as hairless as a baby’s.

  “You’re joking!” he told it.

  He turned back to Pandora, suddenly red and glowering and mutinous. “You really want to come?”

  For a moment she wondered if she might have stepped into—no, this rube could never fake a reaction like that. “Yes, yes!”

  He pouted. “They say there’s one spare seat. Be at Cainsville at 0800.”

  Triumph! Victory snatched again from the jaws of whatever…. “Okay?” Hubbard Cedric asked grumpily.

  “I’ll be there!”

  Without even a good-evening, he started to rise. He and his chair vanished.

  That was a surprisingly abrupt ending.

  Pandora found the blur that was the camera, although she could not bring it into focus. The room was swaying and weaving, and there was a throbbing sound in her ears. “Well, it’s certainly been an interesting evening! Maybe tomorrow we’ll know some more…and…wish you all a very…all wish…”

  “Relax. You’re off.”

  The signal light had gone out.

  It was over, thank God. Over. She felt sick.

  She tried to stand, and darkness poured into the room and the floor tilted. Take another pill—no, don’t.

  How curious! She thought she might be going to faint.

  Not surprising. She was not as young as she looked.

  16

  Cainsville, April 8

  “YOU PLANNED THAT!” Cedric shouted, hurling the door open. In his fury he almost forgot to duck under the lintel. This was the closest to real anger that Alya had yet seen in him. “You set that up!”

  All through his ordeal she had been sitting in a corner of the control room beside Fish Lyle. Bagshaw, the beefy security man, had been leaning against a wall behind them in silence. They had all been watching through a window. Fish had not spoken and had barely moved, an inscrutable gnome. Only once had he used his mike to prompt Cedric, and that had been right at the end, to extend the invitation to Eccles Pandora. Now Cedric crossed the room in two long strides and glared down at him, and was rewarded with a bland smile from the round, pallid face. Lights glinted on Fish’s shoe-polish hair and turned the thick glasses into empty patches of brightness. His face
was a jack-o’-lantern carved from a grapefruit. He bore a scent of cologne.

  “You did very well, Cedric.” His voice was a rustle of leaves.

  “Well done, Sprout,” the security man growled. “Thanks.”

  “Almost too good,” Fish added. “You almost convinced her.”

  Alya stood up and smiled.

  Ignoring her, Cedric again shouted at Fish. “But you knew she would want to come along on the trip tomorrow! Why let her?”

  In another corner the technician arose and stretched. He was a sallow, spotty youth who had done nothing at all that Alya had seen except looked bored and pick his nose—System ran everything. He headed for the door, thumping Cedric on the shoulder in patronizing approval as he went by.

  Fish rose also. “You overestimate my precognitive abilities. But yes, I did run a prediction…” He chuckled inaudibly. “System said that if you played your part as we discussed it, then there was a decimal seven three chance that she would react that way. I’d have guessed higher.”

  “But why let her? Why do we want her?” Cedric had so far afforded Alya no more than a nod. That was a measure of both his anger and of a self-confidence that was growing astonishingly fast. In two days he had visibly matured, throwing off the childish cocoon in which he had been kept swaddled so long. He was filling in the holes in his knowledge, finding his strengths, and measuring them against the world. He had rolled with some of the roughest knocks she could imagine and gained strength from every success. It was a fascinating process to watch, but it did raise problems—such as the problem of where he was going to be allowed to sleep that night.

  As though he had read her thoughts, Cedric turned with a shamefaced smile and hugged her, very softly. He was not always so gentle.

  “You did beautifully!” she told him. “That horrid woman! You tied her in knots.”

  “Did I?” He did not look totally convinced. Cedric being skeptical? That was new, and he was even eyeing Fish more suspiciously than he had before the interview. Obviously the unexpected ending still bothered him. He tugged at a cuff. “And this suit! I feel like I forgot my guitar somewhere.”