Infinity Plus: Quintet

by Neil Williamson

  "Wait," said Dr. Vanchovy. "If Yasque was not dead when Dhow-lin found her, who murdered her afterwards? And more importantly, how?"

  "This is what we all want to know," I replied.

  Here, I left a dramatic pause.

  After a moment Dr. Vanchovy said, "Well?"

  I looked at him and said, "You removed several items from Yasque when you first examined the body. What were they?"

  "Just trivial items of no importance," he replied.

  "If they are so trivial," I quipped, "you will not mind detailing them."

  "They are of no importance to my investigation. I merely removed them to gain some idea of Yasque's character."

  "I think not, Dr. Vanchovy. You removed them because you wanted them. One was the object refered to in the note, which I believe to have been her tribal necklace of many small globes."

  He remained silent, but then frowned and said, "You trawl deep waters, boy."

  "Listen to the rest of my story," I said. "Earlier that evening Dr. Vanchovy bought a drink for himself and one for Yasque. He drugged it, and she drank it. Later, she went to her room. Dr. Vanchovy was surprised and annoyed when Dhow-lin discovered what she thought was Yasque's body, because this upset his plans. Now Dr. Vanchovy had to act quickly if he was to retrieve the object he so desired. He stood up and declared that he would undertake an investigation. We went to the room. But here my own innocent eagerness was to make his situation worse, for I discovered the note. Once I had read it, the contents of that note were public knowledge. It was only then that Dr. Vanchovy decided to kill Yasque, so that she would not wake up and reveal a truth that would shame him. He had a little time to act. Yasque was still drugged, her pulse very slow, her breathing almost imperceptible. Nobody else had examined the body. So he had me stand guard, that she not be disturbed. Next morning, with the stiletto knife concealed in his sleeve, he and I entered the room, where he pretended to find the knife. Then he compared the blade with a mark he feigned finding on Yasque's neck. It was only then that he introduced the poison to her body. We were all dazzled by his brilliance. We did not think to question his procedures."

  "This is all very well," said Dhow-lin, "but what is the object so desired by Dr. Vanchovy?"

  "Isn't it obvious?" I replied. "What was the one thing marring his sartorial perfection? It was his eye-patch. Yasque wore his missing artificial eye around her neck. As she stated in the private note that I made public, she refused to return it to him. Dr. Vanchovy murdered her so that the shameful truth, that a tart wore his eye on her necklace, would never be revealed to us."

  In a low voice Dr. Vanchovy said, "Nonsense."

  I turned to him. "Your intention was to remove your artificial eye then return the necklace to Yasque, wasn't it? If she had spoken up you would have scoffed at her, and everybody would have laughed at such an absurd story."

  Dr. Vanchovy stood up, but Dhow-lin produced a laser pistol and pointed it at him. "You will come with me," she said, "and we will arrange your future."

  "My future?" he replied.

  "I think the priestesses of the Goddess will accept you, Dr. Vanchovy. They will rip off your fine clothes and dress you in rags, then dump you in a cell where you will remain, quite alone, until this city is green and dead."

  Thus did the events surrounding Yasque's death come to their conclusion. We will probably never know how she first came into possession of Dr. Vanchovy's artificial eye, but I hope you will agree with me when I say that he did a bad thing, an inhumane thing, taking the life of an innocent like that, and for such a trivial reason. He thought he would get away with it. He did not. In the end, human life is valuable even in circumstances as desperate as those of Kray.

  And so I conclude my tale from the Spired Inn. In this tale, the detective did it. And this explains why it was Dr. Vanchovy's final case.

  The Girl Who Died for Art and Lived

  Eric Brown

  I knew Lin Chakra, the famous hologram artist, for two brief days in spring. Our acquaintance changed my life.

  I first met her at the party held by my agent to celebrate the exhibition of my crystal, The Wreck of the John Marston. The venue was Christianna Santesson's penthouse suite in the safe sector of the city. The event was pure glitter and overkill; big-name critics, artists in other fields, government officials and foreign ambassadors occupied the floor in urbane groups. With The Wreck I had, according to those in the know, initiated a new art form. Certainly I had done something that no-one else had been able to do before.

  The crystal stood angled on a plinth at the far end of the long room, a fused rectangular slab that coruscated like diamond. Earlier, there had been a queue to experience the work of Santesson's latest find. And, when the guests had actually laid hands on the crystal, they were staggered. The critics were pretty impressed, too – and that pleased me. I wanted to communicate my experience of the supernova to as many people as possible, allow them to live the last flight of the John Marston. Critical acclaim didn't always guarantee popular success, but I was sure that the originality of my art would catch the imagination of the world.

  This was the first social gathering I'd attended since the accident, and I was uneasy without Ana.

  ~

  As the party wore on, I eased my way to the bar and drank a succession of acid shorts. With diminishing clarity I watched the guests circulate like the polychromatic tesserae of a kaleidoscope, and tried to keep a low profile. This wasn't too difficult. The press-release had been brief and to the point. I was described as the sole survivor of an incredible starship burnout, but Santesson's publicity manager had failed to mention the fact that I had no face. Now there was a clique of artists here from the radioactive sector of the city who had taken over the select towerpiles deserted since the meltdown of '67. These people wore fashion-accessory cancers, externalized and exhibited with the same panache as others might parade pet pythons or parakeets. One woman was nigrescent with total melanosis, another had cultivated multiple tumours of the thyroid like muscatel grapes on the vine. I spotted one artist almost as ugly as myself, his face eaten away by some virulent strain of radioactive herpes. They were known in art circles as the Strontium Nihilists, and tonight I was taken as just another freakish member of their band. The observant guest might have wondered, though, at the steel socket console that followed the contour of my dented cranium, or the remains of the occipital computer that had melted and fused with my collarbone.

  From my position at the bar I watched Christianna Santesson as she moved from group to group, playing the perfect host. She was a tall blonde woman in her early seventies with the improved body of a seventeen-year-old and a calculating business brain. Her agency had a virtual monopoly of the world's greatest artists, and when I joined her stable Santesson had never lost an opportunity to press me for the secret of the fusion process. She told me that she had people who could produce mega-art on my fused consoles, but I wasn't selling.

  I was on my fifth acid short when a white light like the nova I'd survived blinded my one good eye. I raised an arm and called out. Silhouetted in the halogen glare I made out the hulking forms of vid-men toting shoulder cameras. Then I became aware of action beside me. Christianna Santesson was being interviewed. The front-man fired superlatives at the camera, stereotyping Santesson as the Nordic Goddess of the art world and myself as The Man With A Nova In His Head. He moved on to me, and I was blitzed with inane questions to which I gave equally brainless replies. Things like how I wanted the world to understand, and how I did it all for my dead colleagues.

  Then the painful glare moved away, leaving the bar in darkness. The vid-men dashed the length of the lounge, the spotlight bouncing like a crazy ball. It appeared that the far entrance was now the focus of attention. The party-goers turned en masse and gawped like expectant kids awaiting the arrival of Santa.

  I thumbed the lachrymose tear-duct of my good eye. "What the hell?" I managed. "I could have done without that."

 
"Daniel," Santesson said, her Scandinavian intonation loading her words with censure. "I had to have them in to record the arrival of Lin Chakra." And she smiled to herself like a satisfied stage-manager.

  Seconds later Lin Chakra entered the spotlight, a diminutive figure surrounded by a posse of grotesques. And I experienced a sudden lurch in the pit of my stomach. Chakra hailed from the same subcontinent as a dead girl called Ana Bhandari, and her resemblance to Ana was unbearable. But then every Indian face sent pangs of grief through me.

  Chakra lived in the radioactive sector, though she seemed unaffected by cancer, and compared with the hideousness of her hangers-on she emanated a fragile Asian beauty. She wore black tights, a black jacket, and a tricorne pulled low. Her face between the turned-up collar and the prow of her tricorne was an angry, inverted arrowhead as she scowled out at the assembled guests.

  She walked across to my crystal, the cameras tracking her progress. I found it hard to believe that this was being piped live into half the homes on the continent.

  She stood on the lower step of the plinth and played her hands over the crystal spread. Visually, it was not impressive, an abstract swirl of colour in the pattern of a vortex; interesting, but nothing more. It was to the touch that the crystals gave out their store of meaning, transforming the object from a colourful display into a work of art. Now, Lin Chakra would be experiencing what I had gone through in the engineroom of the John Marston.

  She took her time, the guests watching her with silent respect, and soaked up the emotions. She lingered over a certain section of the slab, and came back to it again and again to see if the single crystal node still read as true in light of cross-reference with other emotions. She was being diligent in her appreciation of this newcomer's work.

  Then she backed respectfully from the plinth, found Santesson and engaged her in quiet conversation. My agent indicated me with a slight inclination of her head; Lin Chakra's frequent glances my way were like sudden injections of speed.

  Then she joined me at the bar. She hoisted herself onto a highstool and crossed her legs at the knees. "I like your crystal," she said in a small voice.

  Seen closer to, her resemblance to Ana was less marked. Ana had been beautiful, whereas Lin Chakra was almost ugly. She had risen from the oblivion of a low-caste Calcutta slum, and her origins showed. Her lineage consisted of Harijan lepers, char-wallahs and meningital beggars. Physically she was a patchwork of inherited genetic defects, with a misshapen jaw and pocked cheeks, the concave chest and stoop of a tubercular forebear. But like her compatriots of the radioactive sector, she carried her deformities with pride, the latest recipient in a long line of derelict, hand-me-down DNA. And yet... and yet she wasn't without a certain undeniable charm, a frail attraction that produced in me a surge of the chivalrous and protective instinct that some people call affection.

  When she spoke she looked directly at me, using my misplaced remaining eye as the focus of her attention, and not staring at my shoulder as others were wont to do. My injuries were such that some people found it hard to accept that the slurred, incinerated mass of flesh had once been a face.

  Our conversation came to a close. She slipped a single crystal into my hand and climbed from her stool. She mingled with the crowd, then pushed through the shimmer-stream curtain to the balcony.

  In my palm the crystal warmed, communicating. The millions of semi-sentient, empathic organisms gave out their record of Lin Chakra's stored emotion message. The alien stones were sold on Earth as curiosities, novel gee-gaws for entertainment and communication. No-one before had thought of using the crystals as a means of artistic expression. Once invested in a crystal, an emotion or thought lasted only a matter of minutes, and as artists created for posterity the crystals had been overlooked as a potential medium.

  Then, quite by accident, I had come across the method by which to change the nature of the crystals so that they could store emotions or thoughts forever. Hence my sudden popularity...

  A guest, fancying his chances, parted the curtain and stepped on to the balcony. He returned immediately. "She's gone."

  I moved unnoticed from the bar and slipped into the adjacent room. Lin Chakra was waiting for me on the balcony. She had leapt across, and now sat on the rail hugging her shins. I paused by the shimmer-stream curtain. "Hey..."

  "I have a fabulous sense of balance," she reassured me.

  "I get vertigo just thinking about the drop," I admitted.

  "An ex-Engineman shouldn't be afraid of heights," she mocked, jumping down and leaning against the rail on her elbows.

  Behind me, pressure on the communicating door made it rattle.

  She glanced at me.

  "I locked it," I said. "As you instructed. What do you want?"

  "I really meant what I said about your crystal. I like it."

  "It's crude," I said. "Honest in what it portrays, but incompetently executed. A kid with six months' practice could do better."

  "You'll improve as you master the form," she told me.

  I would have smiled, but that was impossible.

  "A lot of people would give both arms to know how you fuse those crystals," she said now. "Do you think you can keep it to yourself forever?"

  I shrugged. "Maybe I can," I said, and tried not to laugh at my sick secret.

  Lin Chakra nodded, considering. "In that case, would you contemplate selling a crystal console already fused, so that other artists might create something?"

  "So that's why you're here tonight. You want a crystal?"

  "I came," she said, "to see your crystal. But–"

  "Forget it," I snapped. "I don't sell them."

  "Don't you think that's rather selfish?"

  I laughed, though the sound came out as a strangled splutter. "I like that! I'm the one who discovered the process, after all. Aren't I entitled to be just a little selfish?"

  She frowned to herself, turned and stared into the night sky, at the stars spread above the lighted towerpiles. A long silence came between us. "Which one?" she asked at last.

  I stood beside her and found the Pole star, then charted galactic clockwise until I came to the blue-shift glimmer of star Radnor 66. A couple of degrees to the right was Radnor B, where the accident had happened. The star no longer existed, and the light we saw tonight was a lie in time, the ghost of the sun before it went nova. In fifty years it would flare and die, reminding the people of Earth of the time when a small cargo ship from the Canterbury Line was incinerated, with the loss of all aboard but one.

  I pointed out the star.

  She gazed up in silence, and as I watched her I was reminded again of her frailty. I wanted suddenly to question the wisdom of her living in the radioactive sector. She seemed so fragile that even something as innocuous as influenza might kill her; but that was ridiculous. No-one died nowadays from 'flu, or cancer. The freaks in the penthouse were merely exhibitionists; as soon as their pet cancers showed the first signs of turning nasty they would be excised, their owners given a clean bill of health. And anyway, Lin Chakra seemed cancer free.

  Her request interrupted my thoughts. "Tell me about the accident," she said.

  I stared at her. "Wasn't the crystal enough?"

  "I haven't experienced everything," she said shrewdly. "And I want to hear the way you tell it."

  "For any particular reason?"

  "Oh... let's just say that I want to clarify a point."

  So I gave her the full story.

  ~

  It had been a regular long haul from star Canopus to Sigma Draconis, carrying supplies for the small colony on Sigma D IV. The John Marston had a crew of ten; three Enginemen, two pilots, and five service mechanics, the regular complement for a small boat like ours. After the slowburn out of Canopus we phased into the nada-continuum with one of my colleagues in the sensory deprivation pod. We were due for a three-month furlough at the end of the run, and perhaps that was what gave the voyage its air of light-heartedness. We were in good spirits
and had no cause for concern – certainly we could not foresee the disaster ahead. When one of the pilots pointed out that we could save five days, and add them to our furlough, if we jumped the flight-path and cut through a sector of space closed to all traffic, we put it to the vote. Five of us voted for the jump, four were against the proposition, and one mechanic abstained.

  The prohibited sector was the size of Sol system, with an unstable star at its centre ready to go off like a time-bomb. The star had been like this for centuries though, and I thought that the chances of it going nova just as we were passing through were negligible... if I thought about it at all. So we changed course and I took the place of the Engineman who had pushed us so far – the only reason I survived the accident. I was jacked-up. laid out and fed into the pod. The last thing I remembered was the sight of the variable sun just outside the viewscreen, burning like a furnace.

  I didn't even say goodbye to Ana. But how was I to know?

  "When I regained consciousness I found myself in the burns bath of a hospital on Mars. Three months had passed since the supernova–"

  Lin frowned. "But if you didn't actually experience the nova, how were you able to–?"

  "Hear me out. I'm getting to that."

  The star had blown just as the John Marston was lighting out of the danger zone; any closer and the boat would have been cindered. As it turned out, the ship was destroyed with the death of all aboard – or so it was thought at the time. The salvage vessel sent into the area reported that only fragments of wreckage remained, and that one of these fragments was the engine-vault. It was duly hauled in, and the salvage team was amazed – and horrified – to find that I had survived.