The Forever Drug

by Lisa Smedman

  Sandra touched a gentle finger to Jane's throat, checking her pulse. She counted silently to herself before answering my question. "It's an old term for 'psychiatrist,' one that hasn't been in use since the 19th century. The 'restraining chair' Jane was talking about was used in asylums in the 1800s. I saw a woodcut of one in an old medical text. The patient's wrists were tied to the arms of the chair, and the ankles were held in clamps at the base. A strap across the chest held the patient in place, and a wooden box that clamped tight over the head kept the patient from looking around, and prevented them from hearing anything clearly. A bucket in the seat of the chair enabled the patient to be held in that position for days on end."

  I stated the obvious guess: "Jane was confined in something like that, wasn't she? That's where that last memory came from."

  Sandra looked thoughtful. "Not in a restraining chair. Jane was a doctor—not a patient—when those things were in use." She gave me a steely look. "Romulus, you and I both know about the 'mask' she was referring to, now don't we?"

  I knew, but I didn't want to believe it. It had to have been a mage mask that Jane was remembering. A plastic hood that wrapped tight around the face, with a mouth tube for breathing. Designed to prevent magicians from spellcasting, it had earphones that cranked out an ear-splitting ninety decibels of white noise, preventing the mage from concentrating. If worn for long periods of time, it could drive the wearer mad.

  Developed for use in the prison system, the mage mask was a trademark of the nation's top security provider: Lone Star. The only way Jane would have wound up wearing one was if she'd been arrested and incarcerated by the police. By my pack.

  No, that wasn't possible. If Jane had been convicted of a crime and served time for it, there should have been a record of her somewhere in the Lone Star database. The scans I'd done had turned up nothing.

  Had someone else gotten hold of a mage mask—or built one on their own? The materials weren't hard to come by; it was pretty low-tech, when you got right down to it. A thought occurred to me. Perhaps Jane had been kidnapped, by abductors who realized she was a mage and could harm them with her magic. They'd kept her on ice until...

  But even prolonged use of a mage mask didn't explain Jane's memory loss. She didn't show any of the signs of psychosis usually associated with misuse of that device.

  And there were even more puzzling things to deal with. I looked at Sandra. "Jane wasn't born in this century, was she?"

  Sandra shook her head. "If these are actual memories we triggered, Romulus, Jane's lived quite a long time. Some of her memories seem to go back nearly three centuries, to the 1700s."

  "How can that be?" I asked. "How can someone live for centuries?"

  "I don't know," Sandra said softly. "Magic? But that would mean that magic was present in threshold levels long before the Awakening."

  We both fell silent, contemplating the woman who lay on the cushions between us. Relaxed in sleep, her face looked like that of a young girl. Only the gray in her hair and her woman's body hinted that she was at least middle-aged. Her true age was well beyond even that.

  Jane was stirring. Her eyelids fluttered, and then, after a moment or two, she sat up and yawned. She looked around Sandra's office, then gave me a tentative smile.

  I took that as a good sign.

  "Do you remember anything that just happened— any of the memories?" I asked anxiously.

  Jane looked at the holo of the forest, obviously puzzled. "Where am I?" she asked. She peered at Sandra and me. "And who ... are you?"

  "Interesting," Sandra murmured. "The short-term memories seem to dissipate after Jane has slept."

  My heart sank. Fat lot of good that observation did me. I couldn't very well keep Jane awake for days on end.

  I sighed. We were back to square one again. I took a deep breath—and introduced myself to Jane all over again.

  9

  We couldn't go back to my place to doss down. The elf would have recovered from Jane's spell by now, and that was the first place he'd look for her. But we still had his nuyen. We checked into a hotel in downtown Halifax early that evening, after leaving the hospital. The fact that I insisted on paying cash and that neither Jane nor I had any ID didn't even faze the ork behind the counter. He was used to sailors checking in with their joy-boys and joy-girls, and not wanting to leave behind an electronic record that their spouses could find. He glanced pointedly down at my pajamalike hospital pants as we checked in, and gave me a knowing wink as I asked for a room with two double beds, and for a meal to be sent up. I let him keep the change from a 100-nuyen bill. That ought to be an incentive keep his trap shut if anyone came looking for us.

  The room smelled of cigarette smoke, air freshener, and the scents of those who'd slept here before us. But the sheets were clean; I could smell the laundry soap on them. I peered out the window to the street below. I was probably just being paranoid. There was no sign of the elf Galdenistal—who I'd begun to call "golden boy" in my mind, due to his taste in fashion and his untouchable, diplomatic status.

  I put the money clip on the table between the two beds. I'd checked: the clip had a hallmark and was indeed gold. It was probably worth more than the thick fold of bills it held. In hindsight, I probably should have taken the elf's gold hair clip, too. But that would be stealing. Taking his money had simply been appropriating assets in the line of duty.

  There was a knock on the door. I thumbed the monitor button that was set into the door handle. The plastic door opaqued, then turned transparent, allowing me to look out into the hallway. Light only passed through it in one direction; the human who stood in the corridor with a tray of food was unable to see into our hotel room.

  I opened the door and took the tray from the fellow. I could smell his irritation when I didn't tip him, but I wasn't about to hand him a 100-nuyen bill. Instead I thanked him and carried our supper inside. The door returned to its usual solid color.

  As we ate our food, Jane sat on one of the beds, yawning between bites. The magical spells she'd cast earlier in the day and her ordeal at the hospital had left her drained. Despite her hunger, she could barely keep her eyes open. But even with dark circles under her eyes, she was beautiful. I could barely resist the urge to stroke her hair.

  "You should get some sleep," I told her when she'd finished eating. Then a thought occurred to me: Jane would forget who I was if she slept. I didn't want her wandering away again. But there was an obvious solution to that problem.

  I used the hotel room's telecom to print out a message: BEFORE YOU LEAVE, PLEASE WAKE ME UP. I pinned it to the door with a needle from a sewing kit I found in the bathroom.

  I smiled at Jane. "That should do it."

  She smiled back. "Thanks, Romulus." Then she started stripping off her jeans and vest, getting ready for bed. I caught just a glimpse of smooth skin and soft curves before I remembered that humans—that elves, I corrected myself—don't like to be stared at when they're naked.

  I made a point of turning my back. I rumpled the sheets and blankets on the other bed into a wad at the center of the bed, then glanced at Jane.

  "You don't mind if I change, do you?" I asked. "I always sleep in wolf form."

  "I don't mind."

  She was safely under the covers, now—all those tempting curves covered by a thick blanket. I dimmed the lights and closed the window blind. Then I let my hospital baggies fall to my ankles, and dropped to my hands and knees on the carpet—which smelled of stale, spilled alcohol—and shifted. I jumped onto the bed and turned around in a circle, pawing at the blankets.

  "Romulus?"

  I lifted my head and peered at her with rapt attention, my ears forward. My vision is even better than a meta's in low light; I could see that she'd raised herself on one elbow and that the covers had slipped down her body. The locket she wore hung down between her breasts. Her gold-flecked eyes seemed to have a pleading look. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part.

  "Would you sleep
beside me?" she asked. "I'd feel safer."

  Would I? I bounded onto the other bed. I gave her a quick kiss, stroking her cheek with my tongue. Then I settled in beside her, my back against hers. There was a blanket between us, but I could feel the warmth of her body through it. Her scent, this close, was almost overwhelming. I was thankful that human and meta pheromones don't affect me nearly so much when I'm in a animal form.

  I kept a watchful eye on the door. My protective posture seemed to soothe her; after a while Jane's breathing deepened. When I was certain she was sleeping soundly, I lowered my head and drifted off to sleep.

  I woke a couple of hours later. It was only eleven o'clock at night, but I was wide awake. I lay in the darkness, watching the numbers change on the telecom's clock and trying to fall back asleep, but it was no use. Ordinarily, I would have assumed that my nocturnal instincts had just gotten the better of me. But I knew what the problem really was. My mind was too full of questions. They wouldn't let me sleep. I had to know more about the mystery woman who lay sleeping so soundly beside me.

  I slid out of bed and changed back into human form. I used the telecom to print out a new note:

  ***

  WAIT HERE FOR ME. MY NAME IS ROMULUS.

  DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR FOR ANYONE ELSE.

  YOU ARE IN DANGER.

  ***

  I pinned it over my previous note. Then I pulled on my pants and jandered out of the hotel.

  The police station was a twenty-minute walk away. Dass would be on duty tonight; I figured she'd be willing to run the name Mareth'riel Salvail through the databases for me. I headed straight for her office.

  Dass leaped to her feet as soon as she saw me. "Romulus!" she said in a loud whisper. "Get your hoop in here. I want your help with something before Raymond sees you and sends you off to Truro to chase down the latest blackberry cat sighting."

  She closed the door of her office behind me. Tonight she was wearing a loose white dress woven with a fabric that caught the light like a prism, creating tiny rainbows in the fabric. She'd painted a band of white across her cheeks, and an intricate mehndi design covered the palms of her hands.

  I shook my head. The human and meta fondness for body ornamentation never fails to surprise me. When in human form I kept my hair clipped and combed, but that was about it. I didn't really care which clothes I wore; I was always losing them, anyway, when I shifted.

  "What's up?" I settled into a chair. I decided to let Dass say whatever was on her mind before I asked for her help. She was obviously excited about something. I knew her well enough to know that she wouldn't hear a word I said until she'd unwound a little.

  "Raymond assigned me the corpselight homicides," she said.

  My ears perked up at that one.

  "And guess what? Those things are being sold as a drug."

  "I know."

  "Oh."

  Dass seemed disappointed by my lack of surprise. I could smell irritation on her.

  "Why didn't you tell me?" she asked.

  "I've been busy with other things," I said. "The Jane Doe case."

  Dass didn't bother to correct me—Jane wasn't a case, exactly. Just someone I was trying to help out. She merely gave me a knowing look and picked up a datachip from her desk. She slotted it into her printer, then waited while the machine produced a brightly colored printout that looked like a topographical map of Nova Scotia. Except that the peaks and valleys were in all the wrong places.

  "Halifax isn't the only city where corpselights are killing people," she told me. "Other Lone Star detachments have been reporting similar cases. There have been 'grinning corpse' deaths or sightings of glowing balls of light in Digby, Liverpool, Shellburne, Lunenberg, Yarmouth, and Parrsboro—all along the coast. But none in Sydney, despite the fact that it's the third-largest city in the area, after Halifax and Dartmouth. You'd expect a new drug to show up there, long before a little fishing town like Parrsboro.

  "Corpselights are also being reported in major cities across the bay, like Saint John, Portland, and Boston. But not in any of the smaller American towns."

  She pulled the printout from the printer and showed it to me. The yellow high points on the map were all along the coast, with orange peaks over the three cities she'd mentioned—the ones on what used to be the American coast. The high points rose to a bright red peak over Nova Scotia's south shore, at a point between Digby and Yarmouth. The lows were all inland and were colored a deep blue-purple— exactly the reverse of what you'd normally expected to see on a map.

  I suddenly realized what we were looking at: a map generated by geographic profiling, a data-analysis system developed back in the 1990s by a Vancouver police detective. By mapping crimes that were "linked" by modus operandi or other important similarities, then crunching the distances between these sites, the geographic profiling program highlighted the areas the perpetrators were most likely to frequent. Nine times out of ten, this area of probability turned out to include places where the criminals lived, worked, or had family or friends. Despite the fact that computers were primitive in the extreme in the last century— those were the days before the Matrix—the program helped police of the day to catch a number of serious offenders: rapists, serial killers, armed robbers.

  Dass had used a modern version of geographic profiling to track down the most probable source for the corpselights. And that source was—assuming the data were correct—somewhere on Nova Scotia's south shore, a part of the world where you only needed two digits to list the population of any given town.

  "That's where the corpselights are being smuggled in from?" I asked, stabbing a finger at the red area on the map.

  Dass nodded. "Kitchaa—crazy, eh?"

  She keyed another command into the printer. After a second or two, another map began printing.

  "And here's something even crazier," she said. "Just for fun, I had the computer crunch through reports of blackberry cats—that's how I knew there was a fresh sighting in Truro—and look what it came up with."

  I looked at the geographic profile in her hand. The peaks and valleys were in slightly different places on this map, but the probable location of origin was the same: Nova Scotia's south shore.

  I drew the obvious conclusion: "The same people are smuggling blackberry cats and corpselights?"

  "Among other things," Dass said. "I asked the Department of Records to run a scan of all reports of illegally-at-large paras on the northeast coast of North America, and eliminated any that were native to the areas where they were sighted. That didn't produce anywhere near the amount of data that there is on corpselights and blackberry cats—those two seem to be the favorites, hands down. But if you take the scattered reports of pegasus, Merlin hawks, aitvaras snakes, and cerberus hounds, you see the same pattern, all over again."

  "Those paras are all native to Europe," I said.

  "Right." Dass stared thoughtfully at the maps in her hand. "And that means someone is smuggling them in from Europe—by sea, obviously, since we're dealing with a distribution network based out of the south shore—and selling them as 'drugs' or as pets."

  "Cerberus hounds?" I asked, incredulous. "Who the frig in their right mind would have one of those as a pet?"

  "Get with the times, Rom," Dass said. "The European trids are calling the cerberus hound the 'pit bull of the'60s.'"

  It took me a moment to realize she was being sarcastic.

  "Spirits save us," I whispered. "I wouldn't want a cerberus hound to lick my hand. Not with a tongue that drips corrosive saliva." I couldn't think of a worse animal to choose as a house pet.

  Except maybe a blackberry cat.

  "So what do you need my help with?" I asked Dass. "You don't need a tracker to find this smuggling operation. You know where these creatures are coming from."

  "I know approximately," Dass said. "The probable area covers more than fifty kilometers of coastline. I need your nose to narrow it down. I'm going to insist that Sergeant Raymond assign you to the MTF t
eam that will be doing the investigation—a team I'm heading up, so I'll get to hand-pick its members. But I wanted to clear it with you, first. Especially since you're busy with... your case."

  Drek. Dass had read me like a book. She'd spotted my attraction to Jane, and had realized that my protective instincts would automatically kick into overdrive.

  I seized the opening Dass had given me. "That's what I need your help with, Dass. I've got a name for Jane Doe. I want you to run it through Lone Star's computers."

  "Vema—I'll do it. Give me the name."

  It took only a second or two to run down the name Mareth'riel Salvail. The results shouldn't have surprised me, but they did. Jane—Mareth'riel—was a citizen of Tír Taimgire. Her metatype was listed as human, not elven, and her age as forty-three. She lived in Portland, Oregon, was single and had no dependents, and was employed by a company called New Dawn Medical Research.

  The face that stared out at me from the crystal-ball monitor—the holo from Mareth'riel Salvail's passport—was Jane all right. She had the same gold-flecked eyes, brown hair, and full lips. Just at the bottom of the image, down near her throat, was the silver locket she'd showed to me in the graveyard. Everything fit. Except that the woman in the holo was somehow not Jane. She had a higher tilt to her chin, a more confident look in her eye. She looked ... older, somehow.

  There wasn't much more than general information—the only reason we'd been able to access that much data was because Mareth'riel had been a regular visitor to the UCAS. The purpose of her trips was listed as business—New Dawn, it seemed, was putting out feelers, looking to set up subsidiaries in the UCAS.

  Mareth'riel's earliest visit to our country was in 2045 and her most recent was a trip made in July of 2057. According to the Customs and Immigration records, she left the UCAS on August 10, the day after President Dunkelzahn was assassinated. Or rather, she tried to leave. She passed through UCAS customs at the Halifax airport, and boarded a flight for Calgary—a flight that crashed during takeoff, killing everyone on board, after rioters storming the Halifax airport abandoned a truck on the runway in the path of the speeding 707.