Drowning World

by Alan Dean Foster

  She was not the only human in the restaurant. Unlike the rest of them, however, she chose to sit by the edge of the dining area, at a small table that overlooked the bustling, rain-washed town, instead of farther inside.

  Gazing at the panorama of busy strilk-suspended businesses and homes, offices and meeting places, it was difficult to envision the brutal clash that was taking place elsewhere between harried Deyzara and persecuting Sakuntala. Precipitation ran steadily and peacefully off roofs and walkways, while pedestrians of several races wended their way to and from work and home. Skimmers dropped off travelers and made deliveries. Harmless winged gerulenk and gaseous totolu soared or floated peacefully among walkways, buildings, fungi-infested trees, and pylons. It was all very civilized and serene. A Commonwealth-sponsored facade, she knew, that masked the deeper troubles that bubbled and boiled just outside the town limits.

  Hanging from the sloping ceiling (there were no flat ceilings in downpour-drenched Taulau or anywhere else on Fluva), cages full of domesticated varisanu steeped the restaurant in song. In addition to their own inborn harmonic repertoire, the fist-size, sparkle-throated varisanu could mimic any music they heard following a single listening. All four hirsute wings unfurled, red eyes bobbing at the tips of short stalks, one nearby blue-and-gold individual was presently declaiming a superb, if muted, rendition of the princess's final aria from Act Two of Turandot. In the same cage, an equally attractive yellow-and-lavender specimen was tootling its way through an entire cycle of atonal Deyzaran folk songs. The consequent counterpoint, she reflected, would have seriously strained the descriptive abilities of the most egalitarian music pundit.

  Her server was a senior Deyzara. Less susceptible to mold and rust than a mechanical, the live waiter was also cheaper to operate in Fluva's remorselessly damp climate. Matthias accepted the food appreciatively and was about to begin eating when a visitor intruded on her vision.

  Looking up, she found a short, slim man with a mournful expression gazing down at her. She decided he could not have weighed much more than fifty kilos. His hair was thin, blond, and receding. He looked to be about thirty. Worn down early, she concluded. One of those sad individuals who found themselves peeled prematurely off the roll of Life.

  “Sorry to break in on your lunch, Administrator Matthias.” He spared a furtive glance for the other occupants of the dining area. “I really need to talk to you.”

  “Here?” She forked food, chewed calmly. Whatever else the man was, he did not appear threatening. “Why not make an appointment with my office?”

  “Kind of in a hurry. Don't like formalities.” He cast a meaningful glance in the direction of the other chair. “May I? I think it's important.”

  She sighed inwardly. One of the main drawbacks to being in charge of everything was never having any privacy. People were always confronting you with complaints, suggestions, requests, demands, angry objections to something you'd just done or were going to do or hadn't even contemplated. It went with the job. Hopefully, it wouldn't take long for her uninvited guest to have his say.

  “Clifford Kamis,” he was saying as he slipped into the chair. “You can call me Clif.”

  She mustered a smile. “Nice to meet you, Clif. I'm afraid I can't talk to you for very long. I don't get much time to myself, you see, and—”

  “I'll be real brief,” he assured her, interrupting. “It's about those two skimmers that went missing.”

  She hesitated with a full fork halfway to her lips, carefully set it back down on the rectangular Deyzaran serving tray. “What about them?”

  He stole another glance at the busy dining room. “Everybody's talking about them, but nobody seems to know much of anything.”

  “And you do—Clif?” She was watching him intently now, her rapidly cooling lunch temporarily forgotten.

  He looked away and shrugged uncomfortably. “Maybe. Maybe not. It's just something I seen. I work graveyard cleanup at the port, Administrator.”

  She nodded understandingly. He had her full attention. “Go on, Clif. Don't worry. Anything you say to me here stays with me, and is between you and me alone.”

  He was appropriately encouraged. “People are whispering that they didn't come back 'cause they were sabotaged. Talk is that the Deyzara is responsible. Me, I don't see how the two-trunks could bring off something like that. Seems to me you got to really know your way around the insides of a skimmer's instrumentation to bring off something like that, you know?”

  Folding her arms, she leaned forward and rested them on the table. “You don't think the Deyzara did it?”

  “What for?” He looked out over the town, into the steadily increasing downpour that had replaced much of the original view with a palisade of drumming gray. “I mean, what would the two-trunks get out of it? Especially if they were found out and held to blame. A few folks, they're saying that the Sakuntala did it and are making it to look like the Deyzara are responsible. Now, that makes more sense to me, 'cause right now the Sakuntala need to make the Deyzara look as bad as possible, so's to help justify what their trigger-happy warriors are doing to the two-trunks.” He shook his head, lips tightening. “But I've never seen any Sakuntala messing around with skimmers they weren't using. Certainly not late at night, when I'm doing my job. And none of the regular engineering types I've talked with know of a Sakuntala tech skilled enough to carry out that kind of advanced high-level instrumental manipulation.”

  She took a sip of her drink. “There are a couple of AAnn observers here on Fluva. They might have the necessary skills.”

  This time when he shook his head, it was with greater certainty. “Still need an expert authority on-site when you're doing that kind of real understated work, or so I've been told by the folks who'd know about such things. And I've sure as hell never seen no lizards sneakin' around the facility.”

  She forced herself to remain patient. “If not the Deyzara, or the Sakuntala with or without AAnn assistance, then who?”

  Now that the time had come to get specific, he wavered. Fighting down a paroxysm of impatience, she reminded him again that whatever he said would be held in strictest confidence. As he leaned over the table toward her, his already soft voice was tempered even further by palpable concern.

  “It's just that, working late at night, there ain't a lot to see. So when there is something to see, you kind of take notice of it, you know? I didn't think nothing of it when I saw it. Seemed perfectly natural to me at the time. But later, afterward, after that bioprospector fella's skimmer went missing and then the rescue team's also, it kind of got me to thinking.

  “See, there was this one time I saw someone working on the prospector's skimmer, real late—and it wasn't him. Next night, I hear that there had been some minor glitches in the port surveillance system. A few days later the system goes down again, for just a little while. That same time it goes down, I seen the same guy working on the skimmer that goes out with the rescue team. Both times, the guy doing the work didn't notice me.” He smiled wanly. “I'm not a real noticeable type, you know? I don't stand out. And I don't move around too much or make much noise when I'm doing my work. Took me a while to put everything together.” He shrugged again.

  “Course, it might not mean a damn thing. Just struck me as a couple of funny coincidences, that's all. The same guy working on both skimmers on the same nights port surveillance goes on the fritz.” He eyed her earnestly. “What do you think, Administrator? Am I wasting your time?”

  She sucked in her breath. “No, Clif, I don't think you're wasting my time. I don't think you're wasting my time at all. One thing I don't understand is, why bring this to me? Why not report it to Port Security?”

  He looked away, clearly ill at ease. “Well, it's like, I don't know the guys who work security all that well. And I'm thinking, what if one of them is working with this guy I seen, to help cover what he's doing? Maybe the security guy is taking down the surveillance system while his buddy is doing whatever it is he was doing to
those two missing skimmers? What if they're working something together?”

  That could certainly explain, she realized, why the Port Security crew had not been able to come up with any useful information to pass along to her office. “Would,” she asked her guest with studied deliberation, “you be able to recognize the individual you saw working on both of the missing skimmers if you saw him again?”

  “Oh, hell, I don't need to look at a holo of him. I know the guy. He's in and out of the port all the time, checking out and working on his own skimmer, always making sure it's operational and ready to go. Seen him working late lots of other times. I'm told he's a bioprospector also.”

  That would make sense, she knew. Someone with a skimmer based at the port wouldn't arouse suspicion when he entered and left the facility, even at odd hours. It shouldn't be too hard for a patrol to pick him up. There weren't that many independent bioprospectors working out of Taulau.

  “Give me his name. Don't worry. Whatever happens, your involvement won't be brought up.”

  Kamis grinned softly. The more she talked with him, the more she liked the soft-spoken little man. “Don't care about him. Don't care if he knows or not. It's the guy I don't know, the security guy who might be helping him out, who worries me.”

  “I'll see to it that you're given protection. Discreet, of course. Just give me a name. I've met a couple, but by no means all, of the bioprospectors who work out of Taulau.”

  He met her gaze unflinchingly. “You know one named Sethwyn Case?”

  At his intolerable, excruciatingly painful words, more than her appetite summarily drained away. Nausea rose in her gut. She felt suddenly queasy. Hardly touched, the meal laid out before her had abruptly taken on the look and smell of warmed-over offal. Exerting a tremendous effort of will, she took a long swallow of her chilled drink without her hand shaking. In contrast, every bit of her insides seemed to be trembling.

  “Are you sure you're not, not mistaken in your identification, Clif? I'm certain you realize how important this is, what you're telling me. You need to be very, very sure.”

  “Oh, I'm sure,” he told her without the slightest hesitation. “It was Seth Case, all right. Both times. Unlike me, the guy's pretty distinctive-looking.” He peered a little closer at her. “Is he one of the prospectors you know?”

  “Yes.” She was having a difficult time breathing. “Yes, he's one of the ones I know.”

  “You okay, Administrator?” Kamis looked suddenly alarmed. “You don't look so good.”

  “Swallowed some juice the wrong way. I'm all right, Clif. I'm just wondering. As long as we're talking about this. What reason could Mr. Case have for sabotaging those two skimmers? What possible motive could he have?”

  Kamis sat back in his chair. “Hey, that's not something for someone like me to speculate on, Administrator.”

  “Go ahead, Clif.” She spoke more sharply than she intended. “Go ahead and speculate.”

  “Well . . .” He scratched at the fine blond hair that barely veiled the pale flesh of his skull. “You listen, you hear a lot of things around the port. There's a lot of competition among prospectors.”

  “I know,” she snapped. Seeing him flinch at her tone, she hastened to reassure him. “Sorry. This is—it makes one angry, you understand?” How angry, her guest could not imagine.

  “Sure, I understand. If it's true and I were in your position, I'm sure I'd feel the same way.”

  You have no idea, she thought bleakly. “You were speculating?”

  “Yeah. Like I said, lots of competition, to find valuable growths and stuff. I don't pretend to understand everything that's being talked about, but I understand about the competition clear enough. Everyone understands about competition.

  “Case, he was pretty jealous of this Hasselemoga's successes. And this Hasa guy, I never met him, but I get the feeling he wasn't real well liked by his opposite numbers.”

  “It is my impression that all the other bioprospectors felt similarly about Mr. Hasselemoga.”

  “Uh-huh. But I didn't see none of them hanging around those two skimmers that've gone missing on the two nights when port surveillance just happened to go out.”

  From the last time they had talked, some of Seth's words suddenly came back to her in an explosive, damning rush.

  “How's your luck been?” she had asked him.

  “Not so good. . . . I've got a couple of leads on some spots down south . . .”

  Down south. That was where the reviled Shadrach Hasselemoga had gone missing. Had Sethwyn been working the same general area? Was he afraid that his detested but resourceful competitor would beat him to discoveries that Case believed were rightfully his to make? Had he seen to it that Hasselemoga's skimmer would crash and not be able to send out a call for help?

  When a rescue skimmer had been sent out to look for the missing prospector, had Case been forced to make sure that it, too, would vanish without a trace, in hopes that no third party would be sent to look for those who had preceded it? Wasn't that exactly what had happened so far? Meanwhile, rumors flew that the Deyzara were behind the twin disappearances. Divert attention. A classic maneuver of the clever criminal. Was Case responsible for them, too?

  Kamis was rising to go. “I just want you to know, Administrator, I'm not telling you about this because I've got anything against this guy Case. Or because I happen to like this Hasa fella. I don't even know him. I ain't doing it because I'm any more fond of Fluva than any other human bean unlucky to be stationed here. I'm telling you because I'm a regular churchgoer and it's against United Church orison for one sentient to belittle another with intent to cause harm. What happened to those two skimmers may or may not be the fault of this guy Case. Any stuff like that has yet to be proved. But the rumors ain't fair to the Deyzara. That's why I'm speaking up. I'd bet my pension they're not responsible for what happened.” He pushed his chair back into the table. “Maybe if you have a chat with Case, you'll find out for sure who is.”

  She did not follow him with her eyes as he made his way back out through the crowded restaurant. Her vision, like her thoughts, was directed elsewhere. She sat at the table, hardly moving, staring at nothing, until the diffident Deyzara server approached. The two-trunks' speaking organ was bobbing fretfully.

  “Your pardon, Administrator Matthias, but is there perhaps something wrong with the food?”

  “What?” Absently she glanced down at the intricately inlaid and still heavily laden tray. “No. Nothing at all. I'm just . . .” Her voice strengthened and she rose from her seat. “I have to go. Emergency call.”

  The server sighed knowingly through his trunk. “I am sorry for you. You must have to deal with a very great many of those in these uncomfortable times.”

  She did not succeed in mustering a reply.

  Somehow, she donned her rain cape and found her way back to the Administration Center, thankful that the eating establishment lay within walking distance and she did not have to use a skimmer or slider. Pedestrians who knew her called out greetings and were taken by surprise when she did not respond. It occurred to her that she was in a mild state of shock.

  She wrenched herself out of it. She was too busy to be in shock. If she wanted to spend time in shock, she would have to set aside an appropriate length of time on her appointment calendar.

  She was dimly aware that Pandusky spoke to her as she entered and strode past him. Possibly one or two other staff members did so as well. She wasn't sure. She could hear nothing except her own searing, agitated thoughts.

  Throwing herself into her welcoming chair, she ignored the insistent flashes of light from her desk. Whatever it was could wait. Everything could wait.

  Kamis's testimony was damning—but it was not conclusive. The maintenance worker had said as much himself. She needed more proof. She needed hard evidence to go with the little man's eyewitness account. Bergovoy would be no help. What would, what could, constitute the proverbial smoking gun? Fully alert and active no
w, her mind ran through a long list of possibilities. Eventually, she addressed the waiting desk.

  “Sanuel?”

  “Administrator Matthias, is there something—”

  “Not now, Sanuel,” she interrupted brusquely. “Get in here. I've got a job for you.”

  Her assistant arrived within seconds. The look of concern on his face was not addressed. She had no time for it.

  Without preamble or explanation, she said, “You know the bioprospector Sethwyn Case? He's been here to talk to me on several occasions.”

  Pandusky's expression remained perfectly neutral. “I remember him, yes.”

  “I'm not surprised. You remember everything, Sanuel.” She did not give him time to respond to the mixed compliment. “I want to see his personal financial records for the past year, local time.” She raised a hand to forestall the reaction she knew was coming. “I know it's illegal. I also know you have the skills and resources to do it. It's a matter of Authority security.”

  At that moment, her assistant looked more uncomfortable than she had ever seen him.

  “I'll take full responsibility,” she continued. “If there's any fallout, I'll see to it that you are completely absolved of any liability.”

  Still, he hesitated. “A matter of Authority security, you said?”

  She nodded. “Utmost importance. Questions of life and death.”

  Pandusky took a long, deep breath, didn't smile, and muttered, “Give me twenty minutes.”

  He was back in fifteen. Matter-of-factly, he dumped the hard copy on her desk. “Will there be anything else, Administrator?”

  She was already poring over the report. It was not extensive. “Not for now, Sanuel. I'll let you know.”

  Nodding, he watched her read for a moment, then retreated gratefully from the room.

  It did not take long to find what she was looking for. There were half a dozen suspicious transfers of credit. None was large enough to stand out, but they were all of approximately the same amount and in each instance the transfers into Case's account had taken place on consecutive days. One large payment broken up into several smaller ones to avoid drawing attention, she surmised. There was no proof that was the case, but it was not an unreasonable assumption. Particularly since every one of the suspect transfers was from a company called Poutukaa. She knew the name. It was part of her job to be at least cursorily familiar with such things.