Xenopath - [Bengal Station 02]

by Eric Brown

  The second thing she noticed was that every child she could see was injured in some way. Some had arms missing, some legs; others were blind.

  She turned to Abdul and said, “Is this a hospital?”

  He shook his head, not meeting her gaze.

  “But all the kids, they’re...”

  “Look,” Abdul said, pointing. “There’s Dr Rao. Do you want to meet him?”

  Pham stared across the bridge to where an elderly Indian man was moving among the groups of children with the aid of a cane. He stopped to chat with the kids, smiling and laughing.

  Despite having a strange feeling about the place, she nodded. It would be rude to have come so far with Abdul and refuse to meet the Doctor.

  He took her hand and led her down a slope into the bridge, and they weaved their way among the children. Pham felt self-conscious as some kids stopped what they were doing and looked up at her.

  Dr Rao saw Abdul and beamed. He looked, Pham thought, like a toothless turtle with old-fashioned spectacles.

  “Abdul! And your little friend?”

  “Pham,” Abdul said, and he sounded proud. “I said I’d show Pham where I live. She doesn’t have a home. She ran away from a factory on Level Twenty.”

  Dr Rao turned his wizened, leathery face to Pham. “Is that so? You ran away? A girl with daring and spirit, no? Now, would you care to live here, with Abdul and the other children?”

  Pham looked around, wordless. She wanted to ask the doctor why all the kids were maimed in some way.

  In a tiny voice, she asked, “What do I have to do?”

  Rao grinned. “We shall talk over specifics once Abdul has shown you more of the ship, shall we? But first—Abdul, would you be so kind as to fetch me a glass of chai? There’s a good boy.”

  “Be back in a minute,” Abdul whispered to Pham, and scooted off back up the ramp and disappeared along a corridor. Dr Rao shuffled off, inspecting his charges. From time to time, Pham saw him bend to inspect more closely the stumps of arms and legs recently amputated.

  Pham stood alone, frozen to the spot. For all she liked Abdul, she hated this place. There was something about it that made her very uneasy, something about all the injured children...

  As she looked around her, a voice in her head whispered, Get out of here. Go the way you came. You will be fine, believe me.

  The voice startled her. So she hadn’t been dreaming, last night. At the same time, there was something soothing in the words, in the feel of the voice in her head.

  She knew that the advice was right. She should get out of here.

  She wished she could say goodbye to Abdul, but she felt that he might be upset if she told him that she didn’t like where he lived.

  She hurried up the ramp and into the corridor, then followed the way she had come to the exit. She looked behind her. There was no sign of Dr Rao, chasing after her to drag her back.

  She hurried down the ramp and across the swaying footbridge. When she reached the gallery, she looked back one last time. The ship was a magnificent sight, but she shivered when she thought about what it contained. She quickly climbed the ladder, opened the hatch and pulled herself through.

  She was in the space between the decks now, and she wondered if she would be able to find her way back.

  It was as if something were telling her to look down, and when she did so she saw a series of footprints scuffed into the dust of the deck.

  She followed them to the column and dragged open the hatch. Then, she climbed towards Level Two and safety.

  On the way she tried to talk to the voice in her head.

  “Voice?” she asked. “Are you still there, Voice?”

  But the voice in her head was silent.

  * * * *

  FIVE

  LIES

  Vaughan paid off the taxi and hunched his shoulders against the hot down-draught as it rose and sped off across the Station. The vision of the dead man would not erase itself from his memory, and the thought of intruding on his wife’s grief, of having to read her mind, did not appeal.

  Gulshan Villas was a strip of exclusive residences on the north side of the Station, each one custom built by an architect famed for innovation. The Kormier residence was an elegant silver arrowhead arranged with its point facing the quiet boulevard; behind it, a long greensward fell towards the edge of the Station. On the lawn Vaughan made out a series of domes arranged so that they rode each other piggyback style, like an agglomeration of soap bubbles.

  His handset chimed. Kapinsky stared out at him. “I’ve drawn a blank at the Scheering-Lassiter HQ,” she said. “I’ll tell you about it later. I’m going over to the police records office now, checking other laser killings. Thing is, the place is sealed, so you won’t be able to get through, okay? If you need me, leave a message.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Catch you later, Vaughan.”

  He cut the connection and approached the house. There was no reply at the front entrance. He walked along the arrowhead’s angled wall and tapped the implant’s code into his handset. Briefly he felt a belt of raw emotion—grief and anger— emanate from the domes on the lawn.

  He killed his implant and headed across the grass to the domes, his apprehension increased by the power of the woman’s grieving.

  An airlock gave access to the massed bubbles. He stepped through, moving from a hot, humid summer’s day to an atmosphere even more humid: it was like a sauna, and his every breath was more a draught of liquid than air.

  He was surrounded by a thousand varieties of flower, a polychromatic panoply of colour. He suspected that many of the blooms were alien—not only by the fact that they looked elegantly tortured and unearthly, but because most of them were thriving in alien atmospheres within their own mini-domes.

  He followed a gridded metal walkway around the display and into a second, much larger dome. Here, alien shrubs of every conceivable hue gave the impression that he had left Earth and stepped onto the surface of some far-flung colony world.

  He headed towards where he judged Hermione Kormier to be—in a smaller, adjacent dome—and paused on the open threshold.

  He decided to question her first, unaided by his tele-ability. Only later, briefly, would he access her thoughts and feelings.

  She was tending a cactus with a spray-gun, half-turned away from him. She was perhaps fifty, silver-grey hair cut short, dressed in a kaftan as colourful as her horticultural collection.

  He cleared his throat. “Excuse me. I’m sorry. There was no reply from the house.”

  She turned, startled, a hand moving involuntarily to the wrinkled skin of her throat. “Oh, that was a shock. I’m sorry—I usually leave a note on the door. You’ve caught me unprepared.”

  He smiled, reassuring, and showed his identity card. “I’m Jeff Vaughan. I work for a private investigative agency commissioned by the Station police to investigate your husband’s case.” He immediately regretted the euphemism: it sounded even more crass than “your husband’s death”.

  Hermione Kormier smiled. She had blue eyes emphasised by a sun-seared face, and something about her no-nonsense outdoors appearance warmed Vaughan to her. He would not have labelled her as someone grieving the death of a loved one, but he knew that appearances were often deceptive.

  “Ah, I was expecting someone, sooner or later.” She gestured at the surrounding cacti. “Through here, if you’ll follow me, Mr Vaughan, are my pride and joy: these are moonblooms from Iachimo, Rigel II. They flower only in the dead of night, once a month. They are notoriously difficult to transplant.”

  The blooms, in a specially filtered half-light, were tiny and delicate and a thousand shades of silver.

  They gave off a subtle scent that hit the nose in a wave, and then subsided, leaving him wondering if he’d imagined the fragrance, until the next wave.

  He followed her through to another dome.

  “All these are examples of Dendri polycarpus, from the uncolonised world of Aldeb
aran IV. They are really two plants in one.”

  Vaughan stared around at the rude bursts of colour. He could only make out a single scarlet bloom in each pot, but beside each one was a withered stem.

  Kormier said, “They exist in a unique symbiotic relationship, Mr Vaughan. Each cannot live without the other, but often their existence appears mutually destructive. One will feed off the other for a time, gaining sustenance, and then the roles will reverse. We have been studying the species for years, but we still don’t fully understand the process.”

  She reached out and laid a sun-tanned hand on the apex of a dome. “I often think that their life cycles are analogous to the human institution of marriage, Mr Vaughan. Would you agree?”

  He opened his mouth to reply, but allowed a few seconds to elapse before saying, “Could I interpret that as a comment on how you viewed your own marriage?”

  She looked away, feigning interest in a vulgar, liverish bloom like a lolling ox tongue.

  “Come, I’ll show you to the house. One can become intoxicated by the atmosphere in here after a while. Coffee?”

  Taken aback by her matter-of-factness, Vaughan followed her.

  They left the domes, crossed the lawns and entered the arrowhead dwelling through a sliding rear door. She escorted him up a wide helical staircase and into an open-plan study overlooking the greensward and the glittering sea.

  She told him to make himself comfortable and left to fetch coffee. He moved around the room, glancing at the ranked books—academic treatises on horticultural subjects—and holograms of riotous blooms.

  He stopped to examine a shelf of holo-cubes. Each one showed a man and a woman against an alien backdrop. The woman was Hermione Kormier, at various ages from perhaps thirty to the present. The man was her husband, handsome and smiling in every cube, his arms around his wife, staring out in blithe ignorance of what the future held in store.

  Vaughan felt something catch in his throat and turned away.

  “Are you married, Mr Vaughan?”

  She was standing in the doorway, carrying a tray. Evidently she had been watching him.

  He was still at that stage of his marriage where he felt compelled to tell people about it. “Nearly two years now, to Sukara. We’re expecting our first child in three months.”

  “Are you happy?”

  He smiled, looking away from the woman and staring out to sea. “I would never have thought that I could be so happy, before meeting her. I worked as a telepath for years before that. It made me cynical.”

  “As it must, I imagine, reading the minds of the criminal and corrupt.”

  “Of course, our happiness is conditional on personal experience.”

  She looked across at him. “Are you still a telepath?”

  He nodded. “But I haven’t been for two years—”

  “As long as you’ve been married?”

  He smiled. “That’s right.”

  “The cynic in me would say that either the resumption of your telepathic duties, or a few years of marriage, might blunt your happiness.”

  He had seen so many relationships founder that he felt fear for his own marriage and, at the same time, guilt at his happiness.

  Hermione Kormier crossed the room and laid the tray on a coffee table before the window. She indicated a wickerwork settee and sat down opposite.

  Vaughan picked up a holo-cube and joined her. The cube was recent, he guessed. He held it up. “You look happy in this one. It can’t have been taken that long ago?”

  “Oh, I don’t deny that I was intermittently happy. Robert was a wonderful man. I was in love with him until the very end. But I also hated him, just as passionately, from time to time.”

  “Can you tell me why?”

  She sipped her coffee, then said, “You aren’t reading me?”

  “Not yet.”

  She inclined her head. “Robert could be very self-centred. Driven. Ambitious. I’ve no doubt that he loved me—but, you see, I’ve no doubt also that my love for him was stronger. He could do things which I interpreted as neglectful, unloving, things which I would never dream of doing to him. He wouldn’t think twice about going away on a field trip for months on end, without me.”

  “What exactly was his job?”

  “He was a xenozoologist, latterly for the Scheering-Lassiter Corporation.”

  “He studied alien wildlife?”

  “That’s right. He was well respected in his field. We met on Cavafy, Vega VI—the planet of a million moons. You can’t get much more romantic than that!”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Twenty years ago. We were married the same year. We managed to mesh our working lives pretty well, arranging it so that our field trips coincided. We saw a lot of the inhabited worlds together.” For the first time, Vaughan detected a haze of sadness in her eyes.

  He took a mouthful of coffee, too on edge to fully appreciate its excellence. “Are you aware of anything that might explain why someone wanted your husband dead, Mrs Kormier?”

  She stared into her coffee. In a small voice, she said, “Robert was a good man, a respected academic. He never made an enemy in his life.”

  But, he thought, she was holding something back. He knew it from some almost subliminal reading of her facial mannerisms, a slight tightening of her lips, a sidewise shift of her eyes away from him as she spoke.

  He said, gently, “What is it?”

  She looked up, surprised. “I thought you weren’t reading me?”

  “I’m not. That is, I’m not reading your thoughts.” He shrugged. “Telepaths become very aware of moods and nuances.” He hesitated, then said, “Maybe later, if it’s okay?”

  She nodded, a slight frown pulling at her lips.

  He went on, “Something is worrying you, though. Something about your husband. You didn’t want to mention it, but...”

  She manufactured a brave smile, even a laugh, almost of relief. “You’re very astute, Mr Vaughan. Yes, there was something. I don’t know if it’s in any way connected with what happened—”

  “Let me be the judge of that,” he said.

  “Very well.” She laid her cup aside and stared at her hands, as if wondering where to begin. She looked up. “Earlier this year Robert was posted to the colony world of Mallory, Eta Ophiuchi VII. It’s a Scheering-Lassiter world. They wanted him to look at some aspect of population control of a native herbivore: he was commissioned to produce an extensive bio-ecological report on local conditions.”

  “And?”

  She looked at him, silent for a second. “When Robert returned from Mallory, he’d changed. Something had happened out there—” She stopped abruptly and made a production of pouring more coffee so as to hide her distress.

  Vaughan waited, then said, “He didn’t tell you what happened, though?”

  She shook her head. “It was obvious that something was wrong. He was quiet, withdrawn. Irritable. Usually, he discussed every aspect of his work with me—as I did my own work with him. But he said nothing and wouldn’t be drawn, even when I asked him about the report he was working on. He denied that anything was wrong, Mr Vaughan. He was... he seemed a different person.”

  “You’ve no suspicions what might have happened, nothing at all?”

  She forced a laugh. “Of course I had—I have— my suspicions. It occurred to me that he’d discovered something on Mallory so... I don’t know... so dreadful that he couldn’t even share it with me. But,” she went on, “I also suspected something far more prosaic, but perhaps more hurtful to me.

  He knew what was coming, and she obliged him by saying, “I suspect that he met someone out there, Mr Vaughan. He was having an affair.”

  Vaughan nodded, feeling for the widow who might never know, for certain, if her husband had been unfaithful. “If you don’t mind me asking, what made you suspect this?”

  She sighed. She was close to tears. “Twice during the last couple of months he went out late, without explanation, and ca
me back in the early hours. He refused to speak to me about where he’d been. We were not sleeping together at this point, Mr Vaughan. We were leading separate lives.”

  “And of course you have no idea where he went.”

  “No,” she said, then went on, “My husband kept an extensive diary. Handwritten. Had done so for almost twenty years.”

  “You have it?”

  “It’s in his study.”

  Vaughan lowered his cup. “And you haven’t been able to bring yourself to read it, right?”