“Remain until I return,” he told the aircar.
“If it is in my interest,” the vehicle replied.
“I will pay a ten per cent premium.”
“Agreed, but the contract is void if unsavory elements interfere.”
There was a who’s-there set into the wall beside the building’s entrance. Conn identified himself and told it he wished to see Hallis Tharp. Time stretched through several long moments while he waited, then the who’s-there said, “He does not answer.”
Conn said, “You did not say he was not at home, only that he did not answer.”
The device made no reply.
“Is he there or not? He may be ill.”
“I am empowered to violate residents’ privacy only in an emergency.”
“Then consider this an emergency. Examine Hallis Tharp’s residence and tell me what you see.”
There was a briefer delay, then the who’s-there said, “Hallis Tharp sits in a chair facing the window.”
“Compare him to the last image you have of him. How does he now seem?”
“Parts of him are missing,” said the device. “Also, he does not appear to breathe.”
A pang passed through Conn. He could not account for it. “Let me in.”
“I should summon the incumbent,” said the who’s-there, referring to the neighborhood’s resident agent for police services.
“Who will pay his fee?” said Conn. “Hallis Tharp is in no condition to meet the obligation.”
“His estate must pay.”
“Do you see any valuable possessions in his room?”
“No. His circumstances are sparse.”
“And death tends to diminish his worth as an indentee.”
“That is so.”
“So your proprietor, the building’s owner, will be liable for the incumbent’s charges,” said Conn. “Is he likely to welcome them?”
“No. He prefers not to incur obligations.”
“Then let me in. Perhaps this matter can be resolved without complications.”
The door buzzed and swung open.
“Which unit?” Conn said.
“West fourteen-eleven.”
“Is it locked?”
“Yes.”
“Then unlock it and show me the way.”
The tiny lobby had a sour and musty smell. There was an ascender but when Conn placed his hand in it he felt no uplift. He climbed the stairs to the fourteenth floor then followed the building’s baseboard lighting directions through a labyrinth of corridors and passages that brought him to a cul de sac and a bare metal door in a wall whose paint was peeling. He pressed the control stud and the door slid sideways into the wall. He stepped through the opening and it closed behind.
Hallis Tharp was bound to an unpretentious chair under the light from the room’s single window. There was blood in his disordered white hair and bruising on his face. His age-spotted hands lay upturned in his lap like two small dead animals. Some of the fingernails were missing.
Conn examined him. None of the injuries were lifethreatening nor did they seem to be extensive. But the old man’s mouth drooped on one side, as if he had suffered a massive stroke. Conn suspected that he had died suddenly in the midst of the torture. It must have been a disappointment to whoever had subjected him to such mistreatment.
“Integrator,” he said to the air, “who has visited Hallis Tharp today?” There was no response. He realized that the building’s system had to be manually activated and looked about for the control. He found it on a wall. It required the insertion of a coin before it would respond. When the connection was made he repeated the question.
“He has had no visitor today,” said the integrator.
“Nonsense.” Conn put his hand on the old man’s neck. The flesh was still slightly warm. “His assailants left here not long since.”
“I saw nothing.”
Conn examined the percept set in the room’s low ceiling. “Does this detect only visual light?”
“And high-temperature heat sources, in which case the fire suppression system activates.”
Elision suits, Conn thought. Their fabric bent light around itself, letting the wearer move about unseen. He had used their virtual equivalents in contests. He corrected himself: he had been automatically assuming it would require at least two attackers to catch and immobilize the old man without drawing attention; but an elision suit would allow a single capable man to do the work.
He might even still be in the room.
Conn assumed a defensive posture, turned this way and that, tilting his head at various angles to examine the room from the corners of his eyes. Looked at straight on, the light-bending suit conferred invisibility, but peripheral vision would detect a shimmer of motion. He saw nothing.
His rotation had left him facing away from the door, so it was the swish of its opening that spun him around. A young woman, slight of figure and dark of hair, stood in the doorway, her startlingly green eyes wide as they moved from Conn to the corpse in the chair.
She dropped the bag she had been carrying, spilling vegetables and packages across the threshold, and fled. Conn pursued her and caught her at the door of another room that was opening to her touch. She fought him energetically but naively until he applied pressure to a point on her throat.
He carried her into the room, giving it a quick inspection before he placed her on a rudimentary couch made of sturdy cartons and foam insulation. The space was as tiny and almost as bare as Hallis Tharp’s, but brightened by a colored print of a landscape affixed to the wall. Conn glanced at it, drew an impression of trees, rolling hills, a gabled white house, a mottled blue sky. Off-world, he thought. There was a tattered poster on another wall advertising Chabriz’s Traveling Show, an itinerant exposition that had broken up on Thrais some time before.
The young woman gave a sharp intake of breath and regained consciousness. In one blink her eyes went from dazed to panicked. She made to rise from the couch but Conn was beside her, one hand pressing her down with a grip intended to remind her of how their former struggle had ended.
He was adept at reading eyes. It was a necessary skill in his profession. He saw fear mingled with outrage, then saw both transpose into sorrow. “Why did you kill Hallis Tharp?” she said.
“I did not.”
“I saw what you did to him! Why would you do that?”
“I did not,” Conn repeated. “We were to meet today. When he did not come I grew concerned. I came and found him dead.”
Her eyes changed again. “You are Conn Labro,” she said.
“Yes.” He was surprised but did not show it. “Who are you?” he said.
“Jenore Mordene. Let me up.”
He saw that she was no longer afraid of him and that she intended neither to fight nor flee. He relinquished his grip. She rose and crossed the room to a small cupboard, opened it and withdrew a large, flat box of polished wood. Conn recognized it immediately.
She said, “He said if anything ever happened to him that you would come and I was to give you this.”
Conn took the familiar object but did not open it. He sat on the couch and rested the box on his knees. He was conscious of a powerful sense of loss, as if he had been thrashed in a contest. The emotion confused him, seemed out of place.
Her voice broke into his thoughts. “What is that thing?”
Conn looked up. “His paduay set. We played for two hours each week at Horder’s Gaming Emporium.”
She looked at him as if he had told her that the old man orchestrated moonbeams. “He played games? How could he afford the stakes? He lived on one meal a day and that no more than soup.”
The issue had never occurred to Conn, but he thought about it now. “We did not wager on outcomes. And he bought a lifetime contract for my services when I was still a child and not costly.”
“But why?”
“He did not play games with you?” he asked.
She gestured to the window. �
�In Skrey, people have more pressing business than trying to defeat each other in artificial settings. Real life is contest enough.”
“Paduay is not a contest,” he said. “The game is about cooperatively opening and closing spaces, theoretically without conclusion. It is unusual in that each player’s goal is to prevent the other from being unable to continue.”
“And he played this every week?”
“Our current match has been going on continually for almost two years. I can show you the dispositions.”
“Spare me,” she said.
Conn ignored her. He would open the set. But when he set his fingers to the catches that would unlatch the box he felt a strong urge not to see again the miniature pieces, the grids of straight and curving lines that could intersect each other in a variety of different spatial dimensions, depending on which of several modes the players invoked.
It was an unsettling burst of emotion. His analytical function recognized that it was tied somehow to Hallis Tharp, not just to the old man’s death, but to their long association: all the Firstday mornings they had sat on opposite sides of this apparatus of wood and metal, ever since Conn’s boyhood. It was not a memory he now wished to explore.
He handed the paduay set back to Jenore Mordene. “Here,” he said, “I will have no further use for this.”
“But he wanted you to have it.”
“It does not matter what he wanted. He no longer exists.”
She took the box and held it to her breast. “I don’t understand you people,” she said. He could see that she was resisting tears. For some reason, her emotion made him uncomfortable. He stood up and said, “Well,” then turned to the door.
“What are we going to do about him?” the woman asked, her moist eyes indicating the wall beyond which the old man’s corpse sat in the chair.
“What was your relationship to Hallis Tharp?”
“We were friends.”
The term had several meanings on Thrais. When applied to the connection between a solitary old man and a young woman, it was usually a euphemism for intimate transactions that the participants preferred not to discuss in bald language.
Conn nodded then saw the expression on her face change again to anger. He had somehow offended her.
“Not like that!” she said. She folded her arms across her chest and gripped her elbows. “What is the matter with you people? Do none of you know what friends are?” She flung her arms wide and said, “Does it always have to be about this?” She touched the first two fingers of one hand to its thumb and rubbed them quickly together.
Conn was not sure what the gesture signified. He was moved to inquire but at that moment his communicator called for his attention. It was Ovam Horder.
“Where are you? Hasbrick Gleffen inquires if you are ready to engage him.”
“Has he arrived?”
“Not yet. But he wishes to arrive at the contest venue before you do.”
“That is contrary to etiquette,” Conn said. “He has challenged me and should enter after I have agreed to receive him.”
“He is an off-worlder. Perhaps this is how things are done where he hails from.”
“It might be intended as a subtle insult.”
He heard Horder sigh. “I will levy a surcharge and credit it to your account.”
It was a reasonable response. Conn said, “Very well. I am on my way.” He put away the communicator.
“Wait,” said Jenore Mordene. “What are we to do about...” Something impeded her speech and she gestured toward the hallway.
“Was he a member of a funeral society?”
She shook her head. She seemed to be resisting tears.
“Then the building will summon a recycler. They will take care of things.”
“They will want to be paid,” she said, and he detected an uncalled-for bitterness in her tone.
“Sell the paduay set, if you wish.”
He saw her hands tighten on the box. “No.”
“There will be enough value in his... attributes to cover the recycler’s cost.”
“His attributes?”
It was not a subject usually discussed in blunt terms. “His materials,” Conn said. “What he is made of.”
She made a gesture that again he found hard to interpret but he had neither the time nor the inclination to seek a clarification. “I must go,” he said and made for the door.
“Wait,” she said.
He stopped and turned, puzzled. She indicated the paduay set in her hand. “How can you not want this?”
“I cannot imagine playing paduay again,” he said. “My time is too expensive and the demand for the game is scant.”
She appeared to be about to say something else, but instead she turned to the window and gazed out at the harshness of Skrey.
The aircar was no longer at the curb. It had elevated itself to a height several stories above the street, out of range of a half dozen bubblers congregated around the building’s entrance. The young men looked Conn over as he stepped through the portal, their faces and body language equally obscured by their semitransparent armor of synthetic material which covered their entire forms like suits of overlapping bronze bubbles.
Conn looked back at them impassively. He had fought in the armor and against it many times. Well bred gamesters enjoyed taking on street toughs, at least in virtual encounters. He knew the bubbler’s strengths and weaknesses and had no doubts that he could deal with a group of young amateurs. They rarely fought amongst themselves, or even against other gangs, reserving their violence for those in the neighborhood who did not pay for their “protection.”
For their part, the bubblers noted the insignia and rank beads on the collar of Conn’s tunic and formed the collective opinion that something much more interesting was probably happening down the street and around the corner. They moved off, though at a deliberately leisurely pace. Conn summoned the aircar and boarded it.
As the vehicle took him back to the center of the city his communicator chirped. It was Horder again. “The off-worlder is finicky,” Conn’s employer said. “He wishes to know how exactly long before you arrive at the arena. Meanwhile he insists that I be here in the third garden to dance attendance upon him.”
Conn had to juggle the communication device in order to retain his grasp on the car’s stanchion while the vehicle wove through traffic in three dimensions. “He is rude,” he said, “even for an off-worlder. I have heard no good reports of Old Earth and this man’s conduct confirms my view.”
“You are right,” said Horder. “I will double the surcharge.”
“No,” said Conn. “Say to him that I am in transit now. I will be in the third garden shortly. We will omit the formalities and I will teach this one a lesson.”
“I would prefer you to be of tranquil mind. He may be good. If you are injured, several upcoming engagements would have to be canceled or postponed.”
“I am calm,” Conn said, reflexively applying the Lho-tso technique. “This man will not leave Thrais as ‘one of the few.’“ He referred to the scant handful of combatants who had bested or tied Conn in full-flesh combat. It had been a long time since there had been a new addition to the select group. “I am, however, more motivated than usual today.”
“I see. Did you find the old man?”
“I found him dead.”
“Ah,” said Horder, “that will free you up for two hours a week.”
“Yes.”
“I will contact Gleffen immediately and tell him I am in the third garden and that you are expected soon.” He broke the connection.
The aircar swooped and sashayed through traffic that grew denser as they neared the city center. Conn could see the Emporium. The day was warm and moderately humid, as were most days in Bay City – the metropolis sprawled around the littoral of a sheltered bight of the Serpentine Sea close to Thrais’s equator. Horder would have ordered the roof dome retracted as soon as the two suns cleared the surrounding towers.
He recognized that he was allowing himself to become irritated and reflexively performed the mental exercise that expunged the emotion. When his clarity of mind was restored, he sorted through is thought processes and was mildly surprised to discover that the irritant had come from more than just the Old Earther’s arrogance; it also had something to do with what had happened to Hallis Tharp. There was irony in that, Conn knew: strong emotion had often been one of the old man’s topics of conversation while they traded moves in the gentle game of paduay. Conn could replay Tharp’s voice in his head: He who loses his temper loses the contest, was one of his frequent observations, usually followed by: You must never give in to anger. In Tharp’s view, for Conn to accede to any overwhelming passion was an error, but anger was the worst of all.
The aircar dropped lower, slid around the Hi-Flite Tower and angled down toward Horder’s Emporium. Its brakes deployed to slow its descent and Conn had to grasp the stanchion tighter as the vehicle juddered and bounced. He saw the canopy of trees above the third garden and, through a gap in the foliage, the foreshortened figure of Ovam Horder pacing in apparent agitation, his hand to his ear as he spoke into his communicator.
The car decelerated further, aiming for a landing stage near the roof’s center. As it positioned itself for a vertical descent to the hard surface, Conn caught a flash of intense light from the corner of his eye. In less time than he could have formed words to express it, his mind told him that a line of incandescent air had arrowed down from the sky to strike the third garden.
His head turned instinctively toward the movement but instantly the smeared window of the aircar was rendered opaque by a glaring explosion. Even as it faded, leaving spots of red and black in his vision, he saw the heaven trees in flame and bursting outwards. Then the shockwave of the blast struck the aircar and flung it out and away from the Emporium.
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