by Jason LaPier
Jax sat on his bed and flipped through a notebook that contained the most recent summary information. “We’ve covered about 95 percent of the employees.”
“And their guilt-probability scores?”
“All relatively low.” There was gossip among the workers, just as there was among the passengers, but the workers didn’t talk much about shady pasts; their gossip mainly had to do with who was sleeping with whom. The working-class stiff out to collect a big paycheck suspect classification had nearly been eliminated by this point.
“Good,” Runstom said. “I think we need to target the highest-scoring passengers.”
“What do you mean, ‘target’?” Jax asked, looking up from the notes. “We’ve already talked some of them blue in the face.”
“Exactly. It’s time to start looking for hard evidence.” Runstom stood and walked over to the profile wall, where they hung details of some of the higher-scoring passengers. “We’ve become close enough to some of the workers. I think we can get some of them to go into rooms for us. Cleaning crews, maintenance crews – those types can come and go as they please without arousing suspicion.” He turned and looked at Jax. “We’d have to compensate them somehow. We’ve still got a few thousand Alleys—”
“Eh,” Jax grunted, cutting the other man off. “These people, they don’t want money. They can’t spend it. They get room and board as part of their employment here. They don’t have any bills. They get a big fat paycheck when they get done with their multi-year tour of duty. We need something that can entice them here and now.”
“Then what?” Runstom said. “We can try to buy something of value from some passengers, but I don’t think they’ll be interested in selling. They’ve got more money than they can spend as it is.”
Jax looked down. He had hoped to keep this little secret to himself, but he felt like it was time to come clean. “Remember when we came out of Xarp, and I didn’t talk for the next five hours or so?” he asked, head still down.
“Yeah. Worst case of Xarp sickness I’ve ever seen. Like a junky, stoned out of—” Runstom stopped in mid-sentence as Jax looked up at him. “You sonova bitch,” he whispered. “Drugs? On my ship?”
“I’m sorry, Stan. I was a little freaked out. The near-death experience and all.”
Runstom looked back at the profile wall. “Where did you get them?” he asked, his voice like ice. “And what are they?”
The officer’s suddenly cold and indifferent tone made Jax’s hairs stand on end. “They were stashed in one of the equipment lockers, behind some guns. Delirium-G. Pill form.” He left out the part where Prosser made a deal with him to reveal the hiding place of the pills in exchange for feeding him a dose. The foul-mouthed Space Waste pilot was pretty heavily restrained in the cargo bay and Jax had felt a little sorry for him, so he agreed.
The officer was quiet for a while, and Jax just let him be. There were worse things in the world than D-G, and Jax knew that Runstom knew it. Let him throw his little cop-minded mini-tantrum. Finally, he said, “I should make you jettison them.” Then he turned around, his demeanor lighter. “But ModPol law on drugs varies to a large degree from one contract to another. And since I’m only well-versed on the Barnard-4 contract, I have no idea what the law is regarding Delirium-G on a Royal Starways Superliner.”
“Oh,” Jax said, a little thrown off by that statement. Having never left his planet before this month, he had not considered the fact that the law wasn’t the same everywhere. He’d always thought that part of the point of having an organization like ModPol around was to have a consistent set of laws across multiple populations.
“Additionally, we’re currently conducting an improvised undercover operation, so I cannot make any attempts to call this in to ModPol HQ. Furthermore, it is acceptable to commit minor criminal or questionable acts while undercover in order to establish connections or discover evidence.”
“It is?” Jax said, wishing he hadn’t questioned that last part as soon as it came out of his mouth.
“Well, yeah. I mean, they do it all the time in the holo-vids.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s true.” Jax was lost in thought for a moment, and Runstom was too, apparently, because a silence grew between them. After a few minutes, he decided it was time to lay out the obvious, for the sake of progress. “So, uh. Here’s an idea: how about we offer some Delirium-G to some employees in exchange for getting them to do a little digging into the rooms of a few passengers?”
“Let the record show that I do not condone the use of these drugs,” Runstom said in some bizarre, half-wooden voice. “But I agree that this may be our best course of action at the current juncture, and time is of the essence.”
What record? was the response that Jax managed to keep to himself. “So noted,” he said, in a mock-official tone. “Let us proceed, Officer Runstom.”
Jax didn’t have a whole lot of experience with Delirium-G, but he’d encountered it a few times. Maybe more than the average person; especially the average B-fourean. After his mother passed, he went through a phase during which he spent a lot of time in the underground corridors of Blue Haven. He mostly drowned his grief in a glass, but he did some occasional gambling, and that had led him to his first introduction to the stuff. In one of the more shady gambling dens, during a card game, a woman had tossed a pill onto the table in place of money. A final, desperate attempt to win back some of her losses. It had not been long since Irene Jackson was in the accident when Jax first learned that his father was going to move to B-3 with his soon-to-be second wife. That night, Jax was on a mission to hit rock bottom, trying to gamble away the small amount of savings he had left. Fate conspired against him and doled out a stingingly ironic streak of good luck. Jax had taken many hands over the course of a few hours, including the one with the Delirium-G pill as a bet.
He was feeling low enough to abuse a substance he’d never encountered before, figuring that if he couldn’t lose his money, he could at least lose his mind. Again his intention to bottom out was thwarted. The drug did not have the detrimental effect that public-service announcements often described. He couldn’t remember most of the experience anymore, but he could remember finding a small amount of peace with the loss of his mother for the first time that night.
Despite the benefits the drug had brought him, Jax knew better than to fall into a trap of relying on it. It had gotten him over a hump (or perhaps more accurately, out of a trough), but he knew the danger in becoming dependent on a chemical. After that first encounter, he’d sought it out again about a week later, while still frequenting the underground. The second time was already noticeably weaker than the first, so he decided to avoid it after that. A few years later, he’d gotten a couple of pills because his girlfriend Priscilla wanted to try it. Since then, he hadn’t even seen it again until that day on the stolen transport, when Prosser told him where some was stashed in a compartment on the vessel.
Since they had gotten the stuff out again to use as currency with the employees, he pocketed one. He wasn’t sure if he even wanted it, and maybe he would just get rid of it. But it was hard to pass up the last chance to hold on to just one.
For a few days, it burned a hole in his pocket. He wouldn’t be able to hold on to the pill for long; he knew he’d be in real trouble if Runstom found out he’d kept one. He thought he’d better just flush it, but then one day Runstom was gone for a while, off bargaining with some cleaning staff. Jax was left alone for a few hours.
As much as he generally disliked life in the domes on Barnard-4, it was his home, and being away from it for so long was having an effect on his nerves. It didn’t help that he was working with a cop who was a lot more used to both the travel and the work. The whole being falsely accused of mass-homicide and facing life imprisonment thing just might have been another factor in the fraying of his edges, but who was he to say, really? He popped the pill and headed for one of the mini-domes that speckled the superliner.
He found himself sit
ting in a deckchair, watching the stars go by impossibly, yet not imperceptibly, slowly. He felt the weight of gravity – not heavier, just pulling more significantly. Tugging, more accurately. A sporadic tugging at his limbs, never all at once, just one here, then there, as if he could detect the microscopic machinations of the artificial gravity pumps deep in the center of the ship. His vision wasn’t affected much, as long as his head was still. If a sound caught his attention and he turned to look, the scene seemed to pan slowly, as if some unseen holo-vid director was attempting to create a sense of bigness and tension. His thoughts ultimately unfocused on the final destination of his gaze, instead lost in the journey it took to get there.
He watched the buzzing of the humans around the ship, the little clockwork bees with jerking movements of the limbs zipping to and fro, stopping to get pollen from the bar and storing it somewhere internally, as if there were a plan to return it to a hive where it could become sweet, sticky honey over time. They sometimes visited him to make conversation, which he would review in his head, as if he were a book-reader at that moment rather than a participant in the dialogue.
At some point he found some headphones. They might have been delivered by a deckhand, or they might have been in his pocket. They were on his head now, and the clockwork bee-people danced across the deck, their legs slaves to the rhythm of the bass-a-tron, their arms and heads swaying with the wavtar. Music was almost non-existent on B-4. It was there, but it was always in the background, always light and airy. There were never percussive rhythms or the warping and layering of instruments he was hearing now.
Eventually, he would have to use the restroom. The internal reminder system was polite and patient, but he knew it would be too humble and it would let him ignore it indefinitely, which would ultimately lead to some other discomfort. If he tried to psych himself up for the journey across the deck to the facilities, the anxiety would overwhelm him. The best course of action was to pretend it wasn’t going to happen, then simply surprise himself by standing up and walking. A few steps in, once the surprise had faded, he had to regulate his speed. The temptation to run was strong, but he knew to run would mean to fall.
“Do you know what it’s like to run? Do you know what it’s like to live in fear?” The attendant-bot didn’t answer his question, but instead offered him a towel. He took it, and cleared his throat. “I accept this gift on behalf of all humans in the galaxy. This is a momentous step forward for robo-human relations.” He hugged the thing, but it was not exactly receptive.
There was a well-known D-G rule about being in the bathroom: never look in the mirror. If you happened to look in the mirror, for fuck’s sake, do not make eye contact with yourself. There’s a very good chance that you won’t recognize the person staring back at you.
Jax looked in the mirror.
“Murderer,” he said, maybe out loud, maybe in his head. “Fugitive. That’s not me. That’s the body I have to occupy because I didn’t play their game. I didn’t fulfill my potential. I didn’t grow up to be anyone important, so I got to be a pawn in someone else’s game.” He looked at the attendant-bot. “I was like you, you know? Instead of handing out towels in a small bathroom, I handed out oxygen in a small residential block. People lived there, you know. Thirty or forty real, live people. They were just restroom patrons to me.”
He grabbed the bot by the towel-arm. “What happens when you don’t give someone a towel?” He shook the arm, to little effect. “What happens, huh? Do they die? Do they fucking die? Because that’s what happens when you don’t hand out oxygen. People fucking die.”
Jax looked back at the mirror. “You killed thirty-two fucking people, you sonova bitch. You worthless sonova bitch. You held the gun while someone else pulled the trigger. You pawn. Run, pawn, run. Run one square at a time, like the pathetic pawn you are.”
He found himself at the bar. The D-G was starting to fade away, bit by bit. He sent a drink into his system to try to throw it off. “Here, work on this. Keep the D-G around for another hour.” Then he had another drink because this was a superliner and the drinks were goddamn fantastic.
“Maybe you’re better off this way,” he said, back in the bathroom, looking in the mirror. It was either the same visit or a return visit, he wasn’t sure. Maybe he was just remembering it. His reflection stared at him expectantly. He felt older. His baby-face had finally begun to age properly, and staring at himself now, his features reminded him of his father. “You disappoint me, Jax,” he said through his father’s mouth. “This never would have happened to you if you’d gone back to engineering school; if you’d come to live with us on B-3 and got out of the sub-domes. If you’d done something with your life, besides waste it.” The word “waste” was a tearing sound, like the jagged whoosh of someone ripping paper.
It was the nose and mouth that were his father’s, so he began to look elsewhere, searching for his mother. Did he have his mother’s eyes? He looked at his own eyes, into the pale-gray irises that he shared with almost all other B-foureans, searching for his mother there among those listless clouds. He felt lost and sad, and the clouds grew darker, thicker. His eyes watered and he blinked briefly, and then suddenly she was there. She did share his eyes, and he could see her seeing him. She had no mouth and no voice, but she could see him. She couldn’t tell him what to do. She could only watch.
He wanted her to tell him what to do. He wanted to hear her voice come out of his mouth. But she could not. And he knew that she would not have if she could. She never told him what to do. Even when she knew he was doing something wrong – she just watched.
He blinked again and she was gone. He looked at his mouth, but his father was gone too. He felt very alone. No father to tell him what to do, always disappointed. No mother to watch over him, always proud, abstaining from offering guidance. Was this what he wanted, to be on his own, to make his own decisions, to guide his own fate?
He looked away from the mirror. Whether or not he wanted it, his parents weren’t there. No more wallowing in pity or self-doubt. If he had any chance of getting out of the mess he was in, he was going to have to grow the fuck up.
Runstom found him later in a rain room, sitting soberly in a plain, white, plastic chair at a small, white, plastic table underneath a canopy, rain drizzling down on three sides.
“I never understood this,” muttered the officer, taking in the scene. “There are beautiful views of the stars from all over this ship. Now the sun rooms, I can understand. The little fake beaches and the little green parks with the blue-sky domes. Sure, stars are beautiful, but feeling like it’s night every hour of the day – yeah, I can see why people would want sun rooms. But a rain room?”
“Back in Gretel,” Jax started, staring outward. A small, thin cluster of trees surrounded the canopied area, rain pattering against their leaves. “In Gretel, we make rain in our blocks. Remember, the RAIN command? And its stupid warning requirement? Hard to get spontaneous rain in dome cities. Air scrubbers regulate the amount of water in the controlled atmosphere. We can’t have people getting wet in their perfect little bubbles. Sometimes I wonder what it’s like on a planet with a real atmosphere.”
Runstom sat down next to the operator. “I’ve been to a few. Only moons, though.” Jax turned and looked at him, a tiny hint of expectation on his face. “It rains more often than you’d think, in some places. And you have to get all kinds of rain-gear, to keep from getting soaked, and to keep your equipment safe. Sometimes it’s damn cold, and instead of rain you get snow or hail. You have to wrap up, or get into a heated suit.” He looked out into the rain, thoughtfully. “Sure does break up the monotony, though. Real weather is good at keeping you on your toes.”
“I come here sometimes,” Jax said. “I’d like to say, I come here to think, but everywhere I go on this ship, I go to think. But sometimes I come here, and I try not to plan it. I try to get up in the morning and tell myself I’m in for something unexpected today. And then I find myself in a rain room, and I
go stand in the rain for a minute and pretend that the weather changed without warning, and I’m caught in it.” He laughed suddenly. “They don’t like it when you do that, you know. They don’t want you to go out there,” he said, gesturing toward the trees. “The walls start beeping at you and if you stay too long, some security guys will show up and tell you to ‘get the hell outta the scenery’.”
“Mm,” Runstom murmured, letting a bit of quiet time pass before continuing. “One time I lived in a jungle for a couple weeks, on a moon in the Sirius system. Rained all the time, without warning, then it would be sun again. Rain, sun, rain, sun, nothing in between. It was hot there, though, so hot that the rain felt like a warm shower. People didn’t run around hysterically when it came, like they do in other places. They just kept on living. If you had any equipment that wasn’t waterproof, you knew you better protect it before taking it outside. Other than that, people didn’t even use umbrellas. The rain would come, and we’d just walk around in it. Just another fact of life, like the need to breathe oxygen or the laws of gravity.”
“When this is over,” Jax said, “however it turns out, whether we catch the people that did this or not, I’m not going back to B-4. I can’t.”
The officer stood up and put a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Someone out there is responsible for the deaths of thirty-two people. I’ve seen plenty of death in my job – mostly accidental, but sometimes by murder. But I’ve never seen anyone do something this foul.” He squeezed his grip. “I am going to find out who did this. And you’re going to help me. And when we’re done, you can go wherever you goddamn well please, Jax. As will I.”
Jax looked up at him, but was at a loss for words. Runstom said, “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”
