Heaven is a Place on Earth

by Graham Storrs

  “He's disappeared,” Ginny said. This woman obviously knew Cal. Her very anger with him suggested they were colleagues, if not friends. Maybe she knew where he'd gone.

  The woman rounded on her, eyes hard. “Too bloody right, he's disappeared. Gone without a bloody trace. Left us up to pick up the pieces, too.” She took a pace closer. “And he gave you this address did he? Now why would he do that? Why did he send you to see Gavin?”

  For all the anger and swearing, Ginny thought she could hear a tone of desperation in the woman's voice. It occurred to her that this tough, menacing woman was worried and maybe a bit frightened. The idea gave her strength. It let some of her own anger loose.

  “I've had enough of you waving that gun at me,” she said. “Either shoot me or put the damned thing away. I don't know who you are or what you're doing here and I've had enough of being interrogated by you. Now tell me, did you shoot Gavin? You don't get another thing out of me until you start giving me some answers.”

  The woman returned her glare with a steady gaze, she was clearly not intimidated by Ginny's rebellion and may well have been considering whether to shoot her. Ginny felt her determination wavering. She might die, right here on a dead man's sofa, with a stranger's bullet in her, and no idea why it had happened. She swallowed hard, thinking maybe she should apologise, let the woman ask her questions, do whatever it took to stay alive.

  But the woman relaxed, stepped back, and slipped the gun into her overalls pocket. “OK, I believe you. You're just some Ellie patsy with the hots for Cal who let him drag her into this mess.”

  Ginny didn't like the description but it wasn't too far away from the truth. “All right. That's me. So who are you?”

  The woman went back to the armchair and perched on it again. “I'm Gavin's sister, Tonia.”

  Ginny gave a grunt of surprise. Then the relief hit her. “So you didn't kill him?” The woman, Tonia, didn't answer, but Ginny was sure she was right. “So who did? Someone kicked the door in and came in here and killed your brother. Was it a rival gang or something?”

  Tonia frowned. “What the hell are you talking about? I kicked the door in because Gavin went dark. What rival gang? What do you think you know little Ellie?”

  Ginny was confused. Did Tonia not know what Gavin was into? “Your brother... He was a drug dealer or something, right? He was working with Cal. Smuggling stuff, maybe. You must know. Why else would someone kill him?”

  Tonia shook her head in disbelief. “Did Cal spin you that line? Or are you just some kind of nutjob?” The question seemed to remind her of more important ones. “Just why did Cal send you round here? Have you got a message for my brother?”

  “Tell me what this is all about or I'm not saying anything.” As soon as she'd said it, Ginny was appalled at herself for saying anything so stupid. This was Gavin's sister, for God's sake. All she had to do was hand her the package and get herself home as fast as she could pedal. She didn't even want to know what was going on. Anything she found out could only make things worse for her.

  “Wait, no, don't tell me.” She stood up. Tonia stood up too, her hand reaching for the gun. “Look, I don't want to know anything about it. I came here because Cal asked me to deliver a package for him. He said I should give it to Gavin in person. But you're his sister, so you'll do.”

  She reached into her pocket for the package and Tonia drew her gun, saying, “Steady.”

  Ginny froze. “I just wanted to – ”

  “OK, but very, very slowly.”

  Carefully, Ginny pulled the little parcel from her overalls and held it out for Tonia to take.

  “What is it?” Tonia asked. She hadn't put the gun away and she showed no sign of taking the package from Ginny.

  “I – I don't know. I assume it's drugs, or diamonds, or something. He's your brother, don't you know?”

  “My brother is not a – ” She stopped and pursed her lips as if angry with herself. “Was not a criminal. He was a good man, a brave man, trying to save dumb shits like you from their own stupidity.”

  The pain in Tonia's expression was clearer now. “I'm sorry,” Ginny said. “I didn't mean to – ” She took a breath. No, she would not apologise to the woman pointing a gun at her. “Do you want it or not?”

  “Open it,” Tonia said.

  “What?”

  “Open it. Show me what's inside.”

  “I don't want to know what's inside.”

  “Just fucking open it!”

  “Why do you keep calling me Ellie?” It's funny the things that seem important when you have a gun pointed your way, Ginny thought. Tonia wasn't going to answer her, so she began tugging at the paper. It tore easily but her fingers were clumsy and it took her far longer than it should. Inside was a small padded box with three data cubes inside.

  She looked at them dumbly then at Tonia. “Data cubes,” she said. Not drugs then. Nor diamonds. Just information. “Industrial espionage?” she suggested. “Blackmail?”

  Tonia stepped forwards and grabbed the cubes, stuffing them into her pocket. The torn paper fluttered to the ground. “You can go now.”

  But Ginny was watching the woman's expression. “That's not it, is it?”

  Tonia walked away from her to stare out of the window. It was as if Ginny didn't exist any more. But Ginny had seen the relief on Tonia's face when the woman saw the cubes. And now it looked as if the she was on the verge of tears. The gun hung like a dead weight at the end of her arm.

  Ginny knew that the sensible thing was to walk out the door, out of the house, and go. But she found she could not. She needed to know what this had all been about, what was on those data cubes that meant Cal had to disappear and Gavin had to be killed.

  “At least tell me what it is,” she said to Tonia's back. “Don't I deserve that?”

  Tonia stiffened and Ginny caught her breath. Whatever the hell she thought she was doing, antagonising the woman with the gun was not a good idea. She tried another tack.

  “The police have been to see me. About Cal. They wanted to know how I knew him. They asked if I knew any of his friends.”

  Tonia turned quickly. “What did you tell them? Did you give them this address? Did you mention Gavin?”

  The sudden fire in Tonia's eyes set Ginny's heart racing. “No. No, of course not. I didn't tell them anything. I just said I didn't know Cal very well. I said I didn't know his friends. I didn't mention Gavin, or the package, or anything.”

  “Why not? Why would you hold that back? You thought it was drugs.” An idea seemed to strike her and she brought the gun up fast. “You're working with them. You're some fucking tagger's bitch.” She stepped towards Ginny and Ginny stepped back.

  “I'm not. Honest. I don't even know what a tagger is.” She took another step back and fell into the sofa with a yell of alarm. Tonia stepped up to her, the big gun in Ginny's face. Tonia's expression said she was seriously considering whether to play it safe and shoot Ginny now.

  “For God's sake! I was just doing a favour for Cal. You've got your data. I'm sorry I stuck my nose in. It's none of my business whatever's going on. Just let me go and you'll never see or hear from me again. I promise.”

  Tonia said nothing, just glared at Ginny, seemingly still undecided as to whether to shoot her.

  “I won't ever talk to the cops, I swear. I don't even like them. That guy Richards gives me the creeps. If I never see him again either I'll be glad.”

  Tonia's expression changed. “Dover Richards?” Ginny nodded. Was Tonia looking scared now? The woman walked away from the sofa, agitated and frowning hard. “Jesus Christ, girl! Dover Richards isn't a cop. He isn't even a tagger. I reckon he's the bastard who killed my brother. Tell me what he said.”

  She made Ginny remember word-for-word her two conversations with the phony cop, while she listened, shaking her head in angry disbelief. When she was sure she'd got as much as she could from Ginny, Tonia made her recite her full name, her QNet address, and her home address. She
wrote them down using a pencil in a little notebook with paper pages. “That's so I can find you again if you ever tell the cops anything,” she said. “Now get out of here and if Dover Richards calls you again, just keep pretending you're a dumb fuck who knows bugger all. That way he might let you live.”

  Ginny didn't need telling a second time. She struggled up from the sofa and made for the door, trying not even to look at Tonia.

  “It's not Ellie,” Tonia called after her. She stopped in the doorway and turned, not daring to upset this strange and volatile woman by ignoring her. “It's the letters, L. E.. Stands for lotos eaters. That's what you are. Now fuck off.”

  -oOo-

  Ginny mounted the bicycle and pedalled away in a hurry. She had to dismount just a couple of streets farther on because she was trembling and crying too much to keep going. She kicked the bike away from her and sat down on the kerb with her head in her hands. She felt sick and angry and relieved and terrified. She might have died. That crazy bitch might have shot her. She had been so scared. She ran over in her mind the stupid things she had done and said, the countless ways she had put herself into danger.

  Perhaps worse, she felt so ashamed of herself for being such a coward – a physical coward and a moral one. She had let herself be driven entirely by fear. The woman, Tonia, had bullied her and threatened her, and she had been craven and pathetic in the face of it. But what could she have done? A man was dead in the house. Tonia had a gun. These were vicious criminal types, without compassion or conscience. She couldn't have fought against an armed woman. She couldn't have stood up to her and challenged her. Every time she said anything, it seemed, she had only made things worse.

  That pig, Cal, had done this to her. He'd sent her into that house of horrors for whatever miserable criminal purposes he had. He had used her and endangered her, and she hoped he burned in Hell for it. Whatever she had walked into back there was some criminal conspiracy that had gone horribly wrong. They were killing each other and hiding from each other and it served them all right. She just wished now that she hadn't given that woman her real name and address. But she had been so scared and flustered, she didn't even think of making up something false.

  The crying slowly stopped and the shaking gradually died down, so she got back on the bike and rode it home. She saw a builder, working with a flock of robots, fixing up a derelict house on a scruffy lot. He pushed back his hat and stared at her in astonishment as she wobbled past him.

  Chapter 4

  She tried to immerse herself in her work. She climbed into her tank and went straight to her studio. She loved her office and could always lose herself in there. It was set in a clearing in a forest on the slope of a high mountain. Displays and musical instruments dotted the clearing. The sky was always blue and, where the slope fell steeply away, there was a view across broad valleys and low hills to distant snow-capped mountains. Steps carved into the mountainside led down to a little auditorium on a rocky promontory far below. There people could visit and listen to performances of her work but they could not climb up to the studio where she enjoyed silence and serenity and total privacy. There was no-one in the auditorium that day. Ginny was not a popular composer. Soundscapes were considered the muzak of their day and she was lucky if two or three people a week stopped by to listen to her pieces. But the worldlet of her office came with the auditorium as part of the package and she was always pleased if anyone at all came by to listen.

  It was a free worldlet tailored for musical applications and came with the studio, the auditorium, a meeting room for receiving clients, and a little rest room – little more than a comfy chair on a ledge of rock with a small table and a coffee machine. She sometimes considered paying for a custom office. When she made it big and had lots of spare credit maybe. Until then this one suited her just fine.

  She made for the studio and pulled up the files for the Old Vienna project. The minute she heard the rattle of carriages and the distant strain of classical strings a wave of utter boredom washed through her. It was almost a physical revulsion. She just couldn't face it. Not today. Maybe not ever.

  She went through to her rest-room and poured a coffee, falling into her chair and staring at the perfect sky.

  A pair of eagles were hunting over the valley, spiralling up on the thermals and gliding above the hills. It was the same pair of eagles that often appeared just there. The trouble with free worldlets was that they didn't come with a huge repertoire of behaviours programmed in. She had often stared at these two birds, thinking they looked like kites with invisible strings, imagining a little girl down in the valley, running and squealing, tugging the lines to make the birds swoop and soar. Today she felt that she was the kite, only her string was broken. She was being blown about on powerful winds, not gliding gracefully across the sky but tumbling along, out of control and in danger of crashing.

  She was tired. Bone weary. Not least from having walked and cycled so much, taking more physical exercise in one day than she had in the previous month. What she really needed to do was sleep, but she was so exhausted she couldn't face the effort of climbing out of the tank and staggering the two paces to her bed. In the end, she forced herself, the prospect of sleeping in the tank again being worse than that of dragging her weary body into bed.

  -oOo-

  She woke in the middle of the night, groggy and confused, and called for lights. For a second she wondered if the woman with the gun, her cycling along city roads, dodging the robot vans, her hair blowing in the wind, had been a dream. Then she felt the ache in her thighs and knew it had really happened.

  She popped up a clock and groaned. Three AM. For a while she lay with her eyes closed and tried to fall back into sleep, but she needed a pee and she was starving. What was worse, the mere recollection of her adventures set her heart racing again and made sleep impossible. It wasn't until she got up that she realised she had slept in her clothes on top of the bed. This is why you don't have a husband, she told herself in a parody of her mother's voice. You live like a hippy. You should get a real job with regular hours. Instead of amusing herself, the recitation depressed her. She probably would need to get a real job soon, either that or starve.

  She grabbed a packet of something from the freezer and put it into the microwave. The little cooker read the tag on the box and set about cooking the contents as instructed. Ginny stared through the window at the slowly rotating packet until the machine pinged and snapped her out of her mindless state. She pulled the box out and took off the packaging. Some kind of Tai soup in a plastic bowl steamed on the counter. With a shrug she grabbed a disposable spoon from the dispenser and sat down to eat.

  The entertainment feed was playing some middle-of-the-night political analysis show. The kind that no-one would watch during the day. There was a bill that the pundits had been getting excited about for several weeks now. Something to do with new powers to fight terrorism. She had seen petitions against it in her messages and had deleted them along with all the other junk. A thin-faced woman was arguing that the bill was a terrible threat to civil liberties. A round-faced woman agreed, pointing out that similar bills had been defeated in every OECD country over the past decade or so and, if Australia passed this measure, the country would become little more than a totalitarian regime. A jowly old conservative man seemed to think that the menace of terrorism had to be fought no matter what the cost and, besides, the Government could be trusted not to abuse any new powers the bill would give them. That brought a guffaw from everyone else on the panel.

  Ginny switched to another feed, then another, wanting to find something entertaining she could stare at and not think about while she ate her soup. The argument about the bill had disturbed her. Normally she was vaguely liberal in her political views. To be honest, she didn't pay much attention until it was time to vote and, even then, she usually voted Labor or Greens on the ground that they generally seemed more humane than the other lot. But what had happened yesterday made her wonder if people we
re quite as safe as they believed they were. Criminals with guns, people going untagged, people impersonating police officers, data cubes hidden in plain sight by AR systems that had been illegally tampered with. Maybe the Government did need more powers to monitor what people were doing. Maybe then they could catch some of these people.

  People like Cal.

  And that was the most disturbing thing of all. She thought she had been getting to know Cal. She thought she liked him. Yet there he was, mixed up with vicious, clandestine murderers.

  She thought again about going to the police but dismissed the idea. She had taken Cal's package and handed it over to that Tonia woman. How did she explain that to the police? Or to a court, if it came to that? She could hardly explain it to herself. Well, it's like this, Your Honour, I sort of fancied the bloke and he asked me nicely. Can I plead naïve stupidity?

  She watched an African cartoon feed as the soup gradually revived her body and spirit, then she showered and watched a Brazilian soap until the sun came up and she judged it wasn't too rude to call on her friend. Della took the call, scowling and grumbling, but agreed to meet her for breakfast at Cassini's.

  “I've only got half an hour,” Della said as Ginny entered the restaurant. “I need to be in early this morning. We're doing a big sales presentation. You couldn't have picked a worse morning really.”

  Ginny grimaced. “Sorry. It's just that I had a very peculiar day yesterday and I'm all on edge about it.”

  She glanced at the menu and tapped it to order a coffee.

  “You're not eating?” Della said. “You dragged me out for breakfast and you're not even eating?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Already eaten.”

  The restaurant was enormous and full. And it wasn't just simulated ambience. Cassini's was a popular spot. A space station orbiting just above the rings of Saturn guaranteed spectacular views. Today, the moon Enceladus was hanging in the sky so close that Ginny could see the fissures on its frozen surface.