Xenopath - [Bengal Station 02]

by Eric Brown

  * * * *

  XENOPATH

  [Bengal Station 02]

  By Eric Brown

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

  * * * *

  ONE

  MIND NOISE

  Vaughan was refuelling The Pride of Calcutta, just in from Ganymede, when the call came through.

  He crouched beneath the freighter’s bulging belly, jacking fuel leads into the main tank. The stench of high-grade octane made him dizzy and the warm wind blowing in across the spaceport did nothing to stir the air beneath the ship.

  It was six, and his shift was almost over for another day. He’d grab a beer or two at Nazruddin’s before heading home.

  When his handset chimed he assumed it was Sukara, wanting to know what time he’d be back. He smiled as he accessed the call. He never thought he’d be a slave to domestic bliss. Hell, how things had changed in just two years.

  The face that stared out from the tiny screen on his wrist was not Sukara’s. The woman was white, with a thin face, a peroxide blonde crew cut, and feral suspicion in her squinting gaze.

  “Jeez, Vaughan. How long’s it been?”

  He recognised the high Sydney whine a fraction of a second before he put a name to the face.

  “Kapinsky?” Reception was bad. He crouch-walked from under the belly of the ship and eased himself upright, his legs aching from the effort. The running lights of the Calcutta threw his shadow ahead of him as he walked across the deck towards the perimeter fence.

  “Back from the dead, pal,” Lin quipped. “How’s yourself?”

  “I’m okay. Fine. Never better.”

  “Christ, you know something? You sound as though you mean it. Am I talking to Jeff Vaughan here, Mr Cynical himself?”

  “It’s been four years, Kapinsky.”

  “But you’re still at the ‘port, still reading heads. So what’s changed?”

  He hesitated, wondering how much to tell her, and curious about why she’d called. He stared through the diamond mesh fencing, down to the moonlit scales on the Bay of Bengal a kilometre below, then looked back at Kapinsky’s mug shot on his wrist-screen. “I’m still at the ‘port, but I’m no longer reading.”

  She squinted out at him. “Come again? No longer reading? What, you trashed your pin?”

  “It’s a long story, Kapinsky.”

  “You sound as if you don’t want to tell me.”

  “That’s right.” He had no desire to share his story—his new-found happiness—with someone as jaded as Lin Kapinsky.

  “Okay, but listen. Reason I called. I need to see you.”

  “Ah... I’m busy right now.”

  “Listen, Pal. I’d be doing you a favour.”

  He almost said that that’d be a first: Kapinsky, doing someone a favour?

  “Like what?”

  “Like, I can offer you a job.” She went on before he could register surprise, “So you no longer read. You got promoted upstairs, right? Admin. You pulling in, what? Five thousand baht a month?”

  She had it so wrong. Two years ago, after he married Sukara and settled down, he’d needed a steady job for a while, something to tide him over for a few months. So he’d applied for menial work at his old employers, the spaceport authority, and found himself injecting octane into old class III interplanetary tubs. A few months had lasted over two years.

  Five thousand baht a month? He was on less than half that, which hardly paid the rent on the coffin that passed for a two-person apartment on Level Ten.

  Despite himself, his curiosity was piqued. “What job?” How was it that Kapinsky, wasted, washed-up, chora-addicted Lin Kapinsky, was in any position to offer him work?

  “Not over the air, Vaughan. Can you skip work and meet me at seven?”

  He was tempted to end the conversation there, but something stopped him. If Kapinsky thought he was holding down an admin job at five thou a month, and she could offer him more...

  He nodded. “I might be able to do that.”

  “Good man. Look, I have an office on Level Two, outer edge.”

  He whistled. “You on the outer? What happened?”

  “Later,” she said. Her smile was monomolecular thin. “I’m in Myrabad district. Unit Seven on Gandhi Mall.” She cut the connection.

  He was left gripping the fence, staring at the blank screen and wondering if he’d dreamed the dialogue.

  He returned to the Calcutta, finished the refuelling and drove his truck back to the garage, beetling between the big voidliners just in from the colony worlds.

  He made a quick change from his grease-stained overalls and walked from the spaceport. The streets around the ‘port were tributaries flowing with an ebb tide of humanity. Restaurant lights branded the tropical darkness. The scent of cooking spices, wafted on the warm night air, reminded him he hadn’t eaten since noon. Half a kilometre ahead, Nazruddin’s faulty, flickering neon promised ice-cold Blue Mountain beer. He was tempted, but he knew that one beer would turn in to three, and he’d be late meeting Kapinsky, and then late home... And Sukara, in her present condition, wasn’t likely to be too forgiving.

  He caught a dropchute to Level Two, crammed into the cage with a gaggle of near-naked, ash-coated sadhu mendicants. At times like this, he was grateful he no longer possessed tele-ability. He’d used an augmentation pin when reading, but even without it the background mind-mush of the press around him would have been an intolerable white noise.

  Now he enjoyed absolute mind-silence. His thoughts were his own. The noise—the audible sound—of the creaking cage, the chanting mendicants, and giggling schoolchildren, he could ignore.

  The cage opened and he spilled out onto a wide mall packed with citizens. Strip lighting illuminated the tunnel and Hindi holo-movie music blared from speakers placed strategically to leave no area unaffected.

  His handset chimed again. This time it was Sukara. Her broad Thai face filled the screen, bisected by the knife wound that served only to make the two halves all the more beautiful.

  “Jeff,” she said.

  “Su, you okay?”

  “Just wanted to see your face.” She looked glum. “Baby blues again.”

  Vaughan smiled. “I’ll be home soon.”

  “When?” She sounded petulant. “I want you now.”

  He laughed. “Su, I’ll be late. Another hour, say.”

  She scowled out at him. “Jeff... I’ve been alone all day, and now you—”

  He hadn’t planned to tell her about the job offer, but her tone prompted him. “Look, Su. Something’s come up. You know you’re always telling me to get a new job?”

  She brightened. “You looking?”

  “An old colleague contacted me today. There might be something. I’m meeting her now.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it when I get back, okay?”

  She beamed. “Good luck, Jeff!”

  He told her he loved her and cut the connection, then headed west towards the outer edge of Level Two.

  He’d known Lin Kapinsky for a few years way back, when he’d worked as a telepath for ‘port security. She’d been in his team for a year, reading the passengers on colony ships newly arrived on Earth. A model officer, she’d discharged her duty with efficiency, but Vaughan had never really warmed to her. Telepaths, as a breed, tended not to be the most rosily optimistic of people—but Kapinsky had turned cynicism into an art form. She had no friends, even among the usually close-knit coterie of fellow teleheads, and she’d gone through lovers as if trying to set a world record.

  Misery loves company, was the old adage, and while Vaughan back then had been a miserable son of a bitch, he found Kapinsky’s existential despair
too familiar a reminder of his own cares and concerns.

  He’d worked with her when he had to, and avoided her the rest of the time.

  A couple of years before he quit ‘port security, Kapinsky’s addiction had got the better of her. All telepaths used chora—the drug kept the mind-noise tolerable—but Kapinsky had snorted the alien dust in brain-burning quantities. One shift she’d gone schizo aboard a ship, punching a VIP from Rigel II, and a few weeks later she tried to hang herself from one of the ‘port loading gantries. An act of macabre symbolism, Vaughan had thought. Someone had cut her down, saved her life, and the last he’d heard she’d been committed to the state psychiatric ward on Level Fifteen.

  And now here she was, arisen like a phoenix, and was offering him a job.

  He found Gandhi Mall and paused outside the sliding steel door of Unit Seven.

  He touched the broad lapel of his leather jacket, felt the reassuring bulge of the mind-shield where he’d stitched it years ago. The last thing he wanted was some snooping telepath rummaging around in his head.

  The door slid aside without Vaughan’s announcing himself.

  He stepped into a bright reception area, equipped with a host of alien flora and a secretary in a sharp suit.

  The man looked up from his screen. “You have an appointment with Ms Kapinsky?”

  “Vaughan. I’m due to see Lin at seven.”

  “Right on through there,” the man said.

  Vaughan stepped through a second sliding door and found himself in a big office. More than just the acreage of floor-space indicated that Kapinsky had come up—in all senses of the word—in the world. Modern carvings, in real wood, adorned the corners of the room, and a vast floor-to-ceiling viewscreen looked out over the neon-lit waters of the Bay.

  Vaughan tried not to appear impressed.

  “Jeff, you look well.”

  Lin Kapinsky sat behind a vast desk. She, too, looked healthier than Vaughan recalled. He remembered her as being pale and anorexic, her expression forever haunted.

  Now she was tanned and smiling, sporting a fashionable crew cut and outfitted in a smart cream suit. Her face was as sharp as ever, though, her steel-grey eyes almost silver, like eucalyptus leaves.

  “Some place you have here,” he said.

  “Sit down. Still drink coffee as if it’s going out of fashion?”

  “Could do with a cup,” he said, sitting in a swivel chair across the desk from her.

  She was smiling at him, and he found that disconcerting. Lin had never smiled. She poured him a big cup of something that smelled authentically Brazilian and pushed it across the desk to him.

  He sipped. Dammit, the stuff was authentic. He smiled, this time unable to hide the fact that he was impressed.

  Lin leaned back in her chair, her thin lips pulled into a smile.

  He looked around. “This place must set you back... what? Five grand a month?”

  “This is Myrabad, Jeff. Select district. Try ten a month.”

  He nodded, staring through the viewscreen at a voidship coming in low over the sea. “So... what the hell are you doing that allows you to pay rent like that?”

  “What I always did, Jeff. What I was good at.”

  “Reading?”

  “What else?”

  He shrugged. “When I heard about what happened after you left the ‘port, the psych ward and all that... I assumed you’d had your implant removed.”

  Her cold grey eyes regarded him. “I did.”

  He nodded. “So you got rid of your implant, got sane... and then had it put back?”

  If that was the case, then it didn’t make much sense to Vaughan.

  She stood and walked out from behind the desk. She was small, barely five foot tall, approaching fifty, but her new-found wealth had bought her the latest in body-couture and face-sculpting.

  Vaughan contrasted Kapinsky’s vanity with Sukara’s refusal to waste money on having her scarred face fixed.

  She stood with her back to him, staring through the viewscreen.

  “Why do you think I asked you here?” she said.

  He sipped his coffee. “I seem to recall something about a job.”

  She nodded, turned on a stiletto heel that endangered the thick pile carpet, and stared at him. He was profoundly grateful that he was carrying a mind-shield, then, as her gaze raked his crumpled trousers, scuffed leather jacket, and unshaven jaw-line.

  She said, “I was always impressed with you, Jeff. You got the job done, and done well. You were accurate. You didn’t moan like some whinging tele-heads, but the pain was always in your eyes.”

  She moved to the corner of the desk, hitched herself onto it side-saddle and regarded him. “Then I heard about what happened a couple of years ago. You were involved in something big, some scam the then spaceport director was running. You got wise to it and blew the thing sky high.”

  Her précis was vague, suggesting that she didn’t really know what had gone down back then. He intended to keep it that way.

  “I did some investigating,” Kapinsky went on, “found out you quit the ‘port, nearly got yourself zeroed by a serial killer. But some Thai street-kid saved your skin and, happy ever after like in some fairy story, you married her.”

  He nodded. “Sounds something like what happened,” he said, not liking the sneer in her tone.

  “Tell me, Jeff. Why did you stop reading? It got too much, right?”

  “I didn’t intend to stop reading. I could live with it. I didn’t like it, but I reckoned I’d done it for so long, why stop?”

  “What happened?”

  “The killer who nearly did for me... he ripped out my implant so he could read my suffering as I died. Only the street-kid, as you called her, Sukara, she shot him and got me to hospital.”

  Kapinsky narrowed her eyes. “And you elected not to have the implant replaced?”

  Vaughan nodded. “When I came round, I experienced mind-silence. Absolute calm, serenity. No voices, no subliminal mind-noise. Bliss. How could I go back to reading, after that?” He shook his head and stared at her. “But you must’ve known what it was like, when you had your implant removed?”

  She nodded. “Oh, I knew. And you’re right. It was bliss.”

  “Yet you had it put back. You chose to return to what drove you mad?”

  She was watching him, and he didn’t like something in her expression, something calculating.

  “Six months ago I opened an investigative agency,” she said. “I started small, just me and a secretary, working from the seventh level. I did okay, kept in work. Then I hit lucky. I was hired to find the killer of the holo-star, Ravi Begum.”

  “I heard about it.”

  “His wife wasn’t happy with how the police were handling the case. She hired me. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I got the killer way ahead of the cops.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Too right, Jeff. The Police Commissioner was impressed. On the strength of my work on the Begum case, he said he’d put work my way. And he has—so much work I can’t handle it all myself.”

  Vaughan didn’t care for the way this was heading. He smiled; spread his hands. “I drive a fuel tanker,” he said. “Detective work isn’t my line.”

  “No? Not even for a flat seven thousand baht a month, and a ten per cent bonus on every successful case?”

  “You forget one thing, Lin—” he tapped the back of his head. “I’m no longer implanted.”

  She had the peculiar ability of flashing an ironic smile from nowhere, like a flick-knife. “And you’ve no desire to be, ever again?”

  He pointed at her. “You’ve got it in one.”

  She sighed theatrically. “I was like that, Jeff, back when I was in the Level Fifteen bin. I had mind-silence, no more chattering voices, and I loved it.”

  “And?”

  “And I met this guy, a friend of a friend. He worked for the United India Corporation. He was a telepath; only he wasn’t equipped with the se
cond-rate implants and augmentation-pins ‘port security palmed off on us. He had the latest neo-cortical rig, just in from Rio.”

  Vaughan shrugged. “How did it differ from what we used?”

  “In a few ways,” Kapinsky said. “Like, it was more powerful. Amplified thoughts approximately fifty per cent more efficiently than our implants.”

  Vaughan winced. “I don’t like the idea of that. So okay, you might be able to read more effectively— but what about when you take the pin out?”