My Brother

by Charles Sheffield

  My original plan, to head for Cuttack the day I learned of its existence, had fallen apart as soon as I tried to act. I had made no allowance for the Indian sense of pace. Even the train tickets took twenty-four hours to arrive at the house.

  While Chandra and Chatterji made arrangements for our trip I spent long impatient hours in the little pantry, pitting my wits against the vagaries of the Indian telephone system.

  The telephone number that I was asking about for someone in Cuttack ? No, sir. It did not exist. A difficult operator insisted that it could not exist, had never existed — perhaps I was reading it wrongly to him? An hour of argument and re-calling to Cuttack revealed the existence of a second exchange, in the same province but not within the town.

  I called the new exchange.

  Triumph! The number had been listed for a Mr. Belur. But it had been taken out of use four months ago, and there was no new listing for that Belur. Computer companies in the same area where Mr. Belur had lived? Of course, sir, they would try to check it for me, but I had to remember that this was not the way that the directory was organized… the chance of success was small… the difficulty was very great…

  I longed for an outstretched hand into which I could drop a little silver, but that time-tested method would have to wait until we got to Cuttack . All I could do from a distance was establish the names of half a dozen candidate companies that might possibly be connected with the vanished Belur. Unless they, like he, had disappeared in the past few months.

  Patience, Chandra told me. Patience is all in India .

  Patience. I had to learn my own limitations. When we finally reached Cuttack and could begin our search, I was forced to revise my ideas about Ameera’s usefulness. She could wheedle cooperation and information out of the least obliging public servants. I could get nothing from them at all.

  Cuttack was one of the Indian government’s new development areas. In the past ten years there had been a huge effort to set up advanced technology there — fiber optics, microprocessors, vapor deposition methods, and hyper-bubble memories. The plants were scattered like white rectangular play-blocks over the brown and green hillocks that lay west of the main city.

  Taxis were hard to come by. Ameera snagged one at the railway station while a horde of noisy travellers shouted at the porters and each other, and we set off on our search. Since we looked at Leo’s notes together I had been through every emotion, but now that we had reached Cuttack my spirits had plummeted. The chances of tracking down Belur had to be low. Only Ameera’s bubbling enthusiasm kept me going.

  Computek was our first stop (all the companies we visited had shunned Indian names in favor of pseudo-American ones). The taxi waited while Ameera and I went in through the paint-peeling door.

  Nothing there — not even evidence of technology development. The staff were suspicious. Were we perhaps inspectors from the Government over in New Delhi ? Ameera soothed their fears, but we gained no useful information. The pattern was repeated at Info-systems Design, Electro-mesh, 4-D Systems, Compu-controls, and Autodyne. I was ready to give up when we came to the shabby grey building on top of a hill eight miles outside the town, and I read the frayed wooden sign that announced the presence of Bio-Electronic Systems.

  “Belur?” said the man. He was all white teeth and cuffs, center-part hair, and oleaginous voice; the very model of a modern manager. “Rustum Belur?”

  Ameera squeezed my arm — she knew how despondent I had been getting. I nodded. “I think that would be him. But as I understand it, he is no longer with your company?”

  The man across the polished desk smiled and offered me an Indian cigarette. I had learned to refuse those on my first day in Calcutta . I shook my head.

  “No longer with us?"’ He blew out a cloud of poisonous smoke. “That is certainly one way to put it, I suppose. He is not with anyone, eh? Not with anyone we can talk to.”

  “Did he leave the area?”

  “I should jolly well say so.” He coughed. “Jolly well say so. He is dead, you see — Rustum Belur was killed, four months ago. Most sad.” He smiled cheerfully. “Most sad indeed. A nice man.”

  I sat there gaping, unable to think of anything at all to say. There goes another one! would not have been a socially acceptable utterance. Ameera helped out.

  “Mr. Belur — how was he killed?”

  Mr. Srinivasa stood up from his seat and went across to the window. “You see that building down the hill, where the cables run from over to our left? That is one of our laboratories. One night, Rustum Belur must have taken a short cut to his home — under the cable. Most irregular, of course, and we have told our employees not to do it.” He shrugged. “They will not listen — not my fault, you understand? He must have slipped and fallen across the high-voltage line. Srritt.” He rippled his hand through the air. “Twenty thousand volts. A deadly charge.

  “We found him the following morning.” There was a cheerful gusto to his voice. “Fried like a maro fish. Jolly bad luck, eh?”

  “Did he leave a family?” That seemed the only avenue left to us.

  “Alas, no,” said Srinivasa happily. “He was not a person to mix well — not like you or me, eh?” He gave a knowing nod towards Ameera. “Mind you, he was a very intelligent man, and his visitors came from many places. But it was all work — nothing for a social life. You knew his work, eh?”

  “A little.” I was ready to leave, but as I started to straighten up in my chair my body twisted to one side and dropped me heavily back to a sitting position. Srinivasa looked at me oddly.

  “Are you feeling all right, Mr. Salkind?”

  “Yes.” I played for time to regain control. “I was wondering just what work Mr. Belur was doing when he died. I had lost touch with him in the past year or two.”

  “More of the same.” Srinivasa shrugged, but I detected in his manner that the question was not to his taste. “He was still working on the electronics-biologic interface, as he had for years. Always the claim that his big advance would be here soon. It never came.”

  “The Belur Package?”

  “He called it that to you?” He stubbed out his half-inch-long cigarette butt and happily accepted a new one from my packet, bought especially for our interviews. “Always the same talk, eh, always about the introsomatic chips? Jolly hard worker, but not too practical.”

  I looked around us, at the evidence of past success and recent failure. It was a fair bet that Belur — “jolly hard worker” and much-visited scientist — had been the sparkplug for Bio-Electronic Systems. When he died, the operation had begun to run downhill. And Srinivasa found it hard to face that fact, like any manager who imagined the success of an organization was really his success.

  “Do you have notes regarding the Belur Package?” It was my last hope, and a slim one.

  “He did not keep good notes.” Srinivasa shook his head disapprovingly. “A good worker, but his habits were strange. Here late at night, then away all the next morning — jolly hard to run a lab efficiently, eh, when people will not keep regular work hours? He insisted that most of his work was better done at home.”

  “He kept a lab there?”

  “Not a real lab. It was in his house, equipped like a lab, but not you understand a real lab.” The expansive gesture around him at the clutter of dusty equipment suggested that Belur’s humble home efforts could not compare with the magnificence of our present surroundings. “Even though he was very rich,” he added after a second or two.

  There was new irritation in his voice. An employee who was not merely of irregular habits, but rich enough to be independent, was a hard cross for a manager to bear.

  “Do you think we could visit his house?” I asked. As I spoke, my stomach seemed to seethe and rise inside me. I thought for a moment that I would be sick on the spot. What was Leo trying to tell me now?

  Srinivasa did not notice. He was too busy registering disdain at my request. “If you really want to, I do not see why not. It would of co
urse take a little time to get there” — wasted time, his manner implied — “and I am afraid we are too busy here to arrange transportation.”

  “We have our own driver,” said Ameera. She was much more successful than I at squelching objections. “If you could tell us how to get there…”

  It was easy to see why Rustum Belur might have taken a short cut to his home. The road went around the hill in a long, winding spiral, so that half a mile on the ground, under the power cable, was stretched to more than five. As we drove steadily around the hillside, Ameera shook her head firmly.

  “Very bad man. I did not like his smell.”

  “You think he is evil?”

  “Not evil. Stupid. He had plenty of time to come with us if he wanted to. And he could show us Belur’s workplace.”

  But not, I suspected, tell us anything useful about it. Belur’s work was beyond Srinivasa’s comprehension. And beyond mine. What had he been doing?

  “What are intro-so-mat-ic chips?” Ameera’s words echoed my thoughts. “He said Belur was making them.”

  “I never heard of them. But ‘chips’ are what they put into computers, to control their programs.”

  And I’ll bet my last penny that Leo could tell me more about them, if only we could find a way to tap his memories. I thought that, but I didn’t mention that to Ameera.

  Belur’s wealth was obvious as soon as we came into sight of his house. Most of the buildings that we had passed were no more than shacks. This one was a thirty-room monstrosity, a wood and cement structure that must have been there long before the industrial park grew up around it. We drove towards it along a road of hard-packed dirt — probably impassable in the rainy season, but now as firm as concrete.

  “Wait here for us.” The man nodded. Indian taxi drivers were very good at patient waiting.

  We were on the eastern side of the hill, towards the town of Cuttack , and the bulk of the house stood high between us and the setting sun. I saw Ameera shiver a little as we moved into the deep shadow.

  “What is the house like, Lee-yo-nel?”

  I suppressed my own gut urge to go back to the car. The house wasn’t inviting, but I had come too far to back off because of some vague uneasiness. Anyway, I felt that I already knew the layout of this house.

  “It’s big — very big. The place that Belur worked is near the back of the building. We have to go down a long corridor, then up a staircase.” The words came out instinctively, yet I was convinced that the description was correct.

  We moved to the open front door, Ameera clutching hard on my arm. “Slowly, Lee-yo. Let me know where we are going.”

  She felt the door to her left, then ran her hand slowly along the wooden panels inside the house.

  While she studied that, I took another look around us. According to Srinivasa, the house was being looked after by two housekeepers until Belur’s family decided what to do with it. But there had been no sign of people, inside the house or out. That was less surprising to me here than it would have been in Europe . I had already learned the tendency of Indian staff to disappear from their duties for long periods on mysterious errands of their own.

  “Anyone at home?”

  The wooden walls and floor echoed back my voice and made me feel slightly ridiculous. With Ameera following methodically behind me, touching and listening, I led the way along the uncarpeted corridor. The whole house was unnaturally silent, and with the sun already low in the sky the windows off to our left threw long, enigmatic shadows over the scanty furniture. The house had not been sold, but someone had done a good job of helping themselves to the fixtures. Marks in the deep carpets told of chairs and tables that had been moved recently from the main rooms.

  We had reached the end of the corridor. Ahead lay a long staircase, curving around one hundred and eighty degrees to the upper floor. I started up hesitantly, Ameera still one step behind and holding to my sleeve. But there was no doubt at all in my mind: Belur’s lab was straight ahead, past the first bedroom, just before the room with all the musical instruments. That knowledge was built-in, a legacy from Leo’s past.

  Halfway up the stairs I paused. Ameera, right behind me, bumped her breasts softly into my back.

  “Why do you stop here, Lee-yo-nel? This is not the end of the staircase — the sounds tell me that.”

  “I don’t know.” My uneasiness was increasing. “Ameera, it’s getting dark. Maybe we should come back here and look around tomorrow, when there is more light.”

  “You cannot see here? Is there not the electricity, for lighting?”

  There was a switch on the wall, at the turn in the staircase. I moved forward and pressed it down. Unshaded electric bulbs in wall brackets threw a shadowy illumination along the stairs. Instead of easing, my sensation of discomfort increased. I stood, half a dozen steps from the upper landing, and looked around us.

  “Lee-yo-nel, what is that?”

  My ears were less sensitive than Ameera’s. It took me a couple of seconds to register what I was hearing. From somewhere ahead of us, on the upper landing, came faint musical sounds. It was the playing of a piano, just a little out of tune.

  I glanced around at the deserted staircase and lower floor, then moved silently to the top of the stairs. Ameera, always graceful and light-footed, was half a pace behind.

  “Lee-yo-nel, who is playing?” Her words were a soft breath, just audible in my ear.

  I didn’t answer. My hands were trembling, and the sound of my own breathing was loud inside my head. Twenty-five years of piano playing had given me at least one talent. Different pianists each have their own stylistic foibles, as unique and recognizable as a signature. I could recognize the masters, old or new, from a few seconds of their playing. Gieseking or Gould, Horowitz or Hellman, Schnabel or Serkin — every one put a personal imprint on the music, unmistakable and undisguisable.

  And the sounds that came from the next room along the landing? I was on the brink of certainty long before I looked in through the half-open door. The glittering runs and trills in the right hand and the bravura octaves and tremolos — they carried me back a month in time.

  The pianist was playing in the evening gloom, his massive back towards us. As I was already moving away to seek an escape along the landing and down the stairs, he swivelled on the piano stool and looked directly at the door.

  “Well, it’s about time you got here,” he said. “Where’ve you been the past few weeks? We’ve been sitting around in this place too bleedin’ long.” It was Pudd’n. The familiar voice merely confirmed my earlier recognition of a distinctive piano style.

  I spun around, pushing Ameera ahead of me, wondering how fast we could tackle the stairs together without falling. But before we had taken one step, a loud slamming noise came from downstairs.

  “Hear that?” called Pudd’n from behind us. He had moved from piano stool to doorway. “Don’t go running off now, it won’t do no good an’ you might get hurt. You know old Dixie . He gets excited real easy.”

  Ameera and I had reached the top of the stairs. I looked down along the smooth spiral of the banisters. The front door of the house had been closed. On the lowest step, with his head tilted up towards us and a broad grin on his face, stood Dixie .

  The light from the unshaded staircase bulbs reflected as a silver glimmer from the gun in his left hand.

  - 12 -

  My first instinct was to run. But where could I go?

  Dixie controlled the stairs, Pudd’n was a formidable presence behind us. In any case, I would not leave Ameera to face those two alone.

  While we stood there, Dixie advanced warily and came to within about nine feet of us: too far away for any attempt at manual combat, even if I had possessed the talent and taste for it.

  I took Ameera’s hand firmly in mine and led her towards the music room. Pudd’n retreated warily before us. Whatever our harmless appearance, neither man was taking any chances. Dixie kept a safe three paces behind us.

  “L
ee-yo-nel!” Ameera’s voice was frightened.

  I squeezed her hand with an assurance I did not feel. “It’s all right. Stay next to me, and don’t move quickly.”

  Dixie circled us until we were facing each other. The gun had been transferred to his right hand, and he was training it alternately on me, then on Ameera.

  “Back up, and sit down.” He lifted the gun until the open barrel pointed a dark circle straight into my right eye. “On the settee. No funny moves, or you get it.”

  As soon we were sitting side by side on the settee, Dixie came around behind us and put the gun against the back of my head. My scalp shivered at the cold touch. We sat perfectly still while Pudd’n came forward and frisked us.

  “Sit tight, Missie, I’m not trying to get fresh,” he said apologetically to Ameera as he ran his hands gently along her breasts, armpits, and thighs. “They’re both clean, Dix. Not even a penknife.”

  Dixie gave a high-pitched laugh of relief. “Pity, really. Two bloody weeks we’ve waited here for you. That deserves something from both of us.” He moved the gun away from my head, while I shivered at the venom and triumph in his voice. “An’ I owe you a good one. That stuff you poisoned me with had me puking for two days. You’ll pay for that before I’m done with yer.”

  Pudd’n went back to sit on the piano stool, while Dixie again circled to stand in front of us.

  “How did you know where to look for me?” I said.

  As I spoke I looked around the room and wondered about our driver. How long would he wait before he decided that something was wrong? Hours, at the least — we had been that long with Srinivasa.

  “Use your loaf, man.” Pudd’n turned back to face the keyboard. “You left a trail a mile wide gettin’ to India . Scouse couldn’t believe it when he found you’d bought a ticket as Lionel Salkind — he was sure you’d have some other fake passport. An’ once he knew you were goin’ to Calcutta , it was obvious you’d be coming back here.”